Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[Mikemcc]

Prof. James Hanson has a new paper that is on his website (not yet peer reviewed) looking at the incidence of outlier temperatures (temperatures anomalies that lie outside of 2 sigma from the mean). He has had to introduce a new catagory of 'extremely hot outliers' to describe the events in Russia and Texas, where the anomliers exceeded 3 sigma variations. He is of the opinion that 3 sigma values will become the norm and range upto 5 sigma values (all compared to the 1951-1980 baseline).

I have e-mailed Prof Hansen with a comment that he should remove the political rhetoric about Gov. Perry, because that has no place in a scientific paper. It's understandable given his activism, but not in a scientific discussion. The results speak for themselves.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20111110_NewClimateDice.pdf

 

[Furcifer]

So you have concede that since the times of 3bodyproblem. Good for you.

Well before then, in fact the rate of change has slowed since my days as an alarmist. When I first became interested in climate change there was talk of massive flooding an mass extinction by the year 2000! Now most of us know how foolish our early claims were, but the change is still rapid in geological terms.

 

[Furcifer]

No amount of assertion on your part will allow dismiss detailed statistical analyses showing current temperatures are warmer than any time in the last 2000 as “just an educated guess”

Nonsense. You've confused yourself yet again. The fact that it's warmer is indeed "confirmed" by empirical evidence. By "how much" is based on a statistical analysis or "educated guess".

BTW you still haven’t answered my question, if you want to ignore the climate reconstructions what is you basis for you (incorrect) claim “over the last 5000 years, several times it's been higher than it is now”

Proxy data. (I guess the mi-Holocene was 6000 years ago, my mistake)

So you do disagree? Once again, do you or do you not admit climate scientists can calculated trends in the earth’s climate?

In the past or future, with what accuracy using what methods, based on what rate of CO2 increase?

As already pointed this does not appear to be a valid URL. It’s pretty obvious you are simply showing your disdain for the climate scientists who run the site http://www.realclimate.org/

Just so you know, wattsupmybutt.com probably isn't a valid URL either. I have disdain for the pseudoscientific manner in which politically motivated and biased websites selectively present and interpret valid scientific studies from reputable journals. I merely implore people to read from the source.

Climate science is physics, not chemistry. Please try to familiarize yourself with the subject at hand.

Nonsense. It's multidisciplinary and by no means exclusive to physics. There are quite a few mathematicians and chemists actively publishing in climate science journals. I routinely peruse Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics for articles on climate science instead of pseudoscientific sites like RealCrapClimate.com and socalledskepitcalscience.com
I really wish you would take a look at the list of Open Access Journals on the EGU site and read some RealClimateScience

Just calling you out for being someone who isn’t willing to discuss the science in favor of their own beliefs.

Nonsense. I've offered my services to explain any climate science articles you've read in journals and might behaving trouble with. I highly recommend the EGU site for up to date climate science articles, some of which you might even help participate in prior to publication! How exciting is that, you might get your name mentioned in an actual climate science paper.

 

[Trakar]

Prof. James Hanson has a new paper that is on his website (not yet peer reviewed) looking at the incidence of outlier temperatures (temperatures anomalies that lie outside of 2 sigma from the mean). He has had to introduce a new catagory of 'extremely hot outliers' to describe the events in Russia and Texas, where the anomliers exceeded 3 sigma variations. He is of the opinion that 3 sigma values will become the norm and range upto 5 sigma values (all compared to the 1951-1980 baseline).

I have e-mailed Prof Hansen with a comment that he should remove the political rhetoric about Gov. Perry, because that has no place in a scientific paper. It's understandable given his activism, but not in a scientific discussion. The results speak for themselves.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20111110_NewClimateDice.pdf

Ah, synchronicity!

I had just stumbled upon and read this paper earlier this evening, I didn't even notice the date, I thought it was an older paper I missed (he cranks out papers like Asimov used to crank our stories and books - dedicated and involved in his passion).
Good read.

 

[r-j]

And yet it was the Coldest summer in 20 years in England, which wipes out two-thirds of the common blue butterfly

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...years-wipes-thirds-common-blue-butterfly.html

I know this is supposed to be a "omg global warming" only thread, but when faced with an alarming report of "one of the warmest years", AND with a record cold summer, in the same year, inquiring minds would like to know more.

 

[Turgor]

And yet it was the Coldest summer in 20 years in England, which wipes out two-thirds of the common blue butterfly

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...years-wipes-thirds-common-blue-butterfly.html

I know this is supposed to be a "omg global warming" only thread, but when faced with an alarming report of "one of the warmest years", AND with a record cold summer, in the same year, inquiring minds would like to know more.

