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Scientists Reconstruct Millennium's Coldest Winter
Ponca City, We love you writes "In England they called it the Great Frost, while in France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that fell over Europe in 1709 ushering in a year of famine and food riots. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travelers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years with temperatures as much as 7 degrees C below the average for 20th-century Europe. Now as part of the European Union's Millennium Project, Scientists are aiming to reconstruct the past 1000 years of Europe's climate using a combination of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents."
I've seen several comments here saying "It gets colder than that here. Grow a pair, wusses!" I'd like to point out a few things to you idiots.
First, cold is relative. If you're in a place that rarely goes below freezing, then having it suddenly go to -15C is a huge change. If you live somewhere that gets colder than that, well then good for you. But not everyone does. I suppose you'd tell people in Hawaii that they're morons for not keeping snow gear around for that once-in-a-lifetime snowfall that they might get.
And second, we're talking about life 300 years ago. If it suddenly got that cold, you couldn't just turn up the heat, or run down to the corner store and get a thicker hat and blanket. These were different times. There was no electricity. Whatever supplies you had were pretty much what you lived with.
So to say "But it gets colder where I live" really doesn't say anything of value. It just shows how self-centered and narrow-minded you can be.
If the code is not supplied, it's probably because the scientists haven't got around to it yet, or because no one needs it, or because the code involved is trivial.
I'm involved in scientific computer modeling, and I've had requests from other researchers to use my code. Though I love everything open-source and believe in sharing information, so far I've decided not to give my code to anybody. The reason is that when you write code only for your small research group, it's usually not very well documented or easy to use. Therefore I know I would get flooded with support requests and questions about the code, and unfortunately I don't have time for that. I wonder how other researchers have dealt with this problem.
Your faith in the scientific method is very sweet; unfortunately it has been shown (Wegman, McIntyre et al.) that Climate Scientists often don't publish all of their data and code. With a lot of these studies it's almost impossible to provide independent verification and a lot of work involves reverse engineering from their results to find out exactly what they did (`Mannian' PCA for example).
With respect to getting people to notice their work, in Climate Science it consists of a simple press release warning of (take your pick) catastrophic warming, catastrophic flooding, catastrophic cooling, catastrophic extinction, catastrophic weather, dead penguins (Linux fans please note!).
"They get called deniers because that is exactly what they are: in the face of overwhelming evidence, they continue to deny, using logic that is identical to 9/11 wonks, moon hoax nutters and, yes, even Holocaust deniers."
And what about proven scientific fraud?
A couple of years ago, two Canadians named Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (aka MM) decided to try to recreate the famous "Hockey Stick." As I recall, one was an economist, the other a mathematician - their work was just to reproduce the results Mann had published using Mann's own model and technique.
They couldn't do it.
In fact, they found two things:
First, Mann and his team had cherry picked their data. They took only the lowest samples from the Medieval Warm Period, and only the highest samples for the modern period. In the case of the former, quite a lot of data was collected and then withheld, data which placed the Medieval Warm Period as considerably hotter than today. This is the equivalent of a historian trying to erase the Roman Empire from history.
Second, Mann's model itself would generate a "hockey stick" out of any data that was fed into it. MM fed a number of samples that were actually random noise into the model, and every single one came out a hockey stick.
Once MM corrected the graph and collected more representative data, what they found was a Medieval Warm Period quite higher than temperatures today, followed by a dip in temperature, and a rise in temperature in the last few years, but NOT one that was out of the ordinary in terms of size or scale.
The paper in which this was published ( http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/mcintyre.mckitrick.2003.pdf ) raised enough questions that in 2006 it was put before a committee led by a statistics professor named Edward Wegman, which performed an independent review of both Mann and his team's "hockey stick," as well as MM's work on debunking it. Not only did they find and report to Congress that the "hockey stick" could not be reproduced, but also that the entire paleoclimate field had become isolated and often unwilling to share important data, or clarify their methodologies - in some cases claiming that a bad methodology was fine because the answer was correct anyway. MM's work was upheld, and the "hockey stick" was debunked.
Sources so far:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanOp-Ed.pdf
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354
When it comes to the IPCC report, the committee broke its own rules to use Mann's "hockey stick." This is documented here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
This is very far from "logic that is identical to 9/11 wonks, moon hoax nutters and, yes, even Holocaust deniers" - it is, however, a damning observation that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
This is probably a troll, but...
If you can not say with any sort of certainty that it will be 20-22 next week on friday. How am I supposed to take your word for it that it is going to be X degrees warmer/cooler next CENTURY?
I can tell you, right now, today, that the temperature six months from now will be warmer than the temperature today. Why? Because what you're talking about is weather, and it's short-term chaotic. What the climate science community is talking about is climate. They deal with long term trends, where that short-term noise is factored out. The fact you don't understand the difference speaks to your lack of education in science and statistics.
Here is a theory maybe its just warmer because there have been less volcano? Or maybe something in the earths core has started emitting more heat? Or maybe the sun is giving off more solar radiation (on its cycle)? There are tons of these things which can change the weather.
And, believe it or not, climate scientists have looked at them all. Yes, it's true... you aren't actually smarter than the entire world's climate science community. And bad news: none of them can account for the level of climate change that's been observed. In just the last 50 years there's been a staggering increase in global temperatures, and none of those factors that you cited can account for them.
I just am saying that the models are mostly based on data that is being fudged around to fit a particular agenda.
According to whom? Have you looked at the models? Examined the data? And if you're so sure, why haven't you written a peer reviewed article refuting these models you've apparently debunked? I'm sure the scientific community would appreciate it.
Even Einstein did this he had his great 'cosmological constant'. As he was trying to fudge his theory to fit his world view. He called it one of his greatest mistakes.
Ummm, that wasn't a "fudge factor". That was a valid term in the equations he produced. The only "fudge" was to assume the value of that constant was zero. Ironically, in that sense, he got it wrong: Go look at cosmic expansion, specifically the fact that it's accelerating. This just happens to coincide with a positive value for that constant you're happily deriding.