NOAA: Global Warming 'Pause' Never Happened

Taco Cowboy writes: The whole global warming debate is as confusing as ever. Researchers from the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have published a new study in Science saying there was no "pause" in global warming. Dr. Thomas Karl points out that the warming rate over the past 15 years is "virtually identical" to warming over the last century, and updated observations show temperatures did not plateau.

"The idea of a global warming 'hiatus' arose from questions over why the trend of warming temperatures appeared to be stalling recently compared to the later part of the 20th century. ... The new analysis corrects for ocean observations made using different methods as well as including new data on surface temperatures."

"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global average temperatures have increased by around 0.05C per decade in the period between 1998 and 2012. This compares with an average of 0.12 per decade between 1951 and 2012. The new analysis suggests a figure of 0.116 per decade for 2000-2014, compared with 0.113 for 1950-1999."

Comments

We'll talk when

[ihtoit]

Orkney exports a good wine.

Re:We'll talk when

[beelsebob]

You mean when the average temperature at orkney has risen by 15C?

That seems like a pretty steep requirement given that we'd expect the major global issues to have happened already with a rise of only 2 or 3C.

Re:We'll talk when

[Applehu Akbar]

Meanwhile, how are those sunspot numbers coming along?

Re:We'll talk when

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

There are multiple wineries in Alaska (and they all seem to be new).

You can make bad wine anywhere.

But dude, there was a snowball

[Anonymous Coward]

A member of Congress throwing a snowball is so much better an argument than any science.

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[Shortguy881]

Did you read the article? They arbitrarily increased all buoy temperature data. If you alter a huge part of your data set to a warmer temperature, of course it shows a larger global increase in baseline temperature.

I say arbitrarily, because there is no provided scientific reason for altering the data.

Furthermore, the error for their data increases over time. This is suggesting data collected in 50's is more accurate than that collected in 2000's. The only reason this would show up statistically is poorly collected data.

Lastly, they adjusted the buoy temperatures by 0.12 degrees which is within the margin of error of temperature change.

They are biasing the data. This isn't science, it's statistical manipulation.

I'm not saying I don't believe people impact global weather, but its hard to determine how when we bias our science with a political agenda.

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[buchner.johannes]

TFA says they calibrated the buoys data with the ship-based data. The offset is not chosen by hand as you claim, but fitted to make the two types of measurements, which should be measuring the same thing, consistent with each other. That is justifiable to remove systematic errors. Another study by IPCC found the same offset value.

The paper says:

Changes of particular importance include: (i) an increasing amount of ocean data from buoys, which are slightly different than data from ships; (ii) an increasing amount of ship data from engine intake thermometers, which are slightly different than data from bucket sea-water temperatures; and (iii) a large increase in land-station data that enables better analysis of key regions that may be warming faster or slower than the global average. We address all three of these, none of which were included in our previous analysis used in the IPCC report

The details on the calibration are:

First, several studies have examined the differences between buoy- and ship-based data, noting that the ship data are systematically warmer than the buoy data (15–17). This is particularly important, as much of the sea surface is now sampled by both observing systems, and surface-drifting and moored buoys have increased the overall global coverage by up to 15% (see supplemental material for details). These changes have resulted in a time-dependent bias in the global SST record, and various corrections have been developed to account for the bias (18). Recently, a new correction (13) was developed and applied in the Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature dataset version 4, which we use in our analysis. In essence, the bias correction involved calculating the average difference between collocated buoy and ship SSTs. The average difference globally was 0.12C, a correction which is applied to the buoy SSTs at every grid cell in ERSST version 4.

Second, there was a large change in ship observations (i.e., from buckets to engine intake thermometers) that peaked immediately prior to World War II. The previous version of ERSST assumed that no ship corrections were necessary after this time, but recently improved metadata (18) reveal that some ships continued to take bucket observations even up to the present day. Therefore, one of the improvements to ERSST version 4 is extending the ship-bias correction to the present, based on information derived from comparisons with night marine air temperatures. Of the 11 improvements in ERSST version 4 (13), the continuation of the ship correction had the largest impact on trends for the 2000-2014 time period, accounting for 0.030C of the 0.064C trend difference with version 3b. (The buoy offset correction contributed 0.014C dec1 to the difference, and the additional weight given to the buoys because of their greater accuracy contributed 0.012C dec1. See supplementary materials for details.)

Third, there have also been advancements in the calculation of land surface air temperatures (LSTs). The most important is the release of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) databank (14, 19), which forms the basis of the LST component of our new analysis. The ISTI databank integrates the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN)–Daily dataset (20) with over 40 other historical data sources, more than doubling the number of stations available. The resulting integration improves spatial coverage over many areas, including the Arctic, where temperatures have increased rapidly in recent decades (1). We applied the same methods used in our old analysis for quality control, time-dependent bias corrections, and other data processing steps (21) to the ISTI databank to address artificial shifts in the data caused by changes in station location, temperature instrumentation, observing practice, urbanization, siting conditions, etc. These corrections are essentially the same as those used in the GHCN–Monthly version 3 dataset (22, 23), which is updated oper

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[krygny]

Too late. They used the word "science" before you did.

