Catholicism and Climate Change: The Sequel

[vz71]

The rest is pretty straightforward — if you have large numbers of observations with normally-distributed errors then you can increase the accuracy by averaging them. This is why you can buy GPS monitoring systems with sub-millimetre accuracy even though the GPS signal itself is only accurate to 10-20 m.

It is a fallacy that you can decrease error by averaging it.
All you get is an average error.

Now, can someone please provide some data on the devices used in the 1870’s to measure sea levels to millimeter accuracy?
Did they even provide millimeter measurements at all?

Where did these measurements come from in the abscence of a measuring device that provides that small unit of measure?

 

[nordskoven]

Al Gore is an oil baron, shares of Occidental Petroleum coming from his senator-dad who got the financier for Communist Russia, Armand Hammer, off of a treason charge after bringing Lyme Disease to the USA in tainted Russian furs. “Russia will spread her errors” as Our Lady warned at Fatima. Gore’s company “won” the bid for the Teapot Dome-related Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve when it was sold to “balance the budget” under Clinton.

Fannie Mae, the Democrat dagger that collapsed the economy, has recently bought a proprietary computer program to trade Carbon Credits. Then they plan to issue mortgages reserving the carbon offsets of “green” houses to themselves–the Democrats who dominate this behemoth. They will make a fee on every Carbon Credit trade demanded by regulations, if passed, and which will of course raise the price of energy all around. Connect the dots. Any regulations will burden small oil companies, allowing Gore’s Occidental Petroleum to scoop them up. Then insiders will cash in on trading Carbon Credits, another exotic trading medium that will insure a fatal blow to the USA short of a miracle, please God. So global warming, even if true, is the basis of an insidious strategy for control over energy and a greedy play at enrichment at the sweat of another man’s brow, something the Democrats are famous for since their embrace of slavery. God forbid Russia’s minions succeed in selling us the rope we use to hang ourselves.

 

[Ender]

The “completely different things” were an ENSO-adjusted trend of 0.0 C/decade from 1999-2008 by NOAA and a warming trend of 0.12 C/decade from 1995-2009 by Jones. If Jones had used ENSO-adjusted figures like NOAA did then the warming trend would have been 0.14 C/decade from 1995-2008.

This started as a dispute about whether in fact there had been a decade without warming, and clearly, according to NOAA, there had. The proper response to this would have been “True. So?” but you apparently felt the need to muddy the water and cast doubt about whether warming had actually ceased, even if only temporarily.

The Jones period, which you helpfully provided, made the decade-without-warming disappear by including the 1998 anomaly. Since '99-'08 warmed by 0.0 degrees and '95-'08 warmed by 0.14 degrees, it must be that '95-'98 increased by … 0.14 degrees.

No, NOAA said that the ENSO-adjusted trend was 0.0 C/decade from 1999-2008 but that that apparent lack of warming was merely a product of internal climate variablility and they explicitly explained that this was perfectly normal in an ongoing warming trend.

This is the best explanation of all: even though no warming was measured we know that warming still continued because … the models predict it. That may well be true of course, but, despite your claim, there is no way to know whether the lack of warming was real or only apparent. We will learn that in the future, but we don’t know it now.

Firstly, you’re looking at a single realisation of a few decades of Hansen’s model.

It is comforting to know that if the data conflict with this realization of his model he can tweak the parameters to make it more in line with the past while still predicting warming for the future.

Ender

 

[kimmielittle]

Here’s a hint: The number of times William Connelly has edited pages on Wikipedia is irrelevant to the question at hand.

Actually wrong, William Connelly is one of the founders of RC

You might have to actually READ the link

He then focuses on** RealClimate.org co-founder William Connolley,** who has “touched” 5,428 Wikipedia articles with** his unique brand of RC centric editing:**

Reminder: The topic of that was Censorship by Realclimate.

Michael Mann’s comments about RC are at least on topic, but, sadly, do not invalidate the observation that RC has changed policy since then and introduced the Bore Hole that I already described to you.

Bore Hole = An RC search of articles they RG ] wish to lead me to…

Given their track record…

It’s interesting that you think a 2006 email invalidates an observational fact.

That observational FACT - IS Realclimate by their own admission i.e. climategate email ]intends to CENSOR…THAT is the fact

It’s also interesting that you’re using this to in response to my comments that Skeptical Science is an excellent resource, yet there is absolutely nothing pertaining to Skeptical Science in your response.

Actually I was waiting for you to defend RealClimate - BEFORE I started on Mr Cook.

BUT here are some talking points on Mr John Cook.
scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/John_Cook_Skeptical_Science.pdf

http://forums.catholic-questions.org/picture.php?albumid=1281&pictureid=9356

Apparently your entire “argument” boils down to “”. Also par for the course.

As par for the course, you don’t understand that is a “RESPONSE” to something you said. I need make no argument… to silly.

I clearly described how you could prove me wrong. I guess it didn’t work out the way you expected, eh?

I understand it is hard for some - to follow debate.

Here is help:
In this posted statement you all but called me a liar. Post 270 of yours ]

And I think there’s a word for making claims about “potential bias” and “tainted work” when you know very well that those claims can and have been thoroughly disproven, isn’t there?

My answer post 277

Actually wrong!

