Hello,
Even though I reside in upstate New York, I follow (and appreciate) your website and emails, and I was wondering if the community has looked at the final report(s) that are currently being unveiled by NOAA’s Climate Change Science Program?
I am particularly interested in opinions on one of the most recent that attributes a significant portion of warming of North America to human causes. The subject of this particular report is reanalysis of historical data.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-3/final-report/default.htm
http://www.climatescience.gov/
Thanks,
Doug White
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I usually post these types of requests at ‘Community Home’. I am posting this note here, including to remind you that there is a Community Home.
Photograph of a seagull resting on a post in the Hudson River, New York, taken by Jennifer Marohasy in March 2008.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Ooooh!, more feathered food. Can Jabba have some?
Curiosity obviously did not have the desired impact on Jabba the Cat (sic) so I thought in a felix moment it would be safe for me to digest . The reanalysis for the USA makes for an interesting read – I will have to discover where the Australian one is at. Punch line was a trend last half century or so of 0.9 C (likely anthropogenic) but maybe there are bits of the reanalysis that others with an empty hypothesis can pounce on. The last recommendation in the exec summary was ironically ” Explore a range of methods to better quantify and communicate findings from attribution research.” So I suppose that is why it appears here trying to define the limit of a useful range of methods of communicating.
I got to page 7 of the first link you posted before the bs got too thick to cut with a knife. Here’s an example:
“1.2 ATTRIBUTION
The term attribute has as a common use definition “to assign to a cause or source” (Webster’s II Dictionary, 1988). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has specifically stated that attribution of causes of climate change is the process of establishing the most likely causes for the detected change with some level of confidence” (IPCC, 2007a). The term attribution in this Product is used in the same context as the IPCC definition. However, here the scope is broadened to include observed climate variations as well as detected climate change”.
What a load of unmitigated bs. (Merriam-Webster online dictionary – ‘unmitigated’ – 2 : being so definitely what is stated as to offer little chance of change or relief). We all know what the verb ‘attribute’ means. When I plug the word ‘attribution’ into the same dictionary, I get this:
“1: the act of attributing ; especially : the ascribing of a work (as of literature or art) to a particular author or artist.
2: an ascribed quality, character, or right.”
It appears as if the IPCC and NOAA are now in the business of redfining English words. They are also both lousy writers. The IPCC did not have to use the word attribution in reference to it’s habit of ‘attributing’ blame based on probability, there is already a word for that. It’s called ‘consensus’.
We go to Merriam-Webster again and plug in consensus. We get this:
“1 a: general agreement : unanimity
2: group solidarity in sentiment and belief.”
What NOAA and the IPCC are implying in flowery term is definition 2. They are describing a definite solidarity in sentiment and belief, as if either of those can be given a probability rating between 0 and 1. However, NOAA is not happy with that alone, they have expanded it to include “observed climate variations as well as detected climate change”.
What the heck does that mean? What is the difference between an ‘observed’ climate variation and a ‘detected’ climate change besides semantics.
Merriam-Webster on semantics:
“3b: the language used (as in advertising or political propaganda) to achieve a desired effect on an audience especially through the use of words with novel or dual meanings”.
Ah, now were getting somewhere. They are bs-ing us with jargon.
I swear, many current scientists are either just plain stupid, or dishonest. Worse still, many of them are patronizing in their stupidity and dishonesty. In the field of computer programming, object-oriented programming has been set up with the explicit aim of abstracting programming. They are trying to hide the computer itself from the programmer by getting him/her to think outside the machine. Many programmers have no idea how to program with the machine’s native language, assembler. If something goes wrong, they are unable to go under the hood and fix it. Not only that, people writing books on the subject often have no idea what they are writing about. The programming has become so abstract they are not clear on the terms. That’s what this NOAA paper brings to mind.
A basic structure in the object-oriented language, C++, is a ‘class’. I have read at least a dozen definitions for a class, and they all differ wildly. Many of the definitions become so abstract that the author appears to be lost. I was delighted recently to read a book on C++ programming by the inventor of the language, Bjarne Stroustrup. The first thing he said about a class, was that it was a ‘user-defined type’. I got down on my knees and bowed in his general direction. A type in programming languages is a very basic ‘data type’. It is a fundamental entity. To hear Stroustrup matter-of-factly say that a class is a type, instead of offering the abstracted crap used by most authors of programming books, was illuminating, to say the least.
