ON Tuesday there was a Parliamentary Information Session in Canberra sponsored by the Global Change Institute and the University of Queensland at which many government-funded climate scientists told members and senators that the end is nigh. That is unless Australia signs on to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at the upcoming COP21 in Paris.
The night before the debate, on Monday, three of the alarmists (Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, John Church and Mark Howden), Bob Carter and I were invited to present information to the Coalition Environment Committee, where Craig Kelly MP facilitated some lively discussion.
It is significant that such a meeting was actually held in Parliament House at which both government-funded alarmists and credentialed independent sceptics were present; this is almost a world first and certainly an Australian first.
I emphasized the importance of distinguishing between real historical data as opposed to naively believing output from computer models that homogenize original measurements. I forcefully criticized both Hoegh-Guldberg and Church for not telling the members and senators that they had presented remodeled data, as opposed to actual measurements in their presentations, which preceded mine.
My presentation* focused on surface temperature data from Rutherglen, and how the Bureau of Meteorology has remodeled the observational temperature series, showing sustained cooling over the 20th Century, to show an apparent dramatic warming trend. This is achieved by the Bureau dropping down past temperatures and promulgating this effect backwards. In particular, the Bureau subtracts 0.57°C from all temperature minima recorded before 1974, subtracts 0.63°C from all minima before 1966, and subtracts 0.49°C from all minima before 1928. The net change back to the beginning of the record in 1912 is thus 1.69°C. This is an extraordinarily significant distortion of the record.
At the meeting, I explained how Rutherglen is one of 104 weather stations used to construct the contrived official temperature trend for Australia, and that every single temperature time series was adjusted. In general, like at Rutherglen, the adjustments have the effect of cooling the past and thus making the present appear relatively hotter.
I mentioned that it was a travesty that Minister Greg Hunt had prevented a proper inquiry into the Bureau last year, and suggested that the senators and members in the room needed to ‘wake-up’ and do something. Public policy, I suggested, needed to be based on real data/real evidence, not contrived temperature series.
After my presentation, Professor Howden began with slides indicating that because of climate change there had been a decline in crop yields. He was interrupted by one of the MPs who asked whether the charts on display represented actual real historical data, or output from a computer model. The Professor acknowledged that he was showing computer output.
At that point, I really wanted to applaud when several of the MPs promptly got up and walked out.
After the presentations there was some discussion of the satellite data at the request of the committee chair, Craig Kelly MP. Luckily, I had a supplementary slide showing the last 17 years of data for Australia to September 2015, that I had downloaded the day before from Ken Stewart’s blog, https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/the-pause-september-update/
This data, which measures radiance in the lower troposphere clearly shows that there has been no global warming for 17 years. However, Professor Howden from the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, claimed that if measurements from different altitudes were combined this data showed global warming. Perhaps he meant that that even this data could be remodeled to show global warming.
Of course, it is possible to change the trend in any time series by making specific adjustments to individual values, then combining measurement in particular ways, with arbitrarily assigned weightings. These are indeed the techniques mainstream climate science apply to data, and then justify the same on the basis it is ‘World’s Best Practice’ because it shows global warming, and any data that does not is just wrong.
Ansley Kellow in his book ‘Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science’ labels this preference for virtual data that tells the “correct” story, over real measurements, as a form of “noble cause corruption”.
At the meeting on Monday night Professor Carter stressed the need to pay attention to the scientific method, and in particular the importance of testing the null hypothesis. Meanwhile Ove Hoegh-Guldberg continually pointed to a thick tome which apparently represented the consensus of all IPCC scientists. Of course, this consensus is all about politics, not evidence or science.
You might consider sending a note of thanks to one or more the following members and senators for attending. Craig Kelly MP, in particular, should be congratulated for organizing the meeting, and facilitating the discussion.
1. Senator Eric Abetz, Liberal, TAS
2. Dr Peter Hendy MP, Liberal, NSW
3. Senator Zed Seselja, Liberal, ACT
4. Craig Kelly MP, Liberal, NSW
5. Warren Entsch, LNP, QLD
6. Dr Denis Jensen MP, Liberal, WA
7. Bert van Manen MP, LNP, QLD
8. Nola Marino MP, Liberal, WA
9. Andrew Broad, National, VIC
10. Tony Pasin, Liberal, SA
11. Brett Whitely, Liberal, SA
12. Rick Wilson, Liberal, WA
13. George Christensen, LNP, QLD
14. Eric Hutchison, Liberal, TAS
15. Sharman Stone, Liberal, VIC
16. Mark Coulton MP, National, NSW
There is more information, and a link to an interview that I did with Alan Jones, 2GB, at Jo Nova’s blog, http://joannenova.com.au/2015/10/alan-jones-talks-climate-paris-mainstream-scientists-caught-out-by-marohasy-in-parliament/
Also, Brett Hogan from the Institute of Public Affairs was the sixth speaker. He gave an interesting talk about coal, and how it is helping the poor in places like India and China out of poverty.
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* My presentation included several charts of data from Rutherglen, and the nearby location of Beechworth, these charts with explanatory notes can be downloaded here: Notes-EnvironCommittee-October2015-V4
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Great post Jennifer. This is extraordinary:
“This is achieved by the Bureau dropping down past temperatures and promulgating this effect backwards. In particular, the Bureau subtracts 0.57°C from all temperature minima recorded before 1974, subtracts 0.63°C from all minima before 1966, and subtracts 0.49°C from all minima before 1928. The net change back to the beginning of the record in 1912 is thus 1.69°C. This is an extraordinarily significant distortion of the record.”
I would consider using that as the basis for seeking a Judicial Declaration about the validity of the BoM temperature record.
Also of note not ONE left wing politician present. The faithful do not want to be exposed to heresy.
Hey Cohenite, what is a ‘Judicial Declaration’, and what is the process that needs to be commenced?
Also, No Labor or Greens were preswent as they were not invited. But Bob and I were keen to attend their meeting with the Alarmists, and Greg Hunt, the next day. But we weren’t invited.
It is Minister Hunt who really does not want to be exposed to “heresy”. He wanted the Monday night meeting stopped, and of course he “killed” the proper inquiry into the Bureau.
An action for Judicial Review was taken in New Zealand with unhappy results:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14122
Lessons would have to be learnt from that case. Australian review follows a similar path and the NIWA case would have application to any Australian review of the BoM temperature record.
Hi Jennifer,
I have made some comments regarding Ken’s use of UAH v6.3 data on his website. I think you may need to reconsider your advocacy for if you read the comments section. He finally terminated our exchange , which he clearly is his prerogative, but had not directly addressed the issues that I raised with the UAH dat.
In short ,the point I made was the following
“.. you are using UAHv6.3 satellite data. This data has been massaged so many times since the days of UAH v1, it is amazing that there is any flesh left. Every year or two there is a new version.
You have complained loudly and incessantly about the B.O.M. massaging their Australian data using homogenization. They are complete amateurs compared to the deep massage experts of Spencer and Christy.
To put this into context, as you have rightly pointed out, the homogenisation by the bureau has increased the temperature trend for Australia from about 0.07 (raw) to approximately 0.1 degree per decade (homogenised).
In comparison UAH v5.6 reported a trend for Australia of 0.16 degrees per decade (from 1979 till present) which is much greater than even the bureaus manipulated data and over twice the bureau’s raw data.
Bizarrely the new version UAH v6.3 shows a trend for the same period of 0.24 degrees per decade for Australia (see http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0beta3 ).
So going from one version of UAH to the next has resulted in an increase in trend by a factor of 1.5 ! The 0.24 degree per decade value is over three times the rate of increase of the bureau’s raw data!
Something is clearly very wrong here. Either the scientists at the bureau have joined the climate change sceptics and are massively under reporting the true rate of global warming or the UAH data is totally unreliable. Which is it?”
Jennifer, you have made a similar mistake in the past of using dubious claims. An example is the reference to Samuel Gordon Stewart Excel calculations – http://jennifermarohasy.com/2014/01/open-letter-requesting-verification-of-2013-temperature-record/ .
Samuel’s calculations were grossly in error (see my comment 22 at the conclusion of http://samuelgordonstewart.com/2014/01/bureau-overheat-figures-by-4-degrees-2013-was-not-australias-hottest-year-on-record .
My humble suggestion is that you apply a bit of due diligence when linking to such dubious material and usefully employ the same meticulous forensic skills that you apply to the BOM’s Rutherglen data etc.. Maybe you could start by asking Dr Spencer why he publishes regional data that is clearly so far out of whack.
Thanks for the report and for your presentation. I am frequently disappointed when trying to demonstrate that there has been no dangerous warming in the last 18 years. People just do not want to believe it.
Jennifer you are one gutsy lady, I just wish we had more like you and Jo Nova to question their CAGW con. I just made this comment at WUWT and Ken’s Kingdom.
The 2014 Concordia Uni study found that there has been about 0.56 C of warming since 1800 attributable to the top 20 countries. Therefore according to this study total warming would be about 0.68 C over the last 215 years.
Not a lot of warming considering the planet’s recovery from one of the coldest periods over the last 10,000 years. I’ve read that many studies show that glacier advance was at the highest Holocene point during the LIA.
So how much of this slight warming is attributable to human Co2 emissions and why? I ‘ve also read that the IPCC states that human co2 impact starts after 1950. Here’s a reference to the study————–
http://berc.berkeley.edu/ranking-global-warming-contributions-by-country/
The Guardian didn’t phone me, and ask my opinion…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/oct/23/coalition-committee-tries-to-balance-climate-science-briefings-by-inviting-denialists-from-think-tank
In the book “Taxing Air” the authors tell us that the IPCC prefers the Had 4 temp data. I’ve tried this before, but can anyone tell me why the alarmists get a free pass trumpeting their so called CAGW? Here’s the 3 warming trends used by Phil Jones in the 2010 BBC interview, but I’ve extended the 1910 to 1940 trend to 1945. That’s 36 years (inclusive), so the 2 early trends shown here are 1860 to 1880 and 1910 to 1945. Both are clearly before the 1950 impact from human co2 emissions.
The later warming trend is from 1975 to 1998 and should be impacted by extra co2 emissions. Please can anyone tell me the difference in the last warming trend? It looks very similar to me and Jones agreed that there was no SS difference during the interview.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:1880/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1945/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/to:1998/trend
Oh Readfearn; at the Guardian. Readfearn says:
“In my view, neither Carter nor Marohasy have any credibility as experts in climate science. They have almost no relevant peer-reviewed publications on the issue and they work for an ideologically blinkered thinktank with a long record of promoting fringe views on climate science.”
This guy is a shocker: “In his view”; what a joke.
Miker,
I’ve just released your comment from ‘pending’. As it was your first post at this blog it didn’t go straight through.
I appreciate you taking the time to draw these issues to my attention; particularly the extent of homogenization of the UAH satellite data. I have avoided using this data because I know it has been homogenized, but I was unsure of the extent. I did go there on Monday night, given the request of the committee chair. Furthermore, I did download the chart from Ken’s blog because I knew there had been a lot of interest in the same.
It is the case that the IPCC uses the UAH satellite data?
Jennifer,
A great presentation and i’m glad some of our politicians took the time to hear the ‘for and against’ argument themselves.
However, I fear it will be for naught given the continual misinformation being fed to and by the IPCC to the world public in general. I read and I apologize for not having the link (Jo Nova I believe), that the climate change consultant industry is worth 1.5 trillion dollars, absolutely staggering!
This is the reason why the gravy train will hog along because this is a massive industry of false deceptions and deceit, paying people to stuff their faces into the government troughs of endless handouts, all in the name of science.
Its a disgrace and I truly believe many of these people feel no shame in their actions.
I think it’s almost over and a new Dark Age is beginning.
miker: are you saying there is a temperature trend consistent with AGW, or that neither UAH or RSS or BoM show that?
Jennifer,
From a cursory look at the last IPCC report (see IPCC AR 5 – WG1AR5_Chapter02_FINAL.pdf) there appears to be a reliance on a range of temperature records, two of which are the satellite data UAH and RSS and the remainder a range of surface records Hadcrut, Giss temp, NOAA,and BEST.
I may have missed it but there appears to be no reference to the UAH data for Australia that Ken Stewart relies upon.
Jennifer, I am glad you are interested in the degree of homogenization or manipulation of the UAH data that results in major changes in trends going from version to version. You should use your undoubted investigative skills and influence to examine this matter in detail. Hopefully you can provide a report on this matter in the near future. I recently made an enquiry on Dr. Spencer’s web site but have not yet received a reply. He may be busy with a new revision of UAH so we may have to be patient.
With respect to the global data, the two satellite data sets are the only data sets for which it is possible to find starting dates that have negative trends until the present and allow claims of ” no global warming since. ..” to be made. For the surface data it is not possible to find any date that permit this inference. Even for the UAH data, the number of start dates where the trend is positive outnumber the number of start dates that give a negative trend by a factor of more than 3.
Anyway the cherry picking of Ken Stewart may all be moot in a few months if the UAH data shows the same pattern as for previous significant EL-Ninos. If this does happen then there will be a cherry famine as there will be no starting points that have the required negative slope, even for the satellite data.
Another classic cherry picking exercise is undertaken by Neville above. To illustrate this , rather than cherry picking 3 periods of relatively short duration (20 to 36 years) with missing gaps of a total of 77 years, I will indulge in a cherry pick (with slightly more justification), that includes all the data, of two equal duration periods, of about 78 years each from 1860-1938 and 1938 until the present (see http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:2015/from/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:1938/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1938/to:2015/trend ) . It is evident that this provides a very different picture to Neville’s.
That is the beauty of cherry picking only the data that supports your preconceived ideas and why it is frowned upon in the academic community. With the appropriate choices almost any argument can be sustained.
Cohenite, the most valid conclusion is that for each of the data sets, if you use the maximum information (i.e. all data points) then there is a clear indication of warming, anthropogenic or otherwise. The degree of warming may be different for each data set but this is totally unsurprising as each set either uses different measurement systems or utilize different methods for treating the data.
Here is a 2014 study by McKitrick and Vogelsang showing the temp in the trop troposphere from 1958 to 2012. BTW isn’t that single jump the late 1970s PDO change? So once again, where is the impact from Co2?
And here is an interesting quote from McKitrick’s climate audit post——
“ Tim Vogelsang and I have a new paper comparing climate models and observations over a 55-year span (1958-2012) in the tropical troposphere. Among other things we show that climate models are inconsistent with the HadAT, RICH and RAOBCORE weather balloon series. In a nutshell, the models not only predict far too much warming, but they potentially get the nature of the change wrong. The models portray a relatively smooth upward trend over the whole span, while the data exhibit a single jump in the late 1970s, with no statistically significant trend either side.”
http://climateaudit.org/2014/07/24/new-paper-by-mckitrick-and-vogelsang-comparing-models-and-observations-in-the-tropical-troposphere/
Miker I just used the same warming trends used by Phil Jones in the 2010 BBC interview. And UAH, RSS and the weather balloons all seem to agree.
Now the Concordia study shows about 0.68c warming since 1800 and HAD 4 data shows about 0.8c warming since 1850. Also the Lloyd study found an average deviation of 1 c per century over the last 8,000 years using both Greenland and Antarctic ice core measurements.
So where is the impact from human co2 emissions since 1950? The Concordia study shows a warming of about 0.32 c per century and the HAD 4 data shows about 0.48 c per century.
Another top post from Werner Brozek at WUWT. The S polar region hasn’t warmed for the entire satellite record, using both RSS and UAH V 6. In fact RSS shows a slight cooling for nearly 37 years., So how is this possible if co2 is their dangerous driver of CAGW? The poles should show the greatest warming according to AGW theory.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/23/polar-puzzle-now-includes-august-data/
just filing this here…
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2015/10/23/jennifer-marohasy-tells-it-like-it-is.html
Judith Curry and her readers easily pull apart the latest junk science nonsense from the delusional extremists.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/10/23/climate-closure/#more-20284
Re: Cherry Picking
Eight foods you’re about to lose due to climate change –
“7. Cherries
Stone fruits, particularly cherries, require chill hours to bear fruit; too few cold nights, and the trees are less likely to achieve successful pollination.
http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2014/oct/29/diet-climate-maple-syrup-coffee-global-warming
16 Oct 2015
Fiona Hall, from Caernarvon Cherries, which farms cherries as well as packing for about 20 growers from around NSW, said all things going well, it should be a bumper crop this year.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/bumper-cherry-crop/6860368
Cherry-picking accusers should be careful when picking inconvenient truths about cherries.
Thank you MikeR. Let’s drill down on your points because whether there is a temperature pause for a climatically significant period, 17 years, is a crucial cog in the AGW narrative.
Neville has linked to Werner Brozek’s work on a temperature pause. Werner’s criteria is a simple one and statistically valid:
“We start with the present date and go to the furthest month in the past where the slope is a least slightly negative on at least one calculation. So if the slope from September is 4 x 10^-4 but it is – 4 x 10^-4 from October, we give the time from October so no one can accuse us of being less than honest if we say the slope is flat from a certain month.”
Werner concludes:
“1. For GISS, the slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
2. For Hadcrut4, the slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
3. For Hadsst3, the slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
4. For UAH, the slope is flat since May 1997 or 18 years and 4 months. (goes to August using version 6.0)
5. For RSS, the slope is flat since January 1997 or 18 years and 8 months. (goes to August)”
This is astounding even if the satellites do measure lower Troposphere compared with the land based indices. AGW has predicted a GREATER rate of warming in the Troposphere than the surface because of evaporative increased water vapour content. Yet the satellites are showing no troposphere Hot Spot (THS).
Previously the land based indices also showed a pause; for instance 5/7/14: Werner reached the following conclusions based on his criteria:
“1. For GISS, the slope is flat since September 2004 or 9 years, 9 months. (goes to May)
2. For Hadcrut3, the slope is flat since September 2000 or 13 years, 9 months. (goes to May)
3. For a combination of GISS, Hadcrut3, UAH and RSS, the slope is flat since January 2001 or 13 years, 5 months. (goes to May)
4. For Hadcrut4, the slope is flat since January 2001 or 13 years, 5 months. (goes to May)
5. For Hadsst3, the slope is flat since January 2001 or 13 years, 5 months. (goes to May)
6. For UAH, the slope is flat since January 2005 or 9 years, 5 months. (goes to May using version 5.5)
7. For RSS, the slope is flat since September 1996 or 17 years, 9 months (goes to May).”
Subsequent adjustments by the land indices has changed this pause. What is going on?
I take your point about UAHv6.3 conclusions about Australia’s warming being greater than BoM’s where other regions are showing much less warming or even cooling as Ken has shown. I think it is worth contacting Dr Spencer for his insight and I will do so.
Sorry that link to 5/7/14:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/05/giss-is-unique-now-includes-may-data/#more-112484
How about some public-minded organisation that champions democracy and open governance puts a petition out that demands just straight answers from Minister Hunt about the ‘adjustments’ the BoM has carried out – what?, how?, why? when?
(+ testable evidence)
Can’t be that hard, surely?
And it would give the BoM the perfect opportunity to put this contentious matter to rest.
Mick, Hunt is not going to do anything; he is a true believer.
Neville, your statement regarding the lack of polar amplification in the UAH record is interesting but it may just be an artefact of the unreliability of UAH satellite data for particular regions.
The UAH Antarctic data shows a slight negative trend which is remarkably at odds with the data for the surface based measurements (see BEST data at http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Regional/TMAX/Text/antarctica-TMAX-Trend.txt ) . The BEST data shows a warming trend of 0.18 degrees per decade from mid 1955 until February 2013.
In light of the bizarre trend values of the UAH Australia data, I think there may also be a great deal of doubt regarding the UAH south polar regional data. Even RSS do not include data for the extreme polar regions (>82.5 degrees) in their analysis as they regard this data as being unreliable.
However it is interesting to note that the UAH north pole data, unlike the UAH south pole data, shows the highest trend value (0.23 degrees per decade) of any region by far (with the exception of good old OZ! – another reason to be highly suspicious of the OZ data ).
So once again, by selection of the appropriate data set (i.e. UAH data only, south pole only) and wilfully ignoring other data sets, Neville can get the required result that fits in with his preconceived prejudices.
