Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[Furcifer]

Yes it is the global average temperature anomaly from NCDC.

Perhaps I should have been more clear, it's the global average from all the data sets.

Well, I can get the surface temperature anomalies from NASA or Hadley Centre. The results would be very close.
If you post a link to 20 of those "hundreds" I'll make the graphs myself, and we can see if they differ.

How about just using the most current of the 4 official data sets?

 

[Furcifer]

This particular gem deserves an old image of mine

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_28149d1e907d3f18.jpg[/qimg]

And I can draw lines on the upswing from 1985-1987 and 1992-1995 and say "Oh no the sky is falling, we're all doomed", that's a favorite of alarmists.

Since 1995 we've been getting more and more accurate data, and we're better at adjusting the data to more accurately reflect the actual temperature. As the noise dies down we'll get a better idea of what's going on. But that's going to take at least 30 years of data from about 1995 before we can know for sure.

If I could say anything to alarmists it would be "Take a break, relax, there's plenty of time for you to save the planet".

 

[Reality Check]

Furcifer, Please present your evidence that RealClimate.com is "rife" with politics

Sure. It's consistent with the "I'll believe anything mentality" the AGW hardliners take.

Thank you for confirirming that you do not know what pseudoscience or politics or science mean!

Nonsense. I never said they have "more political than science articles", if I did it was a mistake. (evidence?)

Yes you did:
"I've checked in the past few days and there are more political articles on the front page of RealCrapScience.com than science."
and you werre wrong since I checked:

Originally Posted by Reality Check
There is a blog about climate science run by climate scientists called RealClimate.com. So how many political articles are there on their front page?
The dog is the weather (educational cartoon)
Open Climate 101 Online (education)
An online model of methane in the atmosphere (science education)
An Arctic methane worst-case scenario (science)
Much ado about methane (science)

A totol of zero articles about politics.

That is the evidence for your mistake. However I doubt that you will acknowledge it (hopefully you will surprise me!)


But I misspoke so here is the corrected list:

1. Are arguing from a position of ignorance of the RealClimate.com web site:
   "I don't follow these pseudoscience websites"
2. Have no idea what pseudoscience means since the RealClimate.com comments on actual climate science.
3. Have lied about RealClimate.com having more political than sceince articles on their front page:
   "I've checked in the past few days and there are more political articles on the front page of RealCrapScience.com than science."

You failed to acknowledge the fact that RealCrapClimate.com purports to be absent of political nonsense, when in fact it's rife with it. It's pure pseudoscience.

You are still persisting with your unsupported assertions from a couple of positions of ignorance (see above).

Furcifer,
Please present your evidence that RealClimate.com is "rife" with political nonsense.

How about you start with something really simple - the % of articles that are political. All that will involve would be you actually reading RealClimate.com that you have seem ignorant of ("I don't follow these pseudoscience websites")

P.S. Front page of RealClimate.com on 29 January 2012
The AR4 attribution statement
“Vision Prize”, an online poll of scientists about climate risk
The dog is the weather
Open Climate 101 Online
An online model of methane in the atmosphere
and older articles
An Arctic methane worst-case scenario
Much ado about methane
Unforced variations: Jan 2012 (open thread)
Recycling
Copernicus and Arrhenius: Physics Then and Physics Today
Climate cynicism at the Santa Fe conference
Curve-fitting and natural cycles: The best part
AGU 2011: Day 5 and wrap-up
AGU Days 3&4
AGU 2011: Day 2
Global Temperature News
AGU 2011: Day 1
Unforced variations: Dec 2011 (open thread)
Ice age constraints on climate sensitivity
Two-year old turkey (22 November 2011)
Where are the politics in the articles for the last couple of months, Furcifer?

 

[Reality Check]

The irrefutable evidence has been cited. I don't even read the cite and I've found more than 7 articles that clearly violate their "memorandum".

Furcifer, Can you link to the"irrefutable evidence" that has been cited.

Can you list the more than 7 articles that clearly violate their "memorandum"?
(First asked 30 January 2012)

Start by citing the "memorandum".
The RealClimate.com About page states:

RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science. All posts are signed by the author(s), except ‘group’ posts which are collective efforts from the whole team. This is a moderated forum.