Why do we need all this bafflegab in climate science? If they don’t know what causes warming, why not say so? We know what this paper is about: IPCC-based climate science has lost face, and NOAA is trying to cook the books to make it appear it’s not so. It’s too late for that.
These guys are seriously confused. I held my nose and got to page 8 and got this:
“1.3.1 Steps in climate science Observations provide the foundation for all of climate science. The observations are obtained from numerous disparate observing systems (see Figure 1.2)…” Referencing that figure, I get a claim that observations are done with the following:
“geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites, aircraft, radar, weather balloons, ships at sea and offshore buoys, and surface observing stations. Numerous other observational systems not shown also provide data that is combined to produce a comprehensive climate system analysis”.
I was concerned about the ‘numerous other observational systems not shown’. What could those possibly be? They are not seriously going to call a climate model an observation system are they? How could I be so stupid, of course they are. Later in the same chapter, they say:
“As in medical science, additional “diagnostic tests” are often required to establish attribution. In climate science, these additional tests most commonly consist of controlled experiments conducted with climate models; results are compared between model outcomes when a climate forcing of interest (e.g., from changes in greenhouse gases or volcanic aerosols) is either included or excluded in order to assess its potential effects”.
These people seem incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy. Diagnostic tests on humans are not the same thing as experiments conducted in a virtual environment. Doctors are forced to go on opinion some of the time because it’s not that easy to cut someone open and look inside. At least they are not programming a computer as a human and doing diagnostic tests on the virtual human.
I am deeply bothered by the implications here. They are claiming on one hand that real telemetry is used to observe the climate when it is not. Satellite and weather balloon data is completely ignored, and when the computer model outputs disagree with the real data, it is the real data that is suspected. Also, they are suggesting that historical data is not to be trusted and needs to be reanalyzed. Yeah, sure, we already know that one. Some of the data doesn’t support the AGW theory so it needs to be cleansed.
The final insult is that the satellite data is NOAA’s own satellite data. They gathered all the data and moth-balled it. To their credit, they handed it over willingly to Spencer and Christy of UAH when they asked for it back in 1979, but now they are denying it. They are using computer models to do ‘controlled’ experiements while ignoring real data collected by their own satellites. Why do they need to reanalyze anything when the satellites are telling them exactly what is going on?
Correction: my page references in the previous posts are to the Introduction section of the report on the reanalysis of climate data.
I skimmed much of the rest of this document because it’s nothing but a regurgitation of IPCC rhetoric. I noted the following points:
“p 66 of 156
Six of the warmest 10 summers and winters for the contiguous United States average surface temperatures from 1951 to 2006 have occurred in the last decade (1997 to 2006).
p 79 of 156
Seven of the warmest ten years since 1951 have occurred in the last decade (1997 to 2006).
p 82 of 156
It is thus very likely that a change in North American annual mean surface temperature has been detected. That assessment takes into account the realization that the climate models have biases that can affect statistics of their simulated internal climate variability”.
With regard to the warmest years, they can’t make up their minds whether it’s 6 or 7. They could have mentioned that an equal number of warm years occured between 1920 and 1950, but hey, their mandate was from 1951 onward, so why rock the boat by bringing in superflous information (superflous to AGW jargon i.e.).
I thought it had already been established that changes had occured in the surface temperature of North America. Was that just another opinion? In other parts of the document, they mention that warming is uneven over North America with large parts having experienced no warming at all. Most of the warming was in the Arctic regions and none was noticed in the southern US.
How does CO2 do that? Does it just hang in large clouds over certain parts of North America, reigning down heat in certain areas. Amazing stuff.
My conclusion is this: the paper is a waste of the same. Let’s stop funding this crap where computer models are used to reanalyze computer models. What…are we all nuts, or what?
ps. let’s also get mathematicians out of physics and back to bean counting. They are seriously obfuscating the problems in climate science.