Handjive,
Are you in your above comment being facetious? If so, my contribution in the same spirit, is that the consumption of too many cherries can cause tummy aches and like most fruit, the runs (sometimes lasting as long as 17 years). It is rumoured that it can also cause hyperthyroidism.
But in case you were being serious I would have to ask. Have you surveyed cherry production world wide over several decades or have you restricted yourself to one location and one or two data points?
I can see you’re going to be fun MikeR. You say:
“The UAH Antarctic data shows a slight negative trend which is remarkably at odds with the data for the surface based measurements (see BEST data at http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Regional/TMAX/Text/antarctica-TMAX-Trend.txt ) . The BEST data shows a warming trend of 0.18 degrees per decade from mid 1955 until February 2013.”
All at a time when the Antarctic is showing both record sea and sheet ice. Hilarious. And given this you prefer a discredited temperature set which does not even do UHIE, not that there is any UHIE at the South pole.
Anyway UAH Southern 60-85S:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image51.png
RSS 60 – 70S:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/image52.png
Southern ocean SST:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/14southern_thumb1.png
Cohenite ,
It may-be a cop out, but in the interests of sanity I would like to defer my discussion of Werner Stozek’s, (and Ken Stewart’s and Lord Monckton’s) analysis until the current EL-Nino has had time to influence the satellite data record. A hiatus of about 4 to 6 months should do nicely.
In the mean time, as Werner Brozek extensively uses Nick Stokes data to make his claims, I will defer to the greater wisdom of Nick regarding these matters- with respect to Werner Brozek (http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/fragility-of-pause.html) and with regard to Lord Monckton (http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/monckton-and-goddard-o-lord.html) .
I am however gratified that you intend to pursue the line of enquiry with Dr. Spencer regarding the weirdness of the Australian UAH data. Maybe it is not intended to be taken seriously.
Cohenite,
The reason ice is increasing in the Antarctica, while the land temperature data indicates warming, is now becoming understood. The dynamics of the annual ice cycle in the Antarctic versus the Arctic are very different.
A large part of the ice of Antarctic region is above a continental land mass . This is very different to the open seas and sea ice of the Arctic. Melting ice coming from the Antarctic shelf is predominantly fresh water and once melted reduces the salinity of the surrounding sea . For the same reason salt is added to roads to prevent ice, this reduction of salinity then allows the freezing of this surrounding sea water and consequently causes an increase in ice around Antarctica.
This is unlike the Arctic where the sea ice, being frozen sea water has a much higher salinity and the same phenomenon does not occur.
Other explanations for this behaviour involve change in winds and sea currents in the Antarctic. For a more detailed explantation see http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/cdeser/docs/fan.antarctic_seaice_trends.grl14.pdf.
The reduction in SST temperatures shown in your linked figures can be simply attributed to the increase in ice cover in the southern ocean.
SST during this El Nino are shown here:
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/01-nino-time-series.png
Strangely though atmospheric temps are not showing the same increase so this El NIno is odd:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/uah/from:1998/plot/gistemp/from:1998
Cohenite,
I think you are being a bit premature. The cross correlation of UAH temperatures with EL-Nino 3.4 function show that UAH follows Nino3.4 by about 6 months. At this stage of the 1997/8 El Nino, Uah had not budged.
Currently the land based measures are going through the roof – see http://models.weatherbell.com/temperature.php .
2015 to date has been a mixed bag from your source:
http://models.weatherbell.com/climate/ncep_cfsr_t2m_anom_022015.png
And I repeat the graph showing nothing much by UAH, RSS while GISS and to a lessor extent HadCrut 4 go nuts:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/uah/from:1998/plot/gistemp/from:1998
Speaking of schizophrenia in temperature indices look at the difference between HadCrut 3 and 4:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998
No doubt you’ll be taking aim at HadCrut next?
Yeah, I see what you mean. For the period 1998-2013 the HadCrut 3 data has a trendline of +0.0046 while the HadCrut 4 data has a trendline of +0.0048.
Totally changes everything.
“Totally changes everything.”
And what is the difference in temperature that those similar trends operate at?
MK I’m finding the HAD 4 and 3 data trends from 1998 are chalk and cheese. Please explain?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/trend
Thanks Neville; I didn’t check and took him at his word. Cheese and chalk indeed!
Cohenite, even Ken Stewart gave MK the boot from his blog last week. Just too much trolling and Bull Sh-ting for Ken to put up with. I’m afraid these religious fanatics can’t help themselves.
I’m currently revising a paper I’ve written on Darwin temps, mostly sticking to ACORN-SAT versus raw/actual measurements versus my own ‘reconstruction’.
Nevertheless, given the interest in difference between versions 3 and 4 of HADCRUT, I would be interested in any comment on this article by Hughes and Thurston…
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/darwinfiddle25jun12.pdf
It gets worse, MK said he used the 1998 to 2013 period and that shows a negative trend for HAD 3.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/to:2013/trend
One of the reasons why temperatures have not risen during this El Nino which is a back to back event is that the ground based indices have already adjusted temps upwards and the temp increase is not being reflected in the adjusted temps:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1687208254891021&set=gm.1641418952783883&type=3&theater
Cohenite and Neville,
Sorry, my bad! This is a scandal clearly up there with ClimateGate.
The figures I quoted previously were from 1860-2013.
As both of you are well aware, the relevant values for 1988 to 2013 are -0.06 degrees per decade for Hadcrut3 and +0.6 degrees for Hadcrut4. The period from 1998-2013 covers 15 years, compared to the 153 years from 1860. It is unsurprising that there is a such significant difference between versions for the shorter period compared to the much longer period
This is change of +0.66 degrees per decade or 6.6 degree per century between each version of HAdcrut. Clearly scandalous manipulation of data is going on!
However If we do the exact same exercises for the UAH global data comparing versions 5.6 and 6.3 for the same period we get the following trend values +0.64 for v5.6 and -0.79 degree per decade for UAH v6.3 . This corresponds to an adjustment swing of -1.43 degrees per decade or -14.3 degrees per century!.
These exercises both illustrate what happens when you try to fit data to noisy datasets over relatively short periods. Garbage in, garbage out, but as you can see the version differences are much larger, by over a factor of 2, for UAH compared to Hadcrut.
Warwick’s and Ed’s paper is remarkable and in normal times would be evidence in a court case. Adjustments are both arbitrary and subjective and consistent with the AGW narrative.
What else can you say?
I hope MikeR comes back to play.
Probably not Cohers…he might have even come over from the dark side.
“I really wanted to applaud when several of the MPs promptly got up and walked out”
Niiiice Jennifer 🙂 🙂 😉
While on the topic of government-approved ‘adjustments;, I’d like to know if I can book my 1998 car into the BoM’s “Homogenizator” to get the speedo reduced from 350k to about 200k.
That would greatly help my prospects for a quicker sale.
My main problem is that I can’t find a booking form for a Homogenizator session on the BoM website.
Any suggestions from correspondents here would be greatly appreciated.
Hi guys, I am back by popular demand. Actually just cohenite. To fully illustrate how unreliable the UAH data set is I present for your enjoyment the following table (I hope the formatting survives pasting into the blog) which contains the differences in trend value (degree per decade) from version 5.6 to 6.3. Also shown is the ratio and percentage differences between values for the two data sets.This is for the period December 1978 until present. I have also included the difference between the Hadcrut versions 3 and 4 for the period December 1978 until May 2014.
version 5.6 version 6.3 Difference Ratio Percentage Change
Globe 0.14 0.11 -0.03 0.79 -21%
Land 0.18 0.2 0.02 1.11 11%
Ocean 0.12 0.08 -0.04 0.67 -33%
NH 0.19 0.14 -0.05 0.74 -26%
Land 0.23 0.21 -0.02 0.91 -9%
Ocean 0.16 0.09 -0.07 0.56 -44%
SH 0.09 0.09 0 1.00 0%
Land 0.1 0.17 0.07 1.70 70%
Ocean 0.08 0.07 -0.01 0.88 -13%
Trpcs 0.08 0.1 0.02 1.25 25%
Land 0.11 0.21 0.1 1.91 91%
Ocean 0.06 0.07 0.01 1.17 17%
NoExt 0.25 0.16 -0.09 0.64 -36%
Land 0.26 0.21 -0.05 0.81 -19%
Ocean 0.24 0.11 -0.13 0.46 -54%
SoExt 0.09 0.08 -0.01 0.89 -11%
Land 0.09 0.14 0.05 1.56 56%
Ocean 0.09 0.07 -0.02 0.78 -22%
NoPol 0.43 0.23 -0.2 0.53 -47%
Land 0.39 0.19 -0.2 0.49 -51%
Ocean 0.47 0.26 -0.21 0.55 -45%
SoPol -0.02 -0.01 0.01 0.50 -50%
Land 0 -0.01 -0.01
Ocean -0.03 -0.01 0.02 0.33 -67%
USA48 0.22 0.18 -0.04 0.82 -18%
USA49 0.23 0.17 -0.06 0.74 -26%
AUST 0.15 0.24 0.09 1.60 60%
Hadcrut 0.19 0.17 0.02 1.12 12%
If you thought the UAH Australia data (60% change between versions) had significant problems there are even worse examples such as land temperatures for the tropics (90%), southern hemisphere land (70%) and the 12% difference between data sets for Hadcrut.
It is clear that people who rely on the UAH data , especially the regional ones,to justify their arguments are skating on very thin ice and will probably be submerged by the time the effects of the El-Nino kicks in. Time to grab some scuba gear.
Thanks, Jen, for a great effort. What has happened with the reporting of hurricane Patricia in recent days is very similar to our BoM.
Why do weather bureaus tell lies? Patricia was reported as THE WORST EVAH !!!
Met reports were saying, when it was approaching that even though the highest rating was Cat 5 it should have been classified as a Cat 7 !!!
But surprisingly there were no casualties. Nobody died.
Highest wind speed recorded over land was 65 knots. Yawn !
Hurricanes around the world in recent years have caused up to half a million deaths from one storm !
When are authorities going to notice and mention this wildly exaggerated reporting?
Is this the state of weather and climate science today?
As cohers says, there needs to be legal action.
They just tell lies and hope everyone’s weather and climate amnesia will let it pass.
Yes as I suspected, the formatting of my table did not survive its encounter. If you want to see the table correctly formatted you need to just download the relevant files from the UAH site.
To make life easy they can be found at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0beta3 and http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt . Anyone with even minimal Excel skills should be able to construct the above table. The trend data is straight after the entry for September 2015.
Mick in the Hills, If you would like to have your odometer wound back, I would highly recommend the services of Spencer and Christie who make the BoM look like rank amateurs in this regard.
Just make sure they don’t wind the odometer back below zero. Even the other commenters on this blog might suspect they have been taken for a ride.
MikeR, the more Spencer and Christie correct for all the satellite problems, the more they agree with NASA’s RSS.
But the more GISS correct, the more they diverge with the satellites:
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/figure-intro-5.png
Strange, that.
Spangled Drongo,
Yes that is indeed true about UAH and RSS becoming closer with this latest revision. It could be that the RSS data maybe just as unreliable as the UAH data.
My major objection however are to people using the farcical UAH regional data to make ridiculous claims. At least RSS to my knowledge does not publish Australian data etc.. If I am wrong please point me in the right direction so I can see if it makes more sense than the UAH data, which wouldn’t be hard.
On that note I did make a slight error 4 comments above”. the second last sentence should read ” there are even worse examples such as land temperatures for the tropics (90%), southern hemisphere land (70%) compared to the 12% difference between data sets for Hadcrut”.
Cutting to the chase the land based indices support alarmism while the satellites do not.
Next point is the variation between all the indices, even allowing for general upward trends during the 20thC.
Why should one be favoured over the other? And given that conundrum how can AGW, which depends on the temperature record, be said to be settled if all the temperature indices are suspect?
RSS does do regions, although not as specific as UAH:
http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
Nice graph SD.
Spangled, and one breathless ABC report I watched mentioned (almost as an aside) that hurricane records for this region only started in 1949!
1949 – a mere 66 years ago.
But Hurricane Patricia was still going to be the biggest EVAH!
(I guess if you’re a 20-something ABC reporter, any event before One Direction is like, ancient history)
MikeR, if you read my post properly, I did ask for GOVERNMENT-APPROVED adjustments to my odometer.
I don’t know what Spencer & Christy’s homogenizator produces, but I’ve contributed to the cost of the BoM’s homogenizator, so I feel somewhat obliged to make use of that one.
Besides, being GOVERNMENT-APPROVED, I figure I won’t be hauled up before the ACCC if the purchaser of my 200k truck (actually 350k) twigs to fact that the odo reading is a bit suss.
Cohenite,
Cohenite, thanks for the link to the RSS data.
Yes, as a result of having a scientific background I am not comfortable with the statement that tbe science is settled and this makes it important to question the validity of data as Jenny Marohasy rightly does. However the same kind of scrutiny needs to be applied to all data, incuding that derived from satellite measurements rather than blindingly accept it because it is in accord with one’s own prejudices.
On this point, some data sets are more suss than others. I think we can come to some agreement that the UAH data, at least that provided for most regions, is suspect? Otherwise tthe implication is that you are quite happy for the UAH satellite data for Australia that provides a trend value for warming of +0.24 degrees per decade? A number like this which is over two times higher than the BoM’s is patently rediculous unless you are now batting for the other side and have become a rabid global warming alarmist.
I think we have additionally seen that Hadcrut, from the data I presented earlier, is way more stable than UAH.
Also I see we are now up to version 3.3 of RSS. As I dont have any data sets for earlier versions I cannot comment whether RSS changes as drastically, from version to version, as UAH does. Do you or anyone else have links to this data?
So in summary all I can say is the kind of exercises where the regional UAH data is fitted over limited periods to make any claim of any sort is bordering on the delusional. Actually probably well over the border into La La land.
MikeR , the point that graph was also making is that when the world was warming last century all the gatekeepers agreed on degree but since it has failed to warm the reconstructors are diverging ever warmer from the satellites.
If they adjusted correctly for UHIE they should show cooler.
It’s about time we admitted that the increase in temp over the last 215 years ( Concordia study) of just 0.7 C and 0.8 C since 1850 claimed by HAD 4 isn’t much to get concerned about. The Lloyd study checked the ice core proxies from both poles and found an average deviation of about 1 C per century. That study of the past 80 centuries is much higher per century than our slight modern warming of 0.32 C ( Concordia) and 0.48 C ( HAD 4) per century. And of course our modern warming comes with our planet’s recovery from one of the coldest periods of the Holocene.
Of course the Concordia study states that Aussies are responsible for 0.006 C of global warming since 1800. Fair dinkum what a load of crap.
spangled drongo,
Your interpretation of the graph https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/figure-intro-5.png is bizaare to say the least. The major divergence in trend lines between the two data records seems to occur suddenly in 2001. Are you sure the urban heat island effect only came into being in 2001? I am sure it was around a lot longer than that.
I did originally send this back on the ‘In the loop’ message
At least you’re no spinning Jenny unlike these lefty western civilization haters . That’s what drives them, hatred for what the west has achieved and they want to pull it all down. Its no mistake that the early doyens of AGW were from the the University of east Anglia which was such a Marxist hotbed of activity in the seventies that Malcolm Bradbury parodied the place in his novel the History Man. I was on the left with the workers revolutionary party throughout the seventies and in to the mid eighties so I well know the mind set of the white affluent middle class left.
This man Alex Mitchell your fellow Australian was the editor of the Workers Revolutionary Party daily newspaper News line, I believe he is back in Australia now but I’m not sure where he stand on politics and AGW
http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/06/29/healys-wrp-inside-story
Ah just found his website
http://cometherevolution.com.au/category/environment/.
Anyhow Jenny you are doing a fantastic job with this as people like me all over the world watch this ideological battle unfold. I note that Paul Homewood and Tony Heller (Steve Goddard) are still fighting this corner on falsified data but spectators like me have to watch from the stands cheering on the teams we believe in. However this temp tampering malarkey , are other taking it seriously like Anthony Watts, what does Roy Spencer think, do you actually keep in touch with all those who feel NASA, GISS and NOAA are cooking the books as well.
I looked at Canberra on Google. What a strange empty place, it looks lovely but so odd -like a Marie Celeste.
Anyhow 1am in London
Once again thanks Jenny for not letting these liars get away with it. It truly is a time of universal deceit and you are a fighter, no doubt about that.
all the best
Lawrence Jenkins
London
On 22/10/2015 09:38, Jennifer Marohasy wrote:
> What you need to know.
> View this email in your browser
>
> Keeping You in the Loop
What I said, MikeR, is “If they adjusted correctly”.
Ever-increasing city sizes [where most of the thermometers are kept] are known to generate huge increases in temperature.
The evidence is on your car’s thermometer everywhere you go if you pay attention.
They may have made some adjustments when the world was warming but when the world refuses to warm in spite of record CO2 emissions guess which inconvenient truth is going to be the first casualty?
Not too hard to understand, really.
More barking mad nonsense from the lunatic left.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/25/alice-bows-larkins-plan-for-green-economic-ruin/
Perhaps MK could tell us how to mitigate his CAGW?
Another conference has found no warming over Antarctica during the 20th century. Rather stuffs up the theory of AGW. Or perhaps they think that all that extra co2 is isolated to the NH?
http://notrickszone.com/2015/10/22/german-climate-experts-conference-antarctica-temperatures-show-no-warming-trend-in-20th-century/#comments
spangled drongo,
Your posts are an example of the maxim- an infinitesimally small amount of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Of the 1040 or so weather stations on the list found at http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/gcos/documents/GSN_Stations_Region_1March2011.pdf
can you check how many are surrounded by cities.
As an assignment why don’t you just restrict yourselves to the Australian sites . You could start with Rabbit Flat and travel to this city and check whether it’s surrounded by vast urban estates or in the midst of an industrial zone.
Actually you can save yourself the arduous trip to Rabbit Flat by means of Google- https://goo.gl/2BVnn3 .
As you are clearly an automotive enthusiast , I note your comment regarding car thermometers. Perhaps the reason that your thermometer is reading high is due to the presence of a heat generating device at the front of your car. You know the one that causes the car to move. It is also the source of the increase in temperature when you turn up the heating control on the dashboard.
MikeR,
Here’s something a little less scientific for you to take a look at…..
It’s from the front section of The Times Concise Atlas of the World. 1985 edition.
It’s under the section called “The balance of man’s environment”….quote..
The Greenhouse Effect
Radiation from the Sun passes through space until it reaches the outer atmosphere of the Earth. Much of it is absorbed by the Earth’s surface,causing the temperature to rise.The heat is then re-radiated. If the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, a larger amount of this radiation is trapped as in a glasshouse, instead of being lost to outer space. IN THE LAST FIFTY YEARS THE INCREASE IN THE LEVEL OF CO2 IN THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE CAUSED BY THE BURNINIG OF FOSSIL FUELS HAS NOT BEEN ENOUGH TO RAISE THE EARTH”S TEMPERATURE.
So there you are MikeR… back in 1985, even with all this “greenhouse” bullshit going on, they were saying the Earth’s temperature had not risen in the last 50yrs.
From Mick In the Hills’s, previous post “but I’ve contributed to the cost of the BoM’s homogenizator”,
I think a request to defund the BoM by your contributions would seem eminently reasonable . It is much more humane than shooting the messengers. I suggest you send an invoice to the bureau for your contribution. However you may find your refund has been homogenized downwards.
But yes, we could dispense with the BoM entirely by taking up spangled drongo’s excellent suggestion and get our temperature records, crowd sourced, from car thermometers worldwide. I suggest you start a project on KickStarter to fund this. I will put in a small donation to this worthy cause. Let us know how you and the spangled drongo go.
As for Mack’s contribution I am glad he prefaced his remark ‘something less scientific” . But in any case does he have the latest edition no. 12 (2013 ) Concise Times World Atlas to check whether they have updated their opinions on this matte since the first edition?.
I seem to recall in the mid 1970’s in Time magazine predicting an imminent ice age. Thirty or Forty years is along time and scientists have been known to change their minds
For more recent updates on the science I recall there used to be an eminent publication here in Melbourne which only expired in the 90s aptly named ‘The Truth’ . It might be worth going to a library to update your knowledge to at least circa 1995 .