So they write commentary on climate science, e.g. papers, conferences and general explanations of climate science.

The violations in those >7 articles you assert you have found would be discussions of the "political or economic implications of the science".

 

[Reality Check]

And I can draw lines on the upswing from 1985-1987 and 1992-1995 and say "Oh no the sky is falling, we're all doomed", that's a favorite of alarmists.

I think that is Megalodon's point.

Alarmists and deniers share a profound ignorance (or are just lying) about climate science. They are both deluded that cherry picking a decade of temperature and deriving a trend is statistically significant. This is wrong for several reasons. The major problem is the cherry picking of the start points for their trends. The next problem is their ignorance of the definition of climate which is basically weather averaged over greater than 30 year periods. A decade is not climate - it is weather . Another problem is that it is not usual AFAIK that a trend over a decade is statistically significant due to the noise in the data.

 

[CapelDodger]

quick pedant: The story of Atrahasis is the enduring legend, Noahs ark is a third generation copy of it

That's what I meant, really . The Great Flood legend would have said it better.

 

[CapelDodger]

We most certainly did. Global Warming alarmism isn't new.

What I said, and you were pretending to respond to, wasn't alarmism. It's alarming to deniers because they know warming's coming. Deniers weren't claiming "no warming" in the 90's, far from it. They were more into lying about it not matching the Hansen et al model by exaggerating the model predictions (see Michaels's presentation to Congress, for instance).

Which would be entirely inconsistent with any other field of science. Especially when we're talking about computer modeling.

?

It's not trending in any significant way.

It is over the last thirty years. It's also become warmer since 2008 when "we have entered a long-term cooling phase" became a denier favourite. Another failure, but they don't mention it now.

Complete nonsense.

Let me repeat it :

"I predict you'll be engaged in a multi-page rearguard action after saying something dumb, and insisting that words and phrases mean what you say they do and not what the rest of the English-speaking world thinks they do."

This is something you're engaged in right now (http://www.realclimate.org/ and the meaning of "pseudoscience"), and it's how you spend most of your time here. It's reasonable to predict that you won't have changed in 2020.

Since "denier" is nothing more than a label alarmists currently like to call skeptics I suspect it will decline in proportion to the decline in alarmists.

The alarmist throngs of your imagination will never decline. "Denier" is a perfectly good description for, say, the sixteen Murdoch-friendly scientists.

There are literally countless studies.

Such as?

I can already feel the breeze from RealCrapClimate.com trying to hand wave this away. Let the denial begin.

Hand-wave what away? The WSJ nonsense? Are you actually impressed by that? It's more of the same tired old denialist crapola they've always been spouting, some of them for decades.

http://www.realclimate.org/ won't be dealing with it because it has nothing to do with science but everything to do with politics and ideological beliefs. You can see a response at ClimateProgress http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/...nds-16-scientists-long-debunked-climate-lies/, and the esteemed tamino dissects from one of the signatories here http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/some-questions-for-rutan/.

 

[Furcifer]

Actually it's "no statistically significant change to the warming trend", which of course is a good deal different than "no warming" or even "not much warming".

Indeed, this is in reference to an amended data set that purports to show a 0.12C per decade increase. Unfortunately the empirical evidence deviates "significantly" from the model mean average over the same period.

 

[CapelDodger]

It wasn't excluded? It was a 15 year period, from 1995-2009. You're probably confused because you're thinking 2009-1995 = 14.

I was responding to your claim that 2010 shouldn't be considered when considering the statistical significance of warming since 1995. You also claimed that adding yet another year's data (2011 has happened as well) would somehow remove the statistical significance, so you clearly know nothing about statistics.

It seems you want to anchor yourself in the previous decade : I hadn't expected to see it quite so explicitly. I'm happy to move on, and anyway don't have much choice.

It was chosen because 15 is a round number, at least when we're talking about decadal changes.

It was chosen because 1995 was the furthest back Motl (who first came up with this) could go before warming was statistically significant (it was 93% from 1995, not 95%). If he could have gone back further he would have done. The question was fed to a journalist who asked the question specifically about warming from 1995-2009. The deniers echo-chamber was soon ringing with claims of "no warming since 1995!" just as it was meant to.

It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to work this out.

It's popular because it's the beginning of more accurate data.

