Slashdot Mirror

"If you have some useful information about that data then please share."

The average temp in Greenland has risen ~3degC in the last century.

You have the raw data and it's not hard to work out how to perform a least squares fit using a spreadsheet. Therefore you have everything you need to confirm/debunk my claim.

If you would rather read about science than perform it then you could start by looking here and here, or if pretty graphs are your thing then try a this random article that took me two minutes to find via a google search

Oh, so you thought Al Gore was a scientist? Nobody told you that he was a politician?

As it happens, his account of the science seems to be pretty reasonable by journalistic standards (according to the real scientists). But nobody is asking you to take Gore's word for it, based on his personal example. If you want the science, you can find it in the primary literature, or for a more technical summary than Gore presents, in the IPCC reports.

Slashdot has gotten to the point where you can't even refer to the people that devote their lives to the study of climatology across the world without being called a Troll. And the real awesome thing is that I see people who haven't even read the report in question being moderated up up up up.

You are being far too negative about slashdot. In fact slashdot has a readership/moderatorship with a far higher level of science and technical education than most online fora. No really!

So here's a little experiment for you. Wait for 24 hrs while the moderation does a global timezone sweep, then come back and browse at a threshold of 4. You may be pleasantly surprised. The Dunning-Kruger filter works pretty well actually. Even the posts opposing scientific orthodoxy tend to be of the more considered sceptical variety as opposed to the outright denialist ones. And when considering truly sceptical arguments, let's not forget this isn't "settled science". Well OK some if it is. [in which AGW "sceptic" and intelligent designer Roy Spencer's intellectual chickens come home to roost.]

You are not wasting your time.

The medieval warm period happened in northern Europe. At a global level there was no "medieval warm period".

Here's the pesky facts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#By_world_region

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/werent-temperatures-warmer-during-the-medieval-warm-period-than-they-are-today/

Sorry for bursting your cozy little bubble.

Re-read the article you are pointing out as evidence. The medieval warm period was in fact global. Newfoundland is not in Northern Europe, nor is the Sahara desert. The Vikings died out in Newfoundland due to the end of this period, hence they could not support farming to sustain them.

The medieval warm period happened in northern Europe. At a global level there was no "medieval warm period".

Here's the pesky facts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period#By_world_region

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/werent-temperatures-warmer-during-the-medieval-warm-period-than-they-are-today/

Sorry for bursting your cozy little bubble.

1. CO2 ice core lag (more here),

2. Water vapour,

3. Greenland,

4. Mars polar ice.

1. CO2 ice core lag (more here),

2. Water vapour,

3. Greenland,

4. Mars polar ice.

1. CO2 ice core lag (more here),

2. Water vapour,

3. Greenland,

4. Mars polar ice.

1. CO2 ice core lag (more here),

2. Water vapour,

3. Greenland,

4. Mars polar ice.

1. CO2 ice core lag (more here),

2. Water vapour,

3. Greenland,

4. Mars polar ice.

8 mo. of the harshest winter for 30 years = press says "weather". 4 we. of the hottest summer for 30 years = press says "global warming, doom, hellfire".

I have no problem with either explanation, but it sure should be consistent.

Your consistentcy problems are caused by looking to the press for an explaination rather than climate scientists. Climate is the long term statistics of weather and due to the signal to noise ratio it takes a couple of decades worth of data to observe a trend with high confidence. If you really do want a detailed and robust scientific explaination of what is causing the observed trend, then read the IPCC's WG1 report. Be warned the WG1 is heavy going but with the amount of layman-freindly explainations and commentry available directly from scientists and scientific institutions there really is no reason to allow the press to keep you ignorant and confused about the basics. If you don't know where to look then start with WP, it will give you a good run down of the science and the anti-science. If it's too much of a bother to read beyond the MSM then IMHO you should extend that apathy toward posting on the subject.

No they're not. Real Climate article http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

Guess who runs realcimate...

Lets find out if Joe Plumber ripped off his last customer. "Hey Joe, did you rip off your last customer? No? Well OK then. Joe didn't rip off his last customer."

In your post above, what's missing is the bit where you explain what was wrong with Steve McIntyre's analysis.

I don't need to. Others have done it for me. Except those others happen to be climate scientists, so I guess that doesn't count.

Because although you delight in the ad-hominem against him, you will note that his criticisms are hard to dispute, particularly the excellent work he did on Briffa and the Yamal series.

No they're not. Real Climate article http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

And at the end there is even a convenient link to a published peer reviewed research article refuting the claims.

The problem here is that none of the inquires bothered to interview those in a position to "verify" the claims. Indeed, I don't believe any of them even asked McIntyre for a statement, even though he was the subject of a lot of the bile in the emails.

And what claims would those be exactly? And why would thy ask McIntyre for a statement? Unlike the jackass who dumped their mail server and selected only the emails that he/she/it wanted to show, the investigators had access to all of them, plus whatever else they wanted.

