Strong Negative Feedback Found in Radiation Budget

Spencer:

Without going into the detailed justification, we have found that the most robust method for feedback estimation is to compute the month-to-month slopes (seen as the line segments in the above graph), and sort them from the largest 1-month temperature changes to the smallest (ignoring the distinction between warming and cooling).
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Convenient. This statistical method is the new contribution. If it's not valid, then the rest of the claims about IPCC models, sensitivity estimates, and all else are simply hand waiving.

Spencer apparently only used this method on the Aqua dataset, or at least only posted graphics from that set, and excluded some of the data. If his results are robust as he claims, then why didn't he show the same results from the longer Terra dataset? Why did he only use ocean data? Land radiates as well...

Blog science sucks...
 
At In To said:
...This statistical method is the new contribution. If it's not valid, then the rest of the claims about IPCC models, sensitivity estimates, and all else are simply hand waiving.

Spencer apparently only used this method on the Aqua dataset, or at least only posted graphics from that set, and excluded some of the data. If his results are robust as he claims, then why didn't he show the same results from the longer Terra dataset? Why did he only use ocean data? Land radiates as well...

Blog science sucks...
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Good questions. He's been working on these short term relationships for several years. Some of that has been explained in prior work. Without a preprint though, we can't tell exactly what was going on. Preprints usually become available sooner or later.

A lot of this type of work uses ocean data for some reasons that make quite a bit of sense. Uniformity. Land goes up and down a lot. Land varies a lot in what it absorbs and emits. Land has those darn cities.

I'm a bit hesitant to start talking about what I think his statistical method was. Probably I have it right, but it's only guesswork in places which really isn't adequate.
 
mhaze said:
Good questions. He's been working on these short term relationships for several years. Some of that has been explained in prior work. Without a preprint though, we can't tell exactly what was going on. Preprints usually become available sooner or later.

A lot of this type of work uses ocean data for some reasons that make quite a bit of sense. Uniformity. Land goes up and down a lot. Land varies a lot in what it absorbs and emits. Land has those darn cities.

I'm a bit hesitant to start talking about what I think his statistical method was. Probably I have it right, but it's only guesswork in places which really isn't adequate.
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So any evidence yet that this creationist's paper is in print?
 
mhaze said:
A lot of this type of work uses ocean data for some reasons that make quite a bit of sense. Uniformity. Land goes up and down a lot. Land varies a lot in what it absorbs and emits. Land has those darn cities.
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So how realistic is a sensitivity analysis of our climate which ignores something which is there, but messy to handle properly? Other scientists who examine sensitivity find that land areas rapidly regain energy balance, that land responds faster to forcings than ocean, and that some of the fast responses are forcing dependent.

If you exclude land then, and your dataset is less than climatology, how do you think this could possibly be an accurate appraisal method of the true climate sensitivity?

I don't think this method will be well accepted, unless he's leaving the good parts in the paper, and assuming blog readers are aware of these issues...
 
Malerin said:
I heard Gregor Mendel was a creationist. Keep it under your hat. ;)
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I heard Gregor Mendel operated around the time where the TOE was first described, a climate were almost everyone were creationists, as opposed to today were being a creationist is strong evidence that a person isn't a good scientist.

Might just be me that thinks him being a creationist is a good indication that we should take what he says with more than a grain of salt, but that's the reason I'm still waiting for evidence that the paper is actually in print.
 
BenBurch said:
Good point! He's not wrong because he is a creationist, he's wrong because he manipulated data until he liked the result.
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And I would speculate that he did that for the same reason he became a creationist - starting with a conclusion and molding the evidence to fit the conclusion.

Ironically, isn't this what the denialists are accusing real scientists of doing?
 
Malerin said:
I heard Gregor Mendel was a creationist. Keep it under your hat. ;)
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Creationism didn't become popular until a few decades after his death, and it's mainly a movement of American fundamentalists, not Europeans Augustinians, so I think he probably wasn't.
 
At In To said:
So how realistic is a sensitivity analysis of our climate which ignores something which is there, but messy to handle properly? Other scientists who examine sensitivity find that land areas rapidly regain energy balance, that land responds faster to forcings than ocean, and that some of the fast responses are forcing dependent.

If you exclude land then, and your dataset is less than climatology, how do you think this could possibly be an accurate appraisal method of the true climate sensitivity?