What more accurate data started being collected 10-12 years before any chosen date?

The reason deniers make a lot of 10-12 year periods is that longer, more revealing periods do not fit their needs. Motl stretched it to 15 years but it broke at that point, and it wouldn't get that far now.

The particular reason is because the temperature oscillates.

No, it doesn't.

In fact you would almost expect a difference of 15 or 16 years to yield the greatest difference in a 30 year period which is the generally agreed upon duration to measure climate change.

Why? And which 15 or 16 years of the 30 year period are you referring to? The first? The last? The middle?

In choosing 1995-2009 out of the 30-year period 1980-2009 Motl selected the lowest differene he could find, and he did this for its propaganda value. That's what deniers do.

 

[Furcifer]

What I said, and you were pretending to respond to, wasn't alarmism. It's alarming to deniers because they know warming's coming. Deniers weren't claiming "no warming" in the 90's, far from it. They were more into lying about it not matching the Hansen et al model by exaggerating the model predictions (see Michaels's presentation to Congress, for instance).

Unfortunately it was, in the late 90's I was an alarmist. I was mislead just as many are now being mislead. It takes one to know one as they say.

It is over the last thirty years. It's also become warmer since 2008 when "we have entered a long-term cooling phase" became a denier favourite. Another failure, but they don't mention it now.

Actually it hasn't. It's impossible to tell if it's gotten warmer since 2008. That's a well known limitation of climate science.

Let me repeat it :

This is something you're engaged in right now (http://www.realclimate.org/ and the meaning of "pseudoscience"), and it's how you spend most of your time here. It's reasonable to predict that you won't have changed in 2020

Nonsense. As I mentioned I was a mislead alarmist 10years ago. Obviously I've changed. I have no doubt that in 10years time many of the alarmists here will change their tune as well.

Opinions, much like the climate aren't static.

The alarmist throngs of your imagination will never decline. "Denier" is a perfectly good description for, say, the sixteen Murdoch-friendly scientists.

A pejorative label for the lazy and ignorant. No more so than "alarmist".

Hand-wave what away? The WSJ nonsense? Are you actually impressed by that? It's more of the same tired old denialist crapola they've always been spouting, some of them for decades.

Let the denialism begin. As I mentioned "takes one to know one".

http://www.realclimate.org/ won't be dealing with it because it has nothing to do with science but everything to do with politics and ideological beliefs. You can see a response at ClimateProgress http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/...nds-16-scientists-long-debunked-climate-lies/, and the esteemed tamino dissects from one of the signatories here http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/some-questions-for-rutan/.

Sure. RealCrapClimate.com is the biggest fraud on the internet when it comes to climate science. Just admit to the politics and move on, real scientists will applaud them.

 

[lomiller]

Indeed, this is in reference to an amended data set that purports to show a 0.12C per decade increase. Unfortunately the empirical evidence deviates "significantly" from the model mean average over the same period.

Wrong. There is a statistialyt significant trend of ~0.17 deg per decade from the late 70's onward.

nfortunately the empirical evidence deviates "significantly" from the model mean average over the same period.

Also wrong, but that's what'll happen when you make blind assertions without ever having read the literature as you are doing. The match between models and measurements is well within the error bands.

 

[Furcifer]

Thank you for confirirming that you do not know what pseudoscience or politics or science mean!

You're confused, I did no such thing. I'm very familiar with pseudoscience. You'll find most people engaging in pseudoscience vigorously deny it, I suspect nothing less when it comes to climate science. RealCrapScience.com has been shown to be a pseudoscientific website.

Yes you did:
"I've checked in the past few days and there are more political articles on the front page of RealCrapScience.com than science."
and you werre wrong since I checked:

Nonsense. You continue to make the same comprehension error.

That is the evidence for your mistake. However I doubt that you will acknowledge it (hopefully you will surprise me!)

I'm afraid not. You're wrong and it's because you are ignoring the specific qualifier "front page".

Please present your evidence that RealClimate.com is "rife" with political nonsense.

How about you start with something really simple - the % of articles that are political. All that will involve would be you actually reading
Where are the politics in the articles for the last couple of months, Furcifer?

I don't read pseudoscience websites. Sorry.