You obey the law and honour the request. Your ego is not a higher authority on these matters, unless you're as arrogant and self-regarding as the Climate-Gate clique and their supporters

I never said he made the right decision. People hold up that quote and turn him into the "Evil Climate Conspiracy Monster". He had his reasons for doing what he did, and it had a lot more to do with the feeling being unnecessarily harassed than "hiding the data".

If your data, methods and claims are water-tight, you've got nothing to worry about.

Oh my. You are so naive.

It took years of fighting before anything was done about smoking. It took years of fighting before anything was done about acid rain. It took years of fighting before anything was done about CFCs and the ozone hole. In all cases there was "water-tight" research (and lot's of it) showing that bad shit was happening. But that doesn't matter when you have a billion dollar PR machine on your side. You don't even need to refute the research. All you need to do is plant a little seed of doubt and all that water-tight science won't mean jack shit in front of the public or congress.

You can't show research proving that something a multi-billion dollar conglomerate is doing is bad and expect your research to be the end of the discussion. They will attack you, drag you through the mud, crucify you, and leave you to the crows.

If they're cobbled together from poorly documented, poorly maintained, part-deleted data, with dubious analysis, as was the case here, then the claims *you* are making, upon which trillions of dollars depend, should not be taken seriously.

How many times does this need to be repeated? CRU != Climate Science Community. It doesn't. Nobody is making a trillion dollar decision based soley on the research done by CRU. No one. Really.

However, when you have thousands of climate scientists from every major national research group on the planet all reporting research that indicates the same thing, maybe, just maybe, people should take notice.

Even if CRU falsified EVERYTHING, there's still thousands upon thousands of research papers out there all showing the same damn thing.

You're also making a lot of claims in regards to the quality of their research, which really you don't seem to know much about. You don't get published in research journals by putting a pile a crap together and sending it in. You won't even make it past the initial review.

Climate science, like any other science branch, is highly competitive. If you send in some POS paper other researchers will be m

I've done my own research and read the emails. The researchers there may be dicks, yes, but nothing nefarious was going on. Climateaudit and Wattsupwiththat are both tend to cherry pick data points that don't agree with the overall assessment, and then say "OMG THE WHOLE THING IS WRONG BECAUSE COLORADO'S WEATHER ISN'T GOING NUTS!"

Blogs are not the place for reputable criticism. I could just as easily point you to http://realclimate.org which are actually scientists at CRU, NOAA, and NASA to debunk all of your conspiracy theories. I would like (and have searched for, but maybe just not hard enough) published, peer reviewed evidence that climate science as we know it is actually incorrect. Not just Mann, et al (who do sound like they are douchebags), but the entire rest of the field.

Or this problem: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/ippc-sealevel-gate/ The errors in IPCC report actually cut both ways.

In reports of this size, there will always be small errors. The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science, and then fox news et. al. broadcast this even further. The result is a complete disaster: people will not make the sacrifices needed to stop climate change if they have doubts about whether it is happening. A great example is leakegate, where the Sunday Telegraph used a tiny citation error to suggest a conspiracy of scientists to falsify evidence of global warming (the UN report cited another report which contained the peer reviewed work, rather than directly citing the peer reviewed work). Eventually, the Telegraph retracted their article, but not before the damage was done. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/leakegate-a-retraction/ As Mark Twain said, lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on...

If you want the data, go here.

Though, lacking the ability to do a google search is hardly a recommendation of someone's ability to deal with the data and draw any meaningful conclusions anyway...

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's an orthogonality problem. If you have a Medieval Warming Period (MWP) -- then temperatures *aren't* unprecedented and become mathematically decoupled from CO2. Mann's "Hockeystick" graph erased the MWP -- problem is, the approach is worthless, and while Mann may believe it (again not conspiracy theory), it isn't true. Thus we still have the MWP (and the RWP, the Minoan, and the Holocene optimum) -- all of which were warmer than today and none of which had AGW contributions.

Well, yeah! The Medieval Warm Period, which was probably local, and restricted to Europe, but with a lower global average temperature... You could at least try to read a bit before spouting talking points...

A challenge to the geeks at slashdot -- read "HARRY_README.txt". If you believe a single thing that comes out of CRU after that, I've got a bridge to sell.

Though you haven't actually linked it, I'll try to answer.

First, let RealClimate speak (scroll down a little)...

HARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the documentation, metadata and databases associated with the legacy CRU TS 2.1 product, which is not the same as the HadCRUT data (see Mitchell and Jones, 2003 for details). The CSU TS 3.0 is available now (via ClimateExplorer for instance), and so presumably the database problems got fixed. Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be.