It's pretty easy: on average the temperature over the summer months was the lowest since 1993, while on average the temperature over the whole year was the second highest measured.

 

[aleCcowaN]

And yet it was the Coldest summer in 20 years in England, which wipes out two-thirds of the common blue butterfly

Oh my gosh! more victims like those poor Bolivian fishes! (see yesterday's posts)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...years-wipes-thirds-common-blue-butterfly.html

I know this is supposed to be a "omg global warming" only thread, but when faced with an alarming report of "one of the warmest years", AND with a record cold summer, in the same year, inquiring minds would like to know more.

You mean,

why do the warmest year doesn't have the warmest Summer?
why do the champion team doesn't have the top goal scorer?
why do the funniest movie ever doesn't have the funniest joke ever?
why do the tallest building doesn't have the tallest floors?
why do the richest country doesn't have the richest person?

Should I go on?

In my experience, most people don't know what standard -or other- deviation is, and from those who are supposed to "know", most of them don't have the faintest idea of the real meaning and practical implications of it. That situation structurally feeds a great percentage of headline-like assertions and contestation about (A)GW.

 

[CapelDodger]

And yet it was the Coldest summer in 20 years in England, which wipes out two-thirds of the common blue butterfly

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...years-wipes-thirds-common-blue-butterfly.html

I know this is supposed to be a "omg global warming" only thread, but when faced with an alarming report of "one of the warmest years", AND with a record cold summer, in the same year, inquiring minds would like to know more.

The coldest summer in twenty years is not a record cold summer, it's just the coldest in twenty years. It was also wet overall, very wet in Scotland but dry in East Anglia and the South-East. Spring and autumn were remarkably warm, and Winter has been warm so far.

This is known as natural variation, which we get a lot of in the UK. If you search the Daily Mail site you might find reference to the warm spring and autumn, but perhaps not - Daily Mail policy is that AGW is a fraud and they select their stories accordingly.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Interesting, I believe that Nature even had a write-up on it detailing the different stressor factors involved in the fish-kill. In such wildlife kills the issue is generally a quick and dramatic change (hot or cold) not just exposure to typical conditions. Likewise there are often complicating factors; an unusually hot previous summer and drought that prevent the growth of adequate forage to allow animals to survive a long or unusually harsh winter, an increase of opportunistic infectious agents and environmental stressors to make the species more susceptible to such agents, etc.,. Interesting read though!

The problem is those people, mainly innumerates, needing an explanation of every single "astonishing weather or seasonal extreme" once and again. They fail to know what is needed to understand the following sentence "In a GW context, averages go «up» and variations go «wider»", so in a climate previously characterized by these three temperature values (5°, 15°, 25°) that have gone to (5°, 17°, 29°) it is expected that everything and everybody is adapting based on that 15° --> 17° (species distribution, farmers speculating with early crops, thickness of hairs or feathers in warm-blooded animals), so its not strange that all the <5° episodes -less frequent but sometimes deeper- are the delight for "deniers" (animals dying during cold snaps, crops ruined by late frosts, etc) while what and who are not adapting to that 25° --> 29° make the days of "doomsdayers" (people dying during hot waves, tropical species and diseases invading temperate zones, etc)

They're not alone. Ludomaniacs also turn the misrepresentation of an extreme into a way of life.

(BTW - Participation on the boards seem to be enhancing and expanding your english, congrats and glad to see you back participating more regularly. Happy New Years)

You're very kind. I hope AGW nay-sayers will see they also have a lot of room for improvement by participating in web forae, but I better not turn my hopes into expectations.

 

[Trakar]

And yet it was the Coldest summer in 20 years in England, which wipes out two-thirds of the common blue butterfly

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...years-wipes-thirds-common-blue-butterfly.html

I know this is supposed to be a "omg global warming" only thread, but when faced with an alarming report of "one of the warmest years", AND with a record cold summer, in the same year, inquiring minds would like to know more.

Please note the difference between the macrocosm represented by "one of the (Globally) warmest years on record" and the microcosm represented by "coldest summer (in England) in 20 years."

 

[Trakar]

...You're very kind. I hope AGW nay-sayers will see they also have a lot of room for improvement by participating in web forae, but I better not turn my hopes into expectations.

LOL, I just miss being able to regularly hold involved debates and discussions with people who hold different opinions, without feeling like I need a shower and a tall mug of rum afterwards.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Prof. James Hanson has a new paper that is on his website (not yet peer reviewed) looking at the incidence of outlier temperatures (temperatures anomalies that lie outside of 2 sigma from the mean). He has had to introduce a new catagory of 'extremely hot outliers' to describe the events in Russia and Texas, where the anomliers exceeded 3 sigma variations. He is of the opinion that 3 sigma values will become the norm and range upto 5 sigma values (all compared to the 1951-1980 baseline).

I have e-mailed Prof Hansen with a comment that he should remove the political rhetoric about Gov. Perry, because that has no place in a scientific paper. It's understandable given his activism, but not in a scientific discussion. The results speak for themselves.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20111110_NewClimateDice.pdf

Will I say it? Well, it's not easy to give away «trade (open) secrets», but these kind of readings often provoke the reaction on those most innumerate among the negationists, and it's easy to spot people talking about what they don't really know when a matter of extremes or records is involved.

The typical innumerate thinks that a record comes in regular periods, that is, the new record high temperature will come tomorrow, then in 20 years, then in 40 years (or 34, or 49, as regular has to include some randomness that make the whole thing to look "natural"), so, «a new record? and what about that!!!».

For any person who studied -in a real way- statistics, it is evident that a record-something becomes every time more difficult to break. If some process has a signal measured by a variable, some variations exist, and the process works in an absolutely constant fashion decade after decade, then the record max value for that variable is broken in intervals increasingly longer. As a result, as time goes by it is less probable to break a record in a particular decade because the process stays the same. I would say this is terribly counterintuitive to innumerate people (but they should have cared first to try reasoning).

The result is that temperature high records broken once an again, even at regular intervals are a hint of warmer times, and temperature low records broken at increasingly long intervals are a sign of business-as-usual or of warmer times too, and highly improbable the sign of the return of colder times, least of all a new glaciation.

But people give away their lack of a numerate background -and thus the lack of what is needed to stand a rational and informed position in a climate change arena where they are, however, so outspoken- by the way they deal with records.

 

[r-j]

Oh my gosh! more victims like those poor Bolivian fishes! (see yesterday's posts)

I saw your commentary, and it sounded great. Then I went and read the news story and found turtles, dolphins and other animals also died in record numbers from the record cold. People also died from the extreme cold. Not that such a record amount of people and animals means anything, unless it can be blamed on global warming, then it's catastrophic.

It's astounding to now see global warming is now supposed to make it colder. It seems the critics of the hype were right after all. I remember jokes about how global warming can do anything. If it can make it colder, more snow, then it really can do anything. It's pseudo science. It can not be refuted.

Like the commentary that tries to convince it wasn't actually that cold in July 2010 in Bolivia. It reads like a pseudo science piece. In reality it was extremely cold, and not just in Bolivia. Even Penguins died in record numbers in Antarctica, people died, all kinds of deaths were due to extreme unusual cold.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10679088
Even cows died from the cold!
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article524911.ece
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2010/0720/Deadly-cold-snap-hits-Argentina-Uruguay-Chile

But if I believe your tale, it wasn't really cold. Something else caused the 3 million fish to die. At the same time all the other animals and people did.

Of course the news about what really happened make your fairy tale ridiculous, when you look at the big picture. That you want the facts to be some sort of 'deniers' conspiracy shows how out of touch the global warming crowd really and truly is.

 

[bit_pattern]

It's astounding to now see global warming is now supposed to make it colder. It seems the critics of the hype were right after all. I remember jokes about how global warming can do anything. If it can make it colder, more snow, then it really can do anything. It's pseudo science. It can not be refuted.

What's probably more astounding is the way that you are making such sweeping generalisations about a science based on what appears to be a very patchy understanding of what climate scientists are really telling us about how the planet responds to warming, as opposed to the crap you hear in the media.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I saw your commentary, and it sounded great. Then I went and read the news story and found turtles, dolphins and other animals also died in record numbers from the record cold. People also died from the extreme cold. Not that such a record amount of people and animals means anything, unless it can be blamed on global warming, then it's catastrophic.

It's astounding to now see global warming is now supposed to make it colder. It seems the critics of the hype were right after all. I remember jokes about how global warming can do anything. If it can make it colder, more snow, then it really can do anything. It's pseudo science. It can not be refuted.

Like the commentary that tries to convince it wasn't actually that cold in July 2010 in Bolivia. It reads like a pseudo science piece. In reality it was extremely cold, and not just in Bolivia. Even Penguins died in record numbers in Antarctica, people died, all kinds of deaths were due to extreme unusual cold.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10679088
Even cows died from the cold!
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article524911.ece
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2010/0720/Deadly-cold-snap-hits-Argentina-Uruguay-Chile

But if I believe your tale, it wasn't really cold. Something else caused the 3 million fish to die. At the same time all the other animals and people did.

