James Hansen on the Warmest Year Brouhaha

Jamie writes "In response to earlier reports, Dr. James Hansen, top climate scientist with NASA, has issued a statement on the recent global warming data correction. He points out 'the effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.' In a second email he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998, explains why the error occurred (it was not, as reported, a 'Y2K bug') and, in response to errors by 'Fox, Washington Times, and their like,' attacks the 'deceit' of those who 'are not stupid [but] seek to create a brouhaha and muddy the waters in the climate change story.'"

Comments

In other news...

[Wiarumas]

In other news, politicians make a stance to INCREASE global warming to provide economic growth for the automobile industry... others blame terrorists for the data error.

Re:In other news...

[lightsaber777]

If you were here in Detroit you wouldn't be saying things like that. Didn't you know that President Bush doesn't like Michigan and wants to crush the domestic auto makers?

Re:In other news...

[flitty]

The proclamations of the contrarians are a deceit, but their story raises a more important matter, usufruct.

Did he just swear in Gungan?

Re:In other news...

[Jeremy Erwin]

It's a legal concept which (very) roughly corresponds to we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children

To wit:

civil law. The right of enjoying a thing, the property
of which is vested in another, and to draw from the same all the profit,
utility and advantage which it may produce, provided it be without altering the
substance of the thing.

Or to put it another way,

"Sure you can stay at my house for the summer. Just don't trash the place."

The bigger issue

[MyLongNickName]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Is there one place to go to see the data used to make the dire predictions I hear all over the place? I generally accept global warming as a fact, but when I see the amount of contortions one person had to go through to figure out there was a problem in the first place, I start to get suspicious.

Re:The bigger issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed - in paticular, let's see the algorithm. There could be other bugs. It's just as likely that global warming is WORSE than what is being claimed (imagine if the average temperature is actually 1 degree MORE than what is currently being calculated) as it is (in this case) that there was an error in the denier's favor.

Until the data and the algorithm are available to the public for scrutiny, it's difficult to trust the results, much less make the correct policy decisions (as noted above - if global warming is WORSE than we think, then maybe more drastic action is needed and vice versa).

Re:The bigger issue

[morgan_greywolf]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Is there one place to go to see the data used to make the dire predictions I hear all over the place? I generally accept global warming as a fact, but when I see the amount of contortions one person had to go through to figure out there was a problem in the first place, I start to get suspicious. Yes. Check out the Publications section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Web site.

According to this article in Scientific American ($), they've come to the conclusion with 80% certainty that global climate change is not only real, but is caused by human activities. They're new 2007 assessment report isn't on the website yet, but it is discussed in SciAm, so it should be there shortly, I believe. Methodologies are discussed pretty well in the SciAm piece.

Re:The bigger issue

[Christianson]

No direct experience with the data in question, or indeed any climatological data at all, but this isn't really an uncommon case in science. People collect and store their own data. The full extent of raw data is often massive, it's often poorly indexed, and there is no such thing as a consistent storage format. Practically speaking, this means that whenever you want to get someone else's data, you have to get in touch with someone who would have collected it, ask them to filter out the part of the data you want, and then send it to you with an explanation of how to make sense of it. It might seem like secrecy, but it's mostly a product of best use of time. Scientists get grant money by analyzing data and publishing the results, not spending the effort to make the raw data publicly available.

Re:The bigger issue

[morgan_greywolf]

Oops.

Link to the SciAm piece.

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

Scientists get grant money by analyzing data and publishing the results, not spending the effort to make the raw data publicly available.

mmm... maybe that needs to change. Given the current tendency towards knee jerk FUD in some quarters, the only way we're ever going to be able to settle debates like this one is if the data can be subjected to widespread peer review.

Re:The bigger issue

[dreamchaser]

He is talking about the raw data used, not the end result of the study. NASA has been rather secretive about both the data and the algorithms used to draw their conclusions.

Re:The bigger issue

[xappax]

the only way we're ever going to be able to settle debates like this one is if the data can be subjected to widespread peer review.

Not to be elitist, but do you really think you could effectively review the data? I sure as hell couldn't. Which is not to say it should be kept secret, simply that it may not be that urgent to make the raw data hyper-available to every guy on the street. As long as interested scientists - regardless of their previous conclusions or political leanings - can get the raw data when they want to review it, I think the process should work fine.

Because so many people lack the highly specialized knowledge to make sense of the raw data, there are two types of information that are far more important to make widely available: 1) Education on how to be a climate scientist and 2) The conclusions that qualified climate scientists have reached.

Re:The bigger issue

[Coryoth]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Well for startes the data is available. Full gridded data can be found here, along with appropriate fortran code to extract individual months of years. Gridded data for individual years can be found here. Original source data for individual stations can be accessed from here. Detailed accounts of the adjustments for urban heat island effects and compilation procedures used can be found in the papers listed in the references here. Most of those papers (i.e. those by GISS staff) are freely available in the GISS publications database. You did actually look to see if the data and detailed accounts of the methods were available, right?

Re:The bigger issue

[kimvette]

Given that these people claiming "ZOMG We're ruining the Earth! We're gonna melt" say this affects everyone, I think it is their duty to fully disclose the raw data and the methods used to arrive at the final result. After all, if we ARE causing global warming and it's not just a natural trend (remember, Mars is warming to. Is that due to the SUVs, er, probes we put there? I doubt it!) we need to know this ASAP, and by fully disclosing the ENTIRE data and algorithm set, then even religiously-skeptical doubters will HAVE to admit they're right.

Until then, there is too much doubt because the raw data is restricted to a privileged few. I for one don't doubt that global warming is happening, but considering other planets are also warming, I doubt mankind is the cause. Oh, I'm sure that we're a contributor and at least a tiny fraction is due to us, but is our contribution 90% of the increase, or .000000241% of the increase, with the rest being due to natural phenomena?

Remember, in the distant past the Earth was MUCH warmer than it is right now. It's happened before naturally, and is likely to occur again naturally.

Re:The bigger issue

[Evilest Doer]

Given the current tendency towards knee jerk FUD in some quarters, the only way we're ever going to be able to settle debates like this one is if the data can be subjected to widespread peer review.

I wish I could share your optimism, but widespread peer review won't change anything. The problem is due to people who know nothing or very little (which is often worse than nothing) about the sciences. If the raw data is publicly available, it will give the people who want to deny basic science more ammunition for their inane babblings. They won't in reality know the first thing they are talking about, but it will impress the people who want to believe the world is only 6000 years old, or we never went to the moon, or their is no global warming, and so on.

Re:The bigger issue

[plague3106]

C02 emissions aren't causing global warming - the evidence shows that C02 emissions are more likely to be a symptom than cause; but neither side can actually prove it either way, so go with what is more scientifically plausible.

Hmm, the evidence is pretty strong that more CO2 leads to higher tempuratures. If C02 was a symptom, please explain what you think would release more C02 as the tempurature rises.

If you buy a Hybrid to cut your C02 footprint; you get used - it's more environmentally destructive to create one of those inefficient turds than it is to go with what's already out there - you'd have to drive the same one for about 75 years to have done less damage than buying a new oil-burner every 5 - 10.

Citation please? This is the first I've heard this particular theory, so I'd like you to back it up by a reputable source.

Re:The bigger issue

[kimvette]

US Citizens paid for it, US citizens own the data, and if global warming is happening, it affects ALL of us. We should have unfettered access to the raw data and all algorithms used to reach their conclusions.

Re:The bigger issue

[Intron]

Did you look at the graph? The error wasn't in anybody's favor. It was negligable.

The overall shape of the graph is the same - a 0.8 degree rise in average temperature over the last century with increasing slope.

I was in the Bahamas last year measuring water temperature, beach erosion and doing population counts to provide data on why coral is dying off all over the world. Its a complex topic but one of the leading culprits is ocean warming. Coral is adapted to a narrow range. Once the coral reefs are gone, which will be soon, say goodbye to fish diversity and sandy beaches.

I live in New England, the recent scare is over West Nile virus. According to the CDC, over 15,000 people in the U.S. have tested positive for WNV infection since 1999 and over 500 have died.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that a small change in temperature won't have a significant effect.

Re:The bigger issue

[Serengeti]

So, let's not investigate ways to counter global warming. I mean, I can understand your reluctance to blame humanity for it, but are you outright rejecting the need for change??

Re:The bigger issue

[ajs]

they've come to the conclusion with 80% certainty that global climate change is not only real, but is caused by human activities. That's a bit of a mis-statement. The computer models used generate results that conform to that hypothesis with an 80% margin for error. The idea that we're 80% certain that the models are correct is not supported by anything I've read.

As some scientists have pointed out, there's substantial concern about these models and how accurate they can be in the first place. What we know is this: some of the Earth is undergoing substantial climate change (always true, but this is exceptional), and much of the change is in the direction of warming (the arctic and antarctic regions, especially). We also know that CO2 levels have risen. The problem is that correlating those two factors requires that we understand the climate on a macroscopic level, which, sadly, we do not. We have models that predict past activity, but they have so far failed to accurately predict future activity accurately. Dyson suggests a naive model ("no change") would be more accurate that the models we use. That's been hotly debated, and I'm willing to believe that he might have gone a bit overboard there.

Still, the fact of the matter is that we're uncertain about a great many things, and until we are certain, we should be careful about what we insist is "fact".

Re:The bigger issue

[Coryoth]

I think it is their duty to fully disclose the raw data and the methods used to arrive at the final result. The raw data, and the papers giving detailed descriptions of methods used to arrive at the final result. Have fun.

Re:The bigger issue

[kimvette]

if you re-read my post, I indicated that is not the case, and revealing ALL of the data will convince skeptics if the alarmists are right. Where Mars and other planets are warming there is a good chance that global warming is not due to us, or not largely due to us (I'm convinced we are at least a contributor but not that we are the cause). Having the raw data for mars, as far back as the data goes, can help to show us whether or not we are indeed the cause of global warming, because Mars can be used for control data. Is the temp here rising at the same rate as there? Is the trend here faster? How much faster? Then, we need to investigate why: is it due to plentiful water vapor here, or because of industry-emitted greenhouse gases? Having the full picture helps both sides attain their goals.

My problem is that the alarmists are chicken little, and the right wingers are like the people who listened to the boy who cried wolf so many times. There is a happy medium and that is called the scientific method. Alarmists with an agenda cannot be trusted, and neither can the other extreme with the ostrich syndrome.

Re:The bigger issue

[Coryoth]

Hmm, the evidence is pretty strong that more CO2 leads to higher tempuratures. If C02 was a symptom, please explain what you think would release more C02 as the tempurature rises. The usual cause is ocean arming leading to outgassing of CO2 (warmer water can hold less CO2). Historically this has worked with Milankovitch cycles to provide a feeback to the small orbital variations with the released CO2 causing yet more warming, and providing the strong glacial/interglacial cycle we see over the lst million years or so. Of course the GPP is wrog in claiming that CO2 is a symptom of warmer temperatures. It is both a symptom and a cause, at least in theory. In practice, in this particular case we can do isotope analysis of atmospheric CO2 and determine the source of the current increase in CO2 (burned fossil fuels have different isotope ratios). The result is that the current dramatic rise in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic -- it's us doing it. In the past CO2 increased and provided a powerful amplifier for changes that were initially spurred by orbital variation. Now we have CO2 increasing for other reasons, but continuing to provide the same warming effects it has historically.

Re:The bigger issue

[ajs]

Ahem... correcting my statement "80% margin for error" should read "20% margin for error"... that was a silly mistake, but the core point is still there: this is the margin for error with respect to the model's representation of the hypothesis. If the model correctly emulates global climate, then we're 80% certain that it demonstrates that the hypothesis was correct.

Re:The bigger issue

[Tyler Durden]

The Mars thing is unlikely

Remember, in the distant past the Earth was MUCH warmer than it is right now. It's happened before naturally, and is likely to occur again naturally.

True, global temperature does tend to change naturally over time. But it doesn't usually happen so rapidly. And when it does, it tends to suck for all us organisms living here.

Re:The bigger issue

[mdsolar]

In fact, the better check is what occured. Methods (algorithms) were described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be reproduced. The data were made available. There has been no secrecy. An independent coding effort meant that problems were revealed which, as it turned out, had to do with the data sets provided. There may be symultaneous errors in both coding efforts, but this is less likely than if code had been released. Science takes work and if you are not willing to put in the effort to take an average yourself, then you are just making noise. If you do put in the effort, and you find a problem, if it turns out to be an improvement on the original work you'll be politely acknowledged as happened here, even when the problem makes no difference to the conclusions. Independent confirmation of results is crucial. Code comparision is only useful when there are independent code sets to compare. Code is usually only provided in a first publication when it is thought that it will have further utility in broader applications. Methods of taking an average do not generally rise to that level. These attacks on the scientific method by the Inhofe crowd just demonstrate their cynical distortions of science.
--
Replace carbon with silicon: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Is there one place to go to see the data used to make the dire predictions I hear all over the place? I generally accept global warming as a fact, but when I see the amount of contortions one person had to go through to figure out there was a problem in the first place, I start to get suspicious.

There are many 'big issues' with the Global Warming (aka Global Climate Change) crowd. Global Warming is still the best term, since the main thesis is clearly increasing global mean temperature. Of course this implies nothing about local climate variation.

First of all, there's the question of whether Global Warming is a real, long-term trend. It's at a minimum interesting that there were reports in the 1920s of widespread arctic ice melting, followed in the 1970s by a "Global Cooling" scare. This recent revision of which was the warmest year in US history casts even more doubt. Looking further back into history, there has been historical warming in Greenland that exceeds the current trend, well before human produced greenhouse gasses could have been a factor.

I think the global warming skeptics are correct in viewing the results of the various computer models with a wary eye. The models are only as good as the data and assumptions fed into them, as well as the actual algorithms used to model absorption, reflection and emission. Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone?

I wonder what the stance of the environmentalists will be if it's scientifically determined that the current climate trends are a natural phenomenon? Surely we shouldn't mess with Mother Nature... ;-)

I personally think the United States, in particular, is doing quite a bit to address greenhouse gas emissions in particular, and pollution in general. If you really want to make a difference, lobby for more nuclear power going forward. What really needs scrutiny now is China (who just passed the US as a CO2 polluter) as well as the other developing nations with little money but a big hunger for energy. So, all you "anti-Western-industrialism" types, you have a new target.

Re:The bigger issue

[plague3106]

Thanks, that was a very informative post.

Re:The bigger issue

[Intron]

Feel free to report to us all of the pleasant positive effects of global warming to offset my negative ones. Just stick to facts instead of namecalling, tho.

Re:The bigger issue

[hador_nyc]

I was in the Bahamas last year measuring water temperature, beach erosion and doing population counts to provide data on why coral is dying off all over the world. Its a complex topic but one of the leading culprits is ocean warming. Coral is adapted to a narrow range. Once the coral reefs are gone, which will be soon, say goodbye to fish diversity and sandy beaches.

I've heard this before, and I'd like to ask you an honest question. Coral has been around for a long time; according to this link on wikipedia, over 500 million years. Average global climate temperature has been both significantly warmer and cooler in that time. My question is why would warming be the thing that's hurting them? I am not a biologist, nor an expert in this in any way; you are; that's why I'm asking you. To me, and again I'm a radar engineer, it seems more likely that the thing that's different now, and hurting them is us; runoff from our farms; the increased nitrogen and fertilizer in the water, or some other group of chemicals we're putting into the environment. Even CO2, as in the form of making the oceans more acidic, doesn't seem to me to be the problem; since again that too has been higher in coral's history.

Also, beach erosion; how is that bad at all; except for the idiots who build houses or hotels on beaches? Isn't that simply a natural process? I think beaches communities should reverse development, and build back the dunes between the towns and the water. Screw the beach front hotels; it's bad for the environment, and we can still enjoy the beach without having a house or hotel on it!

As for your comment about west nile virus, hell, we had malaria here too; but back before you or I were born, we defeated it. DDT being a big help there; amongst other things. West Nile is not a biggie. If we can stop malaria in Cuba and the South, we can stop it here when it gets warmer. People can adapt.

Re:The bigger issue

[E 99]

Yes. Check out the Publications section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Web site.

According to this article in Scientific American ($), they've come to the conclusion with 80% certainty that global climate change is not only real, but is caused by human activities. They're new 2007 assessment report isn't on the website yet, but it is discussed in SciAm, so it should be there shortly, I believe. Methodologies are discussed pretty well in the SciAm piece.

Yeah, the best of luck to anyone trying to find actual methodology on the IPCC site. Seriously, please post if you find it. I do know how they came to that 80% figure -- a bunch of bickering and bargaining until they could get a majority to vote for 80. Very scientific stuff.

Re:The bigger issue

[bzipitidoo]

There are a lot of things we can do to improve our lives regardless of whether global warming is a problem. Should global warming be a problem, these things will help with that problem and other issues. If global warming is not a problem, these things will still help with the other issues.

For instance, stoplights waste a lot of gas and time. If more intersections were replaced with roundabouts, we'd arrive sooner and use less gas. What's not to like about that? Or, there are a variety of reasons engines are kept idling while stopped-- hard to start, especially in cold weather, or for short waits takes more energy to run the starter than to let it idle. Perhaps if anyone had tried, we could've had instant engine start techniques so reliable that they'd be in everything. Another one is the automatic tranny. We could have the convenience of automatic and the efficiency of manual through a variety of means. And, really we already do have those features in hybrids. But there's nothing in such things for the automakers. They don't pay for gas, their buyers do, and as long as buyers aren't pushing for such improvements, they aren't going to spend effort on it. Anyway, that's just cars. Significant improvements can also be found in buildings and other areas.

Don't let "global warming may not be real" be an excuse to give waste and inefficiency a pass.

Re:The bigger issue

[E 99]

For all I know, most of the models cited by the IPCC are TOP SECRET, but if you want actual data for studying climate change, most of the ice core data is here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/current.htm l
Tree ring data is also available, but conclusions draw from that are more questionable.

Re:The bigger issue

[E 99]

If the raw data is publicly available, it will give the people who want to deny basic science more ammunition for their inane babblings.

What you're talking about, "secret science," is science as cult, science as political power, science as hermetic knowledge, ANYTHING but science as science. Real science has nothing to hide.

Re:The bigger issue

[yakmans_dad]

There isn't any cloak of secrecy. The data and algorithms are, in fact, all available, contrary to assertions. The corrections to the temp record were done with ad hoc scripts and one-off programs which are sometimes problematic to track down and replicate. (c.f. any sufficiently busy academic's desk). If one has a doubt about the accuracy, code it yourself and, if the results vary from the published ones, publish a note which describes the differences. That's countering science with science, not science with quibble. Calibration time. The famous anti "hockey stick" paper was bolstered by a graph which changed the scale of the y-axis by almost an order of magnitude. The "hockey sticks" produced would have shown up in the original graph as so much flutter. Which global warming skeptic publicly objected to that little finesse, eh?

Re:The bigger issue

[Anonymous Coward]

"If the raw data is publicly available, it will give the people who want to deny basic science more ammunition for their inane babblings."

I start to get REALLY NERVOUS and suspicious when I am told that the full release of all information on a given issue will be too complex or difficult for the general public to understand.

Labeling skeptical people as "global warming deniers" akin to wacko religious fundamentalists, while convenient, does not negate the fact that there are intelligent people out there that just want to be able to verify what is being said on their own, without having to take Al Gore's word for it.

While global warming is a danger to humans around the world, I would feel more comfortable if there was clear cut, 100% proof that humans have caused it all, and that it is something we have the ability to fix. As this issue has polarized people so much, it seems to me that taking say, 500,000 years of actual climate data would be a good start to win people over, should it actually prove we as a species are causing all this havoc weather wise.

Re:The bigger issue

[Oligonicella]

There have been coral die offs throughout Earth's history.

Re:The bigger issue

[E 99]

Not to be elitist, but do you really think you could effectively review the data? I sure as hell couldn't. Which is not to say it should be kept secret, simply that it may not be that urgent to make the raw data hyper-available to every guy on the street. As long as interested scientists - regardless of their previous conclusions or political leanings - can get the raw data when they want to review it, I think the process should work fine.

As long as there is this kind of fear of science, anything can be passed off as scientific truth for any end, without anyone daring to check it or challenge it.
Don't be afraid! Download some ice core data today!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/current.htm l

Because so many people lack the highly specialized knowledge to make sense of the raw data, there are two types of information that are far more important to make widely available: 1) Education on how to be a climate scientist and 2) The conclusions that qualified climate scientists have reached.

Also, please don't think about religious matters. There are only two things you need to know, 1) How you could become a priest and 2) Conclusions that the ordained priesthood has reached.

Re:The bigger issue

[hador_nyc]

yes, die offs, and there have been mass extinctions too, but unlike the dinos, sabretooths, and mammoths, the corals are still alive.

Re:The bigger issue

[smallpaul]

You cannot use a planet with a completely different atmosphere as "control data". I could pick a random person elsewhere in the world and say that "if that person is gaining weight and you are gaining weight then the source of the weight gain is likely to be the same." Not really, it is much more likely to be a coincidence. Can we let the Mars thing drop? It's totally irrelevant.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

1. fewer people dying of cold.
2. easier/quicker ocean navigation due to new polar routes
3. less road/bridge corrosion due to less salt usage
4. coral reefs can be planted in new areas that haven't had them before
5. New agricultural lands in Asia and N. America will open up that should be a net positive on food balance

In general, there has been little to no work done on what would be an optimum average temp for the planet. In general, when we get colder (as in the little ice age) the economy goes in the tank and getting warmer (as in the MWP) provides an economic boost. There's likely a peak or series of peakes at some point(s) on the graph but we don't know what they are. The changes in global GDP numbers are pretty enormous.

I am in favor of finding out what the peak is and getting us to a level of space technology where we can launch shade/lense/mirror systems that will keep us at or near that peak, something of a global thermostat in order to maximize the utility of our environment. Once you get out of the "warm is bad" mentality and start searching for the optimum peak so we can get there, your brain will start to more easily register the upside.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

It's at a minimum interesting that there were reports in the 1920s of widespread arctic ice melting, It wouldn't be surprising if there were, since there was warming in the 1920s. What is your point?

followed in the 1970s by a "Global Cooling" scare. Which was mostly media driven hype (here). Of course, there was some cooling from 1940 to 1970, but again, what is your point? Neither that nor the above contradict the reality of the global warming trend.

This recent revision of which was the warmest year in US history casts even more doubt. "The warmest year in US history" is utterly irrelevant to any warming trend and the two top years were statistically tied both before and after the revision.

Looking further back into history, there has been historical warming in Greenland that exceeds the current trend, well before human produced greenhouse gasses could have been a factor. Yes, we know that climate change has occurred in the past, and there have been large, rapid changes in Greenland temperatures associated with, for instance, the shutdown/restart of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. However, that doesn't change the evidence that the current warming is not largely due to such natural events.

Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone? Give me a break. Yes, it's impossible to forecast the weather more than a couple weeks in the future, due to chaos. But you can forecast the climate, which is a temporal and spatial average of all possible weather events, out much farther. The ability of climate models to do this has been demonstrated in hindcasting and out-of-sample validation experiments.

Re:The bigger issue

[ubermiester]

Did you look at the graph? The error wasn't in anybody's favor. It was negligable. The problem is not the conclusion, which in this case seems to be correct. This is, imho, only the first of many more controversial science-based political debates to come. A few examples include cloning, gmo foods, genetically engineered viruses designed to treat disease, nanotechnology, man-machine interfaces, trait specific gene therapy (from hair color to mental and physical capacities), etc.

As these issues move to the forefront of our national political discussion, who do we look to when we want impartial information? The government? NASA, in spite of the special place it holds in the hearts of geeks everywhere, is still a government run operation subject (to some degree) to the whims of the current administration. Ditto the NIH and the WHO which, among others, will become just as important to future discussions about the aforementioned topics as NASA and the National Weather Service has been to the debate over global warming.

NGO's are an alternative source of information for these issues, but they more often than not have their own agenda as well. If these issues trend the same as other long debated topics such as economics and the sociology, there will be no real consensus on where to turn for "just the facts".

Re:The bigger issue

[ajs]

Don't let "global warming may not be real" be an excuse to give waste and inefficiency a pass. Oh, you misunderstand me entirely! My concern with respect to the climate is that it takes our eyes off of the environmental issues that routinely kill and permanently damage vast numbers of people. My #1 environmental issue right now is mercury. After that, it's the general issue of drinking water, especially in those nations that the "developed world" uses as manufacturing centers. Global warming isn't even close to the top of the list, but I think that's appropriate, given how horrible the state of the environment is TODAY.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

My understanding is that the request for the full data dump was refused and the error was determined by reverse engineering what was public and finding out that the formula that fit the published curves was erroneous. Then the reverse-engineered formula was sent over to NASA, checked against the actual formula that was not released and found to be identical. They copped to it (to their credit) and fixed it, though we don't know how well the fix was going to propagate absent all the noise that Hanson is complaining about.

If there's no standard storage format, it would seem to be a good use of funds to *make* a standard description of how you store data, have a grand international conference, and have all the major grant making bodies adopt the standard so this problem doesn't crop up. This isn't a political thing. Data quality improvement and ease of checking raw data are bedrock science issues that should be attended to no matter what the field. I would love to make it a high school level act to pull unchecked data, the formula used for analysis, and do basic level data checking. Every once in awhile, they're going to find errors, even if only data entry, trivial type stuff. They can then submit a note, get a real correction and have it drilled into their heads in a very practical way what real science is about, experiment and verify.

Re:The bigger issue

[Snocone]

1) Global plant biomass up 6% since the 1970s due to more CO2, and longer growing seasons. A big win on dozens of fronts, but two bear particular mention:
2) 400,000 km^2 reclaimed from desert over the same period. (Remember the panics over desertification back in the '70s? Now there was an honest-to-god(s) no bullshit environmental catastrophe well worth all the panic it was generating and more besides. And you don't hear anything about it any more, do you? Thanks, global warming!)
3) Increased crop yields, contributing to making the famines that used to regularly afflict India, China, etc. a thing of the past.
4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate of a one degree rise in temperature.
5) Extra calamari! Squids get bigger and grow faster in warmer oceans.
6) Fewer typhoons/hurricanes/etc., due to increase in wind shear making them less likely to form.
7) Better beer! There's no water more pure than that from melting ice caps.

Anyway, I could go on here for a while, but if you're seriously interested, this is probably the best site for collecting actual scientific fact (as opposed to computer simulation nonsense) on the real world observed effects of increased temperature and elevated C02 levels. Strangely enough, the positive vastly outweighs the negative.

http://www.co2science.org/

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise.

An awful lot of science is multi-disciplinary that way, with data gathered for one field but bits and pieces of other fields being brought in to make sense of it. And those bits and pieces tend to be outdated. Economists, for example, regularly shake their heads at the economic analysis applied by political scientists. Mathematicians and evelotionary biologists have some similar friction.

So while the problem of analysis of data exists, there are plenty of cases where eyes from outside the specialty would do a lot of good. We should be very happy to see that sort of professional knowledge silo breakdown. Some people are less than happy.

Re:The bigger issue

[scrondle]

Ahh the Michael Crighton argument. Many of the measurements that scientists (like my wife) are using for temperature come from the temperature of seawater. If the oceans are getting warmer then the planet is getting warmer. The other argument I've heard is that the earth has been warmer than this before, which is true, but there weren't any people then. As a person, that doesn't really comfort me much. I've read all of the arguments against global warming with an open mind and the fact is they don't hold up to scrutiny. Please do some research into it for yourself. The evidence is overwhelming.

Re:The bigger issue

[N3WBI3]

You cannot use a planet with a completely different atmosphere as "control data".

Way to stack the deck, Controll the data control the science

. I could pick a random person elsewhere in the world and say that "if that person is gaining weight and you are gaining weight then the source of the weight gain is likely to be the same.

No but if you and the person are eating the same food we might want to look at the food not your cloths right? Do we ignore the fact you have the same diet because you're wearing nikes and he;s wearing roo's (Do they still make those)?

Can we let the Mars thing drop? It's totally irrelevant.

Right so a planet near earth and earth both have rising temperatures. They have the same sun, the same solar winds and about the same exposure to gamma burst... Completely irrelevant..

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Oh yes, let's hold our data and algorithms in as much secrecy as possible consistent with maintaining our funding. That'll show those know nothings about how open and reliable science is and will advance our quest for... a new priesthood?

Openness helps science. It doesn't help particular scientist factions but I don't really care about that.

Re:The bigger issue

[godzilla808]

See, I would say the bigger issue is actually Joe Z. Public's lack of critical thinking--especially when it comes to scientific matters. They see an emotional story on the "news" that includes a couple of stats thrown in for good measure, and they take it as gospel. They don't question the source, because they're probably watching a "news" outlet that just validates their world view anyway.

Re:The bigger issue

[Intron]

1. fewer people dying of cold.

Worldwide, malaria is a leading cause of death. Freezing deaths are negligable.

2. easier/quicker ocean navigation due to new polar routes

You don't mention the accompanying sea level rise and coastal flooding which is a somewhat more serious effect.

3. less road/bridge corrosion due to less salt usage

and less need for roads and bridges with a lower population.

4. coral reefs can be planted in new areas that haven't had them before

Corals are highly adapted to conditions of nutrients, temperature and salinity so this may not work out real well.

5. New agricultural lands in Asia and N. America will open up that should be a net positive on food balance

Where? Agricultural land needs soil. Soil exists where plants have been growing for a long time. Sand and rock are not arable.

Re:The bigger issue

[hamelis]

Given that most people have at best very limited, and more likely non-existent or critically flawed understanding of statistics, giving everyone access to the raw data isn't going to do very much. If you don't have the tools (in terms of software, knowledge, and skill) to do the statistical analysis necessary to get information out of the data, having the data isn't much help.

Raw data is pretty much incomprehensible and meaningless. Data != information.

Point is, doubters don't have to admit they're wrong if they can't understand the methodology, which, given the (most) doubters views about hard science, is doubtful.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

As with most of that site's content, you're only telling part of the story.

1) Global plant biomass up 6% since the 1970s due to more CO2, and longer growing seasons. A big win on dozens of fronts, but two bear particular mention:

Plant biomass can go up as a whole, but the effect of CO2 fertilization is strongly limited by water and nutrient availability, which in many regions will go down. Longer growing seasons do not occur everywhere, but only in places that don't get too hot or too dry.

3) Increased crop yields, contributing to making the famines that used to regularly afflict India, China, etc. a thing of the past.

Increased crop yields have far more to do with agricultural practices than CO2 fertilization or climate change. Furthermore, even when crop yield goes up, nutritional content often goes down: the planets are bigger but not as good for you.

4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate of a one degree rise in temperature.

That contradicts other studies I've read, but now I have to do some hunting for them.

5) Extra calamari! Squids get bigger and grow faster in warmer oceans.

Ocean acidification, ecosystem stress, forced migration ...

6) Fewer typhoons/hurricanes/etc., due to increase in wind shear making them less likely to form.

The studies I've read indicate that hurricane numbers stay constant or increase, not decrease, and that hurricane strength may increase.

7) Better beer! There's no water more pure than that from melting ice caps.

Strangely enough, the positive vastly outweighs the negative. Really? Then why do leading economists like Nordhaus find net economic damage from warming? Even Tol, who's in the "small warming is good" camp agrees that we need to mitigate our emissions to avoid large warming.

Your one sided story neglects all the other negative impacts of climate change (sea level rise, drought, flooding, heat waves, abrupt threshold responses in the climate system), etc., and also neglects the difference between the climate change which has occurred so far, and the much larger change which is predicted to occur in the future.

Re:The bigger issue

[scrondle]

Sadly there is a standard format, it's called an excel spreadsheet. Having a standard format wouldn't really help, because most of the methodologies used are quite complicated, sometimes even unique, and unverifiable if you don't have your own mass spectrometer.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Actually, there are two methods of countering global warming (AGW), modify or halt the human activities that cause it or change the inputs so that we null it out. The skeptics don't want the former because it tends to put big dents in the economy and, at the margin, kill people. The AGW proponents tend to not want the latter because... well, I can't seem to get a straight answer why geoengineering is a bad idea other than semi-religious rants about how man should not meddle.

There's not a lot of study on what would be the optimum global temp even though it's a core data point needed by policymakers who are juggling how many 3rd world people they're going to kill by sucking up capital into global warming schemes instead of economic development. This is serious stuff and no matter what's done and who wins the debate, there's a very good likelihood that people are going to die. I'd like as little of that as possible.

Re:The bigger issue

[HoneyBeeSpace]

GISTEMP is available in Google Earth here: http://dev.edgcm.columbia.edu/wiki/GISTEMP

Also, if you'd like to do some of the experiments discussed in the article yourself, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.

Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.

Re:The bigger issue

[hamelis]

Allow me to revise your last sentence slightly:

The fact of the matter is that we're uncertain about a great many things, and until we are certain, we should be careful about making drastic and potentially irreversible changes to the biosphere, AKA the only known self-sustaining environment capable of supporting human life.

There, that's a much more rational viewpoint. Sorry, but when you're gambling with an entire planetary ecosystem, being pessimistic and over-cautious is still too risky.

Re:The bigger issue

[sgholt]

ahhh...but when you add someones politics to the mix, that's where the error comes in. I too suspect that runoff and pollution to be a bigger factor than warming. Looking at graphs of global warming and cooling (yes it exists TOGETHER, has been going on for 100s of thousands of years!)the temperature range is about 2 degrees either way. So this is killing coral? I find that to be a little misleading. Granted temperature change could be part of the cause to this problem, but temperature change has been going on for 100s of thousands of years. It is in a cycle...look at graphs of CO2 vs Temp, it is pretty obvious.

I have seen reports of a disease called "white plague" that is responsible for the death of coral in the Caribbean. Other studies blame wastes that are pumped into the ocean without treatment.
Still other studies in the Pacific indicate that the earth is losing coral at the rate of 1% per year, and at this time Pacific coral is 50% of what it was before. OK, that means this started about 50 years ago?

I don't want to start a flame war here...but lumping everything as a product of Global Warming is
isn't productive when you don't also explore other causes and/or cures. It has become such a political movement that people are closing their minds to any other cause or solution.

Re:The bigger issue

[Avatar8]

Rather interesting that warming and WNV are linked as well.

As the temperature gets warmer in general, winters in many parts of the world never get cold enough to kill mosquito larvae and the increases in rainfall and humidity in many parts provide more abundant breeding grounds and a more favorable environment for mosquitoes thriving. I know in Texas due to nearly three months of constant rain, we're seeing a major surge in mosquitoes. WNV infection incidents are on the rise.

One more relationship demonstrating what a closed system we live in.

Re:The bigger issue

[roadkill-maker]

The other argument I've heard is that the earth has been warmer than this before, which is true, but there weren't any people then. As a person, that doesn't really comfort me much. But we did evolve from life that lived in some of those periods.

Re:The bigger issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The data *is* there, but it's raw. The code and tools to process it *do* exist, but they are archaic or take some effort to recode appropriately and validate. The procedure to process the data *is* explained in the published papers. Sometimes there might be a little vagueness in the procedures that requires asking questions or experimenting a bit to be sure you have the right process, but it's there. All the ingredients are present, but it will take a lot of time and effort for someone else to duplicate the effort of the scientists involved. That's why scientists spend a long time on these studies in the first place. Anyone who really understands this stuff will work through it.

And that's the problem. People aren't used to this and unrealistically expect it to be simple and easy (and expect scientists to make it so if it isn't). It's trivial to ask the question "why should it be this difficult?", but it is often the norm in scientific work for it to take almost as much effort as it did the first time in order to duplicate someone else's work. You have to validate as much of the process for yourself as is practical anyway.

If you want to bake a cake, it's fine to say the ingredients and recipe should be easier to obtain or better specified by another chef, but it's quite another matter to imply that someone else should bake it for you or do the work to package it into a "just add water" recipe. Usually you have to do it from scratch to really understand it and test it out. It isn't always easy. Tough.

Re:The bigger issue

[mosb1000]

You couldn't make sense of a series of temperatures, times, dates and locations? It's not rocket science.

Here's how I'd do it. First I'd select a baseline year. Then I'd calculate the total land area represented by each data point, and calculate a land area fraction for each point. For the year question, I'd calculate the difference between the current temperature and the temperature of the baseline year, and multiply it by the land area fraction. Then I'd sum up all the data points and see how large the temperature change from the baseline year is (and whether it is positive or negative).

Re:The bigger issue

[flitty]

Wait a minute... OK, follow the trail.
co2science.org is owned by craig idso, who has in the past been linked to exxon mobile, and exxon has funded co2science.org in the past (Here). Also, co2science was paid $250,000 to make a video about how good global warming would be for society, funded by Western fuels. Do a search on the dude, All you'll find is his links to big business, and little in the way of credentials. For Instance:
http://www.ecosyn.us/adti/Corrupt_Idsos.html
On his work with the Coal Industry
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=129849 &p=irol-newsArticle&ID=577889&highlight=
and for the other side of the aguement, a guy only using 2 sources makes the same case you are, and surprise, one is idso, and the other is a Balling character who is usually listed alongside the Idso's and their funding sources
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA334.html

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

If more CO2 leads to higher temperatures; Venus could serve as pretty solid evidence In fact, it is. You can calculate Venus's maximum possible equilibrium temperature from its distance from the Sun and its reflectivity, and its actual temperature far exceeds that value.

For that matter, the Earth's actual temperature also exceeds its maximum possible temperature according to such energy balance considerations, and that too is because of the greenhouse effect, which adds about 30 degrees C to the global mean temperature.

But Mars can throw a wrench into the whole theory Mars is much further from the Sun than is Venus, and more importantly, has almost no atmosphere to speak of. It doesn't matter if it's pure CO2 if there just isn't much of it in the first place. The greenhouse effect depends on the amount of CO2, not just the fraction.

Earth's atmosphere contains the following gasses (by volume): nitrogen: 78%, oxygen: 20.95%, argon: 0.93% and finally - carbon dioxide: 0.038% - wow, that's a pretty high concentration - I think we're all going to die. We're not going to die, but that amount of CO2 does contribute to the greenhouse effect. 0.038% looks like a small number, but it's meaningless out of context. You can ingest a small amount of cyanide and still die. You have to multiply the amount of CO2 by its potency as a greenhouse gas.

And again, it's not the relative concentration that matters, but the actual amount. You could dilute the atmosphere with as much non-greenhouse gas as you want, making the GHG concentration arbitrarily small, but the greenhouse effect will be the same since you have the same actual amount of GHGs. (Not exactly true because eventually the atmosphere will turn opaque to visible light, but you get the idea.)

Note, too, that the direct greenhouse warming of CO2 so far only amounts to about a 0.1% increase in the planet's temperature. While that's not big as far as the planet's temperature is concerned, it's important as far as we are concerned. A 10% increase in the planet's temperature would wipe out most life on Earth. We may see an eventual increase of 1 or 2% or more.

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

Not to be elitist, but do you really think you could effectively review the data?

That, I think, depends on the assertion it's being used to support. I'm quite good at writing code to crunch large amounts of data and generate useful summaries. I wouldn't like to try and predict global temperature averages one hundred years hence. However, I think I could probably run up a quick sanity check as regards global average temperatures over the last century, for instance.

it may not be that urgent to make the raw data hyper-available to every guy on the street.

Forgive my saying so, but you sound like someone from 1807. I mean at one time, publishing this data would have involved significant effort. You'd have had to print up several telephone directory sized books to hold it all, and then distribute it using horse drawn carriages. And if someone asked me to marshall those sorts of resources, then I suppose that I too might enquire as the urgency of the situation.

The thing is though that this is the 21st Century, and a typical teenage girl probably uses up more resources in an evening's download of MP3s that it would take to publish this data. Hell, it's probably already on a networked computer; all it would probably need is a symbolic link and possibly a new entry in a routing table. I don't think "urgency" is a concept that really applies here.

As long as interested scientists - regardless of their previous conclusions or political leanings - can get the raw data when they want to review it, I think the process should work fine.

And do you think it is working fine? It doesn't seem to be; the intensity of the argument here on Slashdot stands as testimony to that, I feel.

