Slashdot Mirror

I have a hard time trusting historical temperature records because they are not calculated every year in the same way. Furthermore, every single weather station is not audited to make sure that it is has the same conditions over time. For example, some stations have been moved without attribution.

I'm sorry but you're going to have to provide some evidence that temperature records are not calculated the same every year. As I know it they are calculated the same and if there is a change in methodology they go back and recalculate all of the previous years so they have a consistent record. Anything else wouldn't make sense scientifically.

There are 5 major surface temperature records that are independent of each other. HADCRUT, NASA, NOAA, JMA and Berkeley Earth. While the first 4 are selective of the temperature stations they use Berkeley Earth uses every single station they can. All 5 records are in substantial agreement.

Go read up on the Berkeley Earth group. They are independent of government, industry or philanthropic ventures. They post all of their raw data and analysis code online. They use 5 times more data than other groups. Yet their results are still in agreement with the other major temperature records. After you investigate them come back and tell me what you think they're doing wrong.

The only thing that is worrying about the sats is the way they're calibrated which also sometimes changes on a year to year basis which is again questionable. I'd rather look at a raw output of the system over time without modification and then see their suggested calibration. Absent that... I'm a little too paranoid about the whole thing to just take it on faith that everything was done properly.

As I said the raw output of the satellites is measurements of microwave emissions of O2. I have no doubt the raw data is available but it takes knowledge to be able to use it. It takes a lot of processing to convert that raw data into temperatures.

I've read that piece by Judith Curry before. I'm not particularly impressed. She spins things from her POV. I have some respect for Dr. Curry as she has the training to understand climate science. She stands out as a contrarian to mainstream climate science and it's good to have people like her (and Roy Spencer to name another) to make it more likely to catch egregious errors. Yet the contrarians haven't been able to make much headway against the mainstream.

As I said in the previous response 2014 is just another year in the data that makes up climate. Human nature primes us to take note of record events even if they're not particularly meaningful by themselves. I'm guilty of that myself from time to time.

You're still ignoring the Shaping Tomorrows World article.

So you're saying the pause would have to last for 30 years for you to take note?

Pretty much. Now that 2014 has been declared the warmest year on record by 3 of the major temperature records it's difficult to call it a pause. The slope of warming may be lower than in the 1980's and 1990's but it has continued warming.

There has been a lot of research into reasons for the change in slope of warming that has come up with a number of hypotheses. It appears to me that it's a combination of a number of those.

More aerosols in the atmosphere from industrialization, particularly in SE Asia and from a number of moderately large volcanic eruptions.

ENSO being dominated by La Nina's that cause more heat to be aborbed by the oceans. The 2011/2012 La Nina was particularly strong but it was still the warmest La Nina year ever recorded. The PDO going into a cool phase.

And the lowest solar cycle in over 100 years had a slight effect. Put all of that together and you have a slower warming trend for a while.

Now I ask you, how is any climate model supposed to model any of that ahead of time?

The issue is that the warming happens often in 10 year cycles followed by ten years of cooling or flat temperatures.

Where did you get that? I don't think the temperature record supports that hypothesis very well. There has been constant warming since the 1960's (not all of it due to global warming).

Previously climate models treated the ocean as a sink for water only.

GCM's (General Circulation Models or Global Climate Models) have been atmosphere/ocean coupled models since the early 1990's. Coupled models take into account the heat exchange between atmosphere and ocean.

And I feel like that is very easy to do in climate science because of the disorganized way they manage data.

I think climate data is pretty well organized. But it's organized for scientific use, not the general public.

Your climate models have to be tweaked every time they're used BY the people making them.

They are not tweaked to match temperatures. If there is a significant discrepancy between model output and observations that may point to areas where they need to improve the physics of the model but it also may just be a case of natural variability temporarily overwhelming the warming signal. As is obvious climate models are not perfect. Don't you think it's reasonable to make improvements in them as your information about the processes that make up the climate improve?

As I pointed out above there are a number of factors that climate modelers can't know ahead of time so it's unreasonable to expect them to be able to take them into account when they produce their projections. Yet they can have major effects over the short term.

You either didn't read or didn't understand my reference to the Risby, et. al. paper or the article by one of the authors about it. Here it is again. "Well-estimated global warming by climate models"

You're going back to short term thinking again. If you're working off a 30 year running mean then the "pause" doesn't even come in to play. On top of that "pause" is a misnomer. Ocean warming where over 90% of the added energy always goes has not slowed down. It's also a misnomer because although the slope of the warming curve is lower in the 2000's than it was in the 1980's and 1990's warming has continued. In several of the temperature records 2005 and 2010 are the warmest year and 2014 will likely set a new record once they finish crunching the numbers. Finally as I've said you can't expect a climate model to take into account the effects of natural variability since they're impossible to predict ahead of time. Again I direct you to this article about a paper where they selected model runs that just happened by coincidence to have representations of ENSO closer to real world observations of ENSO and it turned out they also modeled real world temperature better too.

