Omniclimate- The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE is moving
This is the link to the new home of “Omniclimate- The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE“.
The old site will remain up and running.
What The HadCRUT4 Update Means
Building up on Paul Penrose’s comment at JS:
How is this news if the results are not statistically significant? Or do people not know what that means? Once you take that into account what they are saying is: News flash – global temperature has not increased since 1998!
Actually, the news flash should be that, since 1998:
- Global temperature has not increased in any meaningful manner
- Northern Hemisphere temperature has not increased at all (some bits of the Arctic aside)
- At most we could talk of an Arctic, not Global Warming
- All of the above, despite all the continuous fudging and cooling of the past
Once again…Whatever Arctic warming there’s been, it’s also been inconsequential. And if HadCRUT4 doesn’t kill Global Warming, it certainly helps putting it in the right place..
A Sea-Surface Miracle!
Overlong “On the adjustments to the HadSST3 data set” blog post just out (after a few technical glitches) at Judith Curry’s comes to a conclusion that aounds like yet another climate-related miracle…
HadSST3 selectively removes the majority of the long term variations from the pre-1960 part of the record. ie. it removes the majority of the climate variation…
…that cannot be attributed to anthropogenic global warming!
How unexpected!
Two Matters Of Logic (And Timewasting Avoidance)
A couple of timewasting avoidance schemes when dealing with anti-skeptic Defenders of the Faith in Science:
(1) The Congealed Minds
Some people pop up in skeptic blogs commenting in a way similar to swashbuckling (or marauding), making statements such as “I believe the scientists doing the research are a much better judge of that than you are“.
That’s a very good sign that we’re dealing with people who:
- Worship mainstream scientific literature
- Are willing mouthpieces of somebody else
- Routinely misrepresent science as an organically growing process where past interpretations are cast in stone
- Act like those philosophers who would reply to Galileo continuously quoting Aristotle and the Aristotelians, rather than accept to reason by themselves
The only question to ask them is: Is there anything anybody could ever say, show, write, demonstrate, ask or explain in a blog or comment to a blog, that will make you change your mind?
The answer will of course be “No”. Therefore there is no point debating with them.
(2) The Deferrers
Another common anti-skeptic tactic is to invoke some Higher Authority, eg: “I won’t presume to substitute my non-professional judgment for that of someone who’s dedicated his career to a pursuit of unbiased scientific knowledge, just as I wouldn’t substitute my judgment for that of an oncologist or a neurologist treating myself or someone close to me“.
That’s a completely meaningless statement, because it is supremely illogical. If a person defers judgment to somebody else, obviously what that person writes has no value at all: we should always be looking for the opinion of “somebody else”. Anybody arguing “don’t listen to me, listen to somebody else” is a prisoner of twisted logic, as the first part of that sentence negates the second one. Therefore there is no point debating with them.
Here’s Why Mann Is So Bothered About His “Enemies”
“Much of the contents of [Mann’s] book is old news“, according to Peter Gleick. In fact, an entire day spent at a website owned by somebody who interviewed the Man, has turned out nothing more than statements accompanied by “that’s nothing new” and “for those buried in the intellectual wastes of the Murdoch media – it will be brand new territory“.
IOW the general consensus appears to be that there is nothing in Mann’s book that has not already been mentioned, described or referred to somewhere on the web (and, I suspect, in the Climategate emails). Somebody tried to make the point that, according to agiographers, Mann’s book contains enough “to spark a dozen Master’s theses“. But that is not the point.
The point is, what would one find in Mann’s book that is nowhere else? Who knows…an insight, a revealing detail, whatever, anything as long as it is new. There has to be a reason to buy and then read the book, right?
According to Mann’s own supporters, the answers to those questions are still “nothing” and “none”. Well, no wonder Mann is ever so bothered about his enemies…with friends like Mann’s, no one needs enemies!
Threatener In Chief
There are 2,830 hits for @BBCRBlack on the BBC News site. Of them, 785 include the words “threat” or “threaten”.
That’s 28%.
Environment reporting is a subset of professionalised scare.
Terrible Ski World Cup Images Confirm Dangers Of Global Warming
THIS IS The #Climate Question
Everything else, is a corollary….
From Bishop Hill’s “Nobel laureate on temperatures” (Feb 2012):
The question is not whether temperatures have risen or whether mankind has affected the climate. Temperatures have always risen and fallen and mankind has always affected the climate. The question is whether we have a problem on our hands. The poor performance of the climate models suggests that the problem is much less than we have been led to believe.