Because so many people lack the highly specialized knowledge to make sense of the raw data, there are two types of information that are far more important to make widely available: 1) Education on how to be a climate scientist and 2) The conclusions that qualified climate scientists have reached.

All right - now you sound elitist. It's a bit like saying there's no need to publish computer source code all you need to do is know where the universities are; and to have access to programs written by qualified programmers.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

The link was written in 2006 (look at the URL) and claims that it's only a 2 year (1 martian year) trend. The original Mars polar pictures were shot in 1999 so it's been 8 years and the trend continues. Other than getting the facts wrong, nice link.

Re:The bigger issue

[piotrr]

Speed.

Corals are slow, human pollution is fast.

If climate change is slow enough, corals will die off at one end and expand at the other, essentially moving as the niche is displaced. If the change is very fast, say two degrees per 100 years or so, the coral won't be able to catch up with the displacement of its niche.

Re:The bigger issue

[chrb]

there's substantial concern about these models and how accurate they can be in the first place.

Try this: New Scientist Climate Myths, in particular the section on computer models.

The problem is that correlating those two factors requires that we understand the climate on a macroscopic level

No, it requires understanding basic physics, that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

The problem doesn't make any difference to the results because we're all just assuming that the error was only in the US. We don't know that.

We just had a bridge collapse in MN. Every other bridge of that type was inspected immediately to see if there wasn't a larger problem with the design.

We just had a data analysis collapse. There's zero effort rechecking elsewhere inside the community to see if it's just the US. Instead it's just baldly asserted that it's only a US problem.

Re:The bigger issue

[dottyslashdottydot]

I'm not a biologist either, but I'm guessing that the reason that coral and other organisms were able to survive these temperature shifts in the past was because they happened gradually at a much slower rate. Species had time to adapt and/or migrate over thousands of generations. The warming we're seeing now is unprecedented and may be happening too fast for some species to handle.

Re:The bigger issue

[TapeCutter]

"Seriously, please post if you find it."

You can ask some of the most respected aurthors of the IPCC report technical questions on this site, however if you are too lazy to look at the reference section of the IPCC when someone points it out to you I don't like you chances of getting an answer. And seriously, if you are serious you need to spend some cash to access journal articles (at a minimum "Nature" and "Science"). Suggesting the data and methodology is somehow more obscure than evidence used in other scientific fields is utter nonesense.

As for computer models, source code for many of them is not hard to track down using the RealClimate link above. In a nutshell, the "secret sauce" is finite element analysis.

"a bunch of bickering and bargaining until they could get a majority to vote for 80. Very scientific stuff."

You don't seem to understand that "bickering and bargaining" is "very scientific stuff", it's what the term "the republic of science" means and when applied to ~2800 scientists it results in a scientifically conservative document.

"Yeah, the best of luck to anyone trying to find actual methodology on the IPCC site."

Yes their web site is less than "user freindly" but that doesn't change the fact that the IPCC is a huge scientific effort rivaling such projects as the LHD or Nasa's "Great observatories".

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

In general, there has been little to no work done on what would be an optimum average temp for the planet. Some have worked on this, like Richard Tol. Of course, the answer is "it depends". "Optimum" depends on where you live and what sector of the economy you work in.

It's somewhat misleading, though, because the economic benefits/damages do not depend on just temperature, but on rate of change of temperature. Change in either direction, and especially relatively rapid change, incurs losses simply because economies and civilizations are adapted to a particular range. The real question is whether the overall temperature change has benefits that outweigh the losses due to the rate of change, and it's one whose answer is less favorable to climate change than the question you're asking.

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

The climate studies I've worked on have always had all raw data (and models) publically available, but how many people have a share on a supercomputer to recreate our results?

Care to share a few URLs? "It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness" and all that...

Re:The bigger issue

[32Na]

Lots of these weather stations have recently gone offline (since the 1970s), according to graph #2 on your link. I'm assuming this is due to the availability of satellite weather monitors, and I'm a bit surprised that data from those don't get included...

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

When faced with this information, NOAA ignores it, because they intend on that offset being misleading. They're not ignoring it, they're just being smart about it.

Instead of running around screaming "OMG an air conditioner!!one!!", they're putting a new temperature network with more carefully controlled measurement and siting into place. Some of the new stations will be placed near old stations to quantify what errors, if any, exist in the old data; the old data can then be adjusted. In the meantime, they have statistical procedures in place to detect and correct (when possible) or discard (when not possible) problematic station data, such as jump discontinuity adjustment and renorming urban stations against nearby rural stations. In addition, even the questionably sited stations have Stevenson screens to ameliorate the influence of nearby heat sources.

The evidence is clear that Global Warming is not man-made, Please, present this "evidence". It contradicts the massive amounts of evidence accumulated over the last 30+ years.

it's a natural, cyclical process which occurs with the strengthening of the Sun There are no known "cycles" which are due right now and produce warming. Natural non-cyclical sources are also inadequate to explain the post-1970 warming trend. The Sun certainly isn't, as solar intensity weakened during that period (e.g. here). Indeed, the temperature effect of solar intensity has been downgraded over the last few years.

Re:The bigger issue

[smitth1276]

Good luck finding a list of stations that were used to do urbanization adjustments to a particular stations record. It's not there. It's a secret.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

The coral organisms will survive ocean acificiation, but the reefs may not, and it takes a long, long time to build those back again. Reefs have built back before, but we may not see it happen.

Re:The bigger issue

[posterlogo]

"WE" "WE" "WE". That's where I have a philosophically different view point. I agree that there can be many natural causes of global warming, and over the long run, yes, many species may suffer. However, this time around, my problem is that, according to the data, WE are the cause of the changes to the environment. So sure, maybe a short term human blip is not much considering the history of the Earth. BUT, the problem is humans aren't going anywhere, we're probably here to stay and will continue to change our environment. This will, unfortunately, not just be a "blip" in the grand scheme of things. Also, on the topic of species constantly emerging and dying: Frankly, I like the coral.

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

I wish I could share your optimism, but widespread peer review won't change anything.

I think it will improve matters, you think it won't change a thing. There's no reason not to make the data available.

If the raw data is publicly available, it will give the people who want to deny basic science more ammunition for their inane babblings.

And if it's not, it gives the people who want to misrepresent scientific findings more scope to lie. Hiding the data only helps people who have already made up their minds, and who don't want anyone pointing out that the data doesn't fit their desired outcome. Making it available helps those who care about the truth. In that respect, I don't care if the planet is getting hotter, staying the same or entering into a new ice age; I want to know the truth, and that is only going to be served by more openness, not less.

Re:The bigger issue

[dpuu]

It is of course true that there is uncertainty in the models -- this fact even makes it into most non-scientific reporting. The problem that I see is that the people who focus on these uncertainties as a basis for inaction typically assume that the errors lead to systematically pessimistic models. I do not know of any evidence for this skewed error distribution: it is equally likely that the errors lead to models that are optimistic. Activists may wish to promote one particular interpretation but purely scientific publications tend to be scrupulous is their desire not to be seen as alarmist.

Re:The bigger issue

[xappax]

I hear what you're saying, that science shouldn't be restricted to a special class of scientists who everyone else has to trust. And I agree. But I do think that science should be restricted to people who know what the hell they're doing, just like any other field. In fact, I think that should be the only restriction on being a scientist. Okay, maybe you also have to agree not to build an army of world-dominating superbots...

Seriously, as someone who doesn't understand climate science, you have two choices: Either accept the conclusions of people who you trust to know what they're talking about, or reject those conclusions and learn for yourself all the things you need to know to be a good climate scientist and reach your own conclusions. The important thing is to make sure that it's possible for any interested person to learn what they need to in order to make their own evaluation on the facts, because otherwise peer review is meaningless - but that doesn't just mean access to the raw data, it means access to the skills needed to evaluate the data. However, realistically most people are going to prefer to trust someone else to make the analysis for them, so it is important to put an emphasis on widely publicizing and broadcasting their findings as opposed to the raw data.

Re:The bigger issue

[Snocone]

And if you follow the trail of alarmists' funding, it leads back to sources with a vested interest in alarmism. Duh.

If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour, which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?

And, indeed, if the truth of climate change is anything other than the media-pushed line that it's all anthropogenic in cause and all negative in effect -- you wouldn't expect anything that might reveal that truth to get funded or studied by funders and researchers whose livelihood depends on continued panic, would you? And at some $50 billion spent on climate research over the last two decades, that's one hell of a lot of motivation to keep the panic at full boil, is it not now?

Re:The bigger issue

[xappax]

The thing is though that this is the 21st Century, and a typical teenage girl probably uses up more resources in an evening's download of MP3s that it would take to publish this data. Hell, it's probably already on a networked computer; all it would probably need is a symbolic link and possibly a new entry in a routing table. I don't think "urgency" is a concept that really applies here.

That's a very good point. Making the data available on the internet is simple enough that it's reasonable to expect them to do it. And if they're refusing to do that, it's reasonable to accuse them of actively trying to prevent sharing and review of their data.

All right - now you sound elitist. It's a bit like saying there's no need to publish computer source code all you need to do is know where the universities are; and to have access to programs written by qualified programmers.

I'm not saying there's no need, just that there's less need. And in that sense I agree with what you said: It's much more important to teach average people how to understand and program computers than to just throw some source code at them and say "Don't trust those pompous programmer assholes, figure out for yourself if this has bugs in it." The reason an average person can't fix their software is not because they don't have the source, it's because they don't know the first thing about programming. So therefore it should be a higher priority to help them learn that than get them access to source code.

But you're right in that it doesn't necessarily have to be a tradeoff - obviously making source data available can be done with essentially no effort, so why not do it? I'm mostly just reminding that it's also important to give people the tools and skills they need to work with the source data.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Way to stack the deck, Controll the data control the science What the hell? Do you know what "control data" is? You can't use Mars as a "control Earth" when its climatology is completely different; it has no oceans and virtually no atmosphere.

Right so a planet near earth and earth both have rising temperatures. They have the same sun, the same solar winds and about the same exposure to gamma burst... Completely irrelevant.. Solar effects are demonstrably not reponsible for the warming on either the Earth or Mars, and even if they were, Mars's climate would still be irrelevant as the planet's climate is so different.

Re:The bigger issue

[mdsolar]

The person who found the problem is doing just that. We'll see what he comes up with. So far as I know, there is no such thing as a data analysis collapse, just iterations past the point of diminishing returns as in this case.

Re:The bigger issue

[hador_nyc]

Corals are slow, human pollution is fast. If climate change is slow enough, corals will die off at one end and expand at the other, essentially moving as the niche is displaced. If the change is very fast, say two degrees per 100 years or so, the coral won't be able to catch up with the displacement of its niche.

aaah, but they say that climate change, human caused or not, can and does happen fast. They say most of the retreat from the last ice age; ie 200 foot rise in sea levels; took only a few hundred years; or less. A supervolcano eruption certainly would have that effect, and it's been proven that the Yellowstone Park Caldera exploded 3 times in the last 1.5 to 1.8 million years or so. So, those Caribbean corals seemed to have survived that; which would have cooled the atmosphere dramatically for 10s of years, at minimum, over the course of a few weeks.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Actually, that site refers to the RealClimate essay which concludes, "Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external [e.g., solar] forcing." Since then, at least one study has been published that shows that Martian dust storm activity is consistent with the trend (unlike any external causes which is what needs to be invoked to establish a relationship to Earth climate).

Re:The bigger issue

[hador_nyc]

"WE" "WE" "WE". That's where I have a philosophically different view point. I agree that there can be many natural causes of global warming, and over the long run, yes, many species may suffer. However, this time around, my problem is that, according to the data, WE are the cause of the changes to the environment. So sure, maybe a short term human blip is not much considering the history of the Earth. BUT, the problem is humans aren't going anywhere, we're probably here to stay and will continue to change our environment. This will, unfortunately, not just be a "blip" in the grand scheme of things. Also, on the topic of species constantly emerging and dying: Frankly, I like the coral.

none of that, I am arguing. What I'm arguing is that it seems less likely that heat or added CO2 is the problem. I think the problem is our chemicals and agriculture runoff; hell even the extra soil erosion we're doing could be adding more silt to situation for corals near the river deltas; or downwind from our farms. I remember an event where they sprayed some chemical here on long island to kill the mosquitoes that spread west nile, not DDT, that ended up in the Long Island Sound, and ended up killing a lot of the lobsters there.

I think we should be push our efforts into no-till farming which lessens the need for fertilizers and pesticides. I think we should not be dumping garbage and raw sewage into the oceans and, well, any part of the environment for that matter. The point is that those things will DEFINITELY help every species in the oceans, corals, fish, and even humans. The warming is probably an irritant, but not one they can't cope with. This raw sewage and garbage is the stuff that they can't deal with. Even if I'm wrong, it's still a good thing for everyone and everything, because that crap; pun intended; is not something out of mother nature's handbook; like the CO2(volcanos) and the warming(you pick the cause) is.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

The problem doesn't make any difference to the results because we're all just assuming that the error was only in the US. We don't know that. The error was due to an incorrect merge of pre-2000 and post-2000 data sets. Other countries do their own data analyses and don't even partition the sets into pre- and post-2000. It is beyond credibility to believe that this error has anything to do with non-U.S. data.

Re:The bigger issue

[morgan_greywolf]

Look, any scientific model for any scientific hypothesis has some margin for error, by definition. A scientific hypothesis is something to be tested. Very, very little in science has been proven 100%, not even gravity or relativity. A hypothesis with only a a 20% margin for error on something as complex as global climate change is very, very good. In 2001, the IPCC could only make the same statement with 66% certainty. A jump of 14% is quite significant.

Re:The bigger issue

[smellsofbikes]

>Mathematicians and evelotionary biologists have some similar friction.

So there's this big conference on population biology the next city over, and State U sends a bunch of statisticians and a bunch of population biologists to it. To save money, they go by train. The two groups go down to the train station, and the population biologists all buy tickets, but the statisticians get together and make one of their grad students go buy a single ticket. The biologists watch this, look at each other, then they go over and say "what's up with the one ticket? You all need tickets to ride the train." The statisticians turn around and speaking in unison say "we are mathematical statisticians. We have rigorous methods for dealing with situations like this." The biologists say "uh, yeah, sure..." and everyone gets on the train. The conductor comes along, asking for tickets, and all the statisticians get up and crowd into the bathroom together and the conductor comes along, knocks on the door, and the grad student sticks the ticket out from under the door. Conductor goes away, the statisticians all come back out, sit down, and enjoy the ride.
On the way *back* from the conference, the biologists are all jazzed that they can save money so they send a grad student over to buy a single ticket. The statisticians, however, don't bother to buy *any* tickets. The biologists watch this, look at each other, then they go over and say "Okay, the one ticket was cute, but how can you get by with NO tickets?" The statisticians turn around and speaking in unison say "we are mathematical statisticians. We have rigorous methods for dealing with situations like this." The biologists, again, say "uh, yeah, sure..." and everyone gets on the train. Conductor heads down the train, collecting tickets, and all the biologists, snickering, crowd into one bathroom and close the door, and all the statisticians crowd into *another* bathroom, except for one grad student, who runs over to the bathroom where all the biologists are and knocks on the door, saying, "tickets, please!"...

Re:The bigger issue

[Intron]

Its a complex issue. Fertilizer feeds algae which then grows on and kills coral. Fishing reduces populations needed for healthy reefs. Murky water and dirt landing on the coral block sunlight. Water temperature affects density, currents, and salinity so it isn't just the direct effect of what the coral like. There are many factors, but the main thing it comes down to is that researchers can get to spend time diving in the Bahamas.

Re:The bigger issue

[snarfer]

"And at some $50 billion spent on climate research over the last two decades, that's one hell of a lot of motivation to keep the panic at full boil, is it not now?"

Are you saying here that people are profiting from spreading the news about global warming? You are talking about RESEARCH GRANTS for studying a problem that threatens the planet.

On the one hand you have giant corporations making huge profits paying millions of dollars to cloud the issues. On the other hand you have dedicated scientists getting research grants to study the problem.

You are on a site that is dedicated to science, so the people HERE understand that research grants provide relatively LOW SALARIES. Working for corporations provides big money. Working for universities provides small money. You are equating the salaries and the motivations.

People who want to make big money go to work for big corporations. People who want to dedicate themselves to science and helping society go to work for universities and you are trying to smear these people by saying they are in it for the MONEY? You really should be ashamed of yourself!

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

But you're right in that it doesn't necessarily have to be a tradeoff - obviously making source data available can be done with essentially no effort, so why not do it? I'm mostly just reminding that it's also important to give people the tools and skills they need to work with the source data.

Heh. Well, there goes my follow up point :) Yes, I agree. Having access to the data is a major step forward in gaining the knowledge needed to interpret that data.

I keep being reminded of one of the early kernel hackers. I've been trying to remember the chap's name (and failing) but (IIRC) he basically recounted how he started out getting caught up in the excitement of the project and submitting patches without any understanding of what he was doing, and getting some very patient replies from Linux. And eventually he got up to speed and wound up one of the more active kernel developers.

And I don't think that would have happened if there hadn't been the resource of the kernel source code available.

I don't know - maybe what we need is a community climatology project, with a mailing list and a forum and all the rest of it. Lord knows there are enough people who care passionately about the issue.

Re:The bigger issue

[jonniesmokes]

You say:
>If the papers reported on c02science.org are of sound methodology, transparent process, and apparent intellectual rigour,
>which they appear in general to be to me, why should the source of their funding matter?

Are you claiming to be a top climatologist? A lot of people can write a paper that
looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth
what its printed on.

I'll give you a personal example. I once worked for a small medical device company
owned by an ex surgeon. He was trying to sell patented technologies to very large
and rich pharmaceutical firms. He needed to show that the technologies were scientifically
tested to standards which the FDA accepts. He hired me (an MIT trained scientist) to
perform experiments and prove that these technologies were valid. This process is
called "validating" by the FDA.

I had a predecessor who had left on poor terms. So I had an inkling something
might be weird. I kept trying to replicate my predecessors results and couldn't.
My boss was becoming increasingly agitated that I wasn't successful making his
technology work. I was certainly trying. I was working my ass off. At one point
in a meeting, my boss told me to change the protocol of the experiment in a subtle
way. I instantly recognized that it would guarantee a positive result, but that
it wouldn't mean anything about the safety of the underlying technology. It
would be fraud. And in fact, it would be very hard for someone to detect that
it was fraud. Only someone who had been working on the technology for 60 hours
a week for 6 months would be able to understand what it meant.

I refused to make the change in protocol, and started looking for anotehr job that
day. The boss and I didn't speak after that. People's lives are at stake
with medical devices and I couldn't be a party to fraud. This was a big deal.

Global warming is somewhat similar and its even more complex. You might consider
putting your faith in trained scientists instead of paid hacks. Or don't and
become a scientist yourself!

Re:The bigger issue

[recharged95]

"Coral has been around for a long time; according to this link on wikipedia, over 500 million years."

And we don't really know if corral has been in domant states within that time span, considering corral has adapted to a narrow range currently (within the last few hundred years).

Are we likely effecting the environment? why YES (entropy, duh...), are we likely accelerating warming? why YES (releasing energy within days that was created over millions of years, thermodynamics basically). Is measuring and simulating climate (i.e. climate research) proving the global warming, not 100% fact (it's measurements). Is global warming a movement, no, this is evolution and we are adapting (becoming more aware and considerate with our environment).

Re:The bigger issue

[hador_nyc]

Its a complex issue. Fertilizer feeds algae which then grows on and kills coral. Fishing reduces populations needed for healthy reefs. Murky water and dirt landing on the coral block sunlight. Water temperature affects density, currents, and salinity so it isn't just the direct effect of what the coral like. There are many factors, but the main thing it comes down to is that researchers can get to spend time diving in the Bahamas.

too true on all points; maybe i should switch careers! either way, i still say that doing things cleaner is a good thing; ie no more raw sewage to the oceans, no more garbage, and better farming techniques to reduce runoff, fertilizer usage, and pesticide usage. No matter what, doing those things will help, and I'd be willing to pay more to do it.

Re:The bigger issue

[Lars T.]

Can we let the Mars thing drop? It's totally irrelevant.

Right so a planet near earth and earth both have rising temperatures. They have the same sun, the same solar winds and about the same exposure to gamma burst... Completely irrelevant..

Well, the temperature on Earth has been rising for over a century - what are your results for Mars in that timeframe?

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

It wouldn't be surprising if there were, since there was warming in the 1920s. What is your point?

That there was warming in the '20s, when human greenhouse gas inputs were far less of a factor. See my point in the grandparent post regarding "natural" warming.

"The warmest year in US history" is utterly irrelevant to any warming trend and the two top years were statistically tied both before and after the revision.

It's relevant to the extent that recent record US temperatures have been tied to "Global Warming" in the press - which is to say, frequently. It also calls into question the published global temperature means - surely the best record keeping and science occurred at least in first world countries. There's also the issue of weather stations being affected by urban heat islands over time.

Yes, we know that climate change has occurred in the past, and there have been large, rapid changes in Greenland temperatures associated with, for instance, the shutdown/restart of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. However, that doesn't change the evidence that the current warming is not largely due to such natural events.

Really? And how do we "know" this exactly? Perhaps you'd care to share with us the percentage of worldwide yearly C02, H2O vapor, and methane emissions for which humans are responsible? I'm also sure you can guarantee that there've been no unaccounted for inputs or effects in the system, that aren't currently modeled correctly... It was widely reported this week that a new, major current had been discovered off Madagascar that's responsible for major climate effects. How can current models be accurate when not taking this current into account? In some models, reduced rainforest area is associated with reduced greenhouse gas sinking. Yet real world observation indicates that rainforests are net greenhouse gas producers, due to methane from decomposition (methane is a 40 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2).

My view is that no drastic action (or expense) should be taken in the West over global warming. I think there should be a continuing move to cleaner energy production and industry, though unfortunately nuclear plant construction has been slower than desirable. In the future, technology will give us tremendous leverage over many problems...in the meantime we need to ensure that the developing nations don't continue to become major polluters. What we really need is a constructive plan for China that doesn't involve hundreds of new coal fired powerplants.

Give me a break. Yes, it's impossible to forecast the weather more than a couple weeks in the future, due to chaos. But you can forecast the climate, which is a temporal and spatial average of all possible weather events, out much farther. The ability of climate models to do this has been demonstrated in hindcasting and out-of-sample validation experiments.

Sure...26 times further would be one year. Now tell me the story about 93 years...

Your point about hindcasting actually damages your case. The "hindcasting" allowed researchers to modify "fudge factors" that made things more closely approximate historical behavior. The lack of first principles models, however, makes the climate forecasts that much more suspect. Further, the complexity of the environment is still just not well understood - for instance there is no consensus on the mechanism of the natural ice age cycle, completely absent human involvement. That cycle of warming and cooling has been going on for millions of years...

Re:The bigger issue

[Lars T.]

US Citizens paid for it, US citizens own the data, and if global warming is happening, it affects ALL of us. We should have unfettered access to the raw data and all algorithms used to reach their conclusions. Errm, sorry, but why then should a Canadian get the right to complain he doesn't get access to the data (whether true or not)?

Re:The bigger issue

[slashname3]

True, global temperature does tend to change naturally over time. But it doesn't usually happen so rapidly. And when it does, it tends to suck for all us organisms living here.

It only sucks for those who can not find opportunity in the change. Just think of all the A/C systems that will be sold in the next 100 years, assuming things get as bad as they want you to think. Or how about the companies that will make billions building flood control systems for coastal cities? This could be a boon to the economy!

As other parts of the discussion have pointed out, corals will survive, they have in the past during major temprature changes. Yes, some species of animals and plants will die off, but others will adapt and fill the niche that is vacated/created due to changes in temprature.

Man is unique in this respect, we can adapt our surroundings to suite us. If we really screw up and don't get people off the planet, then we will have to live underground or in domed cities. We are many centuries away from having to go that route. Or maybe it will be sooner. :) Hard to tell.

Those that think they can place the planet in stasis so we can continue to live as we have been need to get their heads out of the sand. Embrace the coming changes! They can be good for those that are still here! :)

Re:The bigger issue

[d34thm0nk3y]

Hey, I agree with the GP, global warming aint all bad. Check this picture out for example: link
Mountain pine beetles baby. Of course, I am a huge pyro so YMMV.

Re:The bigger issue

[ksheff]

I used to live in a place that would have -20F temps. We still had lots of them. My brother lives in Fairbanks where it will get down to -40. They still have lots of them and they are huge.

Re:The bigger issue

[kir]

That's right sheeple. OIL BAD!

Re:The bigger issue

[N3WBI3]

"Well, the temperature on Earth has been rising for over a century" REALLY! I could have sworn there was this period between 1950 and 1975 when it was decreasing.. Oh yea, There was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling)... See This (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bd/DSC N4904-nas-a.6_crop.jpg) Its called 30 years of sustained cooling.

Re:The bigger issue

[ksheff]

I think he wants links to source code tarballs for all the programs used. I've read lots of requirements & design docs that describe something that's very different than the resulting code. Since all of this is paid with tax money, I see no reason why it shouldn't be available to the general public.

Re:The bigger issue

[plague3106]

That's a nice theory, but I think there are too many other variables at play here.

The closer to the sun a planet is, the more radition it will absorb from the sun. Also, the planets size makes a difference, as well as the composition of the planet.

Re:The bigger issue

[Da_Biz]

I refused to make the change in protocol, and started looking for anotehr job that day. The boss and I didn't speak after that. People's lives are at stake with medical devices and I couldn't be a party to fraud. This was a big deal.

Good for you! I'm gratified to hear an example of someone stepping up to the ethics plate, even if it means financial inconvenience or harm. If only more would do the same...

Re:The bigger issue

[plague3106]

In other words, this is just what you think, and you have no evidence to back up what you're saying. An interesting pet theory, and you ignore that we already make batteries anyway. You also ignore the fact that we could recycle the materials in the batteries, something you can't do with gasoline, which just throws CO & CO2 and other gases into the air.

Don't go arguing that hybrids are more damaging to build for the environment unless you have solid evidence to back it up, not just some half baked thought experiment.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

That there was warming in the '20s, when human greenhouse gas inputs were far less of a factor. See my point in the grandparent post regarding "natural" warming.

Yes, we know that natural warming can exist, and in fact, climate models predict the natural warming in the early 20th century. That doesn't change the evidence that the late 20th and 21st century warming cannot be adequately explained by natural effects.

It's relevant to the extent that recent record US temperatures have been tied to "Global Warming" in the press

In other words, it's irrelevant to the science.

It also calls into question the published global temperature means - surely the best record keeping and science occurred at least in first world countries.

That's a specious argument. Other countries didn't partition the data into pre and post 2000 and even if they did, it would be beyond credibility that they made exactly the same mistake. If you want to argue that they are more likely to have made some other mistake, you are free to do so, but the mistake that was actually made says nothing one way or another about the credibility of other data sets.

There's also the issue of weather stations being affected by urban heat islands over time.

Which has already been studied and, when necessary, corrected.

Really? And how do we "know" this exactly? Perhaps you'd care to share with us the percentage of worldwide yearly C02, H2O vapor, and methane emissions for which humans are responsible?

You're free to start with the IPCC report and dig into the references. We know, for instance, that almost all of the ~100 ppm CO2 increase over the last 150 years is due to us, by (a) estimates of human industrial activity, (b) measurements of natural sources, and (c) isotopic fingerprinting of atmospheric CO2.

I'm also sure you can guarantee that there've been no unaccounted for inputs or effects in the system, that aren't currently modeled correctly...

Ah, FUD. "We don't know everything, therefore we don't know anything."

It was widely reported this week that a new, major current had been discovered off Madagascar that's responsible for major climate effects. How can current models be accurate when not taking this current into account?

There's accurate, and then there's accurate. All models are wrong. Always. The real question is, are they accurate enough for the purposes to which they are put? Modelers have given evidence that they are, based on their correspondence with observed data. If you want to argue that the models are too flawed to be used in climate prediction, you may do so, but you'll have to do better than vaguely insisting that they aren't perfect and are therefore worthless.

In point of fact, models PREDICTED the current you mention, and they are only now observing it in the real ocean, AFTER it was discovered in model simulations! The paper states, "This confirms recent model descriptions of a Southern Hemisphere 'supergyre', a nested system of subtropical gyres". Does that tell you something about the utility of climate models in making useful predictions?

In some models, reduced rainforest area is associated with reduced greenhouse gas sinking. Yet real world observation indicates that rainforests are net greenhouse gas producers, due to methane from decomposition (methane is a 40 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2).

The terrestrial vegetation cycle is not well modeled, and uncertainty in vegetative representation leads to uncertainty in model prediction. However, the uncertainty isn't large enough to change the basic prediction of continued warming.

Sure...26 times further would be one year. Now tell me the story about 93 years...

As I said, weather prediction is entirely different from climate prediction. It is impossible to predict the weather 20 years in advance, but it is p

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

It only sucks for those who can not find opportunity in the change. Just think of all the A/C systems that will be sold in the next 100 years, assuming things get as bad as they want you to think. Just think of all the third world citizens who can't afford A/C (and live in the tropics). Adaptation is for the rich.

Or how about the companies that will make billions building flood control systems for coastal cities? This could be a boon to the economy! Developing more energy efficient technologies could be a boon for the economy, too. Why don't we do that instead?

As other parts of the discussion have pointed out, corals will survive, they have in the past during major temprature changes. The coral polyps themselves will survive, but the reefs very well may not.

Yes, some species of animals and plants will die off, but others will adapt and fill the niche that is vacated/created due to changes in temprature. Yeah, but you still may get massive biodiversity loss, even if a few species take over all the old niches. It's not helped by the massive biodiversity loss underway by other human activities.

Those that think they can place the planet in stasis We can't place the planet in stasis. We can, however, avoid changes that are beneficial neither to us or to the net biodiversity of the planet as a whole.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

For something that has serious potential consequences (1% in EITHER direction would have BROAD consequences)

No, it wouldn't. The error bars on the temperature data are bigger than that already, and the error bars on predicted temperatures are like +/- 30% or more, and that's assuming you know the emissions scenario. A 1% change wouldn't influence any conclusion already made.

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

Yes, we know that natural warming can exist, and in fact, climate models predict the natural warming in the early 20th century. That doesn't change the evidence that the late 20th and 21st century warming cannot be adequately explained by natural effects.

OK, that's at least a concrete statement, though I don't agree with it at this point. Before we discuss anything else further though, I'd like you to tell me if we're in a period of natural cooling, equilibrium, or warming, absent human involvement. That should be straightforward for one with your intimate knowledge of these issues.

Re:The bigger issue

[slashname3]

Why so worried about the biodiversity?

If the coral polyps survive they will eventually re-form into reefs.

But if you embrace the changes they can be very beneficial! Just imagine all the beach side property that will be created! The opportunities abound for ice cream vendors and jet ski rental outfits! It is all good!

Re:The bigger issue

[Lars T.]

"Well, the temperature on Earth has been rising for over a century" REALLY! I could have sworn there was this period between 1950 and 1975 when it was decreasing.. Oh yea, There was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling)... See This (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bd/DSC N4904-nas-a.6_crop.jpg) Its called 30 years of sustained cooling. I repeat: Where is your Mars data? [Tumbeling tumbleweeds, not even crickets chirping] Thought so.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

You're talking about an economist who is using an unstable predictive model to create his own unstable predictive model. Once again, the old "we don't know everything, therefore we don't know anything" argument.

By pretending it's anything more that a very educated guess-from-the-ass, you display your preconceived notions. By arbitrarily dismissing the best conclusions of the most expert economists who have studied the issue, you display yours.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Right now, models predict that we would be cooling slightly, post 1950, without human influence. See Figure SPM.4 here.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Why so worried about the biodiversity?

You have no problem with wiping out large pecentages of all species?

If the coral polyps survive they will eventually re-form into reefs.

Yeah, in thousands of years. In the meantime, say goodbye to the species which depend on them as well as all the tourism and humans who depend on reef fishing.

But if you embrace the changes they can be very beneficial! Just imagine all the beach side property that will be created! The opportunities abound for ice cream vendors and jet ski rental outfits! It is all good!

Sigh.

Re:The bigger issue

[N3WBI3]

Hmmm so let me get this straight, you can make an incorrect statement "the temperature on Earth has been rising for over a century" and demand Mars data to correlate to that. When I show your initial premise was wrong you ignore that and still demand mars data

I must say... NICE!

But here I will do some of your dirty work for you: Before you use dust storms as an excuse consider that weather is driven by the sun on earth and though the makeup of the martian atmosphere differers the same hold true there.

http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/resources/ mars_data-information/data.html
http://mars.sgi.com/ops/asimet.html

Re:The bigger issue

[The One and Only]

Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone?

Connect two chambers together with a tube. One is filled with hot air, one is filled with cold air. While we cannot predict the exact action of one single hot-air particle, it is a statistical certainty that the temperatures of the two tubes will ultimately even out and stay that way perpetually--so much so that we call this the second law of thermodynamics. Chaotic microsystems over a macroscale become easily predictable.

Alternatively, put a pot of water on the stove, and try to predict whether and when the column of water 3 centimeters from the edge, 44 clockwise from the exact front of the pot will bubble, assuming you sprinkle a certain amount of salt into the pot and put a lid on it. Difficult to predict. But you can predict that the pot is going to heat up, and that it will heat to a higher temperature before boiling if you put more salt into it, and that it will heat faster if you put the lid on.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

But here I will do some of your dirty work for you: Before you use dust storms as an excuse consider that weather is driven by the sun on earth

That is a meaningless statement. The Sun provides energy input to the climate system, but you cannot simply wave your hands and ascribe all temperature changes to the Sun. Unless you're prepared to argue that dust storms on Earth are responsible for global warming, you haven't got a point.

Re:The bigger issue

[Socguy]

Do you read the URL's you link to? The Wiki article you linked to clearly states that the 'period of global cooling' was largely a result of aerosols and sulfates and other air pollution particulate in the atmosphere, which over-road the effects of GHG's. This pollution was subsequently dealt with as a matter of public health. In any case your own article states that this period is well represented in global climate models.

If you're trying to make an argument that the temperature on the Earth hasn't been following a perfectly linear warming trend for the past century, well that's true, but it's also totally irrelevant. Nobody, including the parent, is claiming that it was.

Re:The bigger issue

[djmurdoch]

I think I could probably run up a quick sanity check as regards global average temperatures over the last century, for instance.

That's actually much harder than you'd think. The problem is that people build weather stations out in the country where urban heat isn't an influence, and then cities grow, and they have to be moved. It was in correcting for this effect that Hansen's software was wrong for a while.

And do you think it is working fine? It doesn't seem to be; the intensity of the argument here on Slashdot stands as testimony to that, I feel.

I haven't seen anyone posting here who I'd trust to estimate global averages. Not anyone.

I'm a strong believer in reproducible science, so I would like it if Hansen's procedures and the data he used were published and available for anyone to review. But as far as I know from what I read (and trust) on Slashdot, they are.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Well, yes. There's still large uncertainty, but it's only through very hard work that they can make these predictions at all with the confidence they do. And while you may call them "mediocre", they are good enough to rule out possibilities like "no further warming", which have important policy implications.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

The problem is that people build weather stations out in the country where urban heat isn't an influence, and then cities grow, and they have to be moved. It was in correcting for this effect that Hansen's software was wrong for a while. Eh, the correction didn't actually go wrong, it's just that they combined the wrong datasets.

I'm a strong believer in reproducible science, so I would like it if Hansen's procedures and the data he used were published and available for anyone to review. But as far as I know from what I read (and trust) on Slashdot, they are. It's a little murky. The data is downloadable, and the procedures are published. However, GISS hasn't publicly released the source code which implements the procedures.

This is kind of a gray area: scientists use their code as intellectual property. Their competitors are free to use the procedures and data to reproduce the results, but many scientists want to keep the actual code they've spent man-years developing as their competitive advantage: let others write the code if they need to. Well, I kind of see the point — you need to give out enough information for the results to be reproducible, but it sucks for other people to use your hard-won labor to turn around and scoop you on results. And McIntyre has irritated a lot of scientists because he doesn't publish any new results himself, he just attacks other people's work. That's perfectly legitimate in science but doesn't win friends.

However the bottom line is, especially for a government researcher, I feel they need to release their source code. Particularly if there are problems in replicating the published procedure.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

If, as you said, "The evidence is overwhelming", then how come it is easily refutable as an increase in solar activity? Solar activity is not responsible for any significant portion of the post-1970 warming, although it is responsible for some of the early 20th century warming. See here and here and here among many others.

There is evidence to suggest carbon dioxide increase is directly correlated to the increase in temperature I assume you're referring to this misleading argument.

This completely demolishes the Al Gore and NOAA argument that increased CO2 levels are increasing the average temperature of the Earth. Guess again.

Sometimes an "open mind" means an "overly suggestive" mind. Tell me about it .

Re:The bigger issue

[Snocone]

Are you claiming to be a top climatologist?

Well, I *am* claiming -- I can substantiate it if there's some reason I should care about proving it to you, but just take my word for it to save irrelevancy -- to be a top simulation author, which within the context to which you are most probably referring does actually mean MORE authoritative than "top climatologist", since none of them have any fucking clue about anytihing that they haven't measured themselves. (I'd be more specific than that, but that would be discourteous.)

Actually, I'll take back that last paragraph's offer. All climate simulations are written to prove whatever the researcher thinks is the preferred thesis of the source of their funding. Accept that, or don't, it doesn't affect me either way, whatever your opinion is I don't give a shit about confirming or denying it. (Gee, I am --so-- much more relaxed after a long Friday lunch ... funny, that ...)

"A lot of people can write a paper that looks scientific. Only a good scientist can figure out whether the paper is worth what its printed on."

True dat. By 2015 it should be perfectly clear from actual observations whether the solar theorists or the AGW Chicken Littles are right. My bet would be on the first group, but hey I could very well be wrong.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Well, I *am* claiming to be a top simulation author Unless you're a top climate simulation author that counts for jack squat as far as your claims about the motivations of climate simulation authors. And even then, it would only count for your own simulations.

Accept that, or don't, it doesn't affect me either way, whatever your opinion is I don't give a shit about confirming or denying it. Nice to see you admit that your opinions are worthless.

Re:The bigger issue

[NoOneInParticular]

The raw data is there for anyone who asks, the methods are there for anyone who can read, the self-proclaimed sceptics are there, ignoring everything.

The trouble with the entire discussion is that global warming has been predicted, has been measured, and the US in particular is loath to act upon it. The scientists themselves get emotional about this because they are asked to prove the issue, while they know that they can only prove it after several tipping points have passed and it is too late to do anything about it. Or maybe there are no tipping points, and we can all live in oblivious peace for ever hereafter. The latter is still possible, though with every passing year less likely. The court jesters are however happy to bet their children's future on ignoring the issue.

Re:The bigger issue

[NoOneInParticular]

I'll chime in with the grandparent. Where is your Mars data to show that Earth and Mars temperature are correlated?

Re:The bigger issue

[Lars T.]

Hmmm so let me get this straight, you can make an incorrect statement "the temperature on Earth has been rising for over a century" and demand Mars data to correlate to that. When I show your initial premise was wrong you ignore that and still demand mars data

I must say... NICE!

But here I will do some of your dirty work for you: Before you use dust storms as an excuse consider that weather is driven by the sun on earth and though the makeup of the martian atmosphere differers the same hold true there.

http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/resources/ mars_data-information/data.html
http://mars.sgi.com/ops/asimet.html
So let me get this straight: you still have jack shit about Mars temperatures (I said 100 years, not a few month), and you chose to ignore the fact that it is now warmer than 100 years ago by saying "it didn't always go straight upward". Way to go!

Re:The bigger issue

[Tyler Durden]

Other than getting the facts wrong, nice link.

The facts and the link get better when you bother to read the whole thing.

Re:The bigger issue

[Snocone]

Nice to see you admit that your opinions are worthless.

Well, not exactly, I'm saying that my opinions are directly opposed to the AGW-supporting conclusions I'm paid to prove. Those conclusions could very well be right, I don't know. All I'm saying is that simulations are not proof. They match C02 increases very well indeed, since I do a good job of what I'm paid to produce. Their relation to the real world is orthogonal.

And even then, it would only count for your own simulations.

