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Happy Thanksgiving

33 Comments

Jim and I have decided to not cook and we are going out to eat. Other than that, we are raking leaves (because the snow melted in the backyard.) Nothing else planned! Hope you all have a fund day (whether you are celebrating Turkey Day or not.)

Open Thread

33 thoughts on “Happy Thanksgiving”

  2. The timeless and classic dilemma returns. What to have for lunch while slowly cooking Thanksgiving dinner is filling my house with mouth watering aromas…

  4. The WSJ recently had an article about how a couple from New York picked a place to retire.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-15-year-quest-to-find-the-perfect-place-to-retire-1542717748?mod=hp_jr_pos1

    "Even with diligent saving and calculated spending, money is one reason we’re leaving New York. Our annual property and school taxes are nearly $15,000, and our utility rates are among the highest in the country. My commute into Manhattan costs $500 a month—an absurd $6,000 a year. New York is beautiful, and we love our friends, but it’s just too expensive here."

    Sounds familiar. They looked at western North and South Carolina, eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama, i.e. the Appalachian Mountain region. They ended up picking a place in South Carolina.

  5. Wow. That was delicious, but. I know we couldn't possibly have used *every* dish in the house, just seemed that way while cleaning up. :/ Ah well!
    I trust everybody enjoyed their meal?

  6. Mark,
    We had a great time. No cooking!!

    Dewitt,
    Objectively, we can afford to stay here. But the thing is …. why? We can spend the money we save on taxes on things we enjoy.

  7. lucia –
    Same here (about taxes and moving). I don't have your constraints about dance opportunities. But I'm considering moving from Massachusetts to Florida.

    I joke that in MA my vote rarely counts*; in FL my vote would be rarely counted.
    *because most races are won by the Democratic Party candidate by a wide margin

  8. Ooooohhhh. Living dangerously over here! My middle schooler had a potato battery project to do. We powered an LED with three potatoes and *NO* resistor, repeat, *NO* resistor. It didn't burn out and was much more visible that way.
    Oh the reckless shenanigans I get up to.
    *sigh*
    .
    😉

  9. mark bofill,
    Many through-hole LEDs are rated for up to 20 milliamperes; it may be difficult to generate more than that with a few potatos. What were the metalic leads? (zinc and iron?)

  10. Zinc and copper. His hypothesis that sweet potatoes would produce the most voltage (because sugar I guess) was shattered. It was fun though. 🙂

  15. ATTP has a post up on the non pause.
    Put my response here as well as you did have some comments on it ? 4 years ago and thanksgiving is over.

    “what was meant by a “pause” in global warming.”
    A topic of controversy due to the fact that skeptics are supposed to use it to deny global warming from CO2.
    A pause should be simple to define but no one wishes to accept common sense definitions because of the ramifications.
    –
    “Was it an actual pause?”
    Well if someone can find a start and stop date on a set of observations and draw a flat trend line that would be a pause??
    –
    “Did it just mean that the trend was lower than the long-term trend?”
    No.
    Here at least we have the concept of a short term trend being accepted. A short term trend can be flat [AKA as a pause], down, yes down, or up at a rate lower or higher or equal to the long term trend. My answer would be a pause is a pause, a flat trend, not an upward trend lower than the long term trend.
    Semantically I have seen this used by people on both sides [Lucia for example] but it is only and always referred to a slower upwards trend rate, not an actual pause which has no upwards trend at all..
    Hope this helps.

    ” Was it based on the uncertainty being large enough that we couldn’t rule out that there had been no warming? ”
    No.
    The pause, if such there was, was based on up to 20 years of data which showed a flat trend at some stage. This argument conversely could equally be used to deny an upwards trend by those so inclined or blinded.
    –
    “Did it refer mainly to a model-observation mismatch?”
    No
    While models and observations must by necessity be out of kilter the pause refers to observations only.
    –
    “, there wasn’t even a clear definition of what time period was being considered;”
    –
    Hence the need for a simple pause definition.
    The problem with interpretation is that a pause is dated backwards from when it occurs.
    Hence if it is seen and persists the starting point of the pause [which is at the end] moves forwards. At the same time the pause can also extend back further in time as it lengthens if it has a downward continuing trend.
    –
    “global warming didn’t “pause”, at least not in the sense of it having done anything unusual,”
    –
    Short pauses occur all the time when an end point brings the trend over the preceding interval to zero [or flat]. They are a natural occurrence. Pauses of a week a month or 6 months can be found easily. They occur all through the temperature record documented from 1850 on. There are even periods of falls for years.
    Was this pause unusual?
    We just do not know. We can surmise, speculate,wish as much as we like but it will take 30 years minimum to actually know somewhat.