Perspective Amiss At @AmSciMag
Summary of the latest email edition of “Science In The News Weekly“, “a digest of science news stories appearing in the mainstream media. It is delivered every Monday afternoon (or Tuesday afternoon in the case of a Monday holiday) as part of Sigma Xi’s public understanding of science program area, in conjunction with American Scientist magazine”
Science-y news
Another science-y news
Yet another science-y news
World to end(*)
More science-y news
More more science-y news
In particular the (*) bit is of the form:
Scientists say that if carbon dioxide emissions don’t begin to decline soon, the complex fabric of marine ecosystems will begin fraying–and eventually unravel completely.
Evidently reason takes a momentary leave of absence at American Scientist like in many other places, whenever carbon dioxide is mentioned.
BTW the link is to the study that used naturally-occurring CO2 seeps to try to figure out what might happen in 2100, an impressive collection of “might’s” if you ask me.
A Crickey Mystery About #Gleickgate
On Feb 20 Crikey.com came out with an interesting announcement:
Crikey understands The New York Times will tomorrow reveal the identity of Heartland’s “Anonymous Donor”, an individual who has donated $13.7 million to the Heartland Institute since 2007 and at times has provided 60% of the institute’s funding.
The page says (in the code) it’s been published 2012-02-20T13:11:12+1100
Now as we know, the NYT has published nothing of the sort…actually, Gleick confessed sometimes around midnight GMT between Feb 20 and Feb 21, a little less than 24 hours later.
I wonder if this missed announcement has anything to do with Gleick being forced to reveal himself as the Gleickgate perp. BTW make sure you don’t miss out this thread at Climate Audit.
Is Thickness of Mind Mandatory To Become A Distinguished Climate Scientist?
My answer is of course “not”. However, there are some worrying signs. A guy in East Anglia is unable to use Excel, a bunch of guys from the US and elsewhere don’t know how to use Acrobat.
No wonder they haven’t got a clue where their missing heat has gone to. And no wonder they are foreign to the scientific method.
Nothing New About Fudging – Mass Delusions Among Scientists
I’m sure nowadays the NYT would not even mention such a book as Alexander Kohn’s “FALSE PROPHETS“, if it said anything about climate science:
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
By John Gross
Published: December 30, 1986
[…] Deceptions as blatant as this are -as far as anyone can tell – rare in the annals of science, but they represent only one end of a broad spectrum of possible scientific cheating. At the other extreme are errors that are at least partly the product of wishful thinking or a failure to guard against bias; in between come numerous gradations of what the Victorian scientist Charles Babbage classified as ”trimming” and ”cooking” (manipulating the data, suppressing inconvenient facts), along with plagiarism, making bogus claims about the probable course of research and the more subtle varieties of Babbage’s third category of misconduct, outright ”forging.”
[…] here are errors, as Mr. Kohn says, that ”are nothing to be ashamed of,” and he begins by considering some examples – in particular, those cases of collective error where a scientist’s initial mistake has been taken up and repeated by other scientists until it assumes the proportions of a mass delusion.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, for instance, some 500 publications in reputable quarters were devoted to the phenomenon of ”mitogenetic rays” – ultraviolet rays that were erroneously thought to be emitted by plant or animal cells while they were dividing. Mr. Kohn observes that ”mythogenetic rays” might have been a better name; but he also tries to account for what it was that predisposed so many scientists to believe in them, and in subsequent mirages such as ”polywater” (a supposedly anomalous form of water – one eminent authority, J. D. Bernal, referred to it as ”the most important physical chemical discovery of the century”) and ”scotophobin” (a substance said to induce fear of darkness in rats). […]
As I already said, this stuff should be mandatory reading in all science schools.
Open Letter To Heartland From The Don’t-Do-As-We-Do Climate Team
I’ll believe the sincerity of the Open Letter to the Heartland Institute when, say,
- Mann’s twitter account will display a little less bile and won’t say incredibly stupid stuff like “[Climategate] was a crime against humanity. It’s a crime against the planet“
- Schmidt will allow discussion on RealClimate, instead of focusing on “simply deleting all of the attempts to draw attention to [whatever he dislikes to talk about]“
- Overpeck will come clean on the trouble of normalizing proxy reconstruction in a misleading way for policy makers
- Dear Kev will explain why Wolfgang Wagner had to apologize to him of all people, when resigning about publishing a paper that wasn’t retracted;
- Santer will clarify how exactly to tell the “human fingerprint” in global warming
- Karoly will apologize about personally attacking a climate scientist himself
- Bradley will clarify why he kept his concerns very private on a very public HS matter
After all, these are climate scientists that keep writing the patently-untrue, such as passing as “fact” this total fantasy
Climate change is already disrupting many human and natural systems.
that is contrary to the latest IPCC assessment.
