Ban Bing is too long. So I’m going to include this long ramble to preface the ‘open thread’. You can skip… it’s an open thread.
I’ve gotta hand it to the College Board. They definitely know how to twist the AP Physics C free response section to simultaneously
- Include free response questions that are unlike any on any test in at least the past decase (or two)
- Be problems that could easily be completed in the time alloted anyone who mastered the curriculum should be able to do and
- Barely need a calculator to do. (Heck, actually don’t. But the calculator will speed things up.)
This years totally new AP Physics C EM kicked it off with a bang. The student flips to page one and is presented with: A graph of equipotential lines created by two points charges:
(Note: I’ve added annotation that would help explain solutions for (a)-(d). )
The question then begins:
Two point charges, q1 and q2, are fixed in place on the x-axis at positions
x1=1.00 m and x2 =-0.50 m, respectively. Charge q2 has a value of +2.0 nC. Values of electric potential are illustrated by the given equipotentials in the diagram shown above, which is drawn to scale.
(a) Calculate the value of q1.
Those familiar with this test know then continues with questions parts (b)-(f). The budgeted time to do the problem is 15 minutes.
Those comfortable with physics are probably saying easy! I can see exactly which annotations to use. Done! Bam. But bear in mind the high school kids taking this only just learned Physics and looking back through free response questions back to 2003, I don’t see any free response questions requiring students to fish out information from equipotential lines. So they won’t have “trained” themselves to this problem. Beyond that the only question requiring interpretation of electric field lines was Q1 in 2005. So students may well have panicked when they saw this.
That said: if they didn’t panic, took some breaths and identified where to start, they could then race through this pretty easily. Some of the question require nothing more than drawing arrows (based on understanding what equipotential lines mean, of course.)
Overall scores will eventually be posted. I’ll be interested in seeing how student grades overall turn out on this one. (The other two questions were fairly vanilla. I have a checklist of “less common” principles and ‘more common to always’ principles that get tested by the free response. The “less common” one was ‘resistivity’ buried in Q2. Other than that: all “more common to always” principles were covered on the test. For what it’s worth Q1 is all “more common” principles. It’s only the graphical presentation of equipotential that’s unusual.
For those interested in the parts (b)-(f) of this question (or the other questions), the full test is posted here.
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Problem #3 is related to a problem discussed at the Blackboard recently, namely a conductive bar moving in a magnetic field.
OMG. WordPress updated and is now preventing long comments….!
HaroldW,
Problems similar to #3 have appeared over and over on the AP Physics C. I think you’ll notice the AP question is not ambiguous. That’s another feature of question the college board writes. They include useful figures, the words and figure together describe the problem very precisely. So unless a student has a much-too-low ability to understand fairly simple figure or physics questions, question ambiguity will not be a problem.
As some know: I’ve commented on problem ambiguity and noted that it’s common on some other tests. (In fairness, it’s hard to write good question. In fact, I write some questions in moodle for my tutees who can benefit from them. I always proof-read, check and then give then the “wait a few days” treatment. Sometimes– my guess is 5% of the time I don’t know precisely what I was asking later on.)
But that is not true of the AP physics tests. Their team does make sure the question are clear provided a student does have a good understanding of the content in the syllabus.
The questions are never entirely alike so students do need to grasp the material well. But problems very similar to #3 appear over and over and generally can be solved more than one way. ( The direction of the current can be found using F=qv x B or Lens law. Whether the magnetic field at point whatever can be explained using Lenz law or knowing field around a wire and so on.)
In reply to Brandon Gates on what “action” is necessary, I would focus on bringing agreed scientific protocols to the relatively new field of “climate science.” Without rules that are accepted by both believers and skeptics one can’t start to build the frameworks for advancement through mutual trust.
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I am not uni-polar anti-AGW. I lean toward doing even more than we are currently to advance alternative energy. I am strong for nuclear, solar and storage technologies.
The two concerns that (I think) bring my skepticism are:
1) History shows a dynamic of government taking advantage of perceived problems (to the point of even ginning them up) in order to justify the acceleration of the inexorable march toward greater central control (formerly known as tyranny,) even though paved with good intentions.
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2) Whereas history shows a human need of religion; and, uncertainty of future perils is an accelerant to religiosity; and, formal religions are now losing consensus in western culture; thus there is a forcing (if you will) toward non-formal (or surrogate) religiosity.
Hmm… it allowed it on a second try. (I need to figure out why it complained I had too many line breaks before and so on.)
Okay, I’ll ask the dumb question about the exam diagram.
What’s going on at Point E? I seem to have a mental block; my interpretation would have been that the electric field has to be discontinuous at that point.
Where have I gone wrong?
Ron Graf
I think Brandon G is actually trying to create something he thinks would meet the needs of both believers and skeptics. I suspect that why he wants an ECS from me or SteveF to guide his graph. I can understand his frustration that I don’t have a “best estimate of ECS” . Nevertheless, I don’t have one.
I can understand his frustration that I don’t think his basic method of scaling is very reliable, and that he feels he doesn’t have enough temperature data in the forecast region to apply his method in a way that I might accept as reliable. But that doesn’t change my view that tweaking in a way that results in “tweaked” projection that has too high relative to trends in the forecast region doesn’t improve on merely having the existing model based projections and accepting that they seem too high.
I’m perfectly comfortable with qualitative statements and working toward policy implementation using estimate that we have– recognizing they may be biased and keeping track of the likely direction of biased. So it seems to me we already have enough on that score to discuss policy.
Meanwhile improved projections can work in parallel. I don’t think we need perfect projections to work on policy.
Joe Born
The field lines must be perpendicular to the equipotential lines. And notice the equipotential lines are spreading and gettting dang far apart there. So the “dr” in dV/dr is getting pertty dang big.
But remember: |E| can be zero. That allows it to be perpendicular to the equipotential there.
FWIW: The student isn’t required to know what’s happening at zero. The are later required to estimate the work done moving a proton from B to E.
All:
Wordpress is presenting people with crud like this:
I have no idea why. They must have added a “feature” on upgrade. It’s not a plugin I wrote and I don’t know how to fix this yet. Brandon S saw this one, I was presented one with “0.7” line breaks.
No. Idea. What is going on.
“no more than 140 words”… Twitter has taken over the internet 😉 I know, it’s 140 characters for twitter, but I thought the number was funny, like “97%”. Carry on…
When the message presented itself to me, I copied the text, pasted into a text editor, reloaded the page and resubmitted. Then WordPress accepted the text.
This is going to be a PITA to track down.
Turns out it is my plugin. Either IPs are being more widely shared… or … something.
Brandon G,
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I’ve been kicking it around and I think the policy conversation might actually be the most interesting part. There are numerous points I’d like to run by you (I think). Perhaps SLR is a starting point. 1. Can we agree that regardless of what we do from here on out that the seas are going to continue to rise? 2. If so, what (if anything) should we do about this from a policy perspective in the U.S?
I’d like to start with U.S. policy options at least, since we are both U.S. citizens this seems natural, if not limit the conversation to U.S. policy options.
I addressed to Brandon G but I’d be pleased to hear from anyone who has input.
Thanks in advance all.
Joe Born
“What’s going on at Point E?”
That caught my eye too. It’s a point of zero gradient – a saddle point. If it showed nearby equipotentials, they would look like hyperbolae near E. It gives another way of working it out. Lucia has marked the blue and purple arrows, to hint that q_1 is -5 by length ratios (2.5). But the ratio of distances to E has to be sqrt(2.5).
Nick,
Yes. The arrows show how one could find q1.
The reason this question would be “hard” for students is that it takes them quite a long time to sort of “grok” that you could pick any two points and use the fact that the potential is equal to the sum from each charge individually. So if you can pick any you an also pick the value of the potential at the point that makes the algebra the easiest. I think that point is “B” because it’s easy to see the potential =0 at that point and it’s easy to measure the distance from B to each charge.
But of course one could pick any point and do the algebra. That one just seems easiest to me as if you “get” the problem you can do the math in your head. At worst you double check the formula for potential from a point on the equation sheet provided to make sure ‘r’ is what’s in the denominator. But that wouldn’t take long.
Still, for a student the fact that a huge amount of info is provided in a graph and most likely a problem quite like this won’t have been done any time recently might result in them breaking out in a sweat and taking a nose dive. That’s the nature of tests.
(Books tend to have relatively few problems that require the students to pick numbers off graphical presentations of electric fields or potential fields likely because those problems require rather large graphs. And as I mentioned: I’m not aware of a problem with this feature on past AP tests. So oddly, in some ways this problem may be the “easiest” I have ever seen. Except for the issue of “OMG! What the heck is this graph!!! I’ve never seen this before. I think I’m going to dieeeeeeee!!!” )
Mark Bofill-
“2. If so, what (if anything) should we do about this from a policy perspective in the U.S?â€
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For me, at least, you’d have to come to some agreement on how fast and how far they would rise before it was possible to have a conversation on prospective policy responses.
kch,
Well, alright. There are places like Miami that are already having what I consider to be constructive conversations about it. I’m glad they are. I think that ignoring having a policy conversation might be surrendering the initiative to people who have more radical and IMO less sensible solutions. Nature abhors a vacuum; why create the opportunity for somebody with an agenda to step in and fill it?
Thanks Kch.
kch
Then you’re just the guy to help Brandon G on his quest to figure out how far and how fast they will rise.
Meanwhile I agree with mark. Not having a policy conversation because we don’t know how fast or how high precisely is foolish. It’s better to be involved in the conversation. Otherwise it will be dominated by people whose preference is to use corn for gasoline rather than promote nukes.
Mark Bofill, Lucia –
Oh, I agree that not discussing policy is giving the initiative to the more radical ends of the spectrum. It’s just that *my* starting point is that there need be *no* policy response unless it can be agreed that the rise would be fast enough or far enough to justify something be done. So I’ll involve myself in policy conversations, but from the “do nothing or show me why†perspective. (If there are “no regrets†policies for SLR similar to nuclear power for CO2 emissions, I’d be OK with that, though.)
kch,
That’s reasonable. If we can agree that sea level is and has been rising for some time now, and that we’ve got no particular reason to expect this to suddenly change, maybe we could agree that it’d be prudent to go looking at our coastal cities and see how close any of them are to having problems. Maybe we should think about changes to building codes, elevating infrastructure, all that jazz. Maybe look at vulnerability to flooding. I for one don’t relish the idea of federal tax dollars bailing out idjits who incur perfectly foreseeable losses due to ‘natural disasters’ and want taxpayers [edit, added : federal assistance] to cover the natural costs of regional shortsightedness. So on.
Thank you both for the help with the diagram. I don’t remember ever seeing lines intersect on contour maps, and without thinking it through I was subconsciously assuming they couldn’t; or maybe I was confusing them with phase-plane plots.
However that may be, I’m sure if I hadn’t just gone ahead and asked the question it would have taken me far more than fifteen minutes to recognize my tacit assumption: I would have flunked high-school physics.
Thanks again for throwing me a line.
Joe Born
No. Because that question wasn’t asked and didn’t need to be understood to answer the ones that were.
Now, if the question occurred to you and you found yourself unable to answer things like “what is q1” because point E bugged you, then you might have flunked.
The only way point E is used is the student is asked to find work done by electric field pushing a proton from B to E. If you could just plow forward and do that, you’d be golden.
Also: This is the AP. It’s taken to get college credit. High school students take the class hoping to get out of the college level class.
Mark Bofill-
I can certainly agree with the statement “…sea level is and has been rising for some time now, and that we’ve got no particular reason to expect this to suddenly change…â€
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I also think that it might be prudent for the inhabitants of coastal cities to take a look at various zoning-type issues related to that rise. However, I also think that a rise of 2-3 mm/year is not likely to be catastrophic (as demonstrated by what seems to be an entire lack of SLR-related catastrophes over the last century). Fairly normal infrastructure replacement, combined with increasing elevation over time of cities, can easily deal with most of the issue. So, is SLR increasing or not? If it can’t be shown – relatively unambiguously – to be, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
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In addition, though, I’d have to point out that as a libertarian I’m also dead set against bailing out idiots who choose to build in flood plains, on sandbars, in highly probable hurricane paths, etc. If they can’t get insurance, or don’t want to pay the price, not my problem. This goes for more than just the individual level, too – no way Mid-west farmers should be paying for the mistake of building below sea level in New Orleans. Disaster relief is one thing, stupid relief is another…
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[Quick example of the last: up here in Canada the country came together very well, very quickly to assist the inhabitants of Fort McMurray. Really good to see, and I applaud, in particular at the outpouring of private donations and initiatives…but, I do not feel that my tax dollars should bail out anyone who did not have fire insurance and lost their home to fire. I buy insurance, why should they get a pass on my tax dime?]
Mark Bofill:
I’m unimpressed by most discussions of sea level rise. The areas most affected by the rise in sea level, such as Florida, have so many local factors influencing the problem most discussions of global warming have little relevance because they don’t actually look at the real effects caused by sea level rising due to global warming.
Incidentally, sea levels would be rising even without an anthropogenic contribution to global warming. So if you want to narrow the discussion to sea level rise caused by AGW (which isn’t necessary, as sea level rise could be tackled independent of its source), things become even more complicated.
Is the y axis 0.5 m too far to the right?
Why is X1 q2 and x2 q1 ?
Angech,
Cutting and pasting from the test didn’t work and I may have scrambled when I tried to fix the editing. I’m sure the actual test wording is fine, I may have scrambled and then not noticed.
It looks like the diagram is for LIKE charges, that is they are repelling. UNLIKE charges would diagram like this:
https://cnx.org/resources/54c86a27e83faa61b9506aaecd6fa8440c96ebda/Figure_20_04_02a.jpg
Jim2,
Your link shows an electric field. The AP test shows a the potential.
OK (Lucia), I see. Thanks.
jim2 –
If it helps, here is a diagram showing field & potential for like charges & unlike. Because these are equal charges (not 2.5:1 as in the AP problem), the “unlike charges” diagram doesn’t look exactly like that of the test.
Pushing all the buttons trying to get banned so can boast how brave you are.
Such a shame.
Half intelligent.
But totally bent.
You would get so much better and intelligent conversation here if you wished to try.
Bluh now I remember why I hated the Electro-magnetism lab.
kch (Comment #147793)-New Orleans ain’t exactly Midwest or farm country. Otherwise, agreed.
angech,
Are you suggesting someone is trying to push buttons? I’m not seeing it.
Regarding mutually-acceptable solutions to AGW, if I might try to set out a few problems I have with the current approach.
i) There’s a lot of flailing around which to a cool eye looks like trying to do something, anything, regardless of how effective it is.
ii) There is no discussion of any downsides, or they are minimised (wind turbines kill birds, but coal-fired stations don’t, etc).
iii) There is no discussion of cost-effectiveness. To wit: with these several billions of pounds sterling, how much global temperature rise am I forestalling? Show me the cost/K.
iv) In many solutions the cost falls disproportionately on the poor, e.g. via subsidies for solar panels or Teslas.
v) The temperature rise locally might be beneficial in some regions. Why would the people of places that are mostly too cold want their representatives to sign them up to radical lifestyle-curtailing moves? The politicians’ primary responsibility is to their electorate.
vi) There is too much hypocrisy. (Greens go by air).
vii) There is too much hubris. (As if humanity have a control knob for global temperature and we know what to set the thermostat to).
viii) There is too much hyperbole and a lack of perspective (Lawd only knows what will happen the next time a major hurricane makes landfall in the U.S.).
ix) The solutions are supposed to fix problems they in fact have no hope of affecting (see ix).
x) The solutions are imposed on people because human nature means that voluntary solutions don’t work. As a liberal with a small ‘l’, I only agree with intervening in people’s lives if they are causing active harm to others.
lucia (Comment #147894)
“angech,Are you suggesting someone is trying to push buttons? I’m not seeing it.”
Sorry, wrong thread.
Yes.
Not important as everyone getting on “well” now on the other thread.
@147793 – Thanks for that. Sometimes it seems I’m the only one who thinks that way.
Jim2, Kch,
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Are economic losses OK? [Edit: losses by some companies from time to time OK?] I think they are. I think it’s the way the market works. Somebody buys something they shouldn’t sometimes, and they lose.
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I ask because it seems to me that in cost benefit analysis(es), economists count anybody’s loss as a loss to everybody. Sometimes that’s not so. Somebody gets et, and somebody eats.
Whatcha think.
q1 is negative
q1 at x2 and q2 at x1 balance out at radii of 1 meter for q2 and 2.5 meters for q1.
q2 is +2 nC.
so q1 should be negative 2 x 2.5 squared?
q1 = -13.5 nC.
No idea.
Tell me where I am wrong this time.
I got it.
I finally ‘get’ my dog. She’s a war corgi. Absurd as that may seem, and yes; this is why it took me so long to get it. She thinks she’s here to herd, sure. She’ll keep the ‘little un’s’ in and the ‘others’ away. But she wants to fight. Silly little cutie pie. 🙂 She’s about as threatening as… I don’t know. a wet snowball I guess. All friendly and fun and no hard feelings. But don’t try to tell her that.
I’ve never had a dog like this one, and I’ve had dogs all my life. ~shrug~
[Edit: uhm. I was jes talkin here. I wasn’t making some larger point. Just talking about dogs. Really.
No, Really. I like my dog.]
mark bofill,
We once owned a war chihuahua. He would attack the vaccuum cleaner. My mom’s house looks toward the DesPlaines river. When we were kids there was nothing between her and the river (Now the top part has a softball softball field and then some extra nothingness. ) The dog would stand at the back window and start barking whenever anyone would walk through “his” territory.
Oddly, this lead him to be the un-official “rescuer” of three stooooopid kids. How? The area is a flood plain. Every Jan/Feb/March or so, it would flood. Then the water would freeze over. It could sometimes be unexpectedly deep. Some stupid kids decided to walk over it and…. ploop! the ice broke. They couldn’t get out!
The dog was just barking and barking and barking. Normally we would ignore the barking because he’d stop when people finished walking past his line of sight. But this time he didn’t. So Mom went to see what was up, and then called the fire department who came and got the kids out.
Yes. Technically the fire department saved the kids. But really, no one would have noticed this except for the war chihuahua.
Lucia. 🙂 TY. I didn’t need another reason to love canines, but..
angech (Comment #148149)
May 20th, 2016 at 7:05 am
q1 is negative
q1 at x2 and q2 at x1 balance out at radii of 1 meter for q2 and 2.5 meters for q1.
q2 is +2 nC.
so q1 should be negative 2 x 2.5 squared?
q1 = -13.5 nC.
No idea.
Tell me where I am wrong this time.
You are ok in theory but bad at math.
2.5×2.5 is 6.25. 6.25×2 = 12.5
PA (Comment #148172)
“angech (Comment #148149) You are ok in theory but bad at math.”
Sloppy at math”
‘Decade’ not ‘decase,’ I think.
war chihuahua.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMZqS7q7voY
Steve Mosher,
Bandit, our war Chihuahua, did leave teeth marks on the vacuum cleaner….
My experience is that chihuahuas are generally nasty and aggressive, err….. sort of like Hillary.
Mark, We have 2 corgis. One is a domineering alpha wannabe whose size rather limits her effectiveness with larger dogs. The other is an omega and shy and retiring. My information is that corgis generally are stubborn and dominating personalities which would be a job requirement if you were a small dog tasked with herding cattle.
David,
Two corgis! Wow, that must be fun. I’d like to someday meet a shy and retiring omega type of corgi. Mine knows she’s not the boss, but she is definitely one stubborn and assertive little dog.
Ron Graf (Comment #147756),
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Whoops, looks like I’m late to this party.
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Depending on which aspect of the science you’re talking about, even the “consensus” scientists don’t agree on protocols OR conclusions. That’s kind of a feature of any and all non-trivial sciences, even the “hard” ones.
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I’m for all those things too, for a number of reasons which don’t have a thing to do with AGW. I’m less enamored of storage tech because of its relative infancy and potential expense. Other than that, there looks to be plenty you and I could agree on solution-wise. Little if any need at all for the climate boffins to all be on the same page for you and I to work toward some mutually acceptable solution, even if only partial.
lucia (Comment #147760),
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Yes. When there’s mutual cooperation, things tend to move more smoothly and rapidly. Major solutions historically have involved bipartisan cooperation. Obamacare is one notable recent exception — not a single Congressional Republican vote. And I’m entirely ok with that even though I’m not entirely ok with the result.
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No. I asked for that input because both you and SteveF balked at how I was attempting to do my guesstimate. That convo is a bit stale now, and it’s also pretty much moot because you didn’t like my CMIP5 ensemble mean scaling method either.
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Yes, that was frustrating.
mark bofill (Comment #147768),
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We can agree that SLR wouldn’t stop on a dime if emissions stabilized tomorrow. I think the more salient question is whether we’re already past some a point where SLR would continue for several centuries regardless of what we do. We can’t agree on that because my reading of literature is that the ice experts either don’t agree, or openly and honestly say that they don’t know.
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Hope that SLR is stoppable within a century and take aggressive steps to decarbonize. There are plenty of other avoidable potential hazards which would be implicitly addressed by that very same set of actions.
Brandon G,
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I’m out of the serious conversation for the moment. Most of the time I’ve got plenty of slack in my schedule, but every once in a while work demands switch to as close to every waking moment as I can manage. I’m in the heavy load part of the cycle right now.
I’ll be glad to talk about dogs with ya for the moment. 🙂
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No actually you’re welcome to direct comments to me, it’s just I don’t want you to wonder at my lack of response, should it work out that way.
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Anyway – I will briefly say this much. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the guys living in the United States 150 years ago thought they were standing on the pinnacle of history, and that they could foresee the problems we’d have today. 100 years ago, probably the same thing. Looking back, I don’t feel any contempt for people in history who had this notion, but I do note how foolish the idea must have been.
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I think it’s still foolish today, and it’s very probably always going to be a foolish idea, that we can solve the problems that humanity is going to face centuries down the road.
For my part, I’m not particularly interested in that.
While I’m cooking breakfast, I’ll also throw this out there.
The idea that we need to hold the world still in order to avoid ‘damages’ or ‘losses’ looks like a central planner’s wet dream. Unfortunately central planning isn’t the optimal strategy for dealing with societal problems. There will be change, people will win and lose, make fortunes and be ruined. The seas will rise – this will present hazard and opportunity. As it should.
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The main reason I’m interested in hedging my bets at all is that I’m not a rigid ideologue. The above is a rule of thumb, but it shouldn’t be taken to ridiculous extremes. Figuring out the difference is the real trick, and in certain cases timescales have something to do with it.
Mark – the thing about change is that it always happens and most people are conservative (small c) and generally like the world they know. If climate change led to an equal number of winners and losers, you’d hear a lot of complaining from the losers that would not be compensated for by the support of the winners.
Politicians understand this…
Brandon R. Gates says:
Are there actually experts who say sea level rise could be stopped in any foreseeable timeframe? Sea level has been rising for thousands of years. The issue with human influence has always been about causing sea level rise to accelerate, not to start from scratch.
The magical thinking of the climate concerned regarding slr is amazing.
Jit,
Yup. Doesn’t necessarily make much difference to me though. 🙂 Although you touch on a point I forgot about earlier. I will also take steps to build nuclear to disarm opposition. I am not interested in nutty schemes, and I’ll take reasonable measures and meet the people I disagree with halfway to settle the matter. If they are nutty and won’t meet me halfway. Oh well then.
Thanks.
SLR is the same Scary Imaginary Boogeyman Strategery that AGW is, only he lives in water.
Andrew
Andrew_KY.
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You know I love you right.
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Seems like not long ago, I linked evidence at your request about SLR. How it’s real. How’d we do with that?
mark bofill (Comment #148300),
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I completely understand that others have other things going on in their life and that I’m a bit … unusual … in how much of my time I presently devote to talking about this stuff. As you will, sir.
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I have plenty of present day problems to talk about. We might review the coal particulate problem again. A combination of solar, wind and nuclear power would go a long way toward fixing that one.
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This isn’t going to be a happy conversation if you keep challenging me on arguments I’m not making, ok? Nobody on this computer is talking about holding the world still.
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Mmmmhmm. We’ve already agreed that SLR is a century+ scale problem. Burning coal is ending lives prematurely now.
Andrew I’m never looking to pick a fight with you, FWIW. But I talk with people who don’t agree with me at all. A lot of them are open socialists, they come from the other side of the political spectrum. We disagree about a lot o’ junk. I can’t afford to let it slide, when somebody on my ‘side’ pipes up to say SLR isn’t real.
I’m sorry about that.
Brandon G,
WTF?
I didn’t say you made that argument. I don’t know if you make that argument or not. Don’t see why I should burn my limited free time right now on aggravation.
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Chow.
Mark Bofil,
I’m not arguing that sea level doesn’t rise. It does in many places. In many places it goes down. What I have a problem with is the way it is presented as Boogeyman. That’s all.
The link about it was very helpful. It confirmed my position.
Andrew
Holy … uhmm.. Holy jeepers. You did not just say this.
Cite please. Or not. You know, never mind Brandon G. Never mind.
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No, do you know how many effing kids die a day because of contaminated drinking water, which is a problem burning coal could solve?
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Screw this. here. Don’t talk to me about how burning fossil fuels — WHICH POWERS THE WORLD RIGHT NOW — is killing people.
Brandon G.,
Driving automobiles is ending lives prematurely now. Five gallon buckets are drowning a few toddlers a year. Many life saving drugs and surgical procedures also kill some people, blood thinners, for example. All you have to do is watch the lawyer’s ads on TV or listen to the fine print being read on the drug ads to know that. Life is full of risks. We can’t instantly stop burning coal in the US, much less the rest of the world. The question is not one sided. There are benefits to having coal produced electricity too.
All life is ending prematurely. Clearly, the problem is life. We should do something about it.
Brandon G,
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Look. Maybe your larger point was that there are impacts besides SLR. I don’t dispute that.
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I’m done here for now, so. Don’t be surprised if I ignore the brilliant rebuttal or whatever.
Is this one of those times that BrRG isn’t acting in good faith? Or not? If BrRG says he is acting in good faith, how do I know if that statement is or is not made in good faith?
Earle,
That appears to be a rhetorical question. So you should have given us your answer.
I think the answer is, “you don’t know. Nor does anyone else.”
I suspect may here have their own notions about the fraction of Brandon G’s acts here in comments that are in good faith.
Lucia,
My apologies, I did indeed ask a rhetorical question and didn’t provide the answer. I’m sorry.
My answer is since BrRG has stated up front that he at times acts in bad faith then I will assume bad faith on his part in all dealings.
It’s probably obvious, but I am adopting the Skeptical Science abbreviation convention, hence the BrRG.
Brandon S.,
You got me thinking about a book I read some time ago. I couldn’t remember the title, but I managed to find it: Carnival by Greg Bear. It stands current thinking somewhat on its ear. A matriarchal society of homosexuals who have fled Earth is anything but peaceful and a society with AI enforced carbon neutrality on Earth is anything but progressive.
DeWitt Payne, it looks interesting. I’ll have to see about getting a copy to read sometime.
In the meantime, I feel like taking advantage of this being an off-topic thread. Years back, I was sent to my high school counselor because I had written an essay making a case for the extinction of humankind. In it, I argued if one’s system of morality/values is based on the requirement of minimizing the pain and suffering of people, the only logical outcome was that all human life should be ended so there could be no further pain and suffering. The argument is sound as mathematically more humans will live, suffer and die in the future than could possibly be harmed by the plan.
Of course, the point of the essay wasn’t to argue humans should be made extinct. The point was to examine how a system of morality/values based solely upon an examination of negatives was, when fully fleshed out, unfeasible as any such system will always result in the conclusion of, “All human life must end.”
The point of bringing this up is while I disagree with utilitarianism on principle, if you are going to use it is as the justification for some course of action, you must include consideration of any positives. In other words, you cannot look solely at costs, you must also look at benefits. Failing to do so at least implicitly will make your argument’s logical conclusion be, “Kill everybody.”
mark bofill (Comment #148312),
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I know you didn’t, you made that argument. I think it’s ok for me to get frustrated responding to arguments I didn’t make.
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It’s one of the first things I talked about in this forum on the Spring Open thread. I gave several citations.
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A lot. I also know that solar and wind power *could* solve that same problem, without the cost of so many particulates in the air.
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Wind, solar, nuclear and natural gas also POWER THE WORLD RIGHT NOW with significantly less adverse health issues than coal does.
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No maybe about it, that’s exactly what I wrote.
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Great. That indicates that there might be some problems we might agree on solving over the next decade or two, which is a far more reasonable planning horizon than centuries.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #148315)
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Has gotten better over time on a per-capita (or per-passenger mile if you trust those stats) hasn’t it? Same with air transport.
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I take it as a given that most benefits come with some detriment. And I don’t do all-or-nothing thinking if I can help it. I’m into optimizing and improving insofar as that is plausible or possible to do so.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #148316),
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Sure. Gentlemen first.
Earle (Comment #148318),
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Rare is the day that I’m doing one or the other full time.
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You might not be able to tell — some people are very convincing liars. I’m not such a good liar face to face (too many tells, it’s why I don’t play poker), better at it online. Or at least that’s what I’d like to think when I choose to lie.
Brandon G,
Out of curiosity, what fraction of the time do you estimate people here think you are acting in good faith?
Earle (Comment #148320),
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I’m more inclined to be wary when someone says things like, “Trust me, I’m telling the truth.” Another way of putting it is that habitual liars don’t have a habit of being upfront about sometimes acting in bad faith … by definition.
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None of which is to say you should trust anything I say simply because I freely volunteer that I don’t always play things above board. It could all be a ruse. I could simply be ignorant or otherwise mistaken having allowed myself to be misled by others. Etc.
lucia (Comment #148327),
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Varies by person. Mark B. is the one I trust most, I think the vast majority of the time he’s sincere and acting in good faith. I’m not real happy with him at the moment over the SLR/fossil fuel discussion, but you know, shit happens. It’s not like I’m the bees knees of model citizenry.
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Opposite end of the spectrum is the Original Brandon who I think is at least 97% bullshit.
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You’re tougher to evaluate. I think you’re mostly honest about your views, mostly not honest when they’re challenged, so call it 50/50. My *perception* is that you don’t like to negotiate, and I do get frustrated about that; however, that’s not necessarily bad faith.
Brandon G,
That’s an interesting response. But it answers the opposite question from the one I asked.
I want to know your estimate of how often other people (like me) think you are acting in good faith. I ask because you just told us you think you are pretty good at lying online. That suggests you think people believe you when you are lying. So I wondered how often you think you are believed to be acting in good faith around here. Do you think people usually believe you to be acting in bad faith? Or that they are like Earle and believe you are usually acting in bad faity. That’s the question I’m interested in reading an answer to.
I told you as much. I prefer to discuss idea for solutions. I think the idea that we are going to “negotiate” or “horsetrade” in comments is ridiculous. But I repeat myself. 🙂
lucia (Comment #148330),
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Well shit, my infamously poor reading skills strike again. How tricksy of you … [evil grin]
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Past threads contain several comments where you openly express that you think I’m running game. My tendency is to believe that those instances are under-representative, hence I think you mostly don’t trust me. Brandon S. doesn’t trust me at all, and goes out of his way to let everyone else know it. Mark B. said once or twice that he chooses to assume good faith, but that was before I told him that I was suspicious of his motives when he asked me if I’d like to chat on my blog during that flamewar on the Banning Bing thread. Pretty sure that damaged his default goodwill toward me.
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Percentages are hard, humans often defy quantification especially when perception is limited.
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That I’d *like* to think so.
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Again, I’d *like* to think so. I’d rather people believe that I’m telling the truth when my intent is to tell the truth as I understand it.
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I think I’m NOT trusted here more often than not, but there are a few notable exceptions. It’s clear to me that strident partisans tend to not trust others with differing views.
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Earl’s reason is interesting, but not his distrust. I do like how he raised the question, and didn’t at all mind answering him. I didn’t think it was rhetorical of him at all, especially since he allowed for the alternative that I wasn’t bullshitting.
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Mmmm, what I remember reading on the page is that you weren’t negotiating or horsetrading, not that you don’t like to. But I also haven’t checked that thread since last night.
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Yes, brainstorming is how you put it. I like that too.
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I think talking about making deals then switching horses midstream to “I’m not horsetrading” is ridiculous. Same for talking about common ground dealmaking, then immediately going after unilaterally declared white elephants for funding before the cost estimates are even agreed upon.
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By “ridiculous”, I really mean “eyebrow raising”. *Seemingly* contradictory statements tend to do that, donchaknow.
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Cheers.
Wow, my comments really do cause the problems. Look at that.
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Sorry Brandon G. Just ignore me. I didn’t think your suggestion that coal prematurely ends lives was a useful one, but I didn’t mean for it to provoke a discussion of bad faith. I get impatient when I’m under stress, don’t pay it any mind. It doesn’t really have anything to do with you anyway. I’m just likely to be unusually grouchy over the next week. I’ll try not to engage frivolously.
No use.
Mark Bofill, I don’t think you have anything to apologize. You wrote in a comment not addressed to anyone in particular:
Brandon R. Gates responded to this by saying:
You clearly hadn’t challenged him on this as your comment wasn’t directed at him. You reasonably responded:
In response to your bafflement Gates would say you challenged him on an argument he hadn’t made which you hadn’t done, Gates wrote:
The only reason there was any issue is Gates chose to take offense at you talking about something on the grounds he hadn’t said it, thus you shouldn’t challenge him on it. He could have simply chosen not to respond to a comment that wasn’t directed at him. There was nothing about the comment which directed or asked him to respond. There was certainly nothing about the comment which challenged him on the topic.
Gates may be getting frustrated with you, but that’s apparently (at least in part) because he’s falsely claimed you challenged him on a point then said it was reasonable for him to be frustrated responding to something he had no need to respond to. That’s all on him.
Gates may want to attribute blame on matters like that to other people, such as yourself, but the reality is he is going out of his way to cause the very problems he complains about.
Thanks Brandon S. I wouldn’t be surprised if it [was] me [at fault], cause I am feeling a little edgy in truth. But I appreciate it. I don’t want to waste any more effort worrying about it honestly. [It’s all good.]
I’m just trying to chill here before I call it a night.
Brandon R. Gates (Comment #148310)
“I think it’s still foolish today, and it’s very probably always going to be a foolish idea, that we can solve the problems that humanity is going to face centuries down the road.”
“SLR is a century+ scale problem.”
In sequence.
SLR is not a problem, it’s a natural occurrence, just like sea level fall. Any such occurrence over centuries cannot be an issue because people will adapt with so much time to the changes.
Erosion of coastlines has and will be a much more urgent problem for communities, has nothing to do with sea level rise and has already been dealt with in many ways
“I have plenty of present day problems to talk about. We might review the coal particulate problem again.Burning coal is ending lives prematurely now.”
Conflating two different issues.
There are 7 billion people in the world thanks to burning coal, which is 6 billion lives living now thanks to burning coal.
Yes a small number die earlier. Overall much more people are leading useful?, interesting lives that they would never have had.
No matter which method you use some people somewhere will have prematurely ending lives.
Pointing this out while ignoring the massive good done is argument for a belief, not for a reasonable argument.
For what it’s worth, your comment about coal was more combative than normal, perhaps unnecessarily so. I don’t think it was unreasonable. Everybody has their own standards though. I just thought it worth showing why it would be understandable for you to have been exasperated at that point.
It’s sort of like how in the previous open thread Brandon R. Gates suggested cutting tax credits for wind power as a major source of funding for his proposed nuclear program and repeatedly defended the idea then turned around and gave a strong denial about how it is unreasonable to expect him to defend an idea he not didn’t propose but argued wouldn’t work. A person becoming exasperated in a discussion with someone who does things like that is rather understandable. What he did with you was smaller in scale, but it’s the same sort of obnoxious, and arguably dishonest, behavior.
And hey, funny coincidence. DeWitt Payne talked about a book upthread by one Elizabeth Bear. It turns out she was quoted in an episode of Criminal Minds (I have no idea why I still watch that show at times) I saw. I didn’t realize she was the source of the quote until I saw it mentioned in her Wikipedia article:
Seems relevant.
lucia (Comment #148327)
“Out of curiosity, what fraction of the time do you estimate people here think you are acting in good faith?”
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Is that that question that lets you tell if the person who always lies is telling the truth when he is lying?
or is it rhetorical?
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I feel the whole tenor of having been here was and is to be as disruptive as possible.
He actually does have some good knowledge, certainly can post well and does want to discuss the issues even though he is deliberately rude to everyone.
The problem is that he found the people here much more intelligent than he expected, willing to engage in good faith and more able put up reasonable arguments than he ever expected.
He perversely found he enjoys being here.
But wants to be made to leave.
Stuck between Scylla and Charybdis.
Brandon G,
If you are discussing negotiating in general, I think it’s find to negotiate things when it makes sense. Negotiating prices on cars. Negotiating who is going to do what tasks around the house. Negotiating jobs etc. That all makes sense. That’s real negotiating.
But I think the sort of horsetrading you seemed to be proposing I was involved (or you were trying to get me involved in) is just stoooooopid.
Perhaps. But I never made any ‘deals’.
I didn’t talk about “common ground deal making”. You said you wanted to find common ground. Finding common ground doesn’t mean we are “making a deal”. It’s just finding things we agree on.
I have no idea what you consider to be me “going after unilaterally declared white elephants”.
I also don’t think there is the slightest thing wrong with discussing finding funds for things one might want to do in parallel with discussing costs. My main proposal to fund getting nukes of the ground is a tax. Of course I would like to cut funding for any wasteful programs that don’t make sense. But I would like to do that whether or not we fund nukes.
Angech
Neither. I wondered how often he thought people here believed he was acting in good faith.
mark bofill (Comment #148332),
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You spoke your mind. The good faith/bad faith discussion was already a theme, and other people are gonna do what they’re gonna do. Don’t sweat it on my account.
angech (Comment #148336),
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Deterministic physical systems don’t just do things for unfathomable reasons.
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Yeah I get it: we use energy. The point I’ve made many times previously is that coal is not the only presently viable source of energy AND is pretty much the most detrimental. Nuclear power is one of those. So are wind and solar. None of this should exactly be news to you.
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We agree, and I’ve said as much several times previously.
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Except I don’t ignore it. I acknowledge it, and then rebut it in favor of what I think would be an improvement. There is a difference.
Since this is off-topic, and quite frankly I’d love it if we moved discussions away from Brandon R. Gates and his strange behavior, a couple random topics. To start, a quick update on the little eBook I published a couple months ago. Somehow sales have stayed at a higher level than I expected, and it looks like I am set to break 1,000 sales in a week or so. Thanks for the interest and for humoring my discussions of it.
Moving on, you guys may have heard about e-mails by the 20 professors who wrote a letter calling for the investigation and potential prosecution of “skeptic” groups for (according to them) knowingly spreading disinformation in order to mislead the public to prevent action from being taken to combat global warming. If you haven’t heard, FOI requests were filed for the e-mails they wrote about the letter. Some people, such as Anthony Watts, have crowed about how the e-mails are super damning, to the point he said things like:
I don’t agree with his portrayal of what the e-mails show, but what’s more interesting to me is his portrayal of the legal actions being taken in regard to this. Specifically, Watts claimed one of the professors has filed a motion to have e-mails released to the public retroactively removed from view, with a headline like:
And the explicit statement:
Watts never provided any explanation of how Maibach would hope to have this released material pulled from the public view, something which would be completely impossible to do given the nature of the internet. Neither does he quote any document showing Maibach is attempting to have this done. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is none. This idea is nothing more than figment of Watts’s imagination.
Thousands and thousands of people have seen these accusations. Hundreds of commenters, including Steve McIntyre, have posted on threads with these accusations were given prominent attention. None of them said a word about how this is basically just a wild-eyed delusion. It’s all very strange.
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/05/lets-just-make-things-up/
Lucia,
“I want to know your estimate of how often other people (like me) think you are acting in good faith.”
Umm, I want to say 3%, so 97% think he is lying but, I think 0% believes he is acting in good faith. 100% thinks he is acting in bad faith and just taking up space/time so people stop talking about the fact that observations contradict the GCM’s projections.
I honestly don’t know why people keep talking to him…
angech (Comment #148339),
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Ok sure. I don’t mind disrupting arguments that I think are dangerous nonsense.
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Key word being deliberate. OTOH, think back to that little story I told you (I think it was you) about how sometimes I walk into a room and say, “Hi, would you like to hear a story about how we might address the risks of global warming?” That literally does piss people off no matter how “politely” I say it. Here’s me being very deliberately rude: take your tone trolling and cram it up your arse.
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So far as possible, I’m not indiscriminately rude IF I can help it.
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Yes. That’s something I like about this place.
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I don’t think it’s perverse to have my beliefs challenged. Especially not in good faith.
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Wrong. Would you like me to leave?
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #148344),
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Yeah sure, *after* you got your digs in. Here’s a thought: my allegedly strange behavior is always off topic. Deal with my arguments or don’t. Come on B, show us how to construct a brilliant rebuttal without editorializing about your interlocutor’s behavior.
Brandon S,
Sales! Cool!
lucia (Comment #148340),
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Ok fine. What would have been a non-stoooooopid way for me to have responded to this post?
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lucia:
Very! My upper estimate for sales was ~300 in the first month then 100 in the second and third. I estimated the most I could expect was a thousand sales over the first year. And I was thinking those numbers were overly optimistic.
So… very cool!
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #148337),
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Except that isn’t what happened. I objected *twice* to discussing funding *before* cost estimates were even in. I also argued why I didn’t think certain subsidies should be considered “white elephants” that should be cut:
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Both of those comments come *before* I started talking about ramping down windmill subsidies. Next you’re going to remind me that those subsidies are set to expire anyway.
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The two funding proposals I actually endorsed were a revenue-bearing carbon tax and/or direct public financing with the Fed selling securities to raise funds and lending them out at a higher rate. My preference is the former, with private capital providing most of the funding and public monies used to cover defaults. That has not changed, they’re just not methods Lucia was willing to entertain. So reducing subsidies was the horsetrading option I took with *her*.
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Except she wasn’t horsetrading because she doesn’t like negotiating.
“”So far as possible, I’m not indiscriminately rude IF I can help it.”
Good help is hard to find.
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I don’t think it’s perverse to have my beliefs challenged.”
I said your enjoyment in being here was perverse, not your beliefs or challenges to them.
Is it beliefs or believes? English is weird.
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‘But wants to be made to leave. Wrong.”
Perverse, but I already said that
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“Would you like me to leave?”
Yes, Maybe,Maybe not, No. All four.
Not my call ever.
I would like to give you advice generally but I hate being given advice myself. Perhaps the attitude comes from being a poor golfer. No , it’s just me . Never happier than when I am being a Contrarian.
So no.
No advice unless you ask for it.
angech (Comment #148352),
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Fine, thanks for your opinion.
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Indeed it isn’t. One then wonders the point of bringing it up in the first place.
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Then surely you understand why I get more than a little testy when people give me “advice”. Especially when that “advice” is in the form of how I might better behave. You know, like: If you were only more polite, Gates, people might find you more convincing. Disingenuous bullcrap like that really doesn’t deserve a “polite” response any more than the other crap they were running against me prior to their “advice”.
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I think that’s great policy, thanks.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #148344)
“a quick update on the little eBook I published a couple months ago.
I am set to break 1,000 sales in a week or so.”
Congratulations as well.
Well done
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” there were over a thousand other e-mails the courts have looked at as part of this lawsuit. Those e-mails might get released as well.To put it simply, Maibach is asking the courts to put things on pause until he can join in on the debate over whether or not his e-mails should be released.
. Because it would be useless for him to get involved in the lawsuit if the e-mails get released before he can,”
“Edward Maibach tries ’emergency stay’ to retroactively pull Shukla/George Mason University emails from view”.
A little pedantic?
What!
The sense is very obvious.
To recap your points there are these titillating e-mails which the courts but you and I have not seen.
If Maibach succeeds these e mails will never be seen by us and the courts, which have seen them, will have to legally unsee them, hence the retrospectivity.