Of course the news about what really happened make your fairy tale ridiculous, when you look at the big picture. That you want the facts to be some sort of 'deniers' conspiracy shows how out of touch the global warming crowd really and truly is.

Great. Where do I start?

Sorry, in spite of your well studied crescendo from "sounded great" to the overflow of prêt-à-porter media pieces, your argument didn't work "retailer" and it still doesn't work "wholesaler".

The reason is simple: you may numb the public reason with an avalanche of similar information, so every single piece pretend to be a thread and the bunch pretend to work as a strong rope. The problem is structural: every single thread is not a thread (it is "Bolivian fishes", not an anecdote but an instance to explain the structure) and the rope doesn't work as a rope because all the threads are broken at the same point so the rope doesn't hold because the fail is structural, but, how strong it does look for the unaware! how strong it does look for those who wish it to hold!

Not surprisingly every denying argument send us quickly to drawbacks in human understanding:

What you just did sounded to me like the famous "as 10% of ever living humans are alive today, there's no definitive proof some humans are not immortal". Structural is a fancy pansy word, but I think almost everyone can grasp what "structural" means thinking about this last example.

Bolivian fishes. Mongolian livestock. Those exotic places that make the headlines now and then by their catastrophes. What do they do some people without such exotic places?.

The problem is you were talking of places exotic to you (and maybe to your everyday or intended public), but you are talking about my "backyard" (read user profiles and all) as those articles are talking about what I experienced and they include some true and true-like elements but the interpretation is forced: children love it short, simple and emotional, so they got what they wanted. Did it let them make the wrong inference? Who cares! For instance, what did kill those people? "The cold"? -I imagining Dr. Smith saying "Oh! The cold! The cold!"-. I challenge you to provide information about that, even when you have found it doesn't back your argument.

[I'll follow this later. I've a lot of work to do and the unbearable heat forces us to wake up and start earlier]

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Any AGW skeptic who needs a laugh, read McIntyre's latest, "Dr Phil, Confidential Agent, Revisited". Professors Jones and Mann do not act like people who hope to convince with accurate data and honest argument. I'm still trying to figure out how the temperature of a body at a distance r from a heat source of X degrees, dumping heat to a sink of temperature Y degrees, can depend on anything but X, Y, and r. I can't judge the science (I'll leave that to Freeman Dyson), but I can certainly judge the behavior of climate scientists, as revealed in the e-mail release from University of East Anglia.

 

[bit_pattern]

I can certainly judge the behavior of climate scientists, as revealed in the e-mail release from University of East Anglia.

Really? And considering that you've just conceded that you can't judge the science, how can you judge a handful of private emails, selectively quoted out of something like 50,000 to give the worst possible picture with no context, that nearly ALL pertain to specific scientific questions?

Would you like to list some examples of emails that you believe demonstrate this duplicitousness that you see in them?

 

[r-j]

I can't understand why anyone would want to keep weather records secret, confidential, hidden or otherwise try and prevent people from knowing what the weather was. If it really was "teh governments" telling the CRU not to release weather info, that doesn't make any difference. It's still crazy.

 

[Trakar]

I can't understand why anyone would want to keep weather records secret, confidential, hidden or otherwise try and prevent people from knowing what the weather was. If it really was "teh governments" telling the CRU not to release weather info, that doesn't make any difference. It's still crazy.

The point was, that the data wasn't CRU's to release, the national meteorological organizations in each of the individual nations own the rights to that data. The data was shared with CRU but they did not have the right to share that data. This was later dealt with and the data was shared except for Poland's, I believe, who seems to have refused to allow their data to be released by second parties. It isn't that the data is being kept secret, it is that there is commercial value in the data and while most nations make exception and share their data with academic researchers, they have spent budget funds collecting and compiling this data and are reluctant to give it away freely to any around the world who fancy collecting it.

 

[Trakar]

...What you just did sounded to me like the famous "as 10% of ever living humans are alive today, there's no definitive proof some humans are not immortal". Structural is a fancy pansy word, but I think almost everyone can grasp what "structural" means thinking about this last example.

Bolivian fishes. Mongolian livestock. Those exotic places that make the headlines now and then by their catastrophes. What do they do some people without such exotic places?...

I notice they don't mention the more than 30,000 humans who died in the European heat wave back in 2003, or the 56,000 that died in the 2010 Russian heat wave...but, these don't really fit with the narrative being pushed.