No surprise there.
Venus: Stranger Than We Thought
Until now, there were many strange things already about Venus. Now, there is one more, with possible climate implications. From ESA’s Venus Express: Could Venus be shifting gear?
[…] ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has discovered that our cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured. […] Over its four-year mission, Magellan was able to watch features rotate under the spacecraft, allowing scientists to determine the length of the day on Venus as being equal to 243.0185 Earth days. . However, surface features seen by Venus Express some 16 years later could only be lined up with those observed by Magellan if the length of the Venus day is on average 6.5 minutes longer than Magellan measured. […]
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that 6.5 minutes in 16 years translates in 1.56 watt per hour on each square meter of Venus’ surface, if all the rotational energy is converted into heat (I couldn’t double-check the results though). If this process is cumulative, it will certainly have huge consequences.
The First Ever Climate Change Reporter (And Skeptic)
Who was the first one to write about climate change? For a while I thought I had found the most ancient reference in world literature: Lorenzo Magalotti in 1683 (referred to by Giacomo Leopardi in 1832)
[One and a half centuries ago Magalotti wrote] in the Family Letters: “It is certain that seasons’ natural order is worsening. Here in Italy it is common saying and lamentation that the half-seasons have disappeared; and in this confusion, it’s without doubt that the cold is advancing. I have heard my father that in his youth, in Rome, on the morning of Easter Sunday, everybody would change into summer clothes. Nowadays whoever can afford not to sell his shirt, I can tell you he’s very careful not to abandon any winter piece of clothing”. This is what Magalotti wrote in 1683.
Then Tony Brown and WUWT found something even more remote: Saint “Cyrian” (actually, Saint Cyprian) from around 250AD
The world has grown old and does not remain in its former vigour. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the suns warmth are both diminishing. The metals are nearly exhausted the husbandman is failing in his fields. Springs which once gushed forth liberally now barely give a trickle of water.’
I can happily report we can push the date a couple of centuries further back, by referring to “De re rustica” (“Agriculture“) by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (around AD40-50). From Book 1, 1:4-5:
[…] I have found that many authorities now worthy of remembrance were convinced that with the long wasting of the ages, weather and climate undergo a change; and that among them the most learned professional astronomer, Hipparchus, has put it on record that the time will come when the poles will change position, a statement to which Saserna, no mean authority on husbandry, seems to have given credence. For in that book on agriculture which he has left behind he concludes that the position of the heavens had changed from this evidence: that regions which formerly, because of the unremitting severity of winter, could not safeguard any shoot of the vine or the olive planted in them, now that the earlier coldness has abated and the weather is becoming more clement, produce olive harvests and the vintages of Bacchus in the greatest abundance. But whether this theory be true or false, we must leave it to the writings on astronomy […]
Note how little has changed, with Authorities convinced the climate is changing, and the unconvinced agriculture expert…
(h/t Fabio Spina and Climatemonitor.it – Google English translation)
Missing Heat 3 – Implications For Policymaking
Trenberth’s “missing heat” should be a problem of physics, only it’s handled by amateur homeo-climate-paths.
Actually, it’s much more than a problem of physics. It has vast policy implications.
If models are not useful in a decadal timescale, such as they can predict a strong warming for a period of minimal or even no warning, then what use is there for models? What government (apart from North Korea…) would make it difficult for people to heat up their homes in the next decade with the explanation that is going to be warm in 2070 anyway?
People do not average-out their lives across decades or centuries: each and every one of us have to go through each and every day first.
If I freeze to death today at -10C, I will not enjoy the warmth of July at +30C even if the average is +10C, perfectly compatible with human life. The same can be said of plants and animals. If I plant an olive tree in my London garden, it will die of cold in February even if the yearly average is in theory just enough to make olive trees survive in the open. If a nasty mosquito species migrates from warmer places during an August heatwave, still if that species cannot survive the following winter it will not be around until next migration opportunity during a future heatwave.
A purely statistical, multi-year approach to modelling the climate is in theory useless for policymaking (similar considerations could be made for non-regional projections, but that is too long a story here – read “How Space-Time Digested AGW” if interested). And if we end up with 15 years of incorrect projections without even a volcano for an excuse, then whatever physical explanation there is, policymakers would be much wiser in keeping climate scientists at arm’s length.
Missing Heat 2 – The Climate Coincidence Revisited
The Missing Heat of homeo-climate-path Kevin Trenberth is not just a matter of increasing the number of measurement points. Something else is…amiss.