After these last couple of contributions, I must remind myself to refrain from responding to the more egregiously silly contributions. I will endeavor to let them through to the keeper.
At least from cohenite and Neville, even if I disagree with them, their arguments are cogent to some extent.
MikeR, you truly talk rubbish and make false claims.
Are you really claiming that NONE of the thermometers used to assess GW are in big cities that since the industrial revolution and particularly in the last half century or so have been measured at up to 6c warmer [mean, mostly minimum increase] than surrounding countryside?
Not to mention those “urban” areas in the icy wastes that are the ONLY places where the local thermometer may be kept and where they often sport an asphalt runway [kept black and clear of ice all year round] awa central heating etc.
And I did add “if you pay attention” which obviously you don’t or you would notice if and how your car’s thermometer compares with a screened thermometer over many and varying occasions and just how reliable or otherwise it is to give you a guide to the changes in temperature as you move from one micro climate to another.
My vehicle also has an aneroid barometer which I can use to allow for changes in altitude [which it also indicates].
Where did I ever claim that this was anything other than a good indicator of those temperature changes as you move from country to city and vv?
Stop waffling.
Even the warmist Age and the BoM admit the problem but as far as I know the BoM has never attempted to correct for UHIE:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-city-centre-a-death-trap-as-heatisland-effect-takes-its-toll-20140116-30xt8.html
Miker, the proverbial penny for your thoughts (that’s all I could crowd-source).
Just one other point of contention – when you write “scientists have been known to change their minds”, you obviously have missed the mantra from BoM et al that “the science is settled”.
I reckon we should all want to shoot any messenger who sprouts that kind of dogma.
Whether they own a Homogenizator or not.
I recall a story not long ago that when the BoM moved the Melbourne CBD weather station out of LaTrobe St? to a reserve a km or so away on the city fringe, the recorded temps difference on the same afternoon between the old and new sites was around 2C.
Now that’s a UHI effect!
(Probably became 0.2C after Homogenization™)
Jennifer great work from you. Congratulations.
I am sure that you will have made a great many people down there in Canberra to sit up and think!
Geoff W Sydney
I’m not surprised that MK can’t answer my question on the mitigation of his CAGW fraud. Lomborg has a new post that shows that solar and wind supply just 0.4% of todays world energy and if the pollies carry out their threats for more of this garbage it will increase to just 2.2% by 2040. And this will cost trillions of dollars with no discernible difference to temp at all.
We may as well flush those trillions $ straight down the drain.
http://notrickszone.com/2015/10/25/top-danish-economist-bjoern-lomborg-declares-wind-and-solar-energies-a-fata-morgana-powerless-and-expensive/#sthash.eqdTpDXz.dpbs
Jo Nova has a new post from the French Society of Mathematicians that points out that the crusade against global warming is pointless and absurd. Geezzz another group who can actually read and comprehend very simple maths and possess basic logic and reasoning skills. But where are all the other mathematics societies in every other country on the globe?
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/10/french-society-of-mathematicians-global-warming-crusade-is-aburd-and-pointless/#more-46126
I would say that the latest edition, No. 12 (2013) Concise Times World Atlas, would not have any mention at all, of any of your “Greenhouse” stuff , Mike R. Things have got a little bit more uncomfortable for true believers like yourself and also the academics who peddle this AGW tripe.
For your interest…here’s some of the contributors to this 1985 edition.
John Gribbin…..Science Policy Research Unit. University of Sussex.
Kenneth Mellanby….Monks Wood Experimental Station.
Institute of Terrestrial Ecology.
Eric Rawstron….Professor of Geography. Queen Mary College.
University of London
Alan Smith……Dept. of Geology. University of Cambridge.
Peter J Smith….Dept. of Earth Sciences. The Open University.
You see Mike M…back in 1985, the interest and stakes in pushing “greenhouse” crap were not so high back then, and so these AGW brainwashed pommie academics…at the same time as blindly parroting the “science” mantra…were at least honest enough to recognise and declare, there had been no warming for 50yrs.
And you’ve given a couple of diversions..
Time magazine….just US govt. propaganda.
The Truth….definitely more scientific than Inconvenient Truth….mind you, Al Gore could have a good pair of boobs.
Everyone is out in full force tonight. It must be close to full moon. On that basis tomorrow night could be even worse.
Ah spangled drongo. Have you yet been through the 1040 world meteorological stations one by one? Could you indicate how many of the 1040 you suspect are inside cities? It is a bit of a stretch of my geographical knowledge to examine the world wide sites but I have some idea about the Australian and off shore sites. Have you had look at Macquarie Island which like Rabbit Flat is an obvious candidate for an urban heat island hot spot.
There are about 64 weather stations in the 2011 world meteorological list in Australia and surrounds.
None of them are in or close to a major urban centre. I guess Darwin aerodrome might be the closest. However the weather station is about 1.5 km from the airport and nowhere near the city.
A large number are indeed in the vicinity or at aerodromes. These are usually sites that have been relocated from centre of towns (often the post office) to open fields adjacent to airfields to try and eliminate the impact of UHIE (the bureau has been moving stations to remote locations at various times for the better part of a century), and possibly unwanted interactions with the populace.
There have been reports overseas of sites ,such as Svalbard in the Arctic, where there are claims that the station is too close to the tarmac and buildings .
I believe the recommended distance for a weather station is greater than 30 metres from tarmac. If you have evidence that any of the weather stations at airports In Australia are closer than 30 metres let me know.
You can check the relative location using the site http://bonzle.com and entering a search for the weather station. I have looked at a few such as Broome, Meekatharra, Oodnadatta, Port Hedland, Darwin and Gove airport and they tend to be a 1 to 2 km away from the airfield. The Bonzle site also have distances to the nearest road and needless to say they are usually a couple of hundred metres away. So I will leave you and the rest of the denizens that inhabit this corner of the internet to search for weather stations that are within 30 meters of the tarmac of an airport.
Let me know how you go.
Mick In The Hills,
Your statement above (October 26, 2015 at 4:28 pm) states – “” you obviously have missed the mantra from BoM et al that “the science is settled””.
Mick whatever Hills you are in, you are just perpetuating an urban myth. You need to read the primary material rather than parrot what you read on web sites like this.
Here is the BoM’s viewpoint.
see https://blogs.csiro.au/climate-response/climate-faqs/
Go to ‘Is the Science Settled’ section of the FAQ. The last paragraph reads as follows-
“Hence, THE SCIENCE ISN’T SETTLED but there are enough robust findings to provide a basis for action through mitigation of greenhouse gases as well as adaptation to reduce our vulnerability to climate change impacts.
Further research is needed to reduce the uncertainties and quantify confidence levels”.
Mick, as the Mythbusters say upon concluding an investigation “Myth Busted”.
Neville. Who the hell is MK and why doesn’t he answer your questions?
MikeR says about official thermometers:
“None of them are in or close to a major urban centre.”
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/139572/does-measuring-the-air-temperature-near-a-21-lane-asphalt-highway-impact-measure
When I mentioned about paying attention it also covers things like it only takes a wind-proof wall in the bush to make a difference of a couple of degrees.
Well Dr Spencer has yet to get back to me about miker’s complaints about UAH regional, especially Australia, so we’ll press on with miker’s latest ‘point’: that the ground based temperature indices obviously take into account UHIE. I think that is his ‘point’ but if it isn’t perhaps he can clarify.
In regard to UHIE BEST does not even believe UHIE exists:
http://www.scitechnol.com/2327-4581/2327-4581-1-104.pdf
Comment miker?
More nonsense about drowning islands from the usual numbskulls and fools, but the Bolter easily answers their nonsense using facts and proper research. What is the problem these religious fanatics have using proper evidence when researching these issues? And BTW MK I fully understand you can’t answer my questions. Luke tried to avoid my questions here for years but in the end conceded it was difficult and then wimped out by referring to nuclear energy. What nonsense.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/mark_kenny_falls_for_the_drowning_island_scare_and_fiona_stanley_should_ste/
Those 61 signatories for the Paris talks are typical of the alarmist mentality; each and every one of them have monstrous egos and scorn scepticism of their belief.
In respect of sea level rise here is the updated BoM Pacific Sea Level Monitoring Project: The evidence is plain; no sea level rise:
http://www.bom.gov.au/pacific/projects/pslm/
miker you cite the CSIRO’s position, not the BoM’s.
And you might also notice at that link they recommend the RealClimate and Skeptical Science sites for further “facts”
Is this where you get your info from, Mike?
Where’s miker?
The NOAA site allows you to check SL trends from around the world. You can check OZ and Pacific down the page here—————- Of course SLs around OZ were much higher 4,000 years ago and many metres higher during the Eemian IG. But currently Fort Denison Sydney trend is 0.65 mm a year or about 55.3 mm by 2100 or about 2.2 inches. So where is that impact from co2 after 1950? What a load of BS.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global.htm
Mick in the Hills,
It was from the BoM FAQ site (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=About-climate-change&tracker=site-networks) which linked to the CSIRO FAQ. I assumed they endorsed CSIROs position regarding the science not being settled, otherwise I do not know why it would be on the BoM site.
Interesting about BoM / CSIRO linking and endorsing their positions, miker.
So if we are entitled to take promoted links as an endorsement of a position, that means that CSIRO endorses the positions of RealClimate and Sceptical Science, does it not?
(And listening to interviews from time to time of various BoM personnel, it is obvious they also get their ‘talking points’ from RC and SS).
Cohenite,
The Berkeley paper you linked to is interesting. The intro has the poorly worded statement “the difference of these is consistent with no urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010 with a slope of -0.10 +-0.24/100 yr (95% confidence).” ,so I can understand your confusion regarding this paper.
Despite this, if you had read any of the remainder of the paper I can’t possibly see how you could think the authors are claiming urban heat effects do not exist. There is mention in the paper of the term ‘urban heat’ some 45 times.
The authors spent the entire paper discussing the effects on their data set. Their conclusion is that is has little effect even when you include sites with significant UHI in their trend calculations. They attribute this to being due to the number and coverage of such UHI affected sites is relatively small (less than 0.5 % of the total land area – see the discussion) in their massive data sets (see figure 4 that indicates the huge number of stations just in the U.S.)
They also comment their analysis is for land stations only. If you include oceans the effect is going to be even smaller.
So cohenite, please don’t concoct a straw man argument by plucking pull a single sentence out of a paper and disregarding the other 99.9% percent of the paper.This is such a blatant cherry pick it makes tthe material on Ken’s Kingdom seem reasonable.
The other point I need to add is that the BoM has 112 Acorn sites. They explicitly state that eight of them have been eliminated from their calculations of the Acorn trend value due to obvious UHI effects. They have eliminated Melbourne, Sydney Adelaide, Hobart, Rockhampton, Townsville, Laverton and Richmond (NSW) . I will leave it to Jennifer to argue with the bureau about Rutherglen etc. but it would be interesting to see what happens to the overall trend averaged over the remaining hundred or so sites after removing them from the record.
Finally I will quote from the Bureau’s FAQ on this mater- “Is Australia’s annual mean temperature record contaminated by urban warming?
Australia’s annual mean temperature is calculated using only sites designated as non-urban by considering the location of instruments in relation to population centres. Consequently, there is likely to be very little urban contamination in Australia’s annual mean temperature values. This assertion is supported by the fact that the strongest warming trends observed in Australia have occurred at inland locations with very small populations. In addition, sea surface temperatures around Australia, which are measured very differently to temperatures over land, show very similar warming trends to land based thermometers.”
MikeR is impressed by the BoM’s claim that they don’t use urban sites.
When did that happen, miker, and what were the adjustments for the non-continuity?
These are the very aspects of the BoM “data” that need a proper audit.
Please don’t try to tell us you know they are squeaky clean.
spangled drongo
Look the list of sites is here-http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=site-networks .
There is a wealth of information on the bureau site regarding climate change. Do I have to do all the work for you guys. This is seriously getting ridiculous,
Mick in the Hills,
Maybe, maybe not, but this is totally irrelevant to the claim, which you regurgitated above, that the BoM/CSIRO states that the science is settled.
Spangled drongo,
if you want to do your own audit here is some relevant information.
You can find information about the BoM measurement techniques at
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/ACORN-SAT_Observation_practices_WEB.pdf.
This has useful information about when Stevenson screens were introduced at each station (when known exactly otherwise there are approximate dates) and other interesting goodies regarding changes in temperature sensors.
Berkeley Earth is a very good source to find out about when stations have been moved away from urban centres and also includes the temperature adjustments that have been made to compensate for the movements. Berkeley Earth does their own analysis of the raw data and the homogenized trend data is similar to that of the BoM.
Good luck and let us know when you have finished your audit.
Well MikeR., at this stage in the thread you’ve tried to send Spanglers on some wild goose-chase trying to “audit” the corrupted BOM temperature records…and Cohers may not want to be in the mood to continue some statistical, nitpicking arguement with you about temperature graphs,
So feel free to take a break, While you do so, you might want to do some lighter reading starting here….
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2015/04/survey-denying-my-position-on-climate-change/#comment-576587
Here’s a little bit more …
http://www.principia-scientific.org/is-no-greenhouse-effect-possible-from-the-way-that-ipcc-define-it.html#comment-11550
Ken Stewart is looking again at some of the BOMs so called quality sites and has started with Wilsons promontory in Victoria.
https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/case-studies-in-worlds-best-practice-1-wilsons-promontory/#comments
I did say on my post of October 26, 2015 at 2:02 pm that I was not going to comment on silly posts which unfortunately I have honoured more in the breach. I guess I will have to comment yet again on the above post.
Mack, unfortunately cohenite’s nits leave holes large enough to drive several Mack trucks through. His last post (I can hear a bugle sounding) where he extracted one sentence from a paper that totally misrepresented the other 99.9% of the paper was particularly egregious.
As for spangled drongo his ability to make evidence free assertions was impressive if you like that kind of thing. I was trying to make the point , unsuccessfully it seems, that if one has the inclination and minimal skills you can examine the evidence yourself and not swallow the nonsense peddled by those who follow an agenda. If he is incapable of doing that then I suggest he follows the old saying- put up or shut up.
The characteristics of the comments illustrate beautifully that debate on any topic is often dictated by those who are not smart enough to know the limits of their abilities. I think I have enough nous to know that my knowledge in many of these matters is limited compared to those who have been researching the field for decades or more.
Mack, I did have had a brief look at the links that you posted. I was highly amused by the link to Principia Scientifica ( Newton must be turning in his grave) and the claim by this mob that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas (tell that to the Venusians) . Interestingly if there was any doubt about lack of scientific credibility of the Principia Scientifica site, its advocacy of anti-vaccination (read all about it at http://www.principia-scientific.org/the-vaccine-hoax-is-over.html) removes any residual doubt.
Finally I do gain solace in that Jennifer’s posts appear to have political currency with a cohort of liberal and national party members and in the off chance they read the comments section, they may gain some understanding who they have got into bed with. The good new is that there finally appears to be some semblance of sanity with the leadership of the new regime in Canberra but clearly it has yet to trickle down to the lower levels.
All of the above also makes emphasizes the lack of scientific and engineering literacy amongst the Australian population. It makes moves to requires S.T.E.M. courses to at least year 12 level levels vital to ensure that this country’s’ future beyond being just a quarry. As an important side benefit it can also make the public and politicians less susceptible to scientific charlatanism.
I think I will refrain from further comments (unless unduly provoked) and let the pigeons go home to roost. I may throw another cat into the fray sometime in the future but I am going to go outside and enjoy the continuing summer weather in Melbourne.
“Mack, I did have a brief look at the links you posted”
That’s good MikeR….and now you have the rest of your life to look more in depth at these links. You’ve gathered I’m from NZ, so here’s one closer to home for your perusal…it’s mainly what passes for “education” in this country…..
http://thedemiseofchristchurch.com/2013/03/13/are-we-experiencing-a-communist-infiltration-sponsored-by-the-united-nations/comment-page-1/#comment-1093
All the best for your future, MikeR..and please come over from the dark side.
Miker, as we all know, yes, you too if you are honest, it is nearly impossible for 100% of thermometers to not be influenced by the UHIE.
But there other adjustments that should be scrutinised as well.
The simple fact is that BoM and all the worlds gatekeepers need regular auditing if the taxpayer is to be properly served.
There is far too much evidence of tampering for the problem to be ignored.
To deny this is happening is mindless belief in a flawed system, not science.
I am invoking my unduly provoked caveat-
Spangled drongo.
Clearly, except for death and taxes, you cannot say anything with 100% certainty. All you can do and examine the evidence. The paper that Cohenite kindly linked to from the Berkely Earth group ( http://www.scitechnol.com/2327-4581/2327-4581-1-104.pdf ) is evidence that even with the inclusion of all sites many of which are strongly effected by UHIE gave temperature trends that is within 0.5 of a bee’s dick -of the trend you get when you exclude those sites.
This suggests that Jennifer Marohasy and Ken Stewart could do the same thing and exclude the dozen or so sites that they suspect from the total and see how much effect there is on the homogenized trend for the whole of Australia (not just for individual sites). This is so blindingly obvious, and if they haven’t yet done this, then why the eff not?
It would also be of great interest to see if they can match the UAH satellite data trend of 0.24 degrees/decade for Australia.
miker; not only have I read the BEST paper on UHIE I have understood it. Read it again in conjunction with another BEST paper:
http://www.scitechnol.com/berkeley-earth-temperature-averaging-process-IpUG.pdf
BEST’s methodology only acknowledges one non stationary effect on a temperature series which is defined as Global Temperature Change. That is, any effect that doesn’t average to zero over a few years is defined as a change in Global Temperature.
Since, in the real world, UHIE is non-stationary (populations continue to grow), the “New Mathematical Framework” guarantees that UHIE will be considered to be “Global Warming”.
As I say BEST don’t do UHIE.
Arrogant buggar aren’t you.
While miker is sniffing around for some more condescending comments to make, I’ll link to McIntyre who not only shafts BEST on the UHIE business but also gives the ‘best’ explanation as to why UHIE is real and why its existence confounds the land based indices:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/01/closing-thoughts-on-best/
“Extra UHI warming (W) is proportional to the log of the population, so W = log P.
The population is growing at a compounding rate, thus it is P = k^t.
To get the derivative (warming rate) we must apply the chain rule of differentiation. With any luck you will get this answer:
dW/dt = (dW/dP) * (dP/dt)
= (d/dP . log P) * (d/dt . k^t)
= (1/P) * (k^t * log k)
= (1/k^t) * (k^t * log k)
= log k
Thus the warming rate is the same wherever the population growth rate is the same, regardless of their difference in population. On top of that, due to the logarithm, even if their population growth rates are significantly different (eg 1.07 versus 1.03) you still end up with very similar constant ratio between town and city in the trends.
Intuitively this should be the case, because the warming rate of a city is a linear extension of the warming rate it had when it was just a small town.
Therefore any small town and city near each other contemporaneously will have basically the same warming rate if they have nearly equal growth rates, DESPITE having hugely different populations and having measurably different night time temperatures due to a very real and significant UHI. A comparison between places that never grew and places that grew quickly should show a difference in temperature trend regardless of current population.
And the fact is that UHI is easily measured in any city. It leads to a DTR reduction which is locally indistinguishable from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
Since UHI is measurable, it is pointless to try to find a way to prove it doesn’t exist. Because it exists it must have influenced temperature records in high growth areas. The only mystery is why you would believe a statistic instead of photos.”
RSS shows pretty convincingly the alarmist lie of the current, alleged super El Nino; the graph is a comparison of the RRS from 1996, including the real super El Nino of 1998, with the current temperature; the comparison is stark (graph by Shea Lewis):
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1688757984736048&set=gm.1642797749312670&type=3&theater
Cohers, what I find interesting is the graph showing the comparisons since 1997 where the satellite readings that don’t include the UHIE show warmer than the ground based “data” during the past el Ninos but not this current one:
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/figure-intro-5.png
This current one is all Fakery at the Bakery.
Sorry, cohers, I posted without refreshing ☺
Hi SD, the Shea graph is interesting because it clearly shows the so-called super El Nino is not a patch on the 1998 genuine El Nino.
The gap between the satellites and the ground based indices is, or should be, a real issue.