You're just moving the goal posts anyways. RealCrapClimate.com claims to avoid the politics and keep to the science (presumably because they know saying otherwise would make them easily identifiable as purveyors of pseudoscience) and yet they clearly don't. It's as simple as that.

 

[Furcifer]

I think that is Megalodon's point.

Alarmists and deniers share a profound ignorance (or are just lying) about climate science. They are both deluded that cherry picking a decade of temperature and deriving a trend is statistically significant. This is wrong for several reasons. The major problem is the cherry picking of the start points for their trends. The next problem is their ignorance of the definition of climate which is basically weather averaged over greater than 30 year periods. A decade is not climate - it is weather . Another problem is that it is not usual AFAIK that a trend over a decade is statistically significant due to the noise in the data.

At least we agree here.

Unfortunately whats happening is alarmists are trying to push their pet political projects through and in order to do so they make outrageous claims. They refuse to acknowledge what's actually being done to mitigate the use of fossil fuels and the subsequent emissions. That type of denial is just as bad as any other.

 

[Halsu]

The irrefutable evidence has been cited. I don't even read the cite and I've found more than 7 articles that clearly violate their "memorandum". It's pseudoscience.

Great!! Please post links to them, and fulfill your part of the challenge (5th time i ask now).

It's been cited. See below.

No, it has not. For the tenth and final time:

If i ask you to tell us how the very arguments you use for claiming the linked article is pseudoscience actually apply to the article in question, i'm shifting goal posts??

Nope, i most certainly am not. So, for the sixth time:

Could you please point out what in that text, which is a commentary about a confrence, and in your own words, has nothing to do with climate science....

- makes science and idology unseparable (and/or)
- misrepresents scientific findings to promote or draw attention for publicity (and/or)
- distorts the facts of science for short-term political gain

...because i can not find anything in that article that would fit any of the above??

If you still fail to answer, i will take that as an admission that you can't because your argument simply was faulty and you do not want to acknowledge that.

 

[Furcifer]

I was responding to your claim that 2010 shouldn't be considered when considering the statistical significance of warming since 1995. You also claimed that adding yet another year's data (2011 has happened as well) would somehow remove the statistical significance, so you clearly know nothing about statistics.

This makes no sense. I never said it shouldn't be included, I said alarmists were desperate to include it because they need desperately to be "significant". (It's a bit of a double entendre) You're claim I "know nothing about statistics" is just foolish. I suspect everyone knows something about statistics.

It seems you want to anchor yourself in the previous decade : I hadn't expected to see it quite so explicitly. I'm happy to move on, and anyway don't have much choice.

It was chosen because 1995 was the furthest back Motl (who first came up with this) could go before warming was statistically significant (it was 93% from 1995, not 95%). If he could have gone back further he would have done. The question was fed to a journalist who asked the question specifically about warming from 1995-2009. The deniers echo-chamber was soon ringing with claims of "no warming since 1995!" just as it was meant to.

Incorrect. It was Phil Jones.

What more accurate data started being collected 10-12 years before any chosen date?
The reason deniers make a lot of 10-12 year periods is that longer, more revealing periods do not fit their needs. Motl stretched it to 15 years but it broke at that point, and it wouldn't get that far now.
Why? And which 15 or 16 years of the 30 year period are you referring to? The first? The last? The middle?
In choosing 1995-2009 out of the 30-year period 1980-2009 Motl selected the lowest differene he could find, and he did this for its propaganda value. That's what deniers do.

I don't know who Motl is or what you're talking about. This specific quote is from Phil Jones. I have no doubt deniers take it out of context.

 

[Halsu]

Indeed, this is in reference to an amended data set that purports to show a 0.12C per decade increase. Unfortunately the empirical evidence deviates "significantly" from the model mean average over the same period.

No it does not. Here's the data (see attached image for a graph), i plotted four different global series, compressing each decade*** since 1980 to a single point in the graph.

Every series shows that 2000's were more than 0.12C warmer than 1990's.

Here's the woodsfortrees.org plot i used to calculate these. You can check my results if you wish.

*** I chose to use "decades" as usually discussed in casual conversation, 1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009. Changing those to 1981-1990 etc. wouldn't make a big difference.

 

[Megalodon]

Perhaps I should have been more clear, it's the global average from all the data sets.