I repeat:
:Show me RAW data that hasn’t undergone subjective adjustments… Subjective adjustments… IS introducing potential “bias” and “taints” the RAW data.

Instead of your fallacies in logical thought ruling you…try proving me wrong

IMO the closest we can try to get to RAW Data is the B91 hard-copies.

 

[JasonSB]

It is a fallacy that you can decrease error by averaging it.
All you get is an average error.

Not only is it mathematical provable that the accuracy of the average is higher than the accuracy of the individual measurements (the error is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of observations), it’s trivial to demonstrate empirically with a few minutes’ experimentation in Excel and it’s intuitively obvious that random errors, over time, will tend to cancel out because they are random.

So where does this unfounded confidence that all of this is a fallacy come from? It just feels like it ought to be false? Why not simply do some experiments to prove it to yourself?

Now, can someone please provide some data on the devices used in the 1870’s to measure sea levels to millimeter accuracy?
Did they even provide millimeter measurements at all?

The fact that you think they would need to shows that you didn’t understand the graph. The accuracy they provided for the mean sea level in 1870 was +/- 25 mm. Why would the individual tide gauge measurements need to provide millimetre resolution if the average only achieved 25 mm accuracy?

Perhaps you got confused by the sea level trend figure that was provided in mm/year? Well, here are some points that I hope you find intuitively obvious:

1. Since increasing the number of observations really does decrease the error in the average, then this will work with observations distributed temporally just as well as spatially. In other words, if I have 100 observations at time T0 giving me an average that is 10 times more accurate than each individual observation (10 is the square root of 100), and I have another 100 observations at time T1, then provided the thing being measured hasn’t changed by more than my desired accuracy, now I have 200 observations and my average is even more accurate. (It might be a bit less obvious but it is also true that the same concept applies when the time period is long enough that the thing being measured is changing but that you can model that change. “No change” is the simplest possible model, “linear change” is the next simplest and often used to improve accuracies over longer time periods.)
2. Making multiple observations reduces random error but does not reduce systematic error. If the tide gauge is 100 mm higher than it should be, for example, all the readings coming from that tide gauge will be off by 100 mm regardless of how many I make. However, if I am interested in the change over time, then the systematic error becomes irrelevant for precisely the same reason — because the systematic error isn’t changing. This is why temperature anomalies are used when talking about temperatures and why sea level change is more accurate than global mean sea level.
3. If I use a ruler to make measurements and round them off to the nearest 10 mm, and I measure a value of 100 mm, and ten years later I measure it again and get a value of 110 mm, then the change I have measured over ten years is 10 mm. The change per year can be written as 1 mm/year even though my actual measurements were rounded off to 10 mm.

So, what are the latest figures, with accuracies?

The global average sea level rise from 1993-2009 after correcting for glacial isostatic adjustment is:

Using satellite altimeter data: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year
Using tidal gauges: 2.8 ± 0.8 mm per year

You’ll note that both are well within the error margins of the other.

The global average sea level rise from 1880 to 2009 is about 210 mm.

The linear trend from 1900 to 2009 is 1.7 ± 0.2 mm per year (remember: longer time period = more observations = increased accuracy) and from 1961 to 2009 is 1.9 ± 0.4 mm per year.

Yes, it’s accelerating, and the acceleration is statistically significant.

 

[JasonSB]

This started as a dispute about whether in fact there had been a decade without warming, and clearly, according to NOAA, there had.

No, there hadn’t. Why is this so hard to grasp? There quite clearly was warming during that decade, whether you use HadCRUT (0.067 °C/decade), GISS (0.197 °C/decade), UAH (0.123 °C/decade), or RSS (0.034 °C/decade).

What you want to use to support your claim that there “had been a decade without warming” was a set of ENSO-adjusted temperatures that NOAA themselves qualified as an apparent lack of warming, which they then went on to explain.

What you continually fail to acknowledge is that if you want to calculate ENSO-adjusted temperatures on the basis that ENSO is a cyclic phenomenon, then there is no reason not to go further and take into account other effects, like changes in solar insolation, which declined during that decade. If you do that then you get something like this:

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/7228/pmodadjusted.jpg

Remember that graph?

Look carefully at the red line, showing the change in temperature caused by the change in solar insolation using a value of 0.76 °C/(W/m[sup]2[/sup]).

When that is also taken into account, it shows that the actual global warming caused by CO2 was mostly masked by a cooling caused by the sun reaching the lowest solar minimum in a long time, creating a trend of 0.0 during that time. Then adding ENSO back on gives the actual observed temperature change. But it is disingenuous to remove ENSO and then claim that temperatures “actually” did not change while ignoring the effect that the sun had on those same temperatures.

When correcting for both ENSO and SOI, the trend for that same decade is 0.212 °C/decade — slightly more than the long-term trend of similarly corrected data from 1979 to 2009 of 0.202 °C/decade.

The proper response to this would have been “True. So?” but you apparently felt the need to muddy the water and cast doubt about whether warming had actually ceased, even if only temporarily.

No, I needed to clarify the point that global warming had not “actually” ceased, both because you were misrepresenting what the NOAA report showed, and because even if temperatures had been flat or gone down for a decade it wouldn’t mean “global warming had ceased” because it can do that purely due to internal climate variability. Not only do I have no problem admitting that the global temperature can actually decline on short time spans, I even provided a graph demonstrating that it had happened multiple times before even while global warming continued!

