Split from Aug FT meeting: Yet another Global Warming thread

[Hogeye]

Sav, the graph you provided doesn't seem to contradict what Dr. Ball said, since CFCs were around long before 1980. Furthermore, most of the decline has occured since the Montreal Protocol, when one would expect it (after some lag) to start increasing again if CFCs were causing it. I'd be more convinced by a graph showing CFC emissions and anarctic ozone levels (in lagged lockstep.)

Perhaps Dr. Ball would have given a more detailed explanation of dissociation if he weren't addressing laymen.

[Savonarola]

Sav, the graph you provided doesn't seem to contradict what Dr. Ball said, since CFCs were around long before 1980.

Well gee Hogeye, I didn't feel like sinking lots of time into looking for graphs, since it's plain to see that I have other legitimate reasons to doubt Ball's authority (the most important of which you don't respond to). If you'd like to find some graphs showing ozone levels since the 1950s, be my guest. Regardless, these graphs show that the levels are lower now than they were around 1980, so in order for the current levels to be the same as pre-CFC levels, the 1980 levels would have to be higher than the pre-CFC levels. Can you provide graphs showing this to be the case? Can you counter the claim that "before 1980 ozone less than 200 Dobson units was rarely seen [in the Antarctic]"?

Perhaps Dr. Ball would have given a more detailed explanation of dissociation if he weren't addressing laymen.

It's not that Dr. Ball's explanation of the reaction mechanism lacked details, it's that his explanation was simply wrong by any reasonable reading. Again, even if you give him the benefit of the doubt, he did a lousy job of explaining it. I'm not a climatologist with a vested interest in understanding how ozone is synthesized in the stratosphere, yet I provided a perfectly accurate and perfectly understandable -- even to the layman -- explanation of how the reaction proceeds.

[Dardedar]

Sounds like transference to me. I understand the gist of it. I'm amazed that someone calling himself a freethinker is saying to blindly believe authorities rather than trust your own brain.

DAR
We do it all the time. When I go on an airplane I am trusting the pilot who is a trained expert operating a very complicated piece of machinery. Climatology is extremely complex and I have zero training and competence. But I do have a very well tuned bullshit detector and nearly all of your sources set it off bigtime (like the Oregon Petition you passed along and then defended). An armchair layman who gets "the gist of it" is EXACTLY who this Global Warming denier PR stunt is put together for. Creationists operate in the same way. If Ball has good scientific information that our GW science is all wrong, then there are channels for him to provide this exposition. Ball hasn't published anything in 15 years. Why is that? Why does he take his show, bashing the mainstream science position, on the road doing his show for the layman if his information is strong enough to hold up under peer review? Why doesn't he do both? This is why:

"None of them ever come to our scientific conferences. They know they would be laughed out of the building. The stuff they say, some of it is so nonsensical it's hardly worth discussing."

Again, the correlation to creationists and how they operate is clear.

Regarding the NAS panel report, here's what the panel actually wrote: There is "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years."

DAR
Why do you resort to such word games? You are stuffing straw since know one says there is the same "high level of confidence" for one thousands years ago as there is for the last 400. The representatives of the panel at the news conference said "probable."

Rather than taking the word of seething partisans.

DAR
Are you suggesting I shouldn't take your word? Of all the seething partisans on your side, and they are legion, you are quite the seether. And we see this all the time. When crackpots can't win by playing within the rules and the proper double checks of science, they take their show on the road in a PR campaign. And now we see your guys exposed as using the same group to make front groups as the tobacco companies used.
But lets cut to the chase here. You aren't fighting for this junk because there is good science involved. I tried to get you to admit this before but I got distracted and let you duck out of it. Richard Howe Ph. D., young earth creationist, and big fan of Coulter and Limbaugh etc., let it slip plainly in a recent letter to the editor:

"The reason some people are so eager to embrace the news of global warming is that it seemingly gives a scientific impetus for more government control over individual lives."

This is your worst fear. If we really have shit the bed with GW, as it seems we have, and are reaching a tipping point of profound proportions, it will take a large governmentally organized effort to address it. Anarchy doesn't give a flip about a bigger picture. You can't have that because people coming together enmass to solve a problem is anathema to your anarchy beliefs.

I haven't the slighest interest in "the government having more control over individual lives" (that's the RW's boogie man) and the idea that 99.9% of the climatologists have this as their motive (over good science) is just inconceivable.

Hmmm - seems the well-poisoners are taking a degree/radians error in a different paper by McKitrick and claiming that proves everything he did is wrong. Duh.