Okay, friend, news flash: All simulations are based on "thesis" + "adjustments to make past predictions substantiate thesis". I could subsitute "my age" for "C02 levels" and the simulations would be well-nigh identical, and with basically the same scientific justification. If the thesis turns out to be correct, well and good -- but simulations of the thesis are not proof of it. Only actual, real-world, measurements are proof. And of those measurements, I think only satellite measurements are unbiased enough to be worth spending any time on. And they show no significant trend line.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

I'm saying that my opinions are directly opposed to the AGW-supporting conclusions I'm paid to prove. You are not paid to prove "AGW-supporting conclusions". You are paid to develop models. Your grants don't say what conclusions you have to reach.

Their relation to the real world is orthogonal. That statement is directly opposed to both the model results themselves and to the conclusions of your peers.

All simulations are based on "thesis" + "adjustments to make past predictions substantiate thesis". That, quite frankly, is B.S., and if that's what you're doing, you should be fired.

Yes, model parameters are calibrated against real data, but that is a far cry from your implied "models are just curve fitting which can produce any result" or your "models are intentionally rigged to prove AGW".

And of those measurements, I think only satellite measurements are unbiased enough to be worth spending any time on. And they show no significant trend line. Another false claim.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Ok, I am asking you to substantiate your claim to be a "top [climate] simulation author".

Re:The bigger issue

[riverat1]

"There is evidence to suggest carbon dioxide increase is directly correlated to the increase in temperature, not vice-versa"

It's pretty easy to measure the CO2 output of human activities such as burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes. It turns out that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is less than what is emitted, the rest being absorbed by the seas and other natural processes. If the increase in CO2 is due to increased solar intensity then where is it coming from and where is all of the CO2 emitted by human activities going?

Re:The bigger issue

[drmerope]

Did you look at the graph? The error wasn't in anybody's favor. It was negligable.

No, the net bias was about 0.15 C. Note this in the context of your own statement of 0.8 C total warming. Then consider how ironic it is for you to say, "Don't make the mistake of assuming that a small change in temperature won't have a significant effect."

Re:The bigger issue

[Bush Pig]

In fact, purer water does _not_ imply better beer. (Burton pale ales, for instance, are made with fairly hard water.) Yeast needs trace elements, so water that is too pure often has to be adjusted to enable the yeast to do anything at all.

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

Right now, models predict that we would be cooling slightly, post 1950, without human influence. See Figure SPM.4

Well, those are pretty graphs...if you believe the error bars. Color me a skeptic.

Regardless, there's also the question of time scales. Cooling trend over what time scale? What's the long-term trend, over say 10,000 years?

Is it possible that anthropogenic warming might save us from an Ice Age, a la Pournelle/Niven?

At any rate, I submit that 1) more data is needed before taking drastic measures 2) technology will inevitably become more capable of providing mitigation, and 3) the main area of concern at this point is in the 2nd and 3rd world, in other words China, India and the other rapidly rising polluters of record. Don't forget the "Asian brown cloud", recently anointed as a GWC (Global Warming Contributor).

Re:The bigger issue

[Bush Pig]

It's the rate of temperature change that's the problem. Corals (and other species) can perhaps adapt to a 2 degree change that takes place over 10,000 years, but not when it happens in less than a century.

Re:The bigger issue

[hador_nyc]

but that's already happened quickly... remember those things have been around for over 500 MILLION years. in the last 2 million, we've had several supervolcanoe eruptions cooling things off, and they survived; the caldera that more or less is under all of yellowstone national park alone has exploded 3 times in that timeframe.

either way, i still say you're blind to what i believe are much more tangible, and more obvious, causes of their problems. i'll admit that the heat changes are a stress for the corals, but it's one I believe they can handle; even over 5 years let alone 100. My concern for them, and honestly the thing that I think humans are responsible for their decline, is the the effect of run-off on the oceans; particularly farm runoff. The pesticides, fertalizers, and even simply the extra soil via erosion from deep tilling farming, while great for increased food production, are bad for the environment. Let's force our farmers to use the no-till techniques, which has shown; several large farms along the Cheseapeake bay have done this; significantly lower all 3 of those things. Phase 2 would be to prohibit all the raw, untreated sewage from being allowed into the oceans; the Great Lakes get it too, so let's protect them while we're at it. Lastly, and not least of all, let's stop all the dumping of garbage into the oceans. All of these things have shown to be causing definite stress to the corals, and the rest of the oceans. It's cheaper, easier, and there is no question that it will help. Besides, you said the 2 degree change that "happens in less than a century." Well, the corals are under stress now, and the temperature increase has only been a fraction of a single degree in a century and a half. If you ask me, it sounds less like heating that's the problem, and more like our waste. Here's the kicker, while many argue the the causes of GW, no one can argue that the garbage isn't bad. Even ol' GB knows the value of the oceans, he did sign the law making the largest marine sanctuary in the world. Granted, I am not defending him, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. That was right, and there is no question that cleaning up our garbage would help. Want proof; look at the Hudson river as one example. People can swim in it again even as far south as NYC; that was not true when I was born 30 years ago; mind you I still wouldn't, but it's no longer illegal.

there is still no guarantee that the 2 degree rise will happen in the next 100 years; there is no agreement in the models; it could be more or less, and the latest IPCC report lowered it. If they can't get the next year hurricane model more accurate than it has been the last few years, I'm having trouble believing the climatologists, who have their own agenda; funding; are any better.

Re:The bigger issue

[Evilest Doer]

Excuse me, but what part of this exchange did you not understand?

GP:Given the current tendency towards knee jerk FUD in some quarters, the only way we're ever going to be able to settle debates like this one is if the data can be subjected to widespread peer review.

Me: I wish I could share your optimism, but widespread peer review won't change anything.

If you knew how to read, you would see that I am not suggesting that scientific data be hidden. I am merely saying that GP's optimism is unfounded.

Re:The bigger issue

[Evilest Doer]

If the algorithms are publicly available, they can be reviewed

Indeed they can, and they should. I was simply stating that this will not in any way stop people who will deny basic science and try to have their fundamentalism forced on other people.

Re:The bigger issue

[CryBaby]

Is it possible that anthropogenic warming might save us from an Ice Age, a la Pournelle/Niven?

Yeah, let's hope for that. In fact, what we really need is less of this annoying scientific data proving that humans are causing unprecedented global warming, and more hope! Some kind of future technology will surely come along to save us, right? It happens in the movies all the time so why not?

I, like you, have complete faith that someone, somewhere will eventually figure out what's going on and what to do about it. Either that or we'll get really lucky.

In any event, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. I've decided to take what's known in the scientific community as a "wait-and-see" attitude. I'm going to wait until I personally see a lot of people actually dying from global warming before I do anything.

Re:The bigger issue

[Hittite Creosote]

> 4) Decreased mortality. Deaths increase from a one degree drop in temperature at around four times the rate
> of a one degree rise in temperature.

That contradicts other studies I've read, but now I have to do some hunting for them.

Another factor to also consider is not just the overall temperature, but how likely short-term extremes are. A study in Japan, covering the whole range of the country (Journal of Risk Research, Volume 1, Number 3, 1 July 1998 , pp. 209-220(12)) found that the optimum temperature for minimum mortality rate varied from 23C-28 C to 33+C over the North to the south of the country - so while people in a range of climates may be able to adapt to long term changes without an increase in mortality due to the average climate, if the number of extreme climate events increases then this could produce a clear increase in deaths.

A recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health (Medina-Ramon, Zanobetti, Cavanagh and Schwartz) found that in the US, extremely cold weather increases the mortality rate by less than extreme heat.

Global warming may be no problem for you if you live in a climate which can have extremes of cold but doesn't tend to get that dangerously hot (the US Pacific North-West, say, or the UK), and may be preferable if you have a particular illness (e.g. cardiovascular deaths, especially cardiac arrest deaths, show much larger increases on extremely cold days than other mortality causes). But on net - it doesn't appear to be a good thing.

Re:The bigger issue

[Genda]

1. fewer people dying of cold.
2. easier/quicker ocean navigation due to new polar routes
3. less road/bridge corrosion due to less salt usage
4. coral reefs can be planted in new areas that haven't had them before
5. New agricultural lands in Asia and N. America will open up that should be a net positive on food balance

In general, there has been little to no work done on what would be an optimum average temp for the planet. In general, when we get colder (as in the little ice age) the economy goes in the tank and getting warmer (as in the MWP) provides an economic boost. There's likely a peak or series of peakes at some point(s) on the graph but we don't know what they are. The changes in global GDP numbers are pretty enormous.

I am in favor of finding out what the peak is and getting us to a level of space technology where we can launch shade/lense/mirror systems that will keep us at or near that peak, something of a global thermostat in order to maximize the utility of our environment. Once you get out of the "warm is bad" mentality and start searching for the optimum peak so we can get there, your brain will start to more easily register the upside.

Good lord, this is a clueless response... apparently you don't understand the fundamental nature or thermodynamic implications of Global Warming... so I'll try my best to make this clear for you. When you increase the heat of a complex open system not in equilibrium, you get to a place called the point of pertubation. We are perturbing our climate systems... that doesn't mean hot summers and fair winters... That means localized blazing hot summers punctuated by floods and droughts, and winters that can go anywhere from mild to killer cold. In fact one of the many predictions surrounding global warming includes winter storms that are horrific, incredible mega blizzards dumping unheard of amounts of snow... more water vapor, growing temperature differential between surface temperatures and the stratospere (because the greenhouse effect is keeping all the heat in the lower atmoshere.) Result in storms that beggar the imagination, and temperature swings that become increasingly wild, the average temp increases a few degrees, but the real energy in the system is the wild tilts back and forth between killer heat and killer cold.

So your numbered points are rediculous... meaningless... and grounded in some kind of fantasy being spread by men who haven't the vaguest clue as to what will happen if we pass critical tipping points involving the way our global climate system functions. The ways that global warming could and would kill more people would be almost countless, but the hot buttons would include:

• Hotter Summers, Colder winters and more severe storms in all seasons
• Increased breeding seasons for known disease vectors and climates conducive to their incubation and spread
• Floods and droughts directly killing and rendering huge amounts of global arribal land utterly desolate
• Massive die off of fish and ocean food sources as critical currents change and ocean habitats fail
• Now we get to some interesting speculation, but speculation based on solid science, and historical data... collapse of tundra environments
• As tundras melt, they release sequestered CO2 and rot release huge amounts of methane (a greenhouse gas 20x more potent that CO2.)
• As massive release of tundra greenhouse gases cause accelerated heat, temperatures in the north Atlantic rise, releasing frozen methane ices
• Massive clouds of methane bubble up in the north atlantic, killing countless western Europeans
• This continues to feed global warming, and oxygen levels in the oceans plummet
• The increase in acid (Carbonic Acid) and heat, combined with drop in oxygen causes anerobic bacterial blooms in the oceans around the world
• Suddenly massive amounts of H2S are being released into the atmosphere (H2s is more toxic than cianide)

Re:The bigger issue

[Peter La Casse]

The code and tools to process it *do* exist, but they are archaic or take some effort to recode appropriately and validate.

That's my biggest concern. Few scientists are software engineers, and I fear that computer programs used in scientific research have bugs that affect their results.

Re:The bigger issue

[NickFortune]

I'm not at all clear on where the idea that it's all a big secret came from.

A bit of a case of chinese whispers, looking back on it, I think. It started out with complaints about the algorithm being kept a secret. Then it got expanded to algorithm and data. Then Christianson said

Scientists get grant money by analyzing data and publishing the results, not spending the effort to make the raw data publicly available.

I responded that maybe we should look at changing that, thinking that what this debate needs is more data and less shouting and it rather snowballed from there.

Perhaps what I really want is to see these data sources linked to by more of the news pages. I'd like see a higher standard of debate, and Id like people to have a higher expectations of science reporting. I know that's probably unrealistic, but debates like this are too important to let them turn into shouting matches.

Re:The bigger issue

[Peter La Casse]

Making the data available on the internet is simple enough that it's reasonable to expect them to do it. And if they're refusing to do that, it's reasonable to accuse them of actively trying to prevent sharing and review of their data.

Those things are not necessarily reasonable. Data can easily amount to hundreds of gigabytes. I know someone getting data from NASA for weather-related research who, instead of downloading the data via FTP, gets a DVD in the mail each week, because the people generating the data don't have the budget for a fast enough internet connection or a big enough FTP server. Putting it on a throttled FTP server wouldn't necessarily be useful. (Bittorrent, on the other hand, could work, if lots of people wanted to download that 1 TB of raw weather observations.)

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Well, those are pretty graphs...if you believe the error bars. Color me a skeptic. And what is your basis for arbitrarily dismissing the model results?

Even if the skeptics are right and the feedback effects aren't as strong as climatologists think, that still wouldn't turn cooling into warming, it would just turn it into less cooling (just as the skeptics argue that CO2 causes less warming). The direct evidence is simply that the natural radiative forcings have been net negative.

Cooling trend over what time scale? What's the long-term trend, over say 10,000 years? Going by the ice age cycle, probably also a cooling trend. Not that that's terribly relevant.

Is it possible that anthropogenic warming might save us from an Ice Age, a la Pournelle/Niven? I've read Fallen Angels. No, we are not going to see ice sheets covering Canada in the next century without global warming. Ice ages are not that abrupt. They take, as you note, on the order of 10,000 years. If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age.

At any rate, I submit that 1) more data is needed before taking drastic measures, The "wait and see" argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.

If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be worse than is currently believed.

The sensible course of action is to work out a sliding policy: start doing something capable of addressing the issue using mainstream estimates. If things turn out better than expected, scale down the mitigation; if they turn out worse, scale it up. Simply doing nothing increases the risks. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: there are high potential costs to procrastination.

2) technology will inevitably become more capable of providing mitigation, That's true and mitigation will become cheaper, but again, that's not a reason to not start doing it. But CO2 has a long residence time, and the more we can keep from getting into the atmosphere in the first place, the cheaper mitigation becomes. If anything, mitigation now creates the market incentive for that technology improvement, the necessity that is the mother of invention.

and 3) the main area of concern at this point is in the 2nd and 3rd world, in other words China, India and the other rapidly rising polluters of record. Don't forget the "Asian brown cloud", recently anointed as a GWC (Global Warming Contributor). I am well aware of 3rd world emissions, but yet again, that is not an excuse for the 1st world to do nothing, and if the 1st world does nothing, it is all but guaranteed that the 3rd will not either. It is too easy for them to politically say "Look, you guys created the problem in the first place, if you're not getting on board, then screw you". Not only does the 1st world bear responsibility, but their future emissions are still a very significant fraction of the total. Effective mitigation can only take place if everybody does something: if either the 1st or the 3rd world drags their feet, mitigation becomes much harder. You can't simply place all the responsibility on the 3rd world; their emissions are not that much larger.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

either way, i still say you're blind to what i believe are much more tangible, and more obvious, causes of their problems. i'll admit that the heat changes are a stress for the corals, but it's one I believe they can handle; even over 5 years let alone 100. We're potentially getting 6 degrees F of warming or more in 100 years. That's pretty high stress, even on geologic timescales. And it's not just the rate of warming (that has happened a few times with thermohaline circulation restarts), but the absolute temperature as well. It's been warmer before, but the combination of being significantly warmer than now and at a rapid rate is worrisome.

Not to mention that ocean acidification is a real worry: experiments indicate that corals are sensitive to that too, and that will happen as long as CO2 goes up (and for a while after).

My concern for them, and honestly the thing that I think humans are responsible for their decline, is the the effect of run-off on the oceans; particularly farm runoff. Farm runoff is a problem for a lot of aquatic species, but for corals worldwide in particular, climate change is a serious threat; they appear to be particularly sensitive to that.

there is still no guarantee that the 2 degree rise will happen in the next 100 years; You mean the 3 degree (C) rise? That's the mainstream estimate.

there is no agreement in the models; it could be more or less, and the latest IPCC report lowered it. It's called insurance. If it could be less, but it could be more, you want to hedge against the worst outcomes.

If they can't get the next year hurricane model more accurate than it has been the last few years, Why does the accuracy of hurricane forecasts have anything to do with climate prediction.

I'm having trouble believing the climatologists, who have their own agenda; funding; are any better. The whole "funding agenda" argument is stupid. In general, you can't just publish obviously biased science and expect your peers to let you get away with it. People arguing for extremes on both sides get attacked. (Yes, even Hansen has detractors: many think he's being too alarmist.)

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

We have models that predict past activity, but they have so far failed to accurately predict future activity accurately. What's your basis for that statement? See here, here. Sure, they're not perfect, but they're accurate enough to be informing policy.

Re:The bigger issue

[cramoft]

One item you didn't mention: Man made fertalizers are good for growing certain crops, but cannot replace natural fertalizers coming from decomposed native plants and/or composted plant waste. Artificial fertalizers rely heavily on nitrates which for the most part are not good for native plants. The nitrates are better at promoting certain weeds and non-native plants. I don't have the references for this study, but I did read it only a few months ago. I think it was in an issue of the alumni magazine from UC Davis.

Re:The bigger issue

[Bush Pig]

While you're correct about the dangers of farm run-off (much of the current woes of the Great Barrier Reef are attributable to nutrients from the sugarcane farms all along the Queensland coast, the temperature rises (which are already happening as evidenced by a number of serious bleaching episodes) are an even bigger risk.

I also don't understand why everyone keeps banging on about the climatologists only being in it for the money. They could make as much researching other stuff of equal interest, and heaps more by being corporate shills.

Re:The bigger issue

[Bush Pig]

See - I'd really love for all the climate scientists to be wrong. I don't want to have to change the way I live (or die trying). Unfortunately, all the arguments against global warming are simply justifications for people to avoid changing their behaviour.

Re:The bigger issue

[Goaway]

Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone? You know what's really chaotic? A coin toss. We can't predict the outcome of even a single coin toss, much less a hundred of them.

Yet those statisticians, in their hubris, claim they can even so predict the average of the coin tosses! Is it not preposterous?

Re:The bigger issue

[ajs]

there's substantial concern about these models and how accurate they can be in the first place.

Try this: New Scientist Climate Myths, in particular the section on computer models.

The problem is that correlating those two factors requires that we understand the climate on a macroscopic level

The points in that article are useful, but fail to address the concerns raised by the likes of Freeman Dyson as to the reliability of our current models.

No, it requires understanding basic physics, that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas.

This is just poor arm-waving. We understand (since the 1970s) that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas. The problem is that we don't understand much about how it impacts the Earth's climate. The way we determine that now is to build a model which predicts past events using CO2 as a forcer. This is fine, but it's quite possible that these models over or under emphasize the importance of CO2, and ignore other factors. For example (and this is only an example for sake of the more abstract discussion of the models), I'm not aware of any model that takes ground-cover water vapor into account. Water, as you almost certainly know, is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but is traditionally discounted as a candidate for recent warming because cloud-cover water vapor maintains a fairly constant balance through precipitation. Add more water and you just get more precipitation. For ground-cover water vapor this isn't the case. When you irrigate a field, you create a constant blanket of water vapor over it that wasn't there when you started. If you look at the extent of human irrigation over the past few decades, you will find an explosion in irrigation.

Is this related to warming? Perhaps, but the more important question is: why are we so quick to assume that we understand the relationship between humans and climate when we're still at such an early stage of our understanding of the climate?

Now, action is a different issue. Should we take action to reduce our impact on the environment? Absolutely. However, there are many priorities there, and once the panicked hype around global warming is stripped away, you find that other forms of pollution result in death and injury to far too many people today. We don't have to wait for an environmental apocalypse. It's already here. If you don't believe me, try living on a fish-rich diet for a few years without suffering from mercury poisoning. My stepfather found that difficult; about as difficult as he found tying his own shoes once mercury poisoning set in.

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

Yeah, let's hope for that. In fact, what we really need is less of this annoying scientific data proving that humans are causing unprecedented global warming, and more hope! Some kind of future technology will surely come along to save us, right? It happens in the movies all the time so why not?

Your rant would be more meaningful if the US were doing nothing. In fact, the US is aggressively cleaning up it's environmental footprint. If it weren't for environmentalist stupidity on nuclear power plants, the US would have an even cleaner footprint. Many now feel that a rapid buildup of nuclear power is the best way for the US to move towards a cleaner environment (coupled with plug-in hybrid cars).

What I'm saying (which perhaps I wasn't clear enough about) is that I feel the progress to less environmental impact is happening at a reasonable pace in the US. What's not happening is a move to cleaner energy in the rest of the world. Why should we cripple our economy when our economic competitors are already given an advantage by our environmental laws?

The other thing to remember is the idea of disruptive technologies. What if high-efficiency, cheap solar fabric becomes available tomorrow? It might replace 10-20% of our daytime electric needs in short order, with a clean alternative. No legislation or government involvement needed, just the good old market economy. Those kinds of breakthroughs are more than possible, they're almost inevitable. What's not needed is heavy-handed government intervention and wealth redistribution. What would help this country more than anything is smaller, leaner government, coupled with a 90% reduction in national lawyer head count. ;-)

At any rate, you really need to focus on China with your environmental concerns. It's now the #1 carbon polluter.

[snip]

I'm going to wait until I personally see a lot of people actually dying from global warming before I do anything.

What if the majority of global warming is natural? Are you still willing to change it?

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Optimum is the point at which you achieve a global peak. You can do transfer payments to make those injured whole while the remaining surplus provides real benefits. There's the separate issue of rate of change which also needs to be answered. The problem is that too many people, especially among policymakers and the popular press are not thinking in terms of trying to figure out the "right" temp and "how fast" we should change but fetishizing the earth and creating some quasi-religious "don't change anything" ideal.

Global warming is both an issue of scientific discovery and public policy making. So long as it's honest and has no "no go" research zones, I've got no problems on the science end. It's the policy making end which is largely SNAFUd

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Prat.

The problem with your response is you're primed to go after some businessman/political evil axis when all I was trying to do was knock some guy out of the fantasy that there are not any positive factors whatsoever. There are positives even though some of them are swamped by larger negative effects and it's quite possible that the positives overall are swamped by the negatives.

Yes, we could be heading toward wild swings. Or we might not be. That's the fun about chaotic systems. We don't really know where they're going and when you have increasingly unhinged predictions like "when humanity can't breath the air" it doesn't really help get the great mass of humanity on board for sensible action.

The reality is that the political class in the PRC doesn't want to die at the end of a rope at the hands of a mob and to pull that trick off they need a certain amount of economic growth, 8% or so until they've gotten about 800M more people past the point of $3000/year income. That's going to take decades. Any polluting economic activity you regulate out of existence anywhere else is going to simply relocate in the PRC where the political class needs it for their personal, physical survival. Net effect = more greenhouse gas production because PRC economic production tends to be much more dirty than the same production in the US or EU states.

So be alarmist by all means, just realize what the fuck you're doing, helping desensitize the political system to scientific warnings.

Prat.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

The points in that article are useful, but fail to address the concerns raised by the likes of Freeman Dyson as to the reliability of our current models. Dyson never raised any specific concerns about the reliability of current models, just vague handwaving.

It's certainly true that, say, cloud parametrizations are a limitation of the models, but there's a big difference between "doesn't get everything right" and "is completely untrustworthy". Even GCMs from 20 years ago have done a decent job at predicting the future. Feedbacks contribute the greatest uncertainty to GCM predictions, which is why those predictions have error bars, but you can't get extremely far from the mainstream predictions without making some very questionable assumptions. I'm not saying that it's impossible that the basic prediction of future warming will change, but generic FUD about "models are untrustworthy" are not useful: you have to quantify the range of probable error.

The problem is that we don't understand much about how [CO2] impacts the Earth's climate. This is disingenuous. We don't understand everything, but we understand a great deal. (Your example below, by the way, does not concern CO2's impact, but rather land use change.)

For example (and this is only an example for sake of the more abstract discussion of the models), I'm not aware of any model that takes ground-cover water vapor into account. GCMs take into account water vapor from terrestrial vegetation, but do not include water vapor from irrigation. The issue has been studied, however; see, for instance, here. The authors found that there is not much impact on the global climate, but there can be significant impacts on regional climates where there is large land use change. They found that the greenhouse effect of agricultural water vapor is negligible; the main climate effect comes from changes to surface heat fluxes, which reduce warming rather than adding to it. They summarize that while the effect is not significant to the global climate, it may be significant as far as crop production is concerned.

Is this related to warming? Perhaps, but the more important question is: why are we so quick to assume that we understand the relationship between humans and climate when we're still at such an early stage of our understanding of the climate? This misses the point. We do not assume we understand everything about the climate. We don't, and never will. All models are wrong, but some are useful. There is great uncertainty about many climate predictions, yet those predictions when compared to observations are still accurate enough to be useful from a policy perspective, as surmised from several decades of intensive study.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Of course, because linking to one bad effect of a complex system change means that no good effects are even possible.

Right.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

OK, let's try this again. I was not saying that there were not countervailing negatives that wouldn't swamp these. It was a 'top of the head, shoot from the hip' list, not something I'd researched seriously. The post I responded to was saying that there were no good effects, couldn't even think of one. Real policymaking is about balancing positives and negatives and trying to find the reachable optimum. If you say there are no positives, you lose credibility because anybody with half a brain who isn't a blind partisan can think of at least a few. Those positives need to be catalogued and studied so we can generate accurate net costs because eventually nobody listens to you if you refuse to give out accurate information.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

In fact, the US is aggressively cleaning up it's environmental footprint. Not in every key area, however. For instance, it has not required that new coal power plants utilize the cleanest technologies now available. Coal plants are among the largest emitters of CO2 in this country, the plants being built today are likely going to be in operation for many decades, and retrofitting is much more expensive than building the technology in from the start. Even more than trying to convert to nuclear power right away, we need to make sure new conventional plants are as clean as possible.

What's not needed is heavy-handed government intervention and wealth redistribution. Ah yes, the libertarian resonse: everything can be solved by the free market and any kind of government coordinated effort is "heavy-handed wealth redistribution".

Technological advance is only part of the solution. In order for even the free market to work, it needs to be aware of the true cost of carbon. Right now carbon is an externality in the market: how much or how little you emit is economically irrelevant. That has to change. Once the market is aware of the cost of carbon — and that basically boils down to either a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax — only then can we expect efficient solutions. And that's not going to happen without government policy.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Yet in this case we found the error without having to resort to recrunching the numbers using fresh data from a mass spectrometer. Just because some data sharing won't likely appreciably help does not justify the refusal in this case.

Put it all in standard format because at some point a mass spectrometer on a chip (they're starting to go to market now) is going to be within the financial reach of high school science labs and even the stuff you need to remeasure is going to be widely checkable. Make it trivial to share and be open about sharing your science and you get more science, some of it good work from unexpected places. Now of course some of it is going to be bad work coming from the hoi polloi but the correction of that bad work is going to improve general scientific literacy, itself a good result.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

As suggested above, you obviously don't know how to read. The original post nowhere claimed that scientific data should be hidden, merely that widespread peer review won't change anything.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Sorry, that anonymous post wasn't me so please don't imply it was. I sign my stuff.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

One thing it will certainly change is that people won't be whining about how data isn't checked. You're not going to have embarrassing things like MBH98's errors hang around uncaught for 5 or 6 years and I don't care if you believe Mann's assertion that they didn't matter or not. Errors should be found and corrected. That's basic science.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

Sorry, I didn't think it was you. I got the threading mixed up and thought Evilest Doer's response was to the AC, not to you.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

There's an awful lot of propaganda out there that has the correct facts in the links (which few follow) but misleads in the text, like this "The only evidence out there that I am aware of is a series of photographs of a single icey region in the southern hemisphere that shows melting over a two year (~1 martian year) period."

On the study, you're referring, I think, to Colaprete et al, published in Nature (12 May 2005) which tried to bend a climate model not designed to study local phenomena (grid sizes 200-300km large) and use it to conclude that what's happening at the cap is a local phenomena. They might be right but I think I'll wait for a few confirmatory studies now that the MGCMs are starting to have their grid sizes shrink down to more reasonable values.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

One thing it will certainly change is that people won't be whining about how data isn't checked. That won't "certainly" change; I think it's the main point of contention. Sure, grassroots efforts can provide some extra checks, but there's only so much work that can go into checking previous studies. To robustly check data would require independently redoing from scratch every important study, and arguably there isn't enough expertise and manpower around to essentially duplicate the efforts of the scientific community.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

He says in the article (read by everybody) that the only evidence is a 1 martian year trend and then links to an article (which few will follow) that admits it's a 3 martian year trend. What, exactly, is supposed to be getting better when I read more?

You're not supposed to say something in your blog text that's contradicted by your own links. I'm being charitable by saying that he got his facts wrong. I'm not touching his motivation in my parent post. I'm not saying he's using an old propaganda trick (intentionally or not, he is). I'm saying he got the facts wrong. I'll even go so far as saying he got them wrong in an unfortunate way that doesn't look good because the link, at least, gets the basic facts right, though I don't agree with the interpretation.

So why do you think the text is wrong and the link is right? Did *he* read his own link? Is such a flawed post something people really ought to be referring to?

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

On the study, you're referring, I think, to Colaprete et al, published in Nature (12 May 2005) No, I was referring to Fenton et al. in Nature (5 April 2007). They do have a comparable grid size (5x6 degrees).

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Yes, I made up "data analysis collapse". The point is that when the outsider fact checker gets one right and the insiders acknowledge it, the healthy response for the insiders is to take a bit of time and check everything else that might be affected by the same problem. But the insiders aren't doing that. They're leaving the job to the outsider.

That's worrisome.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

So somebody called around and asked the other nations who do this sort of data collection whether they also partitioned pre and post 2000 data and nobody did except the US? That's reassuring. I wish Hansen had said something more like "we've checked and have verified that the same sort of partition error cannot be happening elsewhere". As far as I can tell, he hasn't said it and nobody's actually done the checking that you assert has been done.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

The point is that when the outsider fact checker gets one right and the insiders acknowledge it, the healthy response for the insiders is to take a bit of time and check everything else that might be affected by the same problem. But the insiders aren't doing that. As I noted in my response to you, this error is just the U.S. because GISS doesn't control any of the data sets in other countries. It's not a case of other countries all using the same flawed algorithm, it was just a matter of GISS feeding the wrong data to their algorithm.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

The partitioning of the pre and post 2000 data has to do with the USHCN network in the U.S., not with any other country. You're frankly being absurd. It's a totally independent data set using totally independent analysis code. It's like a physicist making a sign error in a calculation, and arguing that all physicists everywhere need to recheck all their calculations for sign errors.

Re:The bigger issue

[mdsolar]

This one way outsiders become insiders. The insiders have already done quite a lot of work and they are currently working in more adavanced areas. The outsider, if he is committed, will eventually be persuaded of the fundemental soundness of the original work while finding a few more below-the-estimated-errors problems. There is a slight chance he'll find something that actually changes conclusions, but the chance is slight because scientists ususally have a pretty good sense of how far wrong they might be owing to error analysis and stick to what is robust.

Re:The bigger issue

[Tyler Durden]

OK, I see what you mean about the 1 versus 3 year Martian warming trend. But the fact remains that this is still just a region on Mars, not a reflection of global temperature, which you must admit is a much more misleading and errorneous propaganda trick.

As for why he got the text wrong, why don't you ask him how this (pratically insignificant) flaw came up? There is a space for posting comments, you know.

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

And what is your basis for arbitrarily dismissing the model results?

I'm not dismissing the results, I simply feel the error bars don't represent the true error space for this massive of a problem. I'm also quite sure that even with the increased observational capabilities of the last three decades, we're still far short of sufficient data to understand the Earth. Hubris, as I said.

Even if the skeptics are right and the feedback effects aren't as strong as climatologists think, that still wouldn't turn cooling into warming, it would just turn it into less cooling (just as the skeptics argue that CO2 causes less warming). The direct evidence is simply that the natural radiative forcings have been net negative.

Once again, I'm quite unsure the current crop of science is accounting for every input. I'd prefer to see much better quantitative account of every significant environmental factor before rushing to judgment. We are talking about phenomena in which a century is an ephemera, after all.

Going by the ice age cycle, probably also a cooling trend. Not that that's terribly relevant.

Actually that's rather an interesting chart. It seems to show that in this cycle, we've been at a long equilibrium period, something I've heard brought up before. In many of the other ice ages (if one believes this hindcasting) there's been a precipitous drop to several degrees Celsius cooler. I'd not be so quick to dismiss the P/N scenario. ;-)

I've read Fallen Angels. No, we are not going to see ice sheets covering Canada in the next century without global warming. Ice ages are not that abrupt. They take, as you note, on the order of 10,000 years. If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age.

Don't worry - we'll be able to mitigate excessive warming very effectively long before those time scales come into play, or we'll be extinct.

The "wait and see" argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.

That's untrue. What's needed is a true bound of when scientific understanding is up to the challenge, coupled with effective policy.

If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be worse than is currently believed.

Not true. If (just bear with me) global warming were predominantly a natural phenomenon, what would your policy be? Mess with Mother Nature?

The sensible course of action is to work out a sliding policy: start doing something capable of addressing the issue using mainstream estimates. If things turn out better than expected, scale down the mitigation; if they turn out worse, scale it up. Simply doing nothing increases the risks. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: there are high potential costs to procrastination.

I, however, would posit that we are already doing quite a lot. I note you've omitted my entire point about nuclear power, what's your stance on that? Surely any good Global Warming aficionado advocates nuclear power these days, correct? It's clearly a viable way to a decent standard of living along with zero carbon footprint.

I see you also ignored my points about disruptive technologies. That most likely places you in the ranks of Luddites who were worried about buggy whips when they should have been hoping for automatic tranmissions. The future will either be amazing and bountiful, or we'll be extinct. I don't really see much middle ground, but the way forward is not "conservation", at least for the US. We n

Re:The bigger issue

[Glock27]

Not in every key area, however. For instance, it has not required that new coal power plants utilize the cleanest technologies now available. Coal plants are among the largest emitters of CO2 in this country, the plants being built today are likely going to be in operation for many decades, and retrofitting is much more expensive than building the technology in from the start. Even more than trying to convert to nuclear power right away, we need to make sure new conventional plants are as clean as possible.

And in what way isn't that happening? However, I disagree with your premise anyhow, we should immediately limit construction of new conventional plants here, in favor of nuclear.

Ah yes, the libertarian resonse: everything can be solved by the free market and any kind of government coordinated effort is "heavy-handed wealth redistribution".

Not at all, but nice job putting words in my mouth. For instance, I'm all for a strong national defense. However, Kyoto and other similar schemes are little more than a naked money grab.

Technological advance is only part of the solution. In order for even the free market to work, it needs to be aware of the true cost of carbon. Right now carbon is an externality in the market: how much or how little you emit is economically irrelevant. That has to change. Once the market is aware of the cost of carbon -- and that basically boils down to either a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax -- only then can we expect efficient solutions. And that's not going to happen without government policy.

I disagree, and my solar fabric example made the point - better, cheaper, cleaner solutions will happen simply due to improving technology and competition.

There are also other factors at work. Responsible people want a clean environment and a good world for their kids. A government mandate isn't needed to get people moving in the right direction (look at some of the polls). Unfortunately, too many turn to government for every solution, while ignoring its huge cost and intrusion into every aspect of our lives. Government is generally the least efficient solution to a given problem.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

I'm not dismissing the results, I simply feel the error bars don't represent the true error space for this massive of a problem. I'm also quite sure that even with the increased observational capabilities of the last three decades, we're still far short of sufficient data to understand the Earth.

"Understanding the Earth" is a meaningless term. The question is, "Understanding the Earth well enough to make policy decisions". You have given no arguments why models are useless for that purpose, despite their successes in hindcasting, out-of-sample validation, and predicting actual climate on decadal periods.

Once again, I'm quite unsure the current crop of science is accounting for every input.

Science will never "account for every input". That, once again, is beside the point.

I'd prefer to see much better quantitative account of every significant environmental factor before rushing to judgment.

How much "better" is necessary before you think it's possible to draw any general conclusions, and what is your justification for that particular quantification?

We are talking about phenomena in which a century is an ephemera, after all.

No, we are talking about the climate on century scales, not the far distant future.

Actually that's rather an interesting chart. It seems to show that in this cycle, we've been at a long equilibrium period, something I've heard brought up before.

We are not at an equilibrium period; the climate has been cooling since the last deglaciation, as is clearly depicted.

In many of the other ice ages (if one believes this hindcasting)

That's not hindcasting, that's observation. (Hindcasting refers to model simulations of the past.)

there's been a precipitous drop to several degrees Celsius cooler. I'd not be so quick to dismiss the P/N scenario. ;-)

If you believe Bill Ruddiman, humans have slowed the cooling, but that doesn't change the fact that descent into an ice age takes thousands or tens of thousands of years.

Note from the graph that the cooling in this cycle has been about a degree over 10,000 years, and in several other cycles has been less than twice that. The P/N scenario is not realistic science.

"If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age."

Don't worry - we'll be able to mitigate excessive warming very effectively long before those time scales come into play, or we'll be extinct.

That doesn't change the above point.

"The 'wait and see' argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.

That's untrue. What's needed is a true bound of when scientific understanding is up to the challenge, coupled with effective policy.

Scientists now argue that scientific understanding is up to the challenge of setting initial policy; that was not the case 30 years ago, when they openly admitted that too little was known. If you want to disagree with them, you need actual scientific arguments. What do you think the "true" bound ought to be, and how do you justify that?

Recall, too, that policy is not set in stone. You can delay indefinitely "waiting for 'true' knowledge" (which basically means "whenever I personally am convinced), or you can set a mitigation/adaptation policy and revise it upwards or downwards as more is learned.

"If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be wors

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

And in what way isn't that happening? As I said, new coal plants are not being built with the cleanest technologies, such as amine-based CO2 scrubbers.

However, I disagree with your premise anyhow, we should immediately limit construction of new conventional plants here, in favor of nuclear. That wasn't my premise. My premise is that we are not effectively reducing CO2 emissions in key areas.

Not at all, but nice job putting words in my mouth. I'm a poor buggy whip manufacturer, what can you expect?

I disagree, and my solar fabric example made the point - better, cheaper, cleaner solutions will happen simply due to improving technology and competition. That did not, in fact, make the point. In fact, it's just begging the question: you are asserting, without justification, that "technology" will magically solve everything. Economists don't agree. And even if it were true, CO2 still goes into the atmosphere before the technology (whatever it is) is invented; given its long residence time, it's better to prevent it from going in earlier rather than later. Finally, as I noted, if you support the free market, you should support the basic economic premise that an efficient market requires awareness of the true costs of business, which (again, if you except the premise) means that one way or another, there has to be a market cost to carbon.

Technology will improve, but barring unpredictable revolutions, it is not a substitute for mitigation, it only reduces the mitigation necessary.

A government mandate isn't needed to get people moving in the right direction (look at some of the polls). Talk is cheap; action is something else altogether.

Unfortunately, too many turn to government for every solution, while ignoring its huge cost and intrusion into every aspect of our lives. On the contrary, making the free market aware of the cost of carbon is probably the lowest cost solution, but it takes a government mandate to do it.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

1. The distance from the sun a planet is does NOT make as much a difference in the amount of radiation the planet will absorb as the composition of the atmosphere. That is an absurd statement in general. Mercury, with no atmosphere, is much hotter than the Earth, with an atmosphere; distance obviously matters. Venus is hotter than Mercury, but it has an EXTREME greenhouse effect.

As I have demonstrated, we know the makeup of the atmosphere and they are extremely similar. As I demonstrated, the relative makeup of the atmosphere is not important; what is important is the absolute amount of each gas. Mars has virtually no atmosphere and can have virtually no greenhouse effect even if it were pure CO2.

Your distance theory just makes you look stupid. It's called the inverse square law.

Mercury is 27 Million miles from the sun and has an average surface temperature of 250F - yeah, that seems really low for being so close to the sun, but that's because it spins so slowly and the high temperature only reaches about 800F (How can that be???). According to your distance logic, the average temperature of Mercury should be about 1450F and the average temperature of Earth should be approximately 413F - really dumb statements on your part. Here is what the distance logic predicts (formula here:

T_P = (1-a)^1/4 [R_S/(2D)]^1/2 T_S

where T_P is the temperature of the planet, T_S=5780 K is the temperature of the Sun, R_S=700,000 km is the radius of the Sun, D is the average distance of the planet from the Sun, and a is the planetary albedo.