Second, how is this any different from major, even mission critical code in so many other domains? Even in places which could cost thousands of lives (nuclear reactor safety systems, for example... Ever done a code audit on the software for those safety systems)?

Keep in mind that these people aren't professional coders; they're scientists using IDL and Fortran (90, I presume), and probably other languages like Matlab. The code is an implementation of their hypothesis. It's usually ugly, and the first one that works the way they want it. Maintainability? Hah! (note: here, I speak as one who has had to translate "scientist" code into "real" code).

Spouting talking points is hardly critical thinking, which is why you people are called "deniers" and not "skeptics".

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's an orthogonality problem. If you have a Medieval Warming Period (MWP) -- then temperatures *aren't* unprecedented and become mathematically decoupled from CO2. Mann's "Hockeystick" graph erased the MWP -- problem is, the approach is worthless, and while Mann may believe it (again not conspiracy theory), it isn't true. Thus we still have the MWP (and the RWP, the Minoan, and the Holocene optimum) -- all of which were warmer than today and none of which had AGW contributions.

Well, yeah! The Medieval Warm Period, which was probably local, and restricted to Europe, but with a lower global average temperature... You could at least try to read a bit before spouting talking points...

A challenge to the geeks at slashdot -- read "HARRY_README.txt". If you believe a single thing that comes out of CRU after that, I've got a bridge to sell.

Though you haven't actually linked it, I'll try to answer.

First, let RealClimate speak (scroll down a little)...

HARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the documentation, metadata and databases associated with the legacy CRU TS 2.1 product, which is not the same as the HadCRUT data (see Mitchell and Jones, 2003 for details). The CSU TS 3.0 is available now (via ClimateExplorer for instance), and so presumably the database problems got fixed. Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be.

Second, how is this any different from major, even mission critical code in so many other domains? Even in places which could cost thousands of lives (nuclear reactor safety systems, for example... Ever done a code audit on the software for those safety systems)?

Keep in mind that these people aren't professional coders; they're scientists using IDL and Fortran (90, I presume), and probably other languages like Matlab. The code is an implementation of their hypothesis. It's usually ugly, and the first one that works the way they want it. Maintainability? Hah! (note: here, I speak as one who has had to translate "scientist" code into "real" code).

Spouting talking points is hardly critical thinking, which is why you people are called "deniers" and not "skeptics".

>>responding badly to reasoned criticism

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered?

For example;
"This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like "hide the decline") and then hyped into "Climategate"."
(http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/)

Or you can just read the editor's comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here's an interplay between Pielke and Stefan:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/#comment-159627

Or the tendency for certain climatologists to throw out offensive notions like the Salem Hypothesis when someone disagrees with them.

>>In fact, climatologists express how "well understood" an effect is by the error bars on the radiative forcings chart.

To a certain extent you can do this. If you have a positive or negative feedback cycle that is poorly understood, error bars become so large as to be meaningless. For example, if all the ice in Greenland suddenly slides into the ocean next week, it would create a global catastrophe that would lead to various situations well outside of our confidence levels.

Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies.

High efficiency cheap plastic solar cells covering an area of about 230sq km would power the whole Earth. The technology is in the research phase now, and is expected to be rapidly commercialised. 230sq km of plastic is easily achievable - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area of 700,000 sq km to 15,000,000 sq km, and that was made by accident.

Nuclear power is here now.

Yes, we already have a working nuclear fusion energy source.

Educate yourself:

Sea level:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/

Tree ring:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

'Decline':
http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Global_temperatures_are_decreasing

Peer review:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-a-necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-ii/

Educate yourself:

Sea level:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/

Tree ring:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

'Decline':
http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Global_temperatures_are_decreasing

Peer review:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-a-necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-ii/

Educate yourself:

Sea level:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/

Tree ring:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

'Decline':
http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Global_temperatures_are_decreasing

Peer review:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-a-necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-ii/

Educate yourself:

Sea level:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/

Tree ring:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

'Decline':
http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Global_temperatures_are_decreasing

Peer review:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-a-necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-ii/

Educate yourself:

Sea level:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/

Tree ring:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

'Decline':
http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=Global_temperatures_are_decreasing

Peer review:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-a-necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-ii/

The Watts research is case in point. He went out and did legwork that everyone else was ignoring. Unless you're actually claiming it's better off not knowing the quality of surface stations, he made a contribution. But the papers you reference, and your own statements on here, show your amazing reluctance to ever grant a single scrap of credit to the guy.

Yet again, it's the "everyone else was ignoring" clause that I'm disagreeing with. Watts isn't the first person to repeatedly survey stations in person, as riverat1 and I have been saying over and over. Notice that the emphasis is on correcting for undocumented changes. That is, scientists long since recognized that even their labor-intensive survey efforts would miss changes to the site quality, so the last decade has seen additional steps above and beyond repeated surveys. Watts isn't the first person to examine stations in person, he's just the first person to become an internet celebrity by claiming he is.