No, it's not. It's the NCDC global average temperature anomaly.

How about just using the most current of the 4 official data sets?

How about you link to 20 of those "hundreds" of datasets, or withdraw the claim you made about the data I presented?

 

[bit_pattern]

But... But... I thought CO2 was plant food

Extreme heat hurts wheat yields
Monday, 30 January 2012 David Fogarty and Deborah Zabarenko
Reuters

Extreme heat can cause wheat crops to age faster and reduce yields, a US-led study shows, underscoring the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population as the world warms.

Scientists and farmers have long known that high heat can hurt some crops. Now a study led by Stanford University reveals how the damage is done by tracking rates of wheat ageing, or senescence.

Depending on the sowing date, the grain losses from rapid senescence could reach up to 20 per cent, the scientists found in the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Lead author David Lobell and his colleagues studied nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth from northern India, tracking the impact of exposure to temperatures greater than 34°C to measure rates of senescence.

They detected a significant acceleration of ageing that reduced the grain-filling period. The onset of senescence imposes a limit on the time for the plant to fill the grain head.

"What's new here is better understanding of one particular mechanism that causes heat to hurt yields," says Lobell. He says that while there had been some experiments showing accelerated ageing above 34°C, relatively few studies considered temperatures this high.

"We decided to see if these senescence effects are actually occurring in farmers' fields, and if so whether they are big enough to matter. On both counts, the answer is yes."

 

[Reality Check]

Furcifer, Can you pick out the political articles that you saw on the front page

You're confused, I did no such thing. I'm very familiar with pseudoscience.

Yes you did by continuing with your <snip> that RealClimate.com is commenting on pseudoscience. It is commenting on climate sceince.

Nonsense. You continue to make the same comprehension error.

Nonsense. You continue to make the same comprehension error so I will make it simpler for you.
This is what you wrote on 17 January 2012: "I've checked in the past few days and there are more political articles on the front page of RealCrapScience.com than science."

Here are the articles that have been written in the last 2 months on RealClimate.com and could have appeared on the front page this year. The ones in bold are the 5 that should have been on the front page on 17 January 2012.
Can you pick out the political articles that you saw on the front page "in the last few days", e.g 17, 16 and 15 January 2012?
The AR4 attribution statement
“Vision Prize”, an online poll of scientists about climate risk
The dog is the weather (17 January 2012)
Open Climate 101 Online (16 January 2012)
An online model of methane in the atmosphere (11 January 2012 )
An Arctic methane worst-case scenario (7 January 2012)
Much ado about methane (4 January 2012)
Unforced variations: Jan 2012 (2 January 2012)
Recycling (24 December 2011)
Copernicus and Arrhenius: Physics Then and Physics Today 21 December 2011)
Climate cynicism at the Santa Fe conference (19 December 2011)
Curve-fitting and natural cycles: The best part (15 December 2011)
AGU 2011: Day 5 and wrap-up (11 December 2011)
AGU Days 3&4 (9 December 2011)
AGU 2011: Day 2 (7 December 2011)
Global Temperature News (6 December 2011)
AGU 2011: Day 1 (6 December 2011)
Unforced variations: Dec 2011 (1 December 2011)
Ice age constraints on climate sensitivity (28 November 2011)
Two-year old turkey (22 November 2011)

I don't read pseudoscience websites.

You do not read RealClimate.com (you have the fantasy that RealClimate.com is a pseudoscience website!) and yet state

• I've checked in the past few days and there are more political articles on the front page of RealCrapScience.com than science on 15 January 2012
• The irrefutable evidence has been cited. I don't even read the cite and I've found more than 7 articles that clearly violate their "memorandum". on 29th January 2012.

That needs a !
Alternately your admission that you read RealClimate.com (and statement that you do not read pseudoscience websites) could be a statement that RealClimate.com is not a pseudoscience website. But that is obvious to anyone who can read and knows what pseudoscience means.

P.S.
Can you link to the"irrefutable evidence" that has been cited? Can you list the more than 7 articles that clearly violate their "memorandum"?
First asked 30 January 2012

 

[lomiller]

trying to push their pet political projects through and in order to do so they make outrageous claims.

What "pet political projects" be specific.

What "outrageous claims", again be specific.