What Do We Think About Climate Change

Thanks Guillermo, for your "insiders view" on "peer review" - on Climate change I will retain my personal views and look at CSIRO and university research papers for academic purposes, as opposed to commercial or "think-tank" sources....

 

"RSS MSU data for the lower troposphere show that 2007 was the coldest year in this century so far. In 'warmists' jargon, it was the ninth hottest year on record: the most recent year was cooler than all other years in this century as well as 1998 (by a whopping 0.41 °C) and even 1995. According to different datasets (HadCRUT3, UAH MSU, NOAA), the year is going to be approximately the 8th (HadCRUT3, final) or 7th (NOAA) or 6th warmest year. UAH reports 2007 as the 4th warmest year (on 1/7/2008: final, just by 1 millikelvin warmer than 2006) but it is probably because of the diurnal drift that has recently become obvious (see also World Climate Report). When it is corrected, it is likely that UAH will be rather close to RSS.

GISS became a kind of exception (1/8/2008: final) because the 2007 temperatures exactly matched those of 1998, their 2nd or 3rd warmest year (as James Hansen said a few weeks ago, with 2005 being their hot king) - but it is still very far from the hype about the hottest year. There are many people believing that satellite measurements such as RSS, UAH are more accurate than GISS, HadCRUT3. It just happens that HadCRUT3 is closer to RSS than UAH to RSS, as far as the recent rankings go.

The RSS MSU linear trend extracted from the 1998-2007 interval is -0.48 °C per century of cooling! Numerically, it's almost the same trend that 'warmists' assign to the 20th century but with the opposite sign. The RSS MSU data imply that 2007 was 0.12 °C cooler than the already cool year 2006."

Who is right...?

Cheers.

 

The data I provided was current to 2008-08-12. I spend time on http://data.giss.nasa.gov to avoid this sort of confusion caused by posting from secondary sources.

As provided by GISS:

"Several minor updates to the analysis have been made since its last published description by Hansen et al. (2001). After a testing period they were incorporated at the time of the next routine update. The only change having a detectable influence on analyzed temperature was the 7 August 2007 change to correct a discontinuity in 2000 at many stations in the United States. This flaw affected temperatures in 2000 and later years by ~0.15°C averaged over the United States and ~0.003°C on global average. Contrary to reports in the media, this minor flaw did not alter the years of record temperature, as shown by comparison here of results with the data flaw ('old analysis') and with the correction ('new analysis'). "
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates/200708.html

 

Peer review is not as I see it a measure of "truth" is a scientific sense. It is only a gatekeeper for acceptable methodology. Established scientific truths are developed by the findings in question being assimilated into the field of study- or not- as the case may be.

This is from 'Peer Review and the acceptance of new scientific ideas':

"The peer review of scientific papers submitted to journals for publication has a widely proven
record as a means to test the plausibility of new findings. However, scientists never regard peer reviewed
research as beyond criticism. Peer review of a paper is just the first stage: a hypothesis
that survives this first test must go on to be re-tested, and judged for its coherence with work in
related areas."

Opinion pieces on the net are not published simply because they are unpublishable. They have all the scientific credibility of a recipe for "the best oatmeal cookies".



"RSS MSU data for the lower troposphere show that 2007 was the coldest year in this century so far. In 'warmists' jargon........"

"Warmists jargon"......... can we take it then that this finding is without bias?

Anyone know how this whole question of 'valid' temperature representation is vetted? Is "lower troposphere" a more valid representation of temperature than "land-ocean index".....?

 

We'll argue about it until it is shown to be either irrelevant or too late. Everyone wants to be thought right for the present, but safely dead before the **** hits the fan. It's a side effect of our species' perpetual desire for dominance. I'm right, you're wrong, they're not important. Anything to avoid action.

Reminds me of when I was still living with my parents. My mother was a clean freak, clean clothes in case she had an accident and ended up in hospital and the house spotless at all times because you never knew when someone was going to call. Neither ever happened.

Nonetheless, not a bad philosophy. Be prepared. Is that still the Boy Scouts motto, or have they changed it to something politically correct?

Taking corrective action and being on the safe side used to be a sign of maturity and intelligence. Now it just makes you a wimp. To me it makes more sense than doing nothing and maybe running your entire planet into the ground because you can't agree whether we are the ones who are running the planet into the ground or we are merely watching it run itself into the ground. It's like insurance, changing to snow tires before the winter arrives and keeping plenty of beer on hand.