You were the one who kept making erroneous claims of conflict between what I was saying and what NOAA was saying, and what Jones was saying and what NOAA was saying.

The Jones period, which you helpfully provided, made the decade-without-warming disappear by including the 1998 anomaly. Since '99-'08 warmed by 0.0 degrees and '95-'08 warmed by 0.14 degrees, it must be that '95-'98 increased by … 0.14 degrees.

Actually it increased by a lot more than that. I see you still haven’t figured out how trends work. Here’s a hint: a trend of 0.0 from 1999 to 2008 does not mean that 2008 was the same temperature as 1999. The ENSO-adjusted average temperature for 2008 was 0.153 degrees higher than the ENSO-adjusted average temperature for 1999.

This is the best explanation of all: even though no warming was measured we know that warming still continued because … the models predict it.

No, warming was measured. But modelling the effect of ENSO showed that ENSO was responsible for almost all of the observed warming in the HadCRUT record if the effect of SOI was ignored. Modelling the effect of SOI showed that it was responsible for the lack of warming in the ENSO-adjusted data.

If you had presented the SOI-adjusted data and ignored ENSO (rather than the other way around) then it would look like warming was much worse than was actually measured.

We know that warming still continued because the long term trend actually accelerated during that decade, whether you talk about the actual temperatures (where adjusting for these other effects is less important because they cancel out in the longer term due to their cyclical nature) or adjusted temperatures.

NOAA simply showed that models exhibited exactly the same kinds of phenomena and therefore you shouldn’t interpret the result to mean “global warming had stopped”.

That may well be true of course, but, despite your claim, there is no way to know whether the lack of warming was real or only apparent. We will learn that in the future, but we don’t know it now.

Of course we do. If global warming really did stop then it would take a couple of decades to notice it, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now it is clear that it hasn’t.

It is comforting to know that if the data conflict with this realization of his model he can tweak the parameters to make it more in line with the past while still predicting warming for the future.

What a ridiculous interpretation of what I said.

 

[JasonSB]

Actually wrong, William Connelly is one of the founders of RC

And, once again, the number of times William Connelly has edited pages on Wikipedia has no bearing on whether RC or Skeptical Science “defend their positions by censorship”. It’s a red herring on top of a red herring. You can’t even defend your red herrings logically!

Bore Hole = An RC search of articles they RG ] wish to lead me to…

No idea what you’re trying to say, but the fact the RC introduced the Bore Hole so that people would stop complaining about censorship is objective reality. If you choose not to verify that so you can continue spouting easily-refuted nonsense then I guess that’s, again, par for the course.

Actually I was waiting for you to defend RealClimate - BEFORE I started on Mr Cook.

Which is a shame since it was a Skeptical Science link that I used and that you refused to read.

BUT here are some talking points on Mr John Cook.
scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/John_Cook_Skeptical_Science.pdf

Oh, come on — at least try. Assertions by Luboš Motl for the SPPI without a single reference to support his claims do not disprove the well-referenced posts on Skeptical Science. Assertions that do provide a reference almost invariably reference Motl’s own blog!. And what about your double-standards?
dana1981:

Upon noticing Motl’s error, I decided to engage in a discussion on the subject in his blog comments. Surely someone with Motl’s physics background would readily realize and correct the mistake. Again, disappointment ensued. Motl quickly admitted that the hot spot is not specifically anthropogenic, but continued to insist that it is a construct of climate models, and thus if it is not present, the models are “falsified” and “dead”. I politely attempted to explain the physics behind the hot spot, and for my trouble, Motl deleted my comments, banned me from commenting on his site, and again insulted me personally. On top of that, most of the comments from his readers (his Motl-ey Crew, if you will) followed his example with nothing more than petty insults. It was a disappointing display of a complete lack of willingness to engage in intellectual discourse. I have to admit, I was rather stunned at being banned from a site for doing nothing more than posting four polite comments pointing out an obvious error made by its author.

skepticalscience.com/motley-cruel.html

Apparently it’s OK for Motl to defend his position by censorship. If you’re going to use a red herring, at least try to be consistent.

For me it makes no difference — Motl’s arguments fail on their own merits, whether it’s by making obviously incorrect unsubstantiated assertions, or misrepresenting what his opponents say, or referencing easily-debunked rubbish. If the difference in the quality of Luboš Motl’s arguments and John Cook’s arguments is not immediately apparent to you then… well, that would explain pretty much everything you post.

As par for the course, you don’t understand that is a “RESPONSE” to something you said. I need make no argument… to silly.

I obviously know it was your response, my point was that it’s up to the same standard as your usual level.

Here is help:
In this posted statement you all but called me a liar. Post 270 of yours ]

My answer post 277

IMO the closest we can try to get to RAW Data is the B91 hard-copies.

Right. And what did I give you? A link to scanned in copies of the actual, hand-written, RAW observation sheets filled in by the actual people making the actual observations on the ground for you to download and check to your heart’s content.

Now you can either admit that I did show you the RAW Data “that hasn’t undergone subjective adjustments”, or you can claim that the scanned-in hand-written observation sheets available from NOAA are forgeries, despite the fact that you can order certified copies of them if you want, for a fee.

So which is it?

 

[vz71]

The fact that you think they would need to shows that you didn’t understand the graph. The accuracy they provided for the mean sea level in 1870 was +/- 25 mm. Why would the individual tide gauge measurements need to provide millimetre resolution if the average only achieved 25 mm accuracy?

They are providing mm resolution answers where there were no mm level measurements taken.accuracy,

So what was the measurement of the time? cm? inches? feet? yards?
Whatever it was, unless it is as small as the mm, you will never be able to derive mm levels of accuracy. And any attempt to claim mm levels of accuracy are bogus.

And with bogus measurement data from then, any trend is likewise skewed.

So please, what measurement method was used in the 1870’s?
What is the unit of measure for the data collected?
What exactly were they measuring? Sea levels? Tide levels?
How do we know what they measured truly reflected what our measurement of sea level actually is?

 

[kimmielittle]

The CRU then discarded the original data because they could do all their work with the adjusted data.

Only if you don’t understand what they said.

It’s really not that complicated, but given the concept of RAW data seems to be beyond you perhaps I’m expecting too much.

You certainly are - If you expect me to believe you or claims made by CRU.

The CRU asked bureaus of meteorology all over the world to give them data.

The CRU then analysed that data looking for obvious errors and adjusted it to remove them.

The original data is still available at all those bureaus of meteorology all over the world! None of it was lost. If anybody wants to do the same thing, they can do exactly what the CRU did. Nobody is stopping them. Why should the CRU keep it?

I can not believe you ] a “scientist” said this.

BECAUSE IT IS THE KEY DATA There is a long tradition in science of retaining key data.

They put in all that effort to improve the quality of the data so that they could then use it — what would be the point if they’re still going to use the original data?

BECAUSE IT ISN’T REPRODUCIBLE This is the main criteria of science being able to use the RAW Data - apply their adjustments and reproduce outcome.

CRU says:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

Yet they have these data sets in their library.

cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/library/datasets.htm

Don’t like it? Don’t trust their adjustments? Fine — don’t use their temperature record! Use GISS instead — after all, the RAW data, the source code, and the algorithms are ALL PUBLICLY AVAILABLE.

http://forums.catholic-questions.org/picture.php?albumid=1281&pictureid=9375

Their non-use of a base period (GISS using something very odd and NCDC first differences) means they can use very short series that we can’t (as they don’t have base periods) but with short series it is impossible to assess for homogeneity.

http://forums.catholic-questions.org/picture.php?albumid=1281&pictureid=9350

Then you shouldn’t have any difficulty finding where he went wrong, should you kimmie? Isn’t that the beauty of having all of that source code and RAW data PUBLICLY AVAILABLE?

:juggle:How stupid is this statement? Especially, made by a “scientist”. How about Mr Hansen prove it - after all he makes the claims OR you prove it as a defender of AGW

AGW made numerous predictions that came true, as I spelt out in great detail in the previous thread. The simply fact that can make those predictions and that those predications may or may not have turned out to be true makes the theory “falsifiable”. There is absolutely nothing at all “unscientific” about the theory, and repeatedly making this ridiculous claim simply shows how little you understand about both the theory and science.

Do a search for J Hansen predictions proven… OR AGW predictions proven. And point the way to proving CO2 is the main driver of Climate. And that ONLY by reducing CO2 can / will we change climate.

Which, of course, is also completely wrong. The science predicts — and, in fact, predicted — global warming because of the CO2 emissions long before the warming was actually detected.

Nonsense

If you want to claim that something else is responsible for the warming, then the first thing you have to do is explain why physics is wrong because physics predicts that increasing the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in warming.

AND ANY AMOUNT of cooling proves the unproven hypothesis is lacking. IF the Physics supported this Remember to be a law of Physics - it has to OBEY that law - constantly ].

 

[vz71]

The science predicts — and, in fact, predicted — global warming because of the CO2 emissions long before the warming was actually detected.

Then the science is wrong.
Everyone knows the sun is what warms the earth.

 

[JasonSB]

They are providing mm resolution answers where there were no mm level measurements taken.accuracy,

They clearly indicate an accuracy of ± 25 mm for the mean sea level in 1870 on that graph. What difference do the units make? Would you prefer if the graph was simply relabelled in inches so the accuracy was shown as ± 1 inch?

And you’ve completely ignored the fact that the accuracy of an average is higher than the accuracy of the individual measurements anyway. Not just a mathematically-proven fact, or an easily observed fact with a few minutes of trivial experimentation, but an intuitively obvious fact if you just think about it for five seconds.

Here is a commercial GPS-based monitoring system that achieves better than 1 mm accuracy using measurements with errors 10,000 times as large as that! orionmonitoring.com/technology.htm

You really need to look up “standard error” and the central limit theorem before making pronouncements on what is and is not possible.

So what was the measurement of the time? cm? inches? feet? yards?

It probably depends on the country. Metric countries probably recorded measurements in mm, cm, or m, while the US probably used inches. What difference does it make what units they used? We know how to convert between measurements systems.

Whatever it was, unless it is as small as the mm, you will never be able to derive mm levels of accuracy. And any attempt to claim mm levels of accuracy are bogus.

Repeating that over and over again doesn’t make it any more true. You clearly need to inform yourself of some basic principles of statistics.

FWIW, the accuracy requirement for tide gauges is currently 10 mm. I have no idea what it was in 1870 but I’m pretty sure Church and White know, which is why they gave their global mean sea level figure an accuracy of ± 25 mm for that year.

And with bogus measurement data from then, any trend is likewise skewed.

Yet the tide gauges get the same results as sea level reconstructions using sediment cores from salt marshes during their period of overlap:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

And they get the same results as satellites during their period of overlap:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/SLR_models_obs.gif

Just because you don’t know how they work or the mathematics involved doesn’t make them “bogus”.

So please, what measurement method was used in the 1870’s?
What is the unit of measure for the data collected?
What exactly were they measuring? Sea levels? Tide levels?
How do we know what they measured truly reflected what our measurement of sea level actually is?

Perhaps you should have asked yourself these sorts of questions before claiming they can’t possibly be right.

Seriously, what’s up with that?

 

[kimmielittle]

Oh, come on — at least try. Assertions by Luboš Motl for the SPPI without a single reference to support his claims do not disprove the well-referenced posts on Skeptical Science. Assertions that do provide a reference almost invariably reference Motl’s own blog!. And what about your double-standards?

Ad hominem - can you counter what he has said?

skepticalscience.com/motley-cruel.html

Apparently it’s OK for Motl to defend his position by censorship. If you’re going to use a red herring, at least try to be consistent.

You have so many fallacies in logic presenting this statement. The red herring is yours.

I’ll give you a hint:
If sketicalscience John Cook ] censors …Why would I believe what is said on his blog about someone else “censoring”? 1 sucker fish

I didn’t present evidence that Mr Motl censored…Made NO claim that he did or didn’t. 2nd sucker fish

For me it makes no difference — Motl’s arguments fail on their own merits, whether it’s by making obviously incorrect unsubstantiated assertions, or misrepresenting what his opponents say, or referencing easily-debunked rubbish. If the difference in the quality of Luboš Motl’s arguments and John Cook’s arguments is not immediately apparent to you then… well, that would explain pretty much everything you post.

There are numerous sources questioning John Cooks work.jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/debunk/skepticalscience/The%20Unskeptical%20Guide%20to%20the%20Skeptics%20Handbook.pdf

I obviously know it was your response, my point was that it’s up to the same standard as your usual level.

Then you realize it was in response to your usual standards.

Right. And what did I give you? A link to scanned in copies of the actual, hand-written, RAW observation sheets filled in by the actual people making the actual observations on the ground for you to download and check to your heart’s content.

Another of your epic fails? This does NOT equate to Mr Hansen’s work - adjustments. It is Mr Hansen’s WORK Adjustments ] to the FULL collection , that is questioned.

A number of Mr Hansen’s for charities sake ] “Mistakes” in “adjustments” have been pointed out and corrected.

Now you can either admit that I did show you the RAW Data “that hasn’t undergone subjective adjustments”, or you can claim that the scanned-in hand-written observation sheets available from NOAA are forgeries,

No the RAW DATA pertains to the ORIGINAL data and Mr Hansen’s adjustments

ON NOAA NCDC

Today, I want to summarize the clear bias of NOAA’s National Climate Data Center under the leadership of Tom Karl and Tom Peterson on the research we have completed on the remaining uncertainties and systematic biases in the multi-decadal surface temperature analyses that are used by the IPCC and others in the quantification of global warming. Tom Karl is Director of the NOAA’s National Climate Data Center [NCDC], and Tom Peterson works for Tom Karl and has a leadership role in the analysis and interpretation of long term surface temperature data trends and anomalies.

pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-bias-of-the-noaas-national-climate-data-center-ncdc-under-the-leadership-of-tom-karl-and-tom-peterson/

despite the fact that you can order certified copies of them if you want, for a fee.

You seem proud of this??? Why should a taxpayer in this country pay a fee - for something it already paid for?

 

[JasonSB]

You certainly are - If you expect me to believe you or claims made by CRU.

So what, you believe they really did keep copies of the original data and lied when they said they threw them out?

I can not believe you ] a “scientist” said this.

BECAUSE IT IS THE KEY DATA There is a long tradition in science of retaining key data.

Why would they keep the raw data? They already processed it to create the quality-controlled and homogenised data that they wanted to use. They never set themselves up as being the world’s repository of raw data (some of which they were not allowed to pass on anyway), they asked for the raw data so they could use it in their particular research project.

If you want the raw data, do what they did — ask the bureaus for it! It hasn’t been destroyed, after all, contrary to what you claimed. CRU simply haven’t kept copies of all of it.

BECAUSE IT ISN’T REPRODUCIBLE This is the main criteria of science being able to use the RAW Data - apply their adjustments and reproduce outcome.

Of course it’s reproducible. You don’t need access to all of the raw data that CRU used in order to recreate a temperature record that’s almost identical:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/compare_gmst_land.png

If it did make a difference then you could rightly argue that the CRU temperature reconstruction is not robust because using some extra non-public data changes the outcome. Since the globe really is warming, and since there is more than enough publicly-available raw data to accurately reconstruct the temperature record, the result is robust and CRU have been proven not to be doing anything bogus with whatever adjustments and data they have been using. QED.

CRU says:

Yet they have these data sets in their library.

cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/library/datasets.htm

So? Are you saying that the library does contain all of the original raw data? I don’t see any contradiction between the two statements because I can’t tell from the link you provided whether the library does contain all of the original raw data.

Don’t like it? Don’t trust their adjustments? Fine — don’t use their temperature record! Use GISS instead — after all, the RAW data, the source code, and the algorithms are ALL PUBLICLY AVAILABLE.

http://forums.catholic-questions.org/picture.php?albumid=1281&pictureid=9375

So while you don’t trust Phil Jones as far as you could throw him, you do trust him when he says his temperature reconstruction is better than Hansen’s?

How ironic!

Personally, even without CRU’s source code and just using the public information on the algorithms that they use, I think GISS’s technique is smarter, no matter what Jones says. The differences in their results can be easily explained by the fact that GISS tries to reconstruct Arctic temperatures whereas CRU simply assumes that the Arctic is warming at the same rate as the global average, and clearly it is not. The only advantage that I see with CRU is that it does have access to more data precisely because they got additional, non-public records from those weather bureaus whereas GISS restricted itself to purely public records, but I don’t think they make any real difference because the areas where CRU has additional data are oversampled already.

And what I said is absolutely correct — GISS’s RAW data, source code, and algorithms are ALL PUBLICLY AVAILABLE. If you don’t like Jones’ secrecy, then don’t use his reconstruction. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t like the way GISS does something, then modify the source code — it is freely available, after all.

:juggle:How stupid is this statement? Especially, made by a “scientist”. How about Mr Hansen prove it - after all he makes the claims OR you prove it as a defender of AGW

How stupid is this statement? He has provided all of the source code and all of the RAW data. What more can he do to prove he is not doing anything wrong?

Here’s how it normally works — you look at the source code, you discover that it is doing something wrong, and then you tell people that he is doing something wrong. In other words, the conclusion that he is doing something wrong is derived from the observation that something was done wrong.

You are doing it the wrong way around — you are concluding that he must be doing something wrong, but you don’t have any actual evidence and you refuse to even look for it despite the fact that everything you need is right in front of you. In other words, it’s a baseless accusation and you think I’ve made a stupid statement when I’ve asked you for the evidence of any wrongdoing.

The mind boggles.

 

[JasonSB]

Do a search for J Hansen predictions proven…

Here’s a good one:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Hansen_vs_Lindzen_simple.png

OR AGW predictions proven.

Why would I need to search for any when I’ve given you a bunch of them already?

If you have any predictions made by the theory that have since been falsified then why not simply show the prediction and prove it was false?

And point the way to proving CO2 is the main driver of Climate.

CO2 is currently the main driver of climate change:

Fandom

This is simply an observational fact. If the sun was to suddenly change irradiance by a few percent then it would become the main driver of climate change, but that would in no way diminish the effect that CO2 is having.

And that ONLY by reducing CO2 can / will we change climate.

Lots of things can change climate, but CO2 is obviously the low-hanging-fruit because it is the main driver at the moment, it is the longest lived, and we have the technology to do something about it. As the report released by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences said, anthropogenic changes in the composition of the air and air quality are resulting in 2 million premature deaths worldwide every year and we should reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions without delay, using all means possible to meet ambitious international global warming targets, as well as reduce the concentrations of warming air pollutants by as much as 50%.

Nonsense

So you really don’t believe anything counter to your preconceived notions regardless of how patently obvious and well documented it is.

As you know, the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and the effect that greenhouse gasses have on the earth’s temperature was discovered by Tyndall over 150 years ago, but Arrhenius was the first to make the connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming.

By 1958 the outcomes were still far from certain but the possibility that burning fossil fuels could lead to global warming by enhancing the greenhouse effect was already the subject of school science videos: youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg

By 1979 Charney had already calculated that doubling CO2 would lead to a most probable warming of 3 °C ± 1.5 °C. (The current best estimate from no less than six independent lines of evidence — only one of which is climate models — is still a most likely value of 3 °C with a most probable range of 2 °C - 4.5 °C, which shows that even a basic climate model captures the essential physics quite well and everything since then has effectively been fine-tuning.)

At that time there was no clear indication that temperatures were going to rise. However, the Charney report could find no overlooked or underestimated physical effect that could reduce the warming they expected from increasing CO2 — the science predicted the warming would occur, and they tried to find anything that would counteract it but were unable to. Instead they warned that the thermal mass of the ocean could delay the warming for several decades until CO2 loading was such that “appreciable climate change is inevitable”.

By 1990 the IPCC’s First Assessment Report concluded that the global mean surface air temperature had increased “by 0.3 to 0.6 °C over the last 100 years” but that because the warming was of the same magnitude as natural climate variability it was impossible to say whether human-induced greenhouse warming was responsible.

By 1995 the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a “discernable” human influence on global climate.

It wasn’t until the Third Assessment Report in 2001 that the IPCC was able to attribute most of the warming “over the last 50 years” to human activity.

So to claim that the science didn’t predict global warming because of CO2 emissions long before the warming was actually detected shows a breathtaking inability to recognise facts that are clearly indisputable.

AND ANY AMOUNT of cooling proves the unproven hypothesis is lacking. IF the Physics supported this Remember to be a law of Physics - it has to OBEY that law - constantly ].

Of course it obeys the laws of physics. What it doesn’t obey is kimmielittle’s gross misunderstanding of the laws of physics. There is nothing in the physics that says just because the forcing has increased due to greenhouse gas emissions, weather no longer happens. There is nothing to say that ENSO and multiple other similar processes stop cyclically transferring heat between the oceans and the atmosphere. As we have already seen, climate models — which are computer representations of those laws of physics — exhibit exactly the same kind of internal variability that the real world does.

Therefore your claim that there can be no cooling at all and therefore any cooling disproves the theory is a strawman argument because the theory does not say there can be no cooling at all.

 

[JasonSB]

Ad hominem - can you counter what he has said?

Motl is claiming to prove that Skeptical Science’s articles are wrong.

Motl fails to make his argument. Simply asserting in each instance that they are wrong is not at argument. He would need to either:

1. Show how John Cook misrepresented the scientific publications that he is using in the Skeptical Science articles, or
2. Show how John Cook is ignoring valid scientific publications that refute the Skeptical Science articles.

Motl does neither. I’m not going to go through every one of Motl’s points and show how they fail to disprove John Cook’s points because they’re all just as bad as each other so instead I’ll use one example that is pertinent to our recent discussion on temperature records: Are surface temperature records reliable?

John Cook: skepticalscience.com/surface-temperature-measurements-advanced.htm

First he shows that GISS, CRU, and NCDC show essentially the same temperature history.

Then he shows that both GISS and CRU have been successfully implemented by independent investigators who get the same result.

Then he shows that similar results have been obtained by many others using different software and methods.

Therefore the construction of a global temperature record from the publicly-available data is proven to be reliable.

Next he shows that the GHCN adjustment process does not affect the results.

Then he proves that the temperature increase is not an artefact of declining numbers of stations, it is not an artefact of stations being located at airports, and that even if you use completely independent data sets (GSOD) you still get the same result.

Finally he compares the results with the satellite temperature record and does a trend comparison between all of the different reconstructions.

Every single point he makes is supported by links to the source of the information and every single point supports the claim that the global temperature record is reliable.

Presumably he can now add Watts’ research proving that station siting issues are not the source of the warming signal as well.

Now how about Motl?

He makes the unsubstantiated claim that UHI in large cities exceeds the whole assumed warming caused by CO2, but correctly points out that it matters a lot whether the urban effects are isolated without actually saying whether they are or not, and fails to mention whether this actually has any impact on the temperature reconstructions at all (which is because this has already been tested and it’s been shown that using only the best rural stations you get the same result).

Then he says that this is far from being the only problem (despite the fact he hasn’t actually shown if it is a problem) and promptly concludes with “The number of recently found dramatic problems with the surface record is so huge that I can’t even enumerate them here”.

That’s it!

That’s his entire rebuttal.

So what’s the best way to counter what he said? Link to these:

It’s not UHI.

It’s not everything else.

What more can I possibly say? He demurs on his only real claim (UHI) by simply saying that it matters whether the effects are isolated or not but then fails to say if they are isolated or not, and fails to even mention what other “problems” there might be. He did not attempt to show that John Cook has misrepresented the science and does not attempt to prove that John Cook overlooked anything.

There is nothing to counter!

You have so many fallacies in logic presenting this statement. The red herring is yours.

I guess logic is unrecognisable to those not used to it.

There are numerous sources questioning John Cooks work.

I have no doubt about it. But are there any sources that don’t simply question his work but actually show he is wrong?

Jo Nova’s assertions about how important the hot spot is to AGW carry no more weight than Motl’s, and her conflation of climate sensitivity and feedbacks with a difference between tropospheric warming/stratospheric cooling vs the hot spot simply makes no sense.

 

[JasonSB]

Another of your epic fails? This does NOT equate to Mr Hansen’s work - adjustments.

Of course it doesn’t, Hansen has nothing to do with the collection of the raw data — he simply downloads it from the same public website that everybody else can. But you were the one who claimed that I hadn’t shown you the RAW data and asked if my “memory was slipping” when quite clearly I had.

As I said, you have all that information for GISS, and yet you refuse to actually look at it for fear that it might prove your accusations wrong and instead continue to talk about “potential bias”.

It is Mr Hansen’s WORK Adjustments ] to the FULL collection , that is questioned.

Why? How many times do I need to say this? Where is the “potential bias” slipping in?

Is it in the raw data that Hansen uses? Well, I’ve shown you how to download scanned-in copies of the actual hand-written temperature logs so you can check for yourself whether NOAA has been corrupting the data before Hansen gets to use it. So far you have failed to show anything wrong with it. I also pointed out last time that the link was first posted on WUWT about four years ago now. Have any of Watts’ team of volunteers discovered any discrepancies?

If you concede that the raw data that Hansen uses is correct, then there must be something that Hansen then does to that raw data while processing it to construct the GISS temperature record.

However, the source code is publicly available from Hansen and has been scrutinised. It has even been independently re-implemented in a completely different programming language and their version of GISS generates exactly the same results.

The algorithm behind the adjustments was documented for even longer than that (starting way back in 1989, as I showed you before) and the source code definitely does implement the algorithms as described.