DAR
I can't let this classic bit of distortion go without another boot.

The degree/radians error was in a/the main paper going after Mann, so it is pertinent. Is it the exact same one? I don't know. I understand McKitrick has had to tweak/revise his arguments many times because he keeps getting the smackdown from scientists who have training in climatology. This mistake was important enought that:

"Consequently, every single number he calculates is wrong.

Perhaps that doesn't rate as important? And the punchline was that this was after four years of the tighest peer review? And who provided this peer reveiw? M & M's little hand picked GW denier group which later pretty much disbanded after a few more howling mistakes.

And it was much more than you can dismiss with a "Duh." Again:

"If you’re new here: In previous postings on Ross McKitrick I have shown how he messed up an analysis of the number of weather stations,

showed he knew almost nothing about climate,

flunked basic thermodynamics,

couldn’t handle missing values correctly

and invented his own temperature scale."

This is pertinent background information that speaks directly to the breathtaking INCOMPENTENCE of the main expert you are asking me (non-expert) to have faith in. That's bloody ridiculous.

D.

[Hogeye]

Let's look at the list of McKitrick errors.

1. He made a programming error (as every programmer in the world has done) - he thought that the language's sin function used degrees instead of radians. He acknowleged the error and corrected it on his own site, as Darrel shows with the link. If anything, this enhances McKitrick's credibility.

2. Lambert misses McKitrick's point about "global temperature" - that it is not a real existing thing but an average. Thus Lambert is basically agreeing with McKittrick (rather than finding an error) when he writes, "Average temperature has a real, physical meaning." McKitrick of course doesn't deny that "average" has meaning. This is easy to see if you download and read the paper (PDF) in question. Lambert then creates a strawman, saying that McKitrick claimed "that the warming in 90’s might have been caused by the decline in the number of stations." McKitrick merely claimed that the measurements are inaccurate, and warns that "confident assertions are routinely made about ‘changes in the global temperature’ on the order of tenths of a degree C per decade. The confidence masks pervasive uncertainty in the underlying concepts and data quality."

3. Grumbine (unlike Lambert) doesn't even tell what McKitrick paper he's talking about, so we have no idea of the context, let alone McKitrick's claims (if any). For all we know, the alleged writing showing a "correlation between money and warming" was a satire of global warming alarmist papers. Who knows?

4. A repeat of #2, where McKitrick correctly points out that there is no single global temperature and Lambert misinterprets this to be a claim that "average global temperature" has no meaning.

5. Yet another repeat of #2, with another strawman: "Essex and McKitrick claim that physics provides no basis for defining average temperature." But no quote from the Essex and McKitrick book is given to support the strawman; on the contrary the quote given simply points out the fact there there are different ways to average, e.g. the arithmetic and geometric mean. To be fair, Lambert does point out non-standard handling of missing data.

Of course, none of this says anything about whether Mann's hockey stick theory is right or wrong, or refutes the errors found in it. Basically, it's simply attempting to poison the well by dissing McKitrick, a transparent attempt to divert attention from criticism of Mann's papers. Note that none of the papers cited were the pertinent one about Mann98, but instead were miscellaneous writings by McKitrick. Thus, even if these were errors, that does not repair or refute the errors M&M found in Mann98&99. It's just an attempt to kill the messenger.

[Dardedar]

Let's look at the list of McKitrick errors.

1. He made a programming error (as every programmer in the world has done) - he thought that the language's sin function used degrees instead of radians. He acknowleged the error and corrected it on his own site, as Darrel shows with the link. If anything, this enhances McKitrick's credibility.

DAR
You forgot to mention that this glarring error existed "After four years of one of the most rigorous peer reviews ever,..."
Peer review provided by M & M's caliber of non-specialist. Or as the link puts it:

"Somehow these errors were not detected during the “four years of one of the most rigorous peer reviews ever”. Nor did peer review by Climate Research detect the problems. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the peer review process at Climate Research has failed. Last year, several of the editors resigned after another defective paper slipped through peer review. Oddly enough, that paper also attempted to cast doubt on anthropogenic global warming."

On and on the circus goes. These fellows aren't taken seriously except in the PR lecture circuit. If they want to be taken seriously they need to engage in the science, not pandering to the uninformed public like the creationists do. To quote:

"Ross Gelbspan, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor whose 1997 book, "The Heat is On," details industry efforts to discredit climate change science...

"The contradictory statements of a tiny handful of discredited scientists, funded by big coal and big oil, represent a deliberate -- and extremely reckless -- campaign of deception and disinformation."