Climate science is closer in practice to economics than any other field. So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability.

Radtea made a similar argument, which I've already pointed out is ridiculous.

To use your own words, it's like a modified Salem Hypothesis that lets non-physicists like climate scientists think that their hand-waving is a legitimate form of argumentation, whereas everyone else is an anti-scientific nutjob. It probably comes from their field being only tenuously considered a science. Yes, yes, I've read http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, and as someone who as actually studied the philosophy of science, in graduate school... RC.org is wrong, again.

You're not the first "graduate student of the philosophy of science" to say these things. And it's really odd to see you label me a non-physicist. My physics B.S. is in physics, with a research emphasis on experimental optics. I went to graduate school planning to focus on quantum teleportation (that presentation and review paper was part of my physics M.S. defense). It's only in the last 4 years that I switched from optics to studying Earth's time-variable gravity field using GRACE k-band satellite ranging measurements (which got me interested in the physics of the climate). I realize that you think that "I don't fucking know what I'm talking about" but I'm curious as to what you think qualifies someone to be a physicist?

You're not familiar with the Gettier paradox then. I'm tempted here to just quote a bunch of papers on it to show you why you're wrong, without ever saying why, just to show you why your method of argumentation is so poor. But I'll just leave it up to you to research it and figure out for yourself why this claim is fallacious.

Again, you're not the first person to change the topic from "how many independent empirical data sources have been shown to be consistent with dynamical climate model ensembles" to something like "Is justified true belie

>>I'm tired of the repetitive nature of my conversations with non-physicists.

If you can't engage in proper argumentation, then you're really not helping. An argument takes the form of a thesis statement, and supporting statements and references. When the references you cite support my point, and you don't make a thesis statement, you're accomplishing less than nothing.

The Watts research is case in point. He went out and did legwork that everyone else was ignoring. Unless you're actually claiming it's better off not knowing the quality of surface stations, he made a contribution. But the papers you reference, and your own statements on here, show your amazing reluctance to ever grant a single scrap of credit to the guy. I actually agree with you that he's a nutjob, but these... blinders... that climate scientists put on really does away with a lot of the aura the field so desperately tries to craft around itself.

To use your own words, it's like a modified Salem Hypothesis that lets non-physicists like climate scientists think that their hand-waving is a legitimate form of argumentation, whereas everyone else is an anti-scientific nutjob. It probably comes from their field being only tenuously considered a science. Yes, yes, I've read http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, and as someone who as actually studied the philosophy of science, in graduate school... RC.org is wrong, again. Climate science is closer in practice to economics than any other field. So either economics is a science, or climate science isn't, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can't run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability.

>>Claiming that 90% of the stations are compromised would require showing that the previously documented empirical evidence hadn't corrected for the bias

You're not familiar with the Gettier paradox then. I'm tempted here to just quote a bunch of papers on it to show you why you're wrong, without ever saying why, just to show you why your method of argumentation is so poor. But I'll just leave it up to you to research it and figure out for yourself why this claim is fallacious.

Second quick note, based on one of your references (I've been reading through the various links off your site, good times):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/

Scroll down to the Hansen analysis. It's basically saying what I'm saying, that the prediction was wrong, statistically speaking, or at least on the outer edges of the lower boundary. Whereas I was probably a bit too harsh on it, RC.org is characteristically too weak.

A prediction of 0.26C+0.05C versus a reality of 0.19+0.05C becomes "running a little warm compared to the real world. BUT..." This is what I take RC.org to task for. It's not their science, really, nor their facts or data. (That's why I read the site.) It's the fact that they are, well, biased.

Let me continue the analogy for you for warmists - no matter how many natural drivers you show them, they always insist that the evidence is not strong enough, because there is "unaccounted for warming."

The concern is not "unaccounted for warming," but rather the warming that is accounted for and expected.

Of course science != consensus. But here's a refutation of the whitewash

You are citing the notorious Wegman report as a "refutation" of a report by the most respected independent scientific societies in the nation, if not the world? Are you joking?

So you didn't look at any of their graphs? Here, try page 792-793.

Nothing about "runaway global warming" there, either, just projected increases of a few degrees. That certainly will have serious consequences, but nothing approaching what you would get with runaway global warming such as is seen on Venus.

If CO2 has the same effect no matter where it comes from, you can't have lags -> CO2 emitted, whether from oceans in response to solar changes, or from supervolcanoes or model T fords, always acts as a positive feedback effect and raises temperatures. Lags wouldn't exist if CO2 amplified the increase in temperature, since whatever triggered the initial CO2 release, you'd end up with a positive feedback effect.

