Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[aleCcowaN]

As much as I loathe Piers Moron, he had Pat Michaels on his show on CNN tonight and kicked his backside. Michaels face looked like it could have curdled milk.

Here's a transcript. It looks some sort of short cat fight was left out. To me, the words seem to be as founded as the kind the courtesies boxers address to each other in a weigh-in.

I would like to examine Mr Michaels' graphic on accumulated cyclone energy beginning in 1972 and the no-trend in it. Is he referring to Maue's (2011, cite by 0)?

UPDATE: I found it to be this one:

what reminds me the time I was discussing the knot squared thingy at SkC.

 

[aleCcowaN]

This should explain everything worth knowing (in the context of this contrived debate, of course, I'm sure Dr Gergis is a lovely lady )

http://theconversation.edu.au/post-1950s-warming-in-region-unmatched-in-1-000-years-7081

Thank you! I looks like we are going to wait a few months until the paper is republished.

I'm still curious about that Australasian "warm" September and "cool" March. It sounds so Ursa Minor and not Southern Cross.

 

[bit_pattern]

Thank you! I looks like we are going to wait a few months until the paper is republished.

I'm still curious about that Australasian "warm" September and "cool" March. It sounds so Ursa Minor and not Southern Cross.

Yeah September to March is about right, September starts yo warm, culminating with February usually being the hottest driest month, the the temperate autumn conditions start at around March, at least in the SE states, of which I'm most familiar

 

[macdoc]

Or the wettest month in Tropical Australia.

 

[Mikemcc]

Here's a transcript. It looks some sort of short cat fight was left out. To me, the words seem to be as founded as the kind the courtesies boxers address to each other in a weigh-in.

I would like to examine Mr Michaels' graphic on accumulated cyclone energy beginning in 1972 and the no-trend in it. Is he referring to Maue's (2011, cite by 0)?

UPDATE: I found it to be this one:

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=229&pictureid=6865[/qimg]

what reminds me the time I was discussing the knot squared thingy at SkC.

That's the one, though Michaels had removed the temperature anomaly trace.

 

[bit_pattern]

Or the wettest month in Tropical Australia.

Indeed! The "of which I'm most familiar" comment was an afterthought!

 

[aleCcowaN]

The problem is that my experience, my common sense and all data available to me tell that March is warmer than September. For instance, for Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Darwin (Melbourne and Canberra complete the list of all the Australian cities I know something about)

city-average high temperature September - average high temperature March (no means available in wiki pages)

Hobart - 15.1 - 20.1
Adelaide - 19 - 26.5
Sidney - 20 - 24.7 (in fact March is warmer than Sep, Oct and Nov here and April warmer than September; even May is as "warm" as September. All of these is typical)
Perth - 20.1 - 29.6 (! This is interesting because of the streams in the Indian)
Brisbane - 25.6 - 28.9 (and the lows are more strikingly different)
Darwin - 31.9 - 32.6 (idem)

I had to look up for Rabaul to find a September a bit more hotter than March. In Jakarta both temperatures are levelled -they have N. Hemisphere "seasons" in spite of being in the Southern one-.

So, again, I don't understand the scope and purpose of the -supposedly- quote from Gergis referring to SONDJF as the "warm" season (I have to tell I felt 12 again while "studying" Australia's geography -and found a lake having my name-)

 

[aleCcowaN]

That's the one, though Michaels had removed the temperature anomaly trace.

Thanks! I got that image from Michaels' blog at Forbes -published last August-. The little Michaels said in "Inconsequent tonight" has not much to do with what he published in the blog -perhaps a major ongoing natural catastrophe made him weigh his words-.

 

[macdoc]

No end of denidiotcy
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-11/wikipedia-sandy

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

In Patrick Michaels defense, he is a lying sack of ****

I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't.
Here's Wikipedia:

Patrick Michaels obtained an A.B. in biological science in 1971 and an S.M. in biology in 1975 from the University of Chicago, and in 1979 obtained his Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[3] His doctoral thesis was titled, Atmospheric anomalies and crop yields in North America.[4]

I'll check back in another week. Meantime, keep stroking yourselves. It must be so soothing.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't.