2. Lambert misses McKitrick's point about "global temperature" - that it is not a real existing thing but an average. Thus Lambert is basically agreeing with McKittrick (rather than finding an error) when he writes, "Average temperature has a real, physical meaning."

DAR
I was going to quote some bits from this link, but what's the point? People can read it for themselves. I can't imagine anyone being fooled by your mischaracterizations but if they are, there is nothing I can do to help them.

On to better things.

D.

[Dardedar]

Of course, none of this says anything about whether Mann's hockey stick theory is right or wrong,

DAR
I already took care of that sometime ago.



"This image is a comparison of 10 different published reconstructions of mean temperature changes during the last 1000 years. More recent reconstructions are plotted towards the front and in redder colors, older reconstructions appear towards the back and in bluer colors. An instrumental history of temperature is also shown in black. The medieval warm period and little ice age are labeled at roughly the times when they are historically believed to occur, though it is still disputed whether these were truly global or only regional events. The single, unsmoothed annual value for 2004 is also shown for comparison. (Image:Instrumental Temperature Record.png shows how 2004 relates to other recent years).

It is unknown which, if any, of these reconstructions is an accurate representation of climate history; however, these curves are a fair representation of the range of results appearing in the published scientific literature. Hence, it is likely that such reconstructions, accurate or not, will play a significant role in the ongoing discussions of global climate change and global warming."

See the specific references for the ten different studies HERE

DAR
My latest issue of Scientific American has a little article on this latest vindication of the Hockey Stick. The Headline is: "Support for the Stick". Perhaps everyone has reading comprehension problems except for you? Could that be it?

Basically, it's simply attempting to poison the well by dissing McKitrick, a transparent attempt to divert attention from criticism of Mann's papers.

DAR
No, Lambert's response is a direct roast of McKitrick criticisms of Mann's papers. And he makes McKitrick look like a fool. And I am glad he took the time to do it. Mann no doubt has real science to do, in his area of expertise.

Note that none of the papers cited were the pertinent one about Mann98, but instead were miscellaneous writings by McKitrick.

DAR
That's just false. #1 was a paper written by McKitrick, directed at Mann, and demonstrated that every number McKitrick calculated, in his paper which went under four years of extensive (rightwing) peer-review, was wrong. How can anyone trust you to get the important complex details right when you can't the really basic stuff straight?

Thus, even if these were errors,...

DAR
Even if they were errors? Notice how even when the person Hogeye defends ADMITS the errors, hogeye still pretends there is some doubt. Classic GW skeptic strategy.

that does not repair or refute the errors M&M found in Mann98&99.

DAR
Mann did have some errors, as have been admitted long ago. But they were found to be insignificant to the main points and he has been vindicated in by an extensive panel put together by the National Research Council. Get over it.

It's just an attempt to kill the messenger.

DAR
Your M & M messengers are dead, from multiple wounds. This latest vindication for Mann sunk them. All graphs of historical temperature look like hockey sticks and the blade on the right keeps climbing higher as we speak.

D.
-----------------------------
More on the Friends of Science:

A Globe and Mail feature article by Charles Montgomery today has delivered what should be a death blow for the climate change denial and anti-Kyoto attack group, the Friends of Science.

The G&M says that FOS has taken undisclosed sums from Alberta oil and gas interests. The money was funneled through the Calgary Foundation, to the University of Calgary and on to the FOS though something called the “Science Education Fund.”

All this appears to be orchestrated by Stephen Harper’s long-time political confidante and fishing buddy, U. Calgary Prof Dr. Barry Cooper. It seems the FOS has taken a page right out of the US climate change attack group’s playbook: funnel money through foundations and third party groups to “wipe the oil” off the dollars they receive.

This comes as no surprise considering the FOS has been linked to some of the most notorious oil money-backed scientists in the US, including Drs. S. Fred Singer, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood Idso, Willie Soon, Robert C. Balling and Pat Michaels.

LINK

BONUS:

* every year since 1992 has been warmer than 1992
* the ten hottest years on record occured in the last 15
* every year since 1976 has been warmer than 1976
* the 20 hottest years on record occured in the last 25
* every year since 1956 has been warmer than 1956
* every year since 1917 has been warmer than 1917

[Hogeye]

Contrary to Darrel's spin, this graph supports my position: the climate was approximately as warm (or warmer) during the MWP as it is today. Every single one of the climate indicators clearly show this. The one non-climate indicator (the 1-year temperature average) does not, but of course that is a short-term thing and not an indicator of climate. Climate indicators such as ice bores don't show short-term amplitude swings.

The "trick" that confuses some people is the implied equivocation between 1-year temperature averages and climate. For what it's worth: the one-year average peaked 1998 and has gone down since then. (And all this is going by the rather dubious averaging process, biased toward urban areas, taking water instead of air temps over oceans, etc. etc. See this.)

My latest issue of Scientific American has a little article on this latest vindication of the Hockey Stick. The Headline is: "Support for the Stick".

Again, you want to quote reporters giving their spin rather than the actual words in the NAS panel report. As we've seen, the report said only the last 400 years.

Lambert's response is a direct roast of McKitrick criticisms of Mann's papers.

You are mistaken. Lambert and I linked to the McKitrick paper in question. It was called, "An Economist’s Perspective on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol." This is not the same as the (in)famous McIntyre and McKitrick 2003 paper entitled, "Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series."

Notice how even when the person Hogeye defends ADMITS the errors, hogeye still pretends there is some doubt.

Even if M&M were mistaken on one of their points, they found numerous errors in MBH98. And it is unclear which paper (if any) the programming error was made in - the context is missing. For all we know, it was some misc. class project and not a paper at all.

[Dardedar]

My latest issue of Scientific American has a little article on this latest vindication of the Hockey Stick. The Headline is: "Support for the Stick".

Again, you want to quote reporters giving their spin rather than the actual words in the NAS panel report. As we've seen, the report said only the last 400 years.

DAR
Just as I suspected, everyone DOES have reading comprehension problems except for you. So lets quote the "actual words in the NAS panel report":

"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes the additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and documentation of the spatial coherence of recent warming described above (Cook et al. 2004, Moberg et al. 2005, Rutherford et al. 2005, D’Arrigo et al. 2006, Osborn and Briffa 2006, Wahl and Ammann in press), and also the pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators described in previous chapters (e.g., Thompson et al. in press). Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium." pg. 109

As anyone who can read plain english can see, the last sentence flatly refutes your claim: "So, it turns out that the NAS panel agrees more with M&M2003 than with Mann98."

As one person noted in a comment section:

"...the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.[emphasis added]" Plausible? That's not a very strong word. In IPCC-probability terms it must rank well below 'likely' (66-90% probable) and I guess even below 'medium likelihood' (33-66% probable). Hardly a ringing endorsement - which I think is a shame, because as the posting says, the basic conclusion of unprecedented global warming during the millennium is supported by a whole raft of other studies. Again, my feeling is that there's a lot more politics here than science.

(Response:According to the statements in the press conference, they chose 'plausible' becuase they didn't want to quantify likelihood a la IPCC, but I would read it as equivalent to 'likely', which is of course what MBH said all along. - gavin)

Bold mine.

Lambert's response is a direct roast of McKitrick criticisms of Mann's papers.

HOG
You are mistaken.

DAR
No, you are mistaken. You said the paper in question:

"were miscellaneous writings by McKitrick."

This was misleading. My comment "Lambert's response is a direct roast of McKitrick criticisms of Mann's papers" is entirely true. I see two possiblities. You didn't read the paper in question. You didn't understand the paper in question. Or, perhaps you are having trouble with: "Lambert's response is a direct roast of McKitrick criticisms of Mann's papers". I just read it. It references Mann seven times and is certainly a criticism of Mann's papers. Lambert dismantles it and shows McKitrick to be a fool, so it is quite pertinent for me to reference it in this context.

Interesting to see McKitrick admits he wasted his time:

"I have an unexpected familiarity with Mann’s work now, having misspent my fall sabbatical on a research project with Steve McIntyre on the subject (McIntyre and McKitrick 2003)."

Perhaps he was being ironic.

Notice how even when the person Hogeye defends ADMITS the errors, hogeye still pretends there is some doubt.

Even if M&M were mistaken on one of their points,

DAR
What do you mean "even if"? There is no even if. Perhaps this person's explanation of the radian problem will help:

***

Quote:
Originally Posted by hugo
Wow, so we have an internet blogger arguing McKitrick made an error. Any confirmation from a respectable source?>>

Don't take Lambert's word for this. Follow the links he provided and see for yourself. If you have some very basic mathematical and computer skills, the problem will jump right out at you.

1) Look at the SHAZAM software documentation (used by McKitrick; link supplied by Lambert). You will see this: SIN(x) sine (x measured in radians)

2) Download the data file "gdptemp03.dif" from McKitrick's web-site (link supplied by Lambert). Open it with a text editor (emacs, vi, whatever) and poke around a bit. You will see that the latitude values are expressed in degrees.

3) Download McKitric's executable SHAZAM script file "gsmod.txt" (again, link supplied by Lambert) and use your favorite text editor to look at it. The problem will be obvious.

First, McKitric reads the data file containing the latitude values ("read read(gdptemp03.dif) / dif "). The latitude data values are read into the variable "lat". Then further down, the latitude cosines are computed with these command: genr coslat=sin(2*lat)/(2*sin(lat)). At this point, the latitude values (in the variable "lat") are still expressed in degrees. But the SHAZAM documentation makes it clear that the sin() function takes its argument in radians. The erroneous cosine values are then used extensively through the rest of the SHAZAM script file.

That's the kind of stupid blunder that's easy to make and easy to catch. A competent scientist would never let something like that get "out the door". This is not a small mistake -- it's a "show-stopper" of the highest order.
***
LINK

McKitrick has admitted the error so you can stop with the "even if" posturing. Good grief.

they found numerous errors in MBH98.

DAR
All extensively dealt with, by professionals, here, a year and a half ago here:

False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction

And here:

On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick

And here:

The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al (1998) temperature reconstruction have recently been discredited by the following peer-reviewed article to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, "Journal of Climate":

And here.

And this is from just a couple of weeks ago.

This is what MBH would have looked like using centered PC analysis:



This give a good summary
too.

***
Moving Goalposts

Category: McKitrick
Posted on: February 16, 2006 12:00 PM, by Tim Lambert

Hockey stick wars, the story so far: McIntyre and McKitrick (M&M) first claimed that the hockey stick graph was the product of "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH) published a correction to the supplementary information about their article, but which did not affect their results. Next, MM argued that the hockey stick was the result of incorrect normalization of the data. However, Hans van Storch, a strong critic of the hockey stick, concluded that "the glitch [McIntyre] detected in Mann's paper is correct, but it doesn't matter, it's a minor thing." Next, MM argued that the hockey stick depended on the inclusion of the bristlecone pine proxies. However, a new reconstruction by Osborn and Briffa once again finds that the late 20th century is the warmest period in the last 1000 years and the result is not affected by the exclusion of any one, two or even three proxies. Mcintyre responded by arguing that many of the proxies used were defective (as far as I can tell, he thinks that all the proxies that show the 20th century to be warmest are no good.)

etc.

D.

[Dardedar]

Comic relief with more amazing buffoonery from these GW skeptic clowns:

***
You, too, can be a leading climate scientist

Category: Global Warming • McKitrick • bobcarter
Posted on: May 9, 2006 2:03 PM, by Tim Lambert

In the olden days to become a leading climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.

A group of leading climate scientists has announced the formation of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, aimed at refuting what it believes are unfounded claims about man-made global warming. ...

The coalition includes such well-known climate scientists as:

Dr Vincent Gray, of Wellington, an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), most recently a visiting scholar at the Beijing Climate Centre in China.

"Expert reviewer for the IPCC" doesn't mean that they asked him to review material -- all it means is that he asked to see the draft report. The only real requirement to be a reviewer is to sign an agreement not to publicly comment on the draft. Of course, just because he hasn't any qualifications or experience in climate research doesn't mean that he might not be able to offer some insight. Let's look at his public comments on the draft of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:

It is a piece of strident propaganda. ...

They make no bones about suppressing any information they do not like. The most important example is McKitrick and Michaels 2004 Climate Research Vol 26 pages 159-173 which shows that the surface temperature record is biased. A statistical study on station records and the total record between 1979 and 2000 shows a significant influence of population increase, fuek usage, prosperity, and even literacy.

Not to mention the significant influence of feeding degrees into software the expected radians. So his "most important example" of them suppressing information they do not like was that they ignored a paper that contained serious errors.

Also former Met Service chief meteorologist Augie Auer, who offers this:

Prof Auer said that three quarters of the planet was ocean, and 95 percent of the greenhouse effect was governed by water vapour.

"Of that remaining 5 percent, only about 3.6 percent is governed by CO2 and when you break it down even further, studies have shown that the anthropogenic (man-made) contribution to CO2 versus the natural is about 3.2 percent.

"So if you multiply the total contribution 3.6 by the man-made portion of it, 3.2, you find out that the anthropogenic contribution of CO2 to the the global greenhouse effect is 0.117 percent, roughly 0.12 percent, that's like 12c in $100.

"It's miniscule ... it's nothing," he said.

Actually, humans have increased the CO2 content of the atmosphere by 30%. You would have hoped that a "leading climate scientist", or a climate scientist, or even a plain old scientist of any kind would not have got something so basic so wrong.

Also in the coalition is geologist Bob Carter. It seems that even though he's a geologist at James Cook University in Australia, he's a New Zealander. Rounding out the numbers are some more geologists and the only actual well-known climate scientist in the coalition: Chris de Freitas. Of course he's well-known for being the editor responsible for the publication of a paper in Climate Research that was so unscientific that five editors resigned. And he was also the editor responsible for publishing the McKitrick and Michaels degree/radian screwup. Correction: Chris de Freitas isn't listed as a member, so the Coalition doesn't contain any actual climate scientists.

[Dardedar]

Excerpt from an interview with three climate scientists:

***
Daily KOS: Obviously the planet has been warming up since the end of the last ice Age over ten thousand years ago. But on a more recent time scale, is global climate changing, and if so, what is the consensus on the direction and rate of change?

Dr Stefan Rahmstorf:
Let me chime in here, as ice ages are my field of research. They are caused by regular changes in Earth's orbit, the so-called Milankovitch cycles. These cycles affect how much sun arrives on each part of the globe in each season. The last ice age ended because solar radiation in summer in northern continents increased strongly between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago - that melted the big ice sheets away. Since then, the climate has entered the 'Holocene' period and has been pretty stable (with possibly a slight long term cooling) and during which humans invented agriculture and civilization developed. More recently, we've entered another strong warming period, this time due to human influence: by our emissions we've increased the levels of carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas throughout Earth's history, to levels unprecedented for at least 650,000 years. So far we've only seen the feeble beginning of this warming: the planet has warmed 0.7 C since the beginning of the 20th Century. That's not much compared to the end of the last ice age, when the planet warmed by about 5 C. But those 5 C took about 5,000 years - that's only 0.1 C per century. If the steep rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues we have to expect 3, 4 or even 5 C warming during this century - as much again as at the end of the last ice age, but up to fifty times faster.

Link

Bold mine.

Loose end. That there is a multi-century time lag between C02 rise and termperature rise has been brought up by Hogeye again. He even calls Gore a liar for not talking about this in his movie. Once again, it's dealt with here, and here.

D.

[Hogeye]

Darrel, you forgot to quote the punch line of the NAS paper, that there is "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years." That's 400, not 1000, and not 2000.

You make the reading comprehension problem quite clear: the erroneous equivocation of "plausible" with "likely." Of course "plausible" is only slightly stronger than "conceivable," and much weaker than "likely." When the NAS panel writes, " "...the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium," this implies that it is also plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the MWP than last few decades of the 20th century. Both are plausible; "plausible" is a very non-committal word.


The programming error (involving degrees vs radians) occured in this paper: Ross McKitrick and Patrick J. Michaels, "A test of corrections for extraneous signals in gridded surface temperature data", Clim Res 26:159 173 (May 25, 2004).

The Erratum paper was published later in 2004, crediting Lambert with finding the error. Here's the PDF.

We have corrected this and produced new versions of the affected tables. Table 4 below, showing the central results of the paper, displays the original and corrected columns side-by-side for ease of comparison. Tables 5 to 8 are presented in corrected versions only.

As is evident in Table 4, except for the impacts on the COSABLATvariable itself, the changes are very small. The principal effect of the correction is a reduced weight on the constant term and an increased weight on the COSABLATvariable itself. Indeed, the correction improves the overall fit and removes the anomalously small cosine-latitude effect. The socioeconomic variables remain significant and the effects carry over from the station data to the gridded data as before.

Because the main patterns of results persist across the revised tables, the original discussions as worded in our paper need only minor modification, and our overall conclusion, re-stated here, is unaffected:

Overall, the results of this study support the hypothesis that published temperature data are contaminated with nonclimatic influences that add up to a net warming bias, and that efforts should be made to properly quantify these effects.

So we can put this one to rest. The RealClimate claims that the error effected the conclusions from the paper are totally bogus. Basically the RealClimate guys were harping on an inconsequential error, and erroneously making it sound like every paper ever written by McKitrick is wrong. Duh.

Darrel, do you agree that this graph

shows that the climate was approximately as warm during the MWP as the late 20th century? (according to all the climactic models shown which cover that time range, i.e. all except the orange one which starts in 1500?)

[Dardedar]

You make the reading comprehension problem quite clear: the erroneous equivocation of "plausible" with "likely." Of course "plausible" is only slightly stronger than "conceivable," and much weaker than "likely."

DAR
Do anarchists use a special dictionary or do the regular ones work? Actually I know the answer to that because I have watched you twist common language very often to reach your conclusions.

plau·si·ble adj.
Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse.

Synonyms: plausible, believable, colorable, credible
These adjectives mean appearing to merit belief or acceptance: a plausible pretext; a believable excuse; a colorable explanation; a credible assertion.

plausible

adj 1: apparently reasonable and valid [ant: implausible] 2: likely but not certain to be or become true or real; "a likely result"; "he foresaw a probable loss" [syn: probable, likely] [ant: improbable] 3: within the realm of credibility; "not a very likely excuse"; "a plausible story" [syn: likely] 4: appearing to merit belief or acceptance; "a credible witness"; "a plausible story" [syn: credible]

Why did the committee find it plausible? They said, because "This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence..." which they take the time to detail even in this short paragraph.

When the NAS panel writes, " "...the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium," this implies that it is also plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the MWP than last few decades of the 20th century.

DAR
No, the more one is plausible (Mann) the more the other one is implausible (McKitrick). This works the same for the words probable and likely. Apparently your biases so prejudice your reading skills you struggle with simple words when stuck. Boring.

Reminder: Northern Hemisphere is not the globe. That's important and I have shared this with you many times before. The paragraph I quoted directly from the committee speaks for itself. You're just spinnnnnnning.

the RealClimate guys were harping on an inconsequential error, and erroneously making it sound like every paper ever written by McKitrick is wrong. Duh.

DAR
Actually, from all of the substantive rebuttals I have been reading of the guy, I don't think I would have a problem with the assertion that every paper written by McKitrick is wrong. That's really not that big of a stretch. Not entirely wrong but wrong enough to not have him taken seriously in a field he has no expertise in.

Darrel, do you agree that this graph

shows that the climate was approximately as warm during the MWP as the late 20th century?

DAR
Of course. Looks like a hockey stick to me. No one said the hockey was laying horizontal. But your point is deceptive straw in that it ducks many problems I have dealt with many times. The incredible spike in certain measured temperature during the last 150 years along with the highest C02 in over 600,000 years. And this occuring at record speed, due to humans, and certain to increase, at record speed, due to humans. This in contrast to ancient numbers we can only know plausibly.

Again:



Also another note that someone made perhaps sheds light on why these guys differ:

"Even if McIntyre's temperature reconstruction from AD 1400 to 1980 is correct, one thing he always fails to show is the temperatures from the instrument record after 1980 which have risen nearly 0.5 degrees C. If he had included these in his reconstruction it would have been clear that MBH98's conclusion that "Northern Hemisphere mean annual temperatures for three of the past eight years are warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400" was still true.

The question is, why doesn't McIntyre ever show temperatures after 1980?" LINK

Gee, that seems to be a rather important part of the stick doesn't it? The blade. What's been happening since 1980?



See the chart I posted earlier which contains the more recent data showing the blade continuing to grow and spike. This is why the planet is concerned. This includes 99% all of the climate scientists but not the small handful connected with oil money (and trying to hide it). The rest of your post is non-responsive to many points.

Look at the 1998 spike. That one killed over 30,000 people in Europe:



Seems McIntyre stops counting just when things are really getting warmed up! 1980.

One more nice shot of the stick:



Check out that blade! Look at it spike! Hot hot, don't touch!

D.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

DAR, my only quibble is that last graph with the line indicating where human impact begins - I don't have the data & you do, but my reading indicated human impact began at the upturn and not halfway up the blade, which is logical, since that's when America's Industrial Revolution joined the already gang-busters European Industrial Revolution in burning coal.

[Hogeye]

Darrel's dictionary link gives:

plau·si·ble     P   Pronunciation Key  (plôz-bl)
adj.
1 Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse.
2 Giving a deceptive impression of truth or reliability.
3 Disingenuously smooth; fast-talking: “Ambitious, unscrupulous, energetic,... and plausible,a political gladiator, ready for a ‘set-to’ in any crowd” (Frederick Douglass).

The emphasis on "seemingly or apparently" is mine - you apparently overlooked these hedge words, Darrel. Probably def #2 is more apt wrt the NAS panel report.

Reminder: Northern Hemisphere is not the globe.

Right. You need to tell this to Mann and his fans, who advertise the hockey stick as a global phenomena.