  16. angech,
    Commenting at Ken Rice’s blog is as sensible as pissing into a very strong wind… it just never works out very well.
    .
    I gave up on that echo chamber a long time ago. I do occasionally read a thread for the humor content in the many unhinged comments…. and in the fact they all (bizarrely!) believe draconian cuts in fossil fuel use are imminent, renewables will soon dominate, and most importantly, forced reductions in material wealth are certain to happen, and just around the corner.
    .
    OK, I stipulate that it is humor at a level not much above watching zoo monkeys throw $hit at each other, and equally ridiculous, but still worth a giggle once in a while.

  17. The pause is no doubt an example of a stochastic phenomena that would be applied additively to the secular trend in GMST due to GHGs. The exact nature of that random/cyclical variation is not, in my mind, well understood at this point. Empirically it can be shown that multi decadal variations exist in the GMST series and certainly the red noise in this series can have an additional effect. The lesson to be learned here is not whether GHG warming stopped but rather that there are important random longer term variations in the GMST series that should be taken into consideration when making estimates of the secular trend due to GHGs.

    I think the work that Nic Lewis and others are doing with climate sensitivity and comparing, as best they can, the sensitivities derived from models and observations is a better way of analyzing the modeled and observed climate. Lewis selects periods of time for his calculations from the observed GMST that mitigate the natural variations effects on his calculations. I have checked the validity of his method using a version of Empirical Mode Decomposition that can remove the white and red noise and remove multi decadal variations from the GMST series and leave a secular trend as a residual. The results I obtain are very close to those that Lewis derives.

    The secular trends, that I derive from the GMST series using the EMD method when using for GMST a combination of air surface temperatures (sat) for land and sea surface temperature for the oceans (SST), gives for the CMIP5 models during the historical period an ensemble mean trend that is close to that of the observed trend. Using the combination of sat and SST for the models makes the comparison with the observed more apples to apples than using sat for land and ocean. Now if we were to assume that the forcings and ocean heat content (OHC) have to be the same value for the observed and modeled GMST series it would lead to the same sensitivity values for the ensemble mean of the model (using the sat/SST combination) and the observed climates. Those equivalencies,however, do not exist for the calculations of sensitivities. The models have more heat going into the oceans and a lower forcing during the historical period than the those values used for the observed case. The feedback parameter, lambda, is a good indicator of the relative sensitivities of the observed and modeled cases and is equal to (delta F-delta N)/ delta T. The larger that value the less sensitive is the climate. In the case of the observed to modeled case the ratio of observed to modeled is nearly 2.

    I am hoping that Nic Lewis will do a blog post at Climate Etc. explaining in detail the differences in delta T , delta F and delta N that leads to the large difference in feedback parameters for the modeled and observed cases. I think such an post would be important for the layperson with some climate background to understand these differences and the importance of the differences.

  18. angech
    ** Hence the need for a simple pause definition.**

    There may be a need for a simple definition. However, the fact is, there is no single mutually agreed on definition for "the pause". By some definitions it existed; by others it did not.

    The recent paper is silly precisely because there is no single mutually agreed on definition. Under at least some definitions used by those people who *actually used the term* and claimed it was happening, "the pause" existed and still does. No amount of statistics can make that go away. (Showing it's not a "statisticially significant pause" doesn't make it "not a pause" since "statistically significant pause" and merely "pause" are not identical thing.

    I don't think global warming itself "paused" and never did think so. So I'm not remotely upset that someone else thinks it didn't pause.

    I haven't read the paper. But the abstract suggests they are going to be using the spread in the model temperature trends as a measure of 'weather noise". If so, that's not convincing on two counts:
    1) If they are using the spread in multi-model ensemble trends, they are including deterministic differences in mean projection from models as part of "weather" and it's just not. This always tends to inflate the spread above eather in an individual model.
    2) The "weather noise" in models is not necessarily that of earth, and moreover, they don't match each other.

    Nevertheless: I don't think global warming paused.

  19. lucia (Comment #172696)

    "If they are using the spread in multi-model ensemble trends, they are including deterministic differences in mean projection from models as part of "weather" and it's just not."

    Where there are mutiple runs for individual CMIP5 models it can be shown that there are statistically significant differences in trends between a number of individual models. I would think it better to use the noise from multiple runs of individual models to indicate natural variations.

  20. Kenneth,
    It would be better….and still might not be right. I haven't read the paper yet.

    The main thing right now is the el nino ended "the pause" for all practical purposes. So in some sense, who cares? If it resumes, then there will be something to talk about.

  21. I should have said:
    I would think it better to use the noise **derived** from multiple runs of individual models to indicate natural variations.

    In other words, look at trend variation in the multiple runs of individual models. An advantage of models is that many realizations of the same climate can be obtain whereas with the earth we have only one. I know model runs are expensive but I think modelers and the organizations for which they work should concentrate more on making a large number of runs with the same model. A single run model can tell you nothing about variation from realization to realization which makes comparison with a single earth realization tenuous to impossible.