Hmm... As I suspected you don't really understand climate models and their limitations. Climate models aren't expected to predict a 10 year period. That's more akin to a weather prediction than a climate prediction. As I have said the standard period for climatology is 30 years.

In fact it's impossible at the present time and may never be possible to produce a climate model that would accurately (to your standards) predict a 10 year period. That's because it's impossible to predict ahead of time the natural variability of things like ENSO and volcanic activity (to name a couple of the big ones). If no one can predict ahead of time the phases of ENSO and volcanic activity how can you expect a climate model to factor them in to its predictions.

The thing about natural variability is its mostly quasi-cyclical stuff (with the possible exception of volcanic activity). That is natural variability factors like ENSO and other ocean oscillations cycle from one extreme to the other over time periods that are not precisely predictable but in the long run their effects net out to near zero. 30 years is the minimum time period for that to happen for the most part.

A note on terminology: Climate models make projections, not predictions. I used "predictions" above to avoid confusing you. They are called projections because many of the real world factors that affect climate like natural variability are not predictable ahead of time and how the level of CO2 in the atmosphere rises depends on what we may or may not do to reduce emissions. So they feed realistic simulations of them to the model and the output is a projection of what will happen if the real world matches the simulation. They run the model many times with different realistic simulations to capture the full range of possibilities of the evolution of climate and what the public mostly sees is graphs of all of the model runs averaged together with uncertainty bars that cover the range and variability of the different runs.

Which brings up a scientific study that was published in Nature last year. Nature is paywalled but here is an article on it by one of its authors.

The gist of the study is that when they selected individual model runs where the realistic simulations of ENSO coincidentally happened to match well with real time observations of ENSO the models temperature output matched up well with real world observations of temperature (maybe even good enough to satisfy you). When they selected model runs where the realistic simulations least matched the real world the temperature projections were way off.

AGW is not based on temperature observations at all. It's based on the radiative absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide and the expected side effects of that. It started at the dawn of human industrialization in the late 1700's although the effect was small enough until some time in the early 1900's to hardly be noticeable.

As it is, they are already the largest emitter of all time.

With the way that china does things, there is ZERO chance that they will change anything. Heck, they continue to expand with 2 new coal plants each WEEK.

Slightly (3 years) out of date, but here you go. From this article, as of 2011, China was in 3rd place in country rankings for historical CO2 emmisions, responsible for less than 1/3rd what the USA was. If you look further down same article, where it lists the top 25 countries for historical CO2 emmisions, adjusted for population, China is not even on the list.

Yet another warmist attempt to educate the masses, regardless of the data.

The paper is based on an amalgamation of several different surveys, that weren't sent to the people he claimed they were sent to

Your reaction to this survey is a perfect example of the motivated rejection of science. Each version of the survey had a different ordering of the questions. Far from being a conspiracy, cunning plot, versiongate, or even shoddy workmanship - it is actually standard practice. But you are unskeptical of any misdirection that allows you to reject the science. http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyVersionGate.html

Likewise, the contrarian blogs who had at first claimed that they never received an invitation to participate have since admitted that they did indeed receive one. Your immediate presumption is that the researchers lied, and therefor you can reject the science. And you are not alone! I cannot find a contrarian blog that did not jump to these crazy conclusions! - http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyCCCresponse1.html

I get the sense that you are all unwitting participants of the follow-up paper ;)

Yet another warmist attempt to educate the masses, regardless of the data.

The paper is based on an amalgamation of several different surveys, that weren't sent to the people he claimed they were sent to

Your reaction to this survey is a perfect example of the motivated rejection of science. Each version of the survey had a different ordering of the questions. Far from being a conspiracy, cunning plot, versiongate, or even shoddy workmanship - it is actually standard practice. But you are unskeptical of any misdirection that allows you to reject the science. http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyVersionGate.html

Likewise, the contrarian blogs who had at first claimed that they never received an invitation to participate have since admitted that they did indeed receive one. Your immediate presumption is that the researchers lied, and therefor you can reject the science. And you are not alone! I cannot find a contrarian blog that did not jump to these crazy conclusions! - http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyCCCresponse1.html

I get the sense that you are all unwitting participants of the follow-up paper ;)

The conspiracy theorists, of course, have been quick to spin counter-theories about this work.

http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyCCCresponse1.html
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyVersionGate.html

The conspiracy theorists, of course, have been quick to spin counter-theories about this work.

http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyCCCresponse1.html
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyVersionGate.html