There is a positive feedback effect. Fortunately, there are also negative feedbacks that dampen this effect to some extent, at least for CO2 increases anticipated for plausible scenarios. Again, your misconceptioin on this matter simply illustrates how easy it is to fool yourself by making handwaving arguments about systems containing multiple positive and negative feedbacks. This is why models are so crucial--they serve as an invaluable "sanity check." Note that code for a number of models is publicly available, so you can even try them out yourself to verify that the relationship between CO2 and temperature in the model is as described, without the need to postulate absurdities like "CO2 memory"

I'm doing a PhD in a climate area now ... it's clear that we're into at least 40 years of warming, even if we turned off every last CO2 source today!

That's disappointing coming from someone working on a climate PhD. The ocean is absorbing over 40% of the carbon dioxide we currently emit. If we stopped all emissions the absorption would continue and carbon dioxide levels would immediately start slowly dropping, and very soon it would start cooling.

There was an article covering this at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/climate-change-commitments/

Man cannot increase the water vapor level directly, because it quickly precipitates out of the atmosphere. That's why it's a feedback, not a forcing.

Do you think he's getting rich as head of GISS?

If he has any investment sense, yes. But there's more to being the perpetual head of a government agency than money. It carries a bit of power and prestige.

So far he's been more right than wrong about what he's said.

He made three claims: 1988 was warmest year on record (I gather the 30s are still contenders for warmest year on record through 1988, the estimates for those years is lower than 1988, but the actual temperatures may have been higher), second, that because global warming is large, it is caused by the greenhouse effect (I think it likely that the current global warming is caused in large part by human release of greenhouse gasses, but Hansen's conclusion is simply logically faulty), and third, that GISS models predict bad things will happen. The last point remains correct, I imagine, with current GISS models still predicting bad things will happen. Whether bad things actually will happen (or have happened for that matter) remains conjecture. If you look at his actual projection, his models overstated global warming. Two of the scenarios mentioned there, "A" and "B" overstate effective forcing from greenhouse gasses (GHGs) by something like 80% in the case of scenario A (which was intended to be an extreme scenario) and almost 10% for scenario B. The third scenario was a fixed level of forcing, there might be some AGW effect, but it would be bounded and reached by the year 2000. So we ended up somewhere between the weaker AGW scenario and a scenario of no effective AGW. There is a huge difference in what makes good policy choices in this region.

I can't rule out that scenario B was actually more accurate originally, but got sexed up for the 1988 congressional hearing. After all, even by 1988, Hansen had somehow acquired a reputation as someone who'd deliver reliable AGW testimony. He's also on record as saying some remarkably stupid and biased stuff for a scientist. Given that the CRU (which maintains other important global temperature estimates) has also suffered from biased management, we have to consider the possibility that our best estimates of global temperature are compromised and biased upwards by some unknown amount. While I know there are thousands of climatology papers out there, I have yet to see papers (aside from some critics of dubious provenance) either criticize or independently verify the estimates from these two groups.

In other words, Hansen's predictions are borne out by possibly biased GISS and CRU research. Now maybe there is independent verification of these temperature estimates. I'd be interested in hearing about that. But as it looks to me, Hansen gets to verify his own predictions and yet, he was still off in favor of the political view that he continues to wish to propagate.

'mon, really? You're going to sit there with a straight face and accept that not measuring 75% of the earth's surface temp is fine and dandy?

Sounds pretty good to me. Polls can obtain highly reliable statistical results by sampling a much smaller % of a population. Do you have any evidence that 75% is insufficient? For example, a model in which sampling 75% of the earth's surface yields substantially incorrect conclusions?

Sure. Volanoes

BZZZT! Wrong. It is a myth that volcanos emit anything approaching the CO2 released into the atmosphere by man . But it is true that one way in which climate models are tested is by examining whether the predicted climate effects of volcanos match observations.

They reproduce it by hard coding it in, not by actually running the simulation.

BZZZT! Wrong again

Yes, in the 1800s ships took temperature readings of the ocean. And just how accurate, precise and numerous were those readings?

There were about 280,000 such readings, covering most of the world's oceans. With that many readings, you'd expect the means to be pretty accurate and precise. Unless, of course, you have some kind of model that demonstrates that more readings are required?

I love Fermi as much as the next guy, but a systemic bias isn't going to "cancel out".

Any fixed bias cancels out in determination of a trend. Try it yourself. Take a set of x,y values, do a linear regression. Then add a fixed value to all of the y values and do it again. You'll find that the slope of the fitted line does not change at all.

I'm arguing that the default here is an assertion of ignorance, not an assertion of culpability. Identifying gaps does not mean I've got a better idea, it just means that your idea isn't as good as you think it is.

In other words, you are engaging in exactly the same reasoning as the creationists, pointing to "gaps," and trying to suggest that current theory would be unable to account for the unknown contents of those gaps. When you assert with no theoretical basis that the number, accuracy, and precision of measurements is inadequate to evaluate climate change, you are making just such a "gap" argument.