  22. Kenneth,
    If we assume models correctly reproduce "weather", then the amount of "weather noise" should be obtained from multiple runs of the same model. Absolutely. The reason that estimate might not be right is the model might not correctly reproduce weather. Since the models appear to have different "weather" any estimate might be wrong.

    I definitely think anyone running a model should do several realizations from one model. I suspect the teams running models would agree. They just may not be able to do so for practical reasons (including running out of time before runs needed to be submitted.)

  23. Kenneth and lucia,

    It seems to me that one needs to define exactly what you mean by multiple runs of the same model. The last I heard, you could do a version of multiple runs from the same model spin-up by selecting different years from the stable phase for the starting date of forcing. IMO, that is not multiple runs. You would need to spin-up the model multiple times selecting a starting year at random from each spin-up to get something that might look more like independent runs of the same model. I still don't think that would really model real world weather noise, though.

  24. Dewitt,
    *you could do a version of multiple runs from the same model spin-up by selecting different years from the stable phase*
    Yes. This is how multiple runs are accomplished. In principle, the spin up has to be long enough to let the modelers have enough choice with start times that are spaced apart sufficiently wide to be uncorrelated with each other.

    This gets you multiple runs *of a model*. So at least you know "weather noise" *for that model*.

    It might not have the characteristics of earth weather. We only have 1 earth realization so the best one could do is test whether earth's noise falls outside a range of characteristics of "model noise".

    Because "model weather " might not be "earth weather", you can't necessarily test whether "the (earth) pause" was "statistically significant" using model weather. Of course, you can give a conclusion *contingent on the assumption model weather is earth weather*. That's ok– but one must forget it's a big assumption.

    I haven't read the paper and don't really know what question they were addressing. But, honestly, they can't "prove" the pause didn't happen because at least some people merely define "the pause" as a long period during which, if we compare temperature at the beginning to that at the end, the final temperature was about equal to the initial temperature. No statistics, monte carlo runs or ensembles of model runs are required to see whether that happened. Either it did or it didn't.

    If, instead, the people testing whether the "pause" occurred come up with their own definition of convenience, they are just testing a strawman. They are testing something *they* (who don't believe in or like 'the pause) decided to define it as– chosing the definition so they can "disprove". But they are "disproving" something that doesn' match what those those going on about "the pause" meant by the pause. So… oh….. well….

  25. DeWitt…
    to clarify: I don't think you need to run multiple spinups. All you need to do is estimate a time period that is sufficiently long that "weather" in period 1 is independent from "weather" in period 1.

    That's what one does with experimental data. One can argue about how to find that time– but in turbulence at least, one can define an "integral time scale" and space samples some multiple of integral time scales apart and people think that's good enough for many studies.

    (Yeah… you can turn your test rig off and on again and redo collecting only 1 data point each time you re-run. But no one requires it for ME, AERO E or other types of studies so it would be a bit much to insist climate people have to do that.)

  26. Lucia
    "Nevertheless: I don't think global warming paused.
    The main thing right now is the el nino ended "the pause" for all practical purposes. So in some sense, who cares?
    I don't think global warming itself "paused" and never did think so."
    That global warming "itself" is the saving grace.
    Certainly in the sense that one of the putative conditions for some ongoing increasing global warming, that is increasing CO2, exists, you are right.
    As you say definition is very important re a pause in observational data.
    Hence the contortions some people go through to undefine the mathematically obvious data pause. Unlike SteveF I do not find it humorous, just sad that bright people are forced to delude themselves that data did not pause when it did.

  27. angech,
    There are people contorting themselves over details (what is *really* a pause and what is not), but the overarching and constant delusions are: the fantacy that the world will rapidly stop the use of fossil fuels in a few decades, the demand that nuclear be ignored and everything be based on wind and solar, and most of all, that there is going to be climate/social “justice” (uniform poverty a la Cuba) forced upon an unwilling world. Rather than facing reality, and trying to work withing the realm of the politically possible, they are lost in the leftist lunacy weeds, with no obvious path out. It is not just that they are ridiculous (like monkeys hurling $hit at each other), they are wasting their own time and, worse, politically inhibiting obvious technological paths to reduce future CO2 emissions. Like research on failsafe nuclear, rapid installation of current technology nuclear, research on extending battery lifetime, etc. It it a leftist political site, nothing more.

  29. just getting my good wishes in early, in case I forget/to busy –

    Merry Xmas & a Happy New Year Lucia & all at the blog.

  30. Merry Christmas Lucia–and to all the regulars here. Wish I had more time to participate in these discussions. But it looks like you're carrying on just fine without me!

    All the best

    Tom

  31. Thomas Fuller,
    .
    A merry Christmas and happy new year to you and yours. Perhaps 2019 will be the year of, as Winston said, ‘the end of the beginning’ of the climate wars. I retain some hope that compromise, and sensible policies consistent with compromise, will ultimately prevail over both delusions and fantacies. I have no certainty, only hope.

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