I, for one, am quite happy with the WUWT language predicting that. SLR [silly legislative restriction] will flood the courts in Virginia before the end of this decade.
Sorry for the extra hyperbole.
From Brandon S blog link
“Those who said yes talked to one another about what the letter should say and what they hoped to achieve with it.Then *, one of them wrote: Dear fellow letter signers. Shukla and I respectfully request that you send us your private email address.”
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leaving out the little comment * “a miracle happens†ie I think you should be more explicit here in step two.
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As Far as I know the comment re the private email address came well after the letter was published and was in reaction to the letter being published.
It was not as you imply but did not state, an action on it’s own.
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I know you are a stickler for correctness so I hope you will acknowledge this and change or add an addendum to your comment.
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“That was what caused Anthony Watts to correctly write: Here’s the worst part – they knowingly tried to circumvent future FOIA requests”
Brandon G,
Not sure what your point is. The previous context was “negotaiting”. That comment isn’t “negotiating”.
Brandon G,
Not sure what your point is. You don’t want to discuss costs before funding.That doesn’t mean you didn’t end up proposing funding. You did– and quite a bit. You proposed a tax plan, you discussed the fed acting in n inflationary manner, and you decided to attempt your “horse trading”. That you might have expressed objections to doing all the things you did doesn’t mean you didn’t do them.
No. Next I’m going to ask you what point you are trying to make. We were discussing
(a) whether what I was doing was negotiating. Nothing you quoted was “negotiating”. They are ideas of where we can begin looking for funds. It is my idea that we tax but we also look to pare any programs that might seem competing that are wasteful. (I think the Tesla electric car program is wasteful regardless. )
(b) we were discussing whether it makes sense to discuss funding and costs in parallel. I think makes sense to discuss both in parallel. You’ve said nothing to show discussing them in parallel doesn’t make sense. You’ve merely told us it’s your preference not to– while going along and discussing funding (rather enthusiastically) anyway.
I think I clarified: I don’t like pointless “horsetrading” in blog comments. Negotiating when it makes sense is fine– like for a car price, for ideas of whether to go to a movie or dinner tonight and so on.
In comments here, I”m happy to discuss if your ideas or mine. But I don’t think “horsetrading” in the “pork barrel” sense is useful. We are all going to decide to support political candidates programs and so on. I’m certainly not going to leave blog comments and say “Oh! I negotiated a “horsetrade” with Brandon to spare his ‘favored program Z’ in exchange for… whatever” and then actually support your ‘favored program Z’, merely because you wanted to ‘play horsetrading’ in comments.
Beyond that, I certainly don’t expect you are going to really support my electricity tax when you are writing your local friendly congressman rather than your tax carbon tax merely because you got me to say I would protect your “favored program Z”. (One was was making fuel from algea… right? Seemed like a long moving list.) My view is you are still going to like your carbon tax– for reasons you’ve stated.
I just don’t happen to think those are good reasons, but you do. “Horsetrading” isn’t going to change that.
My view about blog comments: they are for discussing whether ‘favored program Z’ is good or bad. Not “trading”.
Less suitable than mine because it is too broad. It’s better to tax electricity generation to support expansion of electricity generation.
Historically, it’s easier to make sure the revenue from a focused tax goes to the precise target we want to fund (in this case nuclear plants) It’s easier to keep the tax from growing unbounded and remaining the correct side. It’s easier to get people to support it for those reasons. Also: this is the tax that is connected to the actual goal of building the nuclear plants so it will be easier to sell than a carbon tax with is broader tax that seems designed to accomplish a different goal, and whose revenues will be difficult to focus on nuclear plants.
Selling securities is an awful idea. Truly awful. (I though even you’d backed down and claimed this was a joke. )
Brandon G
It is actually true that people might find you more convincing if you didn’t digress into longwinded pointless diatribes. That’s not advice suggesting what you should do, just an observation of fact.
You can label those accurate (though not welcomed by you) observations as “disingenuous”. But all your word choice does is make others wonder whether your vocabulary is so limited you don’t know that disingenuous means ” pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.” I don’t believe the people making observations about your behavior are giving anyone the impression they don’t know what they are talking about.
Brandon S
Maybe Maibachs plan is to get permission to release revoked and then go around and sternly tell people that they shouldn’t discuss contents of material a judge has decreed “unreleased”. Because Maibach wants that to be private. And everyone knows Maibach never wanted to private material released. 🙂
lucia (Comment #148356),
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No of course not. The previous comment was not designed to be helpful.
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Deals don’t happen by themselves, Lucia. They’re negotiated.
Sue,
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Every once in a blue moon, there’s a question I don’t feel any conflict or doubt in answering, and one that illuminates something that matters to me. Thanks for posing one!
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Why talk to Brandon? Anders, Eli, Neal, Joshua, so on. Any of them. Well, what else is there? I see two choices in discourse, although no doubt I miss many other options. In my view, with respect to those we disagree with, we can persuade them to our point of view or we can try to persuade others not to listen to them. Or we can sit around and echo with people we agree with. That last option is entertaining for a short while. But.
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Not to mention the other peripheral benefits. Probably other people already have these things covered, but I don’t. I need people to help me see where I’m making dumb mistakes. People who don’t necessarily like me or agree with what I’m trying to accomplish; people who are motivated to tell me where I’m wrong. Who rather than being reluctant to hurt my feelings are more than happy to rub my face in it.
Yah, uncomfortable and not fun, but. Profitable. Not so good for my vanity. :/ part of why I make a special point of self deprecation. It makes it easier if I try to stay used to the cold water.
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Back to the point. Brandon G isn’t a fool. Neal King isn’t a fool. None of these guys are, truthfully. I really honestly believe this is true; these aren’t stupid men. I genuine doubt these guys are evil men either. Why then are we not on the same page on these issues? Don’t blow this point off. These guys ~aren’t~ morons. Seriously. Nor are they evil. So, how come we disagree so strongly?
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Well, there probably are lots of good reasons besides the facts. I don’t really know; I don’t study this in too much detail because I’m not 100% sure the extent to which it matters. Identity politics? Ideology? Some other thing/s? Who knows. Certainly there must be reasons. They’re as smart as me, more or less. They’re as motivated as me if not more. Surely if I can reach out and meet them halfway, they’ll do the same. If I can overcome whatever prejudices me, why couldn’t they?
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Or not, and I’ll learn something I don’t know.
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Finally, I don’t believe anything that really matters in my life will come out of blog discussions. It’s just practice. But who knows.
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As always, thank you Sue.
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P.S. —
I invite anybody who can to come knock me on my butt regarding my POV here. Please! Nothing would make me happier, to be able to quit being nice, swallowing my temper, and trying to see things from viewpoints I disagree with. I’d love to do the ‘Conan the Barbarian’ thing and ‘crush my enemies’. It’d be fun. If it’d work. Tell me.
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Back to work…
lucia (Comment #148357),
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I’m of the mind that most people don’t like doing things which are pointless. Thing is, folks have differing ideas of what the point is supposed to be.
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But white elephant hunting is. Or was.
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Most likely not, but it *might* give me some idea of what the politically acceptable options are across the aisle for doing a nuclear program. I can use that information in two ways:
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1) So that I have a basis for evaluating the plans proposed by the real negotiators when I read about them.
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2) So that I can lobby my own side for things that might find bipartisan acceptance for when they write their local Congrisscritter.
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It really should go without saying that any time I discuss things with people I learn something from the experience. I never think that’s pointless. I do, however, appreciate your input on what I find useful to my own ends and what I don’t.
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That’s dogmatic. Next you’re going to tell me it isn’t.
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IIRC, your original proposal along those lines was to tax all non-nuclear sources of electricity. The original plan was for nuclear capacity to reach about 80% of the grid. That implies that as the number of nuke plants gets larger, there will be less funding available to build them. So I think that tax base is too narrow.
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In short, I’m not seeing the better. Taxing the entire grid regardless of what kind of power source generated them would make more sense to me.
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No seems about it, a cabon tax is designed to reduce carbon emissions. According to you, building nuclear plants is “doing something” to accomplish that goal. As well, I’ve pointed out (and I’m *far* from the only one here who has done so) that selling nukes to the left is going to be an uphill climb; funding it with a carbon tax would be a sweetener. I’m not seeing the problem with a carbon tax which *seems* designed to accomplish a different goal. Rather I look at it as a way to accomplish an integrated set of goals.
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You *seem* to think that building nuclear power plants sufficiently addresses CO2 emissions. I don’t. This *seems* to be the actual major point of contention.
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Yet the Fed has been doing it for decades to meet fiscal obligations, and this country is *far* from insolvent.
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I think that was in reference to my “printing money” comment. I think the better way is for the feds to write loan guarantees and let private capital do the debt financing. It *seems* pointless to keep banging away at me about how truly awful the idea of direct federal lending is when that’s not the method I most endorse.
lucia (Comment #148358),
.
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It’s actually true that when people don’t like the message I’m selling, they will give me “advice” about my posting style.
mark bofill (Comment #148361),
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[knocks Mark on his butt]
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You’re welcome.
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I’m not parsing swallowing temper and quit being nice. What I’m reading is that it can be difficult to see other points of view, especially when they arouse your temper.
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Whichever side wins will at least believe that it works.
Brandon Gates.
Heh.
Maybe you’re not as smart as I gave you credit for.
lucia:
What he said was a joke was his remark about “printing money.” He fully defended the government selling treasury bills to fund the program. I deserve credit for not going on about how stoooopid an idea that is. You have no idea how difficult it is for me to resist.
I think that’s it. And he’s going to do this for all of one week, the timeframe in which his motion hopes to resolve the current issue (of whether or not he can be party to the lawsuit).
By the way, there’s an update to my post because before I ran it, I offered Anthony Watts an opportunity to raise any concerns and/or have a response appended to the post. The update includes a response from a CEI lawyer, who Watts used as his source. It seems deranged to me.
Since you say you had trouble parsing it.
.
:
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Nothing would make me happier to be able to quit being nice,
Nothing would make me happier to be able to quit swallowing my temper,
Nothing would make me happier to be able to quit trying to see things from viewpoints I disagree with.
A certain amount of expressive hyperbole was employed in the above expressions. It is not literally true that ‘nothing would make me happier’ than these things. I believe that most regular Blackboard readers do not require explanations of such details.
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If you have further problems parsing this simplified form, don’t hesitate to ask for additional simplification.
Mark Bofill,
“Ideology?
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In the famous words of Sara Palin: You betcha!
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Many (most?) people on the left (who are usually also very ‘green’) see implementation of CO2 ‘mitigation’ as having little or no socio-political costs, and large socio-political benefits. They LIKE having government control most private economic activity. They LIKE government forcing people adopt the ‘right’ behaviors, and using government to punish any who resist (RICO 20!). They LIKE having the option to redistribute wealth from richer to poorer, both for individuals and for countries. They LIKE the idea of global governance. They LIKE the idea that ‘intellectual elites’ (AKA leftists on college campuses) should determine public policy. They see ‘urgent mitigation’ of global warming as a nearly perfect means by which to ‘save the earth’ AND achieve politically what can’t be easily accomplished otherwise.
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Most people on the right loath all those things and think that they will damage and diminish both society and individuals. They see ‘urgent mitigation’ of global warming as far more costly (both financially and politically) than any conceivable benefits. They see ‘global governance’ as nothing more than a means to implement a global tyranny of the majority over the minority, and so take most personal liberties away.
SteveF,
I think you’re right. This is part of my motivation to ‘deal with’ the policy problem of global warming. If people think the answer is some sort of nutty socialist ‘leap manifesto’, they’ve got another thing coming. [I shouldn’t have to say this, but this is not an argument you need to answer Brandon G. This is a remark directed towards SteveF. Thanks!]
mark bofill (Comment #148365),
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Ouch. Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee yet and missed the point of the juxtaposition.
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(holds breath and counts from one to ten)
Brandon G,
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I don’t have the time or attention right now for the sort of subtlety you’re apparently looking for in my words. There’s no special meaning. I’m just talking, probably just venting, and probably saying stupid things.
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If there’s something odd about the ‘juxtaposition’ of something I said, point it out, we can all have a good laugh at my stupidity, (cause I might could use that, seriously, a good laugh might help), and move on.
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Thanks.
Gates:
No of course not. The previous comment was not designed to be helpful
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That marks the last post of yours I’ll ever read. You’ll some day realize you’re sabotaging your own cause, but ’til then, have fun Vizzini.
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/sheesh
My armchair psychology suggests he already knows this, and it’s his way of crying for help.
Andrew
mark bofill (Comment #148371),
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Appreciated, thanks.
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Well ok, in my experience you don’t say a lot of stupid things for no apparent reason, hence my … confusion … I guess?
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That’s not a rhetorical question of you, but of me. I haz no answer.
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I was reading you literally. Typically swallowing one’s temper is what one does when attempting to be nice, not when deciding to stop being nice. Juxtaposing those things intentionally reads to me as an irony. The full message then reading (literally) as: Being an ill-tempered arsehole isn’t a good way to understand opposing points of view.
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Problem with poetry is that it’s subject to varying interpretation. Here of course I presume that varying interpretations are a problem.
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Wish I could give you a good laugh right now, but I’m not feeling particularly witty at the moment.
Brandon G,
Your word choice seems to indicate that you think it is an expression of principles or morals. I call me expressing my opinion “giving my opinion.”
TerryMN (Comment #148372),
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Yet another variant of if only I’d play by everyone else’s rules, they’d be lining up to support a cause they’ve been opposing for decades. Pull my other one.
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Indeed. Nice to know we agree on something.
Thanks Brandon G. Ive mentioned being really busy. Don’t have the leisure Ive had to ponder. Wouldn’t surprise me if the quality of my comments are suffering as a result. Still, I like chatting here and don’t really want to quit. I hope this doesn’t present some problem.
lucia (Comment #148375),
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“dogmatic: inclined to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true.”
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Often used to refer to religious principles, which does have a moral sense, but that’s not what I was going for.
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“Opinionated” is one of the listed synonyms, which does have a more negative sense than “giving an opinion”. One might even call my usage of “dogmatic” presumptuous, if not loaded. But hey, I’m just expressing my opinion that funding a large national nuclear program intended to reduce particulate pollution and CO2 emissions with a small tax base *seems* hyper-focused and unworkable.
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The bit about taxing wind and solar electricity (and/or killing their white elephant subsidies) also *seems* wholly inconsistent with and counter-productive to the common aim of reducing particulate pollution and CO2 emissions.
Brandon S,
I have to admit, I’m not going to worry too much about the “what exactly Maibach asked for” kerfuffle. I am curious to see how this panns out. I hope a shit-wad of documents get released. Because I like it when FOIA works. 🙂
Of course the vast majority of stuff will be deadly dull. But. Still.
markbofill (Comment #148377),
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I’d mostly noticed a reduction in frequency, not quality.
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No not at all. You’re about at the bottom of the list of folks here with whom I’ve got a bone to pick.
Ty Brandon g. once again, my apologies. I will probably be less prone to open fire on your light utterances in a week or two. Meanwhile, Ive got bastarditice-of-the-blog right now, and will likely be unreasonable till then. Again, nothing personal.
we covered this. Next time I’ll just lin km back here
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #148366),
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ZOMG you correctly remembered something.
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Careful now. I defended the idea of the gummint borrowing at a low interest rate and re-lending it at a higher rate. Which it already does, and has been for ages. We’re still here, and still considered one of the safest investment vehicles on the planet.
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I questioned whether the amount of funding required would preclude the viability of a direct loan program due to the risk of exposure [edit: i.e., default risk … which a loan guarantee program also does.] Which brings us to …
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Here’s your Gold Star. Wear it with pride.
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I know, right? If there were a Nobel Prize for suffering idiots gladly, you’d certainly have my vote.
Mark B., seriously man don’t sweat it. Shit happens. Do a cooldown if you want, or take a chunk out of my ass … all the cool kids are doing it. Whatever works for you, mang. I’m easy, but I’m not cheap. Cheers.
lucia:
I think the defense against the FOI request is wrong as a legal matter, and I both expect and want the e-mails released because I think FOIA laws should be followed. I don’t think there will be much of anything interesting in them though. There certainly wasn’t anything damning or particularly noteworthy in the ones that have been released so far. I doubt any of the other e-mails will be very interesting either. I am curious how many got collected in the search because they refer to Puerto Rico though. It amuses me they got scooped up as well.
The only reason I care about who said what is it is so stupid how much people are trying to sex up this story. It’s a terrible habit “skeptics” have, and it detracts from the real issues. I mean, saying these e-mails seem worse than the Climategate ones? Come on.
Aside from that, this was just such a crazy claim. Requesting a temporary (one week) stay while you join a legal action is not asking a judge to require people remove documents from their web sites.
pull documents down from their servers. It certainly doesn’t warrant writing things like:
The reality is if people reported this story objectively and fairly, it would be a minor blip worth little interest. Reporting every little thing as proof of some sort of conspiracy (yes, Anthony Watts said there was one here) and/or major infraction against the public ensures the public won’t pay attention to the real problems.
Plus, everyone ignoring when groups like CEI say obviously untrue things offends me. It’s the same way as people like Richard Tol get away with making all sorts of false claims and being praised by “skeptics” based on them. That’s not how things should be.
Lucia (Comment #148379)
“Of course the vast majority of stuff will be deadly dull. But. Still.”
–
Maibach has not done that much wrong. If anything.
All legal.
That’s the funny part.
But in trying to cover up what he has done he makes it appear wrong, underhanded and duplicitous.
That’s the funnier part.
He is more likely to get slammed for covering up communication and running off to private e-mails than for anything he has communicated.
Because these are illegal [take note Brandon] once a FOI request has been made.
–
The University officer mad a big play [nudge, nudge, wink, wink] of advising him on what he did not have to disclose, ie anything that you did on private time.So he said to himself and her “Oh, these communications were all private”. They were innocent but not private so he got caught.
He asked people [take note Brandon] to change to private emails due to the flak they were receiving.
Again private emails are all OK just not in response to a FOI order.
result cooked goose. Lots of salacious e mails that should never have seen the light of day.
Desperate housewives stuff.
deadly dull?
From time to time, people find piece[s] of junk and refurbish [them] into reasonable [stuff]. From your friends south of the Mason Dixon line (and no, I don’t care if it turns out these people are from NY, and you don’t need to tell me if they are, I don’t care…) we give you that red rocking chair, aint got no use for it now.
[Edit: Yeah. The singer is from Santa Cruz California. Whatever. He ain’t got no sugar baby now, uhhuh ain’t got no honey baby now.]
So apparently Anthony Watts is unhappy with me, saying I’m a jerk because I wrote this while updating my post to add the text he wanted appended to the post:
According to him, this remark means I’m not willing to provide “fairness and [an] opportunity to respond” and am actually just a jerk. I get it may not pleasant to have what you write called “garbage,” but for a person who runs a site that does things like compare people to Nazis while much of its audience applauds and accuses people of fraud without the slightest basis, I’m not sure where the outrage comes from.
I know this is a little petty. I normally wouldn’t bother posting it. I just wanted to take a moment to mention how Watts Up With That routinely behaves in disreputable ways and promotes all sorts of offensive/nonsensical writings. I feel like that deserves to be mentioned more often.
angech writes:
This is not true. If e-mails are not public records subject to disclosure under an FOI request then it cannot possibly matter whether one writes them on a private server or a university server. Moreover, FOI requests aren’t limited to university servers. Amongst other things, they can also apply to e-mails written on private servers (this was an important issue in the Clinton e-mail controversy). That means if all these e-mails are determined to be public records, even when not written using university resources, they can still be obtained under FOIA laws.
There is nothing illegal about requesting people take their communication to private e-mail servers, and the CEI’s commentary on this issue is all very misleading.
Brandon S
It may not matter vis-a-vis the letter of FOIA law. But there are practical issues.
If I have private email sent back and forth on my private email server, I can do what I want with it. Save it, delete it whatever. But if I use the university server, the university staff will do whatever their policy dictates. Generally, that means it is likely to continue to exist for a long time. If a FOIA requests comes it, some of those might be recognized as truly private and not released. Or mistakes could occur and some stuff might get out. Or some material I consider private might be interpreted as not really private.
And there is an awful lot of stuff that one could arguably be called “private” or “not private”. People do things like have business lunches, nor network or all sorts of other things. And many jobs encourage this. Universities encourage a bunch of interaction with the public under a sometimes ambiguous umbrella they call “service”. This umbrella can both be used to interpret quite a few behaviors that are clearly not “teaching” nor “research” nor “administration” as part of ones “job”– and so permit use of university facilities. No one scrutinizes too carefully on a day to day basis– and so some stuff might actually be private. But no one cares. But that umbrella then means lots of these things can be interpreted as “university business” when FOIA comes along.
In these arguable cases, ea University employee who takes care to do these things using their own non-government resources is likely to find it easier to convince a judge they really were not in anyway “university” business. (That is provided the employee doesn’t just switch to doing all his university business on his private server. Then legally, he’s probably back to where he started with a judge viewing an awful lot of stuff as ‘university’.)
Similarly, things that exist are subject to subpoena. So, if you use your private server and delete… well…. stuff is gone.
The fact is, using the a server owned by a university and sending stuff during work hours makes a lot of stuff that one could argue was private be interpreted as not private. It certainly means a lot of stuff is going to be discoverable. So it does make a big practical difference even if the letter of the law says only the public/private distinction matters.
Personally I like WUWT, ATTP, Climate etc, Arctic Sea Ice blog and especially here. I read stoat and Eli very occasionally.
All except one take my sense and nonsense and deal with it accordingly.
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“If e-mails are not public records subject to disclosure under an FOI request then it cannot possibly matter whether one writes them on a private server or a university server.”
–
If one commits a criminal action in sending e mails in defiance of a FOI request privately, and tells the world one is doing this.
“Our e-mails on this subject seem to be subject to FOI law so can we all send them privately in future on this topic”.
Means the emails on public record [legitimate] but FOI now have emails on private record about the subject of an FOI request and in deliberate intention of evading the FOI act [illegal] and we have admitted this [stupid and illegal].
The crime is never in writing emails, heaven forbid, it is the act of hiding them from an FOI inquiry.
Why is this so hard?
lucia:
This is what I believe Hillary is getting dinged for. Her assumption was that any email she sent to or received from a Department of State server would automatically get saved.
That’s pretty much true, but I believe it fails to meet the archiving standards of the FOIA. Her emails could be recovered, but it required a heroic effort to do so.
Her archiving method may have been consistent with the letter of the law, but failed to comply in spirit.
Carrick,
I’m pretty sure we’ve swum in different waters [before] WRT clearance issues. You being a respected scientist, me being just another of a million code monkeys at one point in time for the DOD.
I have never. EVER. heard any of the managers or security people I’ve worked with discuss the ‘spirit’ of any regulation. NEVER.
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Again – may well be that the ‘spirit’ of the law is reserved for brilliant scientists and potential madam Presidents and not scum such as myself. Still, the uninitiated may appreciate[delete :d] hearing that there is a difference.
So I guess what I’m saying is that if you think she complied ‘with the letter of the law’…
She ought to be good. It doesn’t actually sound to me like she did anything remotely like the letter of the law.
Wha–ever. Maybe Bernie should debate Trump.
Heh.
mark bofill,
When you run for President, the “spirit” of FOI law will matter to many voters. This is especially so with FOI which exists precisely to permit government to be transparent and force a degree of accountability on government employees and officials.
On the other hand, the letter is what matters vis-a-vis legal matters and should be all that matters with respect to employment actions.
I’m not going to pretend expertise on FOI, but as a voter I do care that Hilary’s actions were definitely sub-standard from both FOI and security POV’s. With respect to FOI I think that was intentionally so. (I know she would claim otherwise. But I just don’t believe her. ) I don’t think she intended security lapses, but I don’t think she took appropriate care.
These are among the reasons I will not vote for Hilary. Ever. No. Not even though the other person running is Trump. ( I’m not sure I can hold my nose and vote for Trump either. But I won’t vote for Hilary.)
mark bofill, you’ve got a bit of an anger issue on this one I see.
I was
referringthinking specifically to this document.It may or may not use the exact phrase”spirt of the law”, but it says pretty much the same thing I said above.
Where did I say any such thing?
If she failed to comply with the spirit (intent) of the law, that means she failed to comply with the law.
Remember deep breaths.
Lucia,
Maybe I was making an omelette of FOI and security. At a glance this looks correct, that this was my error.
TY.
LOL.
I do have a bit of anger on that issue.
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Just call me Darth Bofill…
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TY Carrick.
lucia:
Honestly, I think this issue is way down on the list of things most people care about.
I doubt a very high percentage of people’s vote hinges on this issue (other than if she were to get criminally indicted, which I think is an extremely remote possibility).
I would guess that most people are going to vote for her or against her based on ideology or party identification reasons. If she meets the grade on that, they’ll vote for her. If she doesn’t, they’ll just use this as one more reason to dislike her.
The way I see it, is if voters are will to excuse Trump for basically committing fraud wrt his Trump University,then clearly they aren’t basing their votes on ethical behavior.
Carrick,
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It’s hard to take deep breaths and relax when I’m scared. But of course you are correct.
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Fact is I’m scared of both of these goobers. Trump presents more of an upset than Clinton. I can figure out what’s going to happen (well, tell myself that) if Hillary gets in office.
I’m not sure what Trump means. I know what he says.
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Thanks for you patience Carrick, as always.
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I HOPE we don’t just stupidly vote our party. The world is getting too complicated for that..
Mark Bofill, I have anger issues of my own here, but they’re differnt than yours. (I’ve taken a very strong dislike to both parties.)
I don’t admire, like, respect Trump. At all.
But I actually think it would be both awesome [*] and entertaining to watch Trump get paid $10,000,000 to destroy the Democratic Party.
I’m still waiting for Trump to announce a reality TV show shot weekly from the White House.
“It’d get really high ratings. Off the charts. People would come just to watch me. The proceeds could go to ‘some nice worthy charity’.”
That’d be pretty awesome too. And I will vote for him, if he makes that promise.
[*] Nuclear bombs are awesome too. Saying something is awesome isn’t necessary an endorsement, even though in US vernacular, awesome does get used that way too.
ty carrick
Mark Bofill, as far as I can see the different is that Hillary is a sleazy lawyer-politician. She plays games with what is legal, like she did with the private server. Yes that was bad judgement, but it was her judgment.
Were she elected, I’d expect to see decades long hearings over her shading dealings, but it wouldn’t’ strongly affect our national interests other than in how she damages her own party through her poor judgement.
In my opinion, Donald Trump is a corrupt business man in the mold of “the wolf on Wall Street” who has a “cult of personality” following. He has a disregard for what is legal, moral or ethical. He doesn’t seem bound by our social compacts either.
It’s pretty clear to me he’s a dangerous and unpredictable individual to have in the President’s office. He could very well cause lasting damage to our democratic institutions if elected.
From a pure Game-of-Thrones perspective, given the circumstances, if you aren’t a Democrat, you should vote for Hillary. But I predict a Trump victory, mostly because Bernie seems to have no intention of allowing anybody besides himself to win on the liberal side of the field.
Carrick,
I think a lot of people consider whether than can trust the presidential candidate both to be honest generally and to take care of things like national security. That both candidates seem to have problems in that regard presents a problem. But I do think people think about that.
Whether their votes hinge on this issue is another matter. When voting time approaches, there are clearly many issues one cares about. Political leanings and ideology make a huge difference (as they should).
If Trump’s elected, I think his moniker should be “The Wolf in the White House”.
Maybe I should design a tee shirt. :-/
I should vote Hillary?
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I think Sanders is going to flare out once Hillary secures the nomination. That happens this month? 28’th-ish is what I recalled. The booze, stress, and .. god only knows what all.. might be running interference.
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What the heck will it mean for Trump to take office? I can’t figure this out with confidence.
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If liberals could get out of their traditional attack patterns and see how Trump scares conservatives. They could determine the course of this election.
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I don’t know what would be best anymore. I ~do~ tend to ‘run home to Mama’ as you said and think about ideology, even though I know perfectly well that Hilllary Clinton is an experienced and competent Federal administrator. Bill’s admin was OK. Maybe Hil’s will be too.
.
In this world. Death and Taxes.
lucia:
I’m sure they do. But this relates back to my personal theory about how politics functions:
I think the reality is the majority of people aren’t going to research this issue and separate the truth of the matter from the partisan lies and distortions that appear in the media.
Which truths, lies and distortions they’ll accept are generally going to be based on their ideological and political affiliations.
So for the majority of people, the actual truth won’t matter, ideology and politics will drive the perception of the trustworthiness of the candidate towards issues like national security.
The only time the truth matters in politics is when there aren’t alternative versions of the facts circulating around, and that only happens when you are being thrown under the bus by your party.
heh.
[Edit:
I’d buy one. one or several. It’d be the ‘Truth’. :/]
[[Do we NEED a wolf in the white house?]
Mark Bofill:
Sanders can still choose to run as an independent (which is what he is in reality, he clearly has no loyalty to the Democratic Party).
That would sink any hopes for Hillary.
My armchair philosophy suggests that if the two dominant/relevant political parties are now both offering bad candidates, the conclusion is that some kind of outside refresh should take place. Not going to happen, but needs to be acknowledged.
Andrew
I might still vote for her Carrick. Seriously. I made money and got raises when her husband was President. Oh heck – I know. I’ve heard the arguments why that was to his credit and why not. Mostly I think he was lucky ~and~ right, to compromise and be moderate.
.
There is still hope while life remains!
When’s the last time any of y’all got raises? I’m guessing it’s been awhile. Wasn’t Bill Clinton President back then…
Lucia, maybe we could use a wolf. As long as we can keep him out of the sheep pen that is…
Goshdarn Carrick.
I’m feeling all itchy and wooly.
BAAHH!!!!
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Maybe if somebody sheered me.
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Ok that stunk!
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If somebody would pull the wool from my eyes!
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bahdump-duh.
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I can’t… I’m going to go puke now.
lucia, I agree but:
It’s important to note nobody has shown any of these e-mails were sent during work hours. It’s not like being a professor means you have a 9-5 job, especially not in the summer (or weekends). I haven’t checked the timestamps of the released e-mails myself to see exactly when they were sent. but nobody has provided details either. (One person at my site posted times, but he didn’t include dates or day of the week so that wasn’t useful.)
Carrick:
How is that? Complying with a rule does not require reading the mind of the person who made the rule.
Mark Bofill:
I have, but it was always when people were uncertain of a rule and used it to justify going “above and beyond.” Their point was if you’re not sure exactly what a rule/regulation requires but you know the motivation for it, you can be safe by doing more than what the rules might require.
ty Brandon.
Carrick.
I don’t get why you think Trump is any more potentially damaging than Clinton.
FWIW, I actually think there are reasons to believe that Clinton is safer. But if my reasons are the same as yours, I’m being a fool as usual. 🙂 [Humbala! Big butt typo!! disrregard this whole FWIW!] [scratch ‘if my reasons are the same as yours’. I think a piece of Cracken Cocaine got stuck someplace between my brains and my hands there. And I don’t do cocaine.]
he isn’t going to do any more harm than President Obama did. Watch. He’s going to have to pussy up to Congress. He wants to make some point.. What point? What does Trump believe in?
dunno, actually… why the man scares me. And excites voters. He’s the bad boy on the motorcycle. He might actually win the office.
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May God have mercy on us all, who should have known better than to vote for the cute boy on the cycle. My expectation is that He Wont. And I don’t even believe.
Carrick,
That was a suckier comment than I usually make. What I was trying to get at is this.
:
1. They’re all (both of them) a couple of liars.
2. The way Trump plays being a liar turns the fools on and gets them hot.
3. The whole goshdarn thing makes me want to vomit.
.
That’s all.
Thanks.
Brandon:
Well, you can judge for example that the intent of the FOIA is to make access to information easier, not harder. That doesn’t require mind reading abilities.
If somebody chooses to act using an interpretation of the actual words of the FOIA that generally makes access to information more difficult, this would clearly be an interpretation that was counter to the intent of the FOIA.
I would say the person was not in compliance with the FOIA in this case, and they could expect to lose legal challenges over their behavior.
As you likely know, if you act counter to the spirit or intent of the law, you can still be legally culpable even when you can mechanistically argue that your interpretation of the words themselves permitted you to act in the way you did.
I’ll point out that there often is ambiguity in the way laws are written (including case law associated with it) that do require a certain level of “judging intention”, and these give rise to disputes over the legality of particular actions.
These disputes ultimately get settled in a court of law of course. That case law “closes the loop” and establishes meaning. With enough precedents you end up with black letter law or “settled law”.
I don’t know for a fact that Hillary violated the FOIA by using a private server and not archiving and handing over her emails when leaving office, but I “buy into” the argument in the Inspector General’s report that she did. Eventually, if it comes to that, a legal court would make the final determination. But it seems implausible to me she would win such a legal argument.
Mark Bofill, I think the difference in our views comes down to my perception that “Donald Trump is a corrupt business man in the mold of ‘the wolf on Wall Street’ who has a ‘cult of personality’ following. He has a disregard for what is legal, moral or ethical. He doesn’t seem bound by our social compacts either.”
I think such a person could (probably unintentionally) do lasting damage to our national institutions in a way a slimy politician like Hillary never would.
Where is Deus Ex Machina when you need him/her?
The thing that worries me about Hillary is that her inability to understand and act intelligently on the issues she may confront could induce adoption of another really ill-chosen course of action – like Libya.
Here is someone who wants to be president who cannot handle campaign flack, cannot plausibly (truthfully?) explain her secret email system, and would likely respond to the fabled 3 am phone call by having the question focus-grouped.
True, Trump could win, but Jeb could have gotten the votes of a whole lot of democrats who cannot stand her.
I’m looking forward to what happens at the convention when/if it appears that she might lose to Trump. Maybe they’ll settle on Biden.
I cannot find the quote, but a history of France from the Revolution to the end of WW1 included a remark that the country had failed to produce a single competent politician between Napoleon’s second removal and the start of WW1 – I think over some 80 years.
Here, I guess it depends on your outlook as to whether our interregnum (so to speak) starts now or maybe on the first George Busch’s departure from service.
I really hate this.
I really hate this too.
Hillary doesn’t know how to use a computer or any phone besides a Blackberry. She lies about everything she is questioned about. She uses the family foundation like a cash deposit machine for favors she did as SOS.
Trump, I don’t even think wanted to be POTUS, but now his ego won’t let it go. He affiliates w/ the mob and “likes” Putin. The thought of that egomaniac having his tiny finger on nuclear weapons is appalling to me.
I’m w/ Mark and might have to go and vomit…
Carrick:
it also doesn’t tell us much of anything. FOIA laws are clearly intended to make access ot information easier than it would be if FOIA laws did not exist, but that doesn’t translate into a blanket statement like you portray:
You would be wrong. Making access to e-mails more difficult than it might be otherwise is not inherently a violation of FOIA law. Choosing to use e-mail rather than a public message board for one’s communication makes it more difficult to access the information, but no court in the world would rule it to be a violation of FOIA law.
The intent of FOIA laws is clearly to grant greater access to information. There is, however, plenty of room for interpretation of how much greater that access should be. Simply saying any act taken to reduce access to information violates the spirit of the FOIA law is far from accurate.
For instance, if a person chooses to only have discussions in person or over the phone where no record is kept with the intent of not creating public records with information so as to avoid such information being disclosed via FOI requests, that is not illegal. Unless there is a policy stating otherwise, people are allowed to use ephemeral communication to reduce access to information. That’s not a violation of FOIA laws
jferguson, I’d rather ask where Deus is.
Brandon, this is sometimes an engineering oriented site. I was also thinking of the Machina.
as an aside, my first opportunity to vote in a national election was 1964. I didn’t like either one of them, but I never would have thought our country in peril with Goldwater or Johnson. It seems strange that I think we could be in real peril with either of these folks. it could be that I have a better grasp of the possibilities than I did at 22. Do you think imagination might improve with age? I suppose this may be too soon to ask you this question, but it’s worth considering.
I’m not given to paranoia, I hope.
jferguson,
Some people seriously thought Goldwater would start a nuclear war, or didn’t you see the (in)famous Johnson campaign ad?
Brandon:
I probably wouldn’t be. You’re obviously not a justice of the court, who decides this sort of thing anyway.
Sorry, but you have absolutely no way of knowing this. In fact, I suspect if a case like this goes to court , you’ll be proven wrong…
You haven’t even stated why you think what you think.
As far as I can tell, it’s because you think “intent of the law” isn’t factored into legal decisions. Is this a fair characterization of your views?
Just going to add here: I’m not by any means claiming that intent is always factored in, just that it can be, especially in extreme cases where a proposed interpretation yields an absurd outcome, like a law intended to facilitate the dissemination of information, under a particular interpretation, ends up making it more difficult.
This goes under Doctrine of Absurdity.
I’ll also note there are Supreme Court decisions where “intent of the law” was factored in. A particularly famous example is Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892).
As summarized here:
[Emphasis mine.]
What I think here is the email kerfuffle requires a much less “generous reading” by any court, for it to hold as illegal the use of private email (without archiving and handing over the emails after leaving office) in the way that Hillary used it.
I think the bigger issue is whether it is an ethical issue for a high official to manipulate the interpretation of the law in a way that essentially puts the law on its ear, regardless of whether a particular court would uphold their behavior as legal. So while I’m still interested in the interplay between the “plain meaning” doctrine and “original intent”, it doesn’t have too much to do with my condemnation of Clinton’s decision to use a private server.
Gods have mercy, nothing you said was wrong Carrick.
[edit: uhmm. with respect to what you me and Sue were discussing…]
[With respect to special rules for ‘High’ officials. Really?]
Heh. Carrick. I do not spitball you for your honesty. I applaud you for speaking straight.
This said, do explain when you get a chance. I’m already thinking about it and filling in the blanks, but. I’d prefer to hear what you were thinking. [edit: about different rules for high officials. Why is it we should hold them to different rules? Or are you making an observation about the inevitability of it?]
The funny thing with injections is the anticipation of pain with needles. I hate needles with a passion.
Yet I have B12 shots which I give myself.
5 minutes of mental agony building up the courage.
And?
Little pain and a lot of wonder what all the fuss was about after.
–
So it is with Presidents.
So much angst over so little a problem.
Think back about all the Presidents you loved [?] and hated.
Does it all matter looking back?
Did the Presidents cause problems or did the world?
On a range from Bill to Jimmy where will Trump and Hilary end up?
Somewhere in the middle more towards Carter/Nixon.
Both lack voter appeal and appear manipulative and underhanded.
Good credentials me-seems.
“The court heard the Maibach motion in about two minutes and ordered the entirety of FOI released. For the third time. Released was a copy-paper boxful of records that GMU originally claimed didn’t exist.”
–
“Of course the vast majority of stuff will be deadly dull. But. Still.â€
:> TY Angech. Darned if that ain’t so. This too will pass.
Carrick,
“I think such a person could (probably unintentionally) do lasting damage to our national institutions in a way a slimy politician like Hillary never would.”
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We agree on the slimy politician part. But I think the Donald’s obvious incompetence in a number of important areas (strategic defense, international trade, and more) is actually orthogonal to the issues the voters care about. Does Hillary actually understand more about international negotiations than the Donald? Yes, probably she does. Would Hillary make better decisions on a host of policy relevant subjects? That is a more complicated question. A lot depends on if you think the policies she would adopt (essentially Obama III) are in the best interests of the country. Personally, I think Obama’s lawless actions (often in direct, conscience opposition to the law) damages the fabric of our society. If the choice is someone who wants to continue that lawlessness, or someone who has much to learn, it is not clear to me that lawlessness (not to mention obscene financial corruption) is a better choice. I hate having to choose between a corrupt liar and an incompetent buffoon. But I am sick to death of corrupt politicians being in charge.
SteveF, corrupt politicians suck, just like mobbed up businessmen..
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910
I’m voting indy Gary Johnson at this point. Clear conscious not to help either liar become president. Something needs to change in the US regarding our corrupt 2 party system.
Dewitt, I think everyone of age in 64 saw that ad. It could have been that it was too hard a choice for someone my age. It could have been that I thought Goldwater too doctrinaire, although i doubt i knew the word at the time.
I won’t sit this one out, though. But I sure won’t enjoy it either.
I don’t recall whether it showed up in a televised message in 1980 as it did in 1964, but the argument used against Goldwater was bruited widely about in 1980 against Reagan: he was sure to nuke ’em.
I was a Republican district chairman at the time, I heard it repeatedly, and most of the people who told me it made them reluctant to vote for Reagan were Republicans.
Sue,
The problem with voting for the libertarian is that it is little more than a vote for Hillary. Clinton’s base is ~45%, no matter how bad she is. Third party votes will come mostly from people who would otherwise support a Republican. Remember that we are facing this slimy Clinton only because the first slimy Clinton became president with 42% of the votes… a third party candidate (Perot) took 19% of the vote, mostly from George Bush the elder. I confess to being one of Perot’s voters, but now recognize that was a terrible mistake.
The Simpsons, as with all foibles American, nail our problem with the two-party system. And, it was in a Treehouse of Horror episode so we get Kodos and Kang!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v7XXSt9XRM
Steve F, you will no doubt like the Ross Perot cameo. I myself voted for Perot twice, and the second time I knew he was insane! And like you, I regret the Perot vote especially for Elder Bush, he really was a good president.
Fear not. America remains the most powerful nation, both economically and militarily. At the same time, thankfully as per the founders intent, the executive remains the weakest branch, and the president remains the weakest leader among nations.
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It’s easy to get caught up in the emotions that candidates cultivate, but ultimately, with some notable exceptions, most presidents aren’t very important persons.
In some ways, the decline of American political culture was inevitable. As governments get bigger and more powerful, there’s just more opportunity for corruption and the impact of the corruption is more widespread and deep, no matter what side you are on.
Even the most stalwart saint is not immune to his or her tendency to do bad things. Powerful positions just make it easier to do and not be accountable for it. The only sure way to avoid getting dirty is to not get involved, but then if it’s not Hillary or The Donald, it would have been someone else.
So IMO, we are going to bottom out at some point. We just have to do the best we can to get through it.
Saturday Morning Soapbox – Out.
Andrew
mark bofill (Comment #148301)
May 25th, 2016 at 6:46 am
While I’m cooking breakfast, I’ll also throw this out there.
The idea that we need to hold the world still in order to avoid ‘damages’ or ‘losses’ looks like a central planner’s wet dream. Unfortunately central planning isn’t the optimal strategy for dealing with societal problems. There will be change, people will win and lose, make fortunes and be ruined. The seas will rise – this will present hazard and opportunity. As it should.
Pretty much true.
I’m not sure the sea level rise is understood very well.
The over 150% error in older estimates of Antarctic ice mass change (Antarctica is gain ice mass) don’t bode well for a sensible discussion of future sea level.
A sea level rise that is lower than the average subsidence is no catastrophe. And blaming CO2 for subsidence is crazy.
I’m not convinced that given the cooling of the deep ocean that the future sea level rise claims are even supportable.
Dewitt, In 1964, we had just gone through Cuban Missile and Berlin Wall crises. Being young and impressionable (and stupid?), I and my friends thought nuclear war was a possible reaction to the Wall and spent more than a casual amount of time conjecturing how to survive in the caves west of Saint Louis in the event an evacuation became necessary.
I cannot remember ever doing the ‘hide under the desk’ routine in school either in Minneapolis or Chicago. But, there were Nike missile emplacements not far from us in the northern Chicago suburbs. I feel most of us thought nuclear war could happen.
Given that nuclear war seemed quite possible at the time, it wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that the wrong guy in the Whitehouse might make it more likely.
And of course it would never have occurred to any of us at the time that we would be safe in Chicago or Saint Louis because the Soviets had targeted Paducah, KY. Don’t ask how i know this.
Sue, the Libertarian convention is this weekend, and it looks like Johnson, but do consider John McAfee.
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I started supporting him as a lark, but the more I read, he’s probably the most intellectual among any of the candidates.
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If I vote ( and voting just encourages the bastards ) then I’ll vote for McAfee on philosophical grounds.