As noticed by David Whitehouse of the GWPF for quite some time (my emphasis):
In the past decade the atmospheric CO2 levels have increased from 370 ppm to 390 ppm and using those figure the IPCC once estimated that the world should have warmed by at least 0.2 deg C. The fact that the world has not warmed at all means that all the other climatic factors have had a net effect of producing 0.2 deg C of cooling.
But there is more. The counterbalancing climatic factors have not only compensated for the postulated AGW at the end of the decade they have kept the global annual average temperature constant throughout the past 10-15 years when the AGW effect wants to increase it. The key point that makes this constancy fascinating is that for every value of CO2 there is an equilibrium temperature that is higher the greater the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. In other words, the higher CO2 concentration at the end of the decade exerts a stronger climate forcing than at the beginning of the decade.
This makes what has happened in the past decade all the more remarkable. Because the greenhouse effect wants to force the temperature up which in the absence of a cooling influence is what would have happened, the fact that the temperature has remained constant indicates that whatever has been cooling the planet has had to increase in strength at precisely the same rate as the CO2 warming in order to keep the temperature a constant straight line.
This means that for 10-15 years the combined effect of all the Earth’s climate variability factors have increased in such a way as to exactly compensate for the rise in temperature that the increased CO2 would have given us. It is not a question of the earth’s decadal climate cycles adding up to produce a constant cooling effect, they must produce an increasing cooling effect that increases in strength at exactly the same rate as the enhanced greenhouse effect so as to keep the earth’s temperature constant.
Can it really be the case that over the past 15 years the sum total of all the earth’s natural climatic variables such as changes in solar irradiance, volcanoes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the Arctic Oscillation, all of which can change from cooling to warming over decadal timescales, have behaved in such as way as to produce a cooling effect that is the mirror image of the warming postulated by the anthropogenic climate forcings from CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, from the changing water vapour, from tropospheric ozone, and from a clearing aerosol burden?
This can be visualized as following. Imagine there is a quantity ExpT that can be computed beforehand (x(t)=x(t-1)+0.1) (blue in the graph). Consider also the actual measured MeasT values (y(t)=0.5*rand()) (red). Fix x(0)=y(0)=1 and plot their evolution (and divergence).
Now, of course DiffT=y(t)-x(t) (yellow) becomes increasingly larger as x(t) increases whilst y(t) hovers around 0.5. A centered running 5-point average AvgDiff5Cent (green) will mimic ExpT, entering progressively more negative territories. In fact the correlation between AvgDiff5Cent and ExpT is for all intents and purposes, one.
So if ExpT is going up because of CO2 emissions, what kind of magic is intervening to generate the AvgDiff5Cent counterforcing so that the total is zero on a decadal timescale? (And yes, the small small small amount of warming actually reported should obviously be taken as close to undetectable, ie zero).
Even if we had perfect 100% coverage of the whole planet, this question would remain open.
I’m sure Kevin “saying it is natural variability is not an explanation” Trenberth understands this point. It’s a case of missing physics, more than heat.
(Just noticed Judith Curry has hit on the same nail – great minds really think alike 🙂 )
Missing Higgs vs Missing Heat: When Trenberth Is Stranger To Physics
The below elucidates Dr Ivar Giaever’s question about the American Physical Society (APS) attitude to global warming, at the time of his resignation:
In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?
In a sentence, the APS’s behavior is perfectly consistent: because Physics goes one way, whilst Climate “Science” goes another. Trenberth, we have a problem.
Water Boiling-Point Deniers
According to basic physics bread cakes and bricks don’t exist.
The water in the mix boils at 100C so when the oven door is opened only the original powdery substances will remain. This is based on elementary physics discovered by Ur-Arrhenius in the XX millennium BC.
The consensus is multiversal and if you eat bread or cake you’re a water boiling-point denier.
If you eat bricks you’re instead a dentist’s dream client.
Lights Off Upstairs At Skeptical Science
That’s the only explanation for SkS to tweet about “Doonesbury cartoon on climate deniers http://bit.ly/xNSUsx“.
Here’s the strip:
Obviously, John Cook and friends are completely unaware of a few things about their own site:
- It’s built to reach out to climate newbies
- It’s where believers in (catastrophic) anthropogenic climate change go in desperate search of “evidence” to “support their position”
- It’s the one site sporting the belief “everyone is entitled” to read a single set of “facts” as determined by John Cook and friends
- It sports thousands of “facts”
It all looks like a heroic case of irony failure. Unless Doonesbury is so clever as to subtly indicate where the denial of science actually is…at Skeptical Science, of course.
The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE 