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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of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Thames_frost_fairs.
Scientists Reconstruct Millennium's Coldest Winter
I hope this is a lab or computer model, and does not involve spraying particulates into the upper atmosphere.
Apparently, winter of 2009 will be one of the coldest in the last 30 or 40 years. Many people is saying that we should find such extreme temperatures increasingly common as a result of global warming.
Is it impossible that this particular result is being publicised to remind the general public that we have been like this before in history, and that global warming may not be to blame as regards are current weather? At the very least, I am afraid this piece of news may have this as a result.
"On 10 January, Derham logged -12 ÂC, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 ÂC on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days."
For the imperialists among us, -15 C is 5 F. That's really not that cold, and I don't know about the whole "exploding trees" and "combs falling off of chickens" stuff supposedly going on at that temp. I live in Virginia, which is considered the South. We're at a significantly lower latitude than France, and we've had at least 5 days of single digit F temps just this winter alone, and that is typical. Of course our cold temps pale in comparison to Canada, and the northern New England states Maine, New Hampshire, etc.
So maybe those temps are atypical for parts Europe, but trees, and chickens and many types of livestock endure temps that low regularly every single year, which makes me wonder if there was some hyperbole going on back in 1709.
Better known as 318230.
And with roads and rivers blocked by snow and ice, it was impossible to transport food to the cities. Paris waited three months for fresh supplies.
OK, modern power transmission and transport infrastructure is much more sophisticated. But still very vulnerable to extreme weather conditions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storm#Notable_ice_storms
Modern 'just in time' supply chains have less stock everywhere in the pipeline, so are intolerent of the slightest disruption. How would we do if this kind of thing hit again?
I would just have a lot more faith in the models if they were open source.
Yes, because climate scientists would rather act as gatekeepers for patches submitted by kids in their basements than focus on the work they're paid to do.
And how do you know that open source principles aren't in play with the work they're doing? Just because they don't have a project up on SourceForge doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't working with any and all interested parties. It might just be that they don't throw the doors wide open and say "Come on in everybody" for a project that you need a high level of expertise to be involved with.
The problem is not absolute temperature, it the difference between what is expected and the actual temperature was.
The supply of seasoned wood would not have been large enough to last a longer colder than expected winter. Similar for food supplies for both people and livestock.
Barns would not have been build with thermal insulation as a primary concern, far more important would have been rain proofing and making sure enough air gets in to prevent suffication so a very cold snap would have caused serious issues for livestock welfare.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
When oil will start to become as common as it was in 1709 and we'll have more homeless?
-15 C? Give me a break. I live in Minnesota. -15 C is a _good_ night in January. I've seen more than -30F (-34C if I Qalculate! correctly) and over -100F (-73C) wind chill by the old calculations. I had to start the car once at -24F this year -- and that was what it got _up_ to by a sunny holiday 11 am.
Dang. Never seen a tree explode though. That sounds exciting.
I would just have a lot more faith in the models if they were open source.
Yes, because climate scientists would rather act as gatekeepers for patches submitted by kids in their basements than focus on the work they're paid to do.
"Open source" doesn't have to mean "patches welcome :)".
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.
This article, and the research it talks about, is nothing but bad science. Computer models? Tree rings? Proxy indicators? This isn't the internet we're talking about, people, its the climate. IE the temperature. And how do you measure temperature? Well, I use a thermometer, why can't these people?
They've found a way to turn a supercomputer into an extremely powerful thermometer, far better than that wimpy glass tube you have.
We all know that, over time, layers of sediment build up, and so, by digging into the ground you are seeing the earth as it was some time ago - so why don't the scientists just use a thermometer to measure the temperature of the soil at different depths?
Because their superpowerful supercomputing thermometer is far to big to stick in the ground like that.
I wouldn't have thought climate scientists would have much of a problem with climate proxy indicators being referred to as indirect evidence so there's no need for your use of the pejorative term "euphemism" there.
And if you think "circumstantial evidence" includes race, sex, and religion in a court of law, you clearly don't have an understanding of this term either.
Read up a bit on the science involved and you might be surprised to find some of these proxy indicators are little different than using the existence of fossils to infer the presence of dinosaurs in prehistory.
Or perhaps you don't believe in dinosaurs?
This project appears to be good science, whatever your views on climate change - it's recognizing there is a limit to the accuracy of what we currently use as proxy indicators, but by comparing proxy indicator predictions against actual measurements, it hopes to refine our use of these indirect measurements so we can use them to get a clearer idea of the causes of current climate trends.
Well, if the climate models could re-create the last 1000 years
It's not too difficult to construct a model that simulates past events, because you know exactly what behaviour it should have.
I would just have a lot more faith in the models if they were open source. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not sure - some of them may be available),
No offence, I notice the qualifiers, but I suspect you're not well up on how the (academic) scientific world works.
First, you should note the difference between a scientific model and a computer model. Generally the scientific model is the theory and the computer model simply an implementation of it in program form (though some have argued that a computer model *is* a scientific model, but let's not confuse things).
Anyway, the theory is certainly not kept secret -- it's published in papers and discussed and argued over. That's the whole point of science!