Do you mean the John McAfee accused of murder? I don’t remember what happened with that accusation, but the story sounded like he might be a bit unhinged.
Yes, it sounds like that same McAfee .
I suppose I should desist but…
“Ich bin ein Berliner” in 1963 suggests schizophrenia.
Do you mean the John McAfee accused of murder?
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Yes, though technically, I think he was just a person of interest
.
Also the one who admits to taking 100 cubic feet of recreational drugs in his life and married a prostitute.
.
But I’m going with intellect leads to eccentricity.
.
Here are some possible McAfee cabinet members.
McAfee’s attraction is in part that he knows he’s nuts. I’m not sure about our two current standard bearers.
jferguson,
I dunno, a jelly filled doughnut, Berliner, doesn’t have a brain as far as I know.
Actually, using ‘Berliner’ to mean Pfannkuchen wasn’t done in Berlin at the time, so the audience understood what he meant and applauded, not laughed. The laughter came when he made a joke about his poor German accent.
Carrick:
No, and neither is anybody else here. That doesn’t mean none of us can look at the long patterns of how courts handle these issues. Or that none of us can recognize blatantly absurd claims as blatantly absurd. For instance, anyone can recognize the absurdity of saying any action taken to make access to information more difficult which follows the letter of FOIA law violates FOIA law.
Yes, I do. It’s called looking at case law, court rulings and the text of laws. People are quite capable of doing this even if you wish to suggest the only people who know these things are the justice of courts who get to decide this sort of thing.
I have never said or suggested anything of the sort, and I certainly do not believe it.
Nobody is talking about someone using a law designed “to facilitate the dissemination of information” to make “it more difficult.” Clinton did not use this law to do anything of the sort. We can see this as if FOIA and archiving laws did not exist, it would have been even more difficult to access the information than if they did not. In fact, accessing that information may well have been impossible without these laws.
None of these cases involve anyone using FOIA or similar laws to make access to information more difficult. What they all involve is people disagreeing about how easy FOIA laws should make access to information. Those are very different things.
Nor have you stated why you think a person trying to not grant access to information under FOIA law is using FOIA law to make access to information more difficult.
It’s the same McAfee. He claims the Belize gov was corrupt and trying to extort money from him. At least that is what he said on Stossel.
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I voted for Perot also and regretted it. I can’t believe the Dems made the same mistake voting for Nader to give W. Bush just enough. Talk about regretting one’s vote. Even Nader had to regret he didn’t vote for Gore.
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W respect to Hillary emails, she admitted the reason was she didn’t want Dick Morris (and other GOPs) digging through her business before she made several other excuses. The law specifically intends that public official’s business eventually accessible by the public. I’m guessing that email makes it too hard to do the historically customary burning or shredding. Notice that the White House no longer has a recording system to help posterity. Any Hillary supporters here or do I have to go to a real climate site?
Andrew_KY:
I believe there’s a strong argument the United States government was far more corrupt in the past than it is now. I know for sure that’s true at many state and local levels.
Though I am curious what history will show has been going on behind the scenes in recent times. I know many things the FBI and CIA did in the past were not really known at the time. I imagine that may still be true. (That the CIA has lied to the people overseeing it to cover up activities in recent times is easily demonstrable though.)
Brandon S.
That’s the thing about spies: lies are their stock-in-trade. After a while, it’s not at all clear that they even know they’re lying. There was a review of a book about that in the WSJ the other day.
The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers and Guerillas, 1939-45
by Max Hastings
Brandon S.,
My impression is that the ever-present corruption in national gov’t was a little more petty in the past, and is a little more grandiose now.
Andrew
Dewitt, re: Muggeridge quote
Friend was staff psychologist at Talladega Fed Pen. He did it for 10 years and believed that he had been permanently and adversely affected by the experience. He had come to distrust everyone he didn’t know well and some he did. He couldn’t deal with anyone without worrying about how he was being worked.
There probably are studies somewhere on this subject which might characterize personas of folks who spent careers teaching second grade, or freshman Physics Lite, or….
I was another Perot supporter, alas.
angech:
This portrayal by Anthony Watts is highly misleading, which he must know as I’ve challenged him on this point before and he looked at it. The university did not say these records didn’t exist. What the university said is no records responsive to an FOI request exist. The reason is people involved in the process felt these records were not responsive.
That those people were wrong to decide these records were not responsibe does not mean they said the records do not exist. Watts’s statement may be true in some technical sense, but he knows fully well it creates a misleading portrayal which sexes up the story.
Andrew_KY:
I’m not sure what you have in mind, but you should look at the corruption in the Grant administration and compare that to what happens now. That’s just one administration, but it shows something of what I’m talking thinking of. Also, while it may involve petty things, administrations like Nixon’s definitely involved a lot of corruptness. There’s also the decades where the FBI was used to specifically target enemies of the administration, even at the direct behest of the administration. (Though I’m honestly not convinced the FBI or similar organizations have gotten much better )
DeWitt Payne:
That sounds like a fair assessment, though reading things like the CIA’s defense of its torture program makes it very difficult (for me) to believe some of these people don’t know what they say is untrue. It is clear agencies like the FBI/CIA routinely overstate the value produced by their programs.
Mark Bofill:
I’m just saying that high officials should be held to higher standards, not lower. They have more authority, and there’s a farther reach for the consequences of their actions, so … with greater authority comes greater accountability.
SteveF:
I think the problem with Donald Trump is worse than just incompetence.
If we believe Trump about how he’d respond to given scenarios, probably “yes”. Her judgments haven’t always had good outcomes, but things she’s done mostly made sense to do at the time. My biggest slam would be she doesn’t seem to be great about anticipating adverse consequences of her actions.
Carrick.
Meh. Thank you though. But I meh at you.
Brandon, honestly I really don’t see a cohesive argument there. Let’s just start with this sentence:
Leaving aside your obvious exaggerations about ” but no court in the world would rule it to be a violation of FOIA law” (I doubt you are familiar with how the court works in all 196 countries in the world), if you look at the Supreme Court, on highly politicized cases like this one, politics seems to play as big a role as objective arguments. In Bush v. Gore, for example, all of the Supreme Court justices landed neatly on the side that they identified with politically. I doubt that is just a coincidence.
Leaving that aside (but it’s a real issue here), it doesn’t look to me like we’re really talking about the same thing.
Hillary Clinton under the FOIA, as SOS, had archiving responsibilities. The question that would be asked in a court is was whether she met her obligations under the FOIA by using a private server, then destroying her emails upon leaving office. My judgement (and I think that of the OIG’s office) is she did not, and that her arguments for why she did are tortuous and absurd.
Unlike you say something a bit more substantive than your special insight into “how courts handle these issues”, I’m leaving it there.
Mark Bofill, why meh? Isn’t this standard doctrine for positions of authority?
Thanks PA.
Carrick,
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It’s not really worth much bother or I’d have already elaborated, but since you ask:
1. Naw, I don’t think so. I’m sort of a sucker for that blindfolded marble statue with the sword and the scales. I get what you’re saying I think, but I don’t think there should be different rules for the political elite on general principles, even if those rules ‘punish’ them. Taken with a grain of salt and within reason, I know as a practical matter there’s only so far one can take this idea.
2. You’re right probably about it being standard. I honestly wouldn’t know.
3. This third contradicts #1. I’m puzzled about this too and can only offer my red face / blush as an excuse. But I have tentatively come to believe (and it’s humiliating in a way to admit this, but it’s true that I feel this way) that I don’t necessarily want an honest man or woman in the White House. I know, that’s pretty sad. [Edit : but in this day and age being a world class liar seems to be part of the job?]
.
Anyways. I always and without exception appreciate hearing your viewpoints Carrick. Thanks for taking the time out to chat with me.
Time to go mow.
Brandon S: “It is clear agencies like the FBI/CIA routinely overstate the value produced by their programs.”
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Doesn’t everyone overstate their product value? I think a better question is would we be better off eliminating them to reduce the deficit. The three instances that our nation could have most benefited from good intelligence were: Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and Iraqi WMD. Is there a big success I am missing?
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On the down side where America is vilified around the world the CIA is invariably in the mind if not the sentence. Hundreds of billions in foreign aid barely balances the ill-will. Iran will be using the Shaw of Iran Coup to hate us likely for another 1000 years. Before 1980 (an some time after) the CIA saw that coup as one of their neatest black ops. After the Bay of Pigs JFK was likely thinking the same thoughts about long-term utility when trying to shut down Operation Forty, some of his last.
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Counter-intelligence, handled by the FBI, however, has had a much better utility (and justification).
Carrick wrote: “In Bush v. Gore, for example, all of the Supreme Court justices landed neatly on the side that they identified with politically. I doubt that is just a coincidence.”
It was not that simple. In Bush v Gore 1, the vote was 9-0 against the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court. In Bush v Gore 2, it was 7-2 with one of the two admitting that the Florida Supreme Court erred a second time, but saying the error wasn’t big enough to overturn. The 5-4 decision was about halting the recount – so that a decision by the Florida voters could be reported to the Senate on the date specified by the constitution.
Joe Born (Comment #148436)
May 28th, 2016 at 5:47 am
I don’t recall whether it showed up in a televised message in 1980 as it did in 1964, but the argument used against Goldwater was bruited widely about in 1980 against Reagan: he was sure to nuke ’em.
I was a Republican district chairman at the time, I heard it repeatedly, and most of the people who told me it made them reluctant to vote for Reagan were Republicans.
Out in the hinterlands the “Whats flat and glows in the dark” joke earned Reagan votes. In rural areas people were not happy with Iran.
Carrick:
Leaving aside quibbles about the phrase “all 196 countries,” I should point out there are not 196 countries with Freedom of Information type laws. There aren’t even a hundred. And while I am not familiar with all of them, I am familiar enough to be confident my statement is both accurate and reasonable as all I said was:
If you wish to tell everybody, with a straight face, you believe some courts of the world might rule using e-mail instead of a public message board for one’s communication with other people to be a violation of Freedom of Information (like) acts, you can. People don’t have to take me at my word when I say that isn’t the case. They are free to believe courts would rule, purely along political party lines, people involved in government operations must use public message boards for their communication.
That does not match what you said. You claimed Hilary Clinton used FOIA laws to make access to information more difficult than it would have been without FOIA laws, and thus, her interpretation of the law creates a situation so absurd she must have violated it. That is what I have been responding to. While you may wish to claim to be discussing something else, each time I responded to this point, you reiterated it.
If you wish to discuss a different point, you can, but you won’t be doing so with me because I have discussed only this one point, a point which came up because you gave it as an answer to a question I asked you. The answer you gave to my question is wrong, and I’ve been discussing that, nothing more.
Unless you, I’ve actually discussed what people say rather than just make dismissive remarks that do nothing to address their points. You can hand-wave away everything I’ve said by claiming I haven’t made any substantive points, but your current position seems to hold a government official e-mailing people rather than posting his messages to them on a public message board is a violation of FOIA laws. That is bizarre.
If you wish to walk away claiming Hilary Clinton used FOIA laws to make access to information more difficult when they were intended to make access easier, you can. I think most people will see that is not the case though. I think most people can understand trying not to make information readily accessible via FOIA requests is very different from using FOIA law to make access to information more difficult.
Brandon S: On corruption – yea, I also doubt that corruption in the US is worse than it has ever been.
As you say, look at the Grant administration scandal, but really, corruption was rampant in the US back in the 19th century. It’s instructive to read travel accounts from foreigners in the period – eg Anthony Trollope – and note the amazed contempt for the corruption they encountered. It wasn’t just a case of Trollope et al being sneering English douchebags.
And for really appalling 19th/early 20th century corruption, look to much of the activities surrounding the failure & reversal of Reconstruction. (Having recently read Eric Foner’s classic https://www.amazon.com/Reconstruction-Unfinished-Revolution-1863-1877-Perennial-ebook )
IMO, the US has generally and gradually improved since then, but it’s still not great, overall, compared to other “developed” countries.
FWIW, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index has the US improving slightly over the last few years, but still a fair way down the list.
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015
For anyone interested,
I recently used a radiative transfer code on a number of scenarios, the results of which are available in this post:
Global Warming in the Context of Glacial Cycles
There are a number of assumptions and caveats ( most importantly using the same temperature/humidity/cloud profiles throughout ). But I compared scenarios of: the Eemian, the LGM, the HCO, PreIndustrial, 2010, and 2100 ( with 2xCO2 = 800ppm ).
Most of what I found was well known already: Doubling CO2 leads to radiative forcing somewhat evenly across all seasons. The glacials and inter-glacials were the result of changes of seasonal extremes of radiance, not the global annual average.
But I believe it is instructive to consider these scenario differences in context of one another ( always recalling the assumptions and omissions of these scenarios ):
I believe the most important aspects are the changes in the gradients of net radiance. These changes indicate very little change in the strength or range of either the jet streams or the ITCZ compared to paleo variations.
That can be seen in this comparison of NH gradients of radiance for the scenarios.
And in the gradient of extratropical net radiance between the NH and SH
Another interesting aspect is this: During the LGM, the NH gradient was strongest in the annual mean, but also varied the least from winter to summer. Also, during the LGM, the gradient between the hemispheres varied the least. To the extent that variation of the jet stream gradient and of the variation of the inter-hemispheric gradient (ITCZ) determine the wanderings of these features, the constraint of the LGM gradients is consistent with the desertification of the LGM.
Similarly, the wider ranges of gradients during the Eemian and the HCO are consistent with the more vegetated land masses during those times.
One big uncertainty is of sea ice decline. As a last scenario, I ran the Double CO2 scenario with NO sea ice ( neither Arctic, nor Antarctic ) as a contrast to the 10% removal of all sea ice I used for Double. Removing all sea ice does predictably increase net radiance.
Ron G.,
You have to take things in the context of the time. The choice then was between Mossadegh, who seemed likely to take Iran into the Soviet orbit with all those potential dire consequences or engineering a coup to keep Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in power and keep Iran out of Soviet hands. If one were to not act because of essentially unpredictable consequences like an Islamic revolution thirty years down the road, you might as well close down not only the CIA, NSA, etc. but also the Department of State.
I also suspect that a lot of people in Iran who wished for the Shah’s overthrow are not so happy that their wish came true.
Mark Bofill:
I don’t think it is. I think people say it is, but in my experience, the higher up you go the more you can get away with. From what I’ve seen of events, people turn a blind eye to all sorts of improper conduct by higher officials, specifically because of their position. And because:
The reality is nobody likes an honest person. People will hee and haw about how important honesty is, but the reality is there is nothing you can do to make people dislike you than be studiously honest. The reason is people don’t like the truth. They like the idea of the truth, but they like the lies they tell themselves to create their view of their world far more.
It’s part of Donald Trump’s appeal. It’s trivially easy for anyone to see Trump says untrue things on a constant basis. The trick is people want what he says to be true. They don’t just want to believe it; they want confirmation it is true. Combine that with how audacious Trump is with his false claims, and you get people who willfully delude themselves into believing obviously untrue things. They choose that desire to believe over a desire for honesty, and then they justify it by resorting to all sorts of defenses about how the media lies and sources like Trump are the only source for the truth.
The same pattern runs through society as a whole, just to different degrees. People want honesty until it conflicts with something they want to believe. Then they will usually reject honesty. Just look at how many people still believe Christopher Columbus set out to prove the world round, that Galileo was a crusader for scientific progress oppressed by the Catholic Church for heretical views that Thomas Edison was a great inventor and hero of the nation and any number of other things that exist only because they make for a “good story.”
Brandon S.
Obama’s too. I was surprised when polls in 2012 showed that people thought Obama was more honest and truthful than Romney. IMO, nearly everything Obama said in his speeches was at best misleading.
Ron Graf:
Seeing as foreign aid is (often) a tool used to influence/control people, I’m not sure it does anything to balance ill-will. The United States has used foreign aid to help topple governments and prop up dictators. Just look at Central America. It’s a mess in no small part because the government decided “stability” was so important in the fight against the Ruskies it, largely via the use of foreign aid, supported all sorts of horrible people (and help oppress movements for reform).
I’m not sure that’s true. The number of FBI operations which have been terrible is frightening. Leaving aside the scandals where it actively supported criminals in doing little things like murdering people, it all but frames people for criminal activity to claim to have stopped terrorist acts. As in, the FBI literally creates terrorist plots, ropes people into them, provides weapons and planning, and then arrests the people for terrorist plots they never would have even attempted to carry out if the FBI hadn’t gotten involved. Then they boast about how many terrorist plots they’ve stopped.
Szilard:
Definitely. There are tons of examples one can provide. I just wanted to pick a notable and accessible example. I still think the things going on during Prohibition are probably the best example. the amount of corruption involved in not following that constitutional amendment boggles my mind.
Prohibition: Make something people want illegal and you create a criminal business opportunity. IIRC, what we now call organized crime didn’t exist before Prohibition. Illegal immigration and the coyotes and now apparently California street gangs, who facilitate it is another example. And, of course, there are illegal drugs.
Brandon S,
+10.
DeWitt Payne:
Organized crime existed long before Prohibition, with gangs existing since before the nation was founded and even the Mafia operating for 50+ years in the United States prior to Prohibition. Prohibition definitely made much of the organized crime as we know it today though.
Focusing mostly on the Mafia as it is the biggest example, Prohibition helped turn the Mafia from the sort of street gangs we see nowadays with extortion rackets and whatnot into a somewhat respected aspect of society. It certainly gave Mafia members far more power as the profits from illegal distribution of alcohol during Prohibition far exceeded anything they had had access to before. Combine huge revenue streams with people having to accept criminals to get the goods they want, and the result is the Mafia grew enormously and set the face of “organized crime” from then on.
That was helped by Mussolini coming into power during Prohibition and scaring off a lot of Italians who came to the United States, including many members of the Italian Mafia (which previously had little connection to the American one) as he tried to crack down on the organization.
So yeah, there have always been gangs and organized crime in the United States (and everywhere else), but Prohibition was definitely a major factor in shaping and promoting organized crime in the United States. We’d still have organized crime if not for Prohibition and strict drug laws, but it would almost certainly be far less of a serious problem.
Brandon:
If you think I said this, you should quote where I actually wrote that. I never said it, let alone “reiterated” it.
What you wrote amounts to a paraphrase on your part that does neither accurately reflects what I actual said nor what I intended to write.
In fact, I neither wrote nor implied anything remotely close to this. Here’s what I said:
but it was in response to this statement by you:
So I never said anything about using FOIA laws to make the access more difficult. What I said is they used an interpretation of the FOIA laws that resulted in making access to the information “generally more difficult”. [On this note, I should have said “substantially more difficult”… “generally more difficult” certainly is wrong…my guess is the threshold would be established by the relative monetary costs of a particular interpretation of the FOIA.]
I also never said anything about Hillary using “FOIA laws to make the access more difficult.”
What I actually said about Hillary was:
I believe your comment about mind reading was in response to this statement. My later statement was in response to your mind reading comment.
What I gave was an example of behavior that I thought was inappropriate, intended to illustrate the problems with Hillary’s use of a private server.
As anybody knows who’s followed this controversy knows, the actual details of the Clinton emails is significantly more complicated than the pared-down scenario that I gave in response to your mind-reading comment:
For example, many or most of the emails eventually did get turned over. And it appears that Hillary had no role any decisions that led to the loss of the remaining emails from the private server. It does appear she received legal council that she was complying with the FOIA, but that was before she left office. [As far as I know, nobody told her it was okay for her to not turn over her work-related emails.]
To make it clear, I’ve limited time and resources at this point, so what I’m interested in discussing is the comment I made about Hillary getting “dinged” or similar issues relating to her email server.
Beyond that … thank you for your opinions, but I’m no more, or less, clear as to why you think what you think other than you definitely think it. 😛
Mark Bofill:
The problem with this is the consequences of the actions aren’t equal.
If you are riding a bicycle and you run a red light the possible negative consequences of your screwing up are much different than if a driver with a school bus full of children runs a red light.
Guess who gets the bigger fine…appropriately so to me.
Well it’s an old enough idea that it’s an Old Testament & Rabbinic principle. [I’m point this out from the perspective of ethics codified, not from the point of “And Yahweh sayeth…”] So it goes back a long ways.
See for example this discussion.
Many institutions also have rules in place to reflect the risk of more severe consequences for the same act. Our legal system certainly does. Academics are held to a different (and higher) standard of behavior than non-academics (at least in the US).
Brandon:
That can happen for multiple reasons though.
First there is the obvious: corruption, money and power.
Another is that people who set the rules generally have more discretion than the people for whom the rules are written. Hillary Clinton had more authority wrt to sending sensitive data than Jason Brezler ( the Marine officer who transmitted classified information over an open channel to try and save lives). Hillary was the originating authority for classification of information for the DOS, so that provides a significant level of discretion not afforded to Brezler.
[And no, I don’t think Brezler should be disciplined for making the choice he made. ]
TY Carrick.
Carrick, thank you for trying and caring
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Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #148456)
“The court heard the Maibach motion in about two minutes and ordered the entirety of FOI released. For the third time. Released was a copy-paper boxful of records that GMU originally claimed didn’t exist.â€
This portrayal by Anthony Watts is highly misleading
“”The university did not say these records didn’t exist.
What the university said is no records responsive to an FOI request exist.
That those people were wrong to decide these records were not responsibe does not mean they said the records do not exist.””
–
Huh?
Yes it does.
They said these records [responsive to an FOI request] did not exist.
But they did.
Word games, your forte, do not change this fact
Watts’s statement is true in every technical sense
DeWitt:
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I fully understand the Cold War. I even believe that it truly began in 1917, not 1945. But before WWII our foreign policy was largely controlled by multi-national capitalist titans. At first fascism was thought to be an answer to counter communism. Then after that slight goof and WWII the wisdom changed for containment of the red menace via clandestine support for right-wing dictators at the periphery. I won’t list the dozens of propped up regimes that bit our hand immediately and became communist or turned to unacceptably corrupt, brutal and unpopular.
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I heard a professor today tell a graduating class that “American white propertied men” were responsible for the murder of millions of innocent vietnamese as well as the young Americans sent to do it. These same “men” were responsible for the murder of JFK, RFK and MLK, (as well as trying to fight women’s liberation, gay rights and climate mitigation). The point is that policies justified in the name of communist containment I’m not sure were any more wise that extreme policies in the name of war on drugs or dire measures to “save the planet.” I have come to think that many of the US interventions could have resulted in better long-term outcomes had we refrained. Sometimes countries have to make mistakes to learn. Venezuela hopefully will be learning.
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Brandon S:
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Unfortunately, I can’t argue too much with this except to say we were trying to aid and stabilize for mutual benefit. You are probably correct that there is about a much chance of foreign governments to appreciate US taxpayers as there is for US welfare recipients to be. I do support disaster relief and military assistance to defend in cases of foreign invasion (i.e. the First Gulf War).
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The FBI may not always be spotless no agency is, IMO. My point is that nobody can fault self-defense, including catching spies and terror plots.
That professor specifically claimed that scientist already know that the historic high temperatures today will become the average temperatures in twenty years. I found that curious how poorly understood AGW and the warming trends are by professors making speeches. I am curious to ask Anders if he tells his students this.
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She also said that sea level rise of 9ft+ by the end of the century is already inevitable.
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I just paid her college $240,000 over the last four years.
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I did not stand during the standing ovation.
Ron Graf,
I sure hope that professor teaches some fluffy nonsense subject(s), and not science, engineering, architecture, or even business administration. You could ask for you money back.
Ron Graf,
You have my sympathy. How did you keep still while the professor continued on this astonishing rant?
Was there murmuring in the audience?
I wonder if any men think that white American propertied males are responsible for a lot of our wrongdoing. Is this another correlation is not causation?
Has she never heard of the Red Queen?
How about Margaret Thatcher?
While I’m at it, it is too bad that murmuring has gone out of style. I think it was a term used to characterize sounds made by groups of people who didn’t appreciate what they were hearing and then in the late 18th century evolved to describe a general distress in the population.
and there is a lot of murmuring here in the States right now. Too bad no-one sane has appeared in response.
Politico has a first rate interview with the guys who devised the ‘daisy’ ad for Johnson’s campaign. I wonder if Advertising is still a refuge of the highly intelligent inadvertently burdened with humor and literacy, at least those who do not pursue the law. The daisy team clearly were.
Another trouble with Hillary is she lacks the sense of humor to bring on two guys like these.
I voted against Hubert Humphrey because I felt certain that if he became president he would never shut up.
Ron Graf (Comment #148485)
May 28th, 2016 at 9:57 pm
That professor specifically claimed that scientist already know that the historic high temperatures today will become the average temperatures in twenty years. I found that curious how poorly understood AGW and the warming trends are by professors making speeches. I am curious to ask Anders if he tells his students this.
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She also said that sea level rise of 9ft+ by the end of the century is already inevitable.
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I just paid her college $240,000 over the last four years.
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I did not stand during the standing ovation.
There are a lot of conservatives that are warming up to Trump.
This college professor is why.
The federal bureaucracy has turned obstructionism into a career move.
Academics, like the one quoted, are perfectly willing to spout facts they don’t know to defend policies they want.
Trump is these people’s worst nightmare. They are going to see his boots from the bottom side.
Some of us are going to vote for Trump, then buy popcorn and sit back and enjoy the show.
There seems to be a lot of doom and gloom here about your presidential candidates. Cheer up! At least you get the president you voted for. In the UK, I get no say in the president of the EU (actually there are several versions of EU president, thanks to the arcane bureaucracy of that institution). That’s why I’m voting to leave the EU, and also why I was furious when Obama told us to stay in (i.e. to put up with nonsense that he would never countenance).
Meanwhile, if a third candidate can never win, well, why? Because the third candidate can’t win? Seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given the choice you’re likely to have, I’d pick neither. In Austria they recently elected a green (it’s a largely ceremonial presidency in Austria), narrowly beating the far-right candidate; the centre left and centre right candidates (i.e. the mainstream parties) were eliminated at the first stage, with the green and the nationalist proceeding to the run-off. There at least the disillusionment of the populace with the “establishment” has had some sort of effect.
“Shaw of Iran Coup”
Eli had no idea that the Irish and Iranians were a people
Jit,
Are not British products sold in EU required to meet EU regulation and if so, wouldn’t it be better to have access to the regulatory process no matter how oppressive it might be?
jferguson – well, first, the UK has a trade gap with the EU of quite considerable size, i.e. they sell us more than we sell to them. Their products will have to meet our regulations and vice versa. But they are already closely aligned.
Second, I don’t believe that we have any influence now. My impression of the EU is of a nest of poisonous bureaucrats who only exist to create pieces of paper and more bureaucrats and bigger paypackets for themselves. It is these bureaucrats who have the power but they have no accountability.
Third, if we leave there is a strong possibility of a rebalancing of the EU away from “ever-closer union” and government by bureaucracy towards what we signed up to in the first place, a free trade zone.
Fourth, the large companies love the regulations because they can afford to have huge teams making sure they comply with them. Such companies have strong lobbying powers. Small companies, new companies, find the regulations a weight around their necks. This applies to UK companies who don’t even export – they still have to follow all the regulations.
Some years ago the EU fell a long way in my estimation when the Common Fisheries Policy was introduced. Sounds innocuous enough, but what it meant was that countries’ exclusive fishing zones were then shared among all the EU countries. Including countries with no coastline. In the UK we’d managed our stocks relatively well (after the herring crash…) but countries who had destroyed their stocks were now able to take a cut of ours. To soften the blow the EU bought our boats and scrapped them. Our fishing industry more-or-less died overnight.
Jit,
For what it’s worth: There are some benefits for EU membership, but my guess is that the regulatory burdens outweigh the benefits. Be happy you actually have the option to leave… states in the USA lost that option 151 years ago. Of course, there wasn’t much regulatory burden in 1865, but Federal regulations imposed on the states have, shall we say, grown a bit since then. Mr Obama, Mrs Clinton, and a host of others want to regulate just about everything, sort of like the EU bureaucracy.
JIT:“In the UK we’d managed our stocks relatively well (after the herring crash…) but countries who had destroyed their stocks were now able to take a cut of ours. To soften the blow the EU bought our boats and scrapped them. Our fishing industry more-or-less died overnight.”
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My sympathies, though I don’t even begin to know what would be best for the UK.
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It seems like redistribution is a theme in all federations and globalization in general. While I am generally a free trader in principle I am weary of the good being corrupted in practice. I can only hope that voters and elected leaders appreciate the complexity.
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Eli, I meant the Shah of Iran, of course. I’m not aware of the CIA’s Irish black ops yet but would not be surprised. 🙂
Today’s commencement speakers were a bit better (and shorter) than yesterday’s baccalaureate long ranting poly sci professor. The quote of the day: “in this rapidly changing and complex world I do not even begin to offer any advice to you accept to reject any oversimplified generalizations, including that one.”
Ron Graf (Comment #148495)
…
Eli, I meant the Shah of Iran, of course. I’m not aware of the CIA’s Irish black ops yet but would not be surprised. 🙂
Was that the “CIA’s Irish Black ops” or the “CIA’s Black Irish ops”?
As far as the EU the British should remember:
If you Brexit you buy it.
I know virtually all of you are wondering how my garden is doing. 😉
Here is an update with a few new pics!
https://solcather.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/andrews-garden-2016-memorial-day-update/
Andrew
Jit more or less sums up part of my position on the European Union. As I stated before the EU is a lie sold as the EEC, European Economic Community, a free trade zone, not a political union.
The EU is stuffed with liars. The EU threatens sanctions on the UK for the temerity of standing up to German occupied Belgium (plus ca change…). Sanctions will comprise Mercedes, BMW and VW refusing to sell their cars to us. Really! Do I look bovvered?
I came across an expression today: “The Porkouisie” (apparently from WE at WUWT). That sums it up for me. The Porkouisie are unanimous (97%) that the UK leaving the EU will be a very bad thing. Freedom and democracy be damned, they have gold plated pensions to protect.
Ron Graf,
Not likely. Did Argentina learn from their experience with Peron? No. Nor did the rest of Latin America.
A friend of mine’s wife is from Venezuela. He says that anyone who can has left. Venezuela is on the verge of becoming another Somalia. In Caracas, people stand in line for eight hours to get a chance to buy food. If there actually happens to be some available, they’re robbed of it when they leave the store.
Stalin and the Soviet era are making a comeback in Russia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/stalinist-nostalgia-in-vladimir-putins-russia.html?_r=0
I would say that the one thing we know about history is that people don’t learn from it.
It never ceases to amaze me how many bright people profess to believe in socialism.
Yes socialists, that was an invitation to open fire. Don’t have much time, but I’ll make time for this. 😉
Sooner or later it’s going to be time to break cover. Step into the light. Why do you care about AGW?
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Isn’t it because you believe that capitalism has failed? Isn’t this the ironclad scientific proof? I can’t address you if you don’t stand up. I can plow down and burn fields full of straw men all day long. Come on. Naomi Klein has had the courage to say it. Willard alludes to it (I guess, with the ‘growwwth’ thing). Step into the light.
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Don’t let me put words in your mouth. Speak them yourselves.
DeWItt wrote: “I would say that the one thing we know about history is that people don’t learn from it.”
Not necessarily. A recent visit o Berlin showed me many museums and monuments showing how the German people fell into the hands of the Nazis and Communists. That city (which still has fewer people than in 1938) wants to be sure future generations won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The Japanese don’t seem to have the same attitude, possibly because of the atomic bomb and Shinto national religion.
If a people blame others for their disasters instead of first searching within, then they are unlikely to learn the lessons of history. American imperialism/capitalism makes a great excuse in Latin America and many other places. Americans from both the left and right have their fantasies about the past too. From the financial crisis, we have: “predatory lending” and “caused by the GSEs”.
Mark: Naomi Klein – courage? I cannot see how courage has anything to do with her work.
Frank,
I would say that Trump is the counter example. And there’s always the excuse ‘But it’s different this time’ to allow people to ignore previous history.
Frank and Ron,
I recommend Charles Krauthammer’s recent column The Arrow of History in the Washington Post. Realpolitik may look ugly, but you ignore it at your peril. See, for example, Syria.
Jferguson,
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Well, if there is no courage involved, then there should be no problem coming clean.
Krauthammer:
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I am sure Charles knows there are elements of both; a storm swirls and yet has a path. Even generals who fight the last war don’t fight the war before last. They study to understand the common elements to all conflict and try to adapt them to the unique resources and circumstances at present.
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People will always be animals with an animal nature. One denies this at one’s own peril even about one’s self. Mark, the liberal secular humanist revolution has no idea that religiosity is related to a core human need. If one rejects a religion one is likely embracing another whether they understand that or not.
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I don’t know that socialism’s efficacy can be falsified through debate. Even if they crash and burn into bread lines and anarchy if we so much as sneeze their way they will blame their failure on our existence.
(And even if we don’t sneeze.)
Ron,
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Goodness no. I think it can be falsified. Whether or not people can get past being deniers, well, that’s a separate matter.
Thanks Ron.
Goodness no, I don’t agree. I think it can be falsified. Whether or not some people can be persuaded, well, that’s a separate matter.
Thanks Ron.
The holiday weekend is finally coming to an end, so I have more free time again. It’s funny how time off can mean less free time. Anyway, Carrick:
I quoted you saying such multiple times, pointing out what you had said each time. You never disputed my portrayal. It’s a little late in the game to now take issue with it. However, since you say I should quote you on this:
Both of these quotes clearly portray FOIA law as being used to make access to information more difficult than it would have been otherwise. Based on that portrayal, you claimed this creates an “absurd” interpretation of FOIA law whereby it is used to do the opposite of what it intended, thus meaning the interpretation is wrong regardless of whether it could fit the literal words of the law. So while you claim:
You clearly stated a “law intended to facilitate the dissemination of information… ends of making it more difficult.” Your comments directly referred to what was done with the law not what was done despite the law.
That a person disagrees with how much easier FOIA laws should make gaining access to information be doesn’t mean they’re automatically acting contrary to the intent of FOIA laws as FOIA laws are not designed to make all information incredibly easy to access. The only way to create an “absurd” interpretation like you claim is being used is if they specifically use the FOIA law to make access to information more difficult.
No, it wasn’t. I clearly quoted the remark I was responding to with that statement. While it came from the same comment as you refer to now, it was a very different statement. It’s a shame you didn’t manage to quote the correct remark as it is yet another example of you making it clear you were talking about using FOIA laws to make access to information more difficult:
You specifically claimed Hilary Clinton should have been able to determine the intent of FOIA law was to make access to information easier not more difficult. That is only relevant under the idea Clinton used FOIA law to make access to information more difficult. If she actually used FOIA law to make access to information easier, but not as much easier as people might think she should have, this response of yours would be a total non-sequitur.
As a hint of my reasoning on one issue, I think using e-mails for communication involving government operation rather than public message boards is legal despite FOIA laws because because I don’t think FOIA laws were designed to create an utterly insane system which likely bring about the ruin of the country while serving no legitimate purpose. I have no idea why you find that difficult to understand, much less why you would argue it might not be true.
Mark, technically you are correct but realistically the defender of socialism will simply recall different historical examples to endlessly attack capitalism, which I suspect led Churchill to his famous quote: “Capitalism, (aka democracy,) is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”
To admit socialism does not work is to admit that humans are unable to be as productive out of pure altruism as can be while motivated by at least a quasi-self-interest. To admit this is to lose hope that humanity can ever rise above its animalism.
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On the daily work ethic this ideology believes that competition among neighbors is unnecessary and counterproductive.
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Globally the thought is the world would best be one homogenized nation without religion, culture and judgment of morality, except that of the ideals of the consensus, which would never be disputed, or universally disputed but with a blissful overriding love. Imagine all the people living for today.
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Who decides what that means? Who decides the correct direction for humanity? How is anything accomplished without competition at some level? Maybe we do need a socialist to better explain this than my lame attempt here.
Carrick:
The problem with this is the consequences of the actions aren’t equal.
If you are riding a bicycle and you run a red light the possible negative consequences of your screwing up are much different than if a driver with a school bus full of children runs a red light.
Guess who gets the bigger fine…appropriately so to me.
From what I’ve seen, school bus drivers don’t get a bigger fine. I don’t think they even can. A person on a bike might not get stopped, but if a ticket is handed out, the fine is the same in either case. It’s actually a matter of public debate, with some states introducing legislation to increase the punishment for traffic violations by school bus drivers. But writing laws for different situations doesn’t say anything about whether or not the law is or should be blind.
angech:
The university said no responsive records existed. Anthony Watts has on multiple occasions said the university lied about the records existing. In this latest instance, he repeated the idea the university said the records did not exist. In each of these cases, Watts has managed to leave off any qualifier about records being “responsive” to a request, creating the impression the university simply lied about the e-mails existing at all.
Nobody reading Watts’s commentary would be able to tell the university merely said records were not responsive and were then contradicted by the courts which said certain records were responsive. They wouldn’t because he intentionally created the impression the university lied about the e-mails existing rather than simply having disagreed about which e-mails were in fact responsive.
DeWitt Payne:
I don’t think the United States’s “stabilization” of dictatorial regimes (and institutionalizing of others) was intended to benefit the people of those nations at all. Maybe some people justified it to themselves by saying the terrible regimes the United States was supporting would be less bad for the people than a “commie” one, but I think most people just looked at the people of those countries as necessary sacrifices for the United States. I could be wrong about that though. Judging motivations isn’t the easiest thing.
I definitely agree with you on disaster relief and military assistance for defense against invaders. In fact, I think the United States would do better if it showed more interest in either.
I think the idea behind the FBI is good. I just think the FBI was originated with people who were seeking power they could abuse. I think that led to all sorts of shadiness and illegal behavior (or at least behavior that should have been illegal), and I don’t think it’s ever gotten over that. I think it’s gotten much better, but I think the secrecy and poor leadership/oversight for it has ensured serious problems continue to exist.
To damn them with faint praise, at least nowadays I don’t feel the need to worry the FBI might assassinate me.
Brandon S:
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Going back to the Shah of Iran example, I think that everyone involved believed it was in the mutual interest of both the US and Iran. The Shah was brutal because there is no such thing as a non-brutal dictator. Order must be maintained; power rivals must be quashed. Iran westernized and prospered much more than it would have as a Soviet satellite. The Shah did not invade neighbors or commit genocidal killings, like Saddam, for example.
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The mistake was believing we would be seen by the Iranians as having any right to intervene of their behalf. The other mistake was not seeing that a foreign hand provides a perfect propaganda tool for the enemies of the installed regime, thus they are put into to the dilemma of either being loyal to the foreign installer and risk unpopular revolt or biting the benevolent hand to prove they are not a puppet, like Castro did, for example. Both are bad outcomes. This why G.W. Bush declared as a candidate he was against nation building. But as a president he was convinced to try replace a toppled bad actor with an organic slate in which true and pure home-grown legitimate democracy could be born. Wow, we won’t try that one again — except, well, maybe in Libya a few years later.
Ron Graf:
Which is basically the old argument of, “Commies are bad so we must do whatever we can to stop them from spreading.” It is given with the justification that communism is so bad the people under it must be worse off than whatever alternative may get offered, but really, that’s rarely a primary concern. There is little indication the United States used the CIA to shape governments like this out of anything other than simple self-interest. There’s certainly nothing to indicate the people of these countries benefited from the foreign intervention (and plenty to indicate the opposite).
Oddly enough, if the invasion (or more precisely, subsequent occupation) of Iraq hadn’t been so bungled, the outcome would have probably been a very good one. As much as people like to talk about how the invasion was based on “lies,” if things had gone well, few people would have cared. Saddam was a bad man, and he acted in a way which antagonized people who were discussing an invasion. No tears would have been shed for his loss. All people really care about is that the United States screwed the effort up.
The main difference is the United States was up front with its actions in this case. It gave the world plenty of time to voice an opposition. That’s very different from secretly toppling governments to install new dictators or covertly helping the suppression of populations to prevent public revolutions. It makes for a big difference. If nothing else, doing things in full view of the public reduces the ability for people to justify complaints as they share culpability by not speaking up at the time.
Ron Graf (Comment #148518)
“To admit socialism does not work is to admit that humans are unable to be as productive out of pure altruism as can be while motivated by at least a quasi-self-interest. ”
I think it is unrealistic to expect any style of human government to work for prolonged periods of time as interest groups will always develop over time. All of them can be productive if the right people are in charge, Unfortunately the wrong people often gravitate to leadership due to self interest and the fun and games start.
@Frank
Which part of “the Japanese” makes you feel that Japanese don’t wish to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? Is it the part where military activities outside Japan are forbidden by the constitution? Or that since defeat in 1945, Japan has taken part in precisely zero conflicts?
angech is right, of course. You can have a beautifully conceived system, and it won’t be long running before it starts getting abused by users and by administrators.
It’s just what people do.
Andrew
Ron, thanks for your response.
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I’ve always liked the expression, ‘Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed’. What societal phenomena have elevated man to his most godlike powers? I think capitalism is a big part of the answer to that question.
I guess. I’d only like to remark that among the very best of the engineers I’ve had the privilege of working with, it was never a question of ‘us’ against ‘them’ at the end of the day. ‘B’s and C’s’ compete against each other. Among the ‘A’s’, it was more along the lines of us (whoever could help) against the world; against chaos or defeat. All of us, against systems that don’t work, or work badly. Against ignorance of how to do something that would benefit us.
Sure, companies and people compete. It’s not a zero sum game though; working and competing in the U.S., I am both far richer and more powerful (in the sense of ‘mastery over nature’) than I could possibly dream of being alone. I believe I am richer and more powerful precisely because of this capitalistic system. If my competitor bests me at something, well; there is no lack of additional work to be done. There’s always another horizon; another way to extend our dominion.
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Strange huh.
But I’ll add this. I’m not an evil guy. I actually like people and want us all to prosper. But there is no virtue to ‘love’ that is mandated by some law; it’s not ‘love’ if you gots no choice. Which is one of several fundamental problems with socialism in my view. Culture, not Law, needs to drive our ‘love’ for our fellow man; our charity and altruism.
😉 The straw is flying in a blizzard as we lay waste to straw men. Yes I know. But who decides? Darn good question. Who decides if we are to be slaves or free men? A good bit of life’s complexity is wrapped up in this question. I have no clear answer.
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As always, thanks and regards Ron.
Ron,
If you think that the policy of containing the Soviet Union was a mistake, I suggest you read The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn or Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It really was an Evil Empire, especially under Stalin.
Dewitt:
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I do remember reading at least one Solzhenitsyn, the “Day in the Life of Ivan Ivanovitch” or something. For most of my life I believed the same as you. In recent years the question has entered my mind whether or not the Beatles had more to do with the fall of the Soviet Union than the CIA.
Brandon:
Yes, that’s exactly the point.
On the surface they are the same. In practice they are very different.
If a general in the US military commits a crime (say something that he can be blackmailed for), he’s doing so while serving as a general. Because he can be blackmailed to give away national secrets, his behavior generally carries a much higher risk than were a farm worker (for example) to do the same thing.
So even though he did nominally exactly the same thing a farm worker did, he can expect more significant repercussions.
Typically, they are required to have a commercial drivers license in order to operate a school bus transporting passengers.
In most states, the fines and other penalties for people with a CDL are higher…even if they are operating a private vehicle at the time. I’m not going to spend any time summarizing this, I suspect google search works on your computer too.
“In most states, the fines and other penalties for people with a CDL are higher…even if they are operating a private vehicle at the time. I’m not going to spend any time summarizing this, I suspect google search works on your computer too.”
Ya, for some offenses in California there is a life suspension.
The DMV Fines are the different for CDL holders and the penalties are different.
Google is not Brandon’s Friend. Expect him to weasel out of being wrong by saying “as far as I know”
Thats just another way of saying I didnt check my facts.
http://www.dmv.org/ca-california/traffic-ticket-fines-and-penalties.php
Carrick, what you say about penalties for driving related infractions of CDL holders being more serious than for non-holders is similar to the marine environment where a Captain’s license can expose you to a higher share of the blame (and costs) in the event of a collision even though operating in a non-commercial mode.
Accordingly, I think it’s nuts to have either a CDL or any other special license if what you want to do can be done without one. I didn’t feel that this was true of the aviation environment.
Steven Mosher:
🙁
Play nice.
jferguson, thanks. It makes me wonder if owning a CDL would increase your legal exposure in the event of an accident. (I’ve just finished writing a 40 page report… my brain is fed up with looking up information today.)
Going the other direction, I would think one thing people meted to keep an eye on is, different states do having different laws on operating motorized vessels.
As far as I know, there are no laws requiring a special license when operating a sailboat. I don’t own one, but I’ve been able to rent them in different states and even in Europe without needing anything beyond my drivers license.
I am pretty sure in Florida, if you are accompanied by the boat owner (who is properly certified and on deck with you), there are no issues. Not a lawyer though. (Obviously.)
Carrick:
Steven Mosher:
You guys are weird. The example given was two people, one driving a bus and one riding a bike. No other information was given about them. Given anyone can get a CDL (including the bike rider), and a CDL is not inherently necessary for a person to drive a bus, I assumed the only difference in the example was that stated in the example.
Trying to call “Gotcha!” because of a difference not stated in the example, which well could not have existed under the description given in the example, is just weird. Especially since the issue you two are focusing on doesn’t deal with the point of the example – that people get held to different standards based upon their position. If the bike rider also had a CDL, the difference you two highlight wouldn’t exist, so what you’re talking about now is just that there are different penalties for people based upon what licenses/certifications they have.
So… yeah, you guys are weird. I think I’ll leave it at that.
Carrick, as far as I know nothing is required in Florida to operate any watercraft short of a freighter and since that is far beyond anything I ever thought about, I don’t know where the transition occurs. In the last couple of years, New Jersey has required evidence that you’ve taken a boating safety course. we used to transit NJ twice a year so I needed one, but they would accept an equivalent document from Florida so I took the course here. In Florida it is voluntary.
I doubt that anyone would increase his exposure to adverse penalties by taking one of these courses, and I also doubt that not having taken one will cause you any problems in the event of trouble at sea.
some truly amazing things occurred during our twenty years on the water, especially in Miami where a guy took delivery of a new 65 foot Italian motorboat, insisted that he did not need instruction, nor a captain, nor insurance, ran down Biscayne Bay, out Florida Cut, turned right (starboard) and cut a 200 yard swath through the seagrass shoal that is there before coming to the inevitable and very noisy stop – hard aground. He was fined an astonishing amount and essentially had to pay people to sit on the bottom replanting the sea-grass.
No he didn’t need any sort of license, nor training, and I bet when he left the dealer it was with all manner of hold-harmless agreements in the hands of the salesman.
No license required for non-commercial operation of almost any moderate size boat or smaller. I don’t know anything about large boats, say over 100 feet.
Seth asked: “Which part of “the Japanese†makes you feel that Japanese don’t wish to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?”
No one wants to repeat the mistakes of the past. The problem comes from an inability to acknowledge the mistakes of the past. You can read about the controversies about WWII Japanese War Criminals honored the national Yasukuni Shrine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Yasukuni_Shrine
You can read about the vagueness of Japanese apologies for war crimes committed in WWII and before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan
Or controversies about what the Japanese teach their children about the history of imperial Japan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_controversies
I don’t mean to imply that the Japanese are unusual in their reluctance to face up to past mistakes. The Germans seem to be unusual in their eagerness to educate their children about how easily German people accepted two horrendous authoritarian regimes, the Nazis and the Communists. Here in the US, the Star-and-Bars was an official symbol of South Carolina until a racist massacred nine blacks in a church immediately after posing for pictures in front of that flag. At that point, the people of South Carolina finally recognized that their flag stood for more than just a heroic soldiers attempting to gain independence for the South.
DeWitt wrote: “I recommend Charles Krauthammer’s recent column The Arrow of History in the Washington Post. Realpolitik may look ugly, but you ignore it at your peril. See, for example, Syria.”
Krauthammer is often a smart guy, but he is partisan. I find that the following is a somewhat more complete perspective, albeit from the Democrat perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0dLo8BAAvY
jferguson,
In Florida, people born after 1987 are required to have completed a certified boating safety course, and have a state issued card confirming this, when they operate any power boat with more than 10 HP. Those born 1987 or earlier are… ahem…. grandfathered, and don’t need this. I suspect there would have been something of a boater’s revolt had the state required people with thousands of hours boating experience to take an introductory safety course. I never took any course (you saw my boat in the Keys) but I had been using boats, albeit smaller ones, since I was a kid. Pilot anything for money though, and a Coast Guard captain’s license is needed.
.
I had a similar experience with a new owner of a 65 footer near Key Largo. The sucker passed me going 25-30 knots as I was entering the minimum wake zone at the Port Largo entrance, throwing a 6 foot wake. The next day I heard several people complain on channel 16 to the same guy for the same crap…. and then I heard the SOB calling for Towboat US; he had run her hard aground. It was one of those times I thought there may actually be justice in the world.
Carrick:
If the information on this page, “Requirements to Drive a Schoold Bus By State”, is accurate, in at least 44 states one requires a CDL to drive a school bus.
Hi SteveF, we had many similar experiences. Best was being passed (seriously waked) coming out of Beaufort,SC abeam Paris Island, by a very large, very nice motor yacht, Berger I think it was. At some point they must have decided to go outside, because we heard them calling for help, they were out of fuel, or had a blockage and didn’t know what to do about it. They were ten miles east of Fernandina Beach. I never saw them again.
The requirement for the boating safety card must have been introduced since I quit thinking about it. So everyone can have a clear picture of the gravity of this, I’ll post a photo of the back of mine when I get to it. I started sailing a 12 foot Ray Green Nipper (Cat Boat) in a small lake in NW Minnesota when I was 8. I used to spend all day at it.
Arcadian has been gone for almost 2 years now. Every once in a while I still get tingle when i see interesting body of water.
Frank,
Everyone’s a partisan. It’s only a question of whether they’re open about it or they’re pretending to be unbiased.
.
I think that’s right, at most, we can strive to realize what a trap our partisanship can be.
.
“What do I think? Wait, let me see what my group thinks and that’ll be my answer.”
.
And others don’t help, because they want you to be a member of a particular group ( friend or foe ).
.
At the coffee shop, a friend, who’s a state representative, discussed politics with me ( I had my John McAfee shirt on ) but couldn’t go very far without first framing who was a member of what party – “so you’re a Libertarian, right?”
.
I do gravitate toward some of the Libertarian ideals, but as Wired magazine and my wife say, I’m probably a Libertopian – the concepts are attractive, but only in a utopian ideal where everybody behaves. While freedom an liberty are what set us apart, I do still think traffic lights are ok.
What do we mean when we say partisan? Does this mean we come to the table with some ideas already formed, or does this mean that we are unreasoning slaves to an ideology, or does this mean something in between?
[Edit: for those who were unclear (like me), Mirriam Webster said this:
So I guess we are talking about blind, prejudiced, unreasoning allegiance. I don’t think we are all partisans by the actual definition.]
Unfortunately some are programmed this way, and don’t even realize there are alternative ways of thinking. I know people who think “natural food” websites are Ultimate Authorities, for example, and it would take a miracle to get them to consider they may not be.
Andrew
Well, at the risk of pretending to know any sociology, during evolution, humans were very dependent on being part of the group ( strength in numbers ). There were lots of threats ( wild animals, competing tribes, etc. ) and defense, food gathering, and importantly mating, meant being part of the group. And when conflicts arose, to stay part of the group, evolution probably predisposed us to go along with the group rather than die alone.
.
I think group behavior, including thought, is in our DNA.
.
And it certainly affects the global warming “debate”.
.
Many people can’t discuss the issue without first identifying groups ( skeptics, deniers, flat earthers, mouth breathers ) versus ( warmists, alarmists, hysterics – you know, the consensus ).
.
Fortunately, most here are solidly Lukewarmers but even identifying as such probably corrupts objectivity.
Andrew,
.
I don’t mean to say we don’t have prejudices, I think we all very likely do. As you say, some worse than others.
It’s probably another one of those cases of irregular conjugation. I am passionate, you are biased, he is partisan.
mark,
By that definition, Charles Krauthammer is not a partisan, IMO.
DeWitt.
Heh. I’ll think that through.
..
You might could maybe have a point. It’s seductive to think we’ve got the objective truth isn’t it.
Earle
.
So that makes the us form ‘we are French?’?
.
They are … hmm. They, are.. I dunno about those guys and gals.
I liked everything I ate in France. Half the time I had no clue what I was ordering. I’m not sure it’s got relevance. Just sayin…
OMG – they brought me an iced crab. I know how gross that may sound, but. Holie. Shmoes.
They are AWESOME! That’s the conjugal form we were looking for! :p
Or not.
“. Given anyone can get a CDL (including the bike rider), and a CDL is not inherently necessary for a person to drive a bus, I assumed the only difference in the example was that stated in the example.”
Not everyone can get a commerical drivers licence ( there are medical exclusions, certian exclusions for bus drivers .. like criminal records checks.
Also violations when you operate your personal vehicle are treated differently.
The points you get while driving a commercial Vehicle are counted at 150% for the same violation.
So, if you a Commerical licence and run a stop sign
A) driving your bus
B) riding your bike
The penalty will be different.
But in some cases it will be the same. If you hold a commerical licence and text while driving your personal vehicle… SAME penalty.
Also, points you get on your bike do not necessarily apply ot your drivers licence. In california the local courts are not required to report to DMV in the case of bike riders and the law allows for reduced fines for bike riders.
[blockquote]
They are AWESOME! That’s the conjugal form we were looking for! :p
[/blockquote]
By George, he’s got it!
😀
Meh, quotes not working. Did I mess up?
Earle, you need to use less than and greater than signs rather than [].
Everyone else, the GMU e-mails requested by CEI which WUWT has been making a lot of hay over have been released now. You can see them here. You can judge for yourself if they live up to the hype. I don’t think they do. I do, however, think it’s interesting CEI chose not to redact anyone’s e-mail address before disseminating these to the public. That seems distasteful.
Brandon S.,
Thanks! I guess I knew that but am so used to the forum I usually post at that I couldn’t accept that the normal HTML code identifier.
Oh, and a heads up for anyone, the emails Brandon links to are a PDF file of 102 megabytes. Just so you know, in case your internet connection has asthma.
Thanks for pointing the file size out Earle. I had forgotten to mention how large it is. I know it’s a concern for me (satellite internet has annoying bandwidth limits) so I should have thought to mention it.
I noticed in passing on the evening news, I didn’t notice which network, the salt police are doubling down on restricting sodium intake. *sigh*
They’ll never take me alive.
I’m sure that can be arranged. 🙂
Earle,
.
I’m starting to feel like you don’t love me anymore.
.
That or you need more salt in your diet.
.
[Edit. I thought it through, and I still love you, you salty dog. 😉 ]
Mark Bofill:
Certainly not if you keep eating so much salt.
Brandon,
There is absolutely. And I mean absolutely no way I will live long enough for sodium to be a problem. The drinking. The smoking. The crazy all night coding! The silicon begs for mercy but I have none.
.
No chance.
[Edit : Not feeling good. I’m taking it to the emergency room; my tummy hurtz.. Thank God for Obamacare!]
Sorry. The Obamacare crack was mean, not funny. It probably wasn’t the salt either.
Long day.
Night all.
@ mark bofill,
Whoopsie, didn’t mean to imply that I was hankering to do you in. Just that the policies of the salt crusaders might have that effect. No salt for you!
P.S. Am currently enjoying some nice and salty beef jerky. Then I’ll probably mix up some guacamole with salt added. Yeah!
Earle,
🙂 Wasn’t there a Seinfeld… no that was about soup.
There is substantial evidence that salt is not unhealthy. See http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth-about-salt.html
…
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/
…
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/salt-may-not-affect-heart-risks/
JD
While we are on a health issue, I will relate my visit to an Orthopedic Surgeon about 5 days ago and what my visit tends to show about American healthcare. I have a minor tear in cartilage near the left hip joint. It causes me zero functional problems and virtually no pain. However, last year I had an incident playing golf where my hip went out. ( However, the hip didn’t dislocate) So, the only practical effect of the very minor deterioration of the left hip is that I am spooked about playing golf.
….
In any event, I want to make sure that the hip doesn’t deteriorate further and to learn how to do whatever I can to strengthen the muscles that support the hip. In February of 2016, I had an MRI which showed the very minor problems. I finally went to see the Orthopedic Surgeon last week. After I filled out the medical paperwork, someone came out and said that I needed to have an x-ray. I said that I didn’t want to pay $400 for an x-ray, when I just had an MRI but that if the Dr. had a real good reason for the x-ray, I would consider agreeing to the x-ray. Several minutes later the technician came back and said that the office still recommended the x-ray. I said that I didn’t want it since there was no specific explanation as to why it was needed.
…
Went to the patient room and the doctor’s assistant came in and took my history and put my hip through various ranges of motion. (Caused no problem or pain) I thought it was a very good exam. Doc comes in and does essentially the same thing. Again a good exam. Told me I could do whatever I wanted. Suggested that I see a physical therapist. (Physical therapy office was adjacent to him.) Said I had a trainer that I occasionally worked with and could do my own exercises and that I didn’t want to pay for physical therapy. However, if they suggested exercises to me, maybe they would have useful exercises that my trainer didn’t. Meant for doc or assistant to make suggestions.
…
Then a physical therapist comes in and suggests one exercise.
…
I believe most people would agree that there were several wasteful steps and suggestions here. I obviously didn’t need an x-ray. Then in addition to the doctor, there is an assistant and a physical therapist. I suspect that I will be charged $150 (because I have high deductible) for the one exercise recommended by the physical therapist.
…
Also, worth noting that the radiologist who interpreted the February MRI tried to charge the insurance co. (and ultimately me) $2,000 for his radiology report. I think I got lucky here because he jumped the gun while the request for the report was in the pre-approval phase and I haven’t heard anything for a while.
…
My basic point is that the waste evident in my treatment shows why healthcare is so expensive in the U.S. Am amazed that doctors get away with ramping up their bills, but they do.
JD
JD,
Bills are ramped when only a few people can provide the service.
MRI is a reasonably complex procedure.
2000 for an MRI and report seems fine if compared to 400 for a plain X-Ray?
Cost of the machine and support staff in the specialists bill [I would assume].
Will help to pay his medical insurance as well. Very high if you miss a diagnosis.
You did have a problem whatever it was [hip going out] which needed checking.
Your expense has to be balanced against those people who did have and do have serious causes, fracture, arthritis++, infection,osteo-necrosis and cancer.
Very glad you had none of the above and they were excluded.
We have to pay for our technology. Thank goodness the old stuff is getting cheaper everyday and you Americans earn so much.
Angech,
I paid about $500 for the MRI at the time of the service. The $2,000 was on top of the $500. I know several medical professionals and doctors and none of them thought that the $2,000 was reasonable. I was guessing on the cost of the plain x-ray. If I looked I possibly could have gotten it cheaper. However, my gp thought that plain x-ray would be $400, but really didn’t know.
….
Angech “Bills are ramped when only a few people can provide the service.” I disagree that only a few people could provide the service. Intepreting MRIs could be done by Indian or Chinese doctors, who would charge less. I, in fact, have many Chinese connections and will be visiting China in about 3 weeks. If charges like this persist, people, including me, will start looking elsewhere for radiology interpretations.
….
A $2,000 bill for probably 30-45 minutes of time is very unreasonable and charges like this have motivated me to look at foreign doctors who agree to practice medicine according to American standards. Also, the very high and virtually uncontrolled medical costs in the US are an important factor I am weighing in deciding whether to become a dual citizen of Italy, for which I am eligible.
JD
Intepreting MRIs could be done by Indian or Chinese doctors, who would charge less.
We actually outsource some of our medical imaging reports in Australia to overseas [mainly Indian] service providers.
Quality is never assured only assumed wherever you are.
Medical Imaging is extremely notorious in the wide range of reports one can get.
A bit like marking an English Essay rather than a maths paper.
I used to find that sitting down with a radiologist and going through the films of my patients, friends and even myself improved the quality of reporting
Mark Bofill,
I had the same thing happen with my left hip about 15 years ago…. I was trying to “clear my hips” at the start of the downswing like a young Ben Crenshaw instead of a 50 year old SteveF. So my hip joint ‘popped’ a little (audible sound) and hurt enough that I stopped play on the spot. Never saw a doctor, since it got better in a day or so. I could play again in about two weeks. Diagnosis: don’t clear your hips too aggressively; puts too much stress on your left hip joint (or right if you are a lefty). That will be $200. 😉
JD Ohio,
I have never paid any attention to the salt loons nor the cholesterol loons, since there is no credible data suggesting these things in food are bad for you. Diet has virtually no influence on either blood pressure or cholesterol, except for 1) eating too many calories and becoming hugely obese is really bad for both, and 2) hydrogenated shortening (‘trans fat’) is really bad for you. The trans fat effect makes perfect sense…. these virtually do not exist in nature, and they are not easily ‘processed’ metabolically. The inverse correlation of belt size with longevity is very strong…. much stronger than food choices.
Edit of #148576: substitute JD Ohio for Mark Bofill.
Quite a good bit of stuff on Popper over at ATTP.
Too deep for me.
Willard has it in hand anyway.
Anyone got any positive scientific views on benefits of sea level rise to help out in an argument?
mark bofill (Comment #148570),
.
.
My cue to check out is when the tofu in miso soup is colored Soylent Green.
angech:
I was going to check it out and see, but unfortunately, Anders has written another post and I had to stop after reading through it because this was too much:
Though I will admit to reading some of the comments on the post. I quit after one by Tom Curtis though because it said:
There is a certain level of stupidity I cannot tolerate right now.
So yeah, with the e-mails of Edward Maibach released, I think we’ve reached the tail end of this not-a-story story. I don’t think Watts Up With That will have much more to say on this topic, and it doesn’t look like many others are jumping to pick it up. As such, I’ve written what I hope to be my last words on it:
http://www.hi-izuru.org/wp_blog/2016/06/the-not-a-story-story-remains-not-a-story/
Given the stupid things I’ve seen people say on this topic so far, I suspect my hopes will be crushed. Oh well, it beat writing a response to that ridiculous post by Anders tonight. That one needs to simmer a bit before being looked at much.
“”Can we talk about climate change like civilized adults? “”Yesterday, I wrote a column asking that question. The response from the internet suggests: “no.” I pointed out that climate activists have a lamentable tendency to slap the “denier” label on everyone who does not consider global warming to be catastrophic and urgent, even if they are completely on board with the basic argument that human CO2 emissions will warm the planet by some amount.””
Michael Mann says kudos to Megan McArdle for the most intellectually bankrupt and misguided climate piece yet and banned her.
Popper stuff is better Brandon, too technical for me but reached a cul de sac.
Exalted company!
Right. They emerge from the parameterization codes.
The map is not the territory. Climate models are not the real world, in many cases, not even close.
Whether the climate sensitivity is high or not will not be determined by models. It will be measured.
The problem with paleoclimate data is that there isn’t much. Whether the climate sensitivity is high depends entirely on the assumptions one makes about the factors that aren’t and can’t be known.
Brandon,
I don’t get this about Anders.
1. If he thinks it is pointless to talk, well, alright. Let’s not talk. In which case, what is he doing? (I have no idea).
2. If he thinks there’s some easier way to solve the problems by not talking, show us. I don’t believe there is some easier way. Some things are hard. Getting people to agree is one of them.
Maybe he’s just venting.
I think looking for common ground is usually worthwhile. The seas are rising. I’m under the impression that some of the measures we could take to deal with this also provide benefit in terms of protection from occasional hurricane flooding. Nuclear power is something I think a lot of people like me don’t ardently oppose, even though it’s pricier. It shouldn’t be, I think some of that price is artificial.
I just don’t get the ‘well, we disagree so screw-you-guys-I’m-going-home’ approach. It’s never gotten me anyplace. But I’d love it for somebody to show me how to make that work. Besides Eric Cartman I mean… It’d do wonders for my blood pressure, and I probably need that given all the salt.
mark bofil,
I love ya, but this oversimplification doesn’t help to find common ground with people who like their scientific ideas, well, scientific. Sloganish claims are part of the problem. Don’t be part of the problem. 😉
Andrew
Guess I deserved that. 🙂
For instance, I have been presented with evidence that the Sea of Galilee has receded since biblical times. Perhaps you meant oceans, but that’s why sloganeering should be avoided, it doesn’t help with understanding.
I don’t mean to pile on, though! lol
Andrew
Alright Andrew. I don’t have the time to get organized to go engage at ATTP, so I’ll talk with you.
1. In what way is ‘the seas are rising’ an oversimplification? (I have no answer)
2. Why doesn’t it help us to find common ground? I suggest that some of the same precautions we might take against SLR would help us minimize the damage from hurricane flooding. I could go link details if you want. It seems to me that doing ‘no regrets’ things that help protect us from variability can also serve as an added insurance policy against climate change. Why is this wrong?
3. If you think I’m being ‘part of the problem’ by looking for common ground, what would you suggest I do?
Thanks.
…
You got me. Seas. Oceans. I messed up. I used them interchangeably. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Thanks.
[Edit: Anything else?]
See prev comment.
Andrew
You still aren’t being clear. Do you mean all bodies of water? Just oceans? Not rhetorical. Please clarify.
Andrew
quit it andrew, that’s dumb.
So much for trying to find common ground.
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
What mark means is that he thinks you’re being intentionally obtuse, otherwise known as being a tr011. You know perfectly well what he or any of us mean by sea level rise in connection with climate change.
Calling the Sea of Galilee a Sea is something of a misnomer. Lake Michigan, for example has an area 350 time greater than the Sea of Galilee. The surface of the Sea of Galilee, or Lake Tiberias, is also more than 200m below sea level.
@ mark bofill,
I’m finding myself somewhat in agreement with Andrew_KY here, in that a glib statement about sea level doesn’t really identify common ground. Should I infer from your statement an observation that sea level has been rising steaily for at least 150 years, as shown here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png ?
Or should I infer that you are in agreement with the National Geographic that the rising sea levels are an existential threat?
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/natgeo_statue_liberty_sea_level.jpg
It seems like such clarification and qualification shouldn’t be necessary when discussing a straightforward subject like the mean global sea level, but here we are discussing a topic without any sense of proportion.
So when I say more cars are on the road, you all can go home intellectually and scientifically satisfied in some way. Good for you.
Andrew
Earle,
.
Thanks for your response, and for swinging the discussion around into a different direction.
.
I don’t believe for a second SLR is an existential threat. The oceans are rising, something around a millimeter or two a year. If this snail overtakes us and wipes humanity out, existentially speaking, we don’t deserve to survive as a species IMO. I fail to see how that could possibly happen.
.
This said, many of our coastal cities are already vulnerable to flooding from storms. If the oceans continue their gradual rise, I’d think the problem would gradually get worse, and more expensive. I don’t think there’s any emergency. This said, I don’t understand why we can’t plan for these things.
.
I don’t necessarily mean on a Federal level. In fact, I don’t think I do. I’m not sure.
.
TY
In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and consider tipping points. Say there was some massive surge in sea level. Somehow. I don’t think there’s a physically plausible explanation but what do I know.
.
No, I got the doomsday scenario, although it’s total fiction AFAICT. Imagine that a veritable ocean is melting ‘on top of’ some glacier or other ice reservoir. Say it all breaks out and pours catastrophically into the oceans!
.
Say the oceans rise a meter over the course of a year!
.
uhmmm, ok.
.
We’re going to see the water coming in day by day. That’s still millis a day unless my arithmetic is worse than usual, something like three (3) right? Nobody is going to drown. Everybody is going to make it out. It’ll be OK. We may lose some property. Oh well!
TY DeWitt.
In my mind, sea level rise in that context is a non issue. Much more relevant is regional subsidence and the apparent settling of basins due to groundwater extraction. I know that grappling with these issues, which pose much greater threats to coastal communities and infrastructure, doesn’t feed the beast that must gnaw on all things climate-related.
I’m not quite sure where my thoughts are headed, but I suppose you can put me smack dab in the Lomborg school of worry about the world’s problems.
No, I agree with you completely Earle. The CO2 obsession distracts from other concerns, that’s true. Some of them are a heck of a lot more likely in my view.
.
But on the upside, isn’t the policy responsive similar for coastal problems regardless? I’m not an expert and I need to spend more time digging into it, but. Whether or not the root problem is subsidence due to groundwater extraction or SLR, the net result is flooding I think. This is what ‘no regrets policy’ means in my world; it doesn’t matter what climate sensitivity is. We ought to fix this anyway.
.
Thank you.
Look, here’s the whole truth. [Edit: according to that a hole bofill.]
.
1. I don’t think CO2 is all that. Don’t think CS is high.
2. There are many other primates that do.
No stop.
WHAT A TYPO.
😛
What in the HECK did I originally type that got this?
I’d fix it, but I think it’s too funny. It needs to stand for posterity.
..
What in HECK?!?
:>
..
They want this, that, and the other ting to take care of it.
3. If there are things we ought to do anyway. No, I’m not saying let’s go back to the darn caves. Not me never. But if there are things we can do that help minimize the impacts on the off chance that CS is high and we have been just dumb lucky. I don’t get the downside.
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Let’s build more nuclear. Let’s fix our coastal infrastructure. The rest of it? Not sure, I think the market will adapt, but we can always watch.
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That’s my take anyway.
I agree with some of what you say, but I’m not quite sure that is what ‘no regrets’ means. In response to your statement, who ought to fix what? The people of Venice have been adapting to their regional subsidence for centuries. This of course is compounded by the steady increase in global sea level. Should there now be a global policy decision on how best to manage the fact that the city is sinking? I don’t think so. I think for problems of this nature, the folks who have been dealing with the local geography and its instability are best suited to continue dealing with it. There’s no policy decision to made by anyone other than those dealing with the impacts.
I do think there are no regrets policy decisions that can be made, but I believe that those won’t be easy or obvious. If they were they would already be happening. Further, I think that the current state of discourse and public understanding makes developing these no regrets policies all but impossible. BrRG’s little dance with Lucia on the development of nuclear is a good example. An emphasis on nuclear energy development is one that might be no regrets, but when you’re faced with the rhetoric of #CoalKills and subsidies for unreliables into perpetuity, where will the common ground on a no regrets policy be found?
Cheers,
EaW
Edit to add: We cross-posted. I’ll add that if “We’ll cope” is one of the no-regrets policies then I’m all for it.
Earle,
1. Now we be talkin ‘Politics’. And I think you’re right. I think the people of Venice would make better decisions than some .. global? yes. global decision making body.
2. It doesn’t matter how many examples we can find of people not communicating.
3. Now go back and laugh at my typo! :> It was accidental, which makes it all the funnier.
Were we talking about something Earle?
(whistles innocently)
[We’ll cope. Yes.]
🙂 I gotta go pack. Cya all.
Primates, that’s funny…
Be careful of that sea rising, mark, wherever it may be, or something. 😉
Have a happy trip, too. I’m going to Colorado for vaca next week.
Andrew
The Chiefio has an interesting article.
Hurst, Dependence, Persistence, and a fatal flaw in “Climate Science—Posted on 2 June 2016 by E.M.Smith.
on this article
Seasonality and Dependence in Daily Mean USCRN Temperature
Sonoma State University April 12, 2016
Abstract:
A study of daily mean temperature data from five USCRN stations in the sample period 1/1/2005-3/31/2016 shows that the seasonal cycle can be captured with significantly greater precision by dividing the year into smaller parts than calendar months. The enhanced precision greatly reduces vestigial patterns in the deseasonalized and detrended residuals. Rescaled Range analysis of the residuals indicates a violation of the independence assumption of OLS regression. The existence of dependence, memory, and persistence in the data is indicated by high values of the Hurst exponent. The results imply that decadal and even multi-decadal OLS trends in USCRN daily mean temperature may be spurious.
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I recall an effort by Zeke some time back to describe the way all USCRN daily mean temperature is altered to reflect the changes needed by observation bias and how these changes filter back and enlarge in the past [making the past colder]
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Little did I or he realize that the alterations were also taking away the ambient variability of the altered observations and including a pattern for warming and reproducibility and non Gaussian fit.
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This has possibly been raised in the past but when observations are missing and have to be profiled they obviously rely on past history to fit the missing data to the right day/week/month profile.
No good having snow in summer.
The problem is that the past data now has a reproducibility fingerprint which may not have been obvious to Zeke and team when doing it.
–
This fingerprint of intervention becomes glaringly obvious using statistical analysis.
A bit like those teachers results in “Freakonomics” where you could tell the teachers were altering the marks.
–
Now, I don’t mind when people adjust the past data with a program as long as they are open and upfront about it like Zeke is though they should label it as artificial data [which they don’t]
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But as these naive young scientists and the Chiefio point out data that has been tampered with by introducing seasonality and reproducibility and lack of expected natural variability into it is no longer viable or valid for deducing climate trends.
–
Would value any comments, especially from Carrick or DeWitt or SteveF or Lucia. Even the following two antagonists at ATTP recently who have an inking of these matters
Steven Mosher says: June 3, 2016 at 10:06 pm
TE‘the data is from US stations around since 1920 – yes the US is not the globe.â€more importantly GHCN Monthly, which you plot, is not the full data [Note non related issue]
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Hats off to the Chiefio. I hope I did not offend him with my presumptions.
angech,
I haven’t read the article, but based on what little I know about long term persistence, I don’t think it really applies to infilling, especially when it’s done by comparison to nearby stations. LTP reduces the effective number of degrees of freedom even more than serial autocorrelation. That, in turn, increases the uncertainty in calculated trends. I doubt, though, whether it increases the uncertainty enough to make current trends fail to pass statistical significance at 90 or 95% confidence. Also, the tests for LTP need a long time series to be reliable.
If you search the archives here, you should find some articles about LTP. Koutsoyiannis has authored a number of papers on the subject.
angech,
I haven’t read the article either, and climate science still sucks.
Andrew
DeWitt and Andrew KY, thank you for comments .I was hoping for more from everyone.
DeWitt the interest is twofold.
The study shows that natural variability has been removed from the data and that seasonally the data matches preceding years and ? days too closely than is natural.
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The implications are that the data has been manipulated , well we all know that, but that in doing so it does, according to the authors, negate its ability to make useful predictions.
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Also that the data, seemingly random, is able to demonstrate that tampering has occurred in a non random way.
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Because the effect of infilling incorporates positive TOBS and instrument adjustment bias into stations that did not need or deserve this, as well as some that did, the overall outcome would be to introduce an extra false positive trend as well as making the results not reliable for true prediction.
This should be acknowledged and removed.
Angech, if the analysis concludes TOBS adjustment positive bias can not such analysis be used for all adjustment bias?
I would like to see a lot more data analysis. It seems the consensus is way to comfortable with smoothing and averaging to have one undecipherable metric, GMST decadal trend.
Here is the climate part of the commencement speech I referred to last week. I have emailed professor Cindy Halpern for her source on the “climate launch date” for Philadelphia.
“You can start with the greatest challenge you face – the greatest challenge any generation has ever faced. As I say in my classes, “The seas will rise for 1000 years, and there is nothing that can change that now.†Climate change is the greatest threat the human species has ever encountered. We encounter this threat on behalf of all species living on this planet. Some of you are already devoting your lives to this question. Some of you know all this in your hearts, but don’t know what to do about it. And same of us are afraid even to think about it. All of us share these attributes.
.
Since the industrial revolution, we have been pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and it is warming the temperature of the planet, starting at the poles. It is changing the face of the earth as we know it forever. We are facing what the scientists are calling The Sixth Extinction, an event characterized by the loss of between 17,000 and 100,000 species each year. The last great extinction of this size occurred 65 million years ago. Last month was the hottest April on record in the world, by the largest margin ever, continuing a record-breaking trend. Ocean fish, salt-water fish, will become extinct by the year 2050. Also around 2050 come the climate launch dates for major capitals around the world. That’s the date when the record high temperature for that place becomes the average temperature for that place. That year will be 2047 in Philadelphia. We are facing the poisoning of the oceans and the despoiling of the land. Precious ecosystems of the biosphere are in turmoil. And as I said to one economist friend of mine, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere. If the biosphere fails, the economy fails.
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We need only look at the weather that has battered our nation all spring – the massive and unprecedented tornadoes over the heartland, the floods, as in Miami, where I am retiring, the droughts, as in Berkeley, California, where my son lives, the endless rain, and the fires. Over 650 million acres of Canadian boreal forests have burned just this month, with comparable burns in the northwest, in Russia and Alaska in the last couple of years. These forests were sinks for carbon dioxide, absorbing some of the greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere. Now they are burning and turning into even greater sources of these gases. The permafrost in the arctic is melting, releasing methane, the most toxic of all greenhouse gases. The fires and smoke contribute to the melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the Antarctic southern ice sheet — warming the oceans and making them more acidic — also making them rise. It is all interconnected. All of us are downstream from somewhere. The greatest myth that afflicts our society is the myth of separation. There is no separation.
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Climate scientists now predict that the seas will rise three to six feet by the end of the century. That would pretty much wipe out the east coast. By July 4, 2076, the 300th anniversary of the United States, even Independence Hall will be under water — not submerged entirely, but challenging for a parade. And the bad news is that all this weather, all this dying of the oceans, is the effect of the greenhouse gases spewed into the air 30 years ago, before our graduates were born. There is a 30-year time gap between the emissions and their effects. What will be the effects of the emissions we are spilling out now, 30 years from now? We are fast reaching numerous tipping points. What are we going to do with all the people who live on the coasts of America? What about all the people who live on all the coasts all over the world?”
Ron,
Absent the changes made by humans since the invention of agriculture, the boreal forests in Canada would likely be under ice by now.
The lowest point in Philadelphia is 3m above sea level. Now if sea level rises, the river levels may rise also, especially if precipitation increases in a warmer world, but that’s still a lot for only 60 years. The implication that Independence Hall would be mostly under water “not completely submerged” is pure hyperbole. Apparently she’s never heard of things like levees. And “climate scientists predict” should be qualified by ‘a few’ and ‘might’ rise.
She isn’t related to Josh Halpern, is she?
The great extinction, if it’s happening at all, has almost nothing to do with climate.
DeWitt, in Ms. Halpern’s highly refined opinion you are a surely a propertied white male, civil rights oppressing, chauvinist, climate denier, just like DJ Trump.
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The esteemed doctor did not let on if she favored Hillary or Bernie to preside over the free world. But one is a white male so I think we can do the math.
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i don’t think she is related to anyone. https://www.facebook.com/cynthia.halpern.73
http://www.swarthmore.edu/interpretation-theory/cynthia-halpern
Jim Hunt says “Green areas are above 0 degrees Celsius, and bear in mind that the melting point of sea ice is at around -1.8 degrees Celsius.”
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A conundrum,
sea ice is fresh water? so should melt at 0 degrees Celsius?
The freezing point of sea water is -1.8 degrees Celsius.
Am I correct?
Ron Graf –
My condolences on having to sit through that pile of crap. Some of her factoids is so far wrong I’d have to assume that she misread something, or they were typos, or something else confirmation-bias related.
As an example that stood out for me:
Really, professor? Natural Resources Canada says we have 307 million hectares of boreal forests and woodlands, which is about 767.5 million acres. She thinks that 85% of Canada’s northern woodlands went up in flames last month? I think we’d have noticed…
Typical new-age millennialism.
kch,
I fiound it’s standard practice in Climate Science to just kinda throw numbers out there, and see if people believe them. To have the numbers actually represent something that was actually counted or could be counted, is not even a primary consideration.
Andrew
Total area burned in Canadian wildfires this year is about 850 K hectares.
That comes to about 2.1 million acres, a little short of 650 million.
Average (over the last 10 years) area for an entire year is about 2.1 million hectares. Last year was about double that.
angech (#148628) –
Freezing point of seawater is a function of salinity and pressure.
At the surface, for salinities of 30/35/40, the freezing point (in °C) is -1.64 / -1.92 / -2.21 respectively. [source, see page 34 of the .pdf (document page 30).]
Salinity of 35 is considered average, but Arctic tends to be closer to 30. Atlantic is saltier than Pacific.
“Really, professor? Natural Resources Canada says we have 307 million hectares of boreal forests and woodlands, which is about 767.5 million acres. She thinks that 85% of Canada’s northern woodlands went up in flames last month? I think we’d have noticed…”
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What do you expect from a professor of political ‘science’? Lightweight nonsense, and wanting to boss people about, is all she knows.
Ron
It’s kinda disappointing to hear the wildfire story from the good prof. It is a stretch to blame anything along these lines on climate change.
One of the things I learned as an ecology undergrad a long time ago is the difference between a ‘disaster’ and a ‘catastrophe.’ In ecological terms a catastrophe is too unpredictable or happens at too low a frequency for a community to adapt to it. Disasters are more frequent and structure communities. So somewhere prone to wildfires develops a fire-adapted community. A fire-adapted community burns and then rebuilds. Drought might affect fire intensity, but so does fuel load (time since last fire).
I suppose the point I was groping towards there that I would mention to the good professor is that fire-adapted communities burn. That’s what they do. If you keep putting the fires out, they’ll eventually burn big. Either way most of the above-ground fuel will be burnt. It might burn cool every thirty years or burn like inferno every sixty. (Don’t know fire frequencies in Boreal forests.) Climate change not required for this to become a problem when people live in the forest.
KCH, thanks for the sympathy but I am approaching the political bias to education and science with an analytical curiosity.
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DeWitt, and everyone, I’m sure that there is no need to seriously dissect Ms. Halpern’s misinformation. I find it more fascinating that this is the state of current enlightenment one receives at a fine liberal arts school (they have engineering too).
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My snark comment to DeWitt related to Ms. Halpern’s obvious (and spoken) displeasure with the male-centric world was one of quizzical bewilderment, not aggression. Identity politics seems to be an increasingly utilized tool to stir the emotional over the intellectual even at the places created to serve the opposite purpose.
Thanks HaroldW re freezing temp salt water, I was trying to get confirmation that Mr Hunt’s comment on the melting point of sea ice was wrong as well.
A funny lapse for an ice blog man.
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Have also had the Indian drought thrown up as an example of climate change. The use of the emotional weapon is frequently used to recharge the emotional over the intellectual and is almost impossible to argue against
.Having a discussion with and Then There’s Physics
says: June 5, 2016 at 12:20 pm
I said ” more free water (not ice) in the world means more moisture in the air”
He replied, “No, it does not.”
Dikran Marsupial suported him “No, this is not correct AFAICS. The amount of water in the atmosphere depends on air temperature (Clausius-Clapeyron relationship), not the surface area of the oceans. Perhaps you would like to defend this first point before moving on to the others.” ATTP said warmer air can hold more water vapour and the expectation is that relative humidity will remain almost constant meaning more water vapour in the air and more evaporation from the surface.
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I said it was a bit of a circular argument because I feel you cannot have more water in the world unless more ice melts and you cannot have more ice melt unless you have a warmer atmosphere in general and if you have a warmer atmosphere you can have more moisture in it.
However he is probably right.
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I felt he ignored the fact that there may not be enough available water to fully saturate the atmosphere at its temperature and that having an increased amount available through increased surface area will increase availability to reach that potential.
Also more water over shallow land results in increased evaporation due to the more rapid heat up of increased shallow waters, a bit like the bubbles around the edge of a saucepan of soup as it gets close to the boil, again putting more moisture into the air.
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Fairly weak arguments on my part
And in other news, the Portland School Board has issued the following order:
@Portland School Board, Be sure you are right then go ahead — Davy Crockett
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The precautionary principle’s corally is that mis-informed action is has additional costs besides wasted resources.
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One of the key tools of an effective adversarial intelligence ops is to spread misinformation not just to misdirect resources but to cause paralysis due to destruction of the integrity of information sources. Nothing as hurt the cause of climate science more than MBH98/99 and Climategate because it compromised the integrity of foundational climate science sources.
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It is perhaps ironic that many of the consensus view suspect that the aim of the skeptics is to spread mis-information, like paid covert agents, merchants of doubt. Because nothing can do more harm to one’s cause than their own overzealousness.
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I am here because of Climategate six years after the fact reached my notice in a WSJ article by Curry and Christy. I became concerned.
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My first climate paper studied was Marotzke and Forster. I was perplexed at how models could be validated by statistical comparison to the observations upon which the models were constructed without showing any predictive skill. The answer given was that the models were producing “realizations,” their own reality. I am not surprised that many find this unacceptable. I am actually astonished that an exercise that has no predetermined validation test continues to survive to now.
DeWitt
Ron,
I’d be more curious how she managed to inflate the Canadian boreal forest burnt area by a couple of orders of magnitude or so.
DeWitt, you’ll have to ask Eli. He did not include references to boreal forests in his email his mom forwarded to me.
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Here is the article where they project the average temperature in 31 years will be the all-time high temperatures of today. The paper defines this as “the departure from recent variability.” Eli coined the term “climate launch date” (it seems) in his mom’s speech. The paper, Mora et al (2013) uses RCP8.5 as a business as usual concentration pathway in GCM analysis and reports results.
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I find it interesting how under the pathway the GCM is flat-line from 1860-1980 then takes off in a straight line (with ENSO wiggle). There is no mention of diurnal range. I wonder if the GCMs have a DTR shift in land temp as we observe or just increase Tmax in straight tandem with Tmin?
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I am hoping Eli will not mind if I share his emailed footnoted references for the speech as it was an outdoor public event and published here.
.
Josh aka Eli email:
Ron,
I look at the historical data for my area. For June, the average low ranges from 58-64°F and the average high from 81-86°F. It’s June so the temperature is increasing through the month. So picking mid points we have 61-84 for a (high + low)/2 of about 72. Record highs, which were mostly set in the 1930’s and 1950’s range from 92-104°F or about 98°F. That means that for climate launch, the local average temperature in June would have to go up 26°F or about 14.5°C. I don’t think so.
DeWitt”
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But it was just announced to the public as a fait accompli at one of the top 50 universities. The audience was told that 30 years is the incubation period for emissions and 1947 is 31 years away.
Ron,
Btw, the alternative would be for the average high to become the average. But that would still require an increase of 12°F or 6.7°C. IIRC, the low is supposed to increase faster than the high and winter temperatures faster than summer. That makes that sort of increase for May and June even less likely. But that doesn’t matter. It’s more important to scare people.
Recently I stumbled across this plot from Christy.
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Those are extremes of summer maximums, not averages or even averages of maximums, and droughts can explain most of the variation.
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Still, it is instructive.
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Natural variation ( droughts ) have been more significant to the extremely hot weather than AGW has been.
I don’t like the use of a fixed temperature threshold, especially when you expect to have a secular trend superimposed on natural variability.
I’m not sure why he’s using USHCN either. Given the known problems with that data product (use of interpolation, etc), I’d suggest using GSOD instead.
I don’t like the use of a fixed temperature threshold, especially when you expect to have a secular trend superimposed on natural variability.
I’m not sure why he’s using USHCN either. Given the known problems with that data product (use of interpolation, etc), I’d suggest using GSOD instead.
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He was looking at only stations in continuous operation since 1920.
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This doesn’t discount the real warming trend in average temperature.
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But it is a pretty good indicator of extreme temperature.
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Those extreme high temperatures correlate with significant droughts.
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It’s a common conception, especially as portrayed by the media, that global warming leads to more extreme heat. But the record indicates that’s not so, or at least, natural variability (droughts) have been more significant at invoking extreme heat than AGW has been.
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With regard to the threshold, Christy also produced a similar plot of 110 degree occurrence. I suspect if he used 90F instead, the AGW fingerprint would be much more evident.
TE:
I still don’t get it. Use a product like GSOD that has better documentation for what is manipulated versus what isn’t.
And again, by using USHCN, you’re also only sampling the US. That might be okay, if you knew the US was typical, but it’s already established that the US SE is not typical (it’s one of the few regions that’s shown a long term decrease in temperature).
Absolute thresholds have their uses, but it’s a very poor way to look at how extreme temperatures actually vary over time, when you are pretty sure there’s secular variability linked in there too.
As it probably does if you do the analysis correctly. And in any case, this wasn’t a global analysis, it was a regional scale one.
The GSOD is based on the ISD.
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Here are the ISD station counts.
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No international stations back to 1920.
And given the changes, no continuously operating stations for very long.
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I think the USHCN is fine.
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And remember, checking the max readings don’t involve the large number of corrections ( TOBS, estimating Tavg from max-min, etc. etc. ) that mean or anomaly estimates require.
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Absolute thresholds have their uses, but it’s a very poor way to look at how extreme temperatures actually vary over time, when you are pretty sure there’s secular variability linked in there too.
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I don’t think that’s right. Thresholds are the extremes we’re interested in.
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As it probably does if you do the analysis correctly.
What would you do differently?
.
And in any case, this wasn’t a global analysis, it was a regional scale one.
Right – there isn’t a very long global record. So people believe in something without any evidence.
Hurst, Dependence, Persistence, and a fatal flaw in “Climate Scienceâ€. Seasonality and Dependence in Daily Mean USCRN Temperature
A study of daily mean temperature data from five USCRN stations in the sample period 1/1/2005-3/31/2016 shows that the seasonal cycle can be captured with significantly greater precision by dividing the year into smaller parts than calendar months. The enhanced precision greatly reduces vestigial patterns in the deseasonalized and detrended residuals. Rescaled Range analysis of the residuals indicates a violation of the independence assumption of OLS regression. The existence of dependence, memory, and persistence in the data is indicated by high values of the Hurst exponent. The results imply that decadal and even multi-decadal OLS trends in USCRN daily mean temperature may be spurious.
Zeke described the way all USCRN daily mean temperature is altered to reflect the changes needed by observation bias and how these changes filter back and enlarge in the past Little did I or he realize that the alterations were also taking away the ambient variability of the altered observations and including a pattern for warming and reproducibility and non Gaussian fit.
when observations are missing and have to be profiled they obviously rely on past history to fit the missing data to the right day/week/month profile.
The past data now has a reproducibility fingerprint making this fingerprint of intervention becomes glaringly obvious using statistical analysis. A bit like those teachers results in “Freakonomics†where you could tell the teachers were altering the marks.
data that has been tampered with by introducing seasonality and reproducibility and lack of expected natural variability into it is no longer viable or valid for deducing climate trends.
No traction on this but slight relevance to current discussion.
The USHCN data you quote re maximum highs suffers from the problem of being regressed lower as it gets older
There are very few continuously operating stations as per Zeke and WUWT.
Of 1218 putative stations less than 650 are real [rest infilled, guesstimated+- hence unlikely to throw a high wobbly ever or new sites] and of those less than 400 have a true continuous history as far back as 1895
Angech, if I am understanding correctly the fifteen years of USCRN stations used as a control compared with the USHCN show that the daily historic record has a fingerprint of being smoothed by infilling of missing data or falsely assumed spurious data. In other words when they see something that doesn’t fit they drop it or replace it. I imagine that the kriging that BEST uses smooths routinely and automatically by throwing out any data that is too anomalous and replacing it with infilling from neighbors.
.
Is there any evidence of systematic temperature bias that could affect trend?
angech,
That may be obvious to a mind reader, but it’s not obvious to me.
Where does it say that? I couldn’t find it in the Chiefio post that you link.
Long term persistence in a time series can reduce the precision of OLS trends, but I don’t see proof that the trend of interest, the increase in global temperature from 1950 to the present, is spurious. Determining the presence and amount of long term persistence with precision, i.e. the Hurst coefficient, requires a long time series. It ‘s not clear that the instrumental record is, in fact, long enough.
When I was messing about with that using R, the ARFIMA routine did not provide an uncertainty value for the fractional integration value d from which you can calculate the Hurst coefficient. When determining that sort of thing, the assumption is that there is no signal in the time series. If there is a deterministic trend that isn’t removed, the d value will likely be overestimated. That’s exactly the same problem as the unit root fiasco of a few years back.
Turbulent Eddy:
Why does it need to go back to 1920? This seems like an arbitrary restriction. I’d say the requirement that you sample globally (your sample needs to be representative) is more important.
If you don’t like GSOD, and want to go back further, there are plenty of other data sources out there. All of this requires work of course.
As long as you don’t mind being mislead by an unrepresentative geographical sample.
The problem with absolute thresholds is they are a total mess, in terms of what is being tested.
If you see a change, you don’t know if it’s because of the change in mean or because of a change in the distribution of temperatures about an annual mean, or some interplay between them. Basically it’s a useless metric because we don’t learn anything of value by looking at it.
There’s also nothing special that happens when the temperature crosses the 100°F threshold, so knowing how often than occurs over time in a geographically biased sample is virtually useless.
I’m not sure why you think there isn’t evidence. You have to do more legwork to do it “properly” is all.
What is I believe we should be looking at is the rate of growth of summer versus winter land temperature.
What I think you’ll find is that the summertime temperatures grow at a slower rate than the wintertime ones (up to a factor of 4 times slower if I remember for upper northern latitudes).
We could also bin the data in terms of e.g., the upper quartile (> 75%), the interquartile range (25%-75%), and the lower quartile (< 25%). I've not seen it done, but it would be interesting to look at.
Re Hurst coefficient, if I understand the additional resolution of daily data vs monthly produced enough time series in order to gain a statistically significant analysis of Hurst exponent, of the amount of color in the noise. The claim is the USCRN has less color, more randomness, then the USHCN. Is that right? Is there any important implications stemming from this? Any evidence of systematic error or is it likely non biasing random error?
angech:
I looked at the underlying paper. link here.
Not saying too much about the analysis, but the basic point is a solid one. It’s a no-brainer that increasing the temporal resolution of a series, without running into the measurement noise floor, will provide additional information.
If you want to talk about the shortest period that is not weather “noise”, it’s about 5-days, which is approximately the period between weather fronts.
So I’d advocated either daily (it doesn’t hurt to oversample) or divide the calendar into 73 periods per year. You can always go back and down-sample to monthly after you’ve processed the data optimally.
One of the reasons to go back a century, which global data sets don’t allow, is because the events which cause extreme heat are not very frequent.
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Heatwaves are typically brief ( 10 days or so ) and caused by stagnant summer anti-cyclones which provide increased sunshine and reduced sensible heat loss ( low winds ).
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Droughts are much longer events of multiple years. Heatwaves which occur during droughts have the typical increased sunshine and reduced sensible heat loss. Importantly, they also have reduced latent heat loss and reduced soil heat capacity because of the drought.
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AGW has been on the order of 1C.
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The effect of drought on extreme heat is probably much larger than this ( 10C? ). So it wouldn’t be surprising if the AGW is not immediately evident in the record of extremes.
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This goes to the temperature distribution. AGW should shift the temperature distribution, but is it broader? about the same width? or even narrower?
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There is at least one case for narrower – increased humidity tends to reduce variability. But the effect of drought appears to be most important.
“I’m not sure why he’s using USHCN either. Given the known problems with that data product (use of interpolation, etc), I’d suggest using GSOD instead.”
USHCN is a derivative product.
you can pretty much throw it away or just recompile it from GHCN-D
For daily temps start with GHCN daily.
supplement with
First Order summary of the day which goes back to 1884
and then
GSOD 1929,
“This goes to the temperature distribution. AGW should shift the temperature distribution, but is it broader? about the same width? or even narrower?”
some issues
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/memos/wickenburg-hansen-memo.pdf
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/memos/hausfather-hansen-memo.pdf
“Angech, if I am understanding correctly the fifteen years of USCRN stations used as a control compared with the USHCN show that the daily historic record has a fingerprint of being smoothed by infilling of missing data or falsely assumed spurious data. In other words when they see something that doesn’t fit they drop it or replace it. I imagine that the kriging that BEST uses smooths routinely and automatically by throwing out any data that is too anomalous and replacing it with infilling from neighbors.”
Err No.
There is no “Throwing out” of data and replacing it.
Since I am doing a census of all data decisions I can probably clear that up for folks who refuse to read papers and code.
1. The first step is a merge step.
We start with station data from reliable ftp sites. There are at least 14 different sources. The biggest problem is multiple sources of the “same” data. So take GHCN-Daily. That’s an UR source.. it gets compiled by others into other daily products (USHCN) and other monthly products ( GHCN M, and USHCN monthly etc etc ). In the merge step you try to “join” the data
that needs to be joined and delete duplicates. This is not a trivial process.
In the end you have about 51,000 Distinct stations.
Next comes a QC process. About 8000 stations are dropped at this step. bad metadata, no metadata, or series are too short.
Then QC flags ( supplier flags ) are applied. So daily stations with too few records are dropped etc etc.. there are maybe 75 distinct reasons why data can be dropped. We add a few additional checks.
If you took the trends of Raw data and compare them station by station with the trends after dropping bad data.. The average
change is negative.. that is after QC the trends are lower on average. QC looks to cool the record. maybe QC is a secret plot?
At this stage you have 43K stations.
Next we add “markers” to the stations. We mark the months
where
A) metadata indicates a change of position
B) metadata indicates a change instrument
C) metadata indicates a change of time of observation.
D) the data indicates a divergence from its neighbors.
Those are just markers.
I’ll make it concrete with an example. Suppose you have a station
with a marker at june 1950 and another marker at oct 1975.
So, during that period you look at all the stations surrounding
that station. And what we want to do is assign
a Quality weight to that station. We interative re weight that station from 1 toward smaller an smaller weighs until our error
of prediction is minimized. So if all the neighbors are flat and this stations trend goes up.. the suspect station will have a lower weight. There is no infilling, no adjustment of the station.
It gets a lower quality weight. its not deleted or changed. it gets a smaller weight because of its quality
In the end you calculate a field based on the stations weights
Some stations get a weight of 1 and others have lower weights.
Then you integrate the field and come up with a integrated value what some folks call an average.
Finally, we can go back and “simulate” what a station would have said IF its weight were 1. that is, what does the field predict for that location. we call this ‘Homogenized’ data, but its really a prediction of what the field says the station should have reported.
the difference between the actual station and the predicted station is a “residual” or adjustment. So we dont adjust data and then compile an average. we weight stations, create a field and then use the field to predict what should have been recorded.
The field tends to be smooth. ( remember we are trying to minimize the error of prediction) with some new re analysis data I have I hope to characterize that, but I’m not sure if we would actually change anything. If folks are interested in local scale
( say state or country level data ) there are many states and countries that roll there own adjustments. we kinda do a “hands off” one size fits all “adjustment” process. The nationally produced series tend to have higher trends than our global product.
angech,
The time period was 11 years and three months, that’s still only 513 data points on an eight day basis period and only 11.25 seasonal cycles. It’s also during a period when the global trend was low. So saying that an OLS trend during that period is not statistically significant, i.e. may be spurious, is not particularly interesting.
Their Monte Carlo experiment is flawed, as near as I can tell. Rather than simulate 100 years and looking at the first 4100 data points, they should have constructed at least one thousand 4100 data point series and examined the distribution of OLS trends for those series. That’s the best way, IMO, to determine if a trend of 0.12 or 0.14 is significant.
I also don’t see any mention of autoregression or moving average, other types of serial autocorrelation besides long term persistence. As I said,an ARFIMA, AutoRegressive, Fractionally Integrated, Moving Average noise model would have been a lot more interesting.
Mosher writes
I expect this is an idealistic example and reality would have all the neighbouring stations with varying rates of change. So do you weight based on the average of the trends of the station and its neighbours?
And how does the weighting get impacted by distance? For example a neighbouring station within a few kms is likely to be more useful than one say 250kms away. I might expect a station on the coast to have a different trend than one inland even though it might be quite close. Is that taken account of too?
“I expect this is an idealistic example and reality would have all the neighbouring stations with varying rates of change. So do you weight based on the average of the trends of the station and its neighbours?
No the weight is not based on the average
And how does the weighting get impacted by distance?
All the stations in a area contribute to the field. The field predicts the temperature at all locations. The station (actual)
is compared to the station (predicted). This defines a divergence,
not from its neighbors, but rather from the consensus of the neighbors. The Krigging coefficients are then recomputed
“For example a neighbouring station within a few kms is likely to be more useful than one say 250kms away. I might expect a station on the coast to have a different trend than one inland even though it might be quite close. Is that taken account of too?”
coastal stations tend to have higher noise with 50km of the coast and depending on the season.
Here is a more detailed explanation
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Methods-Appendix-GIGS-13-103a.pdf
here is everything you need to answer your questions
http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis-code/
DeWitt Payne (Comment #148708)
when observations are missing and have to be profiled they obviously rely on past history to fit the missing data to the right day/week/month profile.
“That may be obvious to a mind reader, but it’s not obvious to me.”
–
Sorry, I thought you had read Zeke and Mosher on legitimate temperature adjusting in posts infinitum in the past.
Steve good summary #148716) on some of the adjusting
Salient points
1. The first step is a merge [throw out data that disagrees with what we want [AKA as a Gerghis] step. There are 75 other distinct reasons why data can be ignored.
2. Quality weight to that station. We iterative reweight that station from 1 toward smaller and smaller weighs until our error of prediction is minimized. its changed. it gets a smaller weight because of its quality. Some stations get a weight of 1 [AKA the field] and others have lower weights.
[note not higher weights!]
Then you integrate [average] the field
–
“Little did I or he realize that the alterations were also taking away the ambient variability of the altered observations and including a pattern for warming and reproducibility and non Gaussian fit.Where does it say that? I couldn’t find it in the Chiefio post that you link.”
–
“”the finding for “Muleshoeâ€
the data are strongly dependent, and you can not find valid trend in them with a OLS fit. “trend†analysis by “climate scientists†is a least squares regression against averages of temperatures, based on monthly averages as found in the USHCN and GHCN. their statistics methods are bogus, even if they DO show a trend. The ‘trend’ is a result of data dependence, and the analysis method, not a real trend in temperatures.”
–
“Long term persistence in a time series can reduce the precision of OLS trends, but I don’t see proof that the trend of interest, the increase in global temperature from 1950 to the present, is spurious.”
–
Zeke said, and I can only quote from my imperfect memory at this stage, “We had two choices. We could keep the past records stable and increase the current ones or we could keep the current records and and make adjustments downwards to the past records. This has to be done on a daily basis so the records you get of the past are have been and are constantly being adjusted downwards. Some of the increase in global temperature from 1950 to the present, is spurious and always must be spurious.
–
As you eloquently point out
“If there is a deterministic trend that isn’t removed, the d value will likely be overestimated. That’s exactly the same problem as the unit root fiasco of a few years back.”
Carrick (Comment #148710)
“” I think the USHCN is fine. As long as you don’t mind being mislead by an unrepresentative geographical sample.”
We do not have many other instrumental samples, world wide or local to use, on such a long scale unfortunately.
“I don’t think that’s right.Thresholds are the extremes we’re interested in. The problem with absolute thresholds is they are a total mess, in terms of what is being tested.”
Unimportant as well, the premise is unlikely to be true.
Threshold extremes will occur intermittently both ways for all sorts of reasons, but not because of the current average temperature.
TTTM, excellent questions. I would love to know the answers. Steven, thank you for providing the treasure map.
Yes, thanks Steven!
angech,
Of course the trend for Muleshoe isn’t significant at 0.0338/decate. It’s already not significant at the 95% confidence level by OLS and barely passes 90%. Des Moines IA and Goodridge CA are even worse. So freaking what.
You’re reading way more into that paper than is there.
Throwing out station data is not the same as infilling, which BE doesn’t do anyway. Again, there’s nothing in that paper to support your hypothesis that adjusting for changes in TOB and station location are doing anything to the noise structure. It was already not gaussian and autocorrelated. No one expects it to be gaussian.
Whether there is actually long term persistence is another matter. I don’t think that they did a very good job on that analysis
DeWitt Payne (Comment #148724)
“So freaking what.You’re reading way more into that paper than is there.”
Apologies, your right, my motivation does that unfortunately.
Steven Mosher (Comment #148716)
Err No.
There is no “Throwing out†of data and replacing it.
–
BUT ” trends of Raw data and compare them station by station with the trends after dropping bad data.”
–
But ” QC flags ( supplier flags ) are applied. So daily stations with too few records are dropped etc etc.. there are maybe 75 distinct reasons why data can be dropped”.
–
But “a QC process. About 8000 stations are dropped at this step. bad metadata, no metadata, or series are too short.”
–
BUT “what we want to do is assign a Quality weight to that station.
We iterative re weight that station from 1 toward smaller an smaller weights.
. the suspect station will have a lower weight.
There is no infilling, no adjustment of the station.
its not deleted or changed”
BUT it gets a lower quality weight.
We don’t adjust data and then compile an average.
But we weight stations, create a field and then use the field to predict what should have been recorded.
“we kinda do a “hands off†one size fits all “adjustment†process”
[BUT There is no infilling, no adjustment of the station.]
–
I’ve just been to see “Now you see me 2 ”
. I did not get it either.
– Bad data I understand being dropped out but who judges the judges. Gerghis did this and threw out everything that did not fit her preconceived view point.
So much historical data gets thrown out that with a little bit of judiciousness a lot of this data is usable or could be revived.
–
As an aside whatever excuses I might wish to believe in data records does not take away from the fact that the current records are correct and would be higher than most of the past in an unadjusted world.
I just wish you were game enough to say yes we do adjust and change the records in a way we believe is logical and sensible [so we can argue the logic] rather than using word games where you tie yourself in impossible knots .
I repeat. “the suspect station will have a lower weight.” and the others
are not consistent with comments like
“There is no infilling, no adjustment of the station.
its not deleted or changed”
I realize you might get eaten alive by your ilk but you would feel better.
“1. The first step is a merge [throw out data that disagrees with what we want [AKA as a Gerghis] step. There are 75 other distinct reasons why data can be ignored.”
Here are the quality flags.. Not all of them require removal
% Flag Code, Flag Description
%
3: USSOD: Derived Value
4: USSOD: Estimated Value
5: USSOD: Value manually validated
11: USSOD: Expert system approved edited value
14: USSOD: Valid data element
15: USSOD: Valid data element (from unknown source)
16: USSOD: Invalid data element (subsequent value replacement)
17: USSOD: Invalid data element (no replacement)
18: USSOD: Validity unknown
20: USSOD: Substituted TOBS for TMAX or TMIN
21: USSOD: Time shifted value
24: USSOD: Changed units
26: USSOD: Changed algebraic sign
29: USSOD: Subjectively derived value
31: USSOD: Switched TMAX and/or TMIN
32: USSOD: Switched TOBS with TMAX or TMIN
33: USSOD: Substitution of 3 nearest station mean
36: USSOD: Switched snowfall and snow depth
38: USSOD: Manually edited value
39: USSOD: Failed internal consistency check
40: USSOD: Failed areal consistency check
41: USSOD: Replacement value based on TempVal QC process
44: USSOD: Failed spatial tests, assessed as questionable
46: USSOD: Failed spatial tests, assessed as invalid
49: USSOD: Passed consistency checks
50: USSOD: Unknown validity
52: USSOD: Consistency check failed (no replacement)
53: USSOD: Data invalid (no replacement)
54: USSOD: Data from TD-9750 exceeds climate extremes
55: USSOD: Failed an internal consistency check but valid under manual inspection
68: GSOD: Temperature extreme derived from hourly data
80: GHCN-D: Temperature appears to be lagged from reported hour of observation
83: GHCN-D: Failed duplicate check
84: GHCN-D: Failed gap check
85: GHCN-D: Failed internal consistency check
86: GHCN-D: Failed streak/frequent-value check
87: GHCN-D: Failed megaconsistency check
88: GHCN-D: Failed naught check
89: GHCN-D: Failed climatological outlier check
90: GHCN-D: Failed lagged range check
91: GHCN-D: Failed spatial consistency check
92: GHCN-D: Failed temporal consistency check
94: GHCN-D: Failed bounds check
98: USSOM: 1 to 9 Days Missing
105: USHCN-M: Estimated from surrounding values; original failed quality check
107: Pre-existing bad flag
108: Exceeds climate extreme
109: Failed duplicate check
110: Failed frame shift check
112: Failed second derivative check
113: Failed climatological outlier check
114: Failed TMAX > TMIN
115: Failed TMAX >= observed T >= TMIN
116: Perceived Unit Reporting Error Corrected
117: Local Envelope Exceeded
142: New Monthly Average from Daily Values
144: Number of hourly observations hidden in monthly average
147: Days missing from monthly average
148: 10 or More days missing from monthly average
160: Original data was C, tenths of degree
162: Original data was F, whole degrees
163: Original data was F, tenths of degree
165: Number of observations estimated from percentage
166: GHCN-M3: Duplicated annual series
168: GHCN-M3: Isolated temperature report
169: GHCN-M3: Outlier value
170: GHCN-M3: Spatial consistency fail
172: GHCN-M3: Duplicated monthly value
173: GHCN-M3: Manually flagged as erroneous
175: Temporally isolated value
176: Daily values combined via merge
180: Duplicate daily values combined
182: Merger / average of daily values dropped terms with bad flags
183: Merger / average of daily values provided conflicting number of measurements
184: Merger / average of daily values provided conflicting times of observation
185: Merger / average found time of observation for some but not all daily values
187: Merger of daily values found they were consistent within stated precision / uncertainty
188: Merger included daily values that were inconsistent within the stated precision / uncertainty
193: Monthly values combined via merge
196: Multiple monthly values of dissimilar type combined via average
197: Duplicate monthly values combined
199: Merger / average of monthly values dropped terms with bad flags
200: Merger / average of monthly values provided conflicting number of measurements
201: Merger / average of monthly values provided conflicting times of observation
202: Merger / average found time of observation for some but not all monthly values
204: Merger of monthly values found they were consistent within stated precision / uncertainty
205: Merger included monthly values that were inconsistent within the stated precision / uncertainty
208: New monthly TAVG constructed from average (TMAX + TMIN) / 2
210: GHCN-M3: Internal consistency fail
214: GHCN-D: Failed length of multi-day period check
215: Number of observations estimated from secondary data
216: Time of observation estimated from secondary data
224: GHCN-D: Flagged as a result of an official Datzilla investigation
225: GHCN-D: Represents highest or lowest hourly value
One simple test is to ask yourself what do you do when the raw data says the temperature as 15000C?
or when all the stations in the neighborhood say its -14C and one guy says its 35C?
As a sanity check you can calculate trends on the raw data
and then trends on the QC data
Answer: Applying Quality Control REDUCES the trend on average.
So when 100 values in a file are reported in F and 2000 are reported in C, we could just leave the higher F values in place and report strange warming!!
“There is no “Throwing out†of data and replacing it.
–
BUT †trends of Raw data and compare them station by station with the trends after dropping bad data.â€
–
But †QC flags ( supplier flags ) are applied. So daily stations with too few records are dropped etc etc.. there are maybe 75 distinct reasons why data can be droppedâ€.
–
But “a QC process. About 8000 stations are dropped at this step. bad metadata, no metadata, or series are too short.â€
–
Which part of this sentence dont you understand
“”There is no “Throwing out†of data and replacing it.”
AND REPLACING IT
Of course bad data is thrown out. Stations with no locations
Stations with 2 months of data
Stations that report Max lower than Min
Months that report 15000C
Months that only have 10 days of data
The point is there is no process to INFILL this missing data
we dont estimate a missing month from other months
we dont give a missing value a new value.
Now, I will suggest that you can apologize for either being stupid or careless.
“I’ve just been to see “Now you see me 2 â€
. I did not get it either.
– Bad data I understand being dropped out but who judges the judges. Gerghis did this and threw out everything that did not fit her preconceived view point.
So much historical data gets thrown out that with a little bit of judiciousness a lot of this data is usable or could be revived.”
All of the raw data that is thrown out is there.
All 8,000 stations
Do you want to go look through the 4-5K that only report 2 months of data or less?
Do you want to look at the hundred year long station that has no
name, no location, and just an ID number?
Where praytell do I locate that time series to compare it with its neighbors?
anyway, the stations are there. Knock yourself out trying to figure out how to use it.
here are some reasons why stations get dropped, not all of these site flags will cause a station to drop
Flag Code, Flag Description
%
1: Station is known to have been relocated
2: Changing location with time suggests possible relocation
3: Conflicting locations from different sources
4: Station location conflict greater than 15 km
5: Station location conflict greater than 100 km
6: Multiple sources reported this site
7: Multiple names associated with this site
10: Site has country identification conflict
11: Site has no country identification
12: Site has state identification conflict
13: Site has county identification conflict
22: Country name was remapped
24: Part of the US Historical Climate Network
25: Composite Record Created by the USHCN
26: Part of the Global Climate Observing System
27: Source Archive had no Metadata
29: No location data
31: Station record was manually corrected
32: Country identification conflict resolved using reference maps
33: Country estimated from reported location
34: Elevation report discordant with digital elevation model was dropped
35: Apparent latitude / longitude sign error fixed by automatically applying consensus value
36: No elevation data
37: Elevation estimated from digital elevation model
As an aside whatever excuses I might wish to believe in data records does not take away from the fact that the current records are correct and would be higher than most of the past in an unadjusted world.
I just wish you were game enough to say yes we do adjust and change the records in a way we believe is logical and sensible [so we can argue the logic] rather than using word games where you tie yourself in impossible knots .
I repeat. “the suspect station will have a lower weight.†and the others
are not consistent with comments like
“There is no infilling, no adjustment of the station.
its not deleted or changedâ€
I realize you might get eaten alive by your ilk but you would feel better.
#######################
Let me show you the difference.
Lets take the GISS approach.
They take Adjusted data from NOAA.
A1
They apply an urban adjustment
A2.
They then compute a field based on the adjusted data.
Contrast that with the berkeley approach.
We take the raw data
R1
We compute a field
We compute a prediction for each station given the field
We compare the prediction with actual.
We calculate a divergence.
Every station gets a weight that is a function of its divergence.
We recompute the field
We rinse and repeat until the errors are minimized.
We compute a FINAL FIELD using
R1 & Weights
Done. you have your average. No temperature records have
been adjusted. There is no logic that says
L1: oh, there is station move decrease it by X
L2 : oh there is a instrument change decrease it by Y
L3: Oh here is TOBS change, increase by Z
L4: rats UHI, decrease by .65
That is what I mean by adjusting. An EXPLICIT, TRACEABLE,
Change in a monthly value made to account for a specific REASON.
After we finish the average,
“During the Berkeley Earth averaging process we compare each station to other stations in its local neighborhood, which allows us to identify discontinuities and other heterogeneities in the time series from individual weather stations. The averaging process is then designed to automatically compensate for various biases that appear to be present. After the average field is constructed, it is possible to create a set of estimated bias corrections that suggest what the weather station might have reported had apparent biasing events not occurred. This breakpoint-adjusted data set provides a collection of adjusted, homogeneous station data that is recommended for users who want to avoid heterogeneities in station temperature data.”
I would perfer to call this data “Predicted temperatures” because that is what it is. Others prefer to call it adjusted data. That however gives rise to the notion that we have adjusted data values for SPECIFIC INDENTIFIABLE TRACEABLE EXPLICIT reasons.
But we dont do that. UHI, for example, gets “adjusted” for, NOT by saying “Oh here is UHI–subtract 52” UHI gets removed from the averaging process by downweighting. Or to be super precise, when I see Reno Nevada downweighted relative to its neighbors I can
assume it is downweighted because something (UHI) made it warm faster than its neighbors.
So, you can go through GISS code and see the code where
A) a station is identified as Urban
B) its compared to its neighbors
C) Its data values are CHANGED
You cannot similarly go through our code and find a place where
we identify stations as Urban, and change the DATA VALUES.
Imagine the extreme case.
10 stations:
9 rural
1 urban
The 9 rural show no warming
The one urban shows 2C per decade
The field will show a slight warming
Now we compare the field to the data.
The urban ends up getting a near zero weight
The final field shows No warming
The 9 rural stations have weights of 1
lastly we then predict what the urban station WOULD have recorded if it wasnt screwed up
No warming. it will be “adjusted” down 2C
Now consider a different urban station same thing only it warms
.2C more than its neighbors.
It will be adjusted .2C down
But there is no code that says “OH.. nightlights is 42, therefore
UHI is 6” None of that kind of adjusting data before you calculate the expectation.
angech,
I haven’t bothered to read your last two posts, nor do I plan to. Once again you have decided to believe something that simply isn’t true and you can’t accept that. I don’t see any reason to continue with this.
“…I don’t see any reason to continue with this.”
Between the lines: “Good look though. Nobody finds treasure without investigation.”
Ron.
There is nothing much that rests on the calculation of trends.
Think about it.
Steven Mosher (Comment #148727)
“One simple test is to ask yourself what do you do when the raw data says the temperature as 15000C?”
–
Really?
You are better than this, this is not an argument , is it?
–
or when all the stations in the neighborhood say its -14C and one guy says its 35C?
–
True.
But I would seriously wonder what was wrong if 25 stations all said exactly -14 degrees and one said 35C, I thought you would too?
The exact agreement of 25 stations would spark issues of background adjustment would it not. Got to have some- 13’s, – 15’s, a couple of -14.2 and 14.3’s etc to give some veracity, come on.
–
“As a sanity check you can calculate trends on the raw data
and then trends on the QC data” Good idea.
–
But – Steven Mosher (Comment #148733) “There is nothing much that rests on the calculation of trends.”
–
Only nitpicking, thank you for the detailed explanation [again].
Like DeWitt you must get tired of my repetitiveness.
I have just had my backup blog reopened by my son so I might have a couple of old issues to mention if I can find them, but thanks again for the involvement, appreciated that you try.
On temperature adjustments
–
“Zeke (Comment #130058)June 7th, 2014 at 11:45 am
The reason why station values in the distant past end up getting adjusted is due to a choice by NCDC to assume that current values are the “true†values. Each month, as new station data come in, NCDC runs their pairwise homogenization algorithm which looks for non-climatic breakpoints by comparing each station to its surrounding stations. When these breakpoints are detected, they are removed. If a small step change is detected in a 100-year station record in the year 2006, for example, removing that step change will move all the values for that station prior to 2006 up or down by the amount of the breakpoint removed. As long as new data leads to new breakpoint detection, the past station temperatures will be raised or lowered by the size of the breakpoint.
An alternative approach would be to assume that the initial temperature reported by a station when it joins the network is “trueâ€, and remove breakpoints relative to the start of the network rather than the end. It would have no effect at all on the trends over the period, of course, but it would lead to less complaining about distant past temperatures changing at the expense of more present temperatures changing.”
““One simple test is to ask yourself what do you do when the raw data says the temperature as 15000C?â€
–
Really?
You are better than this, this is not an argument , is it?”
Its a question.
See that thing “?”
This indicates a question.
Since there are thousands of these types of examples, I can ask you about each data deletion. Since you question the removal of data, this will be a long process. My bet is that
A) you wont answer the questions ( do science)
B) will have no process that is defensiveable
Basically your game is to confuse people and resist understanding. This is anti science. A scientific approach seeks to clarify, understand, explain. As I explained, we apply all the QC flags supplied by the data supplier to remove suspect data. 15000C is an example. Since you object to data cleansing, I have to wonder why you would keep values like 15000C. I get to ask the question. You of course get to refuse understanding. you get to avoid answering questions. This tells everyone that you do not seek understanding.
It shows them. literally shows them that skeptics dont want to do science they want to fight understanding.
“True.
But I would seriously wonder what was wrong if 25 stations all said exactly -14 degrees and one said 35C, I thought you would too?
The exact agreement of 25 stations would spark issues of background adjustment would it not. Got to have some- 13’s, – 15’s, a couple of -14.2 and 14.3’s etc to give some veracity, come on.”
It looks like you agree on one principle.
It looks like you agree
A) Data should be inspected or QCd
B) That outliers can be identified
C) That too much consistency ( or repeated values ) is a sign of something amiss
So some simple questions to see if you are really interested in doing science or merely interested in trying to confuse, disrupt and annoy.
1. Should we run quality controls on raw data
2. Can we identify outliers
““As a sanity check you can calculate trends on the raw data
and then trends on the QC data†Good idea.
–
But – Steven Mosher (Comment #148733) “There is nothing much that rests on the calculation of trends.â€
Both true.
This was a logic trap I set for you, hoping you would fall for it.
Think hard now..
1. Nothing much rests on the calculation of trends
2. You can test the trends of Raw versus QC
Think hard.
I’ll help.
The difference in trends between raw and QC isnt very important.
We can of course compute them to satisfy the nit pickers, but in the end Nit picking doesnt touch what really matters. calculating temperature trends is really a sideshow in the debate.
Let me make it very simple for you.
Here is what matters. This is the only thing that matters very much.
1. How much will doubling c02 impact the future temperature?
Steven,
Have you ever seen any pattern, maybe graphical, in the perturbed data, or is it mostly random?
“On temperature adjustments
–
“Zeke (Comment #130058)June 7th, 2014 at 11:45 am
The reason why station values in the distant past end up getting adjusted is due to a choice by NCDC to assume that current values are the “true†values. Each month, as new station data come in, NCDC runs their pairwise homogenization algorithm which looks for non-climatic breakpoints by comparing each station to its surrounding stations. When these breakpoints are detected, they are removed. If a small step change is detected in a 100-year station record in the year 2006, for example, removing that step change will move all the values for that station prior to 2006 up or down by the amount of the breakpoint removed. As long as new data leads to new breakpoint detection, the past station temperatures will be raised or lowered by the size of the breakpoint.
An alternative approach would be to assume that the initial temperature reported by a station when it joins the network is “trueâ€, and remove breakpoints relative to the start of the network rather than the end. It would have no effect at all on the trends over the period, of course, but it would lead to less complaining about distant past temperatures changing at the expense of more present temperatures changing.â€
1. Yes. If you use NCDC MONTHLY DATA you have two choices
A) Raw Monthly built from Raw Daily
B) Adjusted Monthly Built from Raw Monthly
2. To adjust data, or homogenize data you have two choices
A) Hold the deep past constant and adjust the recent past
B) Hold the recent past constant and adjust the deep past.
A simple example. Note this is a toy example just to illustrate the choices. I’ll use an example like the old station location adjustment. Roy Spencer uses something akin to this when he adjusts for elevation.
Station A: Station a starts at 1000m ASL.
For 6 months it records the following mean
0 0 0 0 0 0
Then the station is moved to 0m ASL
6 6 6 6 6 6
put together it looks like this 0 0 0 0 0 0 6 6 6 6 6 6
The Raw data shows a 6C jump.
Now of course an analyst has a choice. He can leave the data alone and report a huge change in termperature. This choice obviously has some probability of being right or wrong.
The next choice is to adjust the data. You could look at lapse rates
and say.. “hmm lapse rate is theoretically 6C per 1km) so lets
just assume this is an average location and adjust by 6C.. There is error associated with this decision but it wont get propagated to the adjustment. Your two choices are
Choice A Fix the past
6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6
Choice B Fix the near past
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
What we see is that the jump disappears. It wasnt real. It was caused by the change in altitude.
But now comes the problem. With Choice A I have “changed” the past. Now we really havent changed the past. Skeptics who want to confuse people argue we are changing the past, but in reality the raw past data is still there. The adjusted series shows what we think would have been recorded had the station always been at 0m ASL. But the perception is created that people are rewriting history
With Choice B we are changing the near past. And we change the value to 0. With this choice we are saying, suppose the current station was still at 1000m ASL. Now what happens. Some skeptic
lives by the station. His back yard reads 6. The official temp is
corrected to 0, and he cries that the adjustment is incompetant
because its obviously 6C. He even goes to the site and takes readings… Yup its 6C.. those guys must be fiddling records.
When people explain the adjustment he argues that the recent data is obviously more accurate than the past data and that the past should be adjusted. Witness Karl’s last paper, where they adjusted the most recent data rather than the past data.
The point is that anyone who wants to fight understanding can attack either A or B.. and they can switch their attack from one comment to the next.
That leads to a different solution. The solution is to NOT adjust the temperature data. What happened? The station had an ID
Lets call it XRB6545T. That identifier was tied to a
a) position (x,y.z)
b) instrument
c) observation practice. ( time and manner)
The problem was created when they FAILED to change the ID when the metadata changed. In the business world if we changed a part
we would change the part number and then create a succession history ( sorry Im doing auto parts big data now )
XRB6545T would be eoled and XRB6545U would be created
along with a supercession table XRB6545T ->XRB6545U
Dont talk to me about part numbers
http://money.cnn.com/infographic/pf/autos/gm-recall-timeline/
We would see that there are really two different stations here, one at 0M and one at 1000m. The question of adjustment would never come up. You dont adjust. So that’s effectively what we do at BE. Its called slicing, But If I had to name it over again I would call it what it is: Metadata QC. too late.. meh
Correcting Metadata accounts for about 50% of the error between actual station reports and the expectation.
“Steven,
Have you ever seen any pattern, maybe graphical, in the perturbed data, or is it mostly random?”
You see patterns all the time. The question is are they real.
Right now I am looking at two things.
One of the weak points of using neighbors is the corner case of a bad neghborhood
Suppose that at the same time all your neighbors went from hot to cold .. suppose an instrument change all on the same day
The possibility exists that all those bad apples would be used to adjust a good apple. Anthony draws a lot of these cartoons
what if what if??? blah blah blah.
So I looked at what our algorithm did to CRN stations. Pretty cool results. There’s more here.
Next, I’ll look at patterns tied to things like population or certain land forms.
None of this will convince a skeptic since they dont care about evidence and none of it will be publishable because its mere technical nit picking.
Stephen you keep using the word skeptic as a crank whereas it has two meanings.
An intelligent erudite person who needs a logical argument to convince them,
And a crank.
To use your metadata analogy you have two different sites. Please refrain from using the word skeptic when you mean crank.
Zeke method does not do what you said. There is no ” two different sites”. There is an ongoing lowering of past temperatures from the most recent present temperature with ongoing change in past values.
Would you be able to state the world average temperature in 1998 from 1998, 2000 2010 and 2016? Are they the same?
No.
Do you care?
Probably.
You put out a temperature anomaly that differs every year from what it was when you first present it.
Your trends quoted change every year and you do not care, or get it.
As the poor fellow at 0 meters I would just say, put the thermometer back down here, not at 1000 meters.
“Then the station is moved to 0m ASL”
Wellington, NZ is a real life example. In 1928, the sttion was moved from Thorndon, at 3m asl, to Kelburn at 128m. There is no reason to doubt that temperatures were properly measured in both places. But the thing is, we’re not interested in the temperature at Kelburn or Thorndon as such. We use them as an estimate for the Wellington region in spatial averaging. And if Wellington doesn’t report, we use nearby data. Nothing special happened to the region in 1928.
So the NCDC approach, via Menne/Williams, is to ask whether the apparent drop in 1928 matches other estimates that might be made for the region. If not, it is corrected. They don’t use the metadata at all. And it works there.
The region is hilly. Neither Th nor Ke is necessarily representative in absolute temperature. That is one reason why anomaly, formed by subtracting a mean, is used. And that is why it just doesn’t matter whether you regard Kelburn or Thorburn as the “right” temperature. Either way, when you subtract the respective mean, it’s the same. They always adjust relative to current temperatures, because they are quoted a lot, and historic rarely. You don’t want weather presenters having to describe two different temperatures.
Nick Stokes (Comment #148744)
“”Wellington, NZ is a real life example. In 1928, the station was moved from Thorndon, at 3m asl, to Kelburn at 128m.””
As Steven would say they are different stations.
The data from Kelburn was obviously too short so should have been thrown out anyway.
The altitude rise means 0.7 degrees temp fall is mandated by altitude so it is a real drop, not an apparent drop as you said.
So it could not match other estimates that might be made for the region.
If it did match other estimates it would have meant that all the other places had suddenly elevated 125 meters.
So it was corrected as you say?
So they report the Wellington temp 0.7C higher than it actually is at Kendall??
I don’t think so.
Too many skeptics sitting there with their little thermometers saying it’s wrong.
So they use the actual temperature?/
Yes.
So what happens to Wellington before 1928?
Oh, there is a drop of 0.7 degrees and an obvious warming signal locally.
Thank you , Nick.
If 5% of the world is over 1000 meters what weighting and significance is given to those temperatures > 6 degrees Celsius lower than at sea level?
What about the 15% greater than 200 meters ie 1 degree Celsius less than the overall average.
If we can compute the areas and elevations then we should be able to compute a mean expected global temperature without needing thermometers at all.
Well one to give the baseline.
–
With all the Berkeley Earth averaging processes working out the average anomaly from the 40,000 plus stations there must be a golden egg.
The actual annual earth average temperature at those 40,000 sites.
But because we use anomalies no one ever discusses this temp or what it would have been from the 2000 stations 100 years ago.
Does anyone know ?
Is it 13.9 or 14.1 degrees C.
I would like to know.
“Stephen you keep using the word skeptic as a crank whereas it has two meanings.
An intelligent erudite person who needs a logical argument to convince them,
And a crank.
1. well since Im talking to you the first is ruled out.
2. you walk like a crank and talk like a crank. own it.
“Zeke method does not do what you said. There is no †two different sitesâ€. There is an ongoing lowering of past temperatures from the most recent present temperature with ongoing change in past values.”
1. the NCDC method in the past did in fact exactly what I describe. the methods were shap, filenet, and tobs. they have been supplanted by the new method.
2. the point is if you adjust you have to move ONE segment or the other CRANK!
“Would you be able to state the world average temperature in 1998 from 1998, 2000 2010 and 2016? Are they the same?
No.
Do you care?
Probably.”
your question doesnt even make sense crank.
“You put out a temperature anomaly that differs every year from what it was when you first present it.
Your trends quoted change every year and you do not care, or get it.”
1. As the input data grows and shrinks your Estimate of the past will change.
2. As we improve the method, the estimate changes, just like UHA and RSS.
2. you dont get it CRANK
“As the poor fellow at 0 meters I would just say, put the thermometer back down here, not at 1000 meters.”
Then you still have the problem of what to do with the data.
CRANKS just throw it away.
Or what happens when the instrument changed 40 years
ago.. go get old instruments?
Or what happens when the place it was moved from is now
a CITY…
Or what happens when you change the time of observation
here is the clue. you do EXACTLY what UAH does.. you adjust
When inflation goes up… u adjust
When stocks split… you adjust
its not that hard crank.
“une 12th, 2016 at 1:40 am
If 5% of the world is over 1000 meters what weighting and significance is given to those temperatures > 6 degrees Celsius lower than at sea level?”
1. the POINT of the TOY EXAMPLE, CRANK was to show
you the various options in adjusting data.
2. you are crank. you cant even follow the thread of the very
argument you raised about adjusting the past..
3. I called it a TOY example for a reason.. to Trap CRANKS
“A simple example. Note this is a toy example just to illustrate the choices. I’ll use an example like the old station location adjustment. Roy Spencer uses something akin to this when he adjusts for elevation.”
“What about the 15% greater than 200 meters ie 1 degree Celsius less than the overall average.”
1. What about them?
2. they have ZERO relevance to my TOY EXAMPLE, CRANK.
“If we can compute the areas and elevations then we should be able to compute a mean expected global temperature without needing thermometers at all.”
1. true crankhood right there.
2. what does it mean to compute “areas”? and elevations..
CRANK?
If stupidity could ever earn you a banning , your last few comments took you to the top bracket. congratulations.. crank
Steven Mosher (Comment #148748)
Don’t be so cranky Steven.
–
1. What about them? “What about the 15% greater than 200 meters ie 1 degree Celsius less than the overall average.
If we can compute the areas and elevations then we should be able to compute a mean expected global temperature without needing thermometers at all.””
–
Lesson 1.
The temperature of the earth varies with altitude, 6 C per Kilometer. The altitude of the land surface does matter to the overall surface temperature of the earth.
how much and how high is determined by the area and elevation of the elevated areas.
–
Lesson 2.
An erudite man , SM I believe, has commented in the past that all areas on the earth can have the expected temperature known by the elevation and location of that area for that time of year.
Hence you said you were able to predict what the temperature should be for that position and elevation.
Useful when adjusting sites in your toy example and Nick’s real example.
I just extended your example to it’s full meaning.
–
Lesson 3.
If you choose to use a set of sites to give a world temperature and anomalies, use them and explain them better and take the flak with your decisions on how to use them.
–
You can use one site over 100 years and give an anomaly for the world but that is called cherry-picking for a reason.
You can pick a dozen or 40,000 sites most people might agree the more the better for an anomaly.
But again due to the vagaries of the globe and a little thing called polar amplification a set of sites in the Arctic would give a very different picture of the anomaly changes to an equatorial belt.
So you grid them. and weight them.
Fantastic. except you are still only doing anomalies and the grid sites at sea are not real.
They are infilled from data from other sites but they are not real.
They rely on logical algorithms and common sense.
So when you claim above 40,000 plus sites you know that that is absolute fabrication.
There are no 40,000 real sites in your data, ever.
That is why you got so cranky.
–
Lesson 4.
It is possible to give a real world estimated temperature.
It will never be accurate but it will be more real than the TOA excess guesstimate people go on about.
To do so one would need to do what I said.
Grid the surface of the world Estimate the elevations and areas of elevation. Assign temperatures based on the physics of input from the sun on that day/year at that site.
Chuck in your TOA and clouds and then feed back to the values you can calculate from the stations that do exist. Even use your 32,000 estimated stations.
Bingo a model of the real earth temperature and the variation from what the observations predict.
I am sure it has already been done many times.
Care to share?
Steven Mosher (Comment #148748)
“If we can compute the areas and elevations then we should be able to compute a mean expected global temperature without needing thermometers at all.â€
1. true crankhood right there.
2. what does it mean to compute “areasâ€? and elevations..”
–
From Steven himself
“”A new release from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
by Steven Mosher and Zeke Hausfather stevenmosher | July 30, 2012
Based on latitude, longitude, altitude, you can in fact estimate the temperature at an unknown location to +- 1.6 C.
I found that result pretty shocking. Till you test it. Also, there is probably some room for improvement of this if you include other parameters in the external drift.
The temperature at a given location is defined as a function of a deterministic process and a random process and an error.
So very simply you create a regression where the temperature is expressed as a function of latitude, longitude, altitude and seasonality.”
–
Really Steven?
Thank you for agreeing with me even when you forgot.
You did get a pasting on that post.
I just got back from a vacation in Colorado Springs. Took the train up to the summit of Pike’s Peak, which was awesome.
I learned there used to be a weather station on the mountain until they figured out that the weather on Pike’s Peak had nothing to do with the weather in town.
Andrew
Interesting…
“US Army Corps of Engineers/Signal Corps ran the weather station on the summit. A weather station on the summit of Pikes Peak is functioning again in recent years and data is taken by the Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway:”
http://www.summitpost.org/pikes-peak-weather-statistics/337874
Andrew
This sort of fits in this thread.
In case you were wondering why Takata airbags are faulty, here’s the scoop: http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2016/06/weekend-longreads-bosses-have-no-power.html
Kind of makes Volkswagen smell like a rose by comparison.
Note that water is not necessary. It just speeds up the process.
Oh, and car manufacturers are still installing these inherently faulty airbags in new cars.
angech,
.
.
I think the key is “unknown locations” … as opposed to “known locations” — i.e., the locations containing thermometers. Validation of the model can be obtained by randomly knocking out known locations, creating predictions from the subset, and testing them against the knocked out locations.
.
Where’s the problem?
In the spirit of making work for others it would be interesting to see for how many stations each quality flag flies, also geographic distributions thereof.
“Ocean fish, salt-water fish, will become extinct by the year 2050.”
Professor Cindy Halpern at Swarthmore’s Commencement Address 2016
This appears to be an alarming misrepresentation of Worm ea 2006, and an even worse misrepresentation of the current state of knowledge.
While reading about fisheries, I came across this article which may be of interest, about Greenpeace’s attempt to discredit a scientist who’s been publicly critical of the widely-reported ’apocalyptic overfishing’ narrative put forward by some of his colleagues :
““Fisheries Scientist Under Fire For Undisclosed Seafood Industry Funding” .
Having my Honda airbag fixed tomorrow. I will let you know whether I make it to the repair shop safely. Wish me luck.
JD
JD Ohio,
The key word is safely. They don’t usually blow up on their own. What happens is that if they’re triggered in a wreck, they explode violently, rather than just deploying the air bag, and there’s a lot of shrapnel. The probability that this will happen increases with time.
IMO, air bags were a poor solution to the problem that too many people don’t wear their lap and shoulder belts when driving or riding in a car.
“Ocean fish, salt-water fish, will become extinct by the year 2050.â€
Professor Cindy Halpern at Swarthmore’s Commencement Address 2016
.
Cindy Halpern’s son, Joshua, who collaborated on composing her speech is not related to anyone we know. I made a mistake last week in drawing a false connection.
.
I apologize to those affected.
Sincerely, Ron
Made Eli’s day (not related in any way)
Eli,
“(not related in any way)”
.
Good thing too: she’s as dumb a bunny as there is.
DeWitt,
Air bags do save lives in the States: (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv18/cd/files/18esv-000500.pdf).
If I read that report right, about 2,000 stupid people (not wearing 3-point belt) and a similar number of people wearing 3-point belts, are likely saved each year. That comes at a price of about $9 billion in higher new car purchase cost per year and somewhere north of $4-$5 billion per year in added repair costs after a deployment. So the cost per life saved is on the order of $3 -$3.5 million. There is also benefit from somewhat reduced injuries, especially among the stupid, which is difficult to quantify, partly offset by airbag caused injuries and fatalities, which happen mostly to women. So it is a complicated picture.
.
If we could reduce fatalities from all causes by a million per year, at a cost of $3.5 trillion ($3.5 million per life saved), would we do it? That’s 20% of GDP for about a 35% reduction in death rate. I suspect we would probably try, though reasonable arguments could be made against trying. Saving the lives of younger people would seem to have greater social benefit than older folks, but a big reduction in rate of death would necessarily be concentrated among the elderly.
Steve, satellite navigation and exterior sensor-controlled driverless cars will make airbags obsolete. But they will stay required for a hundred years afterwards.
.
When I was in elementary school there was no school zone speed limit, everyone walked, and the crossing guards were fifth graders with flags and badges. Today the speed limit is 15mph in a school zone, nobody walks and the crossing guards are paid uniformed officers.
Government is a very blunt tool and leaves a huge footprint wherever is strides.
Pretty sure Eli is on the author list for this paper.
Does anybody know anything about this?
A new definition of academic misconduct
I’m interested to see how many of the claims actually check out as facts.
“When I was in elementary school there was no school zone speed limit, everyone walked, and the crossing guards were fifth graders with flags and badges. Today the speed limit is 15mph in a school zone, nobody walks and the crossing guards are paid uniformed officers.”
.
And not too many years ago, volunteer firefighters were the rule. Where I live in Florida, the fire trucks roll for every fender bender and every ambulance call…. most of what they do is waste, and they cost a bloody fortune in real estate taxes doing it… firefighting is now a small sideline for them. The problem is that elected politicians want more influence/power/patronage and more loyal public employee voters, so they usually opt for more of everything government funded than is really needed.
NYT: Republicans are to blame for the Orlando massacre. They don’t say it directly, but we have this paragraph in the editorial:
Oh, puhleeze. There is, by the way, no mention of Islam in the entire editorial or that Mateen told the 911 operator that he had been inspired by Islamic State, who claim to have thrown homosexuals off rooftops. Nope, it’s Trump and those other nasty Republicans.
Carrick, you want to defend Gerlich?
Eli,
I think you and the gang could have done a better job on G&T, but, as they say, hindsight is near perfect. Don’t ask for details, though, I really don’t want to have to read through all that again. I never did figure out why G&T thought that magnetohydrodynamics had any relevance below the ionosphere.
If you believe MASIE, it’s looking less like Arctic Sea Ice extent is going to crater this year. The MASIE anomaly is no longer setting record lows. In fact, some sections are showing increases in extent. JAXA, however, is continuing to set record lows. I did a year by year comparison of JAXA to MASIE and the slope of the correlation plot has changed over time. It was 1.0318 in 2006 and 1.0679 in 2015. I haven’t done the full calculation to see if that’s a significant difference, but I’m pretty sure it is because all the R^2 are 0.99+.
I’m wondering if JAXA could have messed up the cross-correlation with the old AQUA data when they had to switch satellites.
The next step is to compare MASIE year by year with NOAA. I’ll be surprised if that shows a similar drift as MASIE is a NOAA product.
Eli, do you defend the use of wholesale misinformation on college campuses regarding the environment and AGW?
.
If scaring thousands of student, parents and faculty with “climate launch dates” coming our way in 31 years is the acceptable norm do you think it’s justified. Is misinformation for a good cause OK?
.
Climate launch was defined by Professor Halpern as when today’s record high becomes the average temperature.
.
What about the claim that the Great Barrier Reef is 93% bleached and already dying. Did you read the CE post? Should professors that try to correct exaggerated claims of CAGW be censured?
Eli:
lol. no.
I was just dropping “bread crumbs” to Eli’s alter alter ego.
Carrick,
‘bread crumbs’
.
Did you know that rabbits eat their own droppings for a second pass through the digestive track? Maybe better to leave droppings for the alter ego instead of bread crumbs.
SteveF, sounds like rabbits are ecologically lazy then, compared especially to e.g. cows.
Ron Graf:
Have you facts checked the post yet? Start there.
Rabbets are just silly and confuse colorful fluid dynamics with “physics.”
David Young:
Technically fluid dynamics is physics.
A problem occurs when people confuse inaccurate solutions to fluid dynamic systems with physics.
Lesson 1.
The temperature of the earth varies with altitude, 6 C per Kilometer.
Wrong.
There are 43500 sites in both qc and adjusted data.
Deal with it.
51000 in raw.
.
The moist adiabatic lapse rate of the atmosphere is around there.
.
But practically, heatwave forecast high temperatures today:
El Paso, TX (3943ft= 1.2km), 106F
< 100 miles away: Cloudcroft, NM: (8760ft= 2.7km), 85F
.
-11.7C / 1.5km = -7.8C/km
SM: Lesson 1.
The temperature of the earth varies with altitude, 6 C per Kilometer.
Wrong.
.
Yes. Changes in humidity and air flow will screw with lapse rate and even lead to inversion. But I thought it was your position that you could predict the temperature of a station by its altitude in comparison to its neighbors. Chaotic behavior is a point against kriging.
.
Carrick: Have you facts checked the post yet? Start there.
.
I did not see any comments by you there. It seems more likely that tourism and local pollution is more responsible for the reef bleaching of the actual 22% damaged area than a 1C increase in SST.
.
In any case, the answer to either inaccurate claims or unfounded criticism is counter claims and criticism, not muzzling. How can universities not get this? One can only wonder.
Ron Graf,
They get it fine. It’s not part of their role to actually consider ideas. They are divide and confuse organs now.
Andrew
Steven Mosher (Comment #148777)
“-Lesson 1.
The temperature of the earth varies with altitude, 6 C per Kilometer. Wrong.”
–
Grasshopper,
The teacher is always right.
If not go to rule 2.
–
“As an average, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) defines an international standard atmosphere (ISA) with a temperature lapse rate of 6.49 K/km[15] (3.56 °F or 1.98 °C/1,000 ft) from sea level to 11 km (36,090 ft or 6.8 mi). From 11 km up to 20 km (65,620 ft or 12.4 mi), the constant temperature is −56.5 °C (−69.7 °F), which is the lowest assumed temperature in the ISA. ”
–
Remember this?.
–
“â€A new release from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
by Steven Mosher and Zeke Hausfather stevenmosher | July 30, 2012
Based on latitude, longitude, altitude, you can in fact estimate the temperature at an unknown location to +- 1.6 C.””
–
I found that comment pretty supportive, The man himself admits a temperature estimation within +\- 1.6 C is perfect.
SM:As a sanity check you can calculate trends on the raw data
and then trends on the QC data
Answer: Applying Quality Control REDUCES the trend on average.
So when 100 values in a file are reported in F and 2000 are reported in C, we could just leave the higher F values in place and report strange warming!!
.
Steven, have you checked the effect on trend of each QC flag? This list, along with the frequency of use would be a valuable information, at least to those curious enough to wish an audit.
Steven Mosher (Comment #148778)
take GHCN-Daily.
–
“There are 43500 sites in both qc and adjusted data.
Deal with it. 51000 in raw.”
–
Wrong Numerically
see (Comment #148729)
“All of the raw data that is thrown out is there.All 8,000 stations”
And #148716) “data from reliable ftp sites. . In the merge step you try to “join†the data In the end you have about 51,000 Distinct stations. a QC process. About 8000 stations are dropped at this step. bad metadata, no metadata, or series are too short.
Then QC flags maybe 75 distinct reasons why data can be dropped. We add a few additional checks At this stage you have 43K stations.
–
So 51,000 distinct stations doing temperature
But either 7,500 stations droppedor 8000 stations dropped
or 8800 stations being dropped [750 extra at 10 per reason plus 50 for additional checks].
–
and Wrong factually,
–
“The Global Historical Climatology Network – Daily (GHCN-Daily) V3 dataset integrates daily climate observations from 30 different data sources. updates to occur 7 days a week rather than only on most weekdays.
Version 3 contains station-based measurements from well over 90,000 land-based stations worldwide, about two thirds of which are for precipitation measurement only.”
–
That’s a big No No, Steven.
for the mathematically illiterate, like me,
that says they only use 30,000 stations to collect temperature data, not 51,000. Wrong, wrong wrong.
–
Could one ask for a little accuracy in your figures, please, or an explanation?
–
Then
“Over 25,000 stations are regularly updated with observations from the last month.”
–
So only 25000 Real stations?
–
43,000 -25,000 implies 18,000 fictional , adjusted, unreal, stations. 148729) “anyway, the stations are there” now does not have that same confidence now, does it
Off-topic, but interesting: a discussion of ocean currents and why the Southern Ocean has not warmed much. “Official” article at Nature Geoscience. Non-paywalled version here.
SM: “But there is no code that says “OH.. nightlights is 42, therefore
UHI is 6†None of that kind of adjusting data before you calculate the expectation.”
.
UHI is treated by BE method the same as a faulty reading, corrected by the weight of the majority (assumed accurate).
.
1) True – 150 years ago when 9 rural pristine stations surrounded each urban the UHI was erased with de-weighting when the ratio was 9:1.
.
2) As the UHI unaffected to affected (pristine rural tourban and suburban) ratio becomes 1:1 then there is no longer de-weighing of UHI.
.
3) As the ratio becomes 1:5 the good (historically pristine) signal is erased.
.
4) This method would lead to an amplification of of UHI effect rather and a correction for it.
.
5) Is this what Anthony Watts’ new unpublished paper purports?
Carrick, Fluid Dynamics is technically “physics” more or less except for those nasty turbulent flows where the turbulence model is not really “physics” in the sense Ken Rice or the pesky Rabbet means it. That’s a fundamental mistake that is made by those with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. In any case, no high Reynolds’ turbulent flow simulation is really “just physics” except for the ignorant and easily fooled.
In my line of work, we see complex and colorful looking simulations all the time, many of which are just very wrong, but there is always cheery picking to make them look appealing to silly rabbits and naive lecturers in planetary formation, where I suspect the quantitative validation of their models is virtually impossible. But hey there is always “understanding” and we all know that experts in machine learning say that it is virtually impossible to “falsify” any model of highly variable phenomena. 😉
It is hard to read anything Cawley or Rice write without noticing the errors. They are the mirror image of the greenhouse skeptics. Error and ignorance are hard to avoid.
DY, I have seen you express this before. Probably needs posting about once a month. It’s the essence of appreciation of self-corruptibility of the educated mind. The CMIP program seems to have given itself dispensation from operator blind experiments and adversarial validation. The former group are made up both of biased unbelievers and of the careful, patient auditors. The believers are conveniently blind to differentiate the two.
.
BEST I understand was initiated as kind of a private audit of the historical data adjustments. There is a lesson there that once auditors must become permanent vendors of the product they are auditing then they are no longer auditors. If an IRS auditor has to learn your business practices and its special adjustment codes then your records are by definition no longer in compliance with impartial public audit.
Steven Mosher (Comment #148778)
There are 43500 sites in both qc and adjusted data.
51000 in raw.
Deal with it.
–
steven mosher June 23, 2012 at 6:41 am
My preference is to avoid GHCN V3 altogether, and work with raw daily data. That dataset has 26,000 stations ( actually 80K when you start )
(Last Updated: 11/17/2015) The GHCNM v3 has been released. The station network for the time being, is (7280 stations).
–
.
UHI is treated by BE method the same as a faulty reading, corrected by the weight of the majority (assumed accurate).
Err no. There is no explicit treatment of uhi. There is no majority voting. There is a iterative process of weighting and re Kriging the residual.
1) True – 150 years ago when 9 rural pristine stations surrounded each urban the UHI was erased with de-weighting when the ratio was 9:1.
.
2) As the UHI unaffected to affected (pristine rural tourban and suburban) ratio becomes 1:1 then there is no longer de-weighing of UHI.
.
3) As the ratio becomes 1:5 the good (historically pristine) signal is erased.
.
4) This method would lead to an amplification of of UHI effect rather and a correction for it.
.
5) Is this what Anthony Watts’ new unpublished paper purports?
You cannot understand the process without looking at the math and code. We provide both.
I recommend them to you.
Or you can look at examples and see why you are wrong.
.
UHI is treated by BE method the same as a faulty reading, corrected by the weight of the majority (assumed accurate).
Err no. There is no explicit treatment of uhi. There is no majority voting. There is a iterative process of weighting and re Kriging the residual.
1) True – 150 years ago when 9 rural pristine stations surrounded each urban the UHI was erased with de-weighting when the ratio was 9:1.
.
2) As the UHI unaffected to affected (pristine rural tourban and suburban) ratio becomes 1:1 then there is no longer de-weighing of UHI.
.
3) As the ratio becomes 1:5 the good (historically pristine) signal is erased.
.
4) This method would lead to an amplification of of UHI effect rather and a correction for it.
.
5) Is this what Anthony Watts’ new unpublished paper purports?
You cannot understand the process without looking at the math and code. We provide both.
I recommend them to you.
Or you can look at examples and see why you are wrong.
Steven Mosher (Comment #148730)
June 10th, 2016 at 1:03 pm
“As an aside whatever excuses I might wish to believe in data records does not take away from the fact that the current records are correct and would be higher than most of the past in an unadjusted world.
{This provides as much comfort as when the IRS does your taxes.-R}
I just wish you were game enough to say yes we do adjust and change the records in a way we believe is logical and sensible [so we can argue the logic] rather than using word games where you tie yourself in impossible knots .
I repeat. “the suspect station will have a lower weight.†and the others
are not consistent with comments like
“There is no infilling, no adjustment of the station.
its not deleted or changedâ€
I realize you might get eaten alive by your ilk but you would feel better.
#######################
Let me show you the difference.
Lets take the GISS approach.
They take Adjusted data from NOAA.
A1
They apply an urban adjustment
A2.
They then compute a field based on the adjusted data.
Contrast that with the berkeley approach.
We take the raw data
R1
We compute a field
We compute a prediction for each station given the field
We compare the prediction with actual.
We calculate a divergence.
Every station gets a weight that is a function of its divergence.
We recompute the field
We rinse and repeat until the errors are minimized.
We compute a FINAL FIELD using
R1 & Weights
Done. you have your average. No temperature records have
been adjusted. There is no logic that says
L1: oh, there is station move decrease it by X
L2 : oh there is a instrument change decrease it by Y
L3: Oh here is TOBS change, increase by Z
L4: rats UHI, decrease by .65
That is what I mean by adjusting. An EXPLICIT, TRACEABLE,
Change in a monthly value made to account for a specific REASON.
After we finish the average,
“During the Berkeley Earth averaging process we compare each station to other stations in its local neighborhood, which allows us to identify discontinuities and other heterogeneities in the time series from individual weather stations. The averaging process is then designed to automatically compensate for various biases that appear to be present. After the average field is constructed, it is possible to create a set of estimated bias corrections that suggest what the weather station might have reported had apparent biasing events not occurred. This breakpoint-adjusted data set provides a collection of adjusted, homogeneous station data that is recommended for users who want to avoid heterogeneities in station temperature data.â€
I would prefer to call this data “Predicted temperatures†because that is what it is. Others prefer to call it adjusted data. That however gives rise to the notion that we have adjusted data values for SPECIFIC INDENTIFIABLE TRACEABLE EXPLICIT reasons.
But we dont do that. UHI, for example, gets “adjusted†for, NOT by saying “Oh here is UHI–subtract 52†UHI gets removed from the averaging process by downweighting. Or to be super precise, when I see Reno Nevada downweighted relative to its neighbors I can
assume it is downweighted because something (UHI) made it warm faster than its neighbors.
So, you can go through GISS code and see the code where
A) a station is identified as Urban
B) its compared to its neighbors
C) Its data values are CHANGED
You cannot similarly go through our code and find a place where
we identify stations as Urban, and change the DATA VALUES.
{Having unuauditable data is not necessarily an advantage.-R}
Imagine the extreme case.
10 stations:
9 rural
1 urban
The 9 rural show no warming
The one urban shows 2C per decade
The field will show a slight warming
Now we compare the field to the data.
The urban ends up getting a near zero weight
The final field shows No warming
The 9 rural stations have weights of 1
lastly we then predict what the urban station WOULD have recorded if it wasn’t screwed up
No warming. it will be “adjusted†down 2C
Now consider a different urban station same thing only it warms
.2C more than its neighbors.
It will be adjusted .2C down
But there is no code that says “OH.. nightlights is 42, therefore
UHI is 6†None of that kind of adjusting data before you calculate the expectation.”
.
Steven, what is different about your explanation from mine about BEST handling of UHI? How would the code know if more stations are being affected by UHI than in the past? What happens in the code if UHI becomes more common?
David Young:
Yes, this is what I was referring to when I said “A problem occurs when people confuse inaccurate solutions to fluid dynamic systems with physics.”
People forget that complex numerical systems don’t always easily to admit accurate solution.
Your statement about “where I suspect the quantitative validation of their models is virtually impossible” is the type of scenario that Pauling was referring to in his not even wrong comment.
There is a third category of simulations which give the illusion of being verified, but in fact have been manually tweaked to appear to verify (if in no other way that the outputs that are selected for publication are the most favorably looking ones compared to the data they are trying to simulate).
This is why establishing external validity is so important, because it prevents subjective decisions affecting the apparently level of agreement of model output to measurement. In the case of climate data, you really need the model predictions to be run prior to the period where validation data are collected.
There certainly is a tendency of lay people to identify colorful numerical solutions with real physics (the more colorful the simulation, the more “real” the output is). In defense work, that’s notably observed in people at the rank of colonel or general.
Yes Carrick. Have you been exposed to the new CREATE AV software. It’s a DOD simulation software project. This is going to be used by DOD to decide contract awards so contractors are thinking they will need to use it too. So far though, the results I’ve seen in the aerodynamics area are not very credible. But they do have complex colorful movies of complex flows.
There is no such thing as a “Hadley cell.
Climatology once identified semi-permanent features by examining the statistics of averages. This is similar to the statistics of cars on a four lane highway. On average, there is a statistical car in the main lane, and no car in the passing lane. But reality is not the statistics ( don’t stand in the passing lane or you’ll be struck ).
Similarly, near the surface level, the general circulation is composed of polar air masses ( high pressure cells ) which move equatorward. These masses tend to form over land. But once they reach sea level, they’ve reached their lowest potential energy. These cells also elongate as the proceed equatorward. The Hadley cells are not cells at all, but the statistical artifact of multiple elongated individual high pressure cells backing up against the coastlines of the eastern edges of the ocean basins.
Turbulent Eddie (Comment #148795)
“There is no such thing as a “Hadley cell.”
Funny.
and true
Had just been having a discussion at ATTP with several regulars on Hadley cells
–
Going well until I corrected some respected commentators
” Salient points
AGW causes Hadley cells [defined as starting from the equator] to expand.
The upgoing moist air precipitates over the tropics.
The Hadley cells come down at 30 degrees latitude, now cold dry air causing deserts.
The expansion would cause the Hadley cells to move 2 degrees polewards.
Hence the area of precipitation would be expected to move a degree further polewards.
Hence the tropics [trees] could move further polewards and in fact would be expected to anyway in a warming world.”
–
when all of a sudden “There was no such thing as a “Hadley cell.” comment allowed by ATTP.
“You cannot similarly go through our code and find a place where
we identify stations as Urban, and change the DATA VALUES.
{Having unuauditable data is not necessarily an advantage.-R}”
It is auditable silly.
when you audit here is what you will not find.
You will not find explicit adjustments for UHI.
when You audit you will find 300 stations compared for say a 10 year period. During that 10 year period you will find 3 stations
that have Higher residuals than all their neighbors.
The reasons for that are: undocumented instrument changes,
undocumented station moves, Microsite changes, UHI.
You will then see the code calculate a weight for that station
such that its residual falls in line with other stations.
Thats it. You can audit it. Knock yourself out.
“.
Steven, what is different about your explanation from mine about BEST handling of UHI? How would the code know if more stations are being affected by UHI than in the past? What happens in the code if UHI becomes more common?
Your explanation is wrong. The code will make it clear why.
The code doesnt know about past and present. It knows about
the current time segment it is considering.
what if UHI becomes more common? It would depend upon how it became more common it would depend on the temporal evolution and the spatial pattern. If it became really common then we would see pristine stations like CRN potentially infected
by bad stations. Good thing we dont see that.
We would also see patterns show up in the residuals. we dont see that either.
But go ahead there is a test you can perform to prove your case.
get the code. create some test cases. show how the algorithm will miss certain corner cases. It has to. ( Ive found a few )
After you clearly identify a corner case, write it up here at rank exploits..
I will remind you of the only cogent argument hansen had against releasing code. His concern was that once he released code people would pester him with questions about how it worked or
what if this or what if that.
I made a promise to gavin. Release the code and I promise I will work really hard to understand it and never bother Dr, Hansen with questions. The code is his power and if he gave me his power to prove him wrong, it was then my job to read it, make it run, and then tweak it to prove my case.
I kept my word.
And so, sad to say, but your comments and questions will now hit my bit bucket.
“steven mosher June 23, 2012 at 6:41 am
My preference is to avoid GHCN V3 altogether, and work with raw daily data. That dataset has 26,000 stations ( actually 80K when you start )
(Last Updated: 11/17/2015) The GHCNM v3 has been released. The station network for the time being, is (7280 stations).
1. MY preference is GHCN Daily. why? simple, its only 26K or
so and I have my own methods for dealing with the data. Its a
substantial subset of the berkeley data so I RATHER do my
explorations on a subset of the whole pile of data and then
if I find anything I have out of sample stuff that Robert Rohde can look at independent of me.
2. berkeley Earth works with THAT plus OTHER SOURCES
http://berkeleyearth.org/source-files/
Please note. Not ALL these sources get used in the final net
list. So, if we have daily data from GHCN and that same station shows up in monthly (USHCN) then we dont use the monthly.. we construct our own from daily raw.
The 14 or so sources are all put into a merge step. The output of the merge is a subset of all the inputs.. so take station X
A) it will have daily data in GHCN D
B) it will have a monthly record in GHCN M
C) it may also be in USHCN
since B and C are constructed by NOAA we give them low priority. We just use A.
GHCB daily is 20K + ( it changes as more folks contribute)
GSOD and FSOD are the other main sources with similar counts
https://data.noaa.gov/dataset/global-surface-summary-of-the-day-gsod
you want all the stations? Count them ding dong
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Stations/TAVG/Text/
You’ve been pointed at the data several times and persist in misleading yourself and others..
say hello to my bit bucket… your comments and questions will go there..
–
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-daily/
GHCN (Global Historical Climatology Network)-Daily is an integrated database of daily climate summaries from land surface stations across the globe. Like its monthly counterpart (GHCN-Monthly) , GHCN-Daily is comprised of daily climate records from numerous sources that have been integrated and subjected to a common suite of quality assurance reviews.
GHCN-Daily now contains records from over 75000 stations in 180 countries and territories. Numerous daily variables are provided, including maximum and minimum temperature, total daily precipitation, snowfall, and snow depth; however, about two thirds of the stations report precipitation only. Both the record length and period of record vary by station and cover intervals ranging from less than year to more than 175 years.
The dataset is regularly reconstructed (usually every weekend) from its 20-plus data source components to ensure that GHCN-Daily is generally in sync with its growing list of constituent sources. During this process, quality assurance checks are applied to the full dataset. On most weekdays, GHCN-Daily station data are updated when possible from a variety of data streams, which also undergo a suite of quality checks.
Each updated and fully reprocessed copy of the GHCN-Daily dataset is assigned a unique version number , and each dataset version is then archived at NOAA/NCDC for potential future retrieval. GHCN-Daily and its processing system also serve as the official archive and processing system for U.S. Cooperative Observer data, which have been comprehensively integrated into the dataset along with other U.S. daily data sources.
Users of U.S. data are encouraged to see further notes on the Source Data page regarding real-time versus time-delayed, archive quality updates. In general, real-time, update data streams are replaced by archive-quality sources 45 to 60 days after the close of a data month.
Major changes to the processing system as well as announcements of significant data additions to GHCN-Daily are provided via an RSS feed and in the GHCN-Daily status reports . GHCN-Daily data documentation is provided in the readme.txt file, which includes a definition of the data quality and data source flags that accompany each datum.
“Unlike GHCN-Monthly , GHCN-Daily does not contain adjustments for biases resulting from historical changes in instrumentation and observing practices. It should be noted that historically (and in general), the stations providing daily summaries for the dataset were not managed to meet the all of the desired standards for climate monitoring. Rather, the stations were deployed to meet the demands of agriculture, hydrology, weather forecasting, aviation etc. Because GHCN-Daily has not been homogenized to account for artifacts associated with the various eras in reporting practice at any particular station (i.e., for changes in systematic bias), users should consider whether the potential for changes in systematic bias might be important to their application. In addition, GHCN-Daily and GHCN-Monthly are not currently internally consistent (i.e., GHCN-Monthly is not necessarily derived from the data in GHCN-Daily); however, GHCN-Daily is anticipated to be a major source of future updates to GHCN-Monthly.
count
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/ghcnd-stations.txt
Steven Mosher:
.
I think I speak for everyone here that we appreciate the opportunity to us discuss your work with you here. Please keep the this as an invisible assumption bracketing each of our (my) jarring comments.
.
His concern was that once he released code people would pester him with questions about how it worked or
what if this or what if that.
.
It’s a hard investment in time for one to keep such promise to Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen that you will only ask highly educated questions and only ones that have explainable answers. I appreciate you spent a lot of time trying to keep that promise.
.
I realize the ideal situation would be for us to know everything you know and realize that there are no issues. Many here don’t believe there are any significant issues. I am possibly represent a minority that does not understand how an undocumented anthropogenic effect like UHI and micro-site are diagnosed by statistical code and adjusted for. With only reading your step-by-step description of the BEST process I see and QA process designed to catch bad data points that occur sporadically in time and location.
.
I don’t see a process for diagnosing ongoing or gradually increasing bias. I admit I don’t know how the USCRN stations are used in the QA process or if there are enough of them to statistically police general problems. I have heard the claim that there is no significant UHI, which is completely different from it’s all corrected for.
Mosher,
I’m looking at USHCN dailies for TMAX.
In order to avoid the effect of transients coming and going, I’m looking for continuously or as close as can be to continuous stations.
I searched for the intersection subset of station IDs that appear at least once in both 1950 and 2015 yearly files.
Evidently, however, even generous missing data allowances are not enough to preclude large swaths of data holes.
Further, most of South & Central America a Africa are absent for 2014 and 2015.
Is it really this bad?
Steve Mosher,
I read your comments on the recent ATTP (Ken Rice) blog post, ‘Practice what you preach’ thread. I have one observation and one question. Observation: most of the commenters on that thread strike me as boarder line totalitarians; they seem to want to circumvent normal legal means and force everyone to do as they say. Question: (honest question, not rhetorical, and I would very much appreciate an answer) Are you comfortable with the totalitarian tendency the commenters on that thread appear to endorse?
TE,
“Further, most of South & Central America a Africa are absent for 2014 and 2015.”
Is it really USHCN you are looking at?
SteveF,
I think that is called the weak form of Godwin’s law.
Ken Rice,
Call it what you want. I find your true believers more than a little scary.
SteveF,
As far as I can tell, you simply disagree with what some have said and find it convenient to then accuse them of having totalitarian tendencies. I was going to say that I find people who resort to such tactics scary too, but I don’t really, because it just seems intellectually juvenile.
Ken Rice,
That you do not appreciate the intellectual juvenility of many of the comenters at your blog is clear. That you claim to see it elsewhere is comical.
.
What I’m doing is using the year file:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/by_year/
.
1. Get 1950 and 2015 and find the stations ( excluding US ) in each:
.
grep TMAX 1950.csv | cut -d \, -f 1 | grep -v US | sort | uniq > TMAX_GLOBAL_1950_STATIONS
.
grep TMAX 2015.csv | cut -d \, -f 1 | grep -v US | sort | uniq > TMAX_GLOBAL_2015_STATIONS
.
2. Find the stations that had data in 1950 and 2015:
comm -12 TMAX_GLOBAL_1950_STATIONS TMAX_2015_STATIONS > GHCN_STATIONS_SINCE_1950
.
3. Then use some criteria for a bad year ( missing more than 30 days ).
.
The results aren’t pretty.
.
Using the above criteria, here is the station availability.
.
And this is the map for 2014.
.
Now, there are more stations as the years progress, so I’m running stations since 1970. But it appears that there’s not sufficient combination of both spatial and temporal coverage of continuous GHCN stations for analysis.
.
If you have faith in the homogenizations, this doesn’t matter for calculating mean anomalies. But if you are examining extremes relative to natural variability, continuity is necessary.
Steve and Steve, I have noticed that Rice’s commenters are not very in tune with intellectual subtlety and tend to see the world in black and white terms. You can tell this straightaway by the name calling and the censoring of comments. For example, evidence from the SkS “secret” forum was censored in the recent discussion of statistical validation of GCM’s. Presumably because it made Gavin Cawley look very bad. And then Cawley doubled down by repeating his silly ideas about validation. The whole thing was a train wreck with Rice trying to limit the discussion to a very narrow point and even on that point he was manifestly wrong. That’s a classic propagandist approach. Your goal is not truth or an honest discussion.
Cawley’s email correspondence with Wigley contained in the Climategate trove was also censored. Why was that?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
Here’s a startlingly honest discussion of the thought process that leads to a double standard toward truth and diversity.
David Young,
“I have noticed that Rice’s commenters are not very in tune with intellectual subtlety and tend to see the world in black and white terms.”
.
Yes, of course. Which seems to me a juvenile way of thinking about the world. The endless ‘they are not simply mistaken, they are selfish, dishonest, and evil’ take on policy disagreements is more of the same. Sadly, that childish thinking, along with an unfounded certainty they are absolutely right, in a moral sense, is pretty common among self-described ‘progressives’… a description which is IMO, as good an example of Orwellian Doublespeak as exists. Then there is the constant policy blur between the demand to ‘mitigate climate change’ and the demand to ‘redistribute the wealth of the world’s richest’. Most poor people want only to become like the wealthiest 10%, and that 10% surely don’t want to become poorer. These human realities are simply ignored in the Ken Rice echo chamber, as the denizens fantasize about an impossible future.
David Young,
I had already read the Kristof piece…. and I suspect he got a lot of push-back on the left. Seems to me progressives view unjust treatment of conservatives in the same way as people who support Sharia view the treatment of homosexuals. Absolute moral certainty has terrible consequences.
I agree on the policy part. It is very clear that decades of advocacy for mitigation is not working, nor is it likely to work. That failure is then falsely blamed on opponents of mitigation rather than on the inherent difficulty of a strategy of artificial scarcity.
Another thing that is very striking is the constant and reflexive denial by Rice and company of any real problems with science and the refusal to acknowledge the replication crisis. Recently, there was a limited admission of problems, but the damage was controlled by insisting that these were largely limited to biological sciences where the systems were very complex or to economic modeling where the “laws of physics” were not around to guide modeling.
I mentioned here previously the sophomoric error in Rice’s formulation about “being able to reject any model that doesn’t obey the laws of physics.” There was no response of course, because the error is pretty obvious to specialists and to deny the error might lead to further embarrassment.
I hope you all appreciate that Willard must monitor all of this discussion and provide daily summaries back to Anders while strictly censoring any forbidden thoughts on ATTP. It’s a lot of work.
.
Willard, I think this is a partial list of your proscribed topics at ATTP:
1) Any enterprise of action related to Al Gore, his move or Nobel Prize.
2) Mention of Michael Mann or MBH98/99
3) Climategate
4) Anything that impugns the consensus climate brand.
5) Any mention of moderation rules or deletions.
6) All the restrictions above are waived if you are mimicking or mocking points made by skeptical “denier” arguments.
.
As a slight consolation Ad hom personal attacks seem to be more moderated, which is good because there used to be a lot more of them. But having your unapproved comments left with (snip -W) makes it look like you made ad hom comments when you didn’t which degrades your point and incites bad faith.
.
SteveF, They don’t put it together that democratic socialism leads to totalitarianism or that things get bad when the money runs out, or that people produce for the expectation of a personal return. It’s taught only as the beliefs of the old and foolish, selfish clingers to the old-time religion. Cuba, Venezuela, N. Korea and the old Soviet all had the right idea. The imperialist world just undermined them.
“Steve Mosher,
I read your comments on the recent ATTP (Ken Rice) blog post, ‘Practice what you preach’ thread. I have one observation and one question. Observation: most of the commenters on that thread strike me as boarder line totalitarians; they seem to want to circumvent normal legal means and force everyone to do as they say. Question: (honest question, not rhetorical, and I would very much appreciate an answer) Are you comfortable with the totalitarian tendency the commenters on that thread appear to endorse?”
I’d say they were statists.. I certainly dont want them in charge.
Precisely because their type of mentality will impose demands on me that they themselves would not abide by.
Ron Graf, Willard, aka Lord Russell’s Squirrel, is a strange case. He told me once of his admiration of Bertrand Russell, but apparently knows very little about Russell’s work or its importance. My suspicion is that he admires the early and sophomoric Russell while ignoring his later work which is more interesting. It is quite ironic that an admirer of Russell, a strong advocate of free speech would be playing the role of Rice’s censor.
TE,
“What I’m doing is using the year file:”
OK, that is GHCN Daily. That aims to collect all the data available, whether with a long history or not. GHCN Monthly V3 (used for most global indices) aimed for longer histories, but also cut back a lot when the time came to keep a monthly updated list rather than a historic one. I have a Google Maps gadget here which lets you show the GHCN-M V3 stations functioning during various periods. There is another here for GHCN V4, which is like Daily.
Yeah, gotta have the dailies.
.
I re-ran the above from 1970.
.
Still insufficient coverage, but the stations ( different IDs, no doubt ), instead of indicating great gaps and dropouts, indicated 100% complete! Analysis not records?
.
I’m convinced the daily global data is too poor to make any assessments from.
Ron Graf,
” Cuba, Venezuela, N. Korea and the old Soviet all had the right idea. The imperialist world just undermined them. ”
.
And the weirdest part is the doctrinaire exclusion of anyone who disagrees. From the Kristof piece (link above): “In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.”
.
A reasonable person might imagine the reality on the ground of the Soviets, Cuba, Venezuela, and now the rapid economic growth in China (since adopting a mainly capitalist economic model instead of Marxism), would have some impact…. nope, they are immune to influence from actual outcomes. In that sense the die-hard left is like the die-hard Malthusians…. they will never, ever accept reality.
“I’m looking at USHCN dailies for TMAX.
In order to avoid the effect of transients coming and going, I’m looking for continuously or as close as can be to continuous stations.
I searched for the intersection subset of station IDs that appear at least once in both 1950 and 2015 yearly files.
Evidently, however, even generous missing data allowances are not enough to preclude large swaths of data holes.
Further, most of South & Central America a Africa are absent for 2014 and 2015.
Is it really this bad?”
As Nick points out you are not using USHCN.
Sources
This is only current upto 2012, I will have to update it. But its all our daily sources. Data is huge. but you can also see that there are more sources than GHCN Daily.
downloading and organizing ghcn daily takes a good deal of time,
do you do R?
Daily sources through 2012 below. When we first published we “reflected” our source data in a common format. have not updated that in a while.
GHCN Daily Tmax
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/downloads/Sources/GHCN%20Daily/TMAX%20-%20Monthly/LATEST.zip
Global Summary of the day
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/downloads/Sources/Global%20Summary%20of%20the%20Day/TAVG%20-%20Monthly/LATEST.zip
COOP daily ( US)
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/downloads/Sources/US%20Cooperative%20Summary%20of%20the%20Day/TAVG%20-%20Monthly/LATEST.zip
FSOD.. first order summary of the day
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/downloads/Sources/US%20First%20Order%20Summary%20of%20the%20Day/TAVG%20-%20Monthly/LATEST.zip
Alternatively you could look at our daily gridded product.. experimental until we write the paper and get a doi.
Ron and SteveF, I personally find Russell’s History of Western Philosophy useful in this kind of discussion. He attempts to trace the origin of anti-rational modern philosophies back to Rousseau and Romanticism. I’m not sure its the whole story, but it highlights the strongly “feeling based” nature of the philosophy underlying modern forms of totalitarianism, both left and right.
Steven Mosher, Nick, anyone, I hope my someone can answer some basic TOBS questions.
.
1) Has BEST or anyone ever come to a determination of whether Karl(1986) code for TOBS correction to midnight (non-biased observation time) was on average accurate? I realize BEST does not use Karl.
.
2) Has the 50 or 100+ year trends ever been compared of the stations that have have never changed TOBS versus those that had changed more than once (like back and forth) to see if the trends stayed without breaking from the whole or to the neighbors?
.
3) Is the TOBS adjustment less for stations that have low DTR?
In light of the extensive discussion of nuclear power that has occurred on this blog, I expect that some would be interested to know that the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is going to be closed down. (It is located on the seashore in San Luis Obispo County, Calif just North of Santa Barbara where I graduated from high school) I am personally pretty much neutral on nuclear power, but if you wanted a scary location for a nuclear power plant this appears to be it — it is close to a number of earthquake faults. http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/End-of-an-atomic-era-PG-E-to-close-Diablo-Canyon-8314258.php Diablo Canyon is the last nuclear power plant in California.
…
I question the statement of PG & E that the use of renewables will ensure that the cost of electricity will not rise significantly on account of the closure. I suspect they have calculated that, with all of the opposition (and potentially the real danger of its location) that it will be a financial loser in the future, and PG & E has decided that it is in their financial interest to cut their losses and get out in any way that they can.
JD
http://www.john-daly.com/tob/TOBSUM.HTM
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/papers/vose-etal2003.pdf
http://www.skepticalscience.com/understanding-tobs-bias.html
the US is not the world.
https://moyhu.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-necessity-of-tobs.html
JD Ohio,
Three points:
1) The power company agreed to abandon an application for extending the operating licenses past 2025 in exchange for the green loons agreeing to drop ongoing lawsuits to block continued access to cooling water. For the shareholders, this was arguably a reasonable financial choice. For Californians, not so much.
2) The existence of faults was known and considered at the time of construction.
3) The utility will depend on imported power to cover when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. None of it will be cheap.
Steven, thanks for the links. Like the pages I have already read, they are long in demonstrating the problem and short in validating the correction.
.
I might guess that the answers to my questions are that since Karl used centrally located rural stations to create his calibration the lower DTR stations on the coast and urban would be over-corrected using the Karl(1986) code. I would also guess that Zeke has checked this out using tests like I suggested. I would also guess that the error was small enough not to feel a need to broadcast.
“The US is not the world.”
A few other points:
1. PG&E sees operating Diablo Canyon as unviable given the state’s energy policy of increasing the share of renewables
2. The Hosgri fault located three miles away was discovered three years after construction began
3. The increased use of natural gas has lowered electricity prices since 2009 making nuclear plants unviable around the country
RB,
You’re not including the externalities of CO2 generation from natural gas fired power plants when comparing them to nuclear plants. /sarc
And that’s not to mention that cheap natural gas depends on hydraulic fracturing, yet another anathema to the greens.
RB,
The design was modified during construction after the Hosgri fault was discovered. The PUC accepted that the modifications made the plant capable of withstanding any expected g-force from a slippage on any of the nearby faults, and granted an operating license. The rest seems mostly exaggeration and scare stories.
It is true the California State rules make the plant not economically viable in the future, especially in light of cheap imported power from natural gas. But cheap natural gas will not continue forever. I expect the endless environmental lawsuits also contribute to that non-viability. Similar legal tactics will be adopted no matter where a nuclear plant is proposed or in current operation. The enviro-loons’ objections have little to do with the plant site, and much to do with 100% opposition to any power source except wind and solar.
SteveF,
Seafloor mapping more recently shows that the Hosgri is linked to the San Gregorio fault. Experts say that the risk of them producing a longer fault rupture is low but that is an expert risk assessment that PG&E was asked to conduct by the NRC. And there seems to be some ambiguity regarding how serious the risk might be.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/papers/vose-etal2003.pdf
figure 2.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0450%281986%29025%3C0145%3AAMTETT%3E2.0.CO%3B2 see
figure 3
” Karl used centrally located rural stations”
wrong.
see the appendix.
Miami,
daytona,
charleston
Los angeles
cape hattaras
Many more.
The coast is not the nation
Thanks Steven. I had just read both these papers and was referring to Karl’s test group of stations, not the calibration stations. But I now see I had missed San Diego airport.
.
I would still be curious to know how you graded Karl’s accuracy.
“group of stations, not the calibration stations. But I now see I had missed San Diego airport.”
Wrong.
Jacksonville, Fl
Norfolk, Va
Providence RI
Doc finds high rate of cancer near Diablo:
…
“A report by the World Business Academy that details negative health trends in the area surrounding the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County was released Monday.
….
Stephen W. Hosea, MD, the associate director of Internal Medicine Education at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, concluded after reading the report that those living near Diablo have higher cancer risks.
….
“The data contained in this report support a remarkable predisposition of persons living within a 15 mile radius of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant to have a significantly increased incidence of various cancers, including thyroid, breast and melanoma,†Hosea said. “Exposure to radiation is well known to result in an increased risk of developing cancer. Until an alternative plausible explanation is provided, the overwhelmingly logical conclusion must be that the exposure to radiation as a direct consequence of living within a 15 mile radius of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant results in an increased risk of developing cancer.â€
….
http://calcoastnews.com/2014/03/high-cancer-rates-near-diablo-canyon-nuclear-plant/
….
I googled this guy and it turns out that he went to Harvard Medical School. Thought I would see that he was associated with something like “The Medical Association for Truth and Justice and a GMO Free World” (Sarc) Turns out that he works for Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. Almost certainly his assertions with respect to causation are wrong, but it shows that the EPA has a lot to choose from when it desires to assert that new rules will save substantial numbers of lives.
….
Also, in thinking about this, if I was someone who wanted to increase the use of nuclear power, I would probably want this facility closed down. It is either in Big Sur or just South of it. If there was ever an accident in this plant, the blowback would be incredible, and I think it would come close to killing nuclear in the US. If I was building nuclear plants in California, I would build them in remote areas North of San Francisco.
JD
JDOhio,
As DeWitt is fond of saying…. ‘paleeez’.
.
There is no significant radiation leaking from that power plant, or any other nuclear plant in the States. Anecdotal hysteria about a tiny population does not qualify as meaningful evidence. I (and a million or so others!) live within about ten miles of a nuclear plant in Florida; I am not worried at all. Saw a smallish tornado heading for the plant a few years back when I was on my boat…. wasn’t worried then either. The manatees are quite taken by nuclear power; hundreds of them spend most of the winter swimming in the warm cooling water discharge of the plant. The manatees have it right.
.
Please get a grip. Nuclear power, and especially ‘fail safe’ designs based molten thorium salts, are the only currently viable way to produce the power humanity needs in the coming centuries at reasonable cost and near zero risk. If you want to increase the chance of real problems from burning fossil fuels (like long term sea level rises over a meter some time next century), then do your best to keep nuclear plants from being built.
The manatee lowered its baleful eye stalk below the water as radioactive power pulsed through its veins. The time is coming when we will no longer be confined to this 10 mile barrier. Which option to choose though. His body morphed and cycled. Clinton, Trump, Clinton ….
–
Sorry all.
JD Ohio,
I’ve never heard of melanoma being related to radiation other than UV from the sun or tanning beds. I suspect the incidence of melanoma in CA is higher than the national average. Thyroid cancer could be related to the 131 isotope of iodine which is a product of uranium fission. But the data looks more like the result of data mining. If you look for enough things at 95% significance, you’re almost bound to find some purely by chance. Clusters are also well known to occur naturally with small number statistics. It’s like runs of heads or tails.
“The manatee lowered its baleful eye stalk below the water as radioactive power pulsed through its veins.”
.
They don’t have eye stalks. They have quite normal blood…. no radioactive power. They are, however, quite ugly and dumb.
DeWit, ya but if you get heads 6 times in a row, doesn’t that mean tails is overdue?
.
OK, I am joking.
SteveF,
Perhaps you’re very good at coin flipping. I think that’s why you have to bounce the dice off the side of the craps table when you throw them. Also, never let someone catch a coin that’s being flipped for something important.
StevenM: “Wrong.
Jacksonville, Fl, Norfolk, Va, Providence RI”
.
Remember you kept repeating “the question”at ATTP? I kept answering while Willard kept deleting them (except second last time). Apparently he felt my point was an evasion that if the land record was found to be biased it would be pretty bold to argue back that it did not matter due to the sea surface record’s larger weighting of the globe when a reasonable third party would have to also logically suspect the sea record, especially since the SST is easier to bias than the land record (pre-2005), not to mention the physics would predict the land to be more responsive to radiative imbalance than sea surface.
.
Now, if you answered my question about how Karl’s prescribed correction fared against your tests, and if the tests checked both ways for breaks, it would make the point of whether Providence, RI, is a marine climate or not, superfluous, IMO.
.
If you don’t know if Karl(1986) was tested or how it did thanks in advance for your candor.
If you don’t know if Karl(1986) was tested .
Its been tested no less than 4 times. That is HOW you get an error of prediction.
now it isnt even used.
SteveF “As DeWitt is fond of saying…. ‘paleeez’.”
I agree with you. That is why I posted it as an example of scare tactics.
JD
“It’s [Karl 1986] been tested no less than 4 times.”
.
Any chance of elaborating? Who, what, why, when and link to result?
.
I am reading some old CA posts from 2007, “Lights Out Upstairs.†There’s some amazing stuff that was uncovered. There was barely any audience back then but I see you there, SteveM. I know you’re a writer; did you ever write about “Hansen’s error?” GISS apparently mixed USHCN and GHCN data for US, one adjusted and the other not, and applied the same code to each. And, it appears that Steve Mc, or somebody outside NASA found it by just looking at screwiness of stations plots going through 2000-2001 (see CA “Raising Arizona”).
.
This stuff is fascinating. Somebody has approach SteveMc to do a documentary on the history in CA posts. My favorites are the upside down employed proxy reconstructions.
“Any chance of elaborating? Who, what, why, when and link to result?
.
Go study the literature.
First questions:
What did karl do in his paper?
What is the purpose of a tobs adjustment?
How accurate is it?
How is that calculated?
When you answer those four questions to my satisfaction you will get the first link to the first test of karl 86
Melanoma has a very strong relationship with radiation, usually from the sun and Diablo, lovely name, at 35 degrees latitude is far more likely to have increased melanoma incidence due to its latitude than say Nome.
Queensland Australia incidence much higher than Victoria.
–
Proof of radiation caused cancer increase would involve a higher rate of virtually all cancers, not just some selected ones. Clusters of more of some and less of others is just natural variation.
The eye stalk was caused * by the radiation SteveF, was only joking about the effects of the “radiated ” waters on the critters.
What did karl do in his paper? He used hourly recorded data from a group of calibration stations to plot the 24-hr temp function and created a statistical correction for the TOB (double-counting effect) that occurs due to choice of daily recording or choice of demarcation for the day. He created a code that one could input the station lat-long, Tavg reading time, prior and subsequent historical monthly mean and it would output a corrected Tavg for the month.
.
What is the purpose of a tobs adjustment?
The time of observation bias is the difference in the monthly mean temperature derived from a station recording at midnight versus recording at any other time. Recording in the morning leads to a cold bias since many times just after the demarcation time of the reading the temperature will be climbing and never fall that low again during the next morning. Conversely, reading times in the afternoon introduce a warming bias since the instant demarcation could be the highest point for the next 24hours. A station switching from afternoon reading to morning reading will have a double hit of bias, and this was done in the USA starting in the 1960s at many stations to improve accuracy of recording daily precipitation. Thus the USA record had cooling bias that needed correcting of about 0.3C to the USHCN.
.
How accurate is it?
Karl made a disclaimer for the code’s use for stations of a lower DTR that the monthly Tavg range.
.
With advent of stronger computers and experts like BEST programming staff I imagine you could refine TOB by knowing the meta-data and measuring the break in trend from it and get a very precise model. Then the test becomes of Karl’s bias (if the secrets can be revealed).
Let’s start here
‘What did karl do in his paper? He used hourly recorded data from a group of calibration stations to plot the 24-hr temp function and created a statistical correction for the TOB (double-counting effect) that occurs due to choice of daily recording or choice of demarcation for the day. He created a code that one could input the station lat-long, Tavg reading time, prior and subsequent historical monthly mean and it would output a corrected Tavg for the month.”
More detail.
1 what stations did he use,
2 how many?
3.where were they located?
4.Describe the various terms of the model?
5. Why so many terms?
6. he did more than create a code, what else?
When you finish these we can get to your second paragraph
.
Steven, after I did all the assignments would you be giving me something unpublished or just a link to Vose 2003?
.
I appreciate your hints. I will find treasure I think if I keep looking. On the way I found this:
http://surftempbenchmarking.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/homogenization-aspects-that-scare-me.html
.
This is exactly the issue I brought up my last week comment about methods that homogenize by reference not being able to see gradual changes in land use and thus will amplify the trend as the earlier erased contamination will become the dominant infection as LULCC and UHI changes occurs in more and more stations .
“When you answer those four questions to my satisfaction you will get the first link to the first test of karl 86”
you still havent answered the first to my satisfaction.
What did karl do in his paper?
When I see that you can actually read and understand the basics, then I will answer your questions. Until then, no more answers for you.
Steven, I really feel for anyone who had to replicate Karl’s model from using his paper as blueprint. Uncertainty and error abound at every turn. I’ll try to list the factors that affect TOB, each one of them unique to each station:
.
1) The main TOB is caused by the interaction between mean frequency (temperature cycle) and amplitude (mean monthly interdiurnal temperature difference). If either is zero the TOB is zero. Otherwise the TOB is limited by the least active component.
2) Each of the two components have varying location profiles based on altitude, latitude, windiness, cloudiness, marine effect, UHI, topography and most importantly the seasonal effects.
3) Longitude is also a factor as to how close to a timezone a station is for to calibrate for solar cycle.
4) Last day of month partial day drift into the subsequent month must also be corrected for.
.
To create his model Karl selected uniform spatial spread sample of stations with continuous hourly data an few inhomogeneties and used multiple linear regressions to create a statistical map profile for the USA of TOB for each month of the year.
.
One of the interesting things mentioned is:
This makes it tough I bet.
.
Well, Steven, do I get a good link, a yawner, or a gong?
Steven Mosher June 26, 2016
–
” GreenLand is not the world.
The correlation between Greenland temperature and global temp is rather pathetic.”
–
Quote of the year, really.
–
Time for Greenland Exit from the world stage
or a ringing endorsement of Homogenization of temperatures.
Not data fraud?
X July 2, 2014 at 2:47 PM Moyhu blog
Nick,â€Along with “estimated†data for a bunch of closed/zombie weather stations that shouldn’t be reporting at all, and have no data in the raw data file.†Here’s a little back story for you.
I have three degrees in civil engineering,.That summer of 1975, I was lucky enough to work for the USACE CRREL in Hanover, NH as a GS-3.
My job, along with several others, was to update the CONUS snow load contour map, using all available historic raw monthly snow accumulation data.
This was all from stacks and stacks of computer printouts.
When a station was missing data, we INFILLED it using a simple three point average from the closest three adjacent stations (that formed a triangular enclosure for the missing data).
I can’t remember if we did any massive multiyear infilling though (Is that a requirement for the v2.5 USHCN to work?).
But at some point, contour maps are constructed from the final homogenized climatology either as anomalies and/or absolutes. Correct?
We never used those estimates to calculate any other missing data, all interpolation was from original raw data only.
Long story short? Infilling station data has been around a very long time, at least 40 years.”
““When you answer those four questions to my satisfaction you will get the first link to the first test of karl 86â€
you still havent answered the first to my satisfaction.
What did karl do in his paper?
When I see that you can actually read and understand the basics, then I will answer your questions. Until then, no more answers for you.”
You still have not explained what karl did in the paper.
I suggest you start by reading it again.
NOT with a view towards things you find questionable, but rather with a view like this.
What did he do EXACTLY.
That way you will not make bone headed mistakes like missing the coastal stations he used.
paragraph by paragraph… write a summary of what he did.
When you show that you understand what he did… exactly.. then we can move on to the second question.. which you also botch..
Steven,
You never confirmed that you hold anything worth dangling.
.
If you have nothing then I already understand what Karl attempted to do to my own satisfaction. I have plenty of valuable productive projects to work on rather than re-create an obsolete method for academic kicks.
.
As I stated, if I were an operator in your position I would look at long-running stations that flip-flopped the time of observation several times, like the Cooperative Observer Network (COOP) stations that Karl pointed out, to see if the correction prevented breaks. And if there was a consistent pattern of over-correction for bias going from afternoon to morning I would say Karl failed an important test, showing his bias.
.
By the fact that you did not respond to this question first but took the coastal station question instead leads one to believe that you and Zeke were never curious on this question or are not sharing the conclusion you found.
“Steven,
You never confirmed that you hold anything worth dangling.”
.
I have exactly what you asked for.
The fact that you cant even get karl right is kinda funny
What did karl do?
As for TOBS.. It’s not an issue.
1. PHA does a better job
2. We dont use it.
Funny you dont ask about SHAP or FILNET
I am reliably informed that the effect of c02 and other GHG
is .
“1. Lagged by up to 30 years,
2. on the order of .1c to 2c per decade.”
–
Missing seems to be the amount of CO2 increase needed to do this.
the amount of other GHG increase.
How many decades the increase is expected to go on for.
An explanation of why if the effect is lagged for 30 years why any increase would be expected in the first 3 decades at all? [only joking].
Ron Graf and others interested in testing the adjustment algorithms for temperature stations:
I think your best approach in determining the relative capability of the various algorithms used to adjust the temperature records is from the project that has been a long time in coming into fruition and is called the International Surface Temperature Initiative and is linked here:
http://www.surfacetemperatures.org/benchmarking-and-assessment-working-group/what-is-benchmarking
The background and primary purposes and goals for this project are stated on the first page as:
“Homogenisation algorithms are an essential part of climate data-processing to adjust for changepoints (abrupt and gradual) artificially introduced into the data through things like moving a station, changes to the type of screen used to shelter the instruments, change to the instrument type or recalibration or changes to observing/reporting methods.
On the global scale it is impossible to know when all of these changes occurred as they are rarely documented in a way that can be associated digitally alongside the data. There can sometimes be a bias introduced into the data through multiple changepoints occurring in the same direction – this could be misinterpreted as real climate change. Homogenisation algorithms try to detect these signals of change from the background noise and make appropriate adjustments. Most algorithms use comparisons with neighbouring stations for detection and adjustment. Large changes are relatively easy to detect. Small ones are very difficult. There is likely to be some seasonal pattern to these changepoints which further complicates their detection and adjustment. Some changes will be isolated to a single station, some will be network wide – also making their detection more difficult.
Given that there is only one world, and we do not know precisely what changepoints have occurred, when and where, we cannot fully understand how well our homogenisation algorithms are performing. Therefore, we cannot fully understand the uncertainty in climate data products due to changes made to the observing system. (NOTE: we are confident in large scale warming due to the wealth of independent evidence but uncertainty remains in the precisely how much and in the smaller scale details) By creating synthetic climate data that look and feel like real climate station data, with the same distribution over space and time, we can add realistic inhomogeneities and then test how good these homogenisation algorithms really are. This is benchmarking for climate data. This serves three purposes:
1. quantifying remaining uncertainty in any climate data-product due to missed inhomogeneities and incorrect adjustments (uncertainty may differ region to region depending on factors such as data sparsity, natural variability and regional climate change)
2. intercomparing different climate data-products on a level-ish playing field and improving assessments of fitness for specific purposes
3. homogenisation algorithm improvement”
The key to this exercise will be the determining and selecting “realistic inhomogeneities and then test how good these homogenisation algorithms really are”.
At one time I thought this project was going to solicit inputs from citizen-scientists on inhomogeneities to be used, but I do not think that ever happened (probably a funding issue by the current status report). I have directed some of my general choices to project members. One my major concerns in this area is in determining what unknown but possible inhomogeneities could go undetected or incorrectly assessed – like non climate changes that occur gradually over time.
I think these debating contests will be very inefficient in getting a good analysis of the potential problems compared to the benchmarking.
The current status of the project can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=c3VyZmFjZXRlbXBlcmF0dXJlcy5vcmd8aG9tZXxneDo3MTY0M2Y1YzA5ZTA3Nzli
Ken,
Thanks for the info. I happened to land on that same organization last weekend while searching TOBS and Karl. It may have been an old url but I saw Zeke Hausfather had joined at some point. I posted the quote from Victor Venema about 10 comments up where he voiced his “biggest fear” being the land use changes LULCC being too gradual to be caught by homogenization analysis. This concern is again acknowledged in your quote above. I notice when I or othe skeptics voice this issue it is met with dismissal that we know-nothings are just suffering from Dunning Kruger syndrome or paranoia.
.
To anyone else interested in this I recommend reading Hausfather 2013 which also repeats the concern about detecting UHI and land use.
.
Ken, did you recognize any names on the Surface Temperature Benchmarking committees that were skeptical or at least not of the “consensus?”
So I’ve been looking at TMAX data in GHCN. One of the tidbits is that TOBS is mostly not recorded for Non-US sites ( about 1% ). Given the significance of the TOBS aspect, would seem to be a problem for global data. But then, most non-US appears to have a TAVG not based on TMAX/TMIN ( ~ 60% of all TMAX stations are in the US ), so perhaps it’s not as important. doesn’t.
TE, as you point out, if Tavg is calculated from shorter intervals, 3-hr, 1-hr, etc., then the TOB is reduced for a change in day demarcation time. Even if recorded by the minute does not erase month-end overlap bias for time changes.
.
Can’t the GHCN be a little more assertive to pressure governments to enforce uniform standards? Why not have all stations read at midnight? It can’t be that expensive to design rain gauges with a trap to prevent evaporation. It should have been done 30 years ago. Tavg monthly anomaly is not the only concern. There are dozens analyses not even thought of yet that could used to create or validate models if the data was cleaner.
.
It does not seem the climate soldiers are matching the urgency in protocol and ground action that is anywhere near commensurate with the trillions of dollars and dangerous sacrifice to liberty being trumpeted for.
Ron Graf (Comment #149009)
Ron, I recogonize maybe 20% of the names and none are climate skeptics. I believe Zeke was once involved but not currently.
Understanding in detail the algorithms is a much more laborous task than evaluating how well the benchmarking is applied and thus I prefer that approach. Like most climate papers, studies and analyses, detecting an interpretation bias is not al that difficult. Biases occur almost always on here case by what is left out and not what is included.
My biggest concern is the long time it is taking for this project to do the actual benchmarking.
Ken, if Surfacetemperatures.org promoted itself as a blog, complete with the participation of McIntyre climate statistics experts like yourself, Hu and Roman, Lucia etc., wouldn’t that move the science forward? As you point out, most bias is what is left out (forgotten assumptions.) Opposing skeptics are tons more likely to catch them.
.
And, of course it works both ways. But the real value is results that can be trusted and thus utilized by both communities.
.
In my personal investigation I see no reason why Karl, Easterling, Hansen, Vose and Menne couldn’t use a little help and at the same time bring true consensus to the climate science community. Hansen tripled the adjustment for UHI over Easterling. What are the chances that Hansen over-shot versus under? Consider that Hansen considers LULCC to be AGW according to Parker 2010.
.
What would be your odd on bet as to the bias in Karl’s (1986) adjustment to “time of observation bias” being an over-estimate, underestimate or nailing it? What are the odds that advanced Menian statistical methods have been used to find that answer? Why don’t we all know the answer?
Parker 2010:
Hansen 2001:
.
But Parker says the regional land use LULC actually has mild radiative cooling effect (albedo) to planet while warming the surface temp.
.
Blogs like ATTP and RC assume in every post that HADCRUT and GISTEMP are 100% GHG AGW. Hansen should set them straight, apparently.
Ron Graf (Comment #149016)
I would surmise that overall the effect of land use on the global average temperature compared to GHGs is small. On the other hand, I believe that land use effects can be very localized and vary greatly from locale to locale. In the benchmarking approach this creates an interesting problem as whether its effects on station results should be considered climate or non climate related. In the former case this would be taken to account in the clean world where the non climate effects are not yet added in and in the latter case it would be added in as a non climate effect.
I believe you noted above that Victor Venema: https://twitter.com/variabilityblog is aware of the potential land use effect on the adjustment algorithm and he is a part of the benchmarking effort. The latest update from that project noted that the group had meet with Venema and that the meeting had pushed the project forward. It should also be noted that the current status commented that the project was more difficult than initially anticipated and thus the slippage in the time line.
Evaluating a particular paper or article by climate scientists must be done on a case by case basis. If the author(s) are known to be advocating for immediate AGW legislation, I am much more sensitive in my analyses to the lack of sensitivity testing and/or leaving out important tests than I might otherwise be.
Ron Graf,
LULC makes a significant contribution to total carbon emissions. AGW started with the invention of large scale agriculture some 8.000 years ago.
DeWitt, Ken, how do we know how big LULC effect is? Do you trust Karl’s USCRN experiments, if any, on LULC? If it is negligible why wouldn’t Hansen just throw the skeptics a bone and add a tiny adjustment for it and call it handled? Why in 2011 is Victor Venema’s response to “…what scares me (beyond spiders and ice climbing) when homogenizing temperature time series..,” LULC?
.
DeWitt, burning and decay is counted in GHG number. I agree agriculture is LULC, and so are roads and drained swamps. Development is worldwide and continuous, undocumented by meta-data and non-decipherable by any statistical code. I believe Hansen agrees it may account for 0.1C/century, which is 0.165C since land record. If Hansen is wrong by 2X, which does not seem impossible since Easterling was off by 3X compared to Hansen, then 0.3C of the land record is bias LULC, unadjusted UHI and unadjusted micro-site. If the land record analysis has this much bias the SST bias could easily be the same amount.
.
Ken, I have not read Karl 2015 yet. Did he see a break in the trend line from pre-Argo to post Argo? Or, was it a break in the slope of trend?
Ron,
There may well be systematic errors in SST that produce an offset. I seriously doubt that the error in the trend is anywhere near the error in the 2m air temperature trend over land. SST doesn’t change that fast and there is no equivalent to LULC or UHI over the oceans.
DeWitt:
Anthroprogenic effects on the high seas abound. Like everything non-GHG, these effects are poorly understood and not well studied.
http://www.livescience.com/5761-surprising-ship-contrails-space.html
http://esseacourses.strategies.org/module.php?module_id=159
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/1193/2013/
Howard,
Black carbon on sea ice is not the high seas. Contrails are unlikely to cause a biased estimate of the true temperature trend at sea or on land. They may contribute to the trend, but that’s not a bias or systematic error.
Ron Graf (Comment #149031)
Ron, I hope you see that localized differences in land use effects on station temperature adjustment algorithms could be a problem even if the global effect average out to a small one on GMST.
Karl 2015 used observed ocean night air temperatures to adjust for SST. That would be reasonable except for the Cowtan paper which shows that for CMIP5 climate models have different trends between SST and ocean air temperatures (or tas and tos). Cowtan noted in their paper that his observed ocean surface and air temperature data were too noisy to determine the same effect. My data analysis indicates that the effect is in the observed also.
Recall that the difference between New and Old Karl global temperature series was due mainly to their adjustments to the ocean data. I think both the observed ocean and land temperature data adjustments are works in progress and would guess there is more uncertainty in the ocean data even though the oceans’ temperatures are more uniform over distance.
There is a big break in most observed temperature series around 1945 that is due to a break in the ocean series. It is particularly pronounced in the Karl series from the 2015 paper. That break could well be an adjustment artifact.
Karl 2015 does not use Argo buoys data in the New Karl temperature series. They also no longer used the satellite SST data. They also weighted the data between that from the ships and buoys. Lots of choices here on which data to use and exclude.
“So I’ve been looking at TMAX data in GHCN. One of the tidbits is that TOBS is mostly not recorded for Non-US sites ( about 1% ). Given the significance of the TOBS aspect, would seem to be a problem for global data.”
there is a reason for that. The US is unique in that it used volunteers for collecting temps. Hence there was no standard time
of observation. hence when folks decided to standardize and adjustment is needed.
The ROW is the rule. the US is the exception.
Long ago Kennth F asked me which countries used TOBS
There are a few cases where other countries did TOBS adjustments to come up with national series.
Canada, AUS, Norway, Japan
But let me put this all in a policy perspective.
Delta temperature between 1860-1880 and today 1995-2015
is largely uneffected by adjustments.
if you use raw data you get a large Delta T
If you adjust ( use any method you like ) you get a lower delta T
“DeWitt, burning and decay is counted in GHG number. I agree agriculture is LULC, and so are roads and drained swamps. Development is worldwide and continuous, undocumented by meta-data and non-decipherable by any statistical code. ”
wrong.
once again ron doesnt know how to find data.
1. development is not worldwide
2. it is not continuous
3. it is documented by metadata.
the metadata happens to be huge.
The supposition is that land use change will cause a change in temperature. You basically have these major LU changes to worry about.
X to Urban ( forest to urban, crops to urban, field to urban ..)
X to cropland
Those are the two big ones.. turning “natural” into urban and turning natural into cultivated
Now lets turn to an ecs calculation.
You actually WANT the change in temperature due to LU change in the equation. So you dont want to homogenize that out.
As for metadata.. Pick any land location you want on the planet
I will tell you how its Land use changed.
How much Urban area there was over time,
How much cropland over time
How many people over time.
You’d be surpised how many areas we monitor with no change in LU
But go ahead.. pick a location.
ah yes some of this is planned ( or currently in use ) in GCMs.
But go ahead.. pick a location..
SM: “But go ahead.. pick a location..”
The only locations that matter is where stations had once been. So I assume that is what you mean.
.
1. development is not worldwide
[That’s right; very little development over 160 years in the ocean or where there are no people or stations.]
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2. it is not continuous
[The depends on your statistical definition. I would wager that population growth, (which has been continuous,) and development are correlated.]
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3. it [development] is documented by metadata.
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How about this, Steven? I will produce a peer reviewed citing of poor documentation of metadata in the world at large as a problem and you cough up the unpublished test on Karl 1986, (if you have one). Deal?
“How about this, Steven? I will produce a peer reviewed citing of poor documentation of metadata in the world at large as a problem and you cough up the unpublished test on Karl 1986, (if you have one). Deal?”
you havent explained what karl did yet.
you asked for the tests.
When you explain what karl did and answer my other questions you will get the first link
“SM: “But go ahead.. pick a location..â€
The only locations that matter is where stations had once been. So I assume that is what you mean.
Why would you assume that? Pick any location.
.
1. development is not worldwide
[That’s right; very little development over 160 years in the ocean or where there are no people or stations.]
The development is is concentrated. Compare our rural stations with our urban stations and you will see the stark difference. development versus no development.
Go ahead.
you wont.
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2. it is not continuous
[The depends on your statistical definition. I would wager that population growth, (which has been continuous,) and development are correlated.]
too funny. you used the word continuous. There are some places where the growth is gradual.. fits a smooth curve. There are other locations where the development is abrupt. there are other places where there is no development, and still others where population decreases. Now think about what you can tease out when the population goes from 800K to 400K..
think.
So just as a test of your honesty.. I picked a location
https://www.google.com/maps/place/42%C2%B042'59.8%22N+118%C2%B037'59.9%22W/@42.7166,-118.6354887,643m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d42.7166!4d-118.6333
Just a random spot. would this be an undeveloped location?
Regarding “development is not worldwide”, the bigger issue is there is a large scale geographic pattern associated with development that isn’t mirrored in the actual temperature trends.
If we overlay 1995 world population (averaged zonally) as a proxy for development, it doesn’t explain very much of the variance.
Link
Carrick: This plot implies that the NH dominated population land use changes have albedo effects that impact the NH. However, it’s too complicated to unwind, therefore, dungeon and dragon fans play with the CO2 control knob because they are too weak and fragile to put on stout shoes climb the mountains and see how the world is made.
Carrick, I would say your plot reminds us to beware of huge confounding influences in every climate analysis. I would love to see latitudinal anomaly trend plotted by longitude to see the effect of population densities at specific parallels on land and compare the variance to that parallel as it crosses ocean.
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Without changing the subject, why is there no data on your plot for latitudes below -35 degrees?
SM: When you explain what karl did and answer my other questions you will get the first link.
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Okay, I’m not expecting much but I want to demonstrate that I have a grasp of Karl’s model. His assumption was that the TOB bias is mostly correlated with the intersection of two statistical variables. The first variable he labels Delta is the average temperature variation between consecutive 24-hr intervals in a given month. That’s comparing midnight to midnight or noon to noon, etc. The second variable that he labels Rho is the average variance from a standard diurnal cycle.
.
Karl sets up Station A with a Delta =10, Rho =0 and shows that the TOB will be zero because with no variance in the cycle, even a variance in temp relative to 24 hours earlier will still be read correctly without bias.
.
In Station B with a Delta =0, Rho =20, although the cycle is always completely out of phase with the normal diurnal it adds no bias because there is no temperature variation from 24-hr point to point.
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In station C Delta =10, Rho =20 and adding up the variances from noon-noon and md-md and dividing by the days to find the mean variances for both Rho and Delta it add up to 5C, which is TOB.
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Karl then demonstrates that cutting Rho for Station C in half leads to no reduction in bias, thus confirming the lower of the two variables will be the limiting factor. Karl then disclaims the model as very oversimplified and points out several real-life circumstances that his model will fail. He then determines an observed Delta and Rho for each US region and time zone for each month to create his algorithm.
Carrick, not understanding the temperature trend difference in the graph.
What time scale is it over or at what date was the temperature trend calculated for the different latitudes.
There has been a difference in Northern and Southern trends, North higher in the last 60 years but both have gone up.
Is there an element of polar amplification in the rapid Northern Hemisphere temps as they go polar wards?
@Carrick, your population is static, the trend@latitude isn’t. I agree (via rebuilding) you’d get *some* correlation of Dev with pop, but I think that pop gains/losses (trends) would be much stronger – may or may not be easily available by latitude; just saying.
SM, I am wondering if you can explain why Zeke writes in his 2-2015 CE post on TOBS that it accounts for 0.3C in warming of the USHCN and Hanson 2001 says the total adjustments warm the USHCN 0.3, of which TOBS is about half?
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Here is Zeke 2015:
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Here is Hansen(2001):
Hey guys. I just wanted to say I’ve been away for a while because I got rather sick last month, and I’m struggling to get back into the swing of things. If I dropped out of any discussions without warning or missed any queries during that time, I apologize.
By the way Ron Graf, Steven Mosher is just screwing with you. I wouldn’t recommend playing his game as it is unfair and dishonest by design.
Brandon S,
Hope you are feeling better and its nothing too serious. I’ll put you on my prayer list, if that’s OK with you. Maybe I’ll just put you on it anyway. 😉
Andrew
angech:
It’s been a while since I’ve done it… so I’ll need to update it. I believe I used HadCrut 5°x5°, land-only cells. This limits how far south the data go. [Ron Graf I believe this addresses your question.]
The overall pattern won’t change much though: You see a similar curve regardless of whether you pick century long data, or only recent periods. That is the scale changes and the offset changes with the interval selected, but the overall shape is pretty much the same.
Anyway the point is …. population measurement doesn’t explain very much of the variance seen in the actually zonal trends. I did some modeling (fitted the “polar amplification” as a polynomial, fitted the 1995 population to a Gaussian, performed multiple regression to obtain the portion of the trend explained by the two models).
See for example this.
angech:
Yes. As I understand it, one of the big effects is a moderation of nighttime tempeartures (less cooling). This happens more in wintertime than summer…the effect should be larger as you increase the percentage of nighttime to daytime (and vice versus).
And this is what you see (unfortuantely this is for fairly short duration data).
If you exclude wintertime months, you basically don’t get a polar amplification effect. Also, if you do “ocean only” you don’t see an effect. It is my understanding, this is consistent with how the boundary layer affects nocturnal temperatures.
Howard:
It doesn’t shown any such thing of course.
All you can do with data is see whether a particular model is explanatory of the data. In my opinion, the zonal trend data are consistent with the hypothesis that CO2 is driving most of the observed warming.
I do not think the zonal patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that most of the warming is either land-use or an artifact of UHI.
If you want to prove otherwise, you actually have to generate a model that is able to reproduce the data. My guess is it would look very hokey and contrived.
TerryMN:
I think as long as you look at a long enough picture (1900-2000 for example), total population should be a decent proxy for trend. It’s justified on the assumption that population growth is approximately exponential. For pure exponential growth over long enough of a period, the trend becomes proportional to the amplitude.
I agree with using better data though.
I like “collapsing the data” to zonal, because one of the main effects of CO2-forcing is the “polar amplification effect” seen in the data. It’s complex enough that I wouldn’t expect to be able to replicate it with anthropogenic activity, but not so complex what you measure gets dominated by noise (as would be the case for 5°x5° grid points for example).
Carrick,
Isn’t polar amplification associated with any major global average temperature change and not specifically CO2? IIRC, the temperature swing from glacial maximum to interglacial is much larger at the poles than at the equator. The change in CO2 isn’t all that large and doesn’t appear to be the major driver of the glacial/interglacial cycle.
Ron,
To quote Evil Willow from BtVS: “Bored now.”
Mosher has already told you that TOBS isn’t relevant any more, and pretty much never was for the global average.
Strictly speaking, that should be Dark Willow in the link above, not Evil Willow. Evil Willow is Vampire Willow from the alternate universe created by Cordelia when she wished for a Buffy-free Sunnydale. Dark Willow is the real Willow gone bad, like Phoenix/Dark Phoenix (Jean Grey) from the X-Men.
“If we overlay 1995 world population (averaged zonally) as a proxy for development, it doesn’t explain very much of the variance.
‘
Let do an experiment.
Relabel that chart.. so that the green line says co2 and the other line says temperature.
Post it at WUWT and everyone will say
“SEE c02 cant cause warming”
“Carrick, I would say your plot reminds us to beware of huge confounding influences in every climate analysis. I would love to see latitudinal anomaly trend plotted by longitude to see the effect of population densities at specific parallels on land and compare the variance to that parallel as it crosses ocean.”
there is no relationship between population and temperature no matter how you want to slice the data.
Start with this.
heck I think Kenneth Frische did this or something like it
Take tamperature.
Observe that the temperature generallly gets colder as a function of altitude… This is called lapse rate
Observe that Monthly temperature gets colder away from the equator,
google why it is hotter at the equator.
Next. Formulate a theory or model to describe this
T = f(Lat,Elevation)
See how much of the variable T you can explain with these two simple paramters
Over 90%
Now let that sink in…. 90% of the variation in temperature is explained by Latitude and Elevation…
Pause.. and let it sink in..
Now ask yourself… What Else can lead to a difference in monthly temps… what else makes up the final 10%
And more importantly… how hard is it going to be to tease out the causes of that last bit of variation.
So go ahead.. work with the residuals of that regression and look
for patterns
A) does Longitude matter? how and where
B) does the land surface composition matter
c) does the population matter
Understand the last few slivers of difference you are trying to tease out
“Hey guys. I just wanted to say I’ve been away for a while because I got rather sick last month, and I’m struggling to get back into the swing of things. If I dropped out of any discussions without warning or missed any queries during that time, I apologize.”
sorry to hear you were sick. hope you have a speedy recovery.
“SM, I am wondering if you can explain why Zeke writes in his 2-2015 CE post on TOBS that it accounts for 0.3C in warming of the USHCN and Hanson 2001 says the total adjustments warm the USHCN 0.3, of which TOBS is about half?”
My history with TOBS.
1. I first though the adjustment was bogus. Then I found jerryBs work at John Daly’s site. First humbling experience. You need a TOBS adjustment.
2. Phase 2. I thought I should look at the actual adjustment. So I went through karls paper and all the subsequent tests of the method. My takeaway… Like all adjustments there is an error of prediction– that is when you adjust you predict your adjustment will bring the result closer to the truth. My focus was then on the uncertainty of the adjustment.
3. Phase 3. Wherein I discovered that TOBS is largely a US matter.
4. Phase 4. wherein I STOPPED ALL WORK ON USHCN. I discovered GHCN Daily ( about 20k stations in the US ) and decided that USHCN was not worth my time. In my mind NOAA should just deprecate the series ( they largely have ). Nothing would change.
As for Zeke versus hansen..I would trust zeke if I cared about USHCN.. but I dont care to use 1000 stations of adjusted monthly data when I have 20K unadjusted daily stations. so I dont much care .
“Okay, I’m not expecting much but I want to demonstrate that I have a grasp of Karl’s model. ”
You are getting closer… So he made a model…..
Then what did he do?
I was getting”yakked at earlier today (we were getting ready to head out for July 4), so I ended up rushing and making a couple of big mistakes. For example, I didn’t copy in TerryMn’s comment correctly in response to him.
And here’s the correct link comparing polar amplification to population OLS trends.
Regarding DeWitt’s comment—he’s correct, this isn’t direct evidence for attribution of warming to CO2. I think the pattern is just evidence that there is a “true global warming”, rather than a warming in the data that is being created e.g. by UHI.
Steven Mosher:
I think you need to add in seasonal cycle too, right?
SM: “Then what did he [Karl] do?”
DeWitt: “Bored now.â€
Brandon S: “…Steven Mosher is just screwing with you…”
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Brandon, sorry to hear you were ill. It’s good to have you back.
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Brandon, DeWitt, to catch you up about why SM is taking me on a challenge quest of sorts, I realized from reading Karl 1986, which set the GISS and USHCN standards for TOB adjustment, that the Mene-type statistical comparison test for breaks would be able to validate the accuracy of Karl’s ad-hoc created algorithm. My interest has nothing to do with validating TOB; it’s about a rare opportunity to get a snapshot of Karl, who is, as you know, a pivotal figure in establishing protocols for the analysis of the global temperature record.
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I know the first thing to jump to mind is that GISSTemp is only one of several indexes that all give similar trends. Is it then just coincidence that the indexes in the hands of lukewarmers, Spencer UAH and Christy Radiosondes, are of a much lower trend? The consensus would say either they are in wishful error or they are dishonest or both. The logical question then is are only lukewarmers capable of having bias?
.
If BEST, GISSTemp and HadCRUT come to the same 100-yr trend but from different methods does that validate the trend? The answer is only if all assumptions are common to all methods. If one method is warm because it assumes there is no UHI but another method assumes more polar warming and both get the same trend they are not cross-validating; they could both be biased. Steven knows why I am interested in Karl. So why hasn’t SM revealed the four tests of Karl 1986 he know of? He wants to be sure I am educated enough on the mechanics involved so I do not have to rely on trust of his honorable opinion as to the validity of the test result if he supplies it; I can check for myself. Or, the reason could be he does not want to embarrass/alienate his important consensus relationships; he’s on “the Team” now.
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I don’t want to embarrass Steven by reading excerpts from the preface of his and Fuller’s 2009 book (The CRUtape Letters) on his ethical analysis of Team work. (Or, perhaps the author is a different Steven Mosher. I have been know to jump to conclusions.) I would assert that all benefit from free access to knowledge and that includes how the knowledge came about.
SM: “Then what did he [Karl] do?â€
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Karl used the hourly data available from first order stations that had not moved further than 1.5km in their history, except for two, one 5k, the other 20km, because he had to, to obtain good functions for his two variables Delta and Rho, variability from day-to-day Tmax and Tmin and variability of cycle, its deviation from a standard diurnal. I won’t bore with more since I do not have a clue as to where this is going.
Brandon Shollenberger (Comment #149089)
Sorry to hear you were ill.
Glad to see you back.
Steven Mosher (Comment #149103)
Some comments.
I seem to keep sniping.
Sign of my closed mind as SteveF would say.
I apologize to Steven in advance but I cannot seem to stop myself from doing so on some fixations.
This in spite of the act that he puts up good explanations and has a lot of knowledge on the subject and generally is good fun to read.
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“4. I discovered GHCN Daily ( about 20k stations in the US )”
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My gripe/snipe is the number of stations he keeps using.
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Only 1 in 3 GHCN stations records temperature, the other 2/3 only record precipitation.
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Worldwide there are only 7280 GHCN temperature stations, [less in USA obviously]. Would it be too hard to use the correct figures or correct me if I am wrong on this point?
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Ron Graf (Comment #149108)
“I know the first thing to jump to mind is that GISSTemp is only one of several indexes that all give similar trends. ? If BEST, GISSTemp and HadCRUT come to the same 100-yr trend but from different methods does that validate the trend? ”
–
two station lists at GISS. 7364 stations [ 7280 GHCN stations are all present; the others are nearly all from Antarctica plus 2 Southern Ocean stations.]
HadCRUT4 and CRUTEM4 ~5500 land station records from GHCN and other sources combined with HadSST3
BEST land-ocean version uses HadSST3 plus GHCN and others.
–
Extremely surprising if they did not come to the same trend seeing they use a lot of the same data and homogenization.
Validation not an issue.
ATTP Jet streams and things
Posted on July 1, 2016 a mini-furore over a story about Scientists warn[ing] of ‘global climate emergency’ over shifting jet stream. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that the story is utter nonsense.
Thanks ATTP.
Hyping facts is something all sides can do and accurate commentary such as yours is very welcome.
Andrew_KY:
Thanks. I’m recovered, except I have a ton of things to catch up on and I still run out of energy more quickly than I should. As for praying, I should warn you, drawing a deity’s attention to me may result in some smiting 😛
DeWitt Payne:
Actually, Phoenix wasn’t Jean Grey. It was a cosmic entity which met Jean Grey while she was dying, cloned her, put itself into the clone, absorbed part of Jean Grey’s personality, became convinced it was Jean Grey but actually put the real Jean Grey into a cocoon to heal and dropped the cocoon to the bottom of the ocean.
Yeah, it was a stupid retcon. Some people just wanted to bring back Jean Grey and were willing to go to any extent necessary to do it. But hey, as terrible as I find the plotting of Marvel and DC comics, I still keep reading them for some reason.
Steven Mosher:
*Snorts*
This is the silliest thing I’ve seen in a while. Of course you can find a relationship between temperature and population. Saying there is no relationship between two variables “no matter how you want to slice the data” is foolhardy as one can find relationshiops between almost anything. The issue is whether or not those relationships are meaningful or explanatory.
Heck, Mosher’s follow-up commentary clearly shows this statement isn’t actually supported by his arguments. I’m not going to go into details, but I absolutely love how he says:
Anyone who understand attribution modeling should know this is wrong. That you have two variables which are known to influence the final result does not mean you can simply look for the maximum amount of variance they could potentially explain and state, “Ah-hah! They cause X% of the variance! Everything else could only explain 100-x%!” That’s not how it works.