Whomever uses the word "science" first wins.

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[dywolf]

A little understanding goes a long way to dispelling and preventing the spread of myths and misinformation: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

Even more, playing devil’s advocate, the scientists tried to force their data to show them a hiatus; they redid the calculations starting in 1998, as so many deniers have done. The result? The warming from 1998 – 2014 is 0.106 C per decade. It’s still there.

The corrections they applied have to do with the way sea surface temperatures were taken; the method has changed over time, and that introduces biases into the data. The good thing though is that new methods, new understanding of the nature of data measurement, allow scientists to go back and re-examine older data and apply corrections to it.

Different measurement methods have their own inherent biases. They went back through the data AND ITS SOURCES and found that some of the data believed to be from buoys was from engine intakes, and some from intakes was from buoys, and some was from the really old fashioned method of "haul up a bucket of water and measure it".

All corrections are about canceling out those inherent biases so that everything starts from the same baseline.

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[riverat1]

Did you read the article? They arbitrarily increased all buoy temperature data. If you alter a huge part of your data set to a warmer temperature, of course it shows a larger global increase in baseline temperature.

I say arbitrarily, because there is no provided scientific reason for altering the data.

When they compared temperatures measured at ships engine cooling water intakes to temperatures measured by buoys when they were near each other they found that the temperatures measured in ships engine intake were 0.12 C higher than that measured by buoys. In order to combine measurements from two different sources that show a systematic difference you have to adjust one or the other. Since in this case they care more about the trend in temperatures than they do about the absolute temperature it's arbitrary whether you adjust one up or the other down. The trend is the same in either case.

When you look at the effects of all of the adjustments made, not just in this study but all of them in all of the temperature records going back to the 1800s, the net effect is to lower the warming trend from what the raw data shows.

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[onemorechip]

"Did you read the article? They arbitrarily increased all buoy temperature data."

I'm trying to figure out if you have a reading comprehension problem (since you apparently did read at least a portion of the article), or simply don't know what "arbitrary" means.

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[Chalnoth]

So, you're asking whether or not the scientists did their jobs? Yes. They did. They used the best available information to make the temperature records as accurate as possible.

But ultimately issues like this don't make a significant difference to the overall conclusion that the Earth is warming. They just change a few trailing decimal places on how much it's warming. So if your real question is, "Can climate scientists making an error here call into question that the Earth is warming?" then the answer is a flat no.

Re:But dude, there was a snowball

[riverat1]

pastafazou: If it doesn't matter if you adjust one up or the other down, why did they choose to adjust the more accurate data up instead of the suspect data down?

Here's an answer from one of the authors:

The reason for adjusting buoy (+0.12C) rather than adjusting ship (-0.12C) is that there is no buoy observation at all before the 1970s. Therefore, it would be questionable how ship can be adjusted relative to buoy before the 1970s, if we did so. However, assuming that the adjustment to ship is -0.12C before the 1970s, our tests show that the long term temperature trends remain the same. This has been discussed in Huang et al. 2015 (J. Climate 28, 911-930, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1.)

I dispute a 15 year pause. Statistically the warming trend since 1998 is the same as the trend from before that. Here's a blog post by a statistician that examines the question of a slow down in warming from a number of angles and is unable to find any statistically significant slow down in the warming trend.

so what you're saying is

[Anonymous Coward]

we will take out what we don't like and put it what fits our agenda.

Re:so what you're saying is

[thsths]

Sure. And we could go on emitting CO2 like it is nobodies business, and maybe wreck this earth. That would be evidence, but not proof, that climate change is man made. For proof you would want to wreck at least 3 earth, and have another 3 control earth that are just fine without humans.

Re:so what you're saying is

[plopez]

No, Scientists are not Politicians. As new data and peer review move forward things are revised. Otherwise out model of the solar system would still have Earth in the center of it.

Re:so what you're saying is

[Dr. Tom]

You've seen German porn, haven't you?

Re:so what you're saying is

[Crashmarik]

No, Scientists are not Politicians. As new data and peer review move forward things are revised. Otherwise out model of the solar system would still have Earth in the center of it.

Oh really how do you feel about that report from the EPA on fracking ? Seems a whole lot of environmentalists only like science when it agrees with their prejudices.

Re: so what you're saying is

[Anonymous Coward]

And it seems a whole lot of anti-environmentalists (or whatever term you care to use) start to like science when it agrees with their prejudices.

That sword cuts both ways.

Re: so what you're saying is

[silentcoder]

Humans emitting CO2 is not a greenhouse problem. Human breathing is carbon neutral - you can't breath out more CO2 than the carbon you've eaten (less actually since you grow cells out of some of it - that ballances out when you die and decompose).
So every bit of CO2 you breath out, is ballanced by having had that same amount taken OUT by the plants you ate first.