For Mercury, a = 0.12 and D = 57 million km, giving T_M = 439 K = 331 F. The actual temperature of Mercury is 440 K (here).

For Earth, a = 0.387 and D = 148 million km, giving T_E = 249 K = -11 F. The actual temperature of the Earth is 254 K (here) top of atmosphere, but its surface temperature is 288 K (here). The ~30 K difference is very close to the predicted magnitude of the greenhouse effect.

In short, the "distance from the Sun" argument produces pretty much the exact answer (if you include albedo as well as distance).

2. The planet's size makes a difference? The other poster is wrong about that, as you can see from the above formula. (Well, it matters insofar as its size helps to determine how much atmosphere it has, and therefore how much of a greenhouse effect. But it doesn't matter directly.)

3. Composition of the planet does matter too - but you don't know how it matters or why it matters do you? It doesn't matter for the equilibrium temperature, except insofar as it may alter the albedo of the planet. It does matter somewhat to how quickly its temperature can change.

I can't effective explain it here, and will not even bother trying. It's like having a stimulating conversation with bunny turds - there is a lot we don't know about Venus and why it is so hot, but we do know that it is NOT all CO2's fault and knowing this; We don't "know" that. We, in fact, know the opposite: Venus is so hot because of the greenhouse effect of CO2 (and to a lesser extent, sulfur dioxide) in its atmosphere, and this has been known since the 1960s.

[rest of your idiotic rant deleted] You need a basic science education before you can start slinging around accusations.

Re:The bigger issue

[Ambitwistor]

It is well established that the Greenhouse Gas alarmists and their theories are half-baked, employing facts artistically in an attempt to prove opinions. I couldn't care less about some "alarmist" strawman of yours. If you want to discuss what the mainstream climate science community thinks, feel free.

when it comes down to it there will be no measurable improvement until we stop doing the stupid things that humans do such as utilizing obsolete energy sources, cutting down every tree that's in our way and a plethora of other completely insane activities That certainly is true, and the people who advocate conservation usually advocate new energy sources, reducing deforestation, etc. It's not an exclusive choice.

I am well educated in science I think the veracity of that statement speaks for itself in light of your comments in this thread.

I've double-checked some of your numbers (so far as to see that you copied and pasted them in correctly) and they match, but I don't imagine it is the definitive end-all statement you wanted to make. It's just another case where someone shows whatever evidence supports their claims You were wrong. Deal with it. This is not a case of "selective evidence": very concrete physical evidence supports the influence of planetary distance, albedo, and the greenhouse effect on planetary temperature in a known and verified quantitative relationship.

they in no way prove anything either way You were wrong. You can't save face by offhandedly conceding that but then claiming that facts don't prove anything. The greenhouse effect is very real, and not even the skeptical scientists deny that; their argument is about the feedbacks which modify the greenhouse effect.

You may be intelligent, but you're spouting the same line everyone else is and it's not actually accurate in that it's only a small part of the whole It is only intended to address the specific, wrong point you were attempting to make. There are plenty of other points to be made regarding the climate other than the existence of the greenhouse effect. If you want to make a real claim about the science, do it, don't just spout off with stupid and unfounded allegations.

Explore both sides of the argument and pick out the crap until you see the whole Global Warming brouhaha for what it is; a money making engine with no honest intent whatsoever. Put up or shut up. Show me the "both sides of the argument" that you have so carefully explored. Explain in specific, verifiable, quantitative terms what is wrong with current mainstream conclusions regarding global warming. Or admit that you have nothing backing up your opinion but political bias.

so that maybe you can go study science at a real school - where actually teaching students is accomplished. Been there, done that. I hope you weren't one of my students. That would be a great failure on my part.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

These people all know each other. They have to in order to coordinate the assembly of the worldwide figures. An email winging around the community noting the issue and asking if anybody else is doing the same sort of data bifurcation that led to the error in the US would have shown a minimal level of care. That doesn't seem to have been done. Would an email have been unreasonable? It's not about ordering stuff done. Everybody's aware that these are national groups who assemble temp data off of surface stations. That doesn't mean that they don't coordinate and talk to each other.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

Right now we've got a problem that people might just be building castles on sand. So long as you do basic data collection, you don't ever just go on to "more advanced areas". You have a continuing duty to go measure your temps, make sure that bird poop, amorous elk, or any of the hundreds of other compromising possibilities aren't eroding the foundations out from under your advanced work. That means that the enclosures have to get painted on time, the slats can't be blocked with debris or wasp nests, and if somebody gets the bright idea to pave within a certain distance of some enclosures, you've got to re-site the enclosures affected. We haven't been doing that job as well as we should.

Now we don't know when a lot of the compromising stuff happened. All we do know is the list of faulty sites is getting longer and we don't seem to have any statement from the powers that be that they're going to do their own site review and fix the ones that they find broken. We don't even seem to have a commitment from them to fix the ones that outsiders find broken.

Re:The bigger issue

[mdsolar]

These are some interesting issues. Weather stations are a pretty old technology people have been checking data quality for quite some time. The more advanced areas I was thinking of were more along the lines of trying to understand why models underpredict sea level rise. I could be that weather stations and satellites are under reporting temperatures but more likely it is that models of glacial melting are too simple and do not capture accelerated flows owing to enhanced lubrication from surface meltwater that bores down to the base.

One thing that might be done is to keep a record of temperatures at your home and try to compare this with stations in the network that are close to you. This might reveal systematic drifts that might be tied to the sorts of conditions you are worried about. Another effort might be to reproduce a station and then attempt to affect its operation in different ways. This would likely reproduce early calibration work but it would be good to have an independent effort. One old temperature record that seems sound was provided by Benjamin Franklin. He measured the Gulf Stream temperature on a couple of voyages: http://www.nha.org/history/hn/HN-v44n2-gulfstream. htm. The records used in the warming charts don't go as far back as this but may have been obtained with similar care.

Re:The bigger issue

[dbrutus]

ok, I'll bite. When was the last sweep of all weather stations in the US to check for data quality? What were the %s of stations that were good, bad, or marginal? How much money was spent upgrading the maintenance and how many stations moved from being noncompliant to the published standards to compliant?

The whole point of surfacestations.org is that such efforts simply aren't happening. All sorts of statistical corrections are being applied to the data but we don't have people verifying the physical compliance with the siting specification requirements and eliminating the data biases.

Re:The bigger issue

[mdsolar]

You are mistaken that quality checks are not performed. Read this: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn /hcntmptrends.php. I think that the other efforts you mention will confirm the soundness of the data for the purpose for which it is used.

Goalposts.

[Anonymous Coward]

"In a second email he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998, explains why the error occurred"

Since pollution is suppose to be one of the climate changing factors. Did we pollute less in 1934 than we did in 1998? And did the nature of the pollution change?

Re:Goalposts.

[Gandalf_the_Beardy]

You cannot really draw any conclusions from short term data like that - fundamental difference between climate and weather. Now if we had the data for the first decade and last decade of the 20c that would be different.

Re:Goalposts.

[mdsolar]

What makes the most difference to all this is cumulative pollution. We see the effects now of CO2 emitted in 1934 (an other prior years). There are forcings from particulate pollution that can be cooling, and there has been a change in the level of particulates put into the atmosphere, but these are shorter term effects since the stuff does not accumulate.
--
Get off fossil fuels: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Goalposts.

[mdsolar]

What you are looking for is also in the letter.
--
Solar power with no installation cost: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Goalposts.

[LeafOnTheWind]

Maybe this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl has something to do with it?

Re:Goalposts.

[archen]

Yes the nature changed a lot. Look at the industrial revolution and the types of factories used. Most of them used to pour out black smoke unending. Coal was still used as a relatively common way to heat homes. Cars were scarce in comparison to today. It's been well documented that one of the biggest changes in the nature of pollution has been the fact that we've significantly reduced how visible pollution is. This means more sunlight hits the earth instead of something else. Instead we have non visible greenhouse gases accumulating.. We've also expanded the population by leaps and bounds, and cars used to be something a family MIGHT own - and is now something that each family member has. We're also a lot less efficient in many ways. Milk used to come in bottles that were given back and sanitized for reuse. How many people still use a clothes line to dry their clothes? etc.

Re:Goalposts.

[OwnedByTwoCats]

You need a better calculator, then.

"Billions of tons of CO2" is n x 10 ^9 tons, where n is a small real number greater than 1.5. One (metric) ton is 10^3 KG. So "Billions of tons of CO2" is n x 10^12. Which is somewhere above 0.3 x 10^-6. Which would show up as 0.0000003, well within the limits of an 8-digit display that has been the rule for calculators for about 35 years now.

This should be within the abilities of a bright high school science student.

Re:Goalposts.

[Intron]

According to Wikipedia, the increase from 1832 to 2004 is not "ppm" it is 33%. The CO2 in the air is only 383 ppm, so citing the total mass of the atmosphere is misleading. Annual emissions due to human activity are around 2.4x10^13 Kg and is about 5% of the total emissions. The amount emitted and consumed was probably in equilibrium prior to the recent (last 500 years or so) increase due to human activity, so all of the human emissions are going into increased concentration until a new equilibrium is reached. Since humans are also doing things like clearing forests, which are carbon sinks, its not clear what level the final value will reach.

Re:Goalposts.

[Lars T.]

That fact that temperatures back then were so close to what they are now still convinces me to doubt Global Warming's extreme danger on this planet. You are comparing two years, 1934 and 1998, to get this conclusion. Why not use two not so different years, 1935 and 1999? What? Because then you'ld have 0.89C difference instead of 0.02C? Now that would be unfair.

But 5 of the 10 hottest years of the last century (in the US at least) were before WW2, right? So how many of the 10 coldest years of the were before WW2? 8? That can't be true.

Re:Goalposts.

[dbrutus]

More people=more pollution all other things being equal. They are not equal. We behave far differently than our great-grandparents a century ago and that makes a significant difference in pollution levels. NY City couldn't stand the number of horses needed to support its population if we went back to horse and buggy technology. The question is which effect predominates.

Re:Obligatory Firesign Theatre reference

[macs4all]

What's the Bird's-eye lowdown on this Caper, whatever that means?

Immediate action??

[Russ Nelson]

Whenever somebody tells me that I must take immediate action, I reach for my wallet.

Re:Immediate action??

[Hijacked Public]

I Tap, Rack, Bang.

Warmest Year...

[PinkyDead]

...my arse! It's been pissing rain here since April - and I'm getting a bit sick of it.

Re:Warmest Year...

[LanMan04]

Bah, it's been in the upper 90s here in the central US all week (37C for you metric folk) with humidity in the 70%+ range. YUCK

Re:Warmest Year...

[PinkyDead]

http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/yhst-3464 0480252896_1963_117522

Re:Warmest Year...

[Neoprofin]

Welcome to our one month of "summer" in Wisconsin.

Oh how I long for a dry heat...

Then will someone explain to me...

[bagboy]

If the corrected US data doesn't indicate such a large statistical anomaly on a global basis, why are we blaming the US, US government, US Citizens for creating the massive global warming effect being reported? Sounds like we might be less of the cause then?

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[marx]

The temperature in the US has little effect on the global mean value of the temperature (the US is only 2% of the area of the Earth). But the US is one of the top (or the top) polluter of greenhouse gases. That's why there's criticism, the US's share of the pollution is a lot larger than its share of land area or population.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[OwnedByTwoCats]

The USA is the top emitter of Greenhouse gasses. We will soon be surpassed by China, but China has 4x the population of the USA, so the USA is still 4x China on a per-capita basis.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[plague3106]

Because per captia we put out much much more CO2 than other countries. Also, CO2 released over the US doesn't sit just over the US, it moves with the winds. Pollution here causes acid rain in Brazil.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[bazorg]

the US (and Europe) share of emissions is quite fair in proportion to World "GDP" though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ GDP_(nominal)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_emissions

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[Lars T.]

The USA is the top emitter of Greenhouse gasses. We will soon be surpassed by China, but China has 4x the population of the USA, so the USA is still 4x China on a per-capita basis. Of course that doesn't even acknowledge that some of the CO2 China produces comes from making stuff that gets exported to and was previously made in - the US.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[dbrutus]

But the PRC is far more polluting. They have 6-7 times more pollution for every $ of GDP produced than the US. The PRC government is in a race against time trying to get their people rich enough not to have a new revolution and string the CCP up by their fragile communist necks and to hell with the environment.

The easy gains in terms of reduction of pollution per dollar are to be found in the PRC, India, and the rest of the 3rd world. If you want to spend more and get less improvement, concentrate on the 1st world including the US.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[Ambitwistor]

The U.S. more than 2% of the land surface area, but is equal to about 2% of the total surface area. The number of stations in the U.S. is more than 2% of the total number of stations, but that is irrelevant as far as the influence of U.S. temperatures on the global average is concerned. Furthermore, the correction being discussed here has very little to do with practices that are in place in other countries.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[drmerope]

That's why there's criticism, the US's share of the pollution is a lot larger than its share of land area or population.

Uh-huh. Have you considered that the US grows about one-quarter of the worlds grain supply--most of which is exported? Its kind-of funny how grain product strongly correlates with oil consumption.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[marx]

I fail to see why GDP would give you the right to pollute more. This is a formula for GDP from Wikipedia:

GDP = consumption + investment + (government spending) + (exports - imports)

So consuming a hamburger would increase consumption, which would increase the GDP, which according to you would give you the right to pollute more. That doesn't make any sense.

Or building a military weapon and firing it on Iraq would also increase the GDP, which you argue should give you the right to pollute more. Surely you cannot be serious with your argument.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[bazorg]

Not so much a right to pollute, but a normal consequence of polluting (=using resources). Prosperous people/countries can afford to choose to pollute more or less and the poorest don't have much of a choice in that area. The measurement of pollution vs. inhabitants instead of vs. GDP dismisses the fact that companies and economic development spend resources and pollute more than just a sum of a lot of individuals.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[marx]

It seems you've misunderstood the original problem. The problem is that the Earth can only tolerate a fixed level of pollution (greenhouse gases). This means that the global pollution output of all activities on Earth needs to be bounded by that fixed level. If you allow the pollution output to be proportional to the size of the global economy then the pollution output will not be bounded by any value, since the size of the global economy can grow (and does grow a lot).

You need to penalize wasteful production and consumption and a simple (and democratic) way to do that is to restrict each person to a fixed amount of pollution. You seem to want to suggest to restrict persons to different amounts of pollution, proportional to their share of the global economy. This would reward wasteful production and consumption rather than penalize it, since the more you produce and consume, the more you would be allowed to pollute. I don't really see how you can motivate such a viewpoint.

Like I said, if you allow pollution to be proportional to economic size, then producing an unnecessary hamburger and consuming it (or just throwing it away) would give you the right to pollute more. With a system with a fixed allowed pollution per person, then you would be rewarded by not producing the (unnecessary) hamburger in the first place, and you could instead "spend" your pollution on something which is actually useful.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[bazorg]

please pay attention to the following words, as they have never been written here on /. and there may never be another occurrence in your lifetime:

"Hmmm.... if you put things that way... I think you're right!"

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[marx]

I think you're probably right, this is a first :). You made a good point about taking productivity into account, I've dismissed it too quickly before. So I learned a new perspective as well.

Re:Then will someone explain to me...

[dbrutus]

When you reduce pollution in the US, you tend to relocate it to the PRC and other places with lax controls because their production costs become that much lower than ours. They also tend to be more energy inefficient. Global effect is higher energy prices and a dirtier planet. Way to go einstein.

Business as usual

[arivanov]

Fox and Co think that the world consist only of USA, news at 10.

They have looked solely at the USA graphs and completely ignored the world ones which are the ones that look really scary. They have also declared the problem with the USA data analysis to be a flaw in the data for the whole world.

Is anyone surprised? I am not...

Re:Business as usual

[faloi]

I know it's hip to hate Fox News... But the actual article describes the people denying global warming is man made as a "fringe group" and includes quotes from British researchers pointing out that it really doesn't matter on a global scale.

Re:Business as usual

[lottameez]

Personally, I have a far bigger problem accepting that a graph showing a 120 year trend is supposed to mean anything of any significance in the billion or so years that earth has been around.

Re:Business as usual

[Trailer Trash]

It also doesn't help that the email in the article ends with a cross-eyed loony rant about oil companies and car companies being responsible for ruining the planet.

Whaddya wanna bet he drives a car, too?

Re:Business as usual

[ajs]

Fox and Co think that the world consist only of USA, news at 10. My problem with the debate (and this isn't new... it's at least 2 decades old) is that every time some conservative politician or news outlet waves some piece of information around (usually misunderstanding it badly), we immediately seek to use that to discredit the person or group who produced or publicized the information.

We desperately need to remember that scientists and politicians have an intersection, but the vast majority of them don't have anything to do with each other. A scientist who seeks to prove Einstein wrong isn't some Einstein-hating nutjob (typically). In fact, they're performing the most valuable task that the scientific method sets forth: seeking to disprove. By attempting and failing, we learn more about the value of a theory. By attempting and succeeding, we learn more about the theory's weaknesses, and often improve upon it.

Let's not start marching toward those scientists who seek flaws in global climate change research with pitchforks and torches (or rather, let's stop doing so), and instead seek to pressure the media and politicians into supporting them and their less skeptical peers without confusing the issue by politicizing results too early. We need even more funding than we have for those who seek to assail the consensus, not because we think it will fall, but because that's what the scientific method demands. Anything less is not science, it's just politics in a lab coat.

Re:Business as usual

[roadkill-maker]

This stuff normally happens on the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Just 120+ years of rapidly accelerating human industry has managed to create a significant spike in global temperature. http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm I don't see the spike

Re:Business as usual

[chrb]

Let's not start marching toward those scientists who seek flaws in global climate change research with pitchforks and torches

I have absolutely no problem with people using the scientific methodology to investigate flaws in the current theories. What I do object to is tired, old, discredited arguments being re-hashed again and again by people who barely understand the science. See, for example, the great global warming swindle.

We need even more funding than we have for those who seek to assail the consensus, not because we think it will fall, but because that's what the scientific method demands. Anything less is not science, it's just politics in a lab coat.

By that rationale, we should still be funding the flat-Earthers. At some point those who argue against the scientific consensus have to actually provide evidence and start convincing others, otherwise their "research" will never end.

Re:Business as usual

[Lars T.]

I know it's hip to hate Fox News... But the actual article describes the people denying global warming is man made as a "fringe group" and includes quotes from British researchers pointing out that it really doesn't matter on a global scale. I know it's hip to defend Fox News... But the article you claim is the "actual article" is a "Times" peace from today, and thus can not be the article Hanson mentioned in his message from yesterday. Now the "Media Matters" article names the original Fox piece:

During the "Political Grapevine" segment of the August 10 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, guest host and chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle reported that NASA was forced "to admit it was wrong when it said that 1998 was the hottest year on record".

And they even have the video on that page. Any more "stop being unfair to Fox News"?

Re:Business as usual

[The One and Only]

My problem is not the type of people who seek to disprove Einstein using science. My problem is the type of people who seek to discredit Einstein using populist rhetoric and unscientific, political posturing in order to accomplish some political goal. Many of the "global warming skeptics" are either oil companies, people fundamentally uncomfortable with environmental regulations, and your perennial right-wing anti-intellectuals, far more often than they are actual climatologists with a competing theory. I hate to Godwin the thread, but you set me up perfectly for it--the "global warming skeptics" most of us are concerned with are more analogous to the Nazis who discredited Einstein as "Jewish physics" without even understanding it--and not because they cared about physics, but rather because it fit in with their broader political program. In the case of global warming, the "skeptics" are more like the Einstein-hating nutjobs of Nazi Germany, or the Darwin-hating nutjobs of Kansas, than they are ambitious young scientists wanting to join in the age-old scientific practice of disproving old theories.

Re:Business as usual

[ajs]

We need even more funding than we have for those who seek to assail the consensus, not because we think it will fall, but because that's what the scientific method demands. Anything less is not science, it's just politics in a lab coat.

By that rationale, we should still be funding the flat-Earthers. At some point those who argue against the scientific consensus have to actually provide evidence and start convincing others, otherwise their "research" will never end.

This is the wrong way to look at it. Funding isn't how you control that process, peer review and credentials are. When a respected member of the scientific community decides that they are going to try to attack a popular theory in a way that their peers feel is sufficiently sound, there should be no political consideration at all. Today, there is. This is a problem.

Whither the hype?

[dazedNconfuzed]

Ok, so 1998 was still the warmest - but not by more than a tiny fraction of a degree over 1934, and separated by a decrease to 1800s-era temps.

The bigger story I see in TFA's graphs is: we're looking at an increase of less than 1 degree C per century.
What's the fuss?

Re:Whither the hype?

[TemporalBeing]

Ok, so 1998 was still the warmest - but not by more than a tiny fraction of a degree over 1934, and separated by a decrease to 1800s-era temps.
The bigger story I see in TFA's graphs is: we're looking at an increase of less than 1 degree C per century.

Perhaps that's why there's so many that find "Global Warming" to be a myth.

Personnally, I think we still don't have enough accurate data measured to say one way or the other as we still have to figure out the cycles of the earth - and no, pulling core samples from various things won't tell you that. We need to be actively recording ourselves for a lot longer time period. Thus far, we have about a century's worth of data, but even then, the early data is susceptible to more errors and/or not complete. So, probably somewhere around 2250 can we start talking about real Global Warming and have enough data that most will actually believe it.

BTW, that doesn't mean we shouldn't control emissions, recycle, etc. We should. Believing in "Global Warming" and believing we must be "Good Stewards of our Resources" are not mutually inclusive - or mutually exclusive.

Re:Whither the hype?

[Choad Namath]

The way the whole issue has been handled is ridiculous. Extrapolating the very limited data we have to predict Armageddon in the next century is ridiculous. It's like starting to track someone's height at age 10 and then 4 years later predict that they'll double in height by the time they reach 30. Not to say that we shouldn't be studying it more, or taking steps to mitigate the possibility, but there's way too much hype and doomsday scenarios being thrown out there. Conservation is a worthy goal in and of itself, we should be doing it regardless of whether our houses will be under 10 feet of water in 50 years. But using FUD to push something like this is ridiculous.

Re:Whither the hype?

[Ambitwistor]

The bigger story I see in TFA's graphs is: we're looking at an increase of less than 1 degree C per century.
What's the fuss? The "fuss" is:

1. The climate change so far is relatively small, but has already had noticeable impacts on ecosystems.
2. The amount of change is attributable largely (but not wholly) to human activity.
3. The amount of change is projected to accelerate in the future, based both on increases in human activity, the long atmospheric residence time of CO2, and the long term response being delayed by ocean heat uptake.
4. The damages (economic, ecological, and otherwise) are estimated to increase faster than linearly as a function of the climate change.
5. The damages are also rate-dependent, and the rate is projected to increase as in (3).

Re:Whither the hype?

[oojah]

Thus far, we have about a century's worth of data, but even then, the early data is susceptible to more errors and/or not complete. So, probably somewhere around 2250 can we start talking about real Global Warming and have enough data that most will actually believe it.

How much would you trust data from 250 years ago? I'll bet that in 250 years there will be plenty of doubt as to the accuracy of our current measurements.

Cheers,
Roger

Re:Whither the hype?

[Comen]

When you mention the relation between 1934 and 1998 I must think you are looking at the US graph, and not the graph of the global temperature.
And I do not understand why pulling core samples from different places is a bad thing, it is the only way I can think of, to study the past in that amount of detail, Scientist can explain how they gather the information from the core samples and it sounds very logical to me, they can tell generaly how hot or cold that year was from the cycles of the seasons etc for those samples.
If you would rather not belive it and just wait and see what happens that would be up to you, but when data like that tends to lead many groups of scientists to the fact that people have been cauing the temperature of our plant to raise and can show it to use on graphs so that anyone can understand it, and somehow people still want to say we dont have enough data, then maybe some just dont want to listen.
Trying to predict what will happen when the temperature raises might be hard to do, but we should all atleast agree that maybe it is worth looking in to once you look at the data.

Re:Whither the hype?

[d3ac0n]

There's already doubts about the accuracy of our current measurements. Many of the temperature and precipitation reading stations are located in urban areas on rooftops, where localized heating and the "urban heat island" phenomena have been show to skew the results to the high end. Several ave been found to have been placed near the HEAT EXHAUST of building air-conditioning systems. Due to this, many are questioning the veracity and accuracy of even the raw data, let alone the methodology employed in processing the data.

Citation on temperature station problems>: http://newsbusters.org/node/13282

More information here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1927#more-1927

Re:Whither the hype?

[TemporalBeing]

When you mention the relation between 1934 and 1998 I must think you are looking at the US graph, and not the graph of the global temperature. And I do not understand why pulling core samples from different places is a bad thing, it is the only way I can think of, to study the past in that amount of detail, Scientist can explain how they gather the information from the core samples and it sounds very logical to me, they can tell generaly how hot or cold that year was from the cycles of the seasons etc for those samples.

To start with, i didn't quote any data, and quite rightfully agreed with the GP. The major point I was pulling from the quote of the GP was the following:

The bigger story I see in TFA's graphs is: we're looking at an increase of less than 1 degree C per century.

That said, first take a look at this post.

Second, core samples can (a) only tell so much, and (b) can be very misleading because they only give a small set of data. There is a lot we don't know about those time periods. We can extrapolate some information - like this tree grew more this year, or there was a fire, etc. But there is very little that can be had. Tree growth also does not necessarily mean a warmer year. So the relationship that "Global Warming" advocates try to put there is not necessarily there. Core samples are really of limited use, and pretending that they can provide more use than that is really just as stupid as crying out that there is a major issue when we cannot prove one.

Third, for all we know we're in the peak of a fifty, one hundred, two hundred, five hundred, one thousand, or ten thousand year cycle. However, we cannot say that is the case until we have data from several cycles. You cannot extrapolate a full cycle from a portion of a single cycle. (Any one that tells you otherwise needs to get their degree revoked.)

If you would rather not belive it and just wait and see what happens that would be up to you, but when data like that tends to lead many groups of scientists to the fact that people have been cauing the temperature of our plant to raise and can show it to use on graphs so that anyone can understand it, and somehow people still want to say we dont have enough data, then maybe some just dont want to listen.

It's not a matter of believing in "Global Warming" or not. We cannot say one way or the other whether it is happening. There just simply is not enough data to say. Come back in a few hundred years and we'll talk about it then.

Trying to predict what will happen when the temperature raises might be hard to do, but we should all atleast agree that maybe it is worth looking in to once you look at the data.

Trying to predicate what will happen when the temperatures go up is worth looking into. But claiming that we know the cause of or can do anything about it is ridiculous. That said, we still need to be good stewards - cut down on emissions, recycle, etc.

There's good points to both sides of the arguments - "Global Warming" advocates want us to be better stewards (good), but claim something that cannot be proven do strike fear in people to get them to do so (bad). (I won't call it FUD because we can't yet prove it one way or the other; but it doesn't fall far from it - and will more likely pose the same issue as "the boy who cried wolf" if & when it is provable to be true.) A lot of "Anti-Global Warming" advocates simply want us to do nothing (bad), and are pointing out that "Global Warming" can't be shown to exist for certain (good).

That said - I really don't fall in either camp. I'll neither claim it exists, nor that it does not - because it will be a long time past my lif

Re:Whither the hype?

[Ambitwistor]

There's already doubts about the accuracy of our current measurements. There are inaccuracies in any data set. The question is the extent to which they actually influence any conclusions. Some points:

1. The SurfaceStations folk rely on suggestion and implication, not on actual measurement: to what extent does an A/C 10 feet away actually influence temperature measurements? They don't say. They haven't shown that there are actual problems with the recorded temperatures.
2. They then retreat to a generic argument of "Well, something could be wrong with the temperature record, therefore we should just disregard it as unreliable".
3. Siting problems are generally worse in urban areas, which they have so far focused mostly on. They have only found a relatively small fraction of "potential" siting problems among the stations surveyed; the overall fraction and influence of "potential" problems should be even lower once they look at the rural stations.
4. There are already plenty of statistical procedures in place to detect and correct (if possible) or discard (if not possible) anomalous temperatures, such as jump discontinuity detection, renorming urbanized sites against local rural sites, etc.
5. Two independent satellite records agree with the surface temperature record during the late 20th century/21st century period of warming. So too do other less direct measures, within their respective errors, such as borehole temperatures, temperature reconstructions from glacier melt rates, species redistribution patterns, etc.

The SurfaceStations effort is worthwhile in documenting some of this site evidence, but the idea that the surface temperature record is untrustworthy due to site location, or that they are going to overturn the rate of warming, is absurd, given all the other evidence as well as the statistical analysis procedures already in place. Even McIntyre admits that the warming is real; he just wants it to be better quantified.

Re:Whither the hype?

[d3ac0n]

1. The SurfaceStations folk rely on suggestion and implication, not on actual measurement: to what extent does an A/C 10 feet away actually influence temperature measurements? They don't say. They haven't shown that there are actual problems with the recorded temperatures.

Last time I checked, it's NASA's job to make sure that the surface stations are recording temperature accurately. It's rather obvious that a measurement station located in a small area that will get consistently higher temperatures than the surrounding environment is going to be inaccurate. There is no reason to not attempt to get away from artificial heat sources as much as possible, and to defend questionable measurement techniques such as this smacks of ideological motivations.

2. They then retreat to a generic argument of "Well, something could be wrong with the temperature record, therefore we should just disregard it as unreliable".

It's not a "generic argument" it's a very real concern, and if there is a real concern about the accuracy and veracity of a data set, particularly a data set with implications as serious as this one, then it is a scientists duty to excise data that very well may have been compromised. This is standard scientific prodecure. You don't use data you know to be bad, or that there is a strong possibility of being bad. Period.

3. Siting problems are generally worse in urban areas, which they have so far focused mostly on. They have only found a relatively small fraction of "potential" siting problems among the stations surveyed; the overall fraction and influence of "potential" problems should be even lower once they look at the rural stations.

Yes, Siting problems are worse in urban areas, which makes one wonder why they would be sited in urban areas at all. the Urban Heat Island phoenomena alone should be enough to drive any and all sites out of urban areas, let alone away from obvious manmade heat sources such as incinerators, asphalt tarmacks, and air conditioning heat exhausts. Again, it comes down to poor methodology throwing the data into doubt.

Oh, and I love how you claim "a relatively small fraction of 'potential' siting problems".

From the article and the blog: "About 80% of the temperature stations that have been visited and photographed have serious quality problems." In what universe is 80% a SMALL FRACTION? Oops! Caught you in a lie! Try again.

4. There are already plenty of statistical procedures in place to detect and correct (if possible) or discard (if not possible) anomalous temperatures, such as jump discontinuity detection, renorming urbanized sites against local rural sites, etc.

Really? Then why were the results from the cited stations INCLUDED in the data used? And why the need for the correction this whole /. article is about? The point is, IF there are any statistical procedures in place, they aren't being used properly or AT ALL. Of course, since the procedures aren't being performed in an open manner, we really have no idea, do we?

5. Two independent satellite records agree with the surface temperature record during the late 20th century/21st century period of warming. So too do other less direct measures, within their respective errors, such as borehole temperatures, temperature reconstructions from glacier melt rates, species redistribution patterns, etc.

Satellites: Citation Needed

Bore Hole measurements: Due to lack of citation I can only assume that you are speaking about the Taylor Dome borehole data cited in the NAS panel report of 2006. There have been serious doubts about that data, including doubts from Steve McIntyre: "So what we have here: we have a National Research Council panel chairman making statements at a national press conference which rely on an unpublished borehole analysis

Re:Whither the hype?

[Ambitwistor]

It's rather obvious that a measurement station located in a small area that will get consistently higher temperatures than the surrounding environment is going to be inaccurate.

Like I said, the SurfaceStation people have not demonstrated that the stations ARE getting consistently higher temperatures than the surrounding environment. What kind of influence does an air conditioner 10 feet away have on a Stevenson-screened station? It's not at all obvious that it will have any effect at all.

There is no reason to not attempt to get away from artificial heat sources as much as possible, and to defend questionable measurement techniques such as this smacks of ideological motivations.

I didn't defend questionable measurement techniques, I said that the SurfaceStation people haven't demonstrated any errors in the temperature record.

The CORRECT way to go about this is not to sling mud about how we have to toss the entire temperature record, it's to actually measure the extent to which stations have problems, which is part of what is being done with the new Climate Reference Network.

You don't use data you know to be bad, or that there is a strong possibility of being bad.

As I said, there is no data KNOWN to be bad. There is only data alleged to possibly be bad.

Yes, Siting problems are worse in urban areas, which makes one wonder why they would be sited in urban areas at all.

Data is data, and you can't just ignore urban areas: a non-negligible fraction of the planet's surface is urbanized. Tossing out all urban stations altogether doesn't change the overall trend, although the error bars go up.

"About 80% of the temperature stations that have been visited and photographed have serious quality problems."

You're citing Kristen "Ponder The Maunder" Byrnes? Give me a break. Certainly your ClimateAudit link doesn't back it up, and such as statement doesn't appear on SurfaceStations either. If you want to provide something from Watts himself, go ahead. Be sure to define what a "serious quality problem" is, and its quantifiable relation to temperature bias.

Then why were the results from the cited stations INCLUDED in the data used?

Why shouldn't they be? There's nothing known to be wrong with their data. If the CRN is able to quantify errors in the data, they will be adjusted or discarded.

And why the need for the correction this whole /. article is about?

The correction has nothing to do with the quality of surface station siting nor with the quality of the adjustment algorithm; it was simply a mistake in which data set was being used.

The point is, IF there are any statistical procedures in place, they aren't being used properly or AT ALL.

You've made no such point. The procedures are used and they work; they can't give the right answer, however, when you give them the wrong data set.

Satellites: Citation Needed

You can dig in chapter 3 of the IPCC report for the formal references, but the Wikipedia graph is instructive (here).

Bore Hole measurements: Due to lack of citation I can only assume that you are speaking about the Taylor Dome borehole data cited in the NAS panel report of 2006.

What, do you Google everything I say on Climate Audit for your talking points?

The Taylor Dome is one specific borehole in Antarctica. There are lots of boreholes located all over the world, and numerous borehole studies, found in chapter 6 of the IPCC report.

Temperature reconstructions from glacier melt rates and species redistribution patterns are largely considered tangential to overall Global Warming theory by all but the most religious of GW zealots

This is, of course, nonsense. They're not as good as the surface or satellite

Re:Whither the hype?

[snarfer]

Newsbusters is funded by Exxon. Did you know that?

Honestly...

[Otter]

This had seemed like pretty much a non-issue all along. If anything it's Hansen's "second, more impassioned email" that diminishes his credibility as a sober, objective scientist just reporting his data. At least in my field, scientists don't issue corrections like:

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water.

Re:Honestly...

[hal2814]

"At least in my field, scientists don't issue corrections like"

Well, maybe not in your field. In my field, I could've seen Dijkstra making such a statement concerning the continued use of GOTO. I don't think it would've made it into a proper EWD and I doubt it would be sent via email since Dijkstra wasn't that fond of personal computers, but I could see him making such a statement.

Re:Honestly...

[djmurdoch]

You must work in a really boring field. If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted. And I don't mind reading colourful prose, rather than the dead academic passive voice.

Re:Honestly...

[MMC Monster]

This had seemed like pretty much a non-issue all along. If anything it's Hansen's "second, more impassioned email" that diminishes his credibility as a sober, objective scientist just reporting his data. At least in my field, scientists don't issue corrections like:

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water.

Somehow I doubt all of creation will be affected by global climate change. Heck, I doubt even the iron core within our planet will be significantly affected.

Re:Honestly...

[Salgat]

Politics and Science make for a nasty mix.

Re:Honestly...

[slughead]

>You must work in a really boring field. If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted. And I don't mind reading colourful prose, rather than the dead academic passive voice.

The 'colorful prose' is a great litmus test for bullshit. If a scientist reveals data on a subject on global warming and then details what (s)he thinks to be the effects which are outside the scope of their expertise, my bullshit detector goes ape sh*t.

Economic impacts and massive changes in human history are not for climate scientists to say. I'm relieved when they do, however, as it lets me know that there's a great chance that their data was collected to prove their point, rather than the other way around. It really simplifies the process when they basically tell you to ignore their data before you have even read it yet.

A 'good scientist' would be equally interested in data that disproves their theories as data that verifies them. I seriously doubt Hansen is a 'good scientist', by this definition.

Re:Honestly...

[TubeSteak]

If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted. He also makes a cogent political and religious argument in the same section of his letter.

I am puzzled by views expressed by some conservatives, views usually expressed in vehement unpleasant ways in e-mails that I have been bombarded by in the past several days. ... It is puzzling, because it seems to me that conservatives should be the first ones standing up for preserving Creation, and for the rights of the young and the unborn. That is the basic intergenerational issue in global warming and the headlong use of fossil fuels: the present generation is, in effect, ripping off future generations.

Is it possible that conservatives have been too quick to support the captains of industry? The basic problem is that national religious conservative leadership has focused exclusively on issues like "the rights of the young and the unborn" and the gay 'agenda'.

Those (in leadership positions) who desire to shift away from political gay/abortion/Jesus activism and towards things like helping the poor and conserving the environment are mostly told to STFU & get back on message. "They" don't want to split the consideral political capital that's built up behind the religious conservative bloc.

Religion has always influenced politics, but IMO, in the last 30 years, politics has been corrupting religion.

Re:Honestly...

[djmurdoch]

I agree that colourful prose makes it easier to spot someone's biases, but I think it's naive to think that boring writing is free of them. It's not much of a litmus test when it misses so much.

And I agree that climate scientists shouldn't be believed when they talk about economics, but I think their climate science should be judged on its own merits, not based on what they say in other areas.

Is Hansen a good scientist? I don't know, but one sign in his favour is that he didn't hide the programming error that led to the change in post-2000 estimates. Did he cook the data in some other way? I haven't seen any evidence of that yet.

Re:Honestly...

[Otter]

He also makes a cogent political and religious argument in the same section of his letter.

I'm not unsympathetic to his point, but his qualities as a theologian or (regarding the GP's point) as a celebrity are a bit off message from "objective, dispassionate scientist just reporting his findings".

Re:Honestly...

[toganet]

Funny, I read the article as an email, not a peer-reviewed publication. I found no problem with the tone, though it was infused with opinion. I, however, am able to take that with a grain of now-plentiful sea salt.

Re:Honestly...

[jc42]

|If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted.

He also makes a cogent political and religious argument in the same section of his letter.

Ah, but you should know that being an expert in any technical subject disqualifies a person from making any comments on politics or economics. If a scientist makes public political comments, that totally discredits their science.

Those pesky scientists should just leave politics to the politicians and economics to the economists. (And to the people who aren't experts in anything.)

Re:Honestly...

[Scooter's_dad]

Hansen's email is not a scientific publication regarding the correction. It is his personal informed opinion about the nature of the controversy and the degree of deceit involved on the part of his opponents. And as he thinks the stakes are indeed very high, his impassioned prose is perfectly appropriate.

Re:Honestly...

[Straif]

small typo in your comment:

Here in the US we call it Democratism and it hasn't been a nasty..... Oh wait, never mind.

Fixed it for you.

No political party in the US has attempted to use sketchy and unproven science and attempted to demonize dissenting opinions more so that the Democrats with regards to Global Warming. Or maybe you didn't manage to watch that little piece of fiction made by former presidential hopeful Al 'The Goracle" Gore which despite several criticisms including admissions by the man himself that some of the numbers he used were hyped for greater effect, has been pushed as the bible for new age climatologist wannabes even to the point of having it made mandatory viewing in some school districts.

Re:Honestly...

[Autonomous Crowhard]

Exactly. It's statements like this that just add fuel to the morons who accuse the scientific community of having an agenda.

Re:Honestly...

[whit3]

>>You must work in a really boring field. If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they
>>would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted. And I don't mind reading colourful prose,
>>rather than the dead academic passive voice.

>The 'colorful prose' is a great litmus test for bullshit. If a scientist reveals data on a subject
>on global warming and then details what (s)he thinks to be the effects which are outside the
>scope of their expertise, my bullshit detector goes ape sh*t.