The incredible spike in certain measured temperature during the last 150 years...

Yet your own graph shows that, by climatic measures, the late 20th century was about the same as the MWP. You seem to want to compare apples to oranges, i.e. climatic measures to short term temperature averages. Your hockey stick blade is not climatic, but a short term temperature average.

And this occuring at record speed...

You are talking out your ass here, since we don't know the rate of increase for the MWP upswing.

Why doesn't McIntyre ever show temperatures after 1980?

You can write and ask him, but I suspect it is because he's talking about climate rather than short-term temperature. Climate is considered to be long-term, ignoring the fluctuations - i.e. at least 30 years.

[Savonarola]

The emphasis on "seemingly or apparently" is mine - you apparently overlooked these hedge words, Darrel. [color added]

Without even needing to refer to the actual meanings of the words in question, I can only wonder why you chose to contradict yourself in but a single sentence...

[Hogeye]

??? I don't understand. Darrel was treating "plausible" as more or less equivalent to "likely." This indicates that he doesn't understand that it is much, much weaker. I.e. he overlooked the "seemingly or apparently" part of the definition.

[Savonarola]

??? I don't understand. Darrel was treating "plausible" as more or less equivalent to "likely." This indicates that he doesn't understand that it is much, much weaker. I.e. he overlooked the "seemingly or apparently" part of the definition. [boldfacing added]

you apparently overlooked these hedge words, Darrel. [boldfacing added]

If your argument is that the meaning of "apparently" is equivalent to "no-less-than-moderately questionably," then you affirm that Darrel "apparently" overlooked this fact -- meaning that he did overlook this fact -- how is that not shooting yourself in the foot?

In other words, first you want apparently to mean "'much, much' less than likely." Then you use it to mean "surely" or "clearly."

[Dardedar]

DAR, my only quibble is that last graph with the line indicating where human impact begins -

DAR
I totally agree Barbara. I went with that version of the picture because it was handy and a good size. Someone inserted that line regarding human impact and it can be ignored.
The March '05 Issue of Scientific American has a main cover article by a scientist who has a hypothesis that our human impact began with agriculture, about 8,000 years ago. An interesting idea but I didn't find it persuasive.

D.

[Dardedar]

Darrel's dictionary link gives:

plau·si·ble P Pronunciation Key (plôz-bl)
adj.
1 Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse.

The emphasis on "seemingly or apparently" is mine - you apparently overlooked these hedge words, Darrel.

DAR
Why, because I didn't emphasize them? No, I quoted them and am quite please to include them. The humor is of course that you called it an "erroneous equivocation" to describe or compare "plausible" with "likely", and when one looks in the dictionary, they find it is one of the very first words used to describe plausible. Not to suggest that Sav's point isn't really funny too.

So any of these common descripters is perfectly fine, in the answer to my question:

Why did the committee find it (Mann's claim) plausible, seemingly valid, apparently valid, acceptable; credible?

Because, as the panel stated:

"This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence..."

That's what matters. That's why people understand Mann position to have been vindicated. Everyone's charts look like hockey sticks now and the blade just gets higher and higher.

Climate is considered to be long-term, ignoring the fluctuations - i.e. at least 30 years.

DAR
Yeah, that's no doubt why he didn't consider these last really hot years. Boy we're in a big fluctuation aren't we?
I read recently that the first six months of this year were once again the hottest ever measured in the US. Pay no mind though, I am sure it is just a fluctuation.
I think Gore's movie was entirely too optimistic. There are too many greedy people that can't or won't think beyond the old ways of oil and money until they are up to their ass in seawater and millions die. Even then, there may be a few who will still be making excuses and trying to start up disinformation campaigns.
And I musn't forget to emphasize again the real reason you cannot accept a global warming problem if there is one: your anarchist beliefs allow for no such vast organizational measures to address such a problem. Dealing with large scale problems in a large scale organized way is competely anathem to the anarchist, self-interest, faith.

Get ready to pay, the carbon tax man cometh.

D.
--------------------------
"None of them ever come to our scientific conferences. They know they would be laughed out of the building. The stuff they say, some of it is so nonsensical it's hardly worth discussing."

[Guest]

Unless and until the tax and accounting structures are changed to penalize short-term gain causing long-term pain and reward short-term pain (as in capital expenditures) resulting in long-term gain, we will continue to see greed denying the obvious effects of industry spewing mega-tons of CO2 and other GHGs (and other pollutants, as well) into the atmosphere.