Cohers, that link won’t work for me.
SD, try this: the orange is the current El Nino cf with the blue 1998 one:
http://snag.gy/3qiuA.jpg
Cohenite. You are remarkable all for the wrong reasons .Firstly it looks like I might have to repeat myself which is very boring .
I seem to recall that you claimed that BEST does not recognize the existence of UHIE. The paper you referred to when making this claim was entirely about the effects of UHIE and it demonstrated that it did not make a large difference if you included or exlcuded in the data, sites that were clearly effected by UHIE.
I may have exaggerated by saying the difference was less than half a bee’s dick difference. It was probably closer to a full bees dick (95% confidence level ). So your claim that BEST doesn’t do UHIE (if you meant doesn’t consider) is bizarre in the extreme. All that he authors show is that UHIE is not a significant contributor to the trend value.
The second paper you have referred to is a detailed technical description of the process that BEST uses to derive its results but other than showing the rigour of BEST its inclusion it a red herring which can only be there for the purposes of obfuscation . Your statement “BEST’s methodology only acknowledges one non stationary effect on a temperature series which is defined as Global Temperature Change. That is, any effect that doesn’t average to zero over a few years is defined as a change in Global Temperature.” . Where did you get this from? It does not appear to be in the paper referred to.
The other point regarding the relationship between UHIE and population is much more interesting.
Yes as the population increases UHIE effects can progressively contaminate sites. This why the BoM have been moving their station away from the centre of towns often at the post office to rural locations usually near airfields.
You make comment about stationary processes. Are you simply referring to population increases that also increase the UHIE or do you have something else in mind? It is very unclear?. The measurements presented in the BEST paper were done at one particular time so delta T is likely to be very small compared to the rate of increase so the issue of population increase. So accordingly this factor for this particular study is irrelevant. Indeed if they repeated the study at some later time they may have to reduce the number of sites that they consider unaffected by UHIE due to population growth and may get a marginally different result.
The point about the log relationship between temperature and the population centres has been known for several decades or more.
Several studies have demonstrated this , amongst them are http://www.theurbanclimatologist.com/uploads/4/4/2/5/44250401/post6oke1973uhiscaling.pdf, , http://www.theurbanclimatologist.com/uploads/4/4/2/5/44250401/post6australiauhiscaling.pdf and http://sites.biology.duke.edu/wilson/ConClim/chap-2-shading-cooling/2-7-city-heat.html .
This data has been obtained by temperature measurements from within villages, towns and cities and they all show log plots (on the x-axis) that are linear for P>=1000.
There does not seem to have been any studies for P <1000. If you want to adventurous you could try extrapolating back to P=100, P=10 or P=1 or if you are sufficiently foolhardy (don’t try this at home) you could extrapolated back to P=0. In this case you must use an enormous piece of graph paper, universe sized or greater) .
If you do insist on extrapolating the line you get a negative value for the UHI for P=100 and below. This is clearly silly but if you want to persist with this, then for all sites of P=1000 are about 0.5% then UHIE should cause an overall decrease in the trend.
Obviously this is patently ridiculous but it just illustrates the point that extrapolation in the hands of those without the requisite scientific judgement is a very dangerous tool.
It also helps to read the primary resource material.
To emphasize further, this log relationship would only be important of the weather stations were embedded within regions with P>1000. Now if you look at the sites within Australia (neglecting Melbourne, Sydney . which are not used to calculate trends ) you would have a vivid imagination bordering on delusional to suggest the weather stations surrounding Rabbit Flats, Cape Otway etc. are surrounded by population centres where p>1000. I would grant, maybe on the dd occasion p=1 or 2 but P=0 is more likely.
I am in danger of cracking a walnut with a sledge hammer but this UHIE mythology refuses to die.
I will add that the region of the earth where the temperature trends are the highest is in the Arctic which have a large range of remote automated stations in Siberia, Northern Canada and Greenland where the population is very sparse and he likelihood of weather stations being placed in the centre of large population centres is remote. To confirm that this region is UHIE free you can look at the UAH trend data for this region which is 0.19 degrees/decade for the land and 0.26 degree/decade for the ocean. It would require an enormous leap of faith to claim that the data for this region is contaminated by urban heating effects. But as you now know the UAH data for regions is highly suspect to say the least.
I note that I may have upset Cohenite who has commented on my arrogant altitude. I sincerely and deeply apologize, if I convey this attitude, but It is extremely hard not to be condescending as it is well beyond my limited ability to restrain myself when confronted by puerile and infantile nonsense masquerading as science.
It is a bit like asking a batsman, even a mediocre one, to restrain himself when half volleys, long hops and full tosses are being served up. My inclination is to hit them out of the ground rather than letting them pass through to the keeper or dead bat them back.
“arrogant altitude” -> “puerile and infantile nonsense masquerading as science.” = “opening batsman”. Etc.
I said: “In regard to UHIE BEST does not even believe UHIE exists”
BEST says: “no urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010”
That’s their headline, you can duck and weave and snick and edge (they’re cricket analogies) all you want; according to BEST UHIE does not exist..
In regard to BEST’s methodology the usual choice is offered to you: dumb or disingenuous; in fact you skirt around the issue when you say this:
“The measurements presented in the BEST paper were done at one particular time so delta T is likely to be very small compared to the rate of increase so the issue of population increase. So accordingly this factor for this particular study is irrelevant. Indeed if they repeated the study at some later time they may have to reduce the number of sites that they consider unaffected by UHIE due to population growth and may get a marginally different result.”
I said this:
“BEST’s methodology only acknowledges one non stationary effect on a temperature series which is defined as Global Temperature Change. That is, any effect that doesn’t average to zero over a few years is defined as a change in Global Temperature.
Since, in the real world, UHIE is non-stationary (populations continue to grow), the “New Mathematical Framework” guarantees that UHIE will be considered to be “Global Warming”. ”
BEST have removed UHIE by taking stationary temperature as the base and describing any change in temperature as being due to AGW. Naturally UHIE will not be present with such a methodology.
Anyway I suspect you are disingenuous. On page 17 BEST say:
“The data from each of these subsets is then run through the entire Berkeley Average machinery to create 8 new estimates, k ( )Tavg t j of the average global land temperature vs. time.”
Read it again.
What do you think SD; is miker better than luke or what?
That should be page 7, eqn 17.
Yes, cohers, as Luke would say; he should give up and put his mum on.
Cohenite,
There is I believe, a clear difference between the belief in the existence of something and whether is has a significant effect.. For instance, you can believe in a deity, but whether there is evidence that the deity can or cannot perform miracles is a different question,and is clearly the province of science rather than theology.
In this case paper does not even attempt to refute the existence of the urban heat effect (who in the right mind would ) but clearly demonstrates it has minimal effect.
I hope the subtlety isn’t lost on you, but I think we are getting bogged down in semantics . Who would have thought that your desire for obfuscation would lead down this path.
But prithee tell me what is this “New Mathematical Framework’ you speaketh of? It sounds like the devil’s work to me.
A serach at http://tinyurl.com/qa9924d shows nothing of relevance. Perhaps this is all your own work? Maybe an extension of the chain rule of differentiation to more than two variables? I think the Fields medal awaits you.
It is unfortunate that John Tukey (of the Cooley-Tukey FFT fame ) has died, other wise you could have debated with him your insights with regard to the applicability of the Jackknife method (the basis of eqn 17 you refer to) that he helped to pioneer back in 1956.
Seriously this procedure has been widely used for spatial resampling data in many fields and most importantly the jackknife process is being used here to calculate uncertainties for one particular time from a comparison of the temperature for one region with the temperatures of its neighbouring regions.
To quote from the paper (at the top of page 7 immediately preceding eqn 17.) “The ‘jackknife ‘ method in statistics is a well-known approach for empirical estimation of uncertainties that can minimize bias”.
It has nothing to do with calculating the average temperature itself but just a robust method of estimating the uncertainty in the average temperature!
“There is I believe, a clear difference between the belief in the existence of something and whether is has a significant effect”
Particularly if you don’t pay attention.
Cohenite,
I note your claim above that the current El-Nino is a fizzer as it has not caused the RSS satellite temperatures to increase significantly until now. This is very premature. In fact it is so premature it should be in the neonatal intensive care ward.
There is a well known 6 month delay between the satellite data and Nino 3.4. After doing a quick cross-correlation of the two data sets there is also a negative correlation corresponding to a 28 month delay of about the same magnitude as the positive 6 month correlation . Interestingly 28 months go Nino 3.4. was negative. So I wouldn’t derive much comfort for the current satellite data. Enjoy it while it lasts.
The other point to note is that land based temperatures are still going through the roof.
It seems more than likely the impact of El-Nino upon South East Australia is much more than an academic matter. After an abnormally cold winter (compared to the last 20 years or so, reminiscent of the winters I experienced as a child ) we have had an extraordinarily hot October.
Currently the average for Melbourne (raw data) of 24.3 degrees is running at about the same as the long term December average (24.2 degrees) . The current average is about 4.6 standard deviations above the mean (using raw data from 1855 onwards ). Looking up the ’one sided’ Z values at http://www.measuringu.com/pcalcz.php the probability of this occurring by chance is 0.00022 % (i.e. we would expect this to occur every 450,000 years.) without any warming.
Before you can even utter the words UHIE , if you compare it to the average for the last 15 years for Melbourne it falls back to about 3.7 standard deviations which corresponds to a probability of 0.01% or once every 10,000 years. On that note the figures for the averages for the raw data for Mount Gambier, Cape Otway, East Sale and Gabo Island are also at around 3.5 standard deviations above the average and are currently at about the December or January averages. Wilson’s prom is also running about 3.5 standard deviations but Ken has some reservations about this site.
All this assumes the temperatures are normally distributed so I will check for higher order moments such as the skew and kurtosis to see how much they play a part but I doubt if this will greatly moderate the conclusions.
Ken should look at the data and peer review it. I would like his insights but unfortunately I have been sin binned (permanently?) from commenting on his site for dissent. It could be worse. Kim Jung Un could show Ken a thing or two about handling dissenters.
We are also presently experiencing drought like conditions in the south east so if the present El-Nino continues much longer the farmers will be in more trouble and the possibility of extreme weather event sand bushfires become more likely. Fortunately they are predicting some rain for tomorrow. Let’s hope it comes down in buckets.
p.s. Having had a quick look at other sites in Australia there seems to be a similar pattern where summer has appeared to arrive 2 months early. The only exceptions seem to be the northern tropics. This El-Nino has already become a doozy when it comes to the southern half of Australia.
Miker, you’re just a virtual realist. If you paid attention in the real world you might notice that the animals and plants that operate as per the seasons are in many cases running up to a month late in spring due to cooling.
This is mostly what is known as natural variability and everything just gets on with it.
Except alarmists, that is, who insist on more money from the taxpayer to put in their carpetbag.
spangled drongo,
Yes , I have noticed that the first prunus blossoms were delayed in Melbourne by about a week. This is not surprising we have had an unusually cold winter as the bureau reported see http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/updates/articles/a012-winter-2015.shtml.
I am not sure yet how the transition to summer via a spring that that lasted only 1 month will impact on the fauna and flora. We got a couple of mill of rain this morning so that may green up the tips the burnt grass. This month is the wettest month in Melbourne and I don’t think I have seen grass so dry for a long time in October. Maybe during the great drought from 2002 to 2007 possibly.
.At least I am not having to mow the lawn weekly as I normally have to do at this time of the year.
By the way what is the real time data from your car thermometer showing? Any sign of an imminent ice-age? I gather you are naturally suspicious man but I still need to warn you.
If you get a manufacturer’s recall notice for your car it could be just the CSIRO/BoM/Agenda 21 mob having your thermometer manipulated upwards.
miker, the subtlety isn’t lost on me but the sophistry is irritating none the less. Since you’re in a philosophical mood can a real thing which cannot be measured be said to be real? BEST cannot measure UHIE.
The Jackknife method used by BEST does not do time variant factors. UHIE is a time based variable. It is no surprise they did not find any UHIE.
Melbourne is an interesting example of problematic temperatures as Tom Quirk shows:
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/09/the-mysterious-sudden-jump-in-melbourne-temperatures-in-1996-with-an-instrument-change/
And as Geoff Sherrington shows along with other Australian capital cities.
Oops, the Geoff Sherrington link:
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/02/heatwaves-in-australia-not-longer-not-more-common-why-wont-bom-and-abc-say-that/
I might add, since, miker’s attention has moved onto UHIE, that the BoM can measure it and has been doing so for a long time, albeit badly:
http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20101013.shtml
My Cohenite, we are getting into Zen here. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does a bear s… in the forest? Does Shrodinger’s cat only die when observed?
.
But back to reality as we know it. From the Berekely site FAQ – http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/#question-15 .
“Is the urban heat island (UHI) effect real?
The Urban Heat Island effect is real. Berkeley’s analysis focused on the question of whether this effect biases the global land average. Our UHI paper analyzing this indicates that the urban heat island effect on our global estimate of land temperatures is indistinguishable from zero.”
Are we there yet?
I am getting highly irritated by having to repeat myself for Cohenite’s sake. The jackknife method is being used to estimate uncertainties, not as a predictor of temperature trends! Isn’t the quote which explicitly states that in the paper good enough for you?
Look I now have to be little bit more unkind to Cohenite.
I have a very brief look at some of his other contributions to this site. I note that he have had a go at the B.E.S.T .paper before -http://jennifermarohasy.com/2013/05/ten-of-the-worst-climate-research-papers-5-years-on. Not so much personally but he has linked to Anthony Watts’s (in)famous site and articles by Willis Eshenbach amongst others .
There is a lot of material there and as I am not a climate scientist, and I do not intend to become one (one Ph.D. per lifetime is more than enough),
Accordingly I cannot comment directly on the range of material covered. Presumably this critique was published in a peer review journal of repute and I will leave it to the experts to deal with its merits. If someone can find the peer reviewed paper and pass it onto me it would be greatly appreciated. I see Anthony Watts has started his own journal last year and I would have thought he would have published the article there.
For the list of papers that have been published so far in his journal see http://theoas.org/journal-of-the-oas/ .
Cohenite, I do know my limitations in the area of climate science unlike yourself (see Dunning Kruger effect- http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2015/02/the-dunning-kruger-effect-are-the-stupid-too-stupid-to-realize-theyre-stupid/).
It could save time and preserve a modicum of intellectual integrity for Jenny’s site by linking directly to the articles rather than via a clueless 3rd party.
When the 3rd party generates his own material things get even worse, for instance the 1st article he ‘reviewed’ where he shows the SST data (actually just the least squares line- without the data!) for 2003-2013 which had a negative slope see -http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2003/trend.
This is what the current data looks like for the same period http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:2003/trend/plot/hadsst3gl/from:2003 .
This yet again illustrates the limitations of using short periods of noisy data to try and and justify some sort of claim . I am not going to be as silly as Cohenite and try to make a case from such limited data . If you do so then it is likely to come back and bite you on the bum. In this case Cohenite’s wound is going to require suturing before it becomes gangrenous.
For the sake of clarity this is what you get for the SST data if you use a much longer period – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1979/trend/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1979.
I did not proceed beyond the 3rd paper reviewed as it was clearly becoming pointless.
If Cohenite has issue with this , it will be like a learner driver complaining that , after knocking down a dozen pedestrians, his test was terminated before he could display his skills at reverse parking . There comes a time when the inadequacies displayed are so obvious that no further time needs to be wasted.
Cohenite,
I apologize for the bollocking I just delivered in your direction. You can take some solace however that you have been excoriated by some-one who does not know what he is talking about with respect to climate science.
Can you imagine if you had to face someone with genuine expertise in the area? I shudder to think.
“Our UHI paper analyzing this indicates that the urban heat island effect on our global estimate of land temperatures is indistinguishable from zero.”
That’s right; it exists but we can’t measure it; it’s zero. Not a skerrick, scintilla or fraction but zero. The essence of the UHIE is that it effects temperature; if it doesn’t effect temperature than there is no Urban Heat Island EFFECT. Get it: effect.
Now the Jackknife; you say:
“The jackknife method is being used to estimate uncertainties, not as a predictor of temperature trends!”
Yes. And UHIE is a trend. So they tested for UHIE using a method which doesn’t test for it.
To sum up; UHIE is real but doesn’t exist and BEST proved this by not testing for it.
As for uncertainties or confidence intervals, the Jackknife is also fun. It assumes equal weighting for all stations but did BEST do this. Jeff Id explains:
“Another way to think of it is if you have 5 stations. Say one is weighted approximately 10 times greater than the other 4 which are equally weighted. This would be the same as 10 copies of 1 and 4 other copies of something else. If you eliminate one station which happens to be one of the 4 and the weights are recalculated so that one station is say 10 times weighted to 3 at similar weights to the original, the difference in the temperature reconstruction would be about 1/14th of change from error rather than 1/5th as would be assumed by jackknife.
These values are arbitrary of course but if you expand the effect across thousands of stations, you can see that the subsampling and reweighting give artificially low CI’s.”
BEST is a joke.
But keep posting miker; you’re fun; and do please get as irritated as you want.
I have been trying to understand whether the silliness of Cohenite has an upper bound. So far I have not been able to find it.
Zero is a result. The concept has been around for eons.
If the net force on a an object on table is zero it does not mean that that gravity does not exist. You are totally confused, as per usual.
.
Once again, this time with feeling.
Jackkniifing is just a method to estimate the uncertainties of the spatially interpolations of temperatures . Why do you persist with this straw man argument that jack knifing does not measure the trend? I agree 100% with you . Of course it doesn”t.
BEST tested for the effect of UHIE by comparing data sets that have significant UHIE with dataset that exclude these sites. I am just about done with this.
Another sermon dedicated to spangled drongo.
As I am on a roll I will address one of spangled drongo’s earlier pleas for audits of the temperature data , both world wide and for Australia. His pleas have not fallen on deaf ears.
Spangled drongo, with regard to another separate audit, who or what do you suggest would be appropriate for the world wide ( we now know what Putin would do) and Australian cases? For the world wide manipulation of temperature data a bureaucracy set up by U.N. would be an obvious choice (you could call it Agenda 20.9999 so that it does not alarm Mack) .
For the Australian audit we could have yet another Australian government bureaucratic body, either funded from general revenue or by a special levy (just a couple of percent should do) , to run audits on a continual basis (our taxes at work).
I know some people would complain that the cost of this would further blow out our budget deficit and there is a high likelihood these nitpickers might suggest such ideas for audit after audit would only come from a committed socialist. Spangled drongo I had no idea that you follow this particular ideology.
Could Jennifer Marohasy be a committed Marxist too, as it appears that Jennifer is also pushing for the government option? Otherwise why would she have participated in wasting the time of 16 pollies? As further evidence for Jennifer’s political proclivities see the link to Vlad the Impalers climate change policy- http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/30/russian-president-climate-change-is-fraud/
By the way how much does a back bencher and a senator earn per annum and who paid for the travel expenses for those who gave evidence? Were they flown in Bronnie style by helicopter, or had to slum it in business class or, god forbid, mingle with the plebeians in economy? There seem s to have been an awful lot of sucking on the teat of government.
There is however, another avenue that could be explored to save the necessary money to fund these audits This would involve the abolition of the taxation department and redeployment of the redundant personnel with the appropriate training.
Personally I think a more realistic alternative, that is in accord with my free market philosophy, is for some private organization to do the audit. The IPA would be perfect. They should have access to a number of auditors that are in dire need of employment since the GFC. Auditors are renowned for their creativity and you can then get them to provide whatever is the desired outcome.
They normally only require an assurance of further auditing work to perform such duties, but if they baulk at this, you could negotiate performance based fees. These could be based on trend reductions per 0.1 degree per decade.
If none of this appears to be feasible then you may be called upon to join forces with Jennifer and Ken. However as you think the degree of fiddling of the data is much more extensive than those sites identified by these two, then the inference is that you consider them to be too incompetent to be relied upon.
If this is indeed the case I recommend that you take charge and do your own audit. The list of 104 BoM stations can be found at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/index.shtml#tabs=Data-&-network .
Finally , I know you all you guys might find it difficult to be confronted by someone who does not share your delusional belief systems . It is a bit like when cult members are deprogrammed. They tend to go through stages of grief. I hope you can get to the acceptance stage quickly and without too much angst.
This whole thing has gone on way too long and Nellie Melba like, I will once again say farewell and venture outside to enjoy our premature summer.
“Zero is a result. The concept has been around for eons.”
So has stupidity, arrogance etc.
UHIE has zero EFFECT, but its real.
The comparison with gravity is nonsensical. UHIE is dependent on precise and limited conditions.
Perhaps you can look at it this way: under what conditions do you think BEST would find UHIE?
Now: “BEST tested for the effect of UHIE by comparing data sets that have significant UHIE with dataset that exclude these sites.”
And did you consider the point about weighting I made and what effect the process of exclusion would have on unequally weighted sites? No, of course not.
I don’t mind being patronised; every alarmist with tickets on themselves have being doing it for the last 10 years. I don’t want to be personal but you have to lift your game.
UHIE is everywhere.
To think that it has no effect on the climate measuring, ground based thermometers since the beginning of the industrial revolution is delusional.
http://web.archive.org/web/20131231035137/http://cas.umt.edu/geography/documents/Hinkel_etal_2003_winter_UHI.pdf
“Personally I think a more realistic alternative, that is in accord with my free market philosophy, is for some private organization to do the audit. The IPA would be perfect. They should have access to a number of auditors that are in dire need of employment since the GFC. Auditors are renowned for their creativity and you can then get them to provide whatever is the desired outcome.”
BoM often gets just ahead of those people looking at it critically. For instance Ken and David had this paper ready to go for some time:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.362.9661&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The HQ network was replaced at just about the same time with ACORN.
Previous to this the BoM had also headed off an audit application by getting NIWA to do an audit:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/audit/anao-request-audit-bom.pdf
Interesting exchanges from cohenite, miker and spangled drongo.
Why does open consideration of BoM (and NOAA and BEST) temperature diddling have to be so hard.
When they do the diddling of actually recorded temps, they must have some notations / logs depicting –
here’s what we got from the instruments;
now we’re changing these readings to (new values);
the reasons we’re doing this is (clear & precise, in straightforward language);
how we decided that the quantum of adjustment for each record was appropriate was (assumptions & calculations)
Now all they have to do is publish these little stories on their website, rather than just present the end results of their diddling, which causes interested / concerned people such as Jennifer, Ken et al to have to get on their case and try to extract some info about their rationale for adjustments.
Geez, I can remember even at secondary school I couldn’t get away with maths homework by just presenting “42” as an answer to a problem – I had to show all my steps and workings.
Mick, miker is obviously a troll; he/she is not interested in facts. The BoM record is a fiasco with profound defects such as:
1 Min > max for over 950 days
2 Missing data not invalidating sites even when that missing data is a substantial % of the total data
3 Systematic and arbitrary historical cooling
4 Unexplained adjustments in contradiction of their own criteria
5 A dismal prediction and forecasting record
and so on.
Cohenite – The weather has turned cooler here so I will briefly return to the fray.
The hole you are digging for yourself is probably not bottomless but the antipodean point to your mine shaft is likely below the mid Atlantic. Remember to bring scuba gear,
Yes Jeff Id definitely has issues with the Confidence Interval (C.I.) that is used to calculate uncertainties of the BEST data but in the end Jeff id has uncertainties about his own methodology with respect to C.I. (se Mosher near the end)
Apologies for the extensive material below which many of your readers may find taxing in length and complexity and apologies for the cut and paste job, but I think the full context is necessary. Hopefully this will terminate this tedious exchange.
Is the following article by Jeff Id the basis for your reference to weights https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/overconfidence-error-in-best/?
if so this material from this site is particularly relevant.
“The only places I have concern are in the brush-over given to the UHI effect and the obviously over-tight confidence intervals. Even if the CI’s were widened to more correct levels, it wouldn’t change the result and the UHI effect isn’t going to reverse any trend so despite some statistical critique, I believe the result is very close to the actual global surface temperature average minus some unknown amount of warming by UHI. Still, I do believe that I have identified a specific error in the confidence interval calculation which must be corrected and is discussed below.
Now the model they give in the methods paper is designed to separate seasonal, latitude, altitude and measurement noise from the ‘climate’ signal. There is nothing I see wrong with that. The series DON’T appear to be smoothed (low pass filtered) before combination and some care was made to separate bad data from the chaff. They refer to the method as the scalpel method but it does look a bit like a saw to me. For instance, series are sorted for quality and deweighted by an automatic weighting scheme. This could have a small impact on the overall trend but it has the potential for a far greater effect on the uncertainty in the mean as currently calculated. They determined uncertainty by methods which use re-sampling and running the same algorithm which is normally a fantastically reliable way to avoid critique, in this case more discussion is required. The weighting method is very much ad-hoc, but again, I doubt it can change trend results substantially although the same cannot be said for the CI.”
Cohenite. There is some tidbit that you could seize upon in the above.
’ actual global surface temperature average minus some unknown amount of warming by UHI’ sounds promising for your case but this was the whole point of the 2013 study that address this issue.
Here is Jeff Id much later in 2014 at http://rankexploits.com/musings/2014/how-not-to-calculate-temperatures-part-2/.
Jeff Id – June 27th, 2014 at 6:16 am.
“At least the more informed skeptical folks (Anthony Watts, Jeff Id, etc.) accept that anomalies and spatial interpolation are required, which I suppose is progress of a sort.”
Zeke, your critique of Goddard’s method is accurate, your interpretation of model performance in comments on a previous recent thread was at best generous but I like your work and posts generally. One of my first critiques of Steig’s Antarctic work was that the method did not spatially constrain temperature information and allowed stations to be “over/under-weighted” relative to their area of influence in the average. That turned out to be one of the main failures of his paper.
Your critique of my skepticism is more fun and seems to stem from the Lewandowsky incident which is one of the few posts where I made noise about temperature adjustments. At the time I was very interested in learning about climate, the Air Vent had a big audience including RC authors and part of my writing style was to push at the edge of climate science by tweaking the advocacy crowd and create some change. It is ridiculous how closed certain aspects of climate science are. It is also ridiculous how much pure fantasy is still allowed in “science” papers from the field.
Basically, what I’m telling you is that that whole post only existed because I was pushing for openness. That Lewandowsky fell into it was amusing to me. The man is clearly uneducated in the field, but none of that makes me a mathematical simpleton who wouldn’t spatially weight temperatures or who doesn’t see the improvement of using anomaly over absolute temp for averaging.
So lets talk math, IMO you have shown two math problems I’m aware of. First, Nic Lewis has the right of it on the most likely climate sensitivity which I guess makes me a luke warmer? I have to write things like that before I critique climate models or I’ll be kicked out of the club. Models have clearly failed, climate may warm enough to keep it in certain CI windows but the reasonable CI’s have already failed long ago. No real questions left. Therefore I recommend that you should step back and look at the whole of climate models with a more objective statistical eye. If that makes me a skeptic, I’m clearly fine with that label.
The second problem I see is that you need to reexamine the jackknife calculation in BEST CI, because while it may actually be close to real, it would be close by luck rather than by mathematical reasonableness. Reweighting after removing 1/8 of the data creates an average noise level based on the distribution of that noise so the CI is also a function of how the distribution affects your re-weighting. I get that BEST is attempting to address the CI of the method and data but that is not what you have done. To prove the effect, if you don’t understand what I’m saying, I would recommend trying it on fabricated data having different noise distributions (extremes). e.g. signal plus normal noise and then signal uniform noise to see how different they are from distribution based CI calcs. Since data isn’t missing the simplified calculations can judge the performance of your result.
I like much of the BEST work but the failing is that the complex methodology has yet to produce an accurate CI and unfortunately I’m not good enough at stats to tell you how it should be done – other than some over-complex brute force monte-carlo ideas. I was rather hoping that someone like yourself or Mosher would take a crack at fixing the problem”.
In reply to the above request for Steve Mosher to fix the issue.
Steve Mosher -June 27th, 2014 at 11:00 am
In reply to the above request for Steve Mosher to fix the issue.
“Well, It’s on our plate of things to look at. Given your previous comments to me in mail, where you suggested the problem was minor, I haven’t put much effort into it.
1. You object to re weighting, and suggested we test without
re weighting.
2. We ran your test and reported to you that we found that without reweighting the CI was NARROWER.
So, we acknowledge that re weighting has some issues, but they fail on the side of making the CI too wide rather than too narrow.”
Finally Cohenite – Your statements below are bit obtuse but I think I might have finally twigged .
“Perhaps you can look at it this way: under what conditions do you think BEST would find UHIE?
Now: “BEST tested for the effect of UHIE by comparing data sets that have significant UHIE with dataset that exclude these sites.” “
Yes , the method under discussion would find the effect of UHIE upon the trend values if the number of sites considered to be contaminated by UHIE were much larger in number (using MODIS criteria ) or the average UHIE effect per affected site was large enough to significantly change the trend. This was not found to be the case.
There could be arguments about how effective MODIS was in sequestering the relevant sites, which is the basis of the attack on BEST that is happening at the moment, but the weighting issues are relevant only to C.I as explained above.
Cohenite
Yoo can find an intersesting discssion regardding Point 1 above at https://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/a-clue-for-willis/. The number of such occurrences is about 6 per million observations.
miker. you don’t know what you are talking about and you have misquoted Jeff Id. The link is only one of the posts ID and others made about BEST and UHIE. The weighting issues are NOT just connected to the CI they are fundamentally to do with the lack of finding by BEST of a UHIE. ID says:
“3 – Confidence intervals.
The confidence intervals were calculated in this method by eliminating a portion of the temperature stations and looking at the noise that the elimination created. Lubos Motl described the method accurately as intentionally ‘damaging’ the dataset. It is a clever method to identify the sensitivity of the method and result to noise. The problem is that the amount of damage assumed is equal to the percentage of temperature stations which were eliminated. Unfortunately the high variance stations are de-weighted by intent in the processes such that the elimination of 1/8 of the stations is absolutely no guarantee of damaging 1/8 of the noise. The ratio of eliminated noise to change in final result is assumed to be 1/8 and despite some vague discussion of Monte-Carlo verifications, no discussion of this non-linearity was even attempted in the paper.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/03/a-considered-critique-of-berkley-temperature-series/
It can’t be made any plainer. BEST prevented any detection of UHIE in their methodology. Their CI is wrong and imprecise and because of that there is no statistical certainty the NH that UHIE is not present is proved. BEST is an outlier.
With regard to cohenite’s point 3, my personal take, for whatever it is worth, is that it is the result of the movement of stations at various times over the past century,from UHI affected sites, such the centre of towns (typically the P.O), to more rural sites, often adjacent to airports or other non UHI affected sites.
Comparison of the two sites will more often than not show a cooling, simply as a result of being moved away from urban heat environments. The BoM and similar bodies in other countries are interested in trying to determine whether temperature changes are exogenous(due to natural variation or driven anthropomorphically, depending on you viewpoint) rather than simply being due to this move.
I know it may cause an outbreak of cognitive dissonance amongst the usual readers of this blog as, ironically the increase in trends, as a result of homogenization, is due to BoM’s compensation for UHI. The homogenization is an attempt to comparing apples with apples and not with some other fruit (especially cherries) .
This also emphasizes that the BoM are the true believers when it comes to UHIE, not you bunch of johnny come latelys.
I think I need to explain the material of the previous post (6:16pm). Hopefully not more than once.
The 2013 Best study does not state that UIHE does not exist. They specify that they saw no evidence of it within a certain C.I. Presumably this is the basis of their uncertainty in trend at a 95% confidence level. This may be what Jeff Id is on about. He questioned the calculation of CI due to the complexities of weighting and thought they were too confident in their claim that they did not see any discernible effect.
Steve Mosher reassured Jeff on this matter by pointing out the C.I . is smaller when weighting is not used than when it is used, but there is a lot of debate in the comments that follow.I recommend the Blackboard site very highly if you want to examine the minutiae of the debate.
But in the broadest of terms , it all comes down to the size of the bee’s dick differénce in trend values and it’s significance.
BoM and UHIE:
https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/the-australian-temperature-record-part-9-an-urban-myth/
““Please note: Stations classified as urban are excluded from the Australian annual temperature timeseries and trend map analyses. Urban stations have some urban influence during part or all of their record.”
(http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/hqsites/site_networks.cgi?variable=meanT&period=annual&state=aus)
I previously assumed that BOM’s reason for excluding urban sites was that their inclusion would introduce a spurious warming due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.
Never assume.
The reality appears to be quite different. The urban stations’ data presents an embarrassing and perplexing problem for BOM, namely:
Urban temperature trends are substantially less than non-urban sites in Australia.
There is a spurious warming, but it is as a result of BOM’s adjustments. It is not apparent in the raw data.”
“Urban temperature trends are substantially less than non-urban sites in Australia.”
You could not make this stuff up. Oh, wait a minute…
Sorry my previous comment should have said.
It is not the size of the bee’s dick that is in question but its significance.
C
With regard to the bureau’s data are you referring to the raw data or the Acorn data?
Sorry my bad. Ken’s data refers to both. There is a lot to digest there and hopefully I can look at it tomorrow. I am getting tired and having finger trouble. Remind me never to post coments from my phone!
Before finslly retiring i have had a quick look through the entire comments section. One thing is really obvious. As each of Cohenite’e arguments is demolished, he introduces a new diversion. Witness the last two days or so, zigzagging from topic to topic. The term for this is a Gish Gallop http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gish+Gallop .
Unfortunately i keep failing for it but now it has become such an obvious ploy by him, next time he tries it on again, i will endeavour to restrain myself from following him up the garden path.
He hasn’t used the full quota at http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-Gish-Gallop-of-epic-proportions.html so i am sure he has many more diversions in store.
The gish-galloping around here was by you miker in defending the indefensible, namely BEST, the only place in the world which cannot find UHIE.
But, anyway, as the resident alarmist troll, a fair first effort.
Geeezzz, Cohers, SD and others have the patience of saints to keep responding to our new resident troll. He still can’t answer my question about the mitigation of his CAGW and we all know why, don’t we?
If you look at the 3 similar warming periods in the HAD 4 data since 1860 we find zero attribution to increased co2 emissions. Even Phil Jones conceded this point in his 2010 interview on the BBC. See point A at the link. BTW he also conceded ( point G at link) that the Med WP would be a problem for our slight recent warming if it could be be shown that there was a warmer Med WP in SH proxies. Well the Calvo et al and PAGES 2K studies both show a warmer Med WP than today in S OZ and Antarctica. Add these to numerous other Med WP studies in NZ and S. America. So our entire fantasy of unusual and unprecedented recent warming is based on nothing more than a con and a fraud.
Just heard that idiot Shorten on ABC radio telling us we must do more to stop Pacific islanders from drowning. And people vote for these morons.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
The Bolter is in fine form this morning highlighting more of the BS about their delusional CAGW nonsense.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_which_journalists_will_call_bull_on_shortens_warming_hype/
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/how_much_longer_before_journalists_finally_challenge_these_false_prophets/
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/paris_cilmate_festival_paying_to_pretend_to_stop_a_warming_they_pretend_is_/
So far the ABC and Fairfax are running true to form. Big surprise NOT. They reckon it’s better to keep lying to their audience than bother them with facts and science.
UPDATE
ABC AM:Fail.
Sydney Morning Herald: Fail.
ABC News: Fail.
Cohenite,
Not being an assiduous reader of the entire oeuvre of Ken Stewart’s work, i only occasionally drop in for a laugh. I have been doing this since about 2013 . I am not that familiar with his much of his early works so that is the most likely explanation missed these.
Looking at the 2010 piece I can only comment that the data set he uses does not belong to the current Acorn set that is used for the homogenized Acorn trend data. Maybe for good reason. Ken with his scattergun approach may have hit a target. Very few of the sites that appear in his table appear in the current Acorn sites. Possibly the BoM have reviewed the list in the intervening years and dropped them off, but those who have a penchant for nefarious conspiracy theories will have their own interpretation.
The other reason i have not seen the map of sites is that it doesn’t’ appear when you try to access it from the climate links on the BOM site. Maybe I have missed it. However the graphics, layout and fonts appear to be from an early era prior to the current BoM web layout.
However the current 8 sites that the BoM consider Sydney, Melbour e etc. definitely, on average, have a raw trends that are significantly greater than for the remaining non urban sites. I seem to recall that Ken a year two ago did a more up to date analysis of the current Acorn sites, Maybe Ken can check that and get back to us.
Cohenite you have yet again successfully diverted attention from you’re your shortcomings This is really what you excel at. Must be years of constant practice.
All in all cohenite, your Gish galloping is impressive enough, if there is a late scratching for tomorrows race, you should make sure you are ready. Fortunately it is not a hurdle race as your propensity to fall at the first hurdle would mean you would have to be put down.
I note that Neville has joined the race and maybe today or tomorrow I will address his comments. Meanwhile he can get post 2010 information with a Google search. Remember Google is your friend.
What 2010 piece are you talking about miker?
Cohenite.
Kens’ piece of 14/9/2010 linked to in your post of last night (9:11pm).
Glad I am not the only one befuddled by the rampant Gish galloping.
ACORN is allegedly the same trend as HQ so I don’t see your point in that respect. The further point about selective use of sites is very pertinent given the BoM’s swapping and mixing and cherry picking of sites. This is an ongoing saga and some experts are looking at this but an example of BoM fiddling in the context of the alleged hottest day ever in 2013, January 7th:
“It turns out the average maximum of the 721 stations was 35.1C on 7 January 2013.
The BoM’s Special Climate Statement includes a breakdown of each state’s heatwave including 7 January, and the BoM’s area-averaged estimate can be compared with the actual average maximum of all stations:
hottest day table
There’s about a 5C difference, the same as the BoM’s estimate of how much the January 2013 heatwave pushed national temperatures above average.
To achieve the BoM’s national and state averages based purely on all station maxima, it’s interesting looking at how many of the highest maxima stations would be needed out of the total in each jurisdiction:
Australia 339 out of 721
NSW 91 out of 172
Northern Territory 27 out of 54
Queensland 54 out of 125
South Australia 45 out of 80
Tasmania 57 out of 57
Victoria 68 out of 94
Western Australia 60 out of 139
In other words, if you chose the hottest 339 weather stations in Australia on 7 January 2013 and ignored the other 382, you’d find an average maximum of 40.3C”
The hottest day table did not transpose but can be seen at the source:
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/03/mystery-black-box-method-used-to-make-all-new-australian-hottest-ever-records/.
cohenite
I and many others have regularly questioned the usefulness of ‘average’ temp values across a surface as large as continental Australia, encompassing as it does coastal tropics, interior deserts, temperate southern regions, etc etc
Even a region as relatively small as Victoria has numerous climatic zones, each with their own different characteristics, and such widely varying temp readings throughout a day as to make ‘averaging’ these numbers a meaningless exercise. As for WA & QLD, the same in spades.
So what’s the point in arguing about numbers that are so patently meaningless in any practical sense whatsoever?
Can someone more versed (yourself?, Jennifer?,MikeR?, etc) enlighten me about what I seem to be missing here?
Correct Mick and this may explain it for you:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14784&page=0
From the piece:
“The point Ken makes is that a record maximum in one part of Australia may have produced an overall summer mean record. If this is the case the summer temperature record is not based on a Nation-wide mean temperature heating event; it is based instead on a statistical extrapolation of a different temperature type which only has correlation with weather and climate causes in the area where the record occurred.”
cohenite
If you are indeed worried about selective use your statement that the totality of the HQ sites (allegedly) give the same results as the Acorn sites then why are you are worried about the chopping and changing of sites between the two? Much ado about nothing.
By the way the figures for the 3 sites in Ken’s table that are identified as UHI affected by the BoM and consequently removed from the Acorn data set (Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart) have a raw trend value of 1.23 degree/decade(According to Ken’s figures in the table from the 2010 piece ) . In comparison Ken reported in mid 2014 for the raw figures for 83 of the sites (the ones Ken self selected as being the most reliable and presumably least effected by UHIE ) of about 0.63 degrees per decade see – https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/the-australian-temperature-record-revisited-a-question-of-balance/.
Thanks cohenite. I’ve bookmarked that article / site.
I’m somewhat pleased to have confirmation that it wasn’t just me who thought these temp constructs were meaningless nonsense.
I get it that a mean or average is perhaps useful as a guide for someone traversing a journey of say 300k in one region in a day trip, but beyond that they may as well be pondering what the av temp is on the moon.
Then of course the corollary consideration with this madness is – who is paying for these pointy-heads to conduct these useless computations in the first place?
(No need to tell me this – I don’t even need a multiple-choice answer format to get it right)
I see that most of the media is helping the Shorten con merchant spread his nonsense about dangerous SLR. But thanks to the OZ perhaps others will get a taste of the truth.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/media_failing_shortens_climate_test/
Neville,
As i said above, a Google search is all you need re Phil Jones, but remember to eliminate tbe Manchester United defender of the same name.
A good reference is http://www.skepticalscience.com/Phil-Jones-says-no-global-warming-since-1995.htm and notably it is listed under the standard Gish Gallop memes on that web site.
MK here are the warming trends since 1860, from Phil Jones. The trends per decade were similar before 1950 and after 1950. That’s if you can trust the HAD 4 fiddled data of course.
And please tell us how to mitigate your CAGW and how long before we see a lowering of temp, co2 levels and SLR?
Period -years -trend
1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes
1910-1940 31 0.15 Yes
1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes
1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes
miker says:
“By the way the figures for the 3 sites in Ken’s table that are identified as UHI affected by the BoM and consequently removed from the Acorn data set (Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart) have a raw trend value of 1.23 degree/decade(According to Ken’s figures in the table from the 2010 piece ) . In comparison Ken reported in mid 2014 for the raw figures for 83 of the sites (the ones Ken self selected as being the most reliable and presumably least effected by UHIE ) of about 0.63 degrees per decade see – https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/the-australian-temperature-record-revisited-a-question-of-balance/.”
1.23 compared with 0.63; that’s a fair representation of UHIE. Wouldn’t you say?
And that’s per century not decade..
Cohenite. Yes degrees per century. Many thanks for the correction,
By the way your earlier reference to this El-Nino being a fizzer with regard to the satellite data seems even more dubious as the UAH data for October has just come in see -http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/11/uah-v6-0-global-temperature-update-for-october-2015-0-43-deg-c ,
I am going to follow my own advice and not make any further claims from such limited and volatile data.
This is just yet another demonstration ot the dangers ot making the kind of claims Ken Stewart tends to do. King Ken is in severe danger of his lack of attire being called out by even the lowliest of his subjects.
UAH has October temp. Anomaly +0.43c:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Cohenite,
One further thing. How have you being going with your query regarding the bizarre nature of the Australian UAH data? Have you had a response from Dr. Spencer?
I have posted on his site a comment regarding this http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/11/uah-v6-0-global-temperature-update-for-october-2015-0-43-deg-c/#comment-200861 and I have given a shout out to Ken which I hope he appreciates.
Cohenite
Returning to your last gallop (take it easy as you might still get that last call for your services before the running of the Cup) .
Yes 1.23 per century compared to 0.63 degrees per century could well be a reasonable representation of the UHIE for those sites that the BoM exclude. Glad we are getting to some kind of agreement.
It could be an early sign that you are progressing on the road to acceptance. However I am still not sure whether you have got beyond the denial and anger stages of the 5 stages of grief.
Good luck, the journey can be difficult.
Cohenite
Addressing another of your diversions regarding hottest days on record, the BoM data is in for October confirming my impressions and data regarding the extraordinary heat we have recently experienced see http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/aus/summary.shtml.
It looks like the land based global data sets could also set records. We just have to sit back and wait for the next few months of satellite data to come in .It just needs UAH to average 0.38 for the next 3 months for the ‘no global warming since…’ ., by the usual mob of chery pickers, to become obsolete, but time will tell.
Neville,
I thought we covered this nonsense back on October 23 rd. You may have forgotten (probably the heat got to you) so I will repeat.
Another classic cherry picking exercise is undertaken by Neville above. To illustrate this , rather than cherry picking 3 or 4 periods of relatively short duration (21 to 35 years) with missing gaps of a total of 77 years, I will indulge in a cherry pick (with slightly more justification), that includes all the data, of two equal duration periods, of about 78 years each from 1860-1938 and 1938 until the present (see http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:2015/from/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:1938/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1938/to:2015/trend ) .
It is evident that this provides a very different picture to Neville’s.
That is the beauty of cherry picking only the data that supports your preconceived ideas and why it is frowned upon in the academic community. With the appropriate choices almost any argument can be sustained.
As a follow up , you need to revise your values.. The value of Hadcrut 4, 1975 to the present is now reading 0.171 degrees per decade (41 years).
Constant repetition of the same material can be effective as a propaganda tool but it can be counterproductive, if it is so easily countered with facts.. Not every one who reads the material is as totally gullible as some. This is despite the old adage of P.T.Barnum that ‘there is a sucker being born every minute”.
I think my work is done here and would like to finish with a number of comments.
I have little knowledge of climate science per se but I have been involved in scientific data analyses for nigh on 40 years. This experience allows me to apply the ‘smell test’ to a lot of this material. Most of it intuitively felt wrong and upon minimal analysis of analysis, confirmed the material usually stunk to high heaven.
I hope I have managed to induce a moment of doubt with readers that they are the accuracy of what is being presented on this site is the gospel truth.
There also seems to degree of paranoid and delusional material on this site. Usually involving conspiracies to manipulate data by climate change scientists worldwide, ecologists ,marine biologists, glaciologists,scientists who are studying the polar regions, meteorological organizations of almost every nation (Russia may be the odd man out as Putin has commanded the tide to not come in) and of course the UN and its agencies. Much of it so fanciful, it beggars belief , especially the full on crazies, linking to sites that promote charlatanism (you know antivaccine, chemtrails ,commies under the bed etc.) . But these beliefs persist even when confronted by evidence to the contrary.
Having medical people in the family I am aware how intractable it can be to treat delusional paranoia. The last thing such people need is to be immersed full time in environments that reinforce their delusions. On that note I think many of you need get out a bit and look for yourself at a wider range of sites, despite the material might confront your long held and cherished beliefs.
It is difficult but the truth is out there somewhere. It just needs you to expand your horizons.
Politically the ancien regime is being slowly dismantled (the appointment of Dr. Alan Finkel as chief scientist is a good start) and the troglodytes are being marginalized so there is some hope that forces of progress are at foot. I do believe it is better to be on the right side of history than being stuck in the past.
Despite the adversarial nature of many of my encounters on this site It has been a pleasure . Apologies to those who I may have offended with my curmudgeonly contrarianism and my brusque comments. I have a habit of ‘calling it as I see it’ and find it difficult to tolerate foolishness or just plain ignorance.
I thank Jennifer Marohasy for not pulling the plug. I may have had had some unkind words for her but she clearly has my utmost respect for her integrity.
Normal programming will now follow.
Miker, Yes, cherry picking is a wonderful tool but If you apply the trends a little more in line with what really happened over that period wrt the peaks and the troughs, you get this:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1860/to:2015/from/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1860/to:1878/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1878/to:1911/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1911/to:1938/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1938/to:1976/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1976/to:2001/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2001/to:2015/trend
Natural variability of around 0.8c over 155 years equates to about half average Nat Var for the last 80 centuries.
When you also remove UHIE from that 0.8c it doesn’t leave much damage attributable to ACO2.
I think you could also do with some horizon expanding.
Yes Spangled I couldn’t have put it better myself. And the entire record of HAD 4 over 165 years shows just 0.8 C and Concordia uni study finds just 0.7 C for the last 2.15 centuries. Doesn’t leaves anything for their CAGW except more vigorous data fiddling to come I presume.
miker has thoughtfully undertaken a group diagnosis. And again manifested a self-regard which is so embarrassing to read that one can only suggest that he get a room so he can be alone with himself.
Still he seems well intended and it is reassuring that there are medical professionals in his immediate family.
As to substance we have:
1 His support for BEST despite its inability to find UHIE which every other major indice manages to locate.
2 A lack of scepticism for alarmism that enables him to accept without compunction the validity of the BoM’s and every other land based temperature indices’ veracity. To perhaps prod miker to develop some doubt, at least about the scientists who promote alarmism perhaps he could note their degree of self-regard which relegates his to the amateur hour:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2014/08/25/nick-bowers_n_5701202.html?ir=Australia
On behalf of everyone here I sincerely hope miker is not similarly afflicted by such nonpareil and flamboyant vainglory.
That’s about it really. Except to hope miker returns and livens up the place and keeps us on our toes.
We should give Bolt ,Marohasy, Nova , Carter, Watts, Plimer etc medals for helping to win this argument against the extremists. Now to somehow stop these idiots wasting countless billions $ to try and fix a mostly natural and variable climate .
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/csiro_most_australians_are_now_global_warming_sceptics/
The media continues to lie for Shorten, with a few notable exceptions.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/dont_tell_the_truth_media_fails_bill_shortens_warming_test/#commentsmore
Just popped in for a bit of fun. Maybe I am getting addicted.
This might stimulate a bit of debate amongst those who like to fiddle with data while Rome burns – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah-land/from:1979/to:2015/from/plot/esrl-co2/normalise/offset:-0.1/from:1979/from .
Don’t take it too seriously but it just shows how the selective and inappropriate use of data can be used to get anything you want. With the notable exception of Alice it is a bit like Alice’s restaurant.
Spangled drongo
As for horizon expanding, W.T.F. do you think I am doing here with my views that are very different to all the protagonists on this web site? I try to have a look at the arguments on both sides.
You should do likewise and remove your blinkers and pop into a site like Judith Curry at http://judithcurry.com/. where you can dip your toe in with a site that has material for all tastes or plunge into the deep end (maybe you should bring a submersible with you) at http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au . See if you can provide some intelligent commentary. You could create mayhem.
Cohenite
My group diagnosis of paranoid delusion, I think unfairly smeared the group. In my defence this was supplied gratis. I think each deserves his or her own diagnostic criterion.
I did get a second opinion from the family member who has lengthy expertise in these matters. He said gullibility is not currently in the DSM IV even its more extreme manifestations. However he did think that think that my recommendation to avoid being totally immersed in sites that only reinforce theses delusions and paranoia, was appropriate for those who suffer from these conditions.
As for the Huffington Post article, I agree with you it was ludicrous. It just goes to show that neither side of the debate has the mortgage on stupidity. I also doubt if my decrepit visage would have graced these pages and as Groucho Marx famously said I would never join a club that would have me as a member.
I can also reassure you that i am, by nature,a meek and mild mannered. My pet hate of people who do not recognize their own limitations brings out the worst in me.
Cohenite. As long as we don’t go off on another galloping expedition and drift off and get battered like a dust mote battered by Brownian motion we can continue the discussion regarding the BEST data set.
The technique of partitioning a data set and observing how the results are affected by random choices of data is an age old technique used in all areas of quantitative science to provide an estimate of uncertainty.
The technique where the data, rather than randomly selecting data is carefully segmented into two data sets so that they represents a particular type of data is again, one of , if not the most common, technique to examine how the data responds to a variable . The technique is usually a one variable time approach (assuming independence of the variable from other confounding variables) and is the basis of population studies in medicine , sociology, economics etc.
This is also the exact technique that Ken Stewart used in his work https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/the-australian-temperature-record-part-9-an-urban-myth that you linked to in your previous comment above! As a reminder Ken compares averaged urban and non- urban trend values in his work.
If you still persist to object to this methodology being applied to the BEST data set, then please consult with one of the authors. My suggestion is Judith Curry who has now embraced climate change scepticism and you may get some sympathy, if you go onto her blog at http://judithcurry.com/.
While you are there, read the contributions of others who have contributed to the BEST (such as Zeke Hausfather) who provide rather detailed explanations of how homogenization works and why it is necessary. You can examine the Best and the 2013 study and and see if you can find any further material that can be used to undermine the credibility of BEST and Judith Curry
I would like to elaborate with regard your reference about my belief in the validity of the BoM data . There is an incredible wealth of information on the BoM site including peer reviews etc. It is all there if you want to look. Start at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/ and drill down through the tabs. It can be a struggle for the layman and a self confessed dilettante like myself has insufficient time or expertise to examine it in detail but some of it is quite accessible to those who lack scientific skills. The FAQ is a good place to start. You have got it all there, details of how and why they homogenize the data. Why records prior to 1910 are unreliable etc. etc.
But my naïve belief is also based on a Bayesian approach .What is the likelihood of a grand conspiracy versus the occasional stuff up?
For those who believe in conspiracies need to address the following. What are the incentives for manipulating the data.? Does the latest enterprise agreement ,or other arrangements , guarantee pay rises or promotions based on how many tenths of a degree for manipulating the temperature trends upwards. Such performance based pay is normally the domain of executives of the top end of town. Does the same scenario apply for the collators of temperate data worldwide. If so, where are the whistle blowers from within? The massive scale of such a cover up would blow Climate Gate or even Watergate out of the water.
Getting back to stuff ups. The data is never flawless so there are always opportunities for those who have a passion for obfuscation for their own ends.
There will always be mistakes like maxima and minima being inverted and there are sites that could sustain an argument that the homogenization was not appropriate for these particular cases. This is the nature of the beast.
In the end due to the imperfections , how much does this change the overall result? if the half dozen or dozen (seem to be a moveable feast ) of dubious sites that Jennifer is so exercised by, are removed, how much does this change the trends? How much does it matter in the end?
If there is any honesty in all of this then it is bleedingly obvious area that should be examined by someone with the requisite skills of a Ken Stewart.Maybe it has already been done , but if not, Ken you should keep the bastards honest.
So a true believer wanders in and declares skeptics delusional, just in time to be able to contrast his definition of “delusion” with Bill Gates v X.0 wherein the young lad who took the world by storm via the capitalism system is ready to jettison it in the name of climate orthodoxy.
And dear Jesus, this troll can say less in more words than just about anyone not holding an elected office.
Irony, thy name (at least at Jennifer’s) is Mike R.
Ah, miker’s back.
“For those who believe in conspiracies need to address the following. What are the incentives for manipulating the data.?”
The same old same old: belief, power and money.
As for BoM, all of the above. In addition I don’t think they are as smart as they like to think they are, nor do they put the yards in. Intelligent amateurs are visiting old libraries, museums, Yearbooks and newspaper sites to get hold of information about past climate data which the BoM either pretends it doesn’t have and won’t release or can’t be bothered finding.
And these amateurs are insightful; consider what one reseacher discovered about one site:
““It’s always warmer on Sundays (and cooler Monday mornings)”.
1.The case of a single missing day each week.
A while ago I tried to quantify the effect of having no temperature records for certain days of the week. The most common case is for Sunday to have no maximum/minimum readings and Monday to be a composite record of the previous 48 hours. In brief I took a complete year’s data, in this case Deniliquin maximum daily temperature data for 1984, and modeled the effect of missing a set day each week and substituting the following day’s data with the maximum of the preceding 48 hours. I did this in turn for each day of the week.
My results for the average yearly maximum calculated under the various scenarios were as follows:
• Average maximum 1984 with 366 days observations. 22.54OC
• Average with no Sunday and Monday being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.68OC
• Average with no Monday and Tuesday being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.84OC
• Average with no Tuesday and Wednesday being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.81OC
• Average with no Wednesday and Thursday being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.81OC
• Average with no Thursday and Friday being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.79OC
• Average with no Friday and Saturday being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.65OC
• Average with no Saturday and Sunday being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.66OC
• Average with one day missing and next day being maximum of previous 48 hours = 22.75OC
On the surface you would expect that such an arrangement would bias the average maximum result upwards and the average minimum down.
My simulation showed that this is not universally the case. I observed two effects:
1.The first effect was indeed a positive bias as described above. My simulation showed this to average + 0.21OC.
2.The second effect is a statistical error introduced because we have gone from measuring the population to measuring only a sample of that population. Again my simulation showed this to average +/- 0.10OC.
So altogether, taking data from Deniliquin for 1984 the effect of having 6 day a week recording changed the yearly maximum temperature estimates by + 0.21OC +/- 0.10OC.
Interestingly over shorter periods like a single month this second effect swamped the first and monthly averages varied by +/- 0.50OC. This was due to the cyclical nature of the weather at Deniliquin. This was the case particularly in the summer where a weekly cycle often establishes itself. An example might be a succession of hot weekends and cool changes during the week. In this case the missing Sundays will all be warm and the net result of omitting these will be to give a spurious cooling. When looking at the monthly data the effect of the statistical error due to missing days often overwhelmed the errors caused by incorrect observations.” (Phill)
One site, one missing day. Now magnify that over all the BoM sites which all have issues as David Stockwell has found:
https://landshape.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/panel-tests-of-the-acorn-sat-temperature-network-first-results/
Come on MK tell us how to fix your CAGW problem? And tell us how long it will take before we see a change in temp, co2 levels etc ?
Great to see an alternative Paris climate conference asking the hard questions of the UN Sec Gen, AGAIN.
The Paris Climate Challenge
In 2009 we laid down the Copenhagen Climate Challenge, when we asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to answer 10 questions about climate. We’re back to ask the same and more questions, and challenge the climate ‘consensus’ in Paris at COP 21 with alternative climate hypotheses. If you have something to say in Paris, we still have places for a few more speakers. Take some time to navigate our pages, you can leave a comment if you’d like to say something in response to the articles backing up our 10 questions to Ban Ki-Moon below.
His Excellency Ban-Ki Moon,
Secretary-General, United Nations,
New York, NY.
United States of America
8 December 2009.
Dear Secretary-General,
Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ – the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.
Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.
We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate.Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
1.Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
2.Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3.Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4.Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5.The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6.Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7.Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8.Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9.Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10.Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.
It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do.
Signed by:
Science and Technology Experts Well Qualified in Climate Science
Science and Technology Experts in Other Related Disciplines
I wonder how miker reconciles that rapid 120 metre SLR at the start of the Holocene which was all down to natural climate variability with our 0.8c of warming since the little ice age almost 200 years ago?
I wouldn’t’ve thought that left mushroom for the ACO2 GHG effect.
Particularly when you allow for a little UHIE as well.
So wadda ya reckon miker?
What’s your ECS best estimate?
And I didn’t say BEST estimate.
I don’t think anyone who has been following the comments sections here would think such grievous slight by hunter would be allowed to pass.
After all the almost endless discussion and wide ranging discussions about BEST data set, reliability of BoM data, the use and abuse of statistics etc. Hunter joins the fray with a pithy contribution. This is the best he can do. At least he didn’t expend any intellectual energy his zero content submission but he may have been formulating his comment for days.. His ratio of information per word ,zero leaves me for dead in the pollie speak stakes. A bit sad really.
Despite this I do take his insult regarding verbosity seriously. Clearly the material I present taxes him too much and I will follow his advice and try and reduce my comments to mono-syllables or perhaps present my contribution in the form of an interpretive dance.
Pertinent to his accusation of being a troll I would like to say, to the best of my knowledge I do not even have even a skerrick of Norse blood flowing through my veins. I do have a touch of Irish, so maybe the accusation of being a mischievous leprechaun may instead be justified.
Flailing at a leprechaun with a weapon is particularly dangerous and can often result in self disembowelment, so be careful.
I also see he Hunter has a bee in his bonnet regarding Bill Gates. All to their own. But maybe he has been reading and taking much too seriously the following highly amusing piece of nonsense-
http://dailysignal.com/2009/04/29/bill-gates-windmills-and-bono-the-leprechaun/
Hopefully Jenny will soon invoke the mercy rule on behalf of her disciples, lest the their contributions become more even more embarrassing and mine are at grave risk of being just as silly
.In my case it could be an internet virally transmitted case. Over the past week or so (my time flies when you are having fun) I have been exposed to so much nonsense that I may have finally succumbed.
Maybe Jenny can provide a warning at the start of her blog.
‘ WARNING- prolonged exposure to the following material may result in mental impairment . For further advice please consult an appropriate medical professional (or someone with even minimalist scientific training)’.
Finally with respect to irony, I think cohenite is your man. Bad pun intended.
Onto something slightly more serious , cohenite and Nev
Yeah MK more blah , blah, blah and still can’t answer my question. But perhaps this NASA video will help? Shows the planet’s co2 levels over a full year. Now tell me why we should be wasting billions $ on this stupid nonsense?
