Anthopogenic Global Warming Myth or Real ?

Did you know that physics majors are responsible for the sub-prime crises.
The risk of a climate crisis, like the risks associated with sub-prime mortgage securitisation, are calculated using complex computer models and both are too complex for the average punter to understand.

As Graham Young wrote last week in a blog post entitled ‘Sub-prime and climate change’, these models were created by clever people with PhDs in maths and physics, but they are only as good as the information feed into them. GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) is how he described both the climate models and the models that helped created the current credit crisis.
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http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/20...d-is-one-of-novelty-and-change/#comment-63889

Now don't you feel just a little ashamed of yourselves?
 
mhaze said:
Really?

Always?

That'd take about 10 seconds and four words to knock apart.

Hint: Jones
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That's my opinion. If you want to have a go at knocking it apart, be my guest.

UHI can be an artefact. I'm not disputing that. But an artefact that could explain all of the recorded warming in the 20th century surface records (including sea surface temperatures)? Wishful thinking, I'm afraid.
 
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a_unique_person said:
Did you know that physics majors are responsible for the sub-prime crises.
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Ah, and here we were thinking no-one would notice but someone had to spill the beans. We would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

;)
 
CapelDodger said:
Nothing attracts funding like being defence-related.
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My favourite example of that is the Met Office's NAME dispersion model. This was originally developed to model nuclear fallout but we've found it to be more or less bang on the money when you are chasing pollution plumes from cities etc.
 
Spud1k said:
That's my opinion. If you want to have a go at knocking it apart, be my guest.

UHI can be an artefact. I'm not disputing that. But an artefact that could explain all of the recorded warming in the 20th century surface records (including sea surface temperatures)? Wishful thinking, I'm afraid.
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I believe that is a strawman; if not, please show where and how, and by whom, it has been made.

Hint: You won't find it in the linked DR's reference.
 
mhaze said:
I believe that is a strawman; if not, please show where and how, and by whom, it has been made.

Hint: You won't find it in the linked DR's reference.
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I'm merely making the statement that you can't use UHI to write off global warming completely. Some people used to make this claim about 10-15 years ago but neither you nor DR have been daft enough to outright come out with it. Similarly, I'm not going to claim that the effect doesn't exist. Therefore, the answer lies somewhere in between and the next stage of the argument is to show how much it has affected the ensemble temperature records (e.g. GISS).

I've quoted papers that make the argument that overall, it has been adequately taken account of or, in the grand scheme of things, it was never a significant effect in the first place anyway. More to the point, there's an entire section of AR4 where they explain exactly how this effect and others like it are taken account of or can be discounted. All I've seen so far from the opposing argument are individual case studies (e.g. Alaska, where the effect would be biggest) and a 'name and shame' of badly sited weather stations which represent a minority of those in use. That, if anything, is a strawman argument. Nothing has been presented yet to say in a quantifiable manner that any significant amount of the observed warming is due to UHI except that dubious stats paper, from which one would only be able to infer it indirectly anyway, even if the analysis was sound.
 
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Spud1k said:
Ah, and here we were thinking no-one would notice but someone had to spill the beans. We would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

;)
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What the hey, I've banked mine already. Shorted bank stocks and bought Florida shoreline property for a song. Boo-yah :cool:. I love it when a plan comes together.

You can't lose when you're in an Al Gore pool. That guy really is a Master of the Universe.
 
a_unique_person said:
Did you know that physics majors are responsible for the sub-prime crises.



http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/20...d-is-one-of-novelty-and-change/#comment-63889

Now don't you feel just a little ashamed of yourselves?
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That's one of the "special cases" sites, isn't it? Like Icecap. Anything could come out of it.

"...the concept of future prospects and particularly of continued growth in the future invits the application of formulas out of higher mathematics to establish the present value ...


"Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results: but in the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions we draw from them."
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Benjamin Graham, Intelligent Investor, 1934, taken from Devil Take the Hindmost : A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor.

They can't say they weren't warned, can they?
 
mhaze said:
I believe that is a strawman; if not, please show where and how, and by whom, it has been made.

Hint: You won't find it in the linked DR's reference.
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The whole Watts amateur photography project is about promoting UHI as significant portion of measured temperature change. You can hardly claim (and I don't expect you to) that the UHI is not a significant feature of the anti-AGW argument, over its whole history.

Spud expressed his surprise that some people are still harping on about the UHI, and David Rodale leapt on it, with links. It's like pressing a button, frankly.