The CO2 problem is carbon that was fossilized millions of years ago being burned today - with nothing having taken the equivalent amount out first.

Re:so what you're saying is

[holmstar]

Instruments on ocean buoys for some reason are reading a lower temperature than research ships. Many buoys were deployed during the time period of the "pause", which pushed down the average temperature reading as compared to past measurements. They've now taken this disparity into account and the "pause" disappears. They were looking for an explanation for the "pause" and found it to be an error in the way the data was collected, so they corrected for the error.

Re: so what you're saying is

[moehoward]

Those stupid dinosaurs forgot to exhale THEIR CO2. Here, let me help them with that *** starts SUV ***.

Re: so what you're saying is

[tmosley]

Science is a method, not a result, nor a being. "Science" doesn't say anything. With highly politicised topics like this, it is not the data that tells the tale, but rather those flawed humans who may or may not appropriately report the data that tells the tale. There has been enough fraud discovered in academia alone, without systemic bias toward a given result, that to fail to question these results is a major failing on the part of anyone who takes them at face value.

Re: so what you're saying is

[silentcoder]

Dinosaurs make up about 0.01% of fossil fuels.
Fossil Fuels are primarily the fossils of trees that grew in the carboniferous period - the first trees actually. Normally trees are carbon neutral - but those were not because nothing had yet evolved that could eat or decompose wood. They died and they all fossilized.
And while they were alive, because they were not decomposed... the atmosphere had almost twice as much oxygen as today (that's why you could get dragonfly's a meter long).

Re:so what you're saying is

[john.r.strohm]

The word you are looking for is "calibration".

The phenomenon you are describing is called "system-wide consistent calibration error".

The problem with claiming that you have corrected a system-wide consistent calibration error is that you really need to explain how you managed to screw up the sensor calibration in the first place, on all of the ocean buoys, in such a way that they all had the SAME wrong readings.

Re: so what you're saying is

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Democrat party contains anti vaxxers. Trying to act like somehow the Democrats are better than the Republicans in science matters is pretty silly.

While all political parties have their wingnuts, only the GOP routinely nominates theirs as presidential candidates.

There's a difference between having idiots as members of your party and having idiots as leaders of your party.

Re:so what you're saying is

[funwithBSD]

Normally we just call it "non sequitur" because it does not follow.

Re:so what you're saying is

[BCGlorfindel]

we will take out what we don't like and put it what fits our agenda.

Alternately, if the data suddenly changes about the same time as you changed your data-gathering methodology, there's no real need for a big conspiracy theory to explain what happened. But what do I know, I actually read the fine article.

Exactly, like in Michael Mann's "hockey stick" reconstructions and the data-gathering methodology changes at the year 1900 the sudden change in trend obviously is a result of the methodology change as well, and not something else....

Re: so what you're saying is

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the Democratic party. You can tell when someone is a right wing nut job when you see this mistake. Another mistake is trying to create a false equivalency with anti-vaxxers.

The anti-vaxxers aren't that way because of political ideology, like the global warming deniers who are told by right wing propaganda( paid for by oil companies) that global warming isn't real. The anti-vaxxers are typically people who are easily led into woo of the "natural" sort. These are the kinds of people who often commit the "natural fallacy" the idea that natural is inherently better than man made. These people tend to also be pacifist and empathetic, qualities that rarely show up in conservatives. I will qualify that a bit. Conservatives have a great deal of empathy and forgiveness when it comes to other conservatives, but they have no empathy for minorities, poor people or "librals" .

Yes, anti vaxxers tend to be liberals, but liberals do not tend to be anti vaxxers. This is the reverse with American conservatives. American conservatives are not only anti Global warming, they are anti evolution, anti science, anti education and anti progress.

Conservatives are always on the wrong side of history. Think I'm wrong? Name one major conservative policy in the last 60 years that helped the common man and was not a military action or business giveaway.

Here are some things conservatives have fought tooth and nail against.

Equal rights for blacks
Voting rights for women
child labor laws
pollution laws(you're probably too young to remember lakes and rivers catching on fire because of pollution)
Extending voting hours
Mandatory seat belts in cars(they claimed that making manufacturers put in seat belts would destroy the car industry)

The list goes on and on. Conservatives fight progress. Don't be a douche, fight for progress rather than against it and become a progressive.

Re:so what you're saying is

[dywolf]

you mean the one that's being misreported on by Fox and other "news" sources in bed with the industry?
let me guess what you think the report says....your tone is a large enough indicator on that score.

in fact, i'll bet you only read the initial headlines, since retracted, that stated "EPA says fracking is safe" and variations on that theme. you definitely never bothered to read the whole article, or to find the report itself and peruse it.

so let me help you out.
the report that states, and I quote:

From our assessment, we conclude there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources. These mechanisms include water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of wastewater.

We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells.

They cut a fine line between saying it has "no effect" and it "always has an effect".
they say it can have an effect, and be harmful, but it mostly localized right now, rather systemic (ie, inherent) to the activity.

you are now about twice as informed and intelligent as you were previously.