The computer model though is generally not kept secret either. There's no need. The scientific theory is the key, and it doesn't harm the scientists to let others play with their model. Many programs used (I would guess) are open source or public domain. Even if not explicitly so, researchers will often supply copies of the code on request. 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.
but apparently it's more important that researchers keep their competitive advantages away from other researchers than to allow people to replicate their results.
I don't know where you've got this idea from, but this doesn't really happen. Researchers may keep ideas quiet until they publish to avoid someone else claiming the glory, but after they publish it's in their interests for as many people to use their work as possible. If people replicate their results, then that's independent verification of their results -- wonderful! If people build on their model to produce a better one, they get cited and gain influence -- great! The difficulty for researchers is actually the opposite problem -- getting people to notice and user their work. I'm sure there are counter examples, but that has been my experience.
The cold winter in 1709 was towards the tail-end of the "Maunder Minimum" in sunspots and solar activity. Given that sunspot numbers are again unusually low, maybe it will happen again.
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.
To amplify on this, your scientific credentials depend to an extent on how often your work is referred to in other publications. They won't be if you keep the details secret. These credentials, the scientific relevance of your work, if you will, can have a pronounced effect on your funding by various grant-giving agencies. No-one's going to give you much money if your work is ignored. On the other hand, if your work is widely quoted/referenced, your chances of winning the grant sweepstakes go way up. You need to prove to other workers in the field that you know what you're doing. True, you don't want to be scooped, but you lose out by keeping your results secret.
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!).
The History Channel had a show about this over the weekend. There was also a year that it snowed in July in the Northeast US. The possible reasons they gave were: -solar min -volcanic activity releasing sulfur high into the atmosphere -fresh water from northern ice disrupting ocean currents
"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
We started out with the view, based on historical anecdote, that there had been a Roman Warming and Medieval Warming, that were roughly as large as today's warming. There had also been coolings, notably in between the warmings, and in the late 17th century when the Thames froze, and during the early 19C during Napoleon's famous retreat.
The Hockey Stick proxy work appeared to refute this. It seemed to show that temperatures had not varied a whole lot until the 1980's, at which they took off in an unprecedented way. However, the HS work was exploded, primarily not because of misuse of PCA (though that happened) but because the key proxies it depended on were the Bristlecone Pines, which no-one seriously thinks are temperature proxies. This has been gone through ad nauseam, and you will often find people arguing that the results have been replicated independently, but if you look at the proxies used, and the people doing the studies, you'll find they are not independent.
So this leaves us with a reinstated RWP and MWP and the cooling periods, in short, greater natural variability than the HS alleged. To the extent that the IPCC does not accept this, it is just wrong.
We now get the interesting counter argument, which has become more popular as the HS has been discredited, which goes: Ah yes, but if the MWP existed, it proves that the climate is more sensitive than we have thought, and so we should be more worried rather than less about CO2. The attempt is now to make the existence of the MWP into an argument for higher climate sensitivity. This replaces the previous argument that its supposed absence was an argument for alarm, because it proved today's uniqueness. It is logically fallacious of course, since by hypothesis, we do not know what caused it, and so we cannot say anything about its magnitude, and so cannot reach any conclusions about sensitivity based on it.
Where do we end up? We end up having to argue that todays warming is unique in having been caused by CO2. But this is now much harder to prove, since the problem is we have had two other comparably sized warming periods not caused by rising CO2. How do we exclude the cause of them from operating now, especially if we have no idea what it was?
We also have another difficulty rarely alluded to. It is not just the warming due to CO2 that is problematic, it is the independent assertion that lowering CO2 would produce cooling. This has never happened before. Cooling has always preceded falls in CO2 in paleo times. In modern times it has always happened independently of CO2 levels. If we were to do it, at vast expense, how do we know it would work?
And finally, there is the issue of feedbacks. That would take us too far afield, but its agreed that what warms the planet is not primarily the CO2. It is the feedbacks that supposedly amplify the initial warming, from CO2 in the modern case, but could be from anything. The existence of these feedbacks, and whether they are positive or negative, is heavily disputed.
Its a mess. The best advice one can give is, the science is not settled. But another five years of cooling measured by satellite, that will settle it, if it happens.
I have "optimized" (by running profilers on it) a very VERY good program for molecular simulation. It can do molecular dynamics, monte carlo, gradual insertion and what not...
It is designed to run on super-computers, and the next best contestant (Towhee), which is open source, is no where near it. For a simulation that takes 10 days on Towhee, we take only 3 days.
And it all is proprietary. It was written and maintained by a group of PhD students over many years, and they used to distribute binaries to those who needed them. No source code!
I got the source code in the name of profiling, but actually because they offered a PhD position to me, and I was supposed to work on it.
In short, competitive computer models remain closed source. The theory might be well published, the implementation remains within those who want to publish some-thing before someone else does.
I'm a physicist. I happen to doubt some of the claims that AGW proponents think represent the behaviour of the climate.
Why do you claim the right to call me a 'denialist'. I'm not calling you a 'believer' am I?
One of the huge problems with this whole climate change discussion is that it's gone way beyond science, and has become religion!