Spangled drongo
The Gish Gallop is gathering pace again. I remember the sage advice that my Pappy once told me . Don’t invade Russia in the winter and don’t try to open too many fronts at once.
Also unlike yourself I do not claim expertise and the decades of study in matters Holocene or pre-Holocene.
As I explained to cohenite on several occasions, the chopping and changing does make your head spin. This is the standard method to divert attention from past failures.
As the impressive sequence of failures grows by the day , I should try and correlate it to the UAH or CO2 data.
Nev,
I am still puzzle by this MK fellow. Who is he?
Sorry last post should have read “puzzled”.
Nev,this alternative Climate change conference in Paris is intriguing. Maybe the Proceedings can be published in Anthony Watts esteemed publication. For a list of the extensive material already published see http://oasjournal.org/ .
The material should be peer reviewed. I understand the climate change denial community’s view is the term ‘peer reviewed’ means reviewed by Lord Monckton.
I have singed up to be a speaker at info@pcc15.org. I think I might need some travel expense money. Perhaps I should approach the Koch brothers as they provided the necessary funds to underwrite the creation of the BEST data set.
What do you guys think?
By the way , was there an alternative conference in Copenhagen and if so do you have a copy of the Proceedings? The only thing on at around that time was http://www.scidev.net/global/climate-change/news/bolivian-alternative-climate-conference-begins-1.html. but maybe I have missed it.
Cohenite
With regard to the exercise that you have cut and pasted from n yesterdays post at 5:50 pm, can you provide a link to the data? If If I have understood correctly, the numbers are the maximum of the day and the previous day for different days of the week.
Analyzing the 1984 raw data for Deniliquin I get exactly the same average of 22.540 for the entire year. That’s a good start.
However the numbers quoted for the maximum of the day and its preceding day seemed to me way, way too small. I would have expected much larger differences as the average day to day variation average over the year is 2.5 degrees .
When I crunched the numbers I did get much large values. The highest being the maximum of Friday and Saturday (24.38) followed by the maximum of Sunday and Monday (24.33). The smallest value was for Tuesday and Wednesday (23.170) with the other pairs of days having values in between.
There is, I agree a surprisingly large difference between Saturday and Sunday readings and Tuesday Wednesday but as you say, maybe it is the 7 day cycle. I had a look at the data using an FFT and it verifies that there is a strong 7 day cycle for January to March and bit weaker 8 day cycle from October to December. There was no obvious periodicity from April to September .
My conclusion is that there is little evidence for the thesis that the temperatures have been adjusted according to the Sunday , Monday rule . If this was indeed the case then the person or people taking the measurements had the entire weekends off from January to March and then from October to December. Could be. Maybe he or she was off surfing the big waves at Deniliquin or fishing on the Murray.
The other alternative is the well known 7 day cycle of South East Australia. As a kid I remember there was a rule of thumb in Melbourne. We would get Adelaide’s weather a day later and it would always rain on the weekends, especially in the warmer parts of the year.
If you would like me to get in touch with the author of the material you have cut and pasted from ,If he is interested then I will post a link to a Google drive folder tor my calculations and the relevant FFT spectral data.
I know you guys may be wary but I really do prefer cooperation with those who make some kind of effort, rather than confrontation with some of the more mindless contributors to this site, which is getting tiring.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” – Sir Walter Scott.
The following has some relevance to Deniliquin. Avert your gaze if you cannot deal with having your belief system challenged.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/station-adjustment-summary-Deniliquin.pdf
and Jennifer’s all time favourite,
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/rutherglen/rutherglen-station.shtml .
If miker thinks comparing 10c of natural warming over 50 years at a time of almost no population with 0.8c of natural warming over almost 200 years at a time of billions of people is gish gallop [ie bullshit ] it speaks plainly of his completely unaware, religious attitude [ie denial].
“I do not claim expertise and the decades of study in matters Holocene or pre-Holocene.”
Miker, no decades of study needed, Just google Younger Dryas rapid warming and you’ll improve your education no end.
Miker has sent us off to the BOM website. It’s been a few years since I visited there, but I’m sure back then, there were speels about “greenhouse gases” and “climate change” etc. I’ve looked all around the place but it’s not mentioned anymore as far as I can ascertain. This is a great improvement…looks like they’ve decided to tone down, or even get rid of the govt. AGW propaganda.
They’ve also obviously gone to considerable trouble trying to cover their asses with the Rutherglen site , Jennifer. good work.
But we remain with idiots (and extremely intelligent, maths capable idiots) like Miker here, who still believe in AGW. Miker has this “belief system” called the “cause”.
The “cause” gives him comfort. I hope, for his sake, that he hasn’t spent his, nearly 40 yrs, doing stats. analysis to further the “cause”….going to get a rude shock to find out it’s all invalid.
miker, I have asked the author of the exercise about the ‘weekend’ effect to pop in and continue the conversation.
In the meantime Ken has posted another analysis about the BoM’s alarming temperature adjustment procedure:
https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/case-studies-in-worlds-best-practice-2-kerang/
A sample:
“Thus we see at Kerang further misinformation and lack of transparency through failure to supply digitised raw data to allow replication; incompetence through not using basic checks for data integrity, resulting in publication of the “world’s best practice” temperature dataset with minimum temperatures higher than maximum; use of UHI contaminated sites when making adjustments; use of distant neighbours from different climate regimes; over-zealous adjustments resulting in worse comparison with neighbours than before; and undocumented adjustments.”
David Evans has found that climate sensitivity is very low indeed. Could be about 0.25 C for co2 doubling or 560 ppm. Looks like Lindzen has been correct in his assessment years ago.
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/11/new-science-18-finally-climate-sensitivity-calculated-at-just-one-tenth-of-official-estimates/
Cohenite,
Good idea about getting comments from the author. Possibly I have misunderstood his methodolgy so it might be good to try and understand how he obtained his numbers. As they stand they do not make much sense.
Paul Homewood takes another look at the idea that humans should try and limit warming to no more than 2 C by 2100. Of course this is the agenda set for Paris this month. He makes some good points by looking at the CET record. But Id like to know how this could be achieved? Just asking?
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/2-degrees-of-madness/#comments
Jennifer and her disciples need to have some patience. From the FAQ at http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/#tabs=FAQs (see FAQ no. 7).
“The Bureau is also publishing fact sheets on all individual ACORN-SAT locations, including adjustment history. It anticipates these will be available by the end of 2017. Six sites have been published to date including:
Amberley
Deniliquin
Mackay
Orbost
Rutherglen
Thargominda ”
Unfortunately the tangled web is catching up, although very slowly. Perhaps it is the incessant funding cuts to the bureau.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/weather-warning-funds-dry-up-plaguing-bureau-of-meteorology-with-rostering-and-resourcing-issues/story-e6freoof-1226573945924 nad http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/summer-of-discontent-at-bom-20150201-133m6r.html .
But at least ti gives Ken Stewart time to prepare..
Deniliquin and Rutherglen dealt with here:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2015/08/bureau-just-makes-stuff-up-deniliquin-remodelled-then-rutherglen-homogenized/
And if the BoM had done the right job in the first place they wouldn’t need to do this catch-up.
By the UAH6 now shows the Australian trend as 0.15:
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt
Cohenite,
Yes the September 2015 figure of 0.15 degrees per decade is for v5.6. I used it in my post of October 25th (11:46 am.) Prior to September it was 0.16 .This In comparison with v6.3 in which was and still is 0.24 degrees per decade .The divergence between v6.3 and v5.6 is getting worse not better! What’s a piffling 60% difference between versions?
Let us see what October brings? I think you will need a miracle or version 7 of the UAH data set.
Cohenite, thanks for the excellent reminder of the extreme homogenization that UAH satellite data is subjected to by Spencer et. al.
By the way have you heard from Spencer regarding all of this. I am still waiting for a response to my comment on his site but it has only been 3 days since I posted so I may need to be patient.
Apropos of the above. I seem to recall Jennifer in her comment on October 23rd that she didn’t realize the extent of homogenization, but now she was she is having second thoughts.
To quote Jennifer from above “I have avoided using this data because I know it has been homogenized, but I was unsure of the extent. I did go there on Monday night, given the request of the committee chair. Furthermore, I did download the chart from Ken’s blog because I knew there had been a lot of interest in the same”.
Probably time to remove the graphics on this web page lest her credibility is further damaged.
It might be good idea to let the members of the committee to know also, as they may have been misled to the significance of the graph.
Cohers that data you linked to is UAH V 5.6 not V 6.
I didn’t look hard enough at the BOM website….and stand corrected…
http://www.cawcr.gov.au/projects/climatechange/challengesGreenhouse.shtml
Yeah Nev, I slipped up. My bad.
Cohenite
Has the amateur that was the author of the piece (November 4 at 5:50pm) on Deniliquin surfaced?
I just a did a check on Kerang in 1984 and a similar pattern is observed. Maybe the person who read the min/max at Kerang was off fishing with his colleague at Deniliquin on Sunday.It was even the same for the Melbourne mob. It is a long drive for a day of fishing.
Also checked 1988 for Deniliquin and it seems that Wednesdays were their days off, and the same for Kerang and Melbourne. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?
Mack,
Mack’s statement “I hope, for his sake, that he hasn’t spent his, nearly 40 yrs, doing stats. analysis to further the “cause”” was a bit off beam. I have only started to look at the issues around climate change since the beginning of 2014. I left some comments on Ken Stewart”s site then and we had a few terse exchanges at a couple of times over the past year or so culminating in my ban for dissent. If I have been doing this for 40 years, why do you think this is the first time I have commented on one Jennifer’s blogs?
So my devotion to the ’cause’ has only been as long as I have looked at the data and made my judgements. I gather you have been hard at it for donkeys- http://jennifermarohasy.com/2009/08/join-the-climate-sceptics-a-note-from-michael-rowley/.
Also I was offended by his description last night, in reference to myself, that ‘idiots (and extremely intelligent, maths capable idiots) like Miker ….’ .
My only consolation was that this description beats the crap out of ‘idiots (and extremely stupid, maths incapable idiots)’.
Miker, As someone who supposedly uses maths and not emotion, politics or religion to come to your conclusions on GW, why can’t you accept the simple mathematics that if we have warmed by only 0.8c since the end of the coldest period in civilisation [nearly two centuries ago] which is less than half the rate of average natural climate variability per century, which is 0.98c: http://multi-science.atypon.com/doi/abs/10.1260/0958-305X.26.3.417 the effect of ACO2 emissions must be so small as to be a non-problem and possibly even non-existent?
Please show me where those maths are incorrect.
Spangled Drongo
It is very hard to comment on this paper as there is only an abstract available. It costs $35 –US to view the paper. It mentions detrending the data and findiing the standard deviation around the trend. My intr
As the putative reason for the trend line for the past 50 to 100 years is CO2 then one would think that the comparison the range of the trend line for each prior centuries is just as important as, or more important than, the variation around the trendline. For instance the range of the trendover the last century is abou 0,7 degrees the srandard deviation would be the measure of the variation dut to ElNino and LaNina
Sorry. Damn phone. It is too easy to hit the Submit Comment button accidentally before checking for typos etc.. i will comment further about this when I am next at my computer,
spangled drongo,
The oldest tactic in dealing with trolls is likely still the best.
Spangled Drongo i have made the neccessary corrections to last nights comment.. It now reads as follows.
It is very hard to comment on this paper as there is only an abstract freely available. It costs $35 US to view the entire paper. It mentions detrending the data in the abstract and finding the standard deviation around the trend.
My best guess as to the authors intentions and methodologies is therefore limited and my comments need to be seen in that light.
As the putative reason for the trend line for the past 50 to 100 years is the influence of CO2, then one would think that the comparison the range of the trend line for each of the prior centuries is more important than, the variation around the trendline. For instance, the range of the trend over the last century is about 0.7 degrees, the standard deviation would be the measure of the variations due to ElNino and LaNina, volcanic eruptions etc. So I am not sure how they would claim this would be directly relevant to CO2.
Also it would be relevant to know how they removed the trend. Did the they do a linear regression or use some other function to fit the data? The standard deviation would be sensitive to the fitting parameters.
Spangled drongo, as you have read the particular paper in its entirety, otherwise why would you have introduced it in the first place, then could you provide some answers to my questions regarding the paper?
You know Hunter I sometimes wonder what motivates these people. If you look at some of their most popular icons of their so called CAGW you just have to shake your head and wonder. But then a clueless fool like Erhlich still maintains a following after nearly half a century of provable BS.
You can look at the latest SL studies, deaths from extreme events, polar bear numbers, average deviation of temps for the last 80 centuries of about 1 C, recovery from the LIA, record Antarctic ice levels, some recent recovery in Arctic and Greenland ice, PDO, AMO, NAO, ENSO inputs into the mix over the last 100 years etc. And the HAD 4 data shows about 0.8 C increase since 1850, plus the Concordia UNI study finding of about 0.7 C since the start of the Ind rev. OZ is responsible for about 0.006 C of the warming since 1800 according to that study, but what about the natural recovery from the LIA, UHIE, ocean oscillations, data tampering etc.
Of course nobody wants to yap about the fraud of fixing their so called problem. The RS and NAS study even tells us that we can’t expect a change in temp or co2 levels for thousands of years ( if we stopped all co2 emissions today) and even a nong like Flannery conceded this point to Bolt about 4 years ago.
Now two new studies confirm that Antarctica is indeed gaining ice, yet polar melting was supposed to be the sure sign of their CAGW. BTW the Bolt report should be good today with the Bolter using his editorial to deal with their silly and delusional scares.
Hunter,
Thank you for your mere morsel, but currently my hunger is quite sated so I don’t require any further feeding. I can live indefinitely off the fat of the land, with the 200 comments already available.
Additionaly leprechauns only require a daily dram of Irish whiskey.
Miker,
No, I have not read the paper other than the abstract but I am aware that if you look at the vast array of available proxy data on Holocene temperatures you cannot fail to be convinced that climate not only has changed a lot in the past, but always will.
Do you not agree with that observation?
And that 0.98c centennial average is pretty close to the mark for the holocene.
But if you think 0.98c is a wild exaggeration of centennial Nat Var, what would you think would be a reasonable ball-park figure?
Please give us your considered estimate. With a very narrow range of between 0c and 1.0c it shouldn’t be too hard.
These words by British MP as also shown on Jo Nova’s site this am put it very simply, rationally and mathematically:
Interesting study from the GBR that seems to show that SStemps over 5,000 years ago were higher than today.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V1/N6/C4.php
And this matches up with Antarctic ice core records and the Calvo et al Alkenone SST studies off the coast of south OZ. In fact the temp has dropped about 2 C over the last 6,500 years. As the temp dropped rainfall has reduced as well.
http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/dedeckker_p/pubs/12.pdf
East Siberian temps during the last Eemian IG were up to 10 C warmer than today and co2 levels were about 290 ppm at that time. Rather stuffs up their silly BS story. But these donkeys still want to waste billions $ on this non problem.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V11/N19/C3.php
WUWT has another look at climate models and mathematician Mike Jonas concludes that they are hopeless and can never be used to predict future climate. So why would you waste 100s of billions $ every year on these failures?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/08/inside-the-climate-computer-models/
But Richard S Courtenay has another look at clouds using the latest satellite studies over the last few decades. Here is his conclusions.
”
richardscourtney says:
November 8, 2015 at 10:56 am
TonyL:
You say
From this point of view, cloud cover would be a major climate driver, and CO2 wold be a bit player at the bottom of the list. {I know, this begs the question, what drives cloud cover, but I doubt it is CO2, and you must start somewhere}
Yes, cloud cover is a “major climate driver” but nobody really knows what changes cloud cover.
Good records of cloud cover are very short because cloud cover is measured by satellites that were not launched until the mid-1980s. But it appears that cloudiness decreased markedly between the mid-1980s and late-1990s
(ref. Pinker, R. T., B. Zhang, and E. G. Dutton (2005), Do satellites detect trends in surface solar radiation?, Science, 308(5723), 850– 854.)
Over that period, the Earth’s reflectivity decreased to the extent that if there were a constant solar irradiance then the reduced cloudiness provided an extra surface warming of 5 to 10 Watts/sq metre. This is a lot of warming. It is between two and four times the entire warming estimated to have been caused by the build-up of human-caused greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. (The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that since the industrial revolution, the build-up of human-caused greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has had a warming effect of only 2.4 Watts/sq metre).
So, changes to cloud cover alone could be responsible for all the temperature rise from the Little Ice Age but nobody knows the factors that control changes to cloud cover.”
Richard
Was NASA lying about the impact from co2 in 1971 or are they lying now?
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/11/08/nasa-has-known-since-1971-that-co2-is-not-dangerous-yet-lied-to-the-public-continuously/
Contrary to all the lies and deception from many scientists , many pollies and the media the NH ice cover and snowfall is increasing. The recent Greenland and Arctic ice extent record clearly shows this is the case. And two new Antarctic studies show a similar result. So where is that impact from increased co2 emissions?
http://notrickszone.com/2015/11/08/northern-hemisphere-fall-icesnow-cover-explodes-9-million-sq-km-more-than-in-hansens-1988/#sthash.tNcT0CDY.dpbs
Here’s a recent post from Judith Curry about the pause. You’ll note the IPCC AR 5 trend from 1951 to 2012 is 2.4 times greater than the trend from 1998 to 2012. That’s 0.12 C per decade compared to 0.05 C per decade. I would guess that co2 in 1950 was about 310ppm and in 1990 it was about 350 ppm. Food for thought anyone? This is how she starts the first couple of paragraphs.
“Hiatus controversy: show me the data
Posted on November 6, 2015 | 533 Comments
by Judith Curry
The scientific and political controversies surrounding the hiatus have continued to heat up. Lets take a look at ALL the global temperature data sets.
So, what is the ‘hiatus’ or ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’, and why does it matter? Here are three criteria for the hiatus to matter:
1) the rate of warming over a particular period of at least 10 years is not statistically significant from zero (with the context of a nominal 0.1C uncertainty). Note the IPCC AR5 cited: “As one example, the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to +0.15] °C per decade is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade)”
Neville,
Fanatic climate believers don’t care if their facts are wrong.
They will dismiss ether the story due to the source or simply lie about it.
these fools are reshaping the world economy to enrich themselves by producing little or even nothing of actual value.
It is like we are witnessing the start of a dark age created by those we have been told over and over are the best and brightest.
Hunter if some of these drongoes are the best and brightest then GAWWWRRD help us. The Bolter has a post about one of these fools, namely Robyn Williams their ABC science guru. He’s the one that told Bolt that 100 metres SLR was possible by 2100.
This taxpayer funded nong has just informed us that he refuses to interview sceptics because they won’t change their arguments about his CAGW. They evidently will not change their views about SLR, polar bears, extreme events, Greenland/ Arctic/ Antarctic ice build up, no warming for over 18 years, recovery from the LIA, droughts, floods, snowfalls etc. So silly sceptics just accept the observable science and not the endless nonsense emanating from useless models, sarc.
But their taxpayer ABC will continue to allow any delusional left wing pollie or misinformed dummy to parrot any nonsense that suits them. Yet their charter states that this mob are supposed to be unbiased in their reporting. What a 1 billion $ per year joke on conservatives and libertarians. Here’s the link to the Bolter’s post.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/no_wonder_robyn_williams_has_given_up_interviewing_sceptics_like_me/
Spangled Drongo,
I totally agree with your comment of November 8 “climate not only has changed a lot in the past, but always will” .Yes I doubt if you will get the argument from anyone sensible, that the climate has been static over the Holocene. There appear to have been rapid decreases and increases in temperatures, some possibly accompanied by mass extinctions and some not.
There is a diverse range of explanations for some of these events that invoke impact events, volcanic events or positive feedback events such as Methane release by melting permafrost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_release). Others, that can rapidly cool or warm regions or impact globally, have been attributed to disturbances in sea currents that transport heat around the globe(http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/_ and for a historical perspective https://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm ) while others are thought to be a result of disturbances of the jet stream.