Meanwhile the Arctic melts and people take photos of US weather stations. An odd priority, don't you think?
 
Spud1k said:
My favourite example of that is the Met Office's NAME dispersion model. This was originally developed to model nuclear fallout but we've found it to be more or less bang on the money when you are chasing pollution plumes from cities etc.
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The extent to which warfare has determined the cutting-edge of science is ... well, rather depressing, but there it is. Science gets done, often with beneficial spin-offs.

I have a soft spot for thermodynamics, because that was funded by a pure and practical profit motive. Steam-power was the thing of the moment : make it more efficient, and money is no obect. Take out the guesswork and rules-of-thumb, which are no good to an industrialised economy.

And, of course, thermodynamics was a defining breakthrough in the science we're blessed with today.
 
Spud1k said:
I'm merely making the statement that you can't use UHI to write off global warming completely. Some people used to make this claim about 10-15 years ago but neither you nor DR have been daft enough to outright come out with it. Similarly, I'm not going to claim that the effect doesn't exist. Therefore, the answer lies somewhere in between and the next stage of the argument is to show how much it has affected the ensemble temperature records (e.g. GISS).

I've quoted papers that make the argument that overall, it has been adequately taken account of or, in the grand scheme of things, it was never a significant effect in the first place anyway. More to the point, there's an entire section of AR4 where they explain exactly how this effect and others like it are taken account of or can be discounted. ....
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Good, we agree your prior argument from strawmanicopia, and now you have a non daft argument presented.

But the argument that GISS is good science is pretty much insupportable. Much easier to just use sat data . You won't win any debating points defending either GISS or the IPCC view, or trying to use the few papers that obstensibly shore it(them) up. Too much contrary data.

Kind of a waste of time, isn't it? But the right question is what error bounds may be established in those data sets or why they cannot be stated. Can a Warmer even get to that point?

If not, there may not even be a scientific argument that can be made.
 
Pipirr said:
I would.
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The problem Pipirr is not that an intelligent person such as yourself can tell the difference between weather and climate but that if the situation were reversed and it was the hottest year on record would you be so sanguine in writing it off?

If the answer is yes then kudos to you.
 
DogB said:
The problem Pipirr is not that an intelligent person such as yourself can tell the difference between weather and climate but that if the situation were reversed and it was the hottest year on record would you be so sanguine in writing it off?

If the answer is yes then kudos to you.
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Admittedly it takes considerable knowledge of a region to discuss weather, climate :

Fairbanks - Dr. Akasofu
 
mhaze said:
Admittedly it takes considerable knowledge of a region to discuss weather, climate :

Fairbanks - Dr. Akasofu
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More than I have for certain. I'm a biochemist so I have no real opinion on the validity of the consensus claim - other than to assume it's correct until I'm told otherwise by somebody I trust.

I have however noticed that pretty much any extreme weather event is blamed on GW. If last year in Alaska the weather had been unusually warm we would have been bombarded by the fact and a lot of people (a small number of whom should know better) would proudly stand and claim it's an unmistakable signal of AGW. Then when we get cooling we are told it's just a local weather effect.

I just don't like the double standard.
 
DogB said:
and a lot of people (a small number of whom should know better) would proudly stand and claim it's an unmistakable signal of AGW. Then when we get cooling we are told it's just a local weather effect.
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If you are told at all. It seems that the contrary evidence is publicly kept localized and suppressed by the major national news media.
 
easycruise said:
Not sure if anyone has pointed this out yet, but you sure wouldn't expect Alaska to have one of it's coldest summers on record in the midst of all this global warming.

http://www.adn.com/news/environment/story/518517.html
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Why not?

One prediction of AGW is a greater frequency of unusual weather events - and the extensive cloudiness appears to be unusual.

Another prediction of AGW is that winter and nighttime minimums will increase more rapidly than summer and daytime maxima. You'll have noticed that ""The minimum temperatures in the summer of 2008 only ranked as the 34th coolest on record."

("All that stopped this summer from winning a place as coldest ever was, strangely enough, its cloudy grimness" strikes me as a bit strange, given ""What seemed like endless days of cloud cover kept the daytime highs averaging 3 degrees below normal ... Inversely, the cloud cover helped to keep overnight temperatures up." A lack of clouds would have affected both elements of that.)

Don't let one Alaskan summer get your hopes up.
 
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