Re:so what you're saying is

[dywolf]

its not calibration like you are thinking (I am a calibration technician), ie, metrology (NOT meteorology!).

the buoys weren't "wrong".

its not that the buoys were miscalibrated as to the accuracy of the instruments (metrology).

its that the dataset as a whole was "miscalibrated" as relates to the inherent differences in results from different methodologies of measurement. it's a statistical error, not a metrological one.

you can measure the same location in one of 3 typical ways:
-buoys
-engine intake
-bucket (ie, drop a bucket, haul it up, and measure the water inside)

Each has its own inherent (built in) factors that cause the same readings from the same place at the same time, but taken with different methods, to measure slightly differently. The corrections to the dataset seek to remove and cancel out these differences.

and when the measurement is taken they don't JUST write down the reading taken, but the local conditions at the time (sunny? cloudy? windy?), the type of measurement taken and method used, the instrument used, the location of the instrument (on a hill? in the shade?), etc. and all of that additional information is recorded PRECISELY BECAUSE of the desire to eliminate inherent differences so that every measurement conforms to the same baseline.

Re:so what you're saying is

[Sarius64]

If WE cared about CO2 emissions there's easily other energy sources that instill emissions only at the point of source generation/creation vice the continued production of those emissions. Nuclear (preferably molten salt-based), wave generation, and induction strategies are just the tipping points. But the real trouble is government-owned monopolies that claim they are public utilities. They'll never give up their power and money. Now, even those are importing H1B labor to make more profits for their retired government officials. http://www.latimes.com/opinion...

Remember the hole in the ozone layer?

[Overzeetop]

I worked with the group who built and operated the optical sensor which discovered the hole in the ozone. Except that they didn't know they had. Every time the sensor took optical data over the poles there was an "anomaly" in the data and they got uncharacteristically low numbers. For three years, this was written off as an unexplained anomaly when viewing down towards the polar ice. Until they looked up from below and found out that there really was no ozone there. Going back to the old data resulted in a fairly large change to the interpretation of the existing data which had been thrown out as unexplained.

Science learns as it goes.

Re:Remember the hole in the ozone layer?

[Dr. Tom]

...

Science learns as it goes.

So science is NEVER "settled"?!?!?!?

Who knew!

It turns out to be part of the foundation of Science. In Mathematics, you *can* prove things. Done. That's the difference between math and science. You can never prove anything in Science, you can only *disprove* things. "Our earlier hypothesis turned out to be wrong. It turns out that the Earth is not flat. Also domestic sheep have evolved into a new species, they can no longer mate with wild-type sheep. Who knew? Well, some people did. Just not you."

Re:Remember the hole in the ozone layer?

[Luxemburg]

You have a misconception of what science is. None of the facts you mention result from measurements that you did yourself. Rather you heard it from others, and you trust them. If you did measure them yourself, you would have to rely on the correctness of someone else's measurement device. If you made your own measurement devices, you'd rely on someone else's established theory of the phenomena you're measuring. And so on...

In the end, nothing in science is beyond doubt. Science does not deal in truth. What does science deal in? Well, there's a whole scientific discipline to answer this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Re:Remember the hole in the ozone layer?

[Luxemburg]

Actually
1. Mathematics is finite sequences of symbols and rules to translate 1 into the other
2. The rules were inspired by what we see around us and how we experience our world, but they are the result of human observations and human thought
3. Mathematics is famously incomplete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
4. Mathematics has not (yet) been proven to be consistent, and may never: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
5. If we ever find an inconsistency, it will render the whole of mathematics null and void: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Enjoy The Ride

[Dr. Tom]

Yawn. It's too late to do anything about it anyway. You might as well sit back and enjoy it. Unless we start a geoengineering project to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (and who's going to pay for that?) it'll be a thousand years before levels return to normal, *assuming* we cut emissions to zero right now, which will never happen. We could put giant mirrors in space to cool the Earth, but who wants to do that? I like the heat, and since we were due for another ice age, I personally would rather not have New York State under a kilometer of ice.

Re:Enjoy The Ride

[taiwanjohn]

Actually, there is a fairly simple solution that can be done in a couple of decades, and has the bonus side effect of producing megatons of food in some of the more impoverished regions of the world. The trick is to convert semi-arid and arid grasslands into productive grazing lands for herbivores by using Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing which is described in detail (with stunning before/after photos) by Allan Savory in this TED Talk.

In a nutshell: MIRG simulates the "mobbing, mowing, and moving" behavior of large herds of herbivores in nature, where herds "mob together" for protection from predators, and move constantly to find fresh pasture. Following in their wake is a swath of "disturbed" pasture, which has just been aerated by hoof prints and fed with a rich load of fertilizer. This spurs a blaze of regrowth in the grasses, which replaces root mass which had earlier been shed (many plants shed root mass when cropped, to preserve the root-shoot ratio). Thus, every time herbivores graze a piece of land, they sequester a large amount of carbon into the soil, and actually increase the health and the depth of the topsoil.