And here's the rub -> negative feedbacks. Is climate highly sensitive to CO2, or insensitive? And here's where your basic physics kick AGW in the nards -> CO2 has a specific maximum spectrum it can absorb, after which, you get no additional warming.

BZZZT! False. This was an error in early modeling which has been known to be mistaken for half a decade. See here, here, and here. But just like creationists, who are still trotting out arguments that were debunked in the time of Darwin, anti-AGW debaters continue to trot out ancient fallacies. For estimates of climate sensitivity derived from a wide variety of observations, see here.

Look, in the end, if you're really thinking like a scientist here, tell me what evidence, either in the various proxy records or in direct observation, would convince you that the climate is not highly sensitive to CO2?

To have even minimal credibility, you need a mathematical model showing that it is possible to reasonably model historical and prehistorical climate change and the climatic effects

'mon, really? You're going to sit there with a straight face and accept that not measuring 75% of the earth's surface temp is fine and dandy?

Sounds pretty good to me. Polls can obtain highly reliable statistical results by sampling a much smaller % of a population. Do you have any evidence that 75% is insufficient? For example, a model in which sampling 75% of the earth's surface yields substantially incorrect conclusions?

Sure. Volanoes

BZZZT! Wrong. It is a myth that volcanos emit anything approaching the CO2 released into the atmosphere by man . But it is true that one way in which climate models are tested is by examining whether the predicted climate effects of volcanos match observations.

They reproduce it by hard coding it in, not by actually running the simulation.

BZZZT! Wrong again

Yes, in the 1800s ships took temperature readings of the ocean. And just how accurate, precise and numerous were those readings?

There were about 280,000 such readings, covering most of the world's oceans. With that many readings, you'd expect the means to be pretty accurate and precise. Unless, of course, you have some kind of model that demonstrates that more readings are required?

I love Fermi as much as the next guy, but a systemic bias isn't going to "cancel out".

Any fixed bias cancels out in determination of a trend. Try it yourself. Take a set of x,y values, do a linear regression. Then add a fixed value to all of the y values and do it again. You'll find that the slope of the fitted line does not change at all.

I'm arguing that the default here is an assertion of ignorance, not an assertion of culpability. Identifying gaps does not mean I've got a better idea, it just means that your idea isn't as good as you think it is.

In other words, you are engaging in exactly the same reasoning as the creationists, pointing to "gaps," and trying to suggest that current theory would be unable to account for the unknown contents of those gaps. When you assert with no theoretical basis that the number, accuracy, and precision of measurements is inadequate to evaluate climate change, you are making just such a "gap" argument.

And here's the rub -> negative feedbacks. Is climate highly sensitive to CO2, or insensitive? And here's where your basic physics kick AGW in the nards -> CO2 has a specific maximum spectrum it can absorb, after which, you get no additional warming.

BZZZT! False. This was an error in early modeling which has been known to be mistaken for half a decade. See here, here, and here. But just like creationists, who are still trotting out arguments that were debunked in the time of Darwin, anti-AGW debaters continue to trot out ancient fallacies. For estimates of climate sensitivity derived from a wide variety of observations, see here.

Look, in the end, if you're really thinking like a scientist here, tell me what evidence, either in the various proxy records or in direct observation, would convince you that the climate is not highly sensitive to CO2?

To have even minimal credibility, you need a mathematical model showing that it is possible to reasonably model historical and prehistorical climate change and the climatic effects

Unless folks here disagree with the statement. Then they are not climatologist and should be ignored.

Members of the National Academy of Science are not random folks--they are people who have a lifetime of experience evaluating scientific data, and major scientific accomplishments attesting to their skill.

So while the professional climatologists are doubtless the most qualified to evaluate scientific data and methods, if for some reason you doubt their ability or honesty, the NAS (and similar independent scientific societies of other nations) are the next most authoritative source.

As for Al Gore, he has no particular qualifications in climate science, he is just a skilled communicator who listens to and reports what the real scientists are saying. But climate scientists who have reviewed Mr. Gore's movie have concluded that while there were some minor errors, he got it mostly right.

timesonline got it wrong. CRU does not produce original data, and never even had the originals of the raw data in their possession. The original raw data is owned and retained by the various national meteorological services that obtained it. They don't send out their originals to anybody. Copies of the data were loaned to CRU for purposes of analysis. There is no particular reason for CRU to retain those copes after the study was completed and the results published. Scientific etiquette and common decency demands that raw data should be requested from the group that obtained it. Besides, any real scientist who wanted to check their conclusions would go to the source for the most authoritative, up-to-date data.

While some meteorological services charge a fee for access to the data, much of it is available to the public for free. A useful index to the available data, both raw and processed, is available here

I have to wonder why so many in the AGW camp are not concerned that data and methods have been lost.