 

Thomas,

The correction for the 'discontinuity' mentioned above is at the heart of this discussion. Hansen refuses to disclose the algorithms he used for said correction and thereby subject his work to peer review, instead implying that we simply trust him. But this is that same guy that fought hard to keep using the data set that he knew was flawed (presumably) because it produced 'scarier' graphs for public consumption. The data set and resulting graph I referenced from August '07 is therefore the trustworthy set, having not been unauditably 'massaged' by Hansen, who definitely has a dog in the fight. This is like the third time I've brought this up. Each time the fraud and deceit just blows right by you, Thomas. I don't know what shenanigans it will take from the AGW crowd before you see their motives are not purely scientific, but deeply political.

Jimbo

 

This presupposes that the consequences of 'doing something' will always be less than the consequences of 'doing nothing'. But have you even bothered to address the very steep price, both monetary and in lives, of the proposals to effect a meaningful reduction in anthropogenic CO2? I bet not! All the carbon curtailment proposals put together plus all the conservation we can do will barely get us back to 1990 output levels, let alone make any real reductions. And in the face of all this, China and India will grow their outputs exponentially.

Jimbo

 

Thomas,

Here's a pair of graphs from Hadley and GISS. See if you can spot a significant warming trend in the last 13 years. I bet you can't! Remember how the AGW crowd was SO PISSED OFF that the Martin Durkin documentary did not use the 'latest' climate recon. graph, but instead used one that stopped in (IIRC) 1990? The reason Durkin did so of course, was that the graph he used was that last 'good' graph, the graphs produced after that date being 'tainted' by the slanted non-transparent 'science' of guys like Mann, Briffa and Hansen. Their graph showed 1998 as the hottest year ever (a position they still defend) and the extrapolated result being the trace exiting the graph vertically. Very scary!

But the scientists Durkin was talking to told him that 1998 was really just an anomaly, a result of an unusually strong 'El Nino' phenomena. "Nonsense!" "Climate Deniers!" Cried the AGW crowd. But it would take a few years for it to be possible to pen the next graph to see whether this was so or not, so Durkin was really out on a limb, here. Now we have almost 11 years behind us and any objective person can look at the posted graphs and see who was right, and it ain't Mann, Briffa and Hansen.

Jimbo

 

1; If CO2 concentration does act as a greenhouse gas, and aids in the temperature increase, I see no reason why not an increased temperature will indirectly cause more water vapor to stabilize in the atmosphere in gas (or eventually condensated as skies). Check the mollier chart.

http://images.google.com/imgres?img...ram&um=1&start=3&sa=X&oi=images&ct=image&cd=3

2: "CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas....." Ok, the site you linked to stated an increase 1,66 W/m2. That again equals to 2,65 x 10e22 Joules/ year. That's not weak, not in my eyes. (for your information, as all my efforts to get you to grasp the amount of change in the energy balance seem to stray off; here's another sidestep; one ton TNT equals 4,18 x 10e9 Joules; The Atomic bomb that landed on Hiroshima was equal to 13 kT TNT. So the extra energy this earth have to deal with due to the weak greenhouse gas increase during the last 200 years, will again equal to 487 670 225 Hiroshima bombs.... Or 55 670 Hiroshima bombs /hour.... (MUST be something wrong there....).

3: True.

4: True, only a change in temperature or pressure can change that equlibrium (but 2,65 x 10e22 Joules/ year, could do something, couldn't it, if applied to a limited space...eh?).

5: see 4.

6: "CO2 could somehow leverage its tiny intrinsic (and logarithmic) greenhouse potential" Having used "your" numbers.... 1,66 W/m2...It's not tiny!!! Will it never sink in?

7: "we first have to believe that CO2 can accumulate in the atmosphere to start up the process". Well you linked to this site, they stated an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, not as a belief or a religion, but as a plain fact. I do not know ther's a difference between accumulate or increase? but it's probably caused by the fact that I have to stumble my way along in Norenglish....

8: "when more (CO2) is available, the plant biomass consumes more, fixing all that surplus carbon by turning it into sugars, starches and cellulose". Ok, then we have not measured an atmospheric increase in CO2 over the whole earth? eehhh or have we....? On several stations? Increased sea temperature could probably cause some rise in CO2, but not something like 25-30%, we'd all be green.... And this takes place when the sun is in the lower part of its activity?