Obviously, there's quite a bit more to this story, including earthworks to harvest and retain water, permaculture design to optimize ecosystem health and productivity, etc. But hopefully this will be enough to get the gears turning...

Re:Enjoy The Ride

[jwhitener]

I really want to believe that Ted Talk. I've watched it a couple times. But when I did a little background research, I found out that Savory's work was received very well in the mainstream academic circles. There was a lot of criticism that he was cherry picking his success stories from a set of many failures, and that he is basically claiming success based on a lot of correlations, not proving causations.

Maybe I just google'd poorly at the time. Not sure. Do you think he's more mainstream (has good evidence) than my first impressions?

In other words....

[Anonymous Coward]

The new analysis corrects for ocean observations made using different methods as well as including new data on surface temperatures.

"We're still massaging the data to make it look the way that fits our pre-conceived notions. STATISTICS!!"

TGIF

[Guy From V]

Climate change story is a sign the weekend is finally here.

Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[cyber-vandal]

Impress us all by publishing a full rebuttal of global warming in the journal of your choice.

Data tampering

[Anonymous Coward]

The new "analysis" deliberately tampered with data for this very purpose:

New climate data by NOAA scientists doubles the warming trend since the late 1990s by adjusting pre-hiatus temperatures downward and inflating temperatures in more recent years.

Re:Data tampering

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever notice how the deniers always post as Anonymous?

Ever notice how anyone with even the slightest hint of skepticism gets voted down in to oblivion because of the group-think?

Re:Data tampering

[dywolf]

the daily caller is unaware that different measurement methods result in different readings.
but then, this is old news.

every time they talk about this, they (as well as most other unscientifically educated deniers) are reminded that a sensor in the sun an inch away from a sensor in the shade will read a higher temperature, yet neither reading is "wrong".

and therefore corrections are made to align each reading to the same baseline based on the local conditions, sensor type, methodology, and every other factor that may impact a reading, all of which is also recorded along with the measurement precisely for that purpose.

Data doesn't fit political needs! New Model STAT

[Anonymous Coward]

When the data ceases to match the model, why is it that global warming agenda pushers always say that it is the model that is wrong and change the model? Instead of questioning at their underlying assumptions, as the scientific method dictates? Oh, because then they don't get to push their agenda to get more money. CAPTCHA: Idealism

How to fix the pause!

[cirby]

1) Notice that a lot of the ocean temperatures are now collected by buoys
2) Notice that older temperatures were mostly collected by ships, and trended slightly warmer than the buoy measurements
3) Assume that the actual temperature is somewhere in between (instead of using the more-accurate buoy numbers)
4) Adjust the ship temperature numbers down (cooling the past record by a fraction of a degree)
5) Adjust the buoy temperature numbers up (warming the current temps by a fraction of a degree)
6) Voila! The pause disappeared!

(In ocean temps. If you ignore all of the other things like satellite measurements that don't agree.)

Re:How to fix the pause!

[Eunuchswear]

Not too hot on that "reading" concept are you?

No, that is not what they did,

Re:How to fix the pause!

[cirby]

...except they didn't, overall. It would be wrong, at that: most ship-based SST measurements are at various depths (ship intake, bucket measurements, each of which are at random depths). A ship engine intake depth can be anywhere from a meter below the surface to ten times that depth, and the old bucket measurements were all over the place.

Adjustments for differing measurements have already been made in the historical record - they went in and adjusted it MORE because it wasn't agreeing with the global warming that they just assume has to be happening (because of their continually-blown model predictions).

Your "reinterpretation" of #3 is fanciful at best. Why make bad science even worse by adjusting the actual data?

Re:How to fix the pause!

[berbmit]

Always interesting to see people get is backwards. What they actually did was this: Trend adjustments

Re:How to fix the pause!

[cirby]

...except that the article you cite did some cherry-picking to find ONE chart that (if you don't look too closely) sorta disagrees with what you claim they actually did, and ignores pretty much all of the rest of the paper.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/06/05/science.aaa5632/F2.large.jpg

The author screws up by looking at the lower half of Figure 2, and assuming that was their analysis. Instead, he should have paid more attention to the top half of Figure 2, which is their end result. They did one bad thing: used a heavy black line versus a thin red line, which obscured the actual adjustment (lowering in the past, raising in the present). If you go to the actual paper and view the largest version of Figure 2, you can easily see the changes in the top half.

Notice also that the lower half of Figure 2 just shows how they threw out the old, well-used set of corrections for engine intake and bucket methods and substituted their own, which include the "adjustment" to the previous temperature records.

Re:How to fix the pause!

[cirby]

And that's where it falls apart.

This study gets the "warm" result by combining two different datasets - old, ship-based measurements plus new, buoy-based ones. Which has been done many times before, and resulted in the old curve that flattened out. This is NOT a new problem, and has been well understood for as long as AGW has been predicted. The adjustments were already there (see the lower part of Figure 2 in the study).