That 'great litmus test' is called the ad hominem fallacy. Serious thinkers ditched it
a few centuries B. C.

A scientist whose work gets co-opted by spinmeisters has good reason to speak colorful
language, and that does NOT make the spinmeister into a cute, cuddly guy that you
want to align with.

Re:Honestly...

[Bluesman]

It doesn't disqualify you from making statements, but when you lace your scientific statement with political opinion, you end up sounding more like a fanatic than a professional.

You would see the logic in what I'm talking about if you would only accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your own personal saviour, as I have.

See how that works?

Re:Honestly...

[khallow]

Lying is not the only form of deception.

Re:Honestly...

[NoOneInParticular]

Of course, Hansen is after the big money. Being working for NASA and all, he would be rich beyond imagination as long as he can keep this Fahrenhype up.

Yes, these are sarcasm tags /. stripped.

Re:Honestly...

[djmurdoch]

Okay, I'll rephrase:

If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a deceitful arguer, not simply contradicted.

Happy?

Re:Honestly...

[khallow]

Indeed, I am happy. :-) Keep in mind there are numerous cases where parties have adversarial positions and aren't expected to present an unbiased argument. Normally, skewing an argument in favor of your side is deceptive, but it's allowed, for example, in the courts.

Re:Honestly...

[dbIII]

Personally I think that is quite well written. We live in an age where a president will put on a costume to visit an aircraft carrier and put on a show - there's a lot of court jesters out there affecting things right to the top.

Re:Honestly...

[dbIII]

Religion has always influenced politics, but IMO, in the last 30 years, politics has been corrupting religion.

To be a bit eliteist here I think it was when illiterate tent evangalism became more important than educated clergy that things got a bit too political. Creationists should try reading their entire Bible - there's a bit written by Paul that shows why the silly 6000 year earth age thing is not part of the mainstream, and the mainstream accepted evolution a long time ago.

I paticularly dislike the ones that think God hates poor people.

Re:Honestly...

[Ambitwistor]

There's nothing wrong with scientists having zeal, as long as their science is sound. However, their peers do calibrate their statements to separate opinion from fact. I personally take Hansen seriously, but I'm also aware that he's on the more "alarmist" end of the spectrum and that lots of people disagree with him. One also must be aware that while he's entitled to his opinion about societal impacts, he's not an economist or political scientist or anthropologist.

Hansen muddied the waters himself

[Kohath]

I thought it muddied the waters plenty when he

- published incorrect data leading to incorect conclusions,
- refused to release his algorithm so it had to be reverse-engineered,
- and deliberately exaggerated the global warming threat to push his personal agenda (which he later admitted).

Re:Hansen muddied the waters himself

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

I don't pick sides in the global warming "debate" because I don't judge myself knowledgeable enough on the subject to do so since it's not my area of research (unlike legions of bloggers who presumably are qualified to do so). If the climatologists tell me they think it's gonna get warmer, well they are in a better position to judge than me.

What I do see (and find incredibly frustrating as a scientist) is the following:

1) He refused to show what his analysis was. There is no way I'd get away with publishing a paper doing that. You can't simply take some input data, perform a magical transform on it and publish the results without saying what you did. That's not a meaningful result. The error may be small, but if he *had* published his method, then it would have been found sooner and this whole debacle could have been avoided.

2) When someone reverse-engineered his analysis (from the input and output) and it was found to be wrong the attack wing of the "pro"-climate change campaign proactively launched into a hysterical (and unjustified) assault on the person who found the flaw, despite NASA agreeing that the flaw was there and changing the published results, which is a complete own-goal given that this is how their opponents accuse them of behaving.

3) Now he's sent off a bunch of e-mails where he comes over as a petulant child. You can't politicise your research and then whinge because when it's wrong you get into a political slapfight.

None of these things promote rational debate.

It's not a religion folks: If it's wrong, you've not lost anything, if it's right we're in trouble, and either way the oil is finite.

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Soros is hiding under your bed. Don't sleep, it isn't safe.

A solution to all of this FUD...

[_14k4]

Release the data, all of it, openly. NOAA data is available, for a fee to download I think, and so should all of the other data. I don't mean "should" as in "legislated", I mean "should" as in "should" or, "it would be nice."

If all of the data were released in this fashion, in one central "trusted" place, one could assume that as more and more analysts take a gander - themes will appear and more and more of the graphs could be trusted.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[FlatLine84]

I know we're polluting the hell out of this planet. And the studies, and data all point to *at least* a climate change. But it still seems damn strange that all of the sudden this is a huge issue. Let me play devil's advocate and grab my tin-foil hat.... Since the data is secretive, also the calculation behind all these conclusions, is it possible that this is all a rouse to "justify" a rise in oil costs? I mean hell, we never see anything like that... Also, that aside, aren't we (collective people around the globe) and especially the US, polluting less than we used to? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[KingRoo]

> that as more and more analysts take a gander

And produce a report like, say, the upcoming IPCC synthesis report? Where lots of analysts "took a gander"?

Or just the selection of NOAA climate data that's free? Or, did you want to look at, for example, sea ice data?

Reallly, people. There's boats of data out there. Sure, it may not be in a "trusted" place (btw, who exactly would the contrarians consider trusted here?).

Have at it.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[_14k4]

Yeah, you gave a couple of links there and put "trusted" in quotes just like I did...

I'm not saying put the data up on the wikipedia - that's not exactly trusted, either.

But if society could simply learn to stop taking things for face value and start applying the logic of science behind not only the gathering of the data but the reception of it on reports as well. What is the algorithm used? When and where was the data collected from? Were the instruments calibrated properly? Oh they were owned by Shell? Why?

etc etc...

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[KingRoo]

I hear ya - both sides of the debate seem to attract these extremist idiots willing to grasp soundbite-shaped straws. Me, I contend the data (even messy, unformatted) and reasonable analysis (by multiple models, and multiple groups, each with differing assumptions), show us that something potentially nasty is up that should give us - society - some serious pause about how to proceed.

I just react badly to the "if they only gave us the data and algorithms" when, to a very large degree, they have - there's open-source climate models, FTP data sites, etc.

-t

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[_14k4]

I agree - there is data out there. But where is it? I don't want a category on del.icio.us that lists 50 to 100 links of where to get the data... I would like a "community" (ie: scientific types) built repository for it. Think of arxiv.org, for instance.

Mostly because I'm lazy, but also because if the data is discredited at one source out of 100, that's fine.. but if the data was at one central place - the place itself would, hopefully, hold to a higher standard of data consistency, quality, etc.

Without sounding like I don't care, because I do: I don't care if the data shows that the climate is warming, cooling, or staying the same. What I care about, right now in the context of this report that there was no y2k bug, is the lack of "quality" data out there, easily grabable... etc.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[Coryoth]

I don't want a category on del.icio.us that lists 50 to 100 links of where to get the data... I would like a "community" (ie: scientific types) built repository for it. Think of arxiv.org, for instance. You mean kind of like this or perhaps this. These things do exist. Your inability to actually go and look for them would seem to be the problem.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[_14k4]

I don't think you understand - is NOAA the only place for this data? No. Why filter your result set to only one *source* of data? (I mean, incoming data, not source of data to report on, as if I was contradicting my first statement.)

How could someone like me, familiar with instrumentation, go out and gather data and submit it to the community for inclusion in reporting?

That "community" does not exist.

And, btw, I was just about to say thanks for the noaa links. I knew about them, but thought they still charged for "bandwidth" usage, etc.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[Coryoth]

Why filter your result set to only one *source* of data? (I mean, incoming data, not source of data to report on, as if I was contradicting my first statement.)
How could someone like me, familiar with instrumentation, go out and gather data and submit it to the community for inclusion in reporting? You didn't actually look at the NCDC material on the NOAA website did you? It is a collection of a wide variety of climate related data, not simply NOAA data or work. Let's have a little tour. In the ice core section we have Vostok, and Dome C ice core data from Antarctica, GRIP data from Greenland, ice cores from Kilmanjaro, and a glacier in Kenya, and even Peru among many others. How about tree ring data? Why yes, we have tree ring data from innumerable studies from all over the world. Coral data? Got it! Pollen data? Got it! All from many different studies by a wide variety of different people, all providing their data for the archive. There's also cave data, borehole data, and lake data. And that's just the paleo-data. Lord forbid that you should actually have to spend a little while looking for things.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[jc42]

Release the data, all of it, openly.

Actually, there is a fair amount of discussion of exactly this, in a lot of scientific fora. People are pointing out that it's becoming feasible now, and it's just the inherently slow, careful nature of scientific methodology that has prevented it from happening.

The most common suggestion is that the data for all published papers should go into online archives at the time of publication, with complete data descriptions (and maybe sample parsing code) along with the data. We can expect a lot of scientific organizations to implement this in the coming years.

Then it'll be fun to watch the flame wars from the scientifically illiterate (and innumerate) as they do the traditional sort of bogus analyses of the data.

We can see this already, of course, in the climate-change debate, as various interested parties "cherry pick" the data to produce support for their views. They are helped tremendously by the fact that climate is a hugely complex, semi-chaotic system. We can expect a lot of this as the raw data starts going online.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[vastabo]

How could someone like me, familiar with instrumentation, go out and gather data and submit it to the community for inclusion in reporting?

Ah, but that community DOES exist! Sign up at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/

And COOP observations are published at http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/ for free

NCDC generally doesn't charge for data, just publications. There is no "bandwidth" toll.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[snarfer]

"both sides of the debate"

There aren't "sides" in the climate change debate. There are scientists, and then there is the massively funded obfuscation effort from the oil and coal industries.

It's the same as the old "debate" over whether cigarettes cause cancer.

Re:A solution to all of this FUD...

[_14k4]

Hey, thanks ferfucksake. I never said I had much experience in surfing around noaa - without attitude, it would have been great to simply say that NOAA had it all. And it looks like it does, with the link below regarding upload of community data (as I so put it)...

So yeah... noaa does it for me. I can look there until something better comes out. Plus, taxpayer dollars pay for it.

Cerial

[dlhm]

This article does not sound like it was written by a scientist, it sounds like a poor little man who is outraged and upset that anyone would question his admitidly flawed data. I think he needs to take a pill. If Global Warming has increased the earths tempature from .3-.6 C then a .15C IS a big deal.

Re:Cerial

[dlhm]

Once again I question the voracity of a scientist and I'm modded down.. If only i said somthing bad about FOX or GW.. Then i would have been awarded +1 for informative...

Re:Cerial

[vidarh]

And you're illustrating exactly why he is outraged: The errors affected the US. The effect on the data for the global temperatures was so small as to be dwarfed by the overall margin of error for the data, but the media completely ignored that, and ignored that it changes nothing with respects to long term trends and overall global warming.

Re:Cerial

[Zelos]

Of course questioning the appetite of a scientist is going to get modded down, isn't it a bit irrelevant?

Re:Cerial

[Ambitwistor]

If Global Warming has increased the earths tempature from .3-.6 C then a .15C IS a big deal. You're comparing apples to oranges (global temperature to U.S. temperatures). 0.15 C in the U.S. is not a big deal to the global picture, since the affect on global temperatures is about 50 times smaller.

It actually isn't that big of a deal to U.S. temperatures, either (here is a before-after graph of the change), although it is noticeable. It's really only a big deal for trends in specific regions of the U.S.

Not global warming. Global climate change.

[MMC Monster]

Why do we still call it global warming? It's global climate change. Some areas will get warmer. Some areas will get cooler. Some areas will be under water.

The nice thing about it is that the majority of us will live to see the changes. We are in for some interesting times over the next 30-50 years. :-)

"Global" Warming

[LifesABeach]

he shows maps of U.S. temperatures relative to the world in 1934 and 1998

Just a thought, but the first word in "Global Warming" is "Global", would he be so kind as to show us "Global" maps? They do exist, and these temperatures were recorded back much further than 1934.

Re:"Global" Warming

[djmurdoch]

would he be so kind as to show us "Global" maps?

Where would he show these, if putting them in the FA isn't the right place?

Re:"Global" Warming

[jamie]

The maps he shows are global. You didn't RTFA.

Re:.001 degree?

[IBBoard]

Because 0.001 C instead of 0.0005 C (approx 0.001 F) makes a major difference to the correction ;)

TBH, I'd hope they'd be using Celsius as they map directly to Kelvins, but with the Americans and their Fahrenheit then you never know.

Carbon Credits stirred it up

[dbIII]

It went all weird once the economists got involved. Now both sides are talking about things based on little data as if they are certainties and the strongest opponents are grasping at tiny straws and saying that makes the entire thing worthless. What's more the most rabid opponents are saying that people in Antarctica are faking ice core results - a pretty stupid assertion really since they could fake the stuff at home where it is warm instead.

At least most people have given up on saying it isn't happening at all - a lot of opponents have moved to saying it's a purely solar effect. Watching the oil industry they are fairly split too so they can't be blamed - it's governments stirring up the mess and whether they are right or wrong Lysenkoism is taking over in US science and wreaking havoc. I would hate to be a climate scientist caught in the middle having the choice of either potentially career ending ridicule or government funding.

Re:.001 degree?

[grommit]

I think somebody didn't bother to RTFA. You don't even get the years correct.

Re:This is a capitalist society..

[Lord Bitman]

If you want to do something for free, go out and do it for free! Don't wait for someone to ask!

Slow news day?

[will_die]

A quick search on Foxnews show they mention that it is about the US only a few times.
Also it does not make 1934,1998 or 2005(what ever of thoses 3 years) the hottest year as the OP says, it makes it the hottest year in recent recorded time, guess we better start a new topic about that.

Usufruct

[necro81]

Ok, I admit, I had to look this one up:

Usufruct is the legal right to derive profit or benefit from the property of others. It comes from the latin roots for "use" and "fruits," in the sense that you are using the fruits of someone else's labor.

Wikipedia
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary
a legal Dictionary

In the case of Hansen's second email, he is, I think, using it to describe how captains of industry are benefitting from the global warming nay-sayers' spin on this correction. He also uses it in the sense that successive generations have a right and claim to the enjoy the Earth, so we'd better take care of it, even as we benefit from it.

Re:Usufruct

[djmurdoch]

Usufruct is the legal right to derive profit or benefit from the property of others.

You left out the most important part: "as long as the property is not damaged." He's saying we have a right to use the Earth, but we don't have a right to damage it.

Re:Usufruct

[jc42]

He's saying we have a right to use the Earth, but we don't have a right to damage it.

Well, he's going against one of the important doctrines of much of Christianity. A great many of them interpret the appropriate biblical passages to mean that their God gave them the right to do as they wish with their Earth.

Of course, some Christian theologians have insisted that we only have a right to "stewardship" of the planet. But the original Hebrew is brief and somewhat vague about the details, so such theologians are widely ignored. It's clear that the (supposedly) Christian folks now running the US government don't accept such heretical interpretations, and believe that they have a God-given right to exploit the planet maximally for their own short-term gain.

Hansen had better watch his back.

Re:Usufruct

[huckamania]

If the Global Warmers/Climate Changers would stop trying to lay all of the blame on the US, maybe the US government wouldn't be so inclined to ignore their claims.

If scientists could just admit when they are wrong and stop trying to become celebrities, maybe more people wouldn't be so quick to dismiss their claims as well.

The original graph from this guys data was so completely off that once the bug was reported, a quick look could confirm that it was wrong. Now the graphs are smooth and much less frightening and yet somehow this doesn't change anything? The guy should just admit he has egg on his face. He should be double and triple checking everything before he starts making pronouncements, because who knows what else he's gotten wrong.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. How many peer reviewed articles did he publish using this flawed data? How many peer reviewed articles cited this data or his own articles? How many peers completely missed that the graphs were completely bungled? Well, we know now that it was all of them.

Good job scientists! You know lawyering used to be a respected position as well.

Re:Usufruct

[Ambitwistor]

The original graph from this guys data was so completely off that once the bug was reported, a quick look could confirm that it was wrong. Did you even look at the graph? The change is minor (and not even visible on the global scale), and "a quick look" only confirms something once you know where to look.

Now the graphs are smooth and much less frightening and yet somehow this doesn't change anything? They are neither smoother nor "much less frightening". Look again. The global graph doesn't even have a visible change on it.

The guy should just admit he has egg on his face. He admitted he was wrong, and he also correctly noted that the error is not as major as people such as yourself are making it out to be.

Re:Usufruct

[djmurdoch]

Was this accidentally posted as a reply to the wrong message? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with "usufruct", or the message it replies to.

In fact, it doesn't even have much to do with the whole issue being discussed:

- Nobody is putting all the blame on the US, they're just saying that on a per capita basis, it's one of the highest producers of greenhouse gases. But Australia and Canada and a number of smaller countries are just about as bad (or worse, in a few cases).

- Nobody is denying that Hansen's predictions were wrong before.

- His previous graph was not "so completely off". It was barely changed by the correction.

- It doesn't really matter how many articles were published based on the flawed data, because there were no material changes to it.

Re:Usufruct

[NoOneInParticular]

Hmm, have you read the stuff at all? There was a bug, it has been corrected, the flaws are hardly noticeable and the trends are still there. Let me summarize Hansen's statements for you. (a) The bug affected US temperature only, by 0.15 degrees. (b) Global temperature averages are unaffected (as the US is not the globe, how weird that may seem. (c) 1934 was already the hottest year in the US (by 0.01 degrees), now it is the hottest by 0.14 degrees. (d) the graphs are unaffected. (e) you're the type of moron that attempts to make a big stink out of a small correction.

Re:Usufruct

[Peter La Casse]

He's saying we have a right to use the Earth, but we don't have a right to damage it.

That's an interesting religious position, but it makes me wonder how his religious views have affected his research. (Not that that's always a bad thing.)

Re:Usufruct

[Peter La Casse]

You're confusion religion with ethics. A position can be ethical without being religious.

No, you're confusing religious views with organized religion. Someone can hold religious views about anything; any arbitrary position (such as "X is wrong") is a religious view. This certainly overlaps with ethics, though it's not a superset of everything that has to do with ethics (descriptive ethics attempts to observe existing ethical views without necessarily endorsing them).

In this case, Dr. Hansen apparently believes that humanity doesn't have the right to damage the earth. This is clearly outside the realm of science; it's based on one's opinion about the place of mankind in the universe. Moreover, people often hold religious views about things that science does make meaningful statements about, so whether or not somebody believes something religiously is independent of whether or not there are other reasons to believe that thing.

It's possible that Dr. Hansen believes this for legal-historical reasons (for example, perhaps he read it on a web site that he trusted.) That doesn't prevent it from being a religious view though; lots of religious views are formed after being exposed to ideas that ultimately amount to hearsay.

Re:Usufruct

[Peter La Casse]

No, you're using a meaninglessly broad definition of the term "religous".

I think that's the crux of our disagreement. When examining moral or ethical opinions that are plucked out of thin air, I see no need to differentiate between those that are and are not backed by people who wear funny hats while performing weird rituals. The adjective "religious" does not have to mean "is associated with an organized religion". Any time somebody believes something because of faith (as opposed to, say, because of science), that belief can be accurately described as a religious belief. Now, some beliefs are so trivial that it doesn't really add anything to describe them as "religious" (such as my belief that my chair is not about to collapse), but the belief that mankind has a moral responsibility to not trash the earth is not trivial. In this specific case, using the word "religious" to describe that belief is useful, because it leads the reader to compare it to the beliefs typically associated with those who wear funny hats. That's why it's not meaninglessly broad.

It struck me that in a science-oriented discussion, someone's arbitrary (albeit popular) moral assertion went without note, so I noted it.

That is a MORAL view, not a RELIGIOUS view. Religious views can encompass moral positions, but moral views are not, in general, religious.

I can't think of any moral views that can't be accurately described as religious views. One of the definitions of "religious" is a synonym of "moral". Distinguishing between the two is like putting on a funny hat and performing some ritual in order to claim that one's views are special. My views are no more special than yours (aside from whether or not they're accurate).

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[IBBoard]

But "Global Climate Change" doesn't pack such a punch on headlines. Something like "Global Climate Chaos" or "Global Climate Uncertainty" would have a good PR image, as would "Global Climate Flooding" (especially for those people like me in Three Counties who have recently been flooded out).

"Global Climate Change" has about as much punch to most people as "Global Climate Variation" or "Slight Disturbance in Global Weather".

Who needs real science when you've got a punchy name that evokes emotions and provides a lasting impression? ;)

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Fred_A]

Or global head in the sand time, or global denial or whatever.

sounds like zapp...

[Ultra64]

"When we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate."

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[jamie]

In fact, Media Matters has never received funding from progressive philanthropist George Soros.

See how easy that was?

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Russ Nelson]

I'm sure that the next hundred years will be much less "interesting" than the previous hundred years, which saw the violent deaths of 250,000,000 people.

Isn't this the expected response

[lightsaber777]

He's a scientist with an ego... which most scientists have and is a danger and possibly a barrier to objectivity. Being corrected and somewhat mocked for his mistake is, I'm sure, embarrassing and a shot to his ego. Of course, if he had simply released his findings instead of using them as a platform to promote his theories of climate change, I'm quite sure the response to the mistake would not have been so negative. The fact that they trumpeted the first findings and quietly released the second makes one wonder about the real reason for releasing them in the first place. Do real scientists keep things to themselves if their experiments don't fit with their original hypothesis? Do they tweak experiments until they come up with the intended outcome? That's not science... that's politics.

Re:Isn't this the expected response

[Ambitwistor]

The fact that they trumpeted the first findings and quietly released the second makes one wonder about the real reason for releasing them in the first place. Actually, Hansen is on record back in 1998 as stating that 1934 was the warmest year. Since then, 1998 and 1934 have ping-ponged back and forth in the NASA data as "warmest year" as various minor adjustments have been made, and NASA hasn't made much of it. As far as I can tell, it was NOAA, not NASA, which played up 1998 (or 2005, or whatever the record of the moment is) as the "warmest year".

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Chris Pimlott]

because the total heat content of the of the earth, or "globe" if you will, and its atmosphere is expected to rise. likewise, you can talk about the increase in global longevity, even if not every country has a rising life expectancy.

The scientist doth protest too much

[joeyblades]

Hansen makes a huge leap in his second email. He goes from

"the evidence still indicates that global warming is real"

to

"it's all the fault of our leaders"

in a single bound. That kind of superhuman logic belongs in comic books, not in scientific writing.

Re:The scientist doth protest too much

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the letter. The quotation you attribute to him never appears. He says that our leaders have the power to mitigate climate change, but never blames them exclusively for causing it. Where did you get your quotation (which you felt should be put within quotation marks AND blockquote tags)?

Re:The scientist doth protest too much

[joeyblades]

Sorry, I was paraphrasing. Maybe I shouldn't have used quotes... I just wasn't sure how to set the ideas apart from my sentence structure. However, I stand by my point. Hansen's actual quotes are these:

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits.

and

The real deal is this: the 'royalty' controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children.

Do you think my paraphrasing is off the mark or do you merely find fault with my choice of representation? If the latter, then I humbly appologize for any confusion it caused.

My real point is that Hansen is making a political statement guised as a scientific statement...

Wise words

[LentoMan]

He who controls the Global Warming data, controls the universe!

Re:.001 degree?

[everphilski]

Fahrenheit maps directly to Rankine, your point?

Yes they have

[Anonymous Coward]

It just went through Moveon.org first

"According to the March 10, 2004, Washington Post, "The Democratic 527 organizations have drawn support from some wealthy liberals determined to defeat Bush. They include financier George Soros who gave $1.46 million to MoveOn.org (in the form of matching funds to recruit additional small donors); Peter B. Lewis, chief executive of the Progressive Corp., who gave $500,000 to MoveOn; and Linda Pritzker, of the Hyatt hotel family, and her Sustainable World Corp., who gave $4 million to the joint fundraising committee."

and from Media Matters page on Wiki

"Media Matters has received financial support from MoveOn.org"

What a surprise, Media Matters lied.

Re:Yes they have

[crashfrog]

What a surprise, Media Matters lied.

That doesn't quite make sense. I get paid by the USDA; at the same time, I bought lunch at Jimmy Johns.

Is it correct to say that the USDA gave money to Jimmy Johns by "laundering" it through me? That seems like a bit of a stretch. What's your evidence that Soros is using MoveOn to funnel cash into Media Matters without people knowing about it?

Why wouldn't he want people to know about it? If Soros wanted to give to MM, he could do so directly. Not every dollar MoveOn receives comes from Soros. Just because they have some money coming in from Soros and some money going out to MM doesn't prove that Soros is funding MM; particularly if Soros's gifts were all earmarked for other purposes (which they were.)

This "Soros funds Media Matters" is just nonsense well-poisoning, plain and simple. I mean, what exactly is supposed to be so bad about George Soros funding things is never specifically spelled out in the first place. I guess we're supposed to demonize him because he's a rich man with the audacity to not vote for Bush.

Re:Yes they have

[jamie]

Yes, that is correct, Mr. Soros has given money to Moveon.org, and Moveon.org has given money to Media Matters.

Did you think that means it is correct to say that Media Matters was funded by Soros? That is not correct. Do you understand the difference between things that are false and things that are true?

Just in case you're going to start in on other lies being told about Media Matters, go read this and this too.

Oh, and the reference to "admitted liar David Brock"? Yes, David Brock has said that when he was being paid by right-wing smear artists, he put out false information on their behalf. That was part of the experience that led him to start exposing all the other lies from the right.

Finally, what does any of this have to do with the webpage on mediamatters.org that I linked to? It describes an erroneous report on Fox News, and includes a transcript and a video recording of it. Do you have some kind of problem with people documenting the instances where Fox News misleads its viewers?

Re:Yes they have

[crashfrog]

Where did anyone claim that? Wait, no one did.

Parent did. Where they say "Media Matters lied."

Why do you have to resort to lying about what was said in order to have something to refute?

Why are you lying about what was said in order to avoid dealing with a refutation?

And why am I arguing with an anonymous coward?

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[berashith]

Dear Mark's teacher,
Mark was late for class today because he had an important other thing to do.
Thanks and regards,
Mark's mom

typical mud-slinging

[br00tus]

I have not paid much attention to the story, the reporting I heard kept mentioning the warmest year was 1934 and what we've been hearing from the people with the "global warming agenda" (whatever that is, everyone has to wear Birkenstocks?) was false. Of course they somehow neglected to mention that only the figures for the US were off, and only for the past seven years.

More understandably, they neglected to mention that May 1934 was some of the worst weather to hit the US for a long time, and it wiped out the agriculture of many states, it was called the "Dust Bowl". And it was caused by agriculture concerns that had no concern whatsoever for the environment. So they are pointing back to an earlier environmental disaster.

Re:typical mud-slinging

[Salgat]

Was pretty sure the Dust Bowl was triggered by weather, not the other way around, considering that a large drought caused the topsoil to dry up from poor crop rotation. The temperature change was due to a natural phenomenon, not dust covering the air that would, if anything, cool the area below it.

Re:typical mud-slinging

[ElrondHubbard]

What Hansen considers the really significant distortion in the 1934-vs.-1998 comparison is this: while the absolute temperature difference between the two years (for the U.S.) was negligible, the U.S. was much warmer than the rest of the world in 1934, whereas in 1998 it was close to the global average. You can see this if you go back and read the PDF http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074. pdf of Hansen's second e-mail, and especially take a look at Figure 2 on page three. In 1934, the U.S. is a red spot surrounded by cooler areas, whereas in 1998 it's glowing red all over. Of course, the colour codes for a difference against baseline, not absolute temperature, but the difference is clear: 1934 temperatures in the U.S. were anomalously warm vs. the rest of the world, whereas in 1998 they were much more typical.

Re:typical mud-slinging

[Ambitwistor]

Yet in 1934, some places were much hotter, while some places were colder than 1998. But the average was colder, which is the point. It's GLOBAL warming, after all.

So you're saying in 1998, it was less hot than 1934 on average, and the temperature was more homogeneous. No, he's saying that 1998 was hotter than 1934 on average.

Re:typical mud-slinging

[LWATCDR]

The dust bowl was cause by some very poor agricultural practices. The drought was caused by the the temperatures.
So to be 100% accurate the dust bowl was caused by poor agricultural practices combined with the naturally accruing high temperatures and drought.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[pipatron]

Because the global temperature average is rising. A lot. Due to the changing weather patterns this brings a long, some areas previously heated by warm ocean currents might see an actual decrease in local temperature. Other areas (like the poles), might see a +10 kelvin increase.

Mod parent up!

[thegameiam]

Indeed. I would say that peer-review is essential to good science: in fact, experimental repeatability is a hallmark of the scientific method. Being open and honest about how data are collected, and how they are processed can only work in favor of advancing human knowledge.

One thing which more openness can fix is an over-analysis of and over-reliance on small data sets: that tends to exaggerate the effect of the experimental outliers which are always present, and it's easy to treat a "massaged" data set as authoritative (and forget the margins of error which were introduced).

Re:.001 degree?

[squiretalen]

Of course he is trying to save face, but what he said was accurate. The hottest year in the US changed to 1934, from 1998, and the Global Temperature changed only 0.001 (C).

Seventh Generation

[mdsolar]

He also cites the Seventh Generation Principle: http://www.precaution.org/lib/prn_bemidji_original .060706.htm. It is interesting to me we should be looking both forward and back in time here. About seven generations ago we see a discussion of what our attitude should be towards our tenancy in this generation while the indigenous people also credit their ancestors for learning a harmonious way of living on Earth. Our obligations run in both directions. To the past, to glean wisdom and build on it, and to the future, to provide an ever better example of how to live in harmony with the ecosystem and each other.
--
Switch to solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Poisoning the well, alive and well.

[bareman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

Re:Poisoning the well, alive and well.

[dbrutus]

It's only poisoning the well when you get "you can't trust him because he had to correct data" which hasn't happened. The cure for that is to publish your data and a vmware image of the machine used to analyse it (release of code has been resisted because making it not hardware dependent is considered too expensive) and the effort to discredit the data fails.

See, openness can *help*.

I've no doubt that there are politically motivated people who would not be above poisoning the well. Openness short circuits that.

I Worship before the Altar of Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the high priest Nasa Al-Nasa of the Church Global Warming.

I will suffer no infidels. We will wage Jihad against non-Believers. We are the sole holders of the Truth. Dissenters beware!

I hope that was sarcasm

[postermmxvicom]

Honestly, if that wasn't sarcasm, then you are part of the problem. "Climate change" is the new buzz word. It, in my opinion, exposes, at the very least, the mindset of the people behind this. Those people are "buzzword hacks" and not "responsible scientist"

Science in the media:

::insert common thing:: will kill you (or "the children")

next news cycle:

lack of ::insert same common thing:: will kill you (or "the children")


It is only about the ratings.

Re:I hope that was sarcasm

[MMC Monster]

Climate change is actually more accurate. Some areas will get warmer. Other areas will get cooler. Calling it global warming means that when some area has a record-cold summer, the fringe people will say "Hey, global warming doesn't exist!".

The bit about being excited was sarcasm, though. :-)

Blogger wields FUD for successful astroturf

[athloi]

It's easy to earn a few bucks on the stock market. Have your pet blogger issue forth some credible-sounding FUD against an obviously truthful prediction, then sell like mad and reap the profits. It will be 24 hours before the world catches up with reality and points out that your blogger is incorrect, but what do you care? Your stock went up four bucks a share, and that's enough to send your kid to college.

Re:Rest of the world.

[Choad Namath]

If America was humble enough to ask for high-speed railways, both France and Japan would build and run transcontinental superexpresses for free, just to get rid of USA's coast-to-coast car and plane traffic, which are major polluters.

Bullshit. I wish this was true, but you've just got diarrhea of the mouth. I would love to be able to take an express train across the country, it would be great if someone would build one. I very highly doubt that France or Japan would be so generous, though...

It is not hip to hate Fox New

[WindBourne]

It is just that ppl are pointing out the flaws, bias, and agenda at fox news. It is no different than pointing out the corruption in our gov. or our deficits that we run with China and OPEC. It has nothing to do with hating them.

Re:It is not hip to hate Fox New

[d3ac0n]

Except that they go MUCH MUCH further than simply pointing out bias or agendas, which exist just as much if not more at other news agencies.

Honestly, how many here who readily bash Fox News (or "Faux News" as some gleefully exclaim) would then hold up Dan "Memogate" Rather, Keith Olbermann or the Daily Kos as pillars of "unbiased" journalism? I'd say quite a few.

I guess that when every news agency available leans to the left, whether slightly or strongly, having one that is centrist or slightly right-leaning is such a shock that some leftists have to scream about "bias" and "agenda".

Fox news doesn't have any more of an agenda than any other news agency. If anything, they have less of one. Yes, they do have a more centrist or slightly right bent than others, but those personalities on Fox that are "right wing" always say so right up front. Fox doesn't put on airs about objectivity when they are editorializing about a given issue. On the other hand, the other alphabet soup news agencies steadfastly proclaim their absolute lack of bias, when anyone with eyes to see can see the obvious liberal bias.

Maybe that's why Fox News is absolutely STOMPING the other news agencies in the open market. Not because they are necessarily better, but because people are more willing to trust someone who admits their general leanings UP FRONT, rather than someone who claims an absolute moral authority they clearly have no right to.

Re:It is not hip to hate Fox New

[Slothy]

Are you saying that Fox News doesn't claim absolute moral authority, or that they have a right to claim absolute moral authority because they admit they aren't objective?

Re:It is not hip to hate Fox New

[d3ac0n]

You may not realize it, but your question comes off as rather snarky. However, I will assume that you did not mean it that way and that it was asked honestly.

I frankly do not know if Fox News claims absolute moral authority or not, or whether they are deserving of it or not. However, my comment was not directed at Fox News, but at the other news agencies who DO claim absolute moral authority and clearly have no right to do so, vis-a-vis their clear bias and frequent misreporting. (See the Dan "Memogate" Rather comment above.)

In my personal opinion, no news agency can claim absolute moral authority or a complete lack of bias. We are humans, and as a wise man once said, "We all view the world through the lens of ourselves." In other words, we all have biases. When that bias becomes an issue is when we attempt to hide that bias behind a mask of "Impartial journalistic integrity", or worse, use said Integrity mask as a lever to move a specific political or social agenda forward.

Again, we all have biases, we all have opinions. But when news reporters aren't honest with their viewers about biases they may have, they lose credibility. This is what most of mainstream "journalism" has done, but Fox News does not. This is why Fox News is trouncing the traditional media in the ratings. They are honest and up-front about their biases, and people can adjust the way they take in the news from Fox accordingly. Like their tag line says "We Report, You Decide."

Re:It is not hip to hate Fox New

[Slothy]

Oh ok, so the network that uses a "Fair and Balanced" tagline is the one that should be applauded for being up-front about their biases. Gotcha.

Re:It is not hip to hate Fox New

[d3ac0n]

Ah, but see, they are. Those commentators that are Liberal, Say so. Those that are Conservative say so. This is what creates the fairness and the balance. Honesty about who they are and what they believe. You just don't get this with the other big new organizations. If you can't see that, then you are obviously a closed-minded ideologue and I'm not going to waste any more time with you.

Re:It is not hip to hate Fox New

[The One and Only]

Honestly, how many here who readily bash Fox News (or "Faux News" as some gleefully exclaim) would then hold up Dan "Memogate" Rather, Keith Olbermann or the Daily Kos as pillars of "unbiased" journalism? I'd say quite a few.

Given that Dan Rather is retired, Keith Olbermann is an admittedly biased political commentator, and Daily Kos is a self proclaimed "Democratic...partisan blog", I don't think it's fair to compare it to something that uses the phrase "Fair and Balanced" as a trademarked slogan.

On the other hand, the other alphabet soup news agencies steadfastly proclaim their absolute lack of bias, when anyone with eyes to see can see the obvious liberal bias.

I'm pretty sure Fox still goes around using slogans like "fair and balanced" and "we report, you decide".

Maybe that's why Fox News is absolutely STOMPING the other news agencies in the open market. Not because they are necessarily better, but because people are more willing to trust someone who admits their general leanings UP FRONT, rather than someone who claims an absolute moral authority they clearly have no right to.

Or because Rupert Murdoch was clever enough to notice that there was a lot of outcry against "liberal media" and that he could make bank by selling "conservative media". In reality, Fox is biased towards making money. If you look over the Murdoch media empire you see things like topless "Page 3 girls" in Murdoch-owned The Sun and edgy, decidedly not-conservative sitcoms and cartoons on the Fox TV network, because Murdoch is, rather than being devoted to unbiased journalism or even conservative propagandizing, an expert at finding unfilled niches within the media and filling them.

Also keep in mind that the TV market itself is becoming skewed. It's no longer a safe assumption that everyone watches TV. The middle-American evangelical types watch more TV than urban left-wing progressives, so it's obvious which news bias will get higher ratings.

Re:It is not hip to hate Fox New

[unDees]

I guess that when every news agency available leans to the left, whether slightly or strongly, having one that is centrist or slightly right-leaning is such a shock that some leftists have to scream about "bias" and "agenda".

Ah, the old "liberal media" myth. Sssh. That's just something that Republicans tell their kids to scare them straight. I wish the media were at least a little bit liberal! Maybe then, we would have heard some criticism of the war before it began, instead of a thousand "Target: Iraq!" banners tarting up the reporting.

Newspapers and TV stations are owned by corporations, and corporations are about as conservative an entity as you can find.

Even if all the rest of the mainstream media were an evil, Soros-fueled left-fest, it would not logically follow that Fox is merely centrist and just seems right-wing in contrast to the rest. Fox leans pretty far to the right on just about any scale you could think up. Calling themselves "Fair and Balanced" under the circumstances, or presenting opinion as news, is not "admitting their general leanings up front."

Fox gets eyeballs because the conservatives tune in with bliss to hear what they'll say next, and th liberals tune in with outrage to hear what they'll say next. Best just to avoid the whole mess.

More to the story

[emeraldcity]

I referenced the gistempt data in 2003 for a statistics report. In addition to the comments expressed, he had also pointed out several things: The gistempt data is only the surface temperatures-there are other sets of data recorded and analyzed for atmosphere (and they are different numbers) Since the NASA recordings began about 1880 there have been changes to the technology in the instruments that record the data. I'm not a scientist but it was clear there is more to this than a set of numbers, although the numbers are interesting to see for yourself.

Global Climate Forced Differential

[SuperKendall]

Why do we still call it global warming? It's global climate change. Some areas will get warmer. Some areas will get cooler. Some areas will be under water.

Since that would all happen anyway, it should really be called "Global Climate Forced Differential" because the trick is to figure out what we might be doing to create a situation of climate change outside the normal change that would be occurring anyway.

Re:Global Climate Forced Differential

[Miraba]

If you're interested, the American Geophysical Union will be publishing a book later this year on the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Geophysical Monograph series). It's a collection of several dozen papers, many of which attempt to model the various cycles and their effects. Hopefully some of the models will be used to reduce the background noise.

Re:Global Climate Forced Differential

[SuperKendall]

Sounds cool, but how approachable would the reading be for someone not deep in the field?

Re:Global Climate Forced Differential

[Miraba]

I believe it says on the back that it's suitable for students, but I could be confusing it with the book on Kamchatka volcanoes (I had to proof both covers this week). You should have no problem as long as you have Wikipedia to consult.

Re:Global Climate Forced Differential

[Miraba]

The book is now available for order here: https://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/agubookstore?book=OSGM 1734382 I definitely recommend reading the introduction.

Re:.001 degree?

[Anon-Admin]

That would be .001c +/- .5c

Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[benhocking]

Although I love your Church references, the scientists did admit their mistake. They're not blaming the news organizations for reporting their error, they're blaming them for distorting their error. Understand the difference? Some news outlets pretended like this changed the whole "the 9 hottest years on record happened in the last decade" fact, when it did not. Prior to the change 1934 was the second hottest year in the US on record, and after the change it was the hottest year. Prior to the change several of the hottest years in the US on record were during the dust bowl, and after the change this is still true. The changes had no impact on which years were the hottest on a global scale, so the "9 hottest years" fact is still true. Do you understand how the right-wing media that you evidently get your talking points from distorted the truth now?