So we now know how to make you leave for never to return. Thanks. That's a real gain. Farewell!

Michaels seems to be master of dialectics, and I'm going to post tomorrow about that.

 

[bit_pattern]

I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't.
Here's Wikipedia: I'll check back in another week. Meantime, keep stroking yourselves. It must be so soothing.

That doesn't say anything snout Pat Michaels NOT being g a lying sack of ****

 

[lenny]

Thought this was interesting, sea levels around New York are a over a foot higher than they were in 1900[/url]

thanks for this, i also find it interesting. three points:

1) one might wish to more clearly distinguish local sea level rise at any particular location with global average sea level rise, which need happen virtually nowhere.

how much of that "one foot higher" is due to isostatic rebound? (naively, i would have though NY was still rising... wrong sign i know)

2) it is counter-productive to claim that a single event was "caused by" global warming. the post declares a "with us or against us" option:

Given the unprecedented nature of this event, many people are asking whether it was caused by or its impacts amplified by global warming, and many others are of course trying to deny any hurricane-climate links.

3) there is a third group trying clarify that the meaningful attribution of single events is not possible. this has nothing to do with climate change per se:

i have two blue dice, one weighted, one not.
both are thrown.
both come up 3.
both are melted down.

did the fact that one of them was loaded cause it to come up "3"?
even if i do not know which one was the loaded die?

if i throw each die many times, it will become obvious which one is loaded.
given only a single throw, the question is ill-posed.

lastly, a note on "the unprecedented nature of this event." what was super-cool about sandy was its interaction with another system, sorta like atmospheric billiard balls. this aided prediction and explained sandy's rather odd track. such an interaction may be so rare that the fact is is "unprecedented" in the satellite era might well be expected.

can anyone explain exactly what this interaction was?

you can see the series of satellite images (and documented forecasts) here:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/gtw...x.php?basin=atl&current_issuance=201210282038

 

[W.D.Clinger]

In Patrick Michaels defense, he is a lying sack of ****

I stopped by to see if the tenor of the discussion had changed. It hasn't.
Here's Wikipedia:

Patrick Michaels obtained an A.B. in biological science in 1971 and an S.M. in biology in 1975 from the University of Chicago, and in 1979 obtained his Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[3] His doctoral thesis was titled, Atmospheric anomalies and crop yields in North America.[4]

I'll check back in another week. Meantime, keep stroking yourselves. It must be so soothing.

Why cherry-pick such an irrefutable source? Here are the opening sentences of the next two sections:

Michaels has said that he does not contest the basic scientific principles behind greenhouse warming and acknowledges that the global mean temperature has increased in recent decades....

Office of Science and Technology Policy director, John Holdren, told the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee in June 2003, "Michaels is another of the handful of U.S. climate-change contrarians … He has published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science."

 

[macdoc]

Contributing to and causing are different things.

AGW contributed to this in three ways.

Warmer Atlantic ( more fuel for the storm and more moisture in the atmosphere )
More frequent blocking highs ( why it was steered inlans )
Change in jet stream due to shift in the Arctic weather ( blocking highs being one of them ) which brought the cold front into play.

can anyone explain exactly what this interaction was?

A tropical storm intersected a northeaster and was steered inland by a blocking high.

It is not unique.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/satellite/satelliteseye/cyclones/pfctstorm91/pfctstorm.html

••••

in 1979 obtained his Ph.D. in ecological
climatology

how relevant

 

[lenny]

They have no experience evaluating the forecasts from physical models and even less in running the models themselves as they attempted to do.

they did not run the models themselves. what makes you suggest that they did?

In an off discipline journal the editor may not even know who is an appropriate reviewer.

that is certainly possible. are you suggesting that it was the case for this paper, this journal, this editor?

no offense intended, but have you looked at this paper or issue of the journal?

You do realize that for models of this type every run produces a different realization?

yes, and no. running an identical run on the same machine usually yields an identical result (digital computers merely map one big integer into one big integer). cosmic rays and hardware faults can introduce divergent results, but in my experience this is more of a problem if you run climate models on PCs than it is if you run them on supercomputers.

as i recall reproducibility was an early requirement for IPCC runs.

of course runs with the same code but different inputs (or on different hardware, or different compilers) yield different results. is that is what you intended? if so, how is it relevant here?

your opening claim that british statisticians obtained and ran DePreSys casts some doubt on your familiarity either with the computational power of a British "management sciences" department or with the habits of the UK Met Office. i am happy to stand corrected, given evidence.