This study MODIFIES that "change over time" by lowering the ship-based measurements (which dominated the SST series for most of the last century) and fudging up the buoy-based ones. Since there are an increasing number of buoys (though not as many as you'd think) and fewer reporting ships, this adds about +0.12 C to the trend over the last twenty years or so - which just happens to be the right size to make the "pause" disappear. Sort of.

Unfortunately, even if you believe this modification, it causes another issue - it still highlights that (even if you cheat the numbers up), we're still missing a lot of predicted warming - almost 0.5C so far. Which means that catastrophic AGW (in the 3C - 5C range by 2100) just isn't happening.

Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[serviscope_minor]

Impress us all by publishing a full rebuttal of global warming in the journal of your choice.

Does it count if the journal is a blog with a black background, animated GIFs and at least 20 different fonts in a variety of sizes? Also do I get extra credibility points for any of the phrases "global conspiracy", "ivory tower" or "just look at how rich climate scientists are from all the bribe money they take"?

Re:Sinking

[Dr. Tom]

El Niño, derp.

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

You ever hear about convection?

Re:Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[unimacs]

Don't you think they would have just manipulated the data to show what they wanted in the first place?

once the data is "processed"...

[argStyopa]

There have been some accusations that the data is being 'massaged' to get to a specific result:
https://stevengoddard.wordpres...

Not very confidence-inspiring

[Hrrrg]

While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.
 

Re:Not very confidence-inspiring

[FlyHelicopters]

While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.

Your words speak the truth...

You "personally believe" in man-made global warming... just like Christians "personally believe" in God.

I know a few Christians who think the matter is "settled" as well.

---

To the point, I have no idea if we even have global warming, that point can be debated. Then the question is, if we have it, how much, if any, is man-made?

Re:Not very confidence-inspiring

[pastafazou]

• 1. claiming scientists are failing to correct the data for urban island effect means you're a troll?
• 2. incompetence is exclusive to one side?
• 3. do you have a list of those being funded to instill anti-science propaganda? Proof of the funding? Or is this an unfounded accusation based on an assumption?
• 4. why is it okay to accuse one side of being bought with money, but not the other? US Climate Science research spending is in the Billions of dollars.

Electric Joule Heating

[paradigmsareconstruc]

There has been a debate over how to model cosmic plasmas (such as the solar wind) for more than half a century between the Astrophysical Journal and IEEE's Transactions on Plasma Science.

Conventional theory models this flow of charged particles fundamentally as a fluid, but these models have been in dispute since their inception.

Electric joule heating stems from the idea that these moving charges are an electric current, and advocates point to the fact that the solar wind is oftentimes guided by planetary magnetic fields into the poles.

The presence of hot spots at the poles of Enceladus, Neptune and Venus, in particular, are suggestive of the simple idea that these moving charged particles can heat up the planets.

It was noted in 2005 by NASA that Mars' ice caps had also been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Pluto has continued to warm up even as it moves away from the Sun.

Many atmospheric circulation models are unable to reproduce the observed polar stratospheric winds (aka the polar vortex).

The observed splitting of the polar vortex on both Earth and Venus is an expected feature of laboratory plasmas when they are conducting electrical currents, yet climate and planetary scientists claim to not understand either observation.

The solar wind intensity correlates with lightning strikes, raising questions about lightning's underlying cause, and suggesting that the Earth is part of a larger electrical circuit.

Sunspot numbers appear to correlate with lower stratosphere temperature anomalies, minus the temporal effects of volcanic eruptions -- suggesting that the sunspots are related to these electrical flows. Laboratory plasma terrella experiments appear to confirm this suspicion.

Electric field variability can significantly increase the amount of Joule heating, yet existing general circulation models assume a smooth field in both space and time. In other words, the current climate models do not take electric joule heating into account.

The primitive equations which are used to model atmospheric flows basically ignore charge change phenomena.

This will likely turn out to be a mistake.

For a more graphical presentation w/ the sources for these claims, see https://plus.google.com/108466...

Re:Electric Joule Heating

[Anonymous Coward]

The primitive equations which are used to model atmospheric flows basically ignore charge change phenomena.

Lol, this is crank science ... do me a favor 1) write navier stokes equations in energy form 2) add joule heating term 3) do order of mangitude analysis under liberal and conservative assumptions. 4) discard joule heating after realizing its negligible by about by 5 orders of magnitude. Or look up all the papers in the 1950s and 1960s that published on this. Yeah thanks for playing, you idiot clown.

The unfortunate thing of science reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the unfortunate thing of science reporting; the scientific process is misunderstood by laypeople. And as a result, folks start assuming that the scientific community doesn't have a clue or are making shit up to get grants. Now, I am perfectly aware of the problems of publication bias and other criticisms of the process but the study of global warming is so widespread and a concern of so many parties - some of which will lose big and possibly gain big - that any shenanigans would be eliminated from the scientific process or at the very least pushed aside to the fringes.

As far as shenanigans are concerned, it's all in the general media and by people who are completely unqualified to make any sort of educated contribution.

Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[darronb]

Hell, I'd be happy if these jokers could even manage a partial rebuttal.

Science reporting is garbage these days. Dave Jones just did a rebuttal to the "Batteriser" that a whole lot of otherwise respected media outlets are running... as he says any competent EE can tell you loads of ways the Batteriser is 99.999% marketing spin. It's still everywhere and loads of people buy that bullshit.

Explaining global warming is much more complicated than debunking the Batteriser, so if Batteriser demonstrates our current level of competence in reporting something, we've got no F-ing chance at all of getting the real story with global warming to the general public.

The fact that 95% of competent scientists in that field agree should be good enough. Marketing BS by people whose interests are affected by the results of the science apparently don't even have to try that hard to convince a lot of people the science is somehow contested.

Put it this way... I'd bet there are plenty of people that would be skeptical if 95% of competent EEs stood up to say Batteriser is trash, claiming conflicts of interest with some "establishment" or "group think".

A person is smart. People are stupid.

The did and are manipulating the data

[Anonymous Coward]

This latest attempt to shore up the crumbling global warming agenda is another obvious attempt to manipulate the data and create momentum for the Paris meeting later this year.

This new study (or mangling the data to get the conclusion you want) is full of holes.
They have extrapolated land temps to sea areas where no data exists.
They have adjusted (the favorite warmists method, warm new temperature while adjusting old temperature data down to create a trend) sea surface temperatures to agree with a less reliable data set instead of the other way around.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/a-first-look-at-possible-artifacts-of-data-biases-in-the-recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus-by-karl-et-al-science-4-june-2015/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/noaas-new-paper-is-there-no-global-warming-hiatus-after-all/

are two critiques of this tendentiously timed data mangling.

Indeed, our best temperature data in the USA (I know, not the whole world) the USCRN (US climate reference network) uses triple redundant aspirated platinum temp sensors in pristine rural locations. It has been operating for >10 years, and shows NO warming at all. This data is not adjusted like so much of the surface record.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/07/noaa-shows-the-pause-in-the-u-s-surface-temperature-record-over-nearly-a-decade/

The satellite temp record (also with no hokey adjustments to create warming like GISS) also shows NO warming for the past 15-20 years.

So, this new data mangling is just another last ditch attempt to ram through the UNIPCC agenda, of controlling the energy infrastructure of the world for a green socialist fantasy.

Re:The did and are manipulating the data

[turkeyfish]

"The satellite temp record (also with no hokey adjustments to create warming like GISS) also shows NO warming for the past 15-20 years."

This is a false statement, except for one satellite, whose data was reported without correcting for the descent of its orbit.

Even if it were true, it leads to a bigger problem for the deniers of AWG. If its not getting warmer, why is all the ice in glaciers, ice fields, and ice sheets melting at at rates higher than ever previously observed?

Why is it that not a single AWG global warming denier is able to answer this question? We know its not the sun, as the variation in insolation is too small in magnitude to account for all the melting. We know its not Milankovitch cycles and other orbital cycles since the present position of the Earth, Sun and planets all predict that the Earth should be cooling now rather than warming.

Why are AWG global warming deniers unable to answer why it is that all the ice is melting if its not getting warmer?

Re:Using NOAA's fudged data

[paradigmsareconstruc]

It brings me a lot of pleasure actually to see the Slashdot community transition on this issue. I feel like the people here are becoming more informed than the Slashdot moderators themselves who pick these articles -- a situation that is not entirely different from what is also happening at WUWT.

I might have to actually rejoin the comments here. I just didn't want to be a part of what was happening before.

Re:Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[Noah Haders]

When the Rapture doesn't actually happen, at least the kooks admit that it didn't happen. The warmists just say that it did happen by changing the past data to fit their conclusions.

Oh please. That is EZACTLY what the kooks do. They go back to their religious texts and learn that they were interpreting it wrong before, and the rapture is in fact the following Tuesday.

What can we do vs What should we do?

[Atrox Canis]

Q: Should we be actively engaged in protecting our environment
A: Yes

Q: Has mankind contributed to the degradation of our environment
A: Yes

Q: Are we the largest cause of Global Warming
A: Not really certain, possibly

Q: Can we do anything to halt or slow down the damage we are doing
A: Yes

Q: Should we
A: Yes

Well, what should we do vs what can we do becomes the biggest question. There are a number of things that reasonable people can agree upon that will have an impact. Everything from the individual effort to not deliberately contribute to polluting our environment to providing incentive's to corporations and governments to reduce and regulate appropriately. It does no long term good to punish business out of existence simply to appease one group or another. It does no good to exclaim that there is no such thing as global warming or to claim that humans have nothing to do with it or to say that there is nothing we can do about it.

But calling childish names of those that don't agree with you is even less helpful. Is it your goal to convince the opposition to change their mind and start seeing things from your point of view? If so, your efforts are woefully inadequate, assuming you would rather go with your heart and call people names. If you can't be bothered to make an effort to convince people to reconsider, then you should stop polluting the environment with your invective. I was once a very committed "denier" but I didn't stop researching and I deliberately avoid participating in the echo chambers that exist on both sides of the argument. Some very reasonable debate from considerate and passionate and knowledgeable people have contributed my change of position.