If your site name itself claims that you own the TRUTH about climate, than you obviously are not part of science.
Try http://sciencebits.com/ for instance for some interesting insights.
Of course, it was a sensationalist headline, but that's not quite the same as being disreputable.
Quite so...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life.html
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It is pretty black and white when you make official requests for their data and source code and do not recieve them, so to have to resort to Freedom of Information requests which themselves get ignored until lawyers get involved, and only after many many years might you recieve the data required to validate their work but quite often you are met with the situation that "the data is no longer available." Even large scientific bodies such as the NOAA drag their feet and obfuscate when these requests are made.
This goes right to the peer review process. This stuff is supposed to be validatable, but even years after publication which is supposed to be post-validation, you are fighting to get the data needed to validate. Often a requirement of a Journal (such as Science, or Nature) is also that the data is to be archived and available, but the standard when it comes to Climate researchers who are publishing is that its simply OK that the data is neither archived nor available... that nobody bothered to do any validation at all.
The peer review process is a complete failure in the climate sciences. It appears to truely be a clique of climate scientists blindly signing off on each others work while they rake in the government grants.
"His name was James Damore."
I'd MOD him up, but he cited Mann as verification for Mann... which is presented on a site which actively sensors content contributions that are contrary to what Mann is pushing.
"His name was James Damore."
"IE the temperature"
I use Firefox to get the temperature.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Ask and you shall receive:
1. There were two congressional panels, not one. The one done by the statistics experts that upheld MM's findings was headed by Edward Wegman - its report can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf
A commentary by McKitrick explaining the report can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanOp-Ed.pdf
2. The National Research Council report can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/NRCreport.pdf
From what I understand, you have to read this one carefully - apparently the report and the media spin are in opposition. An op-ed discussing this can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/NAS.op-ed.pdf
Documentation of the dishonest approach used to get the "hockey stick" into the IPCC report can be found here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Additionally, you will also find these links of interest:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
Now, you talk about the "denialists" (which isn't a real word - trust me on this, I write and edit for a living - the word you want is "deniers"...a "denialist" would be somebody who studies or specializes in denial) as though they are either a conspiracy nut or part of a conspiracy themselves. It's not the case with scientists in the field - why would it be the case with commentators inside and outside of it?
For example, I'm a writer, editor, publisher, and grad student. I got into this as an interested party with a critical mind, and the more I looked at the field, the less it made sense. The more I looked at both sides, the more I saw the deniers using critical thinking and attacking the results and methodologies, and people like Mann and Al Gore launching character assassinations in response. One of these "refuted arguments" is the Medieval Warm Period being warmer than today, but the evidence is so overwhelming in favour of it that Mann put that data into a folder with the word "CENSORED" in it for his own analysis. You can't disprove the existence of the Roman Empire in Europe by stating that the Mayans of the time didn't encounter Romans, but Mann attempted to do something similar with his own work.
Are all climatologists fraudsters? I very much doubt it. But Mann did commit what amounts to an academic fraud that changed his field, and in the process undermined a lot of the research in it and relating to it. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and in order to understand its relation to the greenhouse effect, accurate temperature over time measurements are necessary. But Mann skewed his data and created inaccurate temperature over time results - so any analysis based on that "hockey stick" is using inaccurate information, and is in error. This goes outside of the field - a lot of work is being done to determine the role of solar activity in climatology, but if a researcher is using Mann's results, he's not going to be able to make an accurate analysis.
The analysis from the entire field of climatology since Mann's "hockey stick" is now on very shaky ground, and a lot of work has to be redone before the data is trustworthy again. Mann has become a scientific superstar, but the damage that has been done to our understanding of climate is incredibly high.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
I suspect that the current "global warming" programs have been written with the assumption that global warming is real, and that they have built this "fact" into the programs. Since there is no way to review the source code to see if this is true, they protect themselves from discovery of this fact. In any other area of science, peer review is considered important, but in this area anything that supports it is lauded, but anything that negates is either ignored or loudly declaimed.
You MUST believe whatever they tell you, or the inquisition will come after you.
There are many bizarre ideas that you must believe to belong in the global warming cult. Such as, the sun has no effect on the earth, carbon produced by SUV's (which is less than 2% of that produced by natural means) is the major cause of global warming, volcanoes don't produce greenhouse gases, the Earth's temperature has never varied more than 1/10 of a degree over the last million years.
What can you say about a program that assumes that the sun and volcanic eruptions have absolutely no effect on the global temperature?
Until you seperate global warming from religion, you will not get any real science done. Until the real cause is understood, there cannot be a usable correction. Any "fix" without understanding the real problem would be like changing the tires on your car when you see an pool of oil under it. You've done something, spent a lot of money, but fixed nothing.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
He would like to but the references were unfortunately lost in a hard drive melt down.
You just need to trust him on this.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So it's a pissing contest first, and the progression of science comes a distant second?
I haven't dealt with this at all, but I would imagine a polite "Here's the code. I did not document it and I do not have time to provide support or answer questions on it." would suffice(May want to put that in the source). Delete all email requests that you get about the code, and go on with life and research.