Because they have actually looked into these claims and have discovered them to be false. The raw climate data is retained and archived by the various national meteorological services that obtained and owns it

Climate science is actually one of the more open fields of science, and a great deal of the data, methods, even code for computer models is publicly available.

A good index can be found here

Except that the ocean data and the satellite data agree with the surface data. And multiple analyses of the biases in the surface measurements have found that the errors are unable to account for the measured trend.

Perhaps you misunderstand saturation. Only specific frequencies are absorbed by CO2. Only a certain amount of those frequencies are sent out by the sun. Once those frequencies are completely absorbed, no further absorption is possible, because no further frequencies of that sort exist.

While scientific errors are eventually corrected in the scientific literature, it seems that within the denialosphere no error ever dies. You are repeating an early mistake--one that was recognized and corrected half a century ago. The source of the error was the failure to properly consider transfer of energy among layers in the atmosphere.

What turns out to be critical is the altitude from which energy is radiated into space. Adding CO2 at higher altitudes has the effect of moving the effective altitude of radiation emission up to higher altitudes from which radiation is emitted less effectively, because it is cooler. Even if CO2 is saturated at lower altitudes, it will not be at the highest, so it is possible to A more detailed explanation is provided here

That's not a prediction, that's an ad hoc rationalization. If you see CO2 lagging, you assume that there was no "CO2 added directly to the atmosphere" (even though, no matter what the source, human, ocean, plant or otherwise, it's still "added"). If you see CO2 leading, you assume that the CO2 as "added directly".

It's not an assumption, it is an unavoidable consequence of the physics of CO2 absorption and solubility. Because there is a positive feedback between CO2 induced warming and release of CO2 from the oceans, it is necessarily the case that if they oceans are warmed by some factor other than CO2, then CO2 is increased after a delay--and if CO2 is directly added to the system, then temperature will increase later on. Since global climate models are physical models that incorporate the radiation absorption/emission spectrum of CO2 and the temperature dependence of CO2 solubility, they necessarily exhibit this behavior.

These scientists are drawing the conclusion that industrialized modern man is the cause yet they fail to explain why global temperatures were higher than they are today before the 14th century.

Because it's not something that the anthropogenic climate change theory seeks to disprove. What it does assert is, in some hundred years, the medieval warm period (as felt in places where it was indeed observed) will seem like a fucking cool time to live in, and the global temperature will continue to rise if we don't drastically curtail our CO2 emissions.

why they were higher when dinosaurs dominated the planet.

Why, there is a lot of research about that. But why does it feel like some kind of triumph to point at this and say: see, dinosaurs could live with those temperatures (which rose gradually over millenia)? Does it mean a damn thing for our potential troubles in adapting to an abrupt raise of temperature at a scale that humans have never experienced?

As far as these scientists and their statement, I agree with others here who've expressed the opinion that they're only hurting the pro-AGW camp. The best thing they could do would be to advocate for a full disclosure of all raw data and have it made available to anyone, and set up something like the X-Prize for anyone that can come up with a decently-working climatological model whose code and algorithms can be released publicly and tested by anyone willing to do so.

The notion that the code and algorithms for climate models is secret is an urban legend. Model algorithms are described in published scientific papers. Code for a number of models, as well as quite a bit of data, both raw and processed, can be found here.

Here is an independent group that is rewriting the GISTEMP temperature-reconstruction data as an open source project.

Actually, if you look at the statistical distribution of estimates from the models and other constraints on climate sensitivity, the lower limit is pretty well known, so the likelihood that anticipated increases in CO2 will not produce dangerous warming is quite small. What is not well established is the upper limit. This article gives the confidence limits on warming derived from various sources, and explains why the upper margin of error is so much wider than the lower one.

Moreover, there are a number of possible factors that could make the consequences of global warming much worse, but which are not understood well enough to model. These include possible destabilization of ocean methane clathrates to release massive quantities of additional greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, and also destabilization of polar ice by mechanisms (e.g. ice sheet flow) other than melting (discussed here).

I wonder whether our civilization will collapse. We have a problem. But instead of arguing about how big this problem is, and what to do about it, too many of us are in denial. It may be that the consequences are mild enough that we can get away with such behavior. If we acted that way towards every problem we face, we would die.

But I wouldn't care to bet on this problem being no big deal, particularly when we don't have to and it's actually more costly to do so. Contrary to the knee jerk thinking that this is all going to be very expensive, the solutions will make our civilization more efficient. That's right, switching to WWS (wind, wave, and solar) and weaning ourselves off of oil would be worth doing even if AGW wasn't real. We'll save money. We could leave the Middle East alone at a huge savings in money and lives.