Some of these disturbances to the sea current and jet streams which may be at play at the moment ( http://science.time.com/2014/01/06/climate-change-driving-cold-weather/ ) could be due to not only global increases in temperature but also to the temperature differentials between different regions such as between the poles (for instance the positive feedback at the north pole where the reduction in sea ice decreases the albedo and causes rapid (runaway?) warming, while the opposite may be occurring in the Antarctic.) There is also the difference in temperatures between each pole and the tropics.
Changing temperature differentials are likely be contributory drivers of the disruption of the climate. Other doomsday scenarios which have created alarm, as we all know, are rapid sea level rises if the Greenland ice sheet or parts of the Western Antarctic end up in the drink. Even in the slowly warming scenarios, sea level rises due mainly to thermal expansion and glacial melts are currently an issue e(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/10/27/historic-high-tides-from-supermoon-and-sea-level-rise-flood-the-southeast-coast/ ).
These scenarios have been evolving as the earth has warmed (even by only 0.8 C) but even if the temperatures increase at the same rate, it then becomes possibly, not if, but when and in whose lifetime the chickens come home to roost.. It appears some people are happy to leave a legacy for their children and grandchildren even if it is just cleaning up the mess they have left behind.
The current warming could be totally benign and naturally occurring or maybe partially or primarily due to human influence. Irrespective of this there is a danger that even a modest temperature increase, whatever the cause, may have incredibly nasty consequences. Personally I tend to take the matches away from my grandchildren but you may think this is alarmist nonsense.
Spangled Drongo, I have no idea whether 0.98C is correct or not and as my expertise, unlike yours, is extremely limited in these matters. Also I have had insufficient time to review the entire literature on the matter. You may have the money to access Nature, Science, PNAS etc. online but unfortunately they are out of my reach.
But as you asked for my opinion, my money is on 0.9799C.
GEZZZZ MK you’ve actually agreed with me that 1 C per century deviation is about right. But why won’t you tell us how to mitigate your imagined CAGW? Lomborg and his team tells us it won’t make a scrap of difference anyway.
But to even achieve his SFA result everybody would have to do everything they promise to do. Fat chance. And how many trillions $ will that bugger all result cost by 2030??
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/no_point_to_paris/
“…..the chickens come home to roost ”
Yeah Miker, we’ve been waiting for these chickens to come home to roost for over 100yrs now. There’s a lot of older people wondering if we had any chickens in the first place….middle aged people who know of chicken littles…and younger folk who’ve only seen fried chicken, but are clued up enough to know this was not caused by global warming.
Neville,
Yes it looks like it could be just a tad over 1 degree. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34763036 .
By the way you still haven’t clarified who this mysterious MK is. Did you experience some traumatic experience at the hands of this person?
As for the mechanisms for alleviating climate change, I am incapable of proviiding an answer or answers.
This is more in the realm of politics and economics and I am just a humble scientist. I will either leave it to ithe wisdom of ntellectual luminaries like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones or see what comes of the Paris meeting.
However by leaving things as they are, the addition of more CO2 to the atmosphere is unlikely to increase the odds of an imminent ice age. This is just my opinion, for what it is worth, and feel free to argue this point.
MK the Royal Society and NAS report tells us there is SFA we can do about reducing temps or co2 levels. In fact their ques 20 tells us that we could stop all human co2 emissions today and we wouldn’t see a change in temp or co2 levels for thousands of years. This rather tops Lomborg’s study by a wide margin. So how many thousands of trillions $ do you want to waste for your zero return?
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-evidence-causes/question-20/
Mack,
Patience, patience. Time will tell. 100 years is a mere blink of the eye . We may be in the process of frying tbe chicken at the moment and just getting a foretaste of things to come. Never judge the entirety of a meal by its entree.
Actually the fable of the grasshopper and the ant is probably more pertinent than any chicken stories but I beiieve in the end, Chicken Little and his colleagues gets eaten by the cunning fox. If they had only listened.
Nev,
Sorry to use the blasphemous expression O.M.G but it really the only appropriate response to a blatant straw man argument. No one , I mean no one, i mean no one, is thinking that we could get CO2 levels back to the preindustrial era by reducing emmisions now. The Royal Society article you linked to just confirms this.
Clearly it also demonstrates the stupidity of pouring more CO2 into the atmosphere because the effects are almost permanent.
It is just a stupid as a guy, with a face mask breathing pure oxygen , ignoring the doctor’s advice to cease smoking because the doctor can’t promise that by doing so, he will have the lung function he had prior to taking up the habit.
Yes the damage is done but this doesn’t justify making the situation much worse.
MK this round in circles argument is a bit like pulling teeth. After weeks of trying you now admit the rate of modern warming is below the average of the last 80 centuries, yet you still think this non problem can be fixed by reducing co2 emissions? But you also understand this won’t change co2 levels or temp for thousands of years and will waste endless trillions $ for nothing. Now if that isn’t crazy thinking I don’t know what is.
So pick one of their icons and tell us why you think there is a problem with SLR or extreme events, or droughts, or polar bear numbers or no hot spot or polar ice or temp at the poles during the LIA or etc? What’s your problem with our slight and way below average modern warming?
“It is just as stupid as a guy, with a face mask breathing pure oxygen, ignoring the doctor’s advice to cease smoking….etc..”
Yes Miker, with some people stupidity is just permanent. There’s a whole swag of pemanently stupid people who adhere to some quack “greenhouse” theory which says…and they actually produce figures to support this…that the atmosphere prevents the oceans from freezing up.
It seems you’re right in there with that permanently stupid bunch, Miker.
Mack the smoking analogy was clearly lost on you.
Am I also right to infer by your remark regarding oceans freezing that you think atmosphere plays no part in regulating the temperature of earth? What do you think the temperature at the surface of the moon is? Have a guess. The answer might surprise you. For the answer see http://www.moonzoo.org/FAQ_MoonFacts .
Mack, if ignorance is bliss then you are clearly the happiest man alive.
Nev,
I am at a loss as to why you think the argument is circular . The argument is linear. You add CO2 to the current level and you get more C02, disregarding the slow loss of CO2 as per the Royal Society article that you kindly linked to . The increase currently is actually exponential with a doubling time of about 230 years. So the only circularity in the argument is a result of your confusion.
I gather you have taken my comment on 0.9779 degrees seriously!). Prior to my comment about the 1 degree increase since preindustrial times, I have not made any comments regarding the average temperature increase in prior centuries. Maybe you are confusing me with mysterious MK. Could this guy be the Scarlet Pimpernel?
I am not sure where you obtained the information regarding the average warming over the past 80 centuries from . Who knows, maybe you just make this stuff up as you go along.
Please read and do your best to understand the following – http://m.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php .
From the above article , “As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years”.
So the average warming over the past 50 centuries is between 0.08 to 0.14 degrees per century compared to 0.77 degrees per century for the past 100 years (using the Hadcrut 4 data from October 1915 until September 2015 )..
The last century has warmed at a rate of 5.5 to 10 times more rapidly than the average over the past 50 centuries.
Over the 50 years the rate of warming has been 1.55 degrees per century (using the Hadcrut 4 data from October 1965 until September 2015 ) so for this period the ratios are 11 to 20 times the average over the previous 50 centuries.
MK I think you are the one who is confused. The Concordia uni study found just 0.7 C of warming since 1800 and if you look at the HAD 4 data from WFTs since 1850 there is 0.8 C of warming.
And the Lloyd study found an average deviation per century of 1 C for the last 8,000 years.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/276276180_An_Estimate_of_The_Centennial_Variability_of_Global_Temperatures
Boy, you’ve really drunk the cool-aid MikeR. You seem to be under some illusion there maybe some thermal effect from the atmosphere. Sorry mate, the atmosphere,(along with the oceans) has no thermal effect ,other than leveling,or ironing out of the heat which is entirely generated by the sun’s energy stricking the earth’s “surface”. No addition or subtraction of temperature. Easy enough for you to understand?
Then there’s some more ignorant,deceptive,illconceived concocted crap parroted by our AGW brainwashed mug MikeR here. He thinks, (actually he’s incapable of thinking) that the Moon’s low temperature is because there’s no atmosphere on the Moon.
Nah Mikky boy, The Moon’s measured mean surface temperature is only -77degree C . This extremely low average of temps. is a result of having a large planet called the Earth, interposed between it and the Sun a lot of the time. Also rotational characteristics of the Moon give it regions where the sun hardly gets to it at all.
It’s called lack of sun on the Moon’s surface. Nothing to do with any lack of an atmosphere, causing some supposed lack of “greenhouse effect” implanted in your brain, MikeR……it’s the Sun, stupid.
The trouble with “intellects” like you MikeR, is that you’ve got so much text-book “knowledge” packed into your head, you’ve become incapable of rational
thought.
I’ll bet your nearly 40yrs doing data analysis was on behalf of of some govt. dept.
Mack,
I thought your knowledge of climate change was limited but your knowledge of astronomy is even more limited.
I have been a passionate amateur astronomer for about 50 years. This an area of science where amateurs have made significant discoveries, many of them by Australians, such as Terry Lovejoy who has discovered 5 comets and the reverend Robert Evans who has discovered 42 nova and supernova and 1 comet. I have recently retired ‘Rosebud’ , my 3 inch refractor that I purchased 50 yeare ago with my hard earned money doing chores.
Despite being an amateur my knowledge of matters astronomical is vastly greater than your pre-Copernican understanding of tbese matters
Firstly the planet that blocks the sun’s rays from hitting the moon does so twice a year on average. This occurs for typically 3 or 4 hours. You might have heard of this phenomenum. It is called a lunar eclipse.
Not all lunar eclipse totally hlock the suns rays as about half are partial when not all of the moon surface experiences totality. There are also also penumbral eclipses where no part of the moon experiences totality but the rays of the sun are partly blocked at the. moons surface .
The total time the earth totally obscures the sun per year is at most 2 hours.
For the case of Mercury, unless there is an undiscovered planet in between the sun and Mercury, there is no possibilty of any blockage of the sun,. The night side is at -100 degrees. The daytime side has regions away from the poles that have temperatures as high as 420 degrees C.
Contrast this with Venus, more distant from the sun than Mercury, whose atmosphere is 96% CO2 where the average temperature is 462 degrees C.
Finally I recommend you visit a great site for amateur astronomers at http://www.iceinspace.com.au . They have forums where you could provide comments like the above. I dont know if they have a forum devoted to humour but you shoukd start one.
Mack,
By the way it has been 25 years in academia and the past 15 years in private industry.
What’s your employment record if you ever had one?
O dear, O dear, MikeR , You’ve really effed up big time on this occasion.
You said…..”Firstly the planet that blocks the sun’s rays from hitting the moon does so twice a year on average. This occurs for typically 3 or 4 hrs. You may have heard of this phenomenon. It’s called a lunar eclipse.”
… then you blather on further about eclipses.
Aaahahahahahaha…sorry mate….Eclipses are where the Moon interposes itself between us and the Sun. When the Earth interposes itself between Sun and Moon its called, phases of the Moon. Ever heard of that phenomenon.? It occurs much more commonly than eclipses…and there are even occasions where absolutely no sun at all strikes (spelling OK) the Moon’s surface.
You could be looking through the wrong end of your telescope MikeM…but I’ll just put it down to brain-fag on your part. No need for an apology.
Mack,
I made a slight faux pas. The temperature on the night side of Mercury is 100 degrees K or -173 degrees C. I am amazed Mack that not pick this up with his vast reservoir of knowledge in these matters.
In you last contribution, I think you are referring to solar eclipses. This should explain the difference between the two – http://www.ducksters.com/science/physics/lunar_and_solar_eclipses.php or alternatively https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UH_h99CI1Q .
The phases of the moon are explained at the appropriate level at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWeaQctUp1c .
Seriously after that contribution above I think I have had enough of Mack and I am sure the other readers of these comments are as well. I will let his contributions stand without comment as they do enough collateral damage to his colleagues via his friendly fire. My contributions to Mack’s process are superfluous.
Nev,the data presented by Philip J Lloyd that you linked to at 10:52 last night is ‘interesting’.
After a cursory reading of this paper I would like to make the following comments.
1. The major curiosity of this paper is that Dr Lloyd hasn’t used the trend data for each century which I suggest is more robust and relevant to the current data than calculations of the standard deviation.
The standard deviation around the trend is more indicative of short term, year to year noise, relatively short trends or oscillations such as ElNino/LaNina and multi-decadal trends such as PDO et. The relative contributions of these should have been measured using spectral analysis i.e. The square root of the power spectrum will tell you how much these terms of varying period contribute to the total standard deviation. If he major contributor is year to year variation then the standard deviation is probably just noise.
2. The data is for 4 locations at the south pole. To compare this data with more contemporary data sets such as Hadcrut that is derived from thousands of weather stations for is bizarre.
For example let us compare the data for one location at the moment , say Melbourne. For the past 100 years using the yearly BoM raw data the standard deviation is 0.625. After detrending using a linear fit the standard deviation drops to 0.535. Comparing this to Hadcrut 4 the equivalent standard deviation is 0.253 and the detrended value is 0.147. The local Melbourne figure is 2.5 times larger than for the global figure for the raw data while for the detrended data it is 3.6 times larger.
This all makes sense, as the averaging process of a dataset of a massive amount of data is going to produce a much lower standard deviation than for a single station. It is like Dr Lloyd has averaged the standard deviation results for Melbourne, Geelong, Bendigo and Sale to make claims about the entire globe.
If you are silly enough to do the exercise then the results Dr Lloyd produces should be divided by 3.6 but I wouldn’t recommend this. It could be any value from 1 to 1000. Take your pick.
3.The standard error quoted for each data set seem to be much too low. The standard error is S/root(n) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error . For the 40 decade data GISP-2, in his Table1 for the average standard deviation of 1.27 ,he has a value for the standard error of 0.02. The actual calculation should be 1.27/root(40) which is 0.2. Similar discrepancies are found for the other values of the standard error.
4. The ice core data is a collection of temperature proxies. It is extremely useful on its own but you would naturally expect the standard deviations for proxy data,due to the indirect nature of this data to be much larger than for in place measurements using thermometry.
In summary , if I ever had the misfortune to review a paper of this standard I would have filed it immediately in the ‘round file’ and used it as compost . This would be its major use.
Maybe the reviewers had a bad day or maybe this journal is one of those of last resort which just publishes any old junk. This is often where papers that have been rejected by reputable journals end up.
Neville, have you read the paper and does your analysis support my conclusions? If not could you please explain why.
For more details about the author of the paper referred to see- http://tinyurl.com/oqz7k2o .
Sorry Jennifer, Cohers, Spanglers, etc. I really goofed up there.
I did say I wasn’t going to comment on a contribution from Mack again but the contrition of Mack made me temporarily suspend my policy.
Mack.,I wouldn’t be apologizing to Jennifer, Nev, cohenite, spangas and the rest of the gang for your megagoofs. I would be highly pissed off, I dont know why they let you go over the top and walk progressively deeper and deeper into the minefield of no man’s land, in the first place. I would have expected them to have intervened and provided you with some sage advice and dragged you back to the safety of your foxhole.
All your so called mates went missing in action. Not exactly the Anzac spirit. The kindest interpretation on their inability to sensibly advise you is that they totally believed the stuff about the phases of the moon etc..or maybe they were simply unsure .A less kind interpretation is that they regarded you simply as cannon fodder.
Either of the above scenarios is pretty sad.
MK you’re wrong about the ice cores. Both Greenland and Antarctic ice cores were used, so both NH and SH are covered. And I still believe that the maths profs at Concordia are probably correct that OZ’s huge contribution is a whopping 0.006 C in the last 215 years. IOW, that’s SFA. And check out HAD 4 from 1850.
BTW Willis has updated his tropical thunderstorm evaporative cooling idea and provides the data to prove his case. Rather buggers up the prevailing narrative.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/11/tropical-evaporative-cooling/
And Dr David Evans is still edging towards his new accurate climate model.
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/11/new-science-19-the-invisible-nameless-model-that-controls-the-whole-field-of-climate-science/ Sorry but I’m off on a trip but will try and catch up later if I can.
Neville,
Thanks for the correction about the locatioons of the ice cores.I did say it was a cursory reading but It doesn’t make an iota of difference to how ridiculous this paper is. Comparing the data from four locations and extrapolating it to the world is still complete nonsense.
While checking the locations mentioned in Dr lloyd’s paper i was struck by the dissimilarity between the graph of the data for Vostok and the graph of the data for Dome C. The Vostok graph being much smoother and lacking the high frequencies of the Dome C graph. This further illustrates how dumb it was for the author not to use spectral data to provide information about the standard deviations at the same frequency.
Have a pleasant trip, Nev.
Nev, Thanks for leaving the links to the posts.
Both are hot off the press. Both claim they are reinventing climate science. They both believe they have the truth. One says it’s the sun the other says it is thunderstorms that are the dominant regulators of the climate. Can they be both right?
It is like a battle between the gods Sol and Thor. Sounds a lot like religious beliefs. We might have a schism like Protestantism and Catholicism or Shia and Sunnis. While despite being variations upon the same theme, they each claim they have ultimate truth and the others are infidels
I urge both to publish this material in a reputable journal authors (I note the commentators on WUWT are also urging this) and not a journal of last resort as most of these publications seem to end up in, if they ever see the light of day in print .
If either of their claims are correct then we might as well start from scratch. As they say extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence ( and needless to say extraordinarily strong evidence). My suggestion is Nature , followed By P.N.A.S or the proceedings of the Royal Society.
As I have said on numerous times I have no particular expertise in climate science but the demolition jobs of David Evans earlier works such as http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/david-evans-notch-filter-theory-of.html?m=1 and http://rankexploits.com/musings/2015/questions-to-david-evans-what-do-you-mean-about-partial-derivatives/ and http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/6/22/1308790/-JoNova-s-Big-News-skeptical-climate-model-is-one-giant-circle do not encourage one to expend the effort.
I think David Evans has spent too much time in the cocoon of his fellow travelers, such as the inmates of the Galileo Society, and has lost the plot.
Witness this extraordinary contribution of David Evans regarding banksters . If you have the stomach for it, the original 2009 version can be found at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/manufacturing_money_and_warming.pdf . There is however another version of this paper which has been sanitized and published in 2010 with the references to banksters and other conspiracy nonsense removed.
Andrew Bolt , bless his dear soul, has lambasted the bankster theory peddled by an inmate of the Galileo Society and given it a more appropriate label. See http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/happy_to_help_those_who_ask_but_not_people_who_peddle_this/ .
This Force X stuff of David Evans also sounds preposterous. However I think it might be up for a Hugo award. It could be a tight battle, as the script for the classic film ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ is also nominated.
Miker, it certainly was a cursory reading. SDs dovetail with mean reversions which are a long term data evaluation tool. It was entirely appropriate to do a centennial comparison using SDs in a detrended context.
Your comparison with Melbourne and extrapolating to the world is nonsense. The polar ice cores are the MAIN data from the past. They are the best historical global indicators we have.
In short, there is NOTHING abnormal about today’s climate. And for your further enlightenment about comparisons between the past and the present read McShane and Wyner:
https://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/aoas1001-014r2a0.pdf
MK perhaps you’d like us to use bristle cone pine proxies or other data that Mann etc have used upside down to get a fully guaranteed BS result. As Cohers said the ice cores are the most accurate records that we have over a very long period of time.
Both sides of the debate generally have accepted the ice core data and Mann has been roundly condemned for his HS fraud. Even Prof Muller has condemned Mann for his HS fraud, plus numerous other scientists from the warmist side of the ledger. Alkenone studies seem to agree with the ice cores over long periods of time and have generally won more approval.
And of course the silly Gergis, Karoly SH HS con only lasted one post at McIntyre’s climate audit blog after Jean S and Steve pulled it apart. Karoly emailed Steve to tell him that the study had been withdrawn. What a joke. But don’t forget that we are recovering from the coldest period for many thousands of years and therefore the slight recent warming is to be appreciated compared to the worst centuries of the LIA.
And deaths from extreme events have dropped 97% since the 1920s, the average lifespan has increased by at least 40% since 1900, nutrition and calorie intake has rapidly increased over the last 100 years and Ridley’s greening planet video is full of facts backed up by UN and WHO data.
Thanks Cohers, I’m feeling a little bit better now.