You can't evaluate output you don't understand.

evidence please? i can contrast and evaluate three different forecast systems for sunspot number without understanding the dynamics of the sun. no?

but what is your point in this case? as it happens these authors do "understand" global mean temperature as well as the average meteorologist understands that rather unphysical entity....

wasn't it the Met Office which selected the target, not the statisticians?

There is SOME work ongoing to try test them against over 1-4 year range, but this is bleeding edge science that is not even remotely "well established"

i suggest you are a bit out of date on this. decadal forecasts are included in (and predate) CMIP5. you could look at outputs from the ENSEMBLES project, which ended a few years ago http://www.ensembles-eu.org/

 

[lenny]

All one needs to do is follow the literature to realize point in time predictions over short 1-4 year time spans are NOT what climate models are expected to do.

perhaps i misunderstood your position, do you agree that empirical models outperform climate (simulation) models, but this fact does not bother you?
if so, i'd liek to explore why it does not, and then i will criticise Fildes and Kourentzes (2011).

are you claiming that no serious climate scientists suggest decadal forecasting is ready for prime time?

and regarding your claim on "1-4" year forecasting: how long is research "bleeding edge" in your opinion?

karl taylor's paper on the decadal hindcast design which appeared in 2009 is here:
http://www.wcrp-climate.org/decadal/cmip5.shtml

 

[lenny]

at what cost?

every work-day he is not doing science is a "win" for those who aim to retard the advance of the science. ...snip...

a sad day. (that knowing all of the above, he decided it best to act.)

Michael Mann is not the only person doing climate research.

i agree, of course. but what is your point?

mine was that if the anti-science lobby and those who aim to obfuscate can take individual scientists out of the production line of science, then the advancement of our understanding suffers.

nothing special about Michael Mann in particular here.

can you help me understand your post?

 

[bit_pattern]

thanks for this, i also find it interesting. three points:

All good points, especially the isostatic rebound, hadn't considered that myself.

Saw this before, and while it doesn't attribute 12" in New York to AGW but it does point out that globally sea levels are up by 8" over the same period & that the NE is especially susceptible to sea level rise, with good evidence the region is rising well above the average. The article headline is interesting in the context of Sandy, considering it was published in July!

http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/news/rising-seas-a-real-threat-to-new-jersey/

The northeastern United States is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise caused by the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the “ocean conveyor belt” that carries heat from the Caribbean to Europe. The motion of this conveyor belt maintains an uneven sea surface along the East Coast of the United States. As the planet warms, the conveyor belt will slow and that uneven surface will flatten — adding to global sea-level changes an additional, regional sea-level rise in the Northeast.

According to a 2009 review by researchers at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, state-of-the-art climate models predict that changes in the conveyor belt would cause the sea level off New York City to rise about 8 inches more than the global average this century. And now a new U.S. Geological Survey study suggests that sea level in the northeastern United States is already rising faster than the global average.

And then there was this prescient warning:

A recent analysis by the Princeton-based nonprofit Climate Central found that 140,000 people in New Jersey live within 3 feet of the high-tide line. When the 4-foot storm surge associated with a once-in-50-years storm is taken into account, a 3-foot sea-level rise would place the homes of 400,000 New Jerseyans at risk

At the end of the day, the attribution argument will be had but I think its important that people are made to understand that, at the very least, this sort of disaster will become more common and that the destruction was caused by events that are consistent with those expected in a warming climate.

How many times a century can NYC go under water before the costs of emission reduction start looking like a smart investment?

 

[macdoc]

When the 4-foot storm surge associated with a once-in-50-years storm is taken into account, a 3-foot sea-level rise would place the homes of 400,000 New Jerseyans at risk

so what does this constitute

Lower Manhattan, completely unprotected, was overwhelmed by Sandy's 14-foot storm surge.

New York Times-48 minutes ago

Somehow I don't think that was an extrapolated once in a millenia storm....