Maybe you have not appreciated just how wonderful an electric motor is compared to a combustion piston engine? Engines are smelly, polluting, noisy, complicated, unreliable, bulky, cumbersome, expensive, dangerously hot, and hard to operate. An electric motor turns on and off in an instant, and is so quiet, smooth, steady, and small. Doesn't need oil changes. Doesn't vibrate its load, causing more wear and forcing the use of heavier components to withstand it. Converts more than 90% of its input into useful work, versus 30% for engines. If that isn't enough, to maybe better see how awful engines are, imagine using a fan powered by a gasoline engine. You'd be choking on the fumes it'd be blowing in your face. You'd have to rig up some kind of belt drive so you could put the engine outside, maybe add a flue to exhaust the fumes, maybe put it in a closet to muffle the noise. What is the matter with you that you can bear to continue living with piston engines and other assorted inferior tech if you don't have to? Is familiarity worth that much? It's not as big a change as you might think. Trains have been halfway there for decades, with the diesel electrics. For railroads, the advantages of driving wheels with electric motors have been so big that it's been more than worth the losses involved in the conversion. Everywhere we can, we use electric motors in preference. The reason they aren't yet widespread in cars is that their "fuel" is hard to store and transfer quickly.

I see little hope for us if a seemingly intelligent person (like yourself?) can't go see for yourself and be honest enough to admit that this information is not fake or wrong or flawed. It would help if there weren't all these liars out there pretending to be scientists-- and have no doubt, those sorts aren't making innocent mistakes, no. They are lying, and they know it. What they may not understand is that they aren't doing good science. Don't seem to get what good science is. They actually think that real scientists make up bull like they do, and that doing so is somehow not the same thing as lying, or that being careful with the facts is not important. There is no way a group as widespread, diverse, numerous, and contentious as real scientists could or would engineer a massive conspiracy to fake something like this, or that lies or mistakes could long go unnoticed and unremarked. Nor is it conceivable that all of us are so stupid as to be mistaken or wrong, and wrong in the same way when there are infinitely many contradictory and mutually exclusive ways to be wrong. Nor can you put this down to "groupthink". If you give that notion any credibility, you fail to understand how competitive and factual real science is.

If you've understood how improbable it is that we're lying or wrong, then how can you not see that our information on the climate does show a break from the past, and that it coincides with the rise of our fossil fuel usage and this is not a coincidence b

The inhospitality of England to vineyards has been greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, the existence of a regional warm period in northern Europe is not really in dispute (PDF)

Furthermore, it seems to suggest that the Earth can warm up several degrees and actually be beneficial for mankind in terms of increased growing seasons for many areas and increased food production in general. It sort of begs the question.... what are we worried about even if the global environment is warming up?

It is certainly possible that some northerly areas might benefit from longer growing seasons. On the other hand, the temperate areas that currently enjoy a near optimal climate, and that produce much of the world's food would be expected to suffer. So a country like Greenland might benefit, while the US would probably lose big. Since agriculture cannot shift from one region to another that rapidly, countries that currentl import large quantities of foods like grain may experience massive starvation.

That's mostly an urban myth - see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/

It's the catastrophic predictions based upon mystery models with hidden data that bothers me.

"Mystery models with hidden data" is an urban myth. Any publication has to describe the models and the data well enough for another scientist to reproduce it. Many of the models and much of the data is freely available over the internet.

Go to the NOAA/NCDC web site to get their code. It's available. Go the the NASA/GISS web site for their data and the Model E code, one of the major GCM's. Read the published papers for methodology. It's mostly out there if you care to put in the work to examine it. There are links to lots of data and code on this page.

And you wonder why people get sick of hearing nonsense like "mystery models with hidden data"? Because it is fundamentally a lie repeated by people like yourself either willfully or through being too lazy to actually look and see what is publicly available. I recommend that you start at the handy page of links provided by the climate scientists who run the RealClimate site. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

On that page you will find links to NCDC raw station data which is used to compile the NCDC and NASA GISS global surface temperature reconstructions. You will also find links to the Global Paleo Climatology Network, maintained by NOAA, containing vasts amounts of proxy data such as tree rings ice cores etc. You will also find links to freely available climate model code. And lots more besides. Try visiting the NASA GISS site where just about everything they do is downloadable - data, papers, models, code - the lot.

This single page of links provides any thinking person who posseses the requisite skills, with sufficient information to begin their own evaluation of climate science. Or you could start by reading some of the published research.

People will stop saying "you are full of it" when you stop constructing straw men and telling porkies.

Climate models are fairly tightly constrained, because they are not fits to arbitrary equations with lots of free parameters, but rather simulations of physical processes for which most of the critical parameters are fairly well known from other data. So the capacity to improve the fit by adjusting the variables is limited. A climate model also has to be consistent with historical (and what is known of prehistorical) climate data, as well as the climate response to "natural experiments" like volcanic eruptions. See here and here for explanation. Further information about the uncertainties in model projections can be found here (PDF)