Sorry for late reply....

The only way we can sort this out is by consuming barrel loads of bitter/ lager.....

 

Well here's something... I normally don't visit their pages, as they're against eating whales, horses.....

But:

http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=4383

Follow the money.... (as my lawyer told me once...)....

My, are we growing cynical here....?

 

"Finally, we note that a minor data processing error found in the GISS temperature analysis in early 2007 does not affect the present analysis. The data processing flaw was failure to apply NOAA adjustments to United States Historical Climatology Network stations in 2000-2006, as the records for those years were taken from a different data base (Global Historical Climatology Network). This flaw affected only 1.6% of the Earth's surface (contiguous 48 states) and only the several years in the 21st century. As shown in Figure 4 and discussed elsewhere, the effect of this flaw was immeasurable globally (~0.003°C) and small even in its limited area. Contrary to reports in certain portions of the media, the data processing flaw did not alter the ordering of the warmest years on record. Obviously the global ranks were unaffected. In the contiguous 48 states the statistical tie among 1934, 1998 and 2005 as the warmest year(s) was unchanged. In the current analysis, in the flawed analysis, and in the published GISS analysis (Hansen et al. 2001), 1934 is the warmest year in the contiguous states (not globally) but by an amount (magnitude of the order of 0.01°C) that is an order of magnitude smaller than the uncertainty."
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

Three thousandths of one percent......
Yes that is a truly stunning deceit

In case you missed it:



If you look really carefully you can see the "fraud"- it's the green line directly under the correct data..



The most interesting part about this whole bit is why you are now questioning heating?

 

It would be interesting to superimpose a curve of global economic activity over the graph of global temperature.

 

Global Tropospheric Temperature Anomalies, shows temperature trends in the lower troposphere, the layer from the earths surface to about 5 miles up - this obtained by googling "lower troposphere", and seems fraught with anomolies as the satellites are trying to figure the temperature from a background of the surface temperature of land, oceans and other stuff on the surface often causing bubbles of air temperature - - and we are familiar with "bubbles" in economic jargon - - not reliable information...

I prefer the information presented by bntii, as that is surface temperature and can be verified by using a thermometer on the ground and there is a greater prospect for the data to be proven to be reliable and not the output of a flatulent cow or some other bubble in the atmosphere up to 5 miles up so the temperature could be taken from anywhere in that column of air????

Talk about farting fruitcakes??? most of the/any impact of global warming/cooling will be seen first in the water temperature of the surface of the oceans, and the consequences for humans is the melting of the ice ON Greenland and ON the Antarctic landmasses... - - that ice which is deemed to be floating will not influence the water level on melting but it has been calculated that the ice sitting on land will cause great catastrophe as it melts the sea level will flood most airports and coastal ports....

Surface air in the northern hemisphere will be expected to rise as the greater cloud coverage will allow the larger land masses to fall to very cold levels and result in significant air temperature drops over night and during northern hemisphere winters....

 

"In the case of the troposphere, the layer from the surface to an altitude of about 7.5 miles, where most weather occurs, it was believed there had been less warming than what was recorded at the surface. However, Fu's team determined the satellite readings of the troposphere were imprecise because about one-fifth of the signal actually came from a higher atmosphere layer called the stratosphere, which for the last few decades has been cooling several times faster than the troposphere has been warming. The group devised a method to remove the stratosphere signal from the satellite data and was left with results that closely matched the warming at the surface. That work was published in May in the journal Nature.

However, critics contended the method overcompensated for the cooling effects of the stratosphere and thus overstated the amount of warming in the troposphere. The criticisms did not appear in peer-reviewed journals.

In the new study, Fu and Celeste Johnson, a UW atmospheric sciences graduate student, used direct stratosphere temperature measurements to examine the contamination from the stratosphere in the satellite channel that measures troposphere temperatures. They also used the same data to evaluate their method for removing the stratosphere contamination. The data they used came from scientists at NOAA and the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in England.

The Fu team's work indicates the troposphere has been warming at about two-tenths of a degree Celsius, or nearly one-third of a degree Fahrenheit, per decade. That closely resembles measurements of warming at the surface, something climate models have suggested would result if the warmer surface temperatures are the result of greenhouse gases."

From:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041129113717.htm

Just for the fun of it:

 

Bntii, Well put and presented.... Your research is appreciated by me...