So there is no way for Hansen to possibly “taint” the data.

Yet that doesn’t prevent you from trying to characterise publicly described and justified adjustments as somehow nefarious.

Why aren’t you forming your opinions based on observed facts rather than formulating unfounded opinions and asking others to prove your opinions wrong?

A number of Mr Hansen’s for charities sake ] “Mistakes” in “adjustments” have been pointed out and corrected.

The Clear Climate Code people found a few bugs, yes. McIntyre found a Y2K bug as well that had the enormous impact of 0.01 C on the global means. But coding errors that have no discernible impact on the result hardly count as evidence of “bias”, do they? How can they be evidence of bias when you can’t even see the difference?

No the RAW DATA pertains to the ORIGINAL data and Mr Hansen’s adjustments

Well that’s good then, since Hansen’s adjustments are completely public and completely described in the scientific literature so there’s no excuse for casting aspersions on his work, is there?

ON NOAA NCDC

pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-bias-of-the-noaas-national-climate-data-center-ncdc-under-the-leadership-of-tom-karl-and-tom-peterson/

So if Pielke Sr. accuses them of bias for ignoring his work or refusing to collaborate with him, it must be true?

The question is simple: Does the raw data provided by NOAA and relied upon by GISS, CRU, and others, accurately reflect what was actually recorded, or does it not? If it does then it doesn’t matter how many times Pielke Sr. complains about them ignoring him. If it does not then prove it.

You seem proud of this??? Why should a taxpayer in this country pay a fee - for something it already paid for?

1. How can you possibly infer that I was proud of the fact that you have to pay a fee??? I mentioned it as a piece of information in case you then complained that it wasn’t free. Your ability to avoid the topic at hand seems boundless.
2. The data is available for free. If you want certified copies then they’ll charge you, presumably because then someone has to be paid to certify the copies — i.e. it has not already been paid for.
3. Why should the US taxpayer subsidise those who want certified copies rather than simply copies of the actual data?
4. What does this have to do with anything? Is it merely to divert attention from the fact that the RAW data is available and that I had pointed this out to you in the past and you denied this?

 

[JasonSB]

JasonSB:

The science predicts — and, in fact, predicted — global warming because of the CO2 emissions long before the warming was actually detected.

Then the science is wrong.
Everyone knows the sun is what warms the earth.

The sun warms the earth, yes.

The sun is not responsible for the warming, however.

Grammar is a remarkable thing.

 

[vz71]

They clearly indicate an accuracy of ± 25 mm for the mean sea level in 1870 on that graph. What difference do the units make? Would you prefer if the graph was simply relabelled in inches so the accuracy was shown as ± 1 inch?

I don’t know. Did they measure in inches?
I have been googling for days and have yet to find anything indicating how these measurements were taken.
I have found the proponents of AGW to be dishonest in the past, I see no reason to trust the measurements now.
It is NOT enough to simply claim a given sea level in 1870.
They need to show how it was obtained.
We use satellite data now, and it is still a tricky process. Yet they want me to believe that in 1870 the tech was available to measure global sea levels.
I do not buy it.

Here is a commercial GPS-based monitoring system that achieves better than 1 mm accuracy using measurements with errors 10,000 times as large as that! orionmonitoring.com/technology.htm

The web page you are referencing does not indicate this.

It probably depends on the country. Metric countries probably recorded measurements in mm, cm, or m, while the US probably used inches. What difference does it make what units they used? We know how to convert between measurements systems.

Cubits are a unit of measure that was used in the past and we have no measure for today.
But more to the point, what if they are measuring in feet?
You see, at that time the main need for measuring depth was to make certain a ship would not scrape the bottom. They had no need for mm accuracy. They likely had no need for accuracy beyond a foot.
So it is very important to know what and how and where these measurements were made.

FWIW, the accuracy requirement for tide gauges is currently 10 mm. I have no idea what it was in 1870 but I’m pretty sure Church and White know, which is why they gave their global mean sea level figure an accuracy of ± 25 mm for that year.

Tide is not the same as sea level. Tide varies based on time of day and is constantly changing. One cannot take a tide level measurement without also noting time of day and location of the moon in order to use it for much.
Tide at midnight with the moon overhead is going to be redically different from a tide measurement taken the next day at the same time.

Just because you don’t know how they work or the mathematics involved doesn’t make them “bogus”.

Indeed it does.
Is not the default of science skepticism?

Perhaps you should have asked yourself these sorts of questions before claiming they can’t possibly be right.
Seriously, what’s up with that?

I am asking you, now. And it appears you do not have answers.
How are we to accept the science behind any of your claims if you cannot answer for how the results were acheived?
Every chart you bring out suffers this same problem.

 

[vz71]

The sun warms the earth, yes.

The sun is not responsible for the warming, however.

Grammar is a remarkable thing.

The sun is no longer warming the earth?

I will keep that in mind the next time I get in my car on a hot day and find the steering wheel to be too hot to touch…the sun did not do it.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

The sun warms the earth, yes.

The sun is not responsible for the warming, however.

Grammar is a remarkable thing.

There HAVE been previous warmings.

Lots of them.

Like when the North American glaciers melted.

So, if it wasn’t the sun that did it, what was it?