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[rronda]

The issue of educating the press about how to communicate science works both ways. I wonder if people complain that much about the press coverage when 1998 was presented as the hottest year on record in the US, I wonder if the argument of the small area of the continental US was used in that case to explain the little significance that the US record has for the global temperature. That means that the "9 hottest years"-record that you are referring to is negligibly important for global temperature when the temperatures considered are only the US ones! I believe that a reasonable scientific stance is one of skepticism. No scientist is able to predict what the climate will be under climate change conditions. That would require for someone to know all inner workings of climate, and the magnitude and direction of all the feedbacks that models attempt to simulate. Of course the error in the data processing does not change the science of climate change. But that means that it leaves the state of the science of climate change exactly as it was before, that is one of uncertainty. And this is not what James Hansen is being teaching us for the last few years.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

The real problem is that this error had to be found out by reverse engineering because climate scientists have a bad habit of not releasing their code and data. We're told that they use a list of high quality temperature sensing stations and discouraged from actually checking. Then when somebody actually does go out and check, we find a significant fraction of them are just awful, hopelessly compromised by local heat island effects. Fixing those problems will only increase the accuracy of predictions and data quality but instead of welcoming it, we had an abortive attempt to take the station list locations private for "privacy reasons" after being public for decades.

Data quality is a major issue with global warming. If the numbers aren't right, we don't really know what's going on. This is just one more case of obfuscation hiding error and the AGW proponents falling back to the nearest trench line and adopting the same shoddy tactics of delay, deny, and obfuscate on data quality issues.

This is not how real science is done and that's why so many people who know and love the scientific method and its fruits have a growing unease about the whole AGW enterprise. Can you blame them?

The US is reputed to have one of the best temp sensor networks in the world and I believe has the only organized effort to go to original sources and check stations. Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest. Real science is "trust but verify". Climate science seems to have a strain of something else going on.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[OriginalArlen]

...and anyway those "10 hottest years" stats only apply to the US -- the thermal inertia of the global climate is actually significantly larger than that of the surface temps in the continental US. I will refrain from making the usual smart-arse euroweenie smug patronising & infuriating comments about the average American's stunning ignorance of geography and the world beyond the 48 states, because I don't want to be mod'd flamebait ;p

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Stormcrow309]

Actually, the real problem here is why isn't Slashdot up in arms about closed sourced climate modeling and data correction algorithms? Sorry, couldn't resist.

In the process for setting myself up for an observance error arguement, why is the three NOAA monitoring stations I know about are in the three hottest sections of my city? All three of them are well within 100 feet of buildings, with one over red brick walkway, one over a concrete pad next to one of our airports and the last one is attached to the tower of the other.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Ambitwistor]

Then when somebody actually does go out and check, we find a significant fraction of them are just awful, hopelessly compromised by local heat island effects. This has not been established, since the SurfaceStation folks have never tried to demonstrate that there are errors in the recorded temperatures, only that there are potential siting problems.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

Sorry but according to the published standards, you are simply not supposed to have burn barrels next to your temp station. You are simply not supposed to put one of these things in the middle of pavement. These and other problems have been photographically demonstrated by the surfacestations.org effort. That's not a potential siting problem, that's a siting problem, period because the published standard that everybody agreed on many years ago says so.

If those are not actual problems, you should take out the language stating that such things are problems from your site standards. If they are problems, you should take out the stations that have those problems from your "high quality" list of sites.

Inconsistently applying data quality standards means your data is quite likely crap.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Ambitwistor]

Sorry but according to the published standards, you are simply not supposed to have burn barrels next to your temp station. You are simply not supposed to put one of these things in the middle of pavement. That's true, but as I said, it doesn't actually prove a problem with the station's temperature readings.

If those are not actual problems, you should take out the language stating that such things are problems from your site standards. If they are problems, you should take out the stations that have those problems from your "high quality" list of sites. They are siting problems, which means that they potentially could have errors in the temperature record. All I'm saying is that's a far cry from demonstrating any actual temperature errors. I'm sure specified siting requirements are far more conservative than is necessary, so a siting error doesn't really prove anything one way or another. To do that, you have to actually put a well-sited station nearby and cross-check. That's what the Climate Reference Network is doing.

Inconsistently applying data quality standards means your data is quite likely crap. You sound like a fundamentalist. "If there's a potential error of unknown magnitude somewhere, then the whole thing is crap". That is very unlikely to be the case, as noted here.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[jamie]

Urban heat is accounted-for in the statistical analysis already.

Stop making up FUD about established scientific fact. The globe is warming. There is no doubt about it. That used to be debatable but there is no longer any doubt.

The next step in the chain was proving that it is to some significant degree human activity, specifically greenhouse gas emissions, that has been causing global warming. There is no real debate about that any more either (it's accepted to a very high degree of certainty).

The next steps after that are to demonstrate the effects that warming is having on the ecosystems of the planet (consensus is a probable effect so far, though not proven) and to find ways to slow, halt, and reverse it (not purely a climate-science question, as the best ways will require input from economists and politicians).

What do you think you're doing with this BS about temperature monitoring stations? You're not seriously trying to make people doubt that the earth is getting hotter, are you?

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Lars T.]

Actually, the real problem here is why isn't Slashdot up in arms about closed sourced climate modeling and data correction algorithms? Sorry, couldn't resist.

Maybe because this has nothing to do with climate modeling?

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Stormcrow309]

Actually, it does. Let me explain. To model something, you need quality data. To have quality data, you need to have good data correction algorithms to adjust for variation. When the scientists will not produce the source code, then the data correction algorithm is closed-sourced, which has material effect on the climate model.

Without the source code or the algorithms used, we don't see the methodology, just a pat on the head explanation. We cannot verify or repeat the process. Since we are feeding this data into climate models and building 'better' models based off of this data, then the climate models should come into question. By close-sourcing a data correction algorithm, I am obfuscating how 'good' is my data, feeding possibly bad data into climate models and screwing over every other scientist working with my data. How many climate models were built on the bad data because of this error? How many years of work has to be reworked? In one fell swoop, NASA has set back climatology by several years, assuming the current produced data has any validity.

Personally, if I was working with this data with my climate models and 'improving' the models with it, I would be upset. Anything I had written would come into question. If it didn't, I would worry about the academic community. People should be tar and feathering Hansen.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[CorSci81]

The climate models are by no means "closed-source". I ran the GFDL-FMS model (and my own variants on it) as a grad student. If you happen to have at least a quad-core processor (or better a cluster) sitting around I'm sure I could dig up the source code in my old files and ship it off to you. Granted, my version wasn't the most realistic model ever created, but it's illustrative. Or you could just go download it directly from NASA.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[CorSci81]

I previewed and I still missed my own typo. I meant the NOAA not NASA. But the rest of the post still stands.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Ambitwistor]

Personally, if I was working with this data with my climate models and 'improving' the models with it, I would be upset. Anything I had written would come into question. That may be true of those doing regional U.S. predictions, but it has little material influence on global climate models in general.

People should be tar and feathering Hansen. Give me a break. GISS made an honest mistake, which was fixed. Hansen didn't murder anyone.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[jav1231]

Yeah, it has to be "the right-wing media." We all have to choose sides. It amazes me that for all the talk about thinking for yourself and letting the facts speak it all comes down to which side are you on. Frankly, all media is to blame. It's media that feeds us what they want us to know. We make judgments based on it. It used to be we could debate it sensibly. Now we rush to our corners, pass the blame, and stake out our territory. It will be a matter of time before was start carving up the country itself. One would hope blogging and other internet outlets would start re-charting the collective psychi but that's not happening. They're parroting the media, perpetuating the rift. Fuck you and fuck the media you worship! They made a mistake and they were wrong. They want to quantify their mistake to say, "We made a mistake but we're still right!" How the hell are we going to agree if the scientists don't? We're not. We're going to go to our corners and wait for the bell! Are you ready for the next civil war? Guess what!? You're in it! WTF is happening to us!?

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[jav1231]

psychi = psyche....Slashdot needs an editor :(

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[tsm_sf]

Yeah, it has to be "the right-wing media." We all have to choose sides. It amazes me that for all the talk about thinking for yourself and letting the facts speak it all comes down to which side are you on.

Well, you've got to consider that one 'side' has been vomiting bullshit for eight solid years. You can't support a camp that's rabidly anti-intellectual and then be surprised that nobody buys their science.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Lars T.]

Actually, it does. Let me explain. To model something, you need quality data. To have quality data, you need to have good data correction algorithms to adjust for variation. When the scientists will not produce the source code, then the data correction algorithm is closed-sourced, which has material effect on the climate model.

Yeah, and to ride a horse, you need a horse, and a horse needs gras, and for gras to grow you need wind to pollinate the grass. So yes, you need wind to ride a horse.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Stormcrow309]

Actually, you need a horse, saddle, head gear, etc... and a good amount of money, but what do I know - I just own two.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

You're "sure specified siting requirements are far more conservative than is necessary" but you don't actually provide any evidence that they are. Essentially you're making an argument that the standard doesn't much matter, that a certain amount of black asphalt nearby is just as good as 50 yards of fields, that an air condition exhaust nearby may make no difference to a thermometer. How committed are you to salvaging this data set regardless of the effects on your own reputation?

In S. Korea, a geneticist faked some data on cloning and was ruined because of it. Later analysis showed that beyond the data faking, he actually had discovered some useful, interesting stuff that advances the field. The two processes were conducted separately there as they should be here.

The stations are not conforming to the standard. That should create a downward adjustment in how reliable we view the data. Forensically, a team should be assembled to see how bad the damage is and how much of the data is salvageable but that's a separate issue.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

I also did not conclude the whole thing is crap. If you inconsistently follow standards, it may make no difference whatsoever. But without actual quality control that works (ie following consistent standards) your actual data quality approximates a random number and as far as public policy decisions go, the data becomes crap, unreliable to the point of uselessness whether it is correct or not.

Fix it. Fix it fast. Get the reliability to where it should be so the data can be used properly.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Ambitwistor]

You're "sure specified siting requirements are far more conservative than is necessary" but you don't actually provide any evidence that they are. Any specification is conservative, by its nature: you over-engineer.

Essentially you're making an argument that the standard doesn't much matter No, I'm making an argument a violation of siting standards doesn't imply that the temperature data is automatically invalid.

How committed are you to salvaging this data set regardless of the effects on your own reputation? Are you addressing me, or Hansen?

Forensically, a team should be assembled to see how bad the damage is and how much of the data is salvageable but that's a separate issue. As I noted, that is (part of) the purpose of the Climate Reference Network.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[Ambitwistor]

But without actual quality control that works (ie following consistent standards) your actual data quality approximates a random number and as far as public policy decisions go, the data becomes crap, unreliable to the point of uselessness whether it is correct or not. This is false. There are plenty of independent reasons to believe that the data is not crap, and the implications about siting quality are themselves tenuous at best.

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

Separating out the science from the Gaia worship BS means you adhere to the scientific method and you actually follow your own rules. I want actual scientific data, not some cargo cult science where following the rules is for suckers. That's not FUD but trying to ensure that those responsible for primary data gathering aren't fouling the nest of science.

To do the serious sacrifice that correcting AGW would require is going to kill people, a lot of people. They're going to mostly be in the 3rd world and dirt poor and that doesn't matter other than their lack of powerful protectors. Before we collectively sign that many death warrants we all better be able to run the numbers from start to finish and have them right on the button as best we can. I doubt that you'd accept this sort of sloppiness in a capital case with a single child molester's life on the line. What is wrong with you that you're not interested in fixing basic evidence issues when so many more lives are on the line

Re:Someone drank the whole pitcher of kool-aid

[dbrutus]

At some point, you either have an indicator that has good quality control which you can bootstrap into validating the other stuff or it's turtles all the way down and we're spending ungodly sums on a chimera. The AGW side is the one advocating huge changes in the world economy and they have the burden of proof. If you want to salvage a data series, you can't just say, there's plenty of other indicators that agree with it. You have to demonstrate why these other indicators (or at least a comforting number of them) are reliable when this series has been violating its own internal rules for how to gather data.

That's the problem with the AGW community response. Their efforts to wave off the challenges are heavy on psychological manipulation, trying to awe everybody into submission, and somewhat light on proactive efforts to improve data quality. And even if the vast majority of people aren't experts in the field, they can smell a BS coverup that would have gotten them flunked by their high school science teacher.

The AGW people, if they are right, are doing their cause and humanity in general a great disservice by trying to go play manipulation games because the markers for those are detectable by most people and *because* most people don't understand the science, they use those BS game markers as proxies for who is right on the science.

Somebody either needs to fix the sites by moving them to better locations (as per the present guidelines) and take the data hit (the anti-AGW camp will make hay on this until new data comes in confirming no change due to siting moves) or come up with an accurate set of siting guidelines to determine what does and does not matter and go through all the sites, validating the current sites by the new standards. Some combination of the two may end up being best.

I'm very uncomfortable at hand waving away internal rules violations at the level that seems to be coming out. No scientist should be comfortable at violating experiment rules.

One word on the essential

[SuperKendall]

people Must Not Doubt. Faith is essential.

I think you meant to say, "Fear is essential". Fear produces more money than Faith.

Re:One word on the essential

[blighter]

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering...

I sense much fear in you.

Re:One word on the essential

[SuperKendall]

What you have found in your cave - is only what you brought with you.

Re:.001 degree?

[pigah]

TFA article says that before the correction 1934 was the warmest year and after the correction it still was the warmest year. Regardless, the temperatures fall within the error estimate so statistically they are indistinguishable. Once again, the data reanalysis changes none of the conclusions about climate history. "Skeptics" are still going to use small errors, or new evidence to attempt to overthrow a solid body of evidence. "Chicken Littles" are going to say we're all going to die. Neither help us really move forward and try to do something sensible and rational. Stupid argument.

Question:

[jbeaupre]

I curious about a particular aspect of global warming: is the temperature increase constant? In other words, do nighttime temperatures rise the same amount as daytime and do winter temperatures rise as much as summer temperatures?

It's not a trivial matter. If summer temperatures were to stay constant, but winter to rise you get one set of consequences, while summer increasing and winter staying the same results in another set. My understanding of radiated heat is that the lows (winter and nighttime) should increase faster than the highs (even if they all increase).

Anybody able to shed some light?

Re:Question:

[emeraldcity]

The gistemp is "global index of surface" temperature so the numbers are global-somewhere in the world it is both winter and summer at the same time. On radiated heat there were some articles recently about the suns heat penetration through the earth's atmosphere and atmospheric refraction and greenhouse gas-I take it you read those? Maybe you need a summary of the atmospheric composition/carbon content to map alongside the temperature index? Alos, one thing I am looking for is an interactive/visual of air current movements around the globe-over both land and oceans-have you seen anything-please send if so. I've found a few but they only cover a really small region/city.

Re:Question:

[Ambitwistor]

I curious about a particular aspect of global warming: is the temperature increase constant? In other words, do nighttime temperatures rise the same amount as daytime and do winter temperatures rise as much as summer temperatures? According to the IPCC report (section 3.2.2.1, 3.2.2.7, diurnal temperature range), daytime and nighttime temperatures appear to have increased by the same amount in the warming since the 1970s. Warming appears to be slightly greater in winter than summer (FAQ 3.1).

Re:Question:

[emeraldcity]

Has the 2000 sea level debate been verified? From:---- Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 2:24 PM To: - Cc: - Subject: Re: Correction-answer statement Dear --- - I have now had the opportunity to enlarge the graph you sent me. It's not the clearest graph I've seen, but as best I can make it out it shows that on Scenario B, temperature is projected to rise by 0.25C between 1988 and 2000.. On Scenario A, temperature is projected to rise by 0.45C. Scenario C is not relevant, because it assumes no additional input of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which is contrary to observation. Averaging scenarios A and B gives 0.35C. I stated 0.3C, which seems to me to be entirely reasonable. I also note that someone has rather clumsily altered the graph since the original presentation, at least to the extent of extending the red observed-temperature line from 1988 to 1998, but not, interestingly, to 2000. As you may know, there was an exceptionally strong El Nino Southern Oscillation in 1998, which caused a spike in temperature. The temperature data which I have already supplied to you show that temperature fell back sharply in the two years to 2000. Between 1998 and 2000, the period of projection that is in question, temperature rose by just 0.05C. I stated 1C, which of course is fair to Dr. Hansen. On the basis of this graph I do not see any case for a correction, and shall advise the Editor of the Sunday Telegraph accordingly. I have already told you that the infelicity of expression which led to the suggestion that Dr. Hansen had said that sea level would rise by several feet to 2000 will most certainly be clarified, and I shall of course stand by that. - Monckton of Brenchley

Re:Question:

[Ambitwistor]

I'm sorry, I haven't followed that debate very closely, and your excerpt doesn't make it very clear to me.

You can see the IPCC report for the latest sea level estimates. Note that a number of scientists have claimed those numbers are too conservative, because they explicitly chose not to estimate the possible contribution of nonlinear ice sheet responses, for which there is recent evidence. Hansen is still on the side of very large potential sea level rise over the next century, on the basis of those nonlinear responses and paleoclimate evidence of large sea level changes. He is on the more extreme end of the spectrum in that regard, but mainstream climatologists agree that potential ice sheet responses are worrisome and could dramatically change the current estimates.

Give them more ammunition, please

[benhocking]

If the raw data is publicly available, it will give the people who want to deny basic science more ammunition for their inane babblings.

Give them more ammunition, please. That makes it that much easier to shoot themselves in the foot. Although I know from first hand experience that raw data is not routinely released to the general public, my experience is that it is usually released to those asking for it (I've never had any requests denied). I'm sure that there are some people who will be loathe to release their data to certain other people in any scientific discipline (scientists are people, after all), but withholding information gives them far more valuable information than releasing it all, publicly and freely. At this point, however, I am not aware of any global warming raw data that has not been released.

Re:Give them more ammunition, please

[dbrutus]

A large bit of the brouhaha over MBH98 (the original hockey stick study) was over Michael Mann's refusal to release data. The salutory effect of all this publicity is to encourage people not to have a multiyear rerun of the controversy (which eventually led to a correction because there were problems with the data).

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

Aren't you cute. The population has grown and at some point resources simply won't stretch far enough for all of us.

What exactly do you think is going to happen then? We'll all sit down, sing Kumbaya, and work out a peaceable solution, with the rich folk voluntarily slashing their standard of living so we can all subsist?

I think it would be pretty hard to say that unless we make some serious changes in the way we do things, 250m violent deaths will be the "good old days". Assuming we don't completely destroy ourselves while fighting over water, energy, and food.

I hope you're right, but I don't see the basis for your optimism.

Fact vs Assumption

[Shark]

It's a growing trend these days that very few facts are being used to drive very bold assumptions for the sake of political agendas. I too agree that there *is* global warming. But the numbers on what actually causes it are avoided like the plague.
Why? Because while global warming itself might be an issue, the effect that human activity has on it is less than 5% of the total CO2 emissions.
And the dreadful horrible CO2 emissions we ought to establish a tax on breathing for is not a big part of that 5%. We should be more worried about methane for example, but there isn't much money to be made on taxing cow farts. Truth is that a fair part of that warming isn't just global, Mars is getting warmer too.
There are two sides to every story and one should do their own research. Pretty easy to get the man-made camp's story, they scream the loudest. In my experience though, the camp with hard scientific facts is the one being shunned and ignored. Do your own research and trust your logic more than the force-fed emotional bull we're forced to endure.
Truth is mostly inconvenient to the man-made global warming camp.

Re:Fact vs Assumption

[Ambitwistor]

I too agree that there *is* global warming. But the numbers on what actually causes it are avoided like the plague. Wow, you haven't read any papers on climate change detection and attribution, have you?

Why? Because while global warming itself might be an issue, the effect that human activity has on it is less than 5% of the total CO2 emissions. Human emissions are smaller than natural emissions, but that's not the point. Natural emissions are almost exactly balanced by natural sinks which remove CO2 from the atmosphere; over centennial time scales this leaves the atmospheric CO2 level constant to within 10 ppm. Human emissions, while comparatively small, have overwhelmed the natural sinks' ability to remove the excess CO2: they can only take up about half of human emissions, leaving the other half to accumulate in the atmosphere year after year. Since pre-industrial times, CO2 levels have gone up by 100 ppm (~35%), much larger than the natural variability (excepting long term geological scale events like ice age cycles). Almost all of that CO2 is directly attributable to human emissions, through (a) estimates of human industrial activity, (b) measurements of natural sources, and (c) isotopic fingerprinting of the types of CO2 put in the air (fossil fuels are isotopically distinct from, say, CO2 emitted by respiration).

And the dreadful horrible CO2 emissions we ought to establish a tax on breathing for is not a big part of that 5%. We should be more worried about methane for example, but there isn't much money to be made on taxing cow farts. It's cow belches that are the problem, and even those, while not negligible, don't approach the total greenhouse effect of human-emitted CO2.

Mars is getting warmer too. Mars's south pole has been getting warmer in recent years. That has nothing to do with the climate on Earth: the only link between the two planets is the Sun, and changes solar output are inadequate to explain the warming on either the Earth or Mars, as they generally disagree in timing, rate, and magnitude. The Martian warming is likely attributable to albedo changes due to patterns of dust storm activity.

There are two sides to every story and one should do their own research. Why haven't you done yours?

Re:Fact vs Assumption

[Shark]

It's cow belches that are the problem, and even those, while not negligible, don't approach the total greenhouse effect of human-emitted CO2.

Well, okay, you *have* done your research. Now what *is* the total greenhouse effect of human-emmited CO2?

Seems like this would be a very important figure to mention in order to back up your statement. We use metric here, so centigrade per mole would be appreciated. Anything short of that is speculation and that's exactly my point.

Yes, you did mention a lot of facts, but when it came to the actual effect on temperature, all I read was assumption.

I may not have provided very good facts to prove that man-made warming isn't substantial, but that isn't the point at all. The point is that so far most of what we hear is assumptions on the *effect* of figures like those you stated. To be fair, both sides are probably guilty in that respect.

I'd also like a bit of clarification on exactly why solar activity is not an important factor. I was kind of under the impression that the sun provided a decent amount of our heat. Note that it isn't just Mars warming up... I'd expect variations in solar output to have a proportional effect on our temperature. Then again, common sense doesn't apply to many thing these days.

Regardless of it all, deforestation is a bigger threat in my opinion than SUVs. And (assumption) tackling that could do a bit more good on the CO2 front than a global tax on carbon while at the same time helping with problems like floods, habitat destruction, etc. We get religious zealotry on climate change yet we practically ignore hundreds of other much bigger (in my opinion) problems.

Re:Fact vs Assumption

[Ambitwistor]

Well, okay, you *have* done your research. Now what *is* the total greenhouse effect of human-emmited CO2?

There isn't an exact figure that everyone agrees upon, but total anthropogenic influences have been estimated to be responsible for about 0.6-0.7 C of warming (see Figure SPM.4 in the IPCC report). However, that combines human warming (CO2, greenhouse gases) and cooling (aerosols); the CO2 warming is probably larger than that. On the other hand, the CO2 warming figure includes feedbacks (such as increased greenhouse effect from water vapor which the CO2 warming causes to evaporate). The greenhouse warming of CO2 alone is, IIRC, more like 0.3 or 0.4 C.

I may not have provided very good facts to prove that man-made warming isn't substantial, but that isn't the point at all. The point is that so far most of what we hear is assumptions on the *effect* of figures like those you stated.

Well, why don't you go read some actual research papers? Climatology is a quantitative science, you know.

I'd also like a bit of clarification on exactly why solar activity is not an important factor.

It's not ... unimportant. It contributed to warming in the early 20th century. But it was overwhelmed by human warming later in the century.

I was kind of under the impression that the sun provided a decent amount of our heat.

It provides all of the external energy input, but what matters is what is causing the change in temperature. The change in solar output is too small to explain that for the late 20th century.

Note that it isn't just Mars warming up... I'd expect variations in solar output to have a proportional effect on our temperature.

The behavior of the Sun doesn't explain warming here or on Mars; in fact, solar output decreased somewhat during some of the greatest warming here as well as during warming on Mars.

Regardless of it all, deforestation is a bigger threat in my opinion than SUVs.

That's probably true, but note that deforestation affects the climate too.

And (assumption) tackling that could do a bit more good on the CO2 front than a global tax on carbon while at the same time helping with problems like floods, habitat destruction, etc.

Tackling that is good, but it may well not be enough. Climate change is real.

Re:Fact vs Assumption

[Shark]

Just for the record. I have read very respectable papers on both sides of the man-made warming argument. Enough to conclude that we don't really know for sure if our contribution is indeed significant. Scientists don't even agree on how much influence variations in solar input affect us. Here's a quote I'd like your opinion on:

"The ice-core data is frequently cited as principal evidence to argue that CO2 is the earth's main climate driver. It is, in a way, the jewel in the crown of the theory of man made global warming. But the ice-core data does not show that CO2 drives climate. It shows, very clearly, that variations in temperature precede rises in atmospheric CO2 - not the other way round. The two phenomena are divided by a time lag of several hundred years."

You said it yourself, climate change is real. We both agree... How much of it we are causing and how important it is to mobilize the entire planet's resources on that specific issue is not at all as clear as all that the zealotry and propaganda would like us to think.

Sounds a lot more to me like an agenda so well revealed by Jacques Chirac when he said that Kyoto was one of the most important tools for global governance. To me, that is an even bigger threat to world order than 5 extra degrees of average temperature. But that's getting into political views and that definitely is material for endless arguments.

Re:Fact vs Assumption

[Ambitwistor]

Just for the record. I have read very respectable papers on both sides of the man-made warming argument. Really? Which ones? Because it sounds like you're just repeating Internet talking points, not published research.

But the ice-core data does not show that CO2 drives climate. To the contrary,

It shows, very clearly, that variations in temperature precede rises in atmospheric CO2 - not the other way round. This does not show that CO2 does not drive climate, and in fact, you can't explain the cycles without CO2 warming. (Well, they can't be fully explained at all, but the discrepancies are even worse if you leave out CO2.)

Temperature changes cause CO2 increases, and the CO2 in turn amplifies and prolongs the warming.

Warming on other planets

[benhocking]

Compare two hypotheses: (1) Global warming is primarily caused by the sun, cosmic rays, or some other external factor. (2) Global warming is primarily caused by humans. (Yes, there are other possible hypotheses.)

If hypothesis 1 is right, you would expect most of the planets to be showing warming over any small period of time. If hypothesis 2 is right, you would expect approximately half of the other planets to be showing warming (and the other half to be showing cooling). Unfortunately, with 7 other planets, it's hard to rely on the law of large numbers to distinguish between these two hypotheses. (If you got 5 heads out of 7 coin flips, would you assume the coin was biased? The only thing you could say for certain was that heads weren't on both sides of the coin.) Of course, we don't even have data from all 7 of the other planets for a small period of time.

Global warming theories aren't based merely on the correlation between increased CO2 and increased temperature. They're based on fundamental science and complicated models. The fundamental science has been known for over 100 years - complicated models weren't necessary for that. The complicated models are necessary to determine the scope of the greenhouse gas phenomenon (feedback cycles, etc., are non-linear and hence can be very difficult to predict with detail). These models have actually done a pretty good job, and they're getting better. Some people are actually saying now, "In 20 years, this warming will be over, and then the scientists will see how wrong they are." Some people were saying that 20 years ago, too.

Re:Warming on other planets

[E 99]

Global warming theories aren't based merely on the correlation between increased CO2 and increased temperature. They're based on fundamental science and complicated models. The fundamental science has been known for over 100 years - complicated models weren't necessary for that. The complicated models are necessary to determine the scope of the greenhouse gas phenomenon (feedback cycles, etc., are non-linear and hence can be very difficult to predict with detail).

No, the AGW theory is based entirely on the tenuous idea that increased CO2 increases temperatures. All the models the IPCC uses are based upon that idea. If that idea is wrong, then all those models are useless. (At it is challenging, to say the least, to explain the ice core data while holding to that idea.)

Re:Warming on other planets

[Ambitwistor]

No, the AGW theory is based entirely on the tenuous idea that increased CO2 increases temperatures. Tenuous my ass. It's been established for over 100 years and even the skeptics don't argue against the existence of the greenhouse effect; they only argue that the feedback effects which amplify CO2 warming aren't as strong as the mainstream claims, and therefore CO2 is responsible for less of the warming than is thought. (More than half of the warming in climate models is not attributable directly to the greenhouse effect of CO2, but to other warming factors which are caused by the initial CO2 warming.)

(At it is challenging, to say the least, to explain the ice core data while holding to that idea.) Of course it isn't, but I'm sure you're going to wave around the CO2 lag as if it disproves the greenhouse effect.

Have they?

[benhocking]

Do you have a reference for that, because I'm afraid I don't believe it. I think you're thinking of McIntyre's account of how he had difficulty in getting data and/or algorithms from Mann.

Re:Have they?

[Ambitwistor]

The raw and adjusted data are available, and the detailed algorithm for performing adjustments is published. However, McIntyre has been unable to exactly reproduce the adjusted data from the raw data using the published adjustment algorithm (he can get close, but not exactly), and he says that GISS refused to give him the algorithm's source code.

Just to expand a bit...

[benhocking]

Additionally, unlike in the past, the CO2 concentration in the oceans is increasing (causing them to become more acidic and destroying corals), not decreasing as temperature goes up. This is because the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing far faster than the temperature is increasing.

African Killer Bees

[Suraci]

While there is no doubt that the Earth has had a warming trend over the past 100,000 years, it's also true that the Earth goes through the same exact cycle approximately every 100,000 years: it also conveniently explains the ice ages.

Human impact on the world has been both detrimental and conservatory, many species have been saved that would otherwise have naturally died out, regardless of urban expansion. The truth is that humans could no more stop the warming/cooling trends of the Earth anymore than we can cause them. If you have any questions to this, please refer to:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Ice_ Age_Temperature.png

These "clever" scientists -cough-activists-cough- like Hansen only show you the past century and claim that we're baaaaaad and evil and self-centered while he ignores the geological history of the Earth. They use fear-mongering and bad science (refer abover to flawed/super-secret algorithms) to bolster their POLITICS with exaggerated claims. If you think they'll stop before getting overly emotional about their eco-terrorism, wait until they whip out the pictures of polar bear cubs.

Don't be played for fools. In one hundred years, people will be holding up apocalyptic signs because of the impending ice age. Now go be productive and find the real reason for the trend/cycle: orbital rotation/changes, cyclical changes in the Sun, etc. And while you're at it .. recycle aluminum, don't litter and pay mind to your personal/family's impact on the environment like a good lad and while you're at it, please don't go scaring the little kids with fairy tales.

Re:African Killer Bees

[Ambitwistor]

While there is no doubt that the Earth has had a warming trend over the past 100,000 years, it's also true that the Earth goes through the same exact cycle approximately every 100,000 years: it also conveniently explains the ice ages. It's also true that the current warming has nothing to do with that cycle.

The truth is that humans could no more stop the warming/cooling trends of the Earth anymore than we can cause them. We can cause some of them, as well as stop them. The ice age trends are not caused by us, but that has nothing to do with the current trend. For that matter, we could actually stop the ice age cycle, at least for a while; I read a study that suggested if we burned all known fossil fuel reserves we might skip the next two ice age cycles. (We probably couldn't do that though, because a lot of the reserves are impractical to extract.)

In one hundred years, people will be holding up apocalyptic signs because of the impending ice age Even if there were no global warming, that wouldn't happen; ice ages don't happen that fast.

Now go be productive and find the real reason for the trend/cycle: orbital rotation/changes, cyclical changes in the Sun, etc. The vast majority of scientific evidenc indicates that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for most of the warming that occurred in the 20th century, your denial notwithstanding.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[jc42]

because the total heat content of the of the earth, or "globe" if you will, and its atmosphere is expected to rise.

Actually, the documented changes are really just in the atmosphere and oceans, and maybe the top few meters of the crust, which are less than 1% of the planet's mass. That's where all the multicellular life lives, of course, so it's the part that's most interesting to us.

But the Earth's core and mantle probably haven't been affected at all, and won't be during any of our lifetimes. All those big, slow creatures living down there in the depths probably won't ever notice what we're doing to the wispy top layer.

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, your information about Media Matters is outdated.

It would be even easier if you were more thorough.

Re:.001 degree?

[IBBoard]

With a base of -459.67 F = 0 R? At least Kelvins have a nice round number as a starting point (even if it is 273).

More importantly, Kelvins are SI but Rankines (which I'd never heard being used in the UK) are apparently not. It's all about standards ;)

So wait...

[SIIHP]

You're advocating "security through obscurity" for scientific data?

Really?

Because you think the downside of allowing the data to be easily available is worse that making sure it's accurate through peer review?

And that makes sense to you?

What kind of reasoning must one engage in to believe the idea that widespread peer review is not desirable because some nutters will misuse the data? THEY DO THAT ANYWAY.

Meanwhile, situations like this occur because the data is not easily available for review.

I simply don't understand how anything you said makes sense, or is in any way insightful.

Re:So wait...

[Evilest Doer]

You're advocating "security through obscurity" for scientific data?

I was not at all advocating that, which would be obvious if you read both mine and the GP's comments. I was simply saying that I don't share his optimism and commenting on the resultant effects of releasing the raw data. I think it should be released, but it sure as hell won't solve anything, which is what the GP seemed to be suggesting.

Now, go take your meds and learn a little reading comprehension.

Re:.001 degree?

[IBBoard]

*reads Wikipedia* Turns out someone lied to me and it's 273.15 for Kelvins (or else someone improved it at some point). That still leaves Kelvins as SI and Rankines apparently predominantly US only.

Re:.001 degree?

[Blakey Rat]

From the article (boldface his!):

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important.

The real deal is this: the 'royalty' controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains' disinformation campaigns.

Well, at least he's not emotionally invested or anything.

(Seriously... holy christ. If you're a global warming believer, keep this guy FAR away from the press please. He sounds like the guy standing at the subway entrance with 3 suitcases full of cans and lice in his shaggy beard.)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

why should I believe Hansen anymore?

[peter303]

Seems like a sloppy guy. Time to move on to more careful scientists, even if they are coming up with similar results. Thats what happens when you become too political.

Facts are hard to ignore... for most people

[sherriw]

Dr. Hansen gets it right on. His 2nd email: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074. pdf is full of facts but most climate change deniers are highly skilled at ignoring those pesky facts.

I think that how humanity handles this issue will be one of the greatest measures of our species in our entire civilization's existence so far. I just hope we don't embarrass ourselves by bickering about this until it's too late.

Re:Facts are hard to ignore... for most people

[Obfuscant]

I just hope we don't embarrass ourselves by bickering about this until it's too late.

I just hope we don't embarass ourselves by flushing the global economy down the toilet, just to find ourselves in a warmer climate due to solar effects that we could not stop no matter how hard we tried.

Facts are hard to ignore. Like http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ mars_snow_011206-1.html and http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article17 20024.ece. Dust storms caused by winds caused by increased solar heating are the reason on Mars. But Mars is also further away from the sun and gets less solar radiation. If Mars gets enough extra radiation to rise 0.5C, the Earth is getting about 16 times as much. (It is about half the distance from the sun, r-squared rule says four times as much. It is about twice the diameter, again, r-squared says four times as much. four times four, sixteen. About.) Thank goodness for the high heat capacity of water, huh?

Educating the press

[benhocking]

The issue of educating the press about how to communicate science works both ways.

No doubt. Many scientists are appalled when the press tries to blame a single hot day/hot summer/hurricane/tornado on global warming. However, it should be noted that although the US temperatures are not major contributing factors to global warming, global temperatures are major contributing factors to US temperatures.

That means that the "9 hottest years"-record that you are referring to is negligibly important for global temperature when the temperatures considered are only the US ones!

I'm not sure what you're saying here. The "9 hottest years" record I'm referring to is referring to global temperatures, so it can't be negligibly important for global temperatures...

I believe that a reasonable scientific stance is one of skepticism.

Absolutely. I am as skeptical about global warming as I am about quantum physics. I know they both have flaws.

That would require for someone to know all inner workings of climate, and the magnitude and direction of all the feedbacks that models attempt to simulate.

Only if you're trying to get a perfect simulation. I run simulations on mammalian hippocampal structures, and I can guarantee you there's a lot I don't know about all the inner workings of it. Nevertheless, I'm able to not only recreate much of its functionality, but I'm also able to make testable predictions about what will happen in certain novel situations. Going back to the quantum physics comparison, there's a lot we don't know about the non-linearities inherent in quantum physics, yet we can still accomplish quite a bit with it.

But that means that it leaves the state of the science of climate change exactly as it was before, that is one of uncertainty. And this is not what James Hansen is being teaching us for the last few years.

How do you figure? Has James Hansen been teaching us that the science of climate change is perfect? If so, I'd appreciate a reference. Everyone acknowledges the uncertainty in climate change. You see those lines above and below the main line on the IPCC projections? Those are uncertainties.

Re:Educating the press

[rronda]

Not sure what you mean by global temperatures are major contributing factors to the US temperatures. The direction of the change in global warming will not necessarily affect a particular region in the same direction. The US change in the temperature can not be interpreted as indication that the global trend of warming is at play. In fact you might well find that in a global warming scenario temperatures in the US (or in parts of it) could even decrease by changes in the circulation of oceans and atmosphere. I don't think models are good enough to pinpoint the direction of a regional change in temperature based in changes in anthropogenic forcing. But people are working to figure this out. I thought you meant the "9 hottest years" in the US. I apologize. About the uncertainty. Sure, you can always get uncertainty bars from any model simulation by changing the parameters according to reasonable values. However (and here I am only talking about the model "evidence") there is no agreement on whether global circulation models are right in the first place. So the issue of uncertainty goes on many levels. There is uncertainty about the uncertainty

Political efforts?

[benhocking]

If there is evidence that James Hanson was not releasing his code or data, I'd like to hear it.

Real science is "trust but verify".

Absolutely.

Yet instead of calling for a review of all the data and figuring out, for real, how bad the problem is, what we get is a political effort to firewall the contamination and an implied "let's not bother" checking the rest.

The thing is, I don't see that. What I see is a political effort to exaggerate uncertainty, a la Philip Cooney. Admittedly, I have a bias that colors how I perceive things. I trust that you realize your own bias as well, right?

About as tenuous as gravitation

[benhocking]

No, the AGW theory is based entirely on the tenuous idea that increased CO2 increases temperatures.

Good grief! Tenuous? Can you find a single scientific skeptic who denies that fundamental fact!?! (By scientific I mean holding a Ph.D. in a scientific, or even an engineering, field. Gene Ray, Doctor of Cubicism, doesn't count.)

Re:Ok, which is it now?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Whichever one supports your ideology.

Personally, I think the issue is so muddied by politics for *ALL* sides that there isn't a person on Earth who really knows what's going on or what's causing it.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[goldspider]

"Global Climate Change" is much more forgiving if/when the computer models and dire predictions turn out to be inaccurate.

Getting hotter? Global Climate Change
Getting colder? Global Climate Change
More rain? Global Climate Change
Less rain? Global Climate Change
Hurricanes? Earthquakes? Global Climate Change
Bridges/mines collapsing? Global Climate Change
Me stubbing my toe in the parking lot? Global Climate Change

See? Global Climate Change encompasses so many more potential disasters than Global Warming.

Warmest year

[Quiet_Desperation]

The warmest year was 3,995,198,201 B.C. Everyone knows that! Sheesh! You kids these days...

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[argStyopa]

Which, no matter which side you are on the issue, you must admit is a much more...convenient... term.

The reason people use the term "Global Warming" is because that's the term that was thrown around so casually to start the discussion.

"Global Warming", pictures of melting snow on mountains, melting glaciers, melting arctic ice, increasing temperatures....that's the language of the film An Inconvenient Truth. There's not a single comment in that film (as I recall, feel free to correct me) about temps going down anywhere, ever, or anything that would taint the "OMG the world is heating up" message.

It's *only* once the naysayers put forth enough data to show that the changes were neither homogenous nor unidirectional, the canon was changed to "global climate change".

So yeah, it IS global climate change. It *may* be that it's changing faster than ever. It may even be that some avoidable human activity is accelerating it. But (I would say thanks to the fervent, 'infallible' approach that the frothing eco-nuts brought to the issue) the entire subject has been reduced to the level of a religious argument: on both sides you have True Believers flinging poo at each other and no actual hope of resolution.

Given that this is a government organization

[benhocking]

...he says that GISS refused to give him the algorithm's source code.

Given that this is a government organization, I think the refusal to hand over the source code is wrong (obviously there is no national security concern). Could a FOIA request force this?

For, scientists working outside the government, I think providing the algorithm and data are sufficient, although even in those cases I would prefer that they open source (not necessarily GPL, though) their code. (We have.)

Re:Given that this is a government organization

[Ambitwistor]

Could a FOIA request force this? It probably could, and McIntyre has been muttering about invoking one.

For, scientists working outside the government, I think providing the algorithm and data are sufficient Maybe, although it's less clear when they receive government funding. As far as legal requirments go, Mann was not forced to hand over his source code, just his data.

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[t0rkm3]

It would be nice if your link was more visible.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page =%5CSpecialReports%5Carchive%5C200503%5CSPE2005030 3a.html

Re:The Other Side of the Argument

[Ambitwistor]

It's always possible to find a handful of contrarians in any field, no matter how settled; their mere presence doesn't say much. The vast preponderance of evidence supports the idea that global temperatures have increased. Even among the skeptics, the debate has largely moved on: McIntyre himself admits that he doesn't think the global warming trend is going to go away, just that it's not as precisely quantified as is claimed. Of your references, I only find the first one to have credible evidence against the surface temperature record, and if you want to argue against that, you're going to have to argue why identical errors have been made in the satellite temperature record, borehole temperatures, glacial melt records, species migration patterns, etc. all of which support the warming trend.

Re:.001 degree?

[illumin8]

Well, at least he's not emotionally invested or anything.

Don't you think it's appropriate to be at least somewhat emotionally invested when it's the goddamn future of our children that is at stake? You and all the other global warming deniers can take a flying fuck.

Third variable

[Negafox]

Judging from Dr. James Hansen's comments on the subject, I would hardly consider him unbiased on his research on the topic. When you begin to slander any opposite as manipulative, money-making bastards, one has to question how much he is allowing his personal opinions and beliefs affect his work. While it is known that global temperatures have been rising in recent years, I question if some of these so-called climate experts are doing enough to determine the cause rather than merely finger point for self-serving causes.

Currently, I am on the fence about the actual cause of global warming. Is the primary cause of global warming the result of human activities, or is this possibly a classic third variable scenario?

Re:Third variable

[rjung2k]

"When you begin to slander any opposite as manipulative, money-making bastards, one has to question how much he is allowing his personal opinions and beliefs affect his work."

Or maybe the global warming deniers are backed by manipulative, money-making bastards? After lal, ExxonMobil is contributing hundreds of millions every year for a "think tank" that does nothing but debunk global warming with dubious counterarguments.

FUD isn't limited to Microsoft any more.

Re:.001 degree?

[Blakey Rat]

Ah, a reasoned and intelligent reply. And modded up, to boot!

Re:.001 degree?

[ArcherB]

Don't you think it's appropriate to be at least somewhat emotionally invested when it's the goddamn future of our children that is at stake? You and all the other global warming deniers can take a flying fuck.

Why is the "Think of the Children" argument valid here, but not at any other time? Just like why is FUD OK when talking about Global Warming and not the War on Terror?

No latte (or kool-aid) for me

[benhocking]

And so much for which side in this debate is really trying to be scientific about it.

Oh, no. You've convinced me. You are obviously well-versed in science.

It's really damned easy to sit at your energy-sucking computer sipping your fucking $5 latte that took a few million joules of energy to heat before you drive your oh-so-fucking-energy-efficient-hybrid to your office that consumes multiple megawatts of power a day and rant about how we need to stop using fossil fuels by not exploring for it or drilling for it.

Although I admire your way with colorful adjectives, I am sipping neither $5 latte nor kool-aid. I'm drinking $0 water (not including municipal costs). As for my energy-efficient-hybrid (which I do own), I didn't use it to drive to work today - I walked. I suppose someone such as yourself who loves the terrorists enough to fund them by buying exorbitant amounts of fuel to fill up your gas-guzzling SUV, however, would find the idea of walking anywhere extremely bizarre. Too bad you can't or won't THINK about the consequences of your desires.

Starve a few million more people in Africa?

I'm interested in where you pulled that one from, but I won't ask. I've seen more than enough disturbing images to last a life-time.

How does that kool-aid

[deesine]

taste?

It was Michael Mann...

[smitth1276]

...who said with 95% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year EVAH in the US. It's called hubris. They have too much of it.

Re:It was Michael Mann...

[Ambitwistor]

...who said with 95% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year EVAH in the US.

No, he said that there was a 95% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year in the last 1000, in the world.

It's called hubris. They have too much of it.

While that may be hubristic (though not as much so as your misquote), limit your statements to Mann and don't paint the entire climate science community with a broad brush on the basis of what Mann said.

Re:It was Michael Mann...

[smitth1276]

You should go read RealClimate sometime. It is characteristic of the entire political climate science community, not the climate science community as a whole. It's the Manns, the Hansens, the Gavin Schmidts, etc.

Re:It was Michael Mann...

[Ambitwistor]

I do read RealClimate. And, once again, you have not supported your statements regarding the climate community as a whole, nor even anything about Schmidt, Hansen, etc.

Re:Explanation.

[dbrutus]

I believe we consume 20% of the fuel and provide 25% of the economy. That's quite efficient. For a place like the PRC which produces only $1 for every $7 produced in the US on the same quantity of fuel, we should be working very hard to get their efficiency up instead of hadnicapping efficient producers in the US and shipping more work over to the PRC.

Re:This man's career

[Ambitwistor]

is staked on perpetrating the "Global Warming" hoax. Oh give me a break. If you want to point out an error in his published research, go right ahead and try. Otherwise, drop with the insinuations and innuendo.

We were worried about the melting Greenland glacier, and dissapearing Arctic ice in the 1920's, too. So? It was warming in the 1920s too, just not as much or as fast as now.

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[Jeremy Erwin]

So, what's the problem? Did some preacher identify George Soros as the antichrist, or something?

Re:Slashdot population disgusts me

[doyoudig]

Ok - not very persuasive -- first you say "how many posters don't understand basic science" then "It is clear as day to me that climate change is happening and is caused by us" -- you back up this statement up with "I have a degree in physical geography" Gee...with that kind of degree you MUST fully comprehend man's contribution to global warming....

WWII

[vanyel]

What I find interesting, and realize it may just be coincidence, but from the global graph, it looks like WWII saved us by delaying the rise by 30 years. Would we have noticed 30 years ago? On the other hand, would it have been easier to deal with with the smaller population of 30 years ago, or did we just not have tech to be able to do so then?

Just a "what if" game, but it sparked my curiosity...

The .001C change isn't the issue.

[smitth1276]

Of course the US record is just a small fraction of the global record, and, thus, this error didn't affect global temperatures by much. What is troubling is that an error like this could be overlooked--because the underlying data is not subjected to any public scrutiny--in the freakin' United States. The question, then, is what major flaws might be hidden in the GLOBAL data if the most sophisticated and well-maintained network in the world has this sort of bad data? If the US data was off by 0.3C, what might we find in Africa? Or rural SE Asia? Or Siberia? The former Soviet bloc states?

The fact is that we put a remarkable amount of faith in the data from surface stations--which are adjusted for time of measurement, then adjusted again for physical location, then adjusted again for urbanization (based on other stations which have, themselves, been adjusted), and those adjustments are NOT well documented and there is no empirical evidence to support the "correctness" of the adjustments. It is reasonable to assume that if we have major errors, the rest of the world as a whole has WORSE errors since their networks are not nearly as well-maintained as ours and they are starting with more suspect data in the first place.

Re:The .001C change isn't the issue.

[toporok]

I think this is the wisest comment in the conversation so far.

Re:This man's career

[chrb]

We were worried about the melting Greenland glacier, and dissapearing Arctic ice in the 1920's, too.

The fact that some scientists suspected so long ago that the increased CO2 output due to industrialisation was having an effect on the environment doesn't mean that they were wrong, or that it isn't having an effect now. See It's all a conspiracy "more than a century":

1930s Global warming trend since late 19th century reported. Milankovitch proposes orbital changes as the cause of ice ages.

1938 Callendar argues that CO2 greenhouse global warming is underway, reviving interest in the question.

Re:That is not raw data

[Coryoth]

GHCN + UHCN corrections is the data that GISS starts with, so it's as raw as they ever see. If you want more than that you'll have to go upstream of them -- they publish the data that they get and use.

Weather Stations Near Heat Sources

[BinBoy]

This web site shows many flawed weather stations: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/weather_stations/

My favorite is the one near a burn barrel: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/06/how_not_t o_measure_temperature_4.html

Here's one on the receiving end of the exhaust from several air conditioning units: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/07/how_not_t o_measure_temperature_23.html

This one's next to an air conditioning unit, a chimney and a grill: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/06/how_not_t o_measure_temperature_12.html

Re:Weather Stations Near Heat Sources

[dbIII]

Yes, but it is a very big world out there. The total range of error from these things would be hardly significant if you consider a lot of them.

Re:Weather Stations Near Heat Sources

[BinBoy]

27 stations so far and the trend is not looking good at all.

Re:Weather Stations Near Heat Sources

[dbIII]

27 stations so far

It is a big world out there. There are more monitoring points than that in the small city of 1 million that I live in.

Re:Weather Stations Near Heat Sources

[Ambitwistor]

The agreement of the surface stations with two independent satellite temperature records, as well as other temperature proxies, suggests that any errors present in the surface record are minimal at best.

My statement applies only to the global record, however. It's still possible that the U.S. record could have some significant problems (though I doubt it, for various reasons I've gone into elsewhere in this thread). But it won't change any basic conclusions about global warming in general.

Check your facts

[Ambitwistor]

A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise. McIntyre is not a professional statistician. He's a former mining executive with education in pure mathematics, politics, and economics.

Re:Check your facts

[huckamania]

Good, my respect for him just went up.

Re:Check your facts

[Ambitwistor]

Great, you respect the statistical opinions of non-statisticians more than you do professional statisticians. Nice to see you're at least consistently irrational.

Re:Check your facts

[dbrutus]

Hansen isn't a statistician. Hansen's acknowledged the error in this controversy so McIntyre's work quality is not at issue in this case.

The problem is that instead of making it easy for McIntyre to check, Hansen made him work at it which reduces the number of things that can be checked. I, and an awful lot of other people, think that this is not good science.

Re:Check your facts

[Ambitwistor]

Hansen isn't a statistician. I never claimed he was.

Hansen's acknowledged the error in this controversy so McIntyre's work quality is not at issue in this case. I didn't say McIntyre was wrong; he obviously is right, and Hansen admitted it. I merely said that McIntyre wasn't a professional statistician, and that the other poster was being an idiot for respecting the statistical analyses of non-statisticians over statisticians as a general principle.

Re:Check your facts

[dbrutus]

Sorry, your link doesn't prove what you say it does. You become a professional statistician by being paid to do statistics. What you're talking about are his academic credentials.

McIntyre's sheepskins say pure mathematics, philosophy, politics, and economics much as Hansen's say physics, mathematics, and astronomy. Hansen's U of Iowa while McIntyre's U of Toronto and Oxford (McIntyre turned down MIT).

Again, this is not about whether McIntyre or Hansen did the data right. Hansen made an error, McIntyre found it. That's not in dispute. The controversy is how easy should Hansen have made it for McIntyre to check his work. McIntyre would like (and he's been on about this since the MBH98 controversy) would like to see more information released, quicker, and in a standardized manner. I think he's on to something.

Re:Check your facts

[Ambitwistor]

You become a professional statistician by being paid to do statistics. What you're talking about are his academic credentials. Someone who does some statistics as part of one's job is not a professional statistician either (for the same reason that Hansen is not a professional statistician). A professional statistician is someone who ONLY does statistics. Hell, McIntyre for the most part has been a mining director, not a practicing statistician.

McIntyre's sheepskins say pure mathematics, philosophy, politics, and economics much as Hansen's say physics, mathematics, and astronomy. For the Nth time, my remarks weren't about Hansen or whether McIntyre is right. Drop the knee jerk defensiveness and read what the hell I'm saying. They were merely about the fact that McIntyre is not a professional statistician. You want to argue about public disclosure or whatever, go argue somewhere else.

Once again, I agree that McIntyre's analysis was right. I was merely responding to your illegitimate appeal to authority: "A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise." McIntyre isn't a professional statistician and does not necessarily have any more expertise in "cutting edge statistical analysis" than a climate scientist like Hansen.

Re:Check your facts

[dbrutus]

Who is the other statistician? I thought the two people being compared were McIntyre and Hansen. And I'd like to hear your definition of what a professional statistician is. It seems to be non-standard but that might just be me.

Re:Check your facts

[Ambitwistor]

I didn't say there was any other statistician. And I'd like to hear your definition of "professional statistician" that includes McKitrick but excludes Hansen.

Re:Check your facts

[dbrutus]

Oh, I wasn't claiming that McIntyre (McKitrick is somebody else) was a statistician while Hansen is not. By the whatever reasonable definition is provided they're either both one or they are neither one. What I was peeved at was the double standard, talking McIntyre down and giving him grief while Hansen's protected as an AGW high priest (help, help the Bush administration is repressing me).

The central issue remains, is part of the job of a scientist to enable fact checking efforts to be run quickly and efficiently or are scientists really only bound to grudging sharing and not always that (see the MBH98 controversy)? If you're in favor of openness and as many checks as possible, I can live with most everything else on the thread.

Re:Check your facts

[Ambitwistor]

Oh, I wasn't claiming that McIntyre (McKitrick is somebody else) was a statistician while Hansen is not. Yes, I meant to write McIntyre.

You were claiming that he as a "professional statistician" he may have more expertise than climate scientists, but that doesn't follow. Anyway, it's beside your point.

What I was peeved at was the double standard, talking McIntyre down and giving him grief while Hansen's protected as an AGW high priest (help, help the Bush administration is repressing me). The poster you were responding to didn't say that. He/she just said that open access isn't necessarily the panacea to scientific debate that some here have claimed, due to the relative lack of expertise outside the scientific community. Which is probably true, specific counterexamples like McIntyre notwithstanding.

The central issue remains, is part of the job of a scientist to enable fact checking efforts to be run quickly and efficiently or are scientists really only bound to grudging sharing and not always that (see the MBH98 controversy)? If you're in favor of openness and as many checks as possible, I can live with most everything else on the thread. I believe that all scientists need to make data products and procedural documentation available. I believe that Hansen ought to release source code. As for openness at the source code level in general, I don't think that's necessarily realistic given the current reward structure in science.

Scientists are rewarded for being first. As such, they are forced into a situation where intellectual property is important. Science needs to reproducible, so they need to make available all the information necessary to reproduce the result. But that doesn't include, say, releasing source code or experimental equipment, as long as they describe how to duplicate it in principle. It would suck to invest many man-years of effort into producing a widget or program and then have another group take it and scoop you on publications using the fruits of your labor: scientists usually don't get rewarded for writing the software, either, but for using it to do science.

That situation as it is, some scientists release source and some don't; it usually has more to do with the competitive consequences of disclosure than any desire for secrecy. Some groups can afford to give away their source to their competitors, and some can't. (I know some groups which have been scooped by larger and faster groups in exactly that way ...) Many grants do stipulate disclosure at the source code level, though. (But I'm not sure how they define "timely" disclosure.)

Either science needs to change so that being first to publish doesn't matter (not bloody likely), or they need to come up with some other scheme to balance disclosure with credit. Maybe a moratorium: you have X months/years to publish papers using your tool, then it passes into the public domain. One common way that scientists have gotten around it so far is to request coauthorship on papers which use their tool, but then release of the tool is contingent on that publication.

That being said, this whole kerfluffle isn't about Hansen getting scooped, it's about inadequate documentation of his procedures so that they cannot be reproduced even from scratch.

Re:Check your facts

[dbrutus]

ok, we seem to be agreeing vehemently at this point, both in favor of openness and aware that there are some issues in theory but not in this case, in putting the theory into practice.

I can live with that.

I think you, not I misinterpreted the original poster but frankly, I don't give a hoot which of us is correct on that point.

Re:The Other Side of the Argument

[Ambitwistor]

So far a lot have been found to be faulty. No data has been found faulty. A small fraction of stations, mostly in urban areas which are already renormed against rural areas, have been found to have siting problems of unknown effect.

FUD meter

[edwardpickman]

Ignore world temperatures, they've increased more than one degree in the northern lattitudes, ignore CO2 levels, ignore the crazy weather, I'm 46 and I've never seen anything like what we have. Ignore all of that, what pray tell is melting virtually all glaciers at a rate that no one thought possible. Some of the glaciers date back more than a million years. Most of the ice that's melting now is tens of thousands of years old yet it's expected to melt in the next hundred years, not theory it's happening. Numbers can be distorted to mean anything when we are talking about small changes that have dramatic effects. Is this a NASA rep discovering a problem or is this the Bush administration performing damage control? Even if it isn't NASA has a history of defending dogma. It pratically had to rain on the landers for NASA to accept that there has been recent water on Mars. At what point do we start accepting global warming? How deep do coastal cities need to be underwater? They can say we aren't the cause all they want but no one is rationalizing how such a massive spike in CO2 levels aren't having an effect on the environment.

Re:FUD meter

[Ambitwistor]

Then inexplicably over a relatively short period of time - about 2,000 years - the ice melted. The end of the last ice age has to do with variations in the Earth's orbit, and deglaciation events are slower and demonstrably not what is going on right now.

So climate change can be rapid. If you want to argue for "rapid" climate change, you want to talk about Dansgaard-Oeschger events, not the ice age cycle. (They also have nothing to do with the present warming.)

Similarly in the mini ice age of the 1700s the Thames in London froze. This mini ice age lasted about 50 years. The Little Ice Age lasted for hundreds of years and its end was, again, not as rapid as the current warming.

Re:FUD meter

[Ambitwistor]

the last D-O event is loosely spoken of as an ice-age and the events are characterized by rapid temperature changes. As I said, D-O events are rapid, and if you want to be speaking of "rapid climate change", you should be talking about them, not ice ages, which are not that rapid.

That being said, D-O events have nothing to do with the current climate change.

Mann's hockey stick graph of current temperature changes has been debunked (some believe) or at least seriously questioned by a number of researchers - in other words temperature changes are probably not occuring at the rate originally suggested. On the contrary, the current rate of change is the best upheld part of the hockey stick, as reaffirmed by both the NRC and NAS reviews. It's the very earliest temperatures that are in question. Those reviews noted that there is no evidence for temperature changes as large/rapid as the current change, although they said that the amount of time over which you can compare is not as long as Mann claimed.

The National Academy follow up was ambiguous regarding Mann's claims about the recent decade being the hottest on record. That's true of that decade, but they were quite unambiguous about the 20th century warming trend in general.

There are differences of opinion regarding the recent little ice age. There appears to be 3 to 4 minima with the most extreme occuring in the 1700s. All of them agree that the overall extent was several centuries, not "50 years", and none of them find support for a rate of change as rapid as the second half of the 20th century.

This sounds all to familiar

[toporok]

Didn't we already have this discussion a while ago when sombody posted observations from http://www.surfacestations.org/

Re:"Yet let anyone dare falsify"

[Ambitwistor]

I haven't actually SEEN any attempt to falsify. How many climatological journal articles have you read? Yeah, I thought so. There is a vast literature on "detection & attribution studies": how much can be attributed to anthropogenic CO2, aerosols, etc.; how much to solar irradiance changes, volcanism, etc.; how much to ENSO variability, and so on.

This would require that the alternate process be investigated in a rigorous manner (so not cosmic rays then) Cosmic rays have been investigated, and arguments for and against published (see Svensmark, Lockwood & Frolich, etc.)

or why the known science (CO2 as a GHG) isn't having any or much effect. CO2 as a GHG is having pretty much the effect predicted by climate models, as far as all data indicates.

Re:.001 degree?

[tgibbs]

Before the correction, the US temperature in 1934 and 1998 were in a virtual tie. Some estimates had 1934 a hair above 1998, others had it the other way around. In 2001, Hansen wrote

The U.S. annual (January-December) mean temperature is slightly warmer in 1934 than in 1998 in the GISS analysis. This contrasts with the USHCN data, which has 1998 as the warmest year in the century.

After the correction, the US temperatures in 1934 and 1998 are still in a statistical dead heat (no pun intended), too close to call. The correction was much smaller than the uncertainty in the the measurements. So this only matters to people who don't understand statistics. Scientists don't place much store in records like hottest years, because peaks in any signal are heavily influenced by statistical "noise" and are often misleading. The real science is based on the average trends, which aren't significantly impacted b by this minute correction.

The real study is that an expert statistician has been assiduously searching for errors in the climate data, and so far the most he has been able to come up with is this negligible correction.

Impression vs. Facts

[Tungbo]

The article you referenced is titled:

"Blogger Forces NASA to Tweak Climate Data"

Rather deep inside, it does indeed describe some of the bloggers as "fringe groups". For a casual reader scanning this article, what impression would she/he get?

"Hmm. Those NASA scientists screwed up again. The little guy was right. May be that global warming talk from those government scientists are so reliable..."

Kudos to Fox for spinning a factual article artfully to suit their slant.

What might be a more accurate head line? How about:

"NASA corrects trivial error in climate data found by blogger"

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[Gadget_Guy]

It would be nice if your link was more visible.

Why? What extra insight can you get from seeing that line of rubbish character as opposed to the human readable anchor text that the grandparent used? We could all see at a glance that the site was cnsnews.com. The few people who really need to know what the URL was could hover over the link and see the status bar, or right click and choose properties (or whatever is appropriate for their browser).

As for this discussion, knowing who paid for Media Matters unimportant. It would only interest people who wish to attack the source rather than actually address the issues that they mention. This is the same as assuming that some news item that Fox News reports must be wrong because of who reported it.

Re:I've never been denied raw data.

[NickFortune]

I have heard of scientists refusing to do anything for people who were obviously politically motivated hacks, but even that's just rumor. Scientists are generally OK with information sharing, even if they work for corporations and can't do it "officially".

I suppose what I'd like to do is to raise the game for all these discussions. I'd like to see a study that didn't supply full data regarded with the same disdain as one that didn't cite an references. And for the same reasons.

I think we need to do something to stop science degenerating into a shouting match. And the only way that'll happen is if we have ready access to the supporting data. Otherwise, it's always going to be a slanging match between the enlightened scientists struggling to make the truth known, and the evil forces of pseudo-science, determined to misrepresent the truth for their own personal gain.

And the interesting thing is that I think that's true regardless of which side you think it which.

Re:The Other Side of the Argument

[tgibbs]

It's a site dedicated to looking at the surface stations which the data comes from and auditing their compliance with the US Weather Station rules.

So far a lot have been found to be faulty. A post above puts it stronger - in many cases we seem to be measuring the spread of air conditioning!

Kind of a waste of time, because the data are already corrected for the major source of errors. So far, nobody has found any errors that make any difference in the conclusions. So it's a lot like the 1934/1998 tempest in a teapot--people obsessing about tiny measurement errors that make no contribution to the overall conclusion that there is global warming. It is one thing to quibble about the best way to measure temperature--in the real world, measurements are always "faulty" to some extent, and the real science is in coming up with methods of analysis that are robust enough that conclusions are not impacted by the inevitable measurement errors and biases. So there is always going to be room to quibble about the best way to analyze the data and to make tiny corrections. But so far, nobody has been able to come up with any way of analyzing the climate data that alters the conclusion--which is why they are making a such huge fuss about statistically insignificant corrections like this one.

Re:.001 degree?

[everphilski]

273.15 is nowhere near round. And it converts by a simple fraction Rankine/kelvin=1.8.

Again, your point?

I hate to add more facts to the debate but...

[Atroxodisse]

...Antarctic ice is growing, it has been for at least the past two decades. There is a smaller chunk that is shrinking, but the larger mass has increased much more than the small mass has lost.

Greenland use to be green.

Most of the ice that's melting is below water level. 89% of an iceberg's mass is below water level. Ice has less density than water, hence a higher volume and hence melting icebergs do little to increase the overall volume of the oceans. It's the ice on land that we need to worry about. Further, if the global temperature is rising then the equilibrium of the ocean will change. More ocean water will evaporate.

Carbon samples from the poles have shown that it was hotter on earth before now, in the last 13000 years I believe. They have also shown that increases in global temperature have preceded increases in global CO2. Not followed them.

Data has shown that increases in solar activity have directly correlated with increases in global temperature.

PAID troll?

[snarfer]

This comment brings up the issue of whether people are being PAID to leave comments at sites like Slashdot. I don't know if the person leaving the comment is paid, but the site referenced is a PAID site, financed by the coal and oil industries.

With so much money being thrown around by the oil and coal industries, why would a person leave a comment like this for free?

Global temperatures affecting US temperatures

[benhocking]

The direction of the change in global warming will not necessarily affect a particular region in the same direction.

Sure, not necessarily. However, there will definitely be that tendency. Nevertheless, your point is valid. One would expect global temperatures to contribute significantly to US climate, but not necessarily to increase its temperatures. (I.e., it's hard to imagine a situation where a significantly warmer world wouldn't have some effect on US climate, but one can imagine a situation where it has conflicting effects on US temperature.)

There is uncertainty about the uncertainty.

For sure. One thing I remember hearing that the recent IPCC report left out was the effect of ice streams. These streams are expect to increase the rate of melting in Greenland and Antarctica, but since they're still poorly understood, they chose to leave them out altogether. This makes the estimate for sea-level rise most likely an underestimate - although I suppose there could be another factor (unknown unknowns, as it were), that would have the reverse effect.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Bluesman]

"The population has grown and at some point resources simply won't stretch far enough for all of us."

Yawn. This was a big fear forty years ago, and yet it hasn't come to pass, despite world population exploding beyond all predictions.

There are still plenty of resources to go around. The method of distribution needs work in some places, but it's not a problem in the civilized world, where only the rich are thin.

Wakka wakka

[Gerocrack]

Am I the only one who quickly looked at the title and thought this was about a new muppet movie?

Then open the source!

[taskiss]

Open the code used to calculate the temperatures to the public and open the data. The US citizens paid for this information, let them have it. If this information was open for review then this wouldn't be the story it is.

Heat island adjustments

[thule]

Yes, Hansen adjusted for heat island effect. The question remains why it appears that the adjustment was applied to high quality sites like the Grand Canyon station and possibly others.

Re:Heat island adjustments

[Abies Bracteata]

Yes, Hansen adjusted for heat island effect. The question remains why it appears that the adjustment was applied to high quality sites like the Grand Canyon station and possibly others.

Data from all sites (urban *and* rural) are adjusted so that their trends conform to the mean of the *rural* stations in the neighborhood (nominally within 500 km -- this may be extended if too few rural stations are found within 500 km). So rural sites whose long-term trends run lower then the mean trend will be adjusted upward; rural sites with trends exceeding the local mean will have their trends adjusted downward. There's absolutely no mystery or intrigue here; it's all very straightforward. I refer you to Hansen's paper (available at http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Hansen_et al.pdf). for the details.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

Right. So we can infinitely expand the carrying capacity of the earth?

That's beyond optimistic. That's a delusion of grandeur.

Re:This man's career

[jevvim]

If you want to point out an error in his published research, go right ahead and try. Otherwise, drop with the insinuations and innuendo.

When they open up that published reserach so that it can be fully reviewed, we could actually argue points instead of insinuating. Until then, though, we should consider why such disclosure wouldn't be made and, from that, assume there to be an agenda at play, be it his own, his supervisor's, or the administration's.

Download climate data and models

[Ambitwistor]

Repost of my AC post:

Lots of data at NCDC.

Simple interactive Java climate model JCM5.

3D general circulation model EdGCM (based on NASA GISS Model II, state of the art in 1983 and what James Hansen himself used in his famous 1988 testimony to Congress).

For more modern and advanced models ... they're not so easy for laymen to run themselves, but ...

There are a variety of Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs) which are not fully 3D models but represent a lot of physics and don't require a supercomputer. One such is UVic; there are many more (here).

You can even get full blown state of the art GCMs which run on supercomputers, like NASA GISS Model E or NCAR CCSM, but expect to run them for most of a year to get any kind of result ...

Re:Explanation.

[Lars T.]

I believe we consume 20% of the fuel and provide 25% of the economy. That's quite efficient. For a place like the PRC which produces only $1 for every $7 produced in the US on the same quantity of fuel, we should be working very hard to get their efficiency up instead of hadnicapping efficient producers in the US and shipping more work over to the PRC. Yeah, lets ignore Purchasing Power Parity, not to mention all other problems with using GDP as a measure for economy - like pretending that increased government spending equals economic growth for example.

Re:.001 degree?

[illumin8]

Why is the "Think of the Children" argument valid here, but not at any other time? Just like why is FUD OK when talking about Global Warming and not the War on Terror?

Well, mainly because when people use the "think of the children" argument to limit freedom, they do everyone a disservice. Where we really should be thinking of the children is on environmental issues such as these. It's not wrong to want to leave the planet in as good or better condition than when we found it.

When I was a kid, my parents used to take us camping in the rocky mountains every summer. They always taught us to leave the campground as clean or cleaner than when we found it. That means not littering and leaving garbage all over the ground for the next people that come to use the campground.

Polluting the environment and destroying our earth is pretty much saying "Fuck you!" to everyone else that lives on this world after you.

So yes, I will use the "think of the children" argument here. It's perfectly valid. I'm not using it to justify government intrusion into our private lives and governmental raising of our kids for us.

Synergistic

[geek2k5]

It could be a synergistic combination of weather and bad farming practices. If you are on the edge and there is a drought going on, bad farming practices in one area can make the weather worse in other areas. The process continues until you reach areas that have more redundancy.

For that matter, the big stock market crash of 1929 could play a part in this. If the economy tanks, crops may not be planted in areas where they are risky, increasing the odds of erosion. Or bad farming practices may be 'encouraged' by the need to maximize profits and minimize costs.

We're dealing with complex, interactive systems that are linked in ways that we do not fully understand.

Re:.001 degree?

[ArcherB]

It's not wrong to want to leave the planet in as good or better condition than when we found it.
Agreed. However, "Well, mainly because when people use the "think of the children" argument to limit freedom, they do everyone a disservice." Telling me what I can or can't drive, or how long I can run my AC or how far I can drive to work, or what I can eat... and so on is a limit to my freedom. Now don't get me wrong, I drive a car with a 4-cylinder engine, but I tend to get a bit miffed when I see protesters drive from their protest blocking the building of nuclear power plant to the protest that blocks the production of a "clean coal" power plant. Solutions are available, we just need to use a common sense approach and tell the protectors to blow it out their ass!

But back to your original point, there is a place for emotion in science, but only when dealing with ethical treatment of humans, animals, etc, not when dealing with climate change. If you let emotion cloud your judgment where the environment is concerned, you end up with sensationalist arguments like An Inconvenient Truth claiming that Florida is about to be underwater. You also begin to think that man is responsible for everything because, otherwise, we are powerless to stop it.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting the environment, but we need to pull the bullshit, hypocrisy, politics and hidden agendas out of it. For example, if you want the US to research renewable resource, don't claim that you want to save the porcupine caribou when you fight against drilling in ANWR. If you are against Walmart because of they don't offer health insurance, don't protest the opening of a new store by waving an "environmental impact study" around. It seems as if every single agenda is being tied to Global Warming and the environment because people can't get their original agendas to stand on their own. And frankly, the whole thing is not only starting to piss me off, but it's starting to make me question the whole thing. I can't trust GW alarmists to honest about their agendas, how can I expect them to honest about the science behind it?

I don't think you're researched this much at all

[SIIHP]

"On the other hand you have dedicated scientists getting research grants to study the problem."

And if the problem were not as bad as we thought, or is non-existent, how much money would those scientists get then?

Exactly.

Stop deluding yourself, scientists feel financial pressure too, and pretending it doesn't exist does no one any good at all.

"You are on a site that is dedicated to science, so the people HERE understand that research grants provide relatively LOW SALARIES."

O Rly?

It seems that those "people" need to check their facts then, because they're dead wrong. Research Scientists have an average salary in the US of 83,0000. That is over twice what Teachers make, nearly twice what police officers make, and more than software engineers, physicians, and attorneys.

http://www.indeed.com/salary/Research-Scientist.ht ml
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Police+Officer&l1=
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Teacher&l1=
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Software+Engineer& l1=
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Physician&l1=

So when you say "relatively LOW SALARIES." what are you "relating" them to, professional athletes and CEOs? I had a hard time finding ANY occupation that, on average, got paid as much as research scientists (be glad you're a dentist if you are, ka-ching!).

"People who want to dedicate themselves to science and helping society go to work for universities and you are trying to smear these people by saying they are in it for the MONEY?"

No, Mr. Strawman, what we're saying is that without money to pay for the research, research doesn't get done. Pretending that they are above the inevitable corruption that follows money is naive in the extreme.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rcs1000]

"Aren't you cute. The population has grown and at some point resources simply won't stretch far enough for all of us."

There is this shocking, general belief that populations are exploding.

The truth is different: in countries as diverse as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Iran (yes, Iran), and Mexico plus all of Europe, birth rates are below replacement levels. In Russia, there were four deaths for every birth last year. Even in India, the birth rate has collapsed, even if it is still well above replacement.

Sure, populations are still expanding globally: but this is a function of life expectancies rising fast in
developing nations. But where birth rates have fallen below replacement levels we are now seeing DECLINING populations. Japan's total population has fallen, and it's working age population is shrinking at an alarming rate. In China, the result of the one child policy in 1979 has also led to an enormous drop off in births. (And one that is compounding now: there are fewer women of child bearing age, having fewer babies.)

Look up the UN population data - they have been consistently revising down "peak" population for 15 years. Read Fewer by Ben Wattenberg. It is amazing to discover that there will probably be fewer humans - by choice - in a 100 years than there are now.

Neither side wants to work on the problem...

[jbburks]

I'm ready to do something about climate change / global warming, but it's not important enough to either side: One side says it's not important enough to:

Encourage better gas mileage for cars

Subsidize efficent inter-city transit (electric railways)

Tax hydrocarbons

Cut the farm subsidy

Encourage smaller family sizes (voluntary)

The other side says it's not important enough to: Build more hydropower (dams)

Build more nuclear power (zero CO2 emissions)

Limit population growth (which in the US and Europe come from migration/immigration)

Encourage smaller family sizes (voluntary)

Limit urban sprawl by crime control and urban renewal

And because of the opposition to these points, we will go on discussing this forever.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[khallow]

Is that delusions even a problem? As another poster points out, population may still be growing, but there's signs of population decline. My take is we'll see peak population a bit before 2050.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

I know.. I'm not making a hockey stick arguement. But the fact is there is already dissapearing potable water in heavily populated areas of china as well as the US. We are, right now, operating beyond currently sustainable levels in energy and water usage, and that in turn is and will be placing pressure on food.

And, more people are demanding more as "all boats rise". Consumption is skyrocketing even though population is merely growing. What do people do who don't have kids? They consume...

Wattenberg is a neo-con apologist...

[Sir_Eptishous]

Wattenberg has as much of an agenda as anyone else. He comes from the American Enterprise Institute, remember...? Sure, Europe and Japan's populations will decline, but the rest of the world, including the U.S., will continue to rise. Resources for the increasing population will be strained to the breaking point, especially with Climate Change in the mix.

How will the U.S. respond? Well, the Pentago is already looking into it.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[snarfer]

"And if the problem were not as bad as we thought, or is non-existent, how much money would those scientists get then?"

About the same, doing something else.

"Research Scientists have an average salary in the US of 83,0000."

Well thanks for making my point. This is MUCH LOWER than corporate research scientists are paid.

My question, what kind of person tries to obfuscate the facts about global warming by trying to smear the researchers, saying they are only in it for the money?

I mean, aside from those who are paid by Exxon, etc. And since so may are paid by Exxon, etc., what kind of dupe shows up at a place like Slashdot and makes those arguments for free?

So ... are you paid, or a dupe?

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Snocone]

Serious congratulations here, friend. Very __ very __ rarely do I encounter anyone capable of getting past "OIL COMPANIES BAD PANIC GOOD" to at least the minimal sanity level of "without money to pay for the research, research doesn't get done." you display here. Which was pretty much my point, you're not going to research anything that might conceivably question your funding source. Weird how many people think that blindingly obvious principle automatically invalidates all anti-AGW papers, no matter what their actual thesis or supporting evidence, yet somehow have a blind spot as to that same argument would automatically invalidate pretty much all pro-AGW papers as well, and with rather better financial motivation to boot...

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Agripa]

As an illustration of what I believe will happen I am going to borrow a quote from one of my favorite science fiction movies:

Professor Bernard Quatermass: The will to survive is an odd phenomenon. Roney, if we found out our own world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do about it?
Dr. Mathew Roney: Nothing, just go on squabbling like usual.
Professor Bernard Quatermass: Yes, but is we weren't men?

Re:Rest of the world.

[DragonWriter]

Part of the reason they can run such high speed trains there is that due to the nature of their governments they were allowed in the past to appropriate right-of-way for the tracks. In the US, private property rights kept them from doing that in many places.

Uh, no, were that true, the US wouldn't have the superhighway systems it chose to build instead of building more rail, which were also built by government appropriation of land (via eminent domain), and take up more land area than rail with similar capacity would.

The reason America doesn't have high-speed rail is more likely because America was less built out at the time the automobile became affordable, and thus it was much easier and more economical in the short-term to build out support for more cars than in Europe and, consequently, both auto culture and the auto industry became more politically significant in America, and both produce resistance to more passenger rail of any kind and serve to keep the priority on roads.

Sooo... unless our fascist government suddenly begins condemning private property in order to build straighter railroad tracks between cities, we aren't ever going to have the screamingly fast trains they have.

You mean the same way our "fascist" government keeps condemning private property for more and higer capacity freeways (sometimes including ones that become privately-owned, for-profit toll roads)?

Reference please?

[benhocking]

They want to quantify their mistake to say, "We made a mistake but we're still right!"

They're doing no such thing. They're saying, "We made a mistake and have now fixed it. These people are misrepresenting the mistake to make you think that this mistake means that the 9 hottest years ever recorded for this planet didn't happen in the last decade." That last bit is the typical uncertainty and doubt coming from the anti-science side in this debate. (The fear part of the equation comes into play when they try to make you think that doing anything to fight global warming will destroy the economy.) When it comes to science and prestidigitation, I will make a choice, and that choice is science.

Re:Reference please?

[jav1231]

I could care less, personally, about which were the hottest. It really isn't part of the equation. I don't think putting everyone into the categories of anti-science and science helps either. What anti-science? There are legitimate scientists on both sides of the climate debate. Their doctorates, research, and expertise is just as valid as anyone else's. Again, it's picking sides. You can't be in the "I think the climate is changing" camp unless you accept that a) its largely humanity's fault and b) its happening on this time table etc. There are legitimate debates going on but no one wants to discuss it openly. They want to put everyone into these categories. For what? The coming battle? To what end are we settings ourselves against each other? There's a bigger problem going on here, is my point. Look at the first reply and see if you can see what I mean.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[The One and Only]

Actually, if we made everyone fabulously wealthy (i.e. as wealthy as the US, Western Europe, Japan), population growth would stall entirely, since that's what happened when the US, Western Europe, and Japan all became fabulously wealthy. The problem is, making everyone fabulously wealthy (i.e. "economic development" or "globalization") will...lead to a shortage of resources. It's not population growth that's the issue.

Population growth these days is simply self-perpetuating poverty, and poverty doesn't put up much of a fight for resources. (Okay, maybe that means all the poor countries starve to death, but at least the rest of us don't have to go to war. Even if it is North Korea--sure, they have nuclear bombs, but if they actually use them instead of just making vague threats about it, they're not getting any more food aid.) It's development that's the issue. Poor countries don't want to stay poor, but rich people somehow want to pay the same price for gasoline even when poor countries are getting rich enough to afford some and increase demand.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

Which was pretty much my point, you're not going to research anything that might conceivably question your funding source. The National Science Foundation doesn't say "we only fund studies which prove manmade global warming". In fact, they would toss any grant proposal which claimed ahead of time what conclusion it was going to arrive at. You write in something like "I'm going to improve estimates of lapse rate feedback effects with thus and such method", and if it's a good idea you get the money. You find out whether your results support or contradict AGW after you get the money and do the study.

Weird how many people think that blindingly obvious principle automatically invalidates all anti-AGW papers The oil companies actually do pay people to write papers that agree with the conclusions they want. On the other hand, there are anti-AGW papers which are funded by the NSF and the like and are published in legitimate journals, which, whether wrong or right, are at least honestly come by.

Re:LOL

[Ambitwistor]

First of all, 20 years ago it WASN'T Global Warming, it was Global COOLING. We were all going to freeze to death. No.

Now those exact same scientists are letting us know that we are all going to BURN to death. Really? The exact same ones? Which ones?

Lets take out all of the computer computations and biological / meteorological babbling out of this and look at FACTUAL science. Yeah, sure, let's toss out those pesky laws of physics and everything we know about climate dynamics.

Geological studies have shown that the Earth has cycles of cooling and warming. There is no geological study which indicates that we are "due" for a cycle of warming which looks like what is happening now.

As a matter of fact, temperatures are cooler today than periods in our recent past using the data that some of the babbling is about. That depends entirely on what you mean by "recent", but that aside, it has nothing to do with the evidence that the current warming is not largely natural in origin.

ABSOLUTELY NOT, I feel that we HAVE contributed to a very small degree some of what is happening. Really? How much? How do you know it's "a very small degree", and not "a small degree", or "a large degree"? What scientific evidence is your conclusion based on?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Depends on what you mean by "both" sides

[benhocking]

There are legitimate scientists on both sides of the climate debate.

That really depends on what you mean by "both" sides. Almost (but not quite) all climate scientists have arrived at the conclusion that man is responsible for the majority of global warming. That's one perspective (or side, if you prefer). A few climate scientists (e.g., possibly Lindzen and Michaels) aren't sure if man is responsible for the majority of global warming, but won't rule it out, either. These climate scientists will acknowledge that man is reponsible for some of global warming — they're just not sure how much. That's a second perspective. I don't know of any climate scientists (or even other "legitimate" scientist) that thinks we aren't contributing anything to global warming. The idea that we aren't contributing anything to global warming is a third perspective.

There are legitimate debates going on but no one wants to discuss it openly.

There are legitimate debates going on openly. For example, how significant are the ice streams in Greenland and Antarctica? How will the discovery of this new ocean current affect the models? The problem is that a certain segment (and I'm not saying you're in this segment) tends to shift the debate towards making fun of Al Gore (oh, I love the endless South Park references), equating uncertainty of magnitude with uncertainty of existence, editing content out of official documents to create/elevate uncertainty, etc. I.e., they're exaggerating the uncertainty. That is not scientific.

Re:Depends on what you mean by "both" sides

[jav1231]

Almost (but not quite) all climate scientists have arrived at the conclusion that man is responsible for the majority of global warming.
I find that statement disappointing and in conflict with much of what I'm hearing and reading. This statement is meant for no other reason than to give weight to the claims, not discuss the issues intelligently.
Even if true, "most scientists" once thought we would see an ice age within 50 years of the 1970's. So it means very little if "most" of anyone believes anything, unless it is political, of course. Then you're talking power and greed, not facts and evidence.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[NoOneInParticular]

Okay wiseguy, let's say I'm a tenured climatologist. I get 83,000 bucks a year. I'm tenured, I cannot be fired. If I start to publish papers about global warming, I get 83,000 bucks a year. If I start to publish papers disproving global warming, I get 83,000 bucks a year + whatever Exxon/Mobile is willing to pay me for that. On which side would you expect rigged result?

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Snocone]

My question, what kind of person tries to obfuscate the facts about global warming by trying to smear the researchers, saying they are only in it for the money? ... So ... are you paid, or a dupe?

Well, I presume you're referring to my other posts in this thread, so let's put it this way.

Were all AGW media-pushed theories to be 100% correct, or underestimated, I would be in a rather privileged position, as I happen to be a Canadian citizen. Were the AGW alarmism pushed by the media to be correct, I would be laughing, because all I would need to do would be to invest my money in Nunavut tundra soon to be the breadbasket of North America as the current American Great Plains dry up; and into the Ellesmere Island Club Arctic properties soon to replace the current Club Med resorts.

However, I just put a shade under a quarter-million of my own money into a development in Ecuador.

So, you tell me. Does that make me paid, a dupe, or ... someone who evaluates both the solar theorists' and the AGW alarmists' actual science, and puts his own money where the sense is?

Doesn't matter to me what you think, since the money's sunk now, but go ahead, tell us what you think, and in 10 years we'll come back and figuure which of us is the numbskull.

Re:This man's career

[smittyoneeach]

The appeals to fear are not intellectual.
You can't build a house on the binary image of the magic algorithms: it ain't property.
The beautiful double negative "intellectual property" makes a nice fig leaf for all this.
The fact that tax dollars were spent to produce it all (I presume) is just bonus.
DO NOT LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

Re:LOL

[Ambitwistor]

OK..it was in the 70's they were touting off about Global Cooling. You got me.

If you bothered to read the link, you would find that the scientific community was not claiming any such thing.

Same mentality people, chicken little

In other words, not the same people.

Yeah..we know EVERYTHING there is to know about physics don't we?

As far as climate is concerned, we know the underlying laws of physics: it's Newtonian dynamics.

Lets not EVEN get started on climate dynamics.

Please, let's.

Climate dynamics and meteorology in general are best guesses.

"Best guesses" with predictive skill. The fact that they are not certain does not mean that their predictions are useless. And you're still confused between weather and climate.

My local weather guy isn't even close to being right 50% of the time.

Get a better one. My weather guy gets the highs and lows quite well and most of the major precipitation events. Only really falls down on the quicky rain events, the ones where you get 15 minutes or rain and then it disappears. Now push that out to a week ahead and the precipitation isn't so good, although the temperatures are still decent.

Contrary to belief we know VERY little about the world around us....

We know a great deal about the weather and climate. It's not enough to make perfect predictions, but it is enough to make useful predictions.

thus the reason that most of what we believe are THEORIES and not FACT.

Not that canard again. "Theory" doesn't mean "we have no idea what's going on and can't make any useful predictions".

Temperatures have been going up since the 1800's after coming out of a cooling period...they have been going up since then. That was BEFORE the Industrial Revolution.

The end of the Little Ice Age was nothing like the current warming.

Temperatures are on average COOLER today than they were in the Middle Ages.

That's also false; there is no record of the Medieval Warm Period being warmer than today, not even in the northern hemisphere, let alone globally.

For every piece of "scientific" information you throw on Global Warming I could most likely counter it with another piece of scientific evidence.

Go ahead. You can start with the claims you just made.

Re:I call BS.

[shadowbearer]

Now IANAC, but I would think that any good station list would include stations that had been urbanized according to the percentage of area of urban sprawl vs. the percentage of "rural" land. (there is no clear line between those two, btw). After all, there is a percentage of the earth's land surface that is dominated by cities and towns. It's small, but it's there. So it's hardly surprising to find some stations in that category - and I'm pretty sure they've corrected as well as they can for any inaccuracies in those station's data, as well. Those stations would understandably get scrutinized pretty closely. I know I would, and IANAC ;)

  Now if there's a disproportionate number of urban/suburban stations vs. rural stations, that'd support your argument. I haven't seen anybody claiming that.

  Just a side thought, Wickenburg looks "suburban" to me I've lived in both big metros and tiny towns - which would mean it'd fall under the grey area I mentioned above. Hardly urban, tho. Lots of empty scrubland in and around town. Reminds me a bit of where I live right now, actually :)

  just my two coppers clinkin' ;)

SB

I was with you until ...

[dbIII]

Economists, for example, regularly shake their heads at the economic analysis applied by political scientists.

Meanwhile astrologers shake their heads at the predictions of economists.

Re:I was with you until ...

[dbrutus]

Economists may have spotty prediction track records, true, but they do tend to know what doesn't work and when they see political analysis that depends on economic theory that was discredit decades ago, they're right to scoff, and we should to.

Re:I hate to add more facts to the debate but...

[dbIII]

When glaciers run down the hill a bit faster and go out to sea what happens? I think you are looking at this entirely the wrong way since others see more icebergs and ice shelves moving faster as an indication of warmth. The increase in area as volume reduces is not really what I would call "Antarctic ice growing".

Re:I call BS.

[Ambitwistor]

Now IANAC, but I would think that any good station list would include stations that had been urbanized according to the percentage of area of urban sprawl vs. the percentage of "rural" land. Actually, they count "urbanized" by how much light at night is observed in the region by satellites.

Re:I hate to add more facts to the debate but...

[gwait]

* Greenland use to be green.

Not really, it's been almost a complete ice flow since the last ice age, except for two narrow and deep fjords that the Norse settled in for several generations before finally dying off (and/or giving up) from many different causes.

See pages 211, 212 from "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, a facinating read about the historic collapse of civilizations, and of the indicators for our current ones.

My favourite quote from the book is "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" - "did he shout - Jobs not Trees!"?

Release the data and algorithms, Hansen

[TallDave]

It's hard to take Hansen seriously when he says global warming is a huge crisis, but doesn't even take the issue seriously enough to release the raw data and algorithms used to calculate the GISS data. Credible doubts have been raised; things like air conditioner exhaust, light bulbs, and other sources of bias have been identified, and now we find there are errors in the algorithms too. Maybe the rest of the data is perfect, but sunlight is the best disinfectant.

If Hansen really cares about climate change, then he should release all the relevent GISS information for public scrutiny. Unless he believes a threat to his ego or funding is a bigger crisis than global warming, it's hard to understand why he would not do so.

It's also difficult to escape the fact his response, attacking the motives of critics, is not exactly the model of a dispassionate scientist. When did science become the arena of highly paid polemicists? Surely we can do better, on such an important issue.

Re:I call BS.

[shadowbearer]

  Interesting. Visible or infrared?

SB

Why all of a sudden has the SnowCone melted?

[turkeyfish]

This was just getting interesting, but it seems that the Snocone has just melted. It would appear that its a lot easier to generate lots of critical comments without actually providing any data from peer-reviewed journals that would substantiate the significance of any of these "critical comments".

I am left wondering why

1) if rapid global warming were not occurring are we NOW seeing so many tropical and subtropical organisms moving their distributions poleward, while we are not seeing hardly any [any?] high latitude species moving their distributions toward the equator?

2) if rapid gobal warming is not occuring why are virtually ALL [all?] the world's glaciers retreating simultaneously?

3) why are the summers starting to feel a lot hotter?

No, I don't understand that

[benhocking]

Do you understand that the left wing MSM have a vested interest in reporting and talking up all conclusions that indicate man made global warming is occuring?

No, I don't understand that. Please tell me which left wing MSM you're referring to (I wouldn't exactly call Air America "main-stream"), and then tell me what their vested interest is. (I'm guessing you're not from the US, based on your spelling of "defence", so perhaps you're referring to media over there.)

And that Hansen has indeed strayed into the MSM with his almost hysterical defence of his position.

Nope, don't understand that either. Perhaps it's my lack of understanding, but I suspect it's really because it hasn't happened.

Also do you understand that your posting is incredibly condescending.

Now, that I do understand. When someone starts using "Church of Global Warming" phrases and then makes ridiculous assertions, I do sometimes get condescending. I'll admit that being condescending is rarely a good strategy, but do you honestly think that he didn't deserve that after all of his "Church" references?

Clean up regardless!

[mechapants]

I keep reading all these articles about warming caused by this or not... Does it really matter? Making the air better quality and keeping the earth a much cleaner place overall will be a plus for everything, not just humans. It costs a lot of money, sure but I'm sure health care costs will drop from airway problems and the benifits for the environment will also be big. So humans MAY or "may not" be causing it, that doesn't matter. Keeping the earth clean should be the first thing to do.

This SHOULD be about SCIENCE, but...

[tiqui]

since anything on this scale inevitably gores SOMEBODY's oxe, and the supporters of the theory want to use the mighty and blunt instrument of government to force people to change their lives, we are in the realm of politics.

I am DEEPLY suspicious about man-made global warming for a number of reasons. Here are just some:

1. The goal posts are always moving. We can NEVER get a fixed set of predictions to hit or miss to prove or disprove the warming and/or human cause. The most-recent version of this is that we are NOW told there will not be any real heating until 2009 (AFTER the next US presidential election...so democrats can wave headlines around with doomsday predictions and not worry about being proven wrong before the election. hmmmmmmm)

2. "Warmest year ever", "Coldest year ever", "Warmest year on record", etc. Since modern weather measuring equipment has only existed for a brief flicker of time in the geologic scale, these phrases are just plain silly. Even the thermometers used a few hundred years ago may not have been calibrated to todays standards, and while indirect things like sediments and tree rings may give clues they are even less-well calibrated.

3. If you cannot explain the past, your predictions for the future are just well-funded guesses. Until supporters can tell us what EXACTLY caused all previous warming and cooling patterns, they cannot honestly claim to understand the mechanisms well enough to properly predict the future. This would be funny if it were not so dangerous. Supporters of the global warming claims want to force entire societies to change in dramatic ways. They want political changes and societal changes that will have sweeping effects. Many average citizens will lose jobs, and homes, and marriages. Industries will be halted/moved and allocation of resources will be shifted. Indeed, changes in politicians will ripple into changes in policies in areas completely unrelated to the climate. The risks to the lives of individuals are on BOTH sides of the action/inaction debates but the proponents of action never consider that, actually I suspect they desire that.

4. We are told the US is the biggest contributor (the BIG SINNER) but as soon as problems are found with the US data, we are told that the US numbers have little to do with the global data and that anybody who links the two is an idiot. hmmmmmmm

5. We are told "The debate is over" over and over again and anybody who says "No it's not!" is trashed with the loaded label "denier". Debates end when they end, not when partisans on one side scream that the debate is over and start hurtling epithets at the other side. In my experience, when epithets are used, the people using them are doing so as a poor substitute for hard data and good logic. Science needs no such insults, and science needs no such consensus. When I see either insults OR consensus in science, I know I am probably not seeing science.

6. Supporters of the idea of man-made global warming continually and intentionally mis-characterize their opponents as deniers of global warming. This is dishonest and simplistic. SOME deny that any global warming is taking place. SOME of these people simply disagree with the very concept that a "global temperature" is valid or of any non-political value. MOST opponents, however, agree the globe is warming, but do not agree that man is causing it. SOME opponents simply question the idea that the climate of 1900, as a random example, was perfect and that it is valid to panic whenever the climate is warmer or cooler than it was on whatever date was selected. If supporters of this are so correct and so supported by science, then they need not mis-characterize their opponents' positions.

7. The supporters of man-made global warming are all in it for the money and prestige. They inevitably get huge piles of money and resources from governments, and the money is dedicated to research into global warming. Their peers hand-out awards and back-pats over this stuff. Just how many of the researc

Re:This SHOULD be about SCIENCE, but...

[Ambitwistor]

The goal posts are always moving. We can NEVER get a fixed set of predictions to hit or miss to prove or disprove the warming and/or human cause.

You're complaining because predictions improve? Sheesh. There's no pleasing you.

The central predictions for temperature change have remained largely the same, within the error bars, for 10-20 years. The predictions Hansen made back in 1988 have been borne out, if you pick the most accurate emissions scenario. A lot of the long term uncertainty is not in the climatology at all, but in forecasts of world economic growth. The climate predictions ARE testable and have been tested. And the evidence in favor of anthropogenic global warming has only increased.

The most-recent version of this is that we are NOW told there will not be any real heating until 2009 (AFTER the next US presidential election...so democrats can wave headlines around with doomsday predictions and not worry about being proven wrong before the election. hmmmmmmm)

That's not a different "version"; until now, nobody has tried to do a short term forecast with global climate models at all! Before now, the answer for the next two or three years would be "hard to say; we can only predict on decadal scales".

And spare me the conspiracy theories. This new prediction has nothing to do with long term climate policy, and wasn't even made by U.S. researchers.

2. "Warmest year ever", "Coldest year ever", "Warmest year on record", etc. Since modern weather measuring equipment has only existed for a brief flicker of time in the geologic scale, these phrases are just plain silly.

Scientists don't speak of "warmest" or "coldest" year ever. "Warmest year on record" is, however, meaningful. Geologic scale is not terribly relevant; whether it was hotter 100 million years ago has little to do with the current warming.

Even the thermometers used a few hundred years ago may not have been calibrated to todays standards,

That's right, and thermometers a few hundred years ago are not even used; the direct instrumental record only goes back about 150 years.

and while indirect things like sediments and tree rings may give clues they are even less-well calibrated.

They're less informative, but they're not useless, either. And even if we knew nothing at all about the pre-instrumental climate, that still wouldn't change the evidence that the modern warming is due to anthropogenic causes. Today is when we can most accurately measure the natural and human inputs into the climate system, after all.

If you cannot explain the past, your predictions for the future are just well-funded guesses. Until supporters can tell us what EXACTLY caused all previous warming and cooling patterns, they cannot honestly claim to understand the mechanisms well enough to properly predict the future.

That is an absurd requirement. As noted above, you don't have to have a perfect understanding of the past in order to have a good idea of what is happening now. No one will EVER tell you EXACTLY what happened at all times in the past, nor do they need to. The mechanisms operating on geologic time scales are only tangentially relevant to the present climate on centennial scales. Understanding paleoclimate events helps, but it's not a necessary requirement.

Supporters of the global warming claims want to force entire societies to change in dramatic ways. They want political changes and societal changes that will have sweeping effects. Many average citizens will lose jobs, and homes, and marriages. Industries will be halted/moved and allocation of resources will be shifted.

You are grossly exaggerating the impacts/costs of mitigation (and ignoring the impacts/costs of climate change).

We are told the US is the biggest contributor (the BIG SINNER) but as soon as problems are found with the US data, we are told that the US numbers have lit

Re:Yes, credibility is the issue

[Keebler71]

I don't know what bothers me more... that your "proof" that Media Matters doesn't receive funding from Soros is a link to a press statement from Media Matters denying it.... or that enough moderators missed this fact or didn't care and got you to +5 informative.

Re:I call BS.

[Ambitwistor]

Visible. You don't necessarily want to go by infrared, because there can be warm rural spots (depends on where they are, of course).

Re:Global Warming

[Ambitwistor]

So... what happened to the Coming Ice Age? Did we have that already? I forget. Nobody was predicting a coming ice age (meaning something within our lifetimes, or even our grandchildren's). See here.

Oh, then there is/was Acid Rain. Whatever happened to that? We reduced air pollution and largely solved the problem. Same with the ozone hole. (Well, that's not solved yet, but on its way to getting better.) Oh, wait, that wasn't the answer you were expecting, was it? I was supposed to agree that environmental problems never amount to anything and that no action is ever needed, right?

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Peter La Casse]

What do people do who don't have kids? They consume...

Everyone consumes; not having kids allows someone to produce more.

Re:LOL

[Ambitwistor]

Soon and Baliunus? Their work was severely flawed; see here. They managed to get it published in Energy and Environment, which is pretty bottom of the barrel; when they got a similar version through peer review in the more respectable Climate Research, half the editorial board resigned in disgrace (here). It should never have passed peer review.

Re:The Other Side of the Argument

[Ambitwistor]

Inconvenient facts such as the planet Mars also heating up or previous warming period are simply ignored with the argument that "this time it is happening faster". Martian warming is demonstrably unrelated to Earth warming; it is not correlated well in rate, magnitude, or timing with either changes in solar activity or Earth's own climate.

There have been previous warming periods, but the natural causes of warming at those times are not present now, and, as you note, the current warming is inexplicably (without anthropogenic causes) faster than any warming over similar periods of time.

Re:.001 degree?

[IBBoard]

My new point is that you didn't read my follow up where I found I'd been lied to ;)

Half of the original point is that Rankine's aren't 'normal' scientific units as they're not SI units.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[IBBoard]

That assumes that people want terms that match the facts, though, rather than terms that sound good and get the interest of the papers ;)

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

If you produce more, someone has to consume it, or you get fired.

Regardless, if you aren't busy raising kids, you're going to do something with all that extra time and money, aren't you?

Don't be a twat just because I caught you

[SIIHP]

"I was not at all advocating that"

Yes you were and I obviously read your fucking comments you stupid twit, how else did I go through and respond to each individual point.

"Now, go take your meds and learn a little reading comprehension."

Well, if you were planning on coming across as a rational well adjusted person, then this really cemented it.

You said something colossally moronic and I called you on it. Don't be a cunt just because I caught you.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"Well thanks for making my point."

If your point was that you were completely wrong, then yes.

You said they get paid LOW SALARIES" and I showed you were wrong.

Why be a dick about it when you get proven wrong?

"My question, what kind of person tries to obfuscate the facts about global warming by trying to smear the researchers, saying they are only in it for the money?"

No one did that, what kind of liar relies on straw men like you just did when they can't refute my point?

"So ... are you paid, or a dupe?"

So, is your point so weak that you result to slandering people when it gets crushed like I just did to it?

W/E

[SIIHP]

"Okay wiseguy..."

I stopped reading right there.

If you'd like to try without being a cunt right off the bat, then let's. Otherwise fuck off.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

It never ceases to amaze me how hard you people try to rationalize your viewpoints, no matter how ridiculous and hypocritical you look in the process.

Like you did right there.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[dajak]

Giving everyone some retirement plan may be a better idea. If I was a third world subsistence farmer and had no way to accumulate wealth for my old age I would also want to have many children, hoping at least one or two survive into adulthood and are successful enough to provide for me.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

It never ceases to amaze me how delusional and out of contact with the actual practice of science people are. The reality of scientific funding has nothing to do with the fantasy wherein scientists get together in smoke-filled back rooms and privately decide what conclusions they're going to reach before they apply for grants. As I noted, funding agencies don't ask what conclusion you intend to support AT ALL, and in fact will not fund a proposal that claims to know what conclusions it will arrive at before performing the study! Grant proposals do not state what the study will conclude.

There is nothing hypocritical about what I said. Unlike, say, the NSF, oil companies do fund studies which reach pre-determined conclusions. And I stated that there are also perfectly legitimate contrarian papers, which are funded by perfectly legitimate sources (like the NSF) — further disproving the ridiculous idea that you can only get funding for "politically acceptable" conclusions.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"The reality of scientific funding has nothing to do with the fantasy wherein scientists get together in smoke-filled back rooms and privately decide what conclusions they're going to reach before they apply for grants."

And no one anywhere claimed as much. The fact that you have to resort to this kind of hyperbole speaks to the strength of your point.

"There is nothing hypocritical about what I said."

The time honored refrain of the hypocrite. "Nuh-uhhhh...Nu-uhhh..."

"Unlike, say, the NSF, oil companies do fund studies which reach pre-determined conclusions"

And some don't. Pretending that studies that diagree with your viewpoint are poisoned because of it is moronic. Judge each study on its individual merits, unless you're not interested in science but ideology.

People bend their ethics in the presence of money. Your pet scientists do it too. That was my only point, and frankly, it's dead nuts irrefutable.

Stop wasting your time trying.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

You said they get paid LOW SALARIES" and I showed you were wrong. No, he said RELATIVELY low salaries, and said that this was respect to corporate research scientists, not your silly strawman of policemen. The point, you will recall, is that climate scientists aren't in it for the money: they could easily be making more money outside of academia, or for that matter outside of climate science.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"No, he said RELATIVELY low salaries"

And I related them to other jobs and they were STILL HIGH.

"and said that this was respect to corporate research scientists"

After I showed him he was wrong, because his original point was garbage.

And now you're wrong too.

"The point, you will recall, is that climate scientists aren't in it for the money: "

No, the point I was addressing was that the salaries were low, which is a lie.

Neither you nor he have done anything to refute that, because you can't, because they're not.

This make three times you've chimed in and been completely wrong.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

And no one anywhere claimed as much. The fact that you have to resort to this kind of hyperbole speaks to the strength of your point. The original poster claimed that "You're not going to research anything that might conceivably question your funding source". I pointed out that scientists do not actually get together and agree on what conclusions they're going to tell their funding sources, so this criticism is off the mark. It is merely a conspiracy theory with no basis in the realities of scientific funding.

The time honored refrain of the hypocrite. "Nuh-uhhhh...Nu-uhhh..." Your continued inability to actually point out any hypocrisy on my part speaks for itself; your argument is nothing but "Yuh-huh... yuh-huh..."

Pretending that studies that diagree with your viewpoint are poisoned because of it is moronic. On the contrary, the moronic oil-funded studies which have been produced are the best evidence that oil-funded studies tend to produce wrong conclusions.

People bend their ethics in the presence of money. And for the second time you ignore the basic fact that funding sources do not actually give funding for which CONCLUSION is going to be reached, and in fact would REJECT any funding request for a study which claims it intends to either support or contradict AGW.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[snarfer]

Yes, $83,000 is a low salary for someone with a doctorate. Researchers get low salaries.

Corporate scientists get much, much better pay.

The global warming deniers are being paid in the hundreds of thousands. One anti-global-warming article pays $10,000

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"People bend their ethics in the presence of money. Your pet scientists do it too. That was my only point, and frankly, it's dead nuts irrefutable.

Stop wasting your time trying."

So you're trying to claim scientists don't get corrupted by money? Right, STFU with that, no one's buying.

And then, please quote where I called YOU a hypocrite. If you can't, then retract your claim that I did so.

As to your points, I don't give a fuck about them. They don't matter to my point, and I really don't care to hear your ideas on the subject.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"Yes, $83,000 is a low salary for someone with a doctorate. Researchers get low salaries."

It's more that physicians (MD) or Attorneys (JD) both of whom have a doctorate They get more than psychologists with PsyD's, and Principals with EdD's. The site I linked to says they're not low, RELATIVELY which was the original claim.

Just saying "Researchers get low salaries" without evidence (which I provided and you did not) is pointless.

I gave links and evidence. You gave nothing but a statement which my evidence makes clear is quite wrong.

Care to back your statement up with more than, well, than not a god damn thing like you currently have?

You're wrong.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

So you're trying to claim scientists don't get corrupted by money? Right, STFU with that, no one's buying. Look, you jackass, I'm saying that the NSF and other standard funding sources don't actually offer scientists money to prove AGW (and in fact would withhold funding from anyone who says he's going to), so your point is irrelevant.

And then, please quote where I called YOU a hypocrite. "It never ceases to amaze me how hard you people try to rationalize your viewpoints, no matter how ridiculous and hypocritical you look in the process. Like you did right there."

Ok, you never called me a hypocrite, you merely called my viewpoints hypocritical.

As to your points, I don't give a fuck about them. They don't matter to my point, and I really don't care to hear your ideas on the subject. In other words, your point is trivially disproven but you don't want to admit it and refuse to even consider the possibility that your point is stupid.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[snarfer]

What we are discussing is the accusation that the tens of thousands of scientists who are trying to alert the public to the global warming problem are part of some huge hoax, intended to get money for themselves.

On the other side of the argument is vastly-profitable Exxon, pumping millions and millions of dollars into a propaganda campaign to convince the public that global warming is a hoax and they should keep burning more and more oil.

You are saying that it is the tens of thousands of scientists who are only doing it for them money.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"Ok, you never called me a hypocrite, you merely called my viewpoints hypocritical."

This is the kind of accuracy that is present in your though process. It shows in your posts.

"In other words, your point is trivially disproven but you don't want to admit it and refuse to even consider the possibility that your point is stupid."

No cunt, in other words, I made a very clear point, you did nothing but run off at the mouth and avoid it, and I don't give a fuck what you think because, as you already admitted, you aren't reading what I say, you're reading what you think and making it into what I say.

You didn't refute a single thing I said, you just spouted off and were wrong. Why would I give a fuck what you think when you make false accusations because you're reading comprehension sucks?

I gave links and facts. You gave nothing, but keep saying you've done something to refute me.

It's that kind of reasoning that made you think I called you a hypocrite, and you were wrong about that too.

Get back to me when your reading comprehension improves.

On second thought, don't.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

This is the kind of accuracy that is present in your though process. It shows in your posts. Arguing with you is like arguing with a retarded 5-year-old. You called me a hypocrite. Deal with it.

I made a very clear point Which is provably irrelevant to anything being argued here, but you refuse to admit it. Next.

You didn't refute a single thing I said I didn't "refute" it, I just showed that it didn't support the point that the conclusions of AGW scientist are being biased by funding sources. It other words, it's irrelevant.

as you already admitted, you aren't reading what I say I admitted no such thing. You called me a hypocrite, I read it, you won't admit it.

I asked for LINKS

[SIIHP]

"I gave links and evidence. You gave nothing but a statement which my evidence makes clear is quite wrong.

Care to back your statement up with more than, well, than not a god damn thing like you currently have?"

Support your statements like I did or fuck off.

"What we are discussing is the accusation that the tens of thousands of scientists who are trying to alert the public to the global warming problem are part of some huge hoax, intended to get money for themselves."

No, we're not. I don't give a fuck what you thought YOU were discussing, but that was not what I was discussing, and YOU responded to ME.

Also, that was never the accusation, that's a stupid childish straw man that you concocted because reality is irrefutable. I never claimed that ANYWHERE, so don't argue it with me.

Re:I asked for LINKS

[snarfer]

"What we are discussing is the accusation that the tens of thousands of scientists who are trying to alert the public to the global warming problem are part of some huge hoax, intended to get money for themselves."

No, we're not. I don't give a fuck what you thought YOU were discussing, but that was not what I was discussing, and YOU responded to ME.

Follow it back. This thread is in response to the following statement: "And if you follow the trail of alarmists' funding, it leads back to sources with a vested interest in alarmism. Duh."

You are taking the position in this discussion that global warming is a hoax spread by scientists who are motivated by money, that climate research scientists are paid more than corporate scientists, that DExxon's money is for the good of the public, and that scientists are engaged in a hoax.

No wonder you are getting upset and abusive in response to the direction the discussion must necessarily take, when your arguments are presented to an educated and informed audience.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

First you said

""Ok, you never called me a hypocrite"

Then you said IN YOUR VERY NEXT POST

"You called me a hypocrite"

Which one is the lie liar? How do you say two completely opposite things, then have the balls to call ME names when I have evidence in black and white that you're lying?

"You called me a hypocrite"

Then why did you say I didn't liar?

How fucking messed up are you?

"Which is provably irrelevant"

In other words, you can't refute it, so it's irrelevant. Again, exactly what I expected from a liar like you.

"Arguing with you is like arguing with a retarded 5-year-old."

And arguing with you is like arguing with a liar. No, actually, it IS arguing with a liar.

Go ahead and claim otherwise, while everyone can read the quotes that prove it.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

Which one is the lie liar? You are, as you're poorly attempting to use "retarded 5-year-old logic" to argue that "Your views are hypocritical" isn't equivalent to explicitly saying "You are a hypocrite". But hey, if you want to keep looking like a bozo, keep at it, man. Maybe with enough legalistic hairsplitting you can convince yourself you're not an idiot.

In other words, you can't refute it, so it's irrelevant. In other words, it's got nothing to do with anything being discussed on the thread. You have utterly failed to prove any monetary influence on AGW conclusions.

Re:Explanation.

[dbrutus]

I make a bolt in Michigan. It ends up in a stop sign in a supermarket parking lot in Boise, ID. It uses X units of energy for manufacture and transport and produces Y units of pollution. I make the same bolt in the PRC instead and its manufacture and transport to that stop sign in Boise takes 9X units of energy and produces 4Y units of pollution. How, exactly, does Purchasing Power Parity enter into it at all?

The PRC is now the workshop for the world. We've collectively outsourced a lot of our manufacturing there and it's dirty, inefficient production that often has to be transported long distances. We can reduce PRC pollution much more cheaply than we can reduce 1st world pollution because the PRC production centers often don't even do the cheap stuff that results in a great deal of bang for the buck.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"You are, as you're poorly attempting to use "retarded 5-year-old logic" to argue that "Your views are hypocritical" isn't equivalent to explicitly saying "You are a hypocrite"."

It's not, you're just not smart enough to understand the difference I guess.

And that's funny liar, if that's true, then why did YOU say I didn't call YOU a hypocrite?

Were you lying then or now?

You lost liar, and your desperation right now proves you know it.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

And that's funny liar, if that's true, then why did YOU say I didn't call YOU a hypocrite? Because, you didn't literally say that. You merely said something equivalent to it. You're just not smart enough to understand the difference. Or rather, you do know that you called me a hypocrite, and want to resort to semantic gymnastics to distract from your failed arguments about science funding.

But hey, let's see how long we can keep this going. I want to see how many puerile jeers I can elicit from you in lieu of cogent arguments about biases in AGW research. Maybe you can spend all day avoiding the point.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"Because, you didn't literally say that"

So are you lying now, or were you lying before?

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

As noted above, neither. You called me a hypocrite, just without using those words in that order.

That's five, by my count. Care to go for six?

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"You called me a hypocrite"

And you also said I didn't earlier.

Which one of those statements was a lie?

Need me to quote them again for you liar?

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

"Which one of those statements was a lie?"

As noted above, neither.

Seven.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"As noted above, neither."

Restating your lie doesn't make it any less of a lie.

You lied I caught you.

And now you're trying to avoid admitting it.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

Eight.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"You lied I caught you.

And now you're trying to avoid admitting it."

"Eight."

In other words, you know I'm right and proving you're smart enough to count with your shoes on is all you have left.

Thanks for admitting it.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

Now go ahead and reply with "Nine" because you know I caught you lying.

Can we agree that you replying by saying "Nine" is you admission that you're a lair?

Signal this by replying with "Nine" because I've owned you and you want to admit it.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

Now you're lying about what I've "admitted".

Nine. Keep it up, champ. You know I'm right.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"Nine."

Thanks, I'm glad you know it, and I'm glad we agreed on a way for you to admit it without looking even more stupid.

Nice of you to do exactly what I wanted.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

Now you're preemptively trying to find a "graceful" way out and declare victory because you're too immature to back down. No, keep at it. I agree to or admit nothing. I want to see how long you can keep up your self-flagellation. Just like that "Breakfast Club" scene with Bender and Principal Vernon. Of course, that's well before your time. It's morbid curiosity.

Ten.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[SIIHP]

"Ten."

No actually, there was nothing in there that met your stated qualifications.

OOPS!

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

Nice of you to do exactly what I wanted.

You mean, exactly what I wanted, and stated I was going to do. But real clever of you, forecasting the future like that.

Eleven. And hey, twelve.

Keep it up, you can go the distance.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

Sorry, the opposite has already been established. I'll see how long you can keep it up until you give up in shame, or one of us hits the comment limit. Either way will be tacit acknowledgement of my victory, according to the official SIIHP protocol of "I'm redefining any action or inaction on your part or my part to equal your loss and my victory".

13. Keep dancing.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

14. Keep dancing.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

And yet you just can't stop. Fascinating. 15.

Re:I don't think you're researched this much at al

[Ambitwistor]

You stopped replying by replying. Funny.

16.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Russ Nelson]

The worlld is increasinhhly shifting to free markets. They have proven to be very resilient.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

Have they? Where is this proof?

Re:Explanation.

[Lars T.]

I make a bolt in Michigan. It ends up in a stop sign in a supermarket parking lot in Boise, ID. It uses X units of energy for manufacture and transport and produces Y units of pollution. I make the same bolt in the PRC instead and its manufacture and transport to that stop sign in Boise takes 9X units of energy and produces 4Y units of pollution. How, exactly, does Purchasing Power Parity enter into it at all?
PPP enters once you pretend GDP has anything to do with efficiency, not to mention anything like quality of life. Because you can inflate GDP with inflation. Anyway, even if you keep PPP out, rank 39 isn't that good either.

The PRC is now the workshop for the world. We've collectively outsourced a lot of our manufacturing there and it's dirty, inefficient production that often has to be transported long distances. We can reduce PRC pollution much more cheaply than we can reduce 1st world pollution because the PRC production centers often don't even do the cheap stuff that results in a great deal of bang for the buck. Not if you include the fact that "you" produce 20X CO2 while driving to the place where you make the bolt, and the Chinese only 5X - if he is one of the few with a car, else its about 0.01X.

Re:I call BS.

[shadowbearer]

  Hmm. Visible doesn't tell you much about the IR making it thru the atmosphere to the satellite; wouldn't that be a more useful piece of information than eyeballed infrastructure estimates (I'm assuming that's what they are doing in visible; enlighten me :) )

  SB

Good job wasting your mod points

[SIIHP]

You fucking loser.

I win again.

Re:Good job wasting your mod points

[Ambitwistor]

You just ... can't ... stop. It's like watching a train wreck.

Re:Good job wasting your mod points

[SIIHP]

"It's like watching a train wreck."

So get out from in front of the mirror.

I win.

Again.

Re:I call BS.

[Ambitwistor]

The point is not to try to directly equate "hot" regions with "urban" regions; you can't make that determination on temperature alone. The point is to equate industrialized/settled regions with "urban" regions. For that, you want to look at a proxy for population density, which is street and building lights.

1934 not caused by temperatures!

[ebvwfbw]

Economic, not nature. Seems that so many people forget their history. You're (We're) doomed to repeat it. The reason 1934 was so hot was because of the 1929 start of the depression. Farms failed and as the banks foreclosed on farms, they were abandoned. Nothing to hold the dirt down so it blew around and eroded which caused other problems and peaked in 1934 when people started to take farms back, things started to grow again and slowly we recovered in spite of FDR's best attempts to prolong the depression. Not that I want to sound like I'm bashing him, it was his help that was incredibly incompetent and gave him very bad advice.

Today we are once again getting rid of vast tracts of agricultural land and paving paradise. Big buildings, parking lots, houses, gone are the trees. Trees that put a LOT of moisture in the air. This process of water evaporating forces the temperature down. This is a physical effect and very well established science going back over 2000 years as the Romans used evaporating water to bring temperature down in their amphitheaters, even the Coliseum.

So yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas that plants use to metabolize into O2. Greenhouses happen to be hot to trap sunlight and protect them. It isn't as if you pump CO2 into a greenhouse to make them hot! That is the lie part. CO2 causing global warming is simply Al Gore's attempt to "save us" from a made up disaster. After all, the 1992 GW report from the UN had no mention of humans causing GW. In 1993 it was added with absolutely no explanation why as pointed out by French scientists recently. I know about other significant problems for the "man is the cause for GW crowd" that will likely come out soon, so stay tuned.

I'll probably get moded down, how dare I tell it like it is.

Re:The Other Side of the Argument

[Ambitwistor]

May I draw your attention to the following articles that indeed show there is a correlation between Mars and Earth's tmeperature changes. I am aware of them; they are precisely what I was addressing. The correlation between the two planetary temperatures only exists for a short period of time, and moreover, the temperature changes on both planets don't agree well with solar forcing either in correlation or magnitude.

Religion is a system based on belief not fact: I see you have got Global Warming Religion. Spare me the rhetoric.

Thanks

[SuperKendall]

I'll take a look...

Odd definition of "most"

[benhocking]

This statement is meant for no other reason than to give weight to the claims, not discuss the issues intelligently.

This statement often comes after all attempts to discuss the issues intelligently fall on deaf ears. Is there a particular issue you would like to discuss? I'd recommend starting with an FAQ. There are a lot out there.

Even if true, "most scientists" once thought we would see an ice age within 50 years of the 1970's.

Only if by "most" you mean "very few". There were about as many climate scientists who "thought we would see an ice age within 50 years of the 1970's" as there are climate scientists now who think it is possible (> 5% probability) that humans are not primarily responsible for global warming.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Russ Nelson]

When was the last famine in a free market society?

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

When has their ever been a free market society, other than in anarchies?

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[Russ Nelson]

The US is more or less a free market society. So are most European countries. India is becoming more so, but has tariffs that are way too high. China, too. Of course they started so far back, that any progress is immediately noticable.

Re:Not global warming. Global climate change.

[rhakka]

If that's your standard of a free market, with welfare, medical support, support for infrastructure and public developement, public research and developement, environmental regulation, and more... then fine, yes, "free markets" are very stable. You might want to modify your term though, as the real free marketeers would probably take issue with your characterization.