I don't think this method will be well accepted, unless he's leaving the good parts in the paper, and assuming blog readers are aware of these issues...
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Realistic?

Well, a general problem in climate science has been finding real world scenarios which through some way of measuring and handling them allows separate of cause and effect. The "net" of a group of interrelated causes and effects doesn't really tell you anything.

As an example, do clouds cause temperature to change or the reverse? (It's just a trick question). The real answer is both, about fifteen different ways and sideways. Any "net" summation to which statistical measures are applied obscures hopelessly the mechanisms.

Here the subject is radiative balance and surface temperatures (or lower troposphere temps). As you've noted, limiting the conditions down to a testable hypothesis may indeed generate test cases which are "unnatural" as compared to the real world. That's where they get around to saying "more research is required, more funding <ca ching! ca ching! ca ching!>"

Certainly readers who have followed Spencer's work for the last five years or so have a general idea of where he may be headed - he thinks that very short term phenomena should be studied for causation, rather than averages at the climatic scales. As I noted in the OP, a possible criticism is the lack of multi decadal data. But that is possibly invalid if and when causative relationships are shown to exist on a short time scale.
 
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uke2se said:
And I would speculate that he did that for the same reason he became a creationist - starting with a conclusion and molding the evidence to fit the conclusion.

Ironically, isn't this what the denialists are accusing real scientists of doing?
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AGW Truthers have become so pathetically desperate that they will latch onto anything that appears to show they are right no matter how obviously flawed.
 
mhaze said:
Certainly readers who have followed Spencer's work for the last five years or so have a general idea of where he may be headed - he thinks that very short term phenomena should be studied for causation, rather than averages at the climatic scales. As I noted in the OP, a possible criticism is the lack of multi decadal data. But that is possibly invalid if and when causative relationships are shown to exist on a short time scale.
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It's not as large of a problem when you have data sparseness if you do actually check your results with other related datasets. It's troubling to me that he thinks what he has is robust. It is not. It's highly selective. Hopefully his editors are asking him for the same, especially if it's a new method. How can it be better with such limited application?

Anyways, I'm unimpressed by this work, such as it is. Time will reveal all anyways.
 
Mhaze, are you ignoring my request for you to show evidence for your claim that this paper is in print?

As it stands now, even IF the paper is in print, your claim while unsupported is nothing but a lie. Scratch another one up for the books, eh?
 
uke2se said:
Mhaze, are you ignoring my request for you to show evidence for your claim that this paper is in print?

As it stands now, even IF the paper is in print, your claim while unsupported is nothing but a lie. Scratch another one up for the books, eh?
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Took me about 7 seconds to confirm this myself.

Here if you're interested.
 
At In To said:
It's not as large of a problem when you have data sparseness if you do actually check your results with other related datasets. It's troubling to me that he thinks what he has is robust. It is not. It's highly selective. Hopefully his editors are asking him for the same, especially if it's a new method. How can it be better with such limited application?

Anyways, I'm unimpressed by this work, such as it is. Time will reveal all anyways.
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I assume that's all been thrashed out, since this article has been going back and forth to the journal for two years now.

He stated that the apparent negative feedback was over 11x using the surface datasets, and about half that for lower troposphere. The lower troposphere satellite record would be a more reasonable set of numbers to use, one would think.

I'm sure people will be gaming the numbers with different temperature data sets, and different satellite data sets, in order to see if there is consistency or the glaring lack of it. Nothing wrong with that.
 
So here we go again, folks.

AGW denier posts an alleged piece of support for their position.

It immediately gets shown to be:

* Without merit;
* Irrelevant;
* Not saying what they claim it's saying;
* Or some combination of the above.

Then begins the endless stream of backpedaling, red herrings, denier catchphrases, further irrelevancies, and pure datum ex rectum, while others provide documented refutations to all denier claims which are not so off base as to be immune to any kind of documented discussion at all.

This will continue indefinitely without the deniers producing one single shred of valid evidence in their favor (because none exists).

As Gleason said... "Away we go!"
 
mhaze said:
I assume that's all been thrashed out, since this article has been going back and forth to the journal for two years now.
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So what you're saying is that the author has been attempting for a couple of years to have it accepted?
 
Am I being stupid here? Has anyone got a copy of the actual paper?
 
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