Everybody knows it is easy to find spurious relationships. The number of pirates in the world has grown over time, and temperatures have risen. We could “explain” some variance in global temperatures using the number of pirates as a parameter. That’s obviously wrong, but it shows the amount of variance that could potentially be attributed to a factor by correlation is not the same as the amount of variance actually caused by that factor.
In the case of global temperatures, I don’t agree with Mosher’s claim we can attribute 90% of temperature variance with latitude and altitude (though that’s a matter for another day), but even if I did, I would still be mindful of the possibility that including other variables might reduce that value below 90%. I would understand that looking for an effect by something like population or development doesn’t require us only look at the 10% left unexplained by latitude and altitude, but in fact requires use re-examine whether that 90% is correct.
Would this change the result? Probably not because I think the BEST way of doing this is wrong and bound to give a poor answer. Even if that weren’t true though, I don’t know that this would make a difference. What I do know, however, is that it is theoretically possible including another factor in the model would reduce the explanatory power of altitude and temperature to 80, 75% or even lower. Insisting people only do attribution studies on the 10% those two variables couldn’t possibly explain is wrong, mathematically.
Of course, all of this seems strange to me as it seems Mosher must know his remarks are hugely misleading. People have been discussing changes in temperature, not absolute temperatures. The explanatory power he cites only works for absolute temperatures. The percent of change in temperatures over time explained by latitude and altitude is far smaller than the 90% he likes to cite.
Anyway, I’ll shut up now.
Sorry for the triple post, but just in case my last comment was clear enough on this point, Steven Mosher’s claim to be able to explain ~90% of temperature with just latitude and altitude arises from facts like higher altitudes tend to be colder than lower altitudes. This is akin to how people using anomalies to create a temperature record would point out different areas have different baseline temperatures, saying to make fair comparisons, you need to subtract out those baselines.
It’s a total red herring. While using anomalies is not the best approach, doing so means altitude and latitude will no longer explain 90% of temperature. In fact, altitude and latitude will probably explain less than 10% of temperature. That means when Mosher says:
The 10% he derides people trying to explain more or less contains the very warming attributed to greenhouse gases. He is basically mocking people for trying to find relationships between the planet’s warming and human activity on the basis human activity can’t explain the baseline temperatures of the planet which (according to him) make up 90% of the variable.
Not to mention CO2 levels are directly correlated with population
Brandon S.
I was going to mention something about that awful retcon and the even worse Madelyn Pryor clone thing, but decided to leave it out. I gave up on comic books when the prices skyrocketed and sold my collection. Fifteen cents was one thing. $3.50 was quite another. I got what I considered a decent amount of money at the time for my X-Men books that included the original Phoenix story. I’m sure they would be worth a lot more now, but I wasn’t willing to commit to a liquid nitrogen storage system, or whatever it took to stop the paper decay.
angech:
Um… their geographical distribution is very different. CO2 mixes and is approximately constant with lattiude (yes there are seasonal effects). Population has maximum near 30°N and goes to zero at the poles.
That’s the whole point of looking at zonal (latitudinal) trends, rather than just global values.
Brandon, you hit the nail on the head (after a few whacks.) The whole point of the difficulty in finding the weak AGW signal is large interfering signals along with random noise. The point of the exercise is to separate and quantify each of the signals from the noise. I don’t believe Steven was being intentionally misleading but just forgot that the adjustments made in BEST to the stations, to normalize for latitude and altitude to compare apples to apples, is a large adjustment (the 90%) relative to the weak signals being sought (the remainder 10%). Among those weak signals, TOB, UHI, LULCC, micro-site, ENSO, AMO, PDO, aerosols, instrument upgrades and AGW are all the same order of magnitude.
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Carrick, polar amplification is just one more huge confounding signal that needs to be separated, lest it blind or mislead us.
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As to why the Antarctic is immune to polar amplification is not proven. The consensus guess (I mean assessment) is that its the PDO (or IPO they also call the 50-70-year cycle). And they say when it turns positive the Antarctic will warm up fast. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/07/05/this-new-antarctica-study-is-bad-news-for-climate-change-doubters/
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One might ask why there is no 100-yr warming trend in the Antarctic then. But I guess just deniers ask questions.
Brandon, you hit the nail on the head (after a few whacks.) The whole point is the difficulty in finding the weak AGW signal among large interfering signals along with random noise. The challenge is to separate and quantify each of the signals from the noise. I don’t believe Steven was being intentionally misleading but just forgot that the adjustments made in BEST to the stations, to normalize for latitude and altitude to compare apples to apples, is a large adjustment (the 90%) relative to the weak signals being sought (the remainder 10%). Those weak signals, TOB, UHI, LULCC, micro-site, ENSO, AMO, PDO, aerosols, instrument upgrades and AGW are all the same order of magnitude, making them easy to partially mis-allocate to one another.
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Carrick, polar amplification is just one more huge confounding signal that needs to be separated, lest it blind or mislead us.
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As to why the Antarctic is immune to polar amplification is not proven. The consensus’ guess, (I mean their assessment,) is that it’s the PDO (or IPO they also call the 50-70-year climate cycle now) masking AGW. They say when it turns positive the Antarctic will warm up fast. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/07/05/this-new-antarctica-study-is-bad-news-for-climate-change-doubters/
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One might ask why there is no 100-yr warming trend in the Antarctic then. I just ask too many questions.
Ron Graf:
Huh?
You can use polar amplification to distinguish UHI induced apparent warming from actual warming. There is nothing confounding about that.
We have very limited inland data coverage in Antarctica. Much of it historically of poor quality. Honestly, I don’t think there’s very much to learn from there, especially over a 100-year period.
Ron,
And that’s not to mention that the Antarctic Plateau has an average altitude above sea level of 3km. I think only the Tibetan Plateau, with an average altitude of greater than 4.5km is higher for large, contiguous regions on the planet.
The isostatic rebound since the beginning of the Holocene on the Tibetan Plateau has been quite large, about 650m. I wonder how high it has to get before it starts to form an ice sheet again?
Re: Arctic Amplification, there are two aspects.
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1. the modeled amplification is albedo reduction ( of the sea ice ).
.
2. the shift of temperature expression from summer to winter. If there is still some ice, energy will go toward melting that ice ( latent heat ) before realizing temperature increase ( sensible heat ). So summer temperatures may not rise much ( or even decline somewhat. Then, in winter, when ice is reforming, the release of latent heat of freezing occurs which causes cold season temperatures to increase more than average.
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Unlike the Arctic sea ice, over the Antarctic land mass, there is close to zero albedo feedback (and even radiative cooling from 2xCO2). So it’s not surprising that no Antarctic Amplification is observed ( among the mentioned few Antarctic stations ).
.
The amplified winter time Arctic temperatures indicate some fluctuations may have occurred in the past.
Ron,
Water freezing does not ‘release’ heat. The temperature does not go up unless the system has been super-cooled below the freezing point. It just doesn’t drop. That’s why freezing points (zinc (692.677K) and gold (1337.33K) are two examples) are used as temperature reference points. Since water has three phases, you have its triple point, where all three phases are present, for a temperature reference point, defined as 273.16K.
Once ice has formed, however, the temperature above the ice drops until the rate of energy transfer to space is equal to the energy transfer to the ice from the water below. That’s about -30°C for 2m thick sea ice.
Turbulent Eddie:
Just to be clear, I’m referring to an effect over land inside of the atmospheric boundary layer, where you get a net amplification of warming in more polar regions.
One explanation I’ve seen for this is nocturnal temperatures do not cool as rapidly with increased CO2 or increased water vapor.
Brandon,
Sorry you have been feeling poorly.
I hope you continue rapidly towards a full recovery.
Carrick:Huh?
You can use polar amplification to distinguish UHI induced apparent warming from actual warming. There is nothing confounding about that.
.
Just to be clear, I’m referring to an effect over land inside of the atmospheric boundary layer, where you get a net amplification of warming in more polar regions.
.
Carrick, the boundary layer warming effect you are referring to is the presumed AGW preference of raising the colder temps at an amplified rate over warmer temps. Therefore winters are more affected than summers, nights more than days and polar latitudes over tropical (only because they are colder). Correct? If so, all of those effects are shared by UHI. Thus they are directly confounding. I’m not saying they would be impossible to separate. Are you aware of any studies that have attempted to?
.
The next question is if amplification is not affecting the Antarctic then there is a very strong counter effect of some nature like the just recently published study pointing at the PDO. However, if natural unforced variability can completely erase the delta T between the poles then one must ask how strong the AGW effect is? Maybe it is more logical to presume there are natural readjustments of the global polar gradient. We have evidence of this in a large degree in paleo-reconstruction of the collapse from the LGM to the YD. The hemispheres warmed separately in staggered fashion. BTW, do you put any stock into the consensus theory that a large CO2 release warmed the poles selectively, one after the other?
TE: Re: Arctic Amplification, there are two aspects.
.
1. the modeled amplification is albedo reduction ( of the sea ice ).
.
2. the shift of temperature expression from summer to winter. If there is still some ice, energy will go toward melting that ice ( latent heat ) before realizing temperature increase ( sensible heat ). So summer temperatures may not rise much ( or even decline somewhat. Then, in winter, when ice is reforming, the release of latent heat of freezing occurs which causes cold season temperatures to increase more than average.
.
I don’t understand how arctic sea ice albedo has more a feedback then Antarctic Sea ice out to latitudes even further distant from the pole and thus reflecting more insolation.
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I don’t understand how the heat of fusion in one half of the year is not exactly recovered by the heat of melting in the other half. We are talking about yearly anomalies.
Recovered from where? Much, if not all, of the heat of fusion is lost to space during the freezing process when the sun is below the horizon in Arctic in the winter. The Arctic, and Antarctic for that matter, radiate more to space than they receive from solar radiation. The breakeven latitude is in the 40’s.
Freezing and thawing may reduce the seasonal variation, however.
Ron Graf:
They have completely different geographical and temporal characteristics.
There’s nothing confounding about it at all (even assuming that the only effects of UHI otherwise mimic polar amplifcation, which is also not correct).
How does one know UHI and LULC are temperature slope artifacts and not forcings? Apparent warming????? WTF, over. Is that like slightly pregnant.
Soot, NOx, SOx rain down food for fungi, bacteria and algae that helps melt polar ice. That’s not related to population either as the polar amplification is perfectly asymmetrical.
Polar amplification is the phenomenon that any change in the net radiation balance (for example greenhouse intensification) tends to produce a larger change in temperature near the poles than the planetary average.
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“Turbulent Eddie Arctic Amplification, there are two aspects..
1. the modeled amplification is albedo reduction ( of the sea ice )..
2. the shift of temperature expression from summer to winter.”
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Basically both poles, independent of 3 km protuberances and albedo, should be producing larger swings in cooling and warming than the global average purely due to being polar.
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100% of the variation in temperature is explained by Latitude and Elevation” “and season”
The other 10% variation on the variation is due to currents, clouds, volcanoes and Coriolis force
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Carrick (Comment #149093) thanks for your reply
Carrick (Comment #149125)
Not to mention CO2 levels are directly correlated with population Um… their geographical distribution is very different
True but people still produce the CO2 [increase] of AGW.
Too funny that some people deny that CO2 has a warming effect
see
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Steven Mosher (Comment #149101)
“there is no relationship between population and temperature no matter how you want to slice the data.”
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Hence denying that humans produce CO2 that warms the planet.
I don’t understand how arctic sea ice albedo has more a feedback then Antarctic Sea ice out to latitudes even further distant from the pole and thus reflecting more insolation.
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Hmmm….
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I had written a response going on about how the potential for Arctic feedback is greater than the potential for Antarctic feedback ( because Antarctic sea ice declines so much already as part of normal summer ).
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But when I reviewed the model runs for scenarios that I made, I noticed that’s not really the case. The scales are compressed so as to reflect equal area, so the purple ( 2xCO2 but NO sea ice at all for any season ) indicates about the same feedback potential for both North and South.
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So it’s back to the common assumption that the Arctic sea ice decline is 100% due to AGW while the Antarctic increase is 100% due to natural variation.
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That’s probably not correct.
I don’t understand how the heat of fusion in one half of the year is not exactly recovered by the heat of melting in the other half. We are talking about yearly anomalies.
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That may well be.
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My point about the shift is that it explains the temperature fingerprint ( melt season warming minima (or even cooling), and freeze season warming maxima.
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But increased summer melting also introduces the additional energy from a falling albedo.
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But also, as above, some of the observed Arctic sea ice decline may be natural. The temperature signature appears to indicate that something similar happened 1910 through 1945.
TE, thanks for your informative and humble answer to my question. I like your link to the net radiance by latitude chart for different scenarios. It’s a good tool. Did you create this?
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Carrick, I agree that UHI’s effects do not exactly mirror polar amplification, which is why I asked if you were aware of studies to separate the two. This brings me to Angech’s cited definition of polar amplification, which I have also seen. Question: are the poles more sensitive simply because colder conditions are more sensitive? In other words, are nights and winters in all non-tropical locations more sensitive to all forcings?
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Howard: Soot, NOx, SOx rain down food for fungi, bacteria and algae that helps melt polar ice.
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I don’t think the crew this string is in a receptive mood for more confounding influences.
Howard: How does one know UHI and LULC are temperature slope artifacts and not forcings? Apparent warming?
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Actually, if Mosher and others remove LULC from the record they are making an error according to Hansen (2001) which states that LULC is to be included in AGW.
Question: are the poles more sensitive simply because colder conditions are more sensitive?
Poles are by definition colder.
There is a funny rule about energy emission going up by the forth power.
So it takes a lot more energy to heat up something by 1 degree if it is already very hot.
Conversely very cold in relation to objects [poles] would heat up 1 degree with little effort or energy in a rising energy world.
So both poles should show the warming signal barring natural variation.
I don’t see a La Nina cold current affecting the Arctic for the last 30 years however ….
Good point TE
angech,
It’s not the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, it’s the humidity. Most of the energy required to heat air at constant relative humidity at the equator, assuming you’re not in the middle of a desert, by 1K is used to evaporate water to provide the increase in water vapor pressure. The poles are cold and dry, so the effective heat capacity of the air there at constant RH is a lot lower than at the equator.
angech and TE,
Speaking of sea ice, it’s looking somewhat less likely that Arctic sea ice will crater this year. Only JAXA is setting record lows and that’s not by much. MASIE, NOAA near real time and PIOMAS are not. MASIE is interesting because it has data for the individual areas. Many of those are at or near record (MASIE only goes back to 2006) highs. Greenland Sea ice is at record lows, but that’s actually a good thing. It means that ice probably isn’t being exported at a high rate through the Fram Strait.
TE, you’re right about something like this happening to Arctic Sea ice in the early twentieth century. Not coincidentally, IMO, the AMO Index was at a peak then too. There’s also something called the polar seesaw. When it’s warming at one pole, it’s usually cooling at the other.
Now that we’ve seen the peak of the current El Nino, it will be interesting to see if it follows the recent pattern by having a strong La Nina soon.
Ron Graf:
“Do not exactly mirror” is a bit like “just a flesh wound”. They don’t have much in common. Less than 1% of the observed pattern of warming can be explained by the hypothesis that UHI is biasing the measured temperature trends.
Yes, I think this is true. That relates to DeWitt’s point—all you can truly say is the zonal influence on temperature trend is consistent with a global scale change in radiative forcing.
Carrick:
That number, which you state with seeming certainty, is not justified. I really wish people would stop throwing numbers like these out there without even attempting to acknowledge the numerous caveats necessary for their estimations.
I mean, we can just say things like, “Altitude and latitude explain 90% of temperature so clearly UHI can’t matter” and pretend that’s a coherent argument. I’d just like to think we’re capable of analytics better than that of an average WUWT post.
Brandon:
What do you mean? It’s the number that comes from an OLS fit (shown above).
Added: Here’s the link.
If you want a caveat: “Based on my assumed models for UHI and polar amplification, I found less than 1% of the variation in temperature trend with latitude could be explained by UHI. Your mileage may vary [tm].”
I should add that the hypothesis I was testing was whether the dominant effect of UHI [population] was a systematic bias in temperature trend. (This is a skeptics arguing point; one Ron Graf seems to be mirroring here–but my apologies to Ron if I’ve misstated what he is saying.)
Since Brandon brings it up, the effect that is interesting to me is that of elevation on trend. There seems to be some evidence that high elevation locations have a larger trend than lower ones.
I assumed Steven Mosher was referring to trend and not anomalies, but he’s not be back on to confirm or deny this.
Carrick:
There are dozens of assumptions which go into the methodology you used, many of which have not been mentioned, much less justified. Given that, I believe it is inappropriate to state a numerical result with such certainty. Doing so conflates the (un)certainty of the model you used with the actual (un)certainty of the result.
I feel like you misspoke here as your test couldn’t possibly determine what “the dominant effect of UHI” is. It only looks at one (potential) effect of UHI. You couldn’t possibly use it to judge whether UHI had some other effects, much less if those effects are the more dominant ones.
There is some evidence which suggests colder areas warm faster tn warmer areas in general. It’d be interesting to see if one could distinguish between effects of that hypothesis and those of one which says altitude itself is the cause.
I can tell you already he wasn’t talking about trends. He’s used that exact same talking point dozens of time, and he has referenced work by BEST to justify his claims – work which deals with finding “climate field.” He specifies this climate field as the variation in temperature caused by geography, with the remainder being termed the “weather field.” This creates an interesting situation where climate change is the change in the “weather field” of the planet as the “climate field” must always remain constant (given the formulation he uses).
If you don’t want to take my word on this, just look at his comment again. Take note of how he specifically talks about temperatures, not trends in temperatures.
Carrick: “Based on my assumed models for UHI and polar amplification…”
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If Steven Mosher was indeed talking about anomalies regarding stations correlating altitude and latitude then we are talking about a claim of 90% correlation with lower humidity (colder climates) as having the most warming. This makes sense except for the southern hemisphere. But if we conclude that ocean current mode is causing the hemispheres to warm-cool independently then we must admit that the 90% figure is overblown. While we are at it, UHI has most effect in cold seasons (low humidity) in temperate in areas of low ground moisture on low wind and low humidity days.
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Carrick, just because your model works without UHI effect does not mean your model would not work with UHIE, (which happens to be a scientifically proven commodity). If we took 0.3C off of all the land temperature data how would that conflict with your model?
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UHIE can be quantified by comparing windy and rainy day Tmin to clear and still Tmin for urban versus pristine (o development) stations nearby, (corrected for altitude and latitude if different).
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UHIE does not reverse when a population abandons a city, btw. It only reverses if the pavement is torn up and trees grow. What has happened often is that poorly sited stations on top of flat-roof buildings or in parking lots were moved to undeveloped areas at the edge of town like airports and water treatment plants, only to be enveloped once again by development. The stations were adjusted down for the break point of the move, the abrupt cooling, but never got adjusted adequately or at all for the gradual warming ends of the cycle.
Ron,
Would you please give us data rather than just speculation and hand waving. IMO, your estimate of 0.3 degrees is high by an order of magnitude or two.
A systematic trend error due to contamination of surface temperature data by highly localized UHI does not explain the rather close correlation of satellite and surface trends.
If it isn’t highly localized, then it isn’t UHI, it’s LULC and is legitimately included.
DeWitt, I thought the purpose of this site was speculating “on the blackboard”. Hansen admits to 0.1C/century in Hansen(2001) for the land record. That’s 0.15C since pre-industrial, which is exactly 1/2X of my speculation based on extrapolating Kim(2002) and Hamdi(2011) and Vose(2005).
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Before Hansen(2001) the official UHI rate was 0.03C/century, set by Easterling.
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If the land record is off by 0.2-0.3C the sea record is more easily biased than the land, unless you think that Karl has no bias. (This is what makes Karl(1986) interesting.)
DeWitt Payne (Comment #149150)
It’s not the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, it’s the humidity. the effective heat capacity of the air
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Wiki implies this mechanism exists on most worlds with a GHG factor and even without water and that SB might be a factor
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“Feedbacks with sea ice and snow cover are the main cause of recent terrestrial polar amplification. amplification in model worlds with no ice or snow.[8] Due to intensification of poleward heat transport and more directly from changes in the local net radiation balance (an overall decrease in outward radiation will produce a larger relative increase in net radiation near the poles than near the equator).”
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Your explanation as the major reason for earth PA sounds very good but is not listed in the subject matter.
Is there a science of doom post on this?
DeWitt Payne (Comment #149151)
“Speaking of sea ice, it’s looking somewhat less likely that Arctic sea ice will crater this year.”
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Thanks for the heads up.Hope you are right.
I have gone very quiet on this because of the “feedback commentating factor”.FCF
Known in Australia as putting the mozz on an event or person.
“Australian informal Exert a malign influence on (someone); jinx.”
I now wait for the result like PIOMAS to come out first, then comment if good.
I also include land use LULCC in my UHI.
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Unlike Hansen, I think that land use should not be in the official warming since it does not affect sea level rise and is much easier to mitigate than GHG.
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LULCC is like UHI for rural stations.
Ron Graf:
Fun factoid. Estimating a “climate field” based on the geography of the planet by fitting data for latitude and altitude like BEST did requires selecting a period to perform the fit for. There is no objective way to determine which period should be used, and one’s results will vary depending on the period chosen. BEST ignored or overlooked this issue for several years, not once saying a single word to anyone about its effect on BEST’s ability to estimate uncertainty in its results.
I believe it has since put results showing its global temperature record with a different baseline period being used. The results were not hugely different, but they were also not so close to one another for the differences to be irrelevant. I’d have to check to make sure though. They didn’t discuss the results at all or explain anything about their choices of baselines, so my memory is a bit foggy. It’s possible the change in baseline they made for those results was in regard to a different step which also requires the somewhat arbitrary selection of a baseline period.
Yes, there are two steps requiring the selection of a baseline period. BEST didn’t bother to explain the reasons for its choices for them or discuss what effects those choices have. And interestingly, the baseline periods used in each step are not the same.
But oh well. BEST knows fully well its stated uncertainty levels are smaller than they would be if they truly captured all the uncertainty in their results (for this and other reasons). A couple members have even admitted it. It seems nobody cares. I still find that baffling.
Then again, BEST has long gotten away with claiming it would, and later claiming it had, published results it never published. If they can get away with that, I don’t think there’s any hope people will care about statistical problems in BEST’s work.
That’s an assertion with no evidence. If it’s big enough that it affects the satellite data, it’s nothing like UHI. Mitigation isn’t as trivial as you seem to think either. One the biggest LULCC is agriculture. Do you plan to stop growing food? Using biomass for energy won’t help either.
Carrick (Comment #149154)
Your graph of population per latitude seems extremely flat, not the expected Bell curve.
Surely population should decrease markedly with increasing latitude?
I do not understand the flat line implying an almost immutable population.If a Bell curve existed there might be some observable UHI affect, or not.
Obviously I am missing something simple as usual.
Brandon
surely even you would agree with this statement
Steven Mosher (Comment #149101)
“there is no relationship between population and temperature no matter how you want to slice the data.â€
Steven Mosher (Comment #149101)
“there is no relationship between population and temperature no matter how you want to slice the data.â€
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True, unless you are talking about anomalies and effects of UHI and LULCC, then the statement becomes false, at least in that part. And since that is what we were talking about his statement at the very least is misleading.
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DeWitt Payne (Comment #149165)
July 6th, 2016 at 6:07 pm
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Actually, if the effect is doubtful to be detected by satellites. It’s a lower boundary layer warming combined with a radiative cooling by slight increase in albedo. UHI and LULCC are both too low for satellites to detect the surface warming. See Hansen(2001), Parker(2010). That the satellites or balloons should not be able to detect it, and both their temperature trends are lower than land stations, would presume to be circumstantial supporting evidence of my assertion.
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The main point is that LULCC is not caused by radiative transfer at the TOA and is not a forcing on the oceans and should therefore not be used lest it confound the modeling calculations of EfCS and/or TCR (climate sensitivity to GHG).
LULCC also affects carbon emissions. It’s become less significant in that regard as fossil fuel burning has increased, but it’s still there.
You can’t have a long term surface warming trend and not warm the atmosphere above it. That would imply a lapse rate increase, which can’t happen. Have you read Caballero yet? It sounds like you haven’t
angech:
For what it’s worth, the shape does look more or less correct to me. While it is very flat, it has a curve to it more or less resembling a bell curve. I’d have chosen different axes for the graph so the population line would have been more readable, but given the choice of axes is arbitrary, there’s no “right” or “wrong” choice.
That said, one question is what Carrick used for his model: population or population density. From what he wrote, it sounds like he used population, but latitudinal population is clearly not a good choice. A large population spread out over a large amount of land is not the same as the same population spread out over a smaller amount of land.
Whether or not that would even matter is something I don’t know. I cannot seem to find any images showing population density by latitudinal band. I did find this cool resource though.
My laptop died a while back so I don’t have the data/code I had used to look at BEST’s gridded results anymore (I can re-download the data and rewrite the code, but it’d take time), but eyeballing some of the images I made of the BEST results makes me think there may actually be some correlation between population density and rate of warming in the United States.
Does anyone know a good resource for gridded population data in the United States? I’d like to see if this is just my eyes and mind playing tricks on me or what.
Great map though if it showed Australia it would be almost bald.
What happened to recently frequent commenter Mark B?
Andrew
I’m here. What up?
Just been busy. That and have nothing I really want to talk about right now.
Fair enough, Mark B. One of the things that interest me are the people behind the comments. I sometimes wonder what happened to the people who comment here and then are gone. Like David Gould from years ago. I wonder what he’s up to, to.
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
My guess is that those who are mostly interested in the politics of mitigation (rather than ‘the science’) ultimately tire when they realize there is little possibility of convincing people with a different political view to change to their own view… it just doesn’t happen.
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My guess is that those who are more interested in ‘the science’ (and its technical credibility!) tire of dealing with people who are mostly interested in the politics of mitigation when they realize the credibility of ‘the science’ does not at all influence those folks.
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It’s a bit like trying to discuss the legality of abortion…. there just isn’t much compromise to be found, no matter how much people discuss the issue.
SteveF, clearly it’s rare someone is going to change their opinion on any point they are long invested it. The climate bloggers are not representative of the public at large since they are not as invested on the topic except by proxy from their political affiliation perhaps. I think those seeing the alarm have a combination of three emotional reactions.
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1) Fear of the future danger and uncertainty in general.
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2) Anxiety of knowing of a specific challenge waiting to be dealt with and having uncertainty as to the resources of human/political and technological capital that will become available.
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3) General skepticism of humanity’s worthiness of self-governance and the ethics of allowing personal wealth accumulation rather than collectivism.
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Not coincidentally all three of these points are typically addressed through one’s religion. There is growing secular religion of social justice/Earth justice-type doctrine. It has similarities common to all religions — original purity – Eden – orthodoxy based on cosmic intention in conflict with man’s vices and sins (mostly of the un-believers) that would otherwise despoil the planet it not stopped.
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I believe if you had a room full of people who all agreed on those points 1-3 you could correctly predict there stance in the climate debate 99%. All science should have strict protocols to counter bias. That is were we really need action.
There is a new article by Kyle Armour in Nature Climate Change, Projection and prediction: “Climate sensitivity on the rise”, if anyone has a subscription.
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DeWitt, to illustrate my point of how LULCC is used by the consensus, Victor Venema confides to colleagues in 2011 that it’s effects are the scariest thing in the land surface record. But on the TOA level LULCC is considered a cool forcing like aerosols. Venema mentions utilizing it his soon to be published paper claiming an EfCS of 4.6 to counter all the recent Lewis et al type low estimates. Venema readily admits that he does not buy it but merely wanted to illustrate that with sufficient choices it could be done. It really bothers him that the IPCC can’t get rid of the low side of the ECS range. Here’s his story today. http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2016/07/climate-sensitivity-energy-balance-models.html
Ron,
I suspect all they are looking at is change in albedo to get a negative forcing. It’s not at all clear that the total effect is negative when you consider the net increase in CO2 emission from LULCC.
I’m not terribly interested in how the ‘consensus’ spins things. If the AMO Index goes into its negative phase on schedule, the consensus “got some ‘splainin to do.”
I think the article by Armour has to do with this paper – it sounds like they hit upon some legitimate issues.
Ron Graf (Comment #149178)
That subject was discussed at Climate Etc starting about a week ago.
On that thread I shopped my analysis of the comparison of CMIP5 climate models to observed temperature series and model to model series comparisons for trend, autocorrelation, variance and NH/SH warming ratios. I had posted the analysis at CA previously. I got the same response at both blogs – which was essentially zero.
In the meantime I have looked at the very issue that is highlighted in the paper to which you refer: The differences in ocean air surface temperatures (tas for ocean) and SST (tos). Indeed the models show a different trend for tas than tos with those for tas being higher. I took the analysis further than I believe previous authors have whereby I found a very good correlation between the first difference of the tas series and the first difference of the tas -tos series. In order to eliminate the series noise I used a Single Spectrum Analysis to derive the non linear trends and it was those trends series that I first differenced above.
This means that the tas to tos trend difference is a function primarily of the increase(decrease) in tas – or for that matter the GMST. The same relationship exists between the global land minus global ocean to global land land temperature increase (decrease).
The trend differences vary with zone and time period. Although there are considerable differences in the tas and tos trends from model to model the ratios of these trends are bounded in a relatively narrow range.
I have also noted that when the first differences described above are put into a scatter plot and the individual years are labeled in the plot that for sequenced years – within the time period being plotted – are very much in a straight line. The overall correlation values vary from the high near 1 only by the number of sequential straight lines with different slopes and offsets that are present in the entire time series. The number of changes in slopes and offsets varies from model to model (and thus the overall correlation value) and I am curious as to what might cause those changes with time.
I need to do some more work on this analysis before I might post the results here. After all it appears that no one to this point has criticized my model analyses – or perhaps there are other reasons for the zero response. I would like to do a model to observed comparison for tas to tos differences but the available observed tas ocean data is sparse and might be unreliable. I might do better to look at the land to ocean trend differences.
Kenneth, I have read your comments on these analyses and am definitely interested.
Ken, I am one of your biggest fans. Please keep up the work even in the face of lack of response. I’m used to not having anyone knowledgeable to soundboard my discoveries in my non-climate field. (It helps keep things proprietary at least.) One suggestion to invite more replies is to imagine you are explaining to an audience that knows little more than the basics (like me). They also want to know the implications of each finding as it applies to the claims by others.
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The claim by Armour that sea surface air is trending significantly higher than the top 2m is surprising one would expect that would have been found earlier. Karl using night air temps above the sea, for example, to normalize changes in SST observation method would have seen a divergence of trend over the century. What am I missing? Are the models behaving differently than the observed record? Your type of detailed critical analysis is exactly what the models need.
“I can re-download the data and rewrite the code, but it’d take time), but eyeballing some of the images I made of the BEST results makes me think there may actually be some correlation between population density and rate of warming in the United States.
Does anyone know a good resource for gridded population data in the United States? I’d like to see if this is just my eyes and mind playing tricks on me or what.”
When you look at gridded population you have to take extreme care.
First off you need to be aware that our gridded product is 1 degree. That’s 110km on a side at the equator.. less of course as you look at the usa.
Needless to say looking at the temperature averaged over 1 degree and the population averaged over 1 degree is going to be problematic.
Ross Mckitrick tried it over 5 degrees.. not really a robust result.
You can get population data from the following
A) US census. You can get decadal data usually in shapefiles.
its a lot of work.
B) GPW is another dataset. 2.5 minutes.. this contains some modelling.
C) GRUMP.. 1km data contains more modelling
The problems with GPW and GRUMP are that they only have a couple of slices say 1995 2000, 2005. So if you buy Ross’ argument you really want to compare time series of population with time series of temperature. Problem is you have different
frequencies of data ( monthly versus decades)
D) Hyde.
Hyde is 5 minute data collected for every decade going back as far as you like. modelling of course and emprical data.
E) Landscan. Probably the best source but you have to pay.
Other issues.
Is the population resident or ambient?
US census will get you resident.. but there is a problem with that.. see san fancisco
The relationship Oke found was between Population density
and MAX UHI.. it was also a function of windspeed and different regions of the world had different curves.. and so he eventually gave up on the approach in favor of more physics related approaches ( regressing against population he noted was dimensionally messed up )
Look at over 400 large cities…. population ended up not being a significant factor for SUHI.. basically UHI scales with the square root of the urban area and that of course is colinear with population so once you account for urban area you have effectively “represented” the population effect. that is we build building for people.. generally.
With certain use cities ( detriot, cleveland ) having major depopulation it is fun to look at individual temperature series for those areas.
Even better is to get Urban Net data.
there is also a conus 1km dataset derived from census data.
On the NOAA ftp somewhere.. I have copies.. Its yearly data
( modelled from decade census data )
basically if you use population data you’ll have fun justifying the selection. each source has its pros and cons..
Why is CO2 growth seemingly linear when population growth has been exponential?
Does anyone have an actual global world average annual temperature for say 2015?
You know, the one the anomalies are worked off?
Thinking about Bell curves, land area, population and latitude
there would have to be a population level relating to land area greater in the Northern Hemisphere as there is more land overall there though perhaps not at the equator , more as one moves North.
The deserts tend to occur at 30 degrees latitude due to Hadley cells?
So population on both sides might dip at those locations then increase again with temperate climates and finally rapidly fall as one approaches the poles.
So not a Bell Curve at all.
Nonetheless CO2 should go up with population increase and this should show up as a forcing with an increase in temperatures due to population increase.
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Not sure why the population distribution matters so much on a latitude temp anomaly map.
The main reasons for variation in temps away from the predicted norm are the effects of current and air circulation and Polar amplification [whatever the cause of this]. UHI effects are small in comparison.
The population volume and rate of change is more important. Decreasing it by a carbon tax or wars are very effective measures but not ones that I want to be a part of.
Population control by non life style decreasing measures eg the pill, one child policy, convincing people to not have kids would seem to be more effective.
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Well, in the US, total emissions are falling even though population is still growing.
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This is telling.
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Undeveloped economies have to expend a lot of energy just because they’re undeveloped. Because there’s no infrastructure, use of energy by those lucky enough to have it, is inefficient and the have to expend energy to develop that infrastructure. Once they do develop, market forces make energy just another cost to wring out of production.
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There are other factors, of course. Large continental nations ( Russia, China, US, Canada, and Australia ) have greater travel expenditure and continental climates, meaning both heating and cooling.
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But it’s not surprising that energy use declines somewhat with economic development.
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Well, as mentioned above, the ice albedo feedback gives some additional energy.
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Another aspect, the polar regions, particularly in the cold nine months of the year, are marked by a steep inversion. That inversion means heating of the lowest layers can accumulate before breaking the inversion and escaping in turbulent eddies. That may be why in the Arctic, the temperature trends are high at the lowest layers, but not as high above
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Also, FWIW, regardles of the sensitivity, the Radiative Forcing is least at the poles, and greatest at the tropics. The atmosphere does mix things up, but there’s less forcing poleward.
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Then again, that’s forcing at the tropopause. Forcing measured at the surface, is just the opposite – greatest at the poles, least at the tropics.
just when I thought there were no stupid questions
Interesting discussion. Lets just agree that Best is Best, give Steven the pat on the head he rightfully deserves and move on.
Half of the CO2 emitted is sequestered. Prior to it’s sequestration, it must pose additional transient forcing above and beyond the WMGHG forcing of the average 400-ppmv? Obviously, this CO2 transient is concentrated in the NH. It is also accounted for in the GCMs?
This image shows how the NH is diaproportionatly painted with the effluvia of industrial production.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/earth/climate/20151109/m15-162b.jpg
SM: “just when I thought there were no stupid questions”
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Steven, since I asked that apparently rookie question — what causes polar amplification, all the answers are sensible, ice albedo feedback, lack of humidity, colder (weaker and thus more sensitive) BB emission profile, but everyone’s is a little different. What’s your understanding of the cause of polar amplification?
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Get us all on the same page. And no links. Use words.
Howard,
“Half of the CO2 emitted is sequestered. Prior to it’s sequestration, it must pose additional transient forcing above and beyond the WMGHG forcing of the average 400-ppmv? Obviously, this CO2 transient is concentrated in the NH.”
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The N/S difference is only about 3 PPM on average. The difference is mainly due to more emissions in the north. The difference in forcing is miniscule: about 5.35 * ln(400/397) = 0.04 watt per square meter. Even if you believe the high sensitivity of climate models (I don’t) of about 0.86 C/watt/M^2, the “extra warming” in the northern hemisphere would be only 0.035C, and that is not considering the aerosol cooling that accompanies emissions in the north. The additional warming from slightly higher CO2 in the northern hemisphere is undetectable.
One theory put forth on the asymmetric polar warming was put forth by Drew T. Shindell and Gavin A. Schmidt (2004) that the halocarbon depletion caused “ozone hole” in the Antarctic offset the AGW caused change in southern annualar mode SAM temporarily, but that it would reverse soon and we would see Antarctic warming now (from 2004).
“I think you need to add in seasonal cycle too, right?”
add it in or take it out.. yes.
thanks for posting the population thing.. I’ve gone and put together some stuff. maybe a post for people to chew on
Ron I was talking about angech
According the discoverer of the south pole ozone hole the north pole is developing a hole too. Yes… And they are both attributed to, you guessed it — AGW.
http://www.theozonehole.com/arcticozone.htm
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The professor explains that the Antarctic had the hole first because there are more stratospheric clouds there which catalyze the destructive CFC free radical reactions. Now, thanks to climate change arctic has a cooler stratosphere which is conducive to clouds.
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If Professor Shanklin is right and Shindell and Schmidt are also right it’s logical we should see a flip-flop in the polar anomaly trends soon. Any bets?
If anyone wants to see some pics of my garden from this week, go here:
https://solcather.wordpress.com/2016/07/10/andrews-garden-july-sample/
It’s doing really well! 🙂
Andrew
Ron Graf (Comment #149188)
“One suggestion to invite more replies is to imagine you are explaining to an audience that knows little more than the basics (like me).”
With more effort I could do a better job of explaining my analyses at a more basic level. I write up my analyses more to assure myself that I have thought through my analytical methods sufficiently and not so much to garner blog interest.
“They also want to know the implications of each finding as it applies to the claims by others.”
I think the implication thing can be overdone even though it might be what makes a blog post gain reader interest. I would rather post the analysis that follows on the work of climate scientists and let the interested reader decide what it means or implicates. My general implication in the write-ups of my analyses is most often that the current literature in climate science is incomplete and lends to an inaccurate view of certainty and overly simplified conclusions taken from the evidence (as reported in a paper). I suppose what you suggest for implications in a blog posts making the material more readable also applies to peer review literature at some more sophisticated level.
In my search of the literature, I believe the Cowtan (2015) paper was the first instance of authors detailing the temperature trend differences in the CMIP5 model runs between ocean tas and tos and the implication of comparing trends between how model and observed trends are normally reported – which is the apples to oranges problem. The divergence of land to ocean temperature trends had been reported in at least 2 papers as I recall. None of these papers looked at the relationship of these difference to the warming (cooling rates).
The Karl paper and the New Karl ocean and global temperature series uses ocean night air temperatures to adjust for what is reported as SST. In other words the implication for the Karl paper is that ocean tas and SST are equivalent which is in direct contradiction of the Cowtan paper if one assumes that the model differences translate to the observed. The Cowtan paper comments that the observed records for ocean tas are too noisy to determine if the model differences do indeed translate to the observed. My initial analysis indicated that the differences do translate from model to the observed but the data are sparse.
I communicated my concerns to Cowtan and Karl about the potential inconsistencies, but without any apparent interest on their parts for a detailed discussion of this matter.
Ken, reading Karl(2015) I understand he used night time marine temps to make bucket temp corrections to the newer engine intake thermometer method. It’s unclear what the (tos)-(tas) deltas are in his short paper. Do you know?
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I found the HadNMAT2 database Karl used here. They updated it in 2012 to chop off the pre-1880 data as too unreliable and made other adjustments bringing it on trend with SST records.
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That was good thinking of them. The question remains in my mind as to why Karl or others had not simply adjusted all of the (tos) measurements to extrapolate them as a proxy for (tas) and make it an official stamped product for climate use, filling the apples to apples question for models. Perhaps that is what Cowtan and Armour are doing I suppose.
Goodness Steven.
I use your arguments and you say they are stupid.
Lucky I did not set a trap for you.
(Heh).
I would love to know how many temperature stations GHCN uses.
Is it 53,000?
51,000?
Or in the region of 7000?
I think we should be told.
Oh, sorry the first two responses were correct.
Stupid question.
Not.
Kenneth,
“I think the implication thing can be overdone even though it might be what makes a blog post gain reader interest.”
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It can be ‘under-done’ as well. You do a lot of interesting analyses; I think your reporting of them does not do them justice. You are best able to draw conclusions and advance an argument based on your efforts; if you did some of that, then what you report would generate much more interest and critique.
I would love to know how many temperature stations GHCN uses.
GHCN M or GHCN D
I use GHCN D
you keep asking stupid questions
and GHCN doesnt “use” stations. It is a database.
two versions.
One is a superset of the other.
Did you ever look?
answer. No.
ignorant angech.
SteveF (Comment #149214)
Thanks, SteveM, for your thoughtful reply and, yes, I would agree that your suggested approach might bring forth more discussion. To be clear my motivation in posting my analyses is twofold. I am attempting to draw constructive criticism of my methods and the application of those methods that I might use as a learning experience and further I want to show to myself and other interested parties that in many areas of climate science the scientists papers often lack coverage of topics that are critical to understanding the matters being reported.
The lack of sufficient coverage in two areas of climate science has led me to not take seriously the reported results in those areas. The areas of temperature reconstruction and climate modeling are probably the two most important areas for determining what the future of the climate and the consequences for humankind will be under AGW and unfortunately those are the two areas I will not be able to take seriously until I see the scientists addressing the issues as I will outline below.
For temperature reconstructions the major issue is in selecting the proxy data for reconstructions using the after-the-fact measure of how well the proxies respond to the current warming and not using a prior selection approaches that are based on a reasonable chemistry/physics/dendro foundation. The fact that the involved scientists will not seriously address this issue is a major problem in my view and upon which I have posted many times.
For climate modeling the problem arises from using an ensemble of individual climate models for comparisons to the observed and most ofter the comparison is limited to temperature trends. A more critical and proper comparisons will involve individual model against individual model, individual model versus observed, using only individual models with sufficient numbers of multiple runs that will allow determining statistical significant of differences between models and at least where the observed result lies on the individual model probability curve, and finally not confining the comparisons to trends, but rather such variables as red and white noise and ratios of Northern to Southern hemisphere warming rates. An example of what this approach can avoid is accepting incorrectly a model comparison that matches an observed or another model result like temperature trend but while differing significantly or greatly in another variable like NH/SH warming ratio or white or red noise. In other words the proble of the right answer for the wrong reasons.
I doubt that anything I may write, no matter how well it is written or discussed at a blog, is going to change the approaches of climate scientists in the areas I noted above. What I want to accomplish is to assure myself that I have established analyses and methods that would if used in whole or part by a climate science area convince me to take their work and results seriously.
Kenneth,
“I doubt that anything I may write, no matter how well it is written or discussed at a blog, is going to change the approaches of climate scientists in the areas I noted above.”
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I think there are lots of things you have done which should (and very well could) have an impact. Certaintly being presented in a blog post is no disqualifier….. Nic Lewis posted on Marvel et al and that led to a correction of an error in a published paper. I think your analysis of the CMIP 4X CO2 temporal response is in the same category, and if publicized more, along with awkward implications, could have the kind of impact that emails to authors don’t. The only alternative would be a journal submission… with all the gate keeping and hoop-jumping that would entail. It is the quality of the analysis (and associated argument!) which is important, not the venue.
I agree that a Nic Lewis, who has a publishing reputation and like Steve McIntrye, have a reputation preceding their blog posting that gets the attention of climate science authors who have committed major errors in their published papers. Further I have to admit that analyzing climate science papers is what most interests me about these blogs that sponsor that activity.
While I judge that for some interested parties to the AGW debate these analyses show the uncertainty of some of these overblown claims coming from poorly performed climate science, I doubt that the overall approach in climate science will change until it evolves from that community alone.