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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of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents."
... 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.
Are you suggesting Sir that our ancestors might be prone to exaggerating? Telling tall tales? Prone to jest?
Hogwash I say! Pure unadulterated hogwash.
Now if you'll excuse me I've an appointment with Baron Münchhausen.
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.
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.
There has never been a "this is probably the last year you can ski here" statement from climate scientists. It's straw man attacks like these that make denialists into denialists: instead of criticising the models, the predictions and the findings, you come up with your own stuff. Or you choose to criticise moonbat environmentalist hippies instead of the science.
Exactly right.
For example, the oft-troped canard that scientists claimed we were heading for a new ice age back in the 70's.
Most predictions of an impending ice age came from the popular press (eg - Newsweek, NY Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine). As far as peer reviewed scientific papers in the 1970s, very few papers (7 in total) predicted global cooling. Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming due to CO2.
But of course, the denialists (yes, I'll use that term, because that's what they are) still repeat this debunked claim. In that way, they are damn similar to creationists: Repeating old discredited arguments based on misinformation to back their points.
This means YOU, Anonymous Coward above ("It doesn't help that scientists/politicians/news have claimed the onset of catastrophic climate change in both directions several times before in recent history.")
(Source : http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm )
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.
I expect you're prepared for that. Happens every year?
Living in London, I'm not prepared for -15C, but that's OK, it never happens. I'm not really prepared for -5C. When there was 15cm of snow last Monday most people didn't go to work: very little of the public transport was running, mostly because it's not worth spending millions on snow/ice clearing equipment that'll be used once every 20 years. They also ran out of salt/grit, the emergency stockpiles weren't big enough.
The last time I took the "wow! it snowed!" photos was 2007. It seemed a huge fall of snow at the time. Looking back, you can still see the grass, and it only lasted a day.
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
I've seen trees explode(well the aftermath) here in upstate NY. It usually only happens when you get a cold snap BEFORE winter. Before the trees have enough time to pull all the sap out of them selves. Trees with tons of sap still in their trunks, sap made up of mostly water that expands when it gets cold, that suddenly drop to teens F and single digits F will make a tree explode.
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.
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.
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."
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.