Yes, I believe there is enough evidence to conclude that the planet is warmer on average now than it has been in the last several hundred years. Yes, I believe that humans have contributed in exacerbating an natural process of warming that would have occurred without our involvement. We have made it worse by a measurable percentage. Yes I think there are things we should do to reduce the damage we are doing. No, I don't believe success will come from cap and trade, making carbon based fuel illegal or forcing our industry to move all their operations out of the country by draconian levels of regulation. I also am convinced that if we were to, today, stop all production of CO2 worldwide we wouldn't get back to "normal" levels for several decades. We need reasonable solutions that don't crush the life out of the lives we are trying to save.

We should be expending our efforts in trying to convince the opposition rather than shutting them down. We should be expending our efforts in researching and implementing reasonable solutions rather than lining the pockets of our "evangelists" and "prophets". I'm an example of the success that can be had by being reasonable, fair and adult in our efforts. It does work. Don't believe it, go back and read some of my previous posts.

Re:What can we do vs What should we do?

[blue9steel]

Well, what should we do vs what can we do becomes the biggest question.

Before you can answer that question you have to answer this one first: "How much is it rational to spend on this project?"

Re:Sinking

[ArcadeMan]

Convection, bleh. Ever heard of a microwave oven?

And 4)

[mpercy]

What is the temperature of the Earth *supposed* to be?

IOW, what is the *ideal* temperature for the planet, and while you're at it, show your work explaining how that particular number was derived.

It seems to me that the AGW folks chose temps circa 1850 or so as the gold standard, at least partly (but to me probably mostly) because that's about when decent measurements and record keeping began. Of course this ignores all temperature variations that preceded that.

They're kind like the Amish, who seem to have decided that technology circa 1850 or so is exactly the level of tech that is allowed. Why not technology circa 0AD--if Jesus didn't need the tech, why should the Amish?

If the AGW folks picked temps from about 15000 years ago, we'd *really* be in the dumper right? I mean, we'd have destroyed all that ice-pack covering swaths of North America, sea level would have risen 100ft, and the temp went up what? Like 8 degrees C? Talk about warming!

None of my comments should be construed to mean I think that humans are not contributing to climate change or that I'm fine with pollution. But this is nothing new, either.

Wikipedia: "The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust, Oxygen Revolution, or Great Oxidation, was the biologically induced appearance of dioxygen (O2) in Earth's atmosphere.[1] Geological, isotopic, and chemical evidence suggest that this major environmental change happened around 2.3 billion years ago (2.3 Ga). Cyanobacteria, which appeared about 200 million years before the GOE,[4] began producing oxygen by photosynthesis. Before the GOE, any free oxygen they produced was chemically captured by dissolved iron or organic matter. The GOE was the point when these oxygen sinks became saturated and could not capture all of the oxygen that was produced by cyanobacterial photosynthesis. After the GOE, the excess free oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere.

Free oxygen is toxic to obligate anaerobic organisms, and the rising concentrations may have wiped out most of the Earth's anaerobic inhabitants at the time. Cyanobacteria were therefore responsible for one of the most significant extinction events in Earth's history."

Re:And 4)

[serviscope_minor]

IOW, what is the *ideal* temperature for the planet, and while you're at it, show your work explaining how that particular number was derived.

There isn't one in an abstract sense. OF course the Earth doesn't care if we live or die or merely suffer a lot. One can be fairly sure that current society is built around the current conditions. I have no doubt the human race will survive pretty extreme events. However given the amount of infrastructure near sea level and the amount of farming land positioned predicated on the current claimate with its rainfall and temperature patterns one can be fairly sure that any big change is going to be pretty disruptive.

For example, take a large, sea-level city of your choice. Assume no dramatic changes in population size. If the sea level rises to make the city uninhabitable, what would be required to build a new city elsewhere with the same infrastructure? Now multiply that by the number of large low-level cities. You're into hundreds of trillions of dollars very quickly, and that's barely getting started.

It seems to me that the AGW folks chose temps circa 1850 or so as the gold standard

Huh? The AGW "folks" (and by that presumably you mean the scientists trying to demonstrate that anthropogenic global warming is happening) piked a starting point around about when we started with large scale coal burning, i.e. large scale carbon emissions. Nothing prior to that would be anthropogenic since we didn't burn all that much fossil fuels before that.

It's not a "ooh life is wonderful" gold standard of any sort. It's the industrial revolution.

They're kind like the Amish, who seem to have decided that technology circa 1850 or so is exactly the level of tech that is allowed.

So, you're claiming that those trying to prove humans are causing global warming have decided that vast, inefficient machines burning vast quantities of coal is optimal? [citation needed]

If the AGW folks picked temps from about 15000 years ago, we'd *really* be in the dumper right?

You can get temperature graphs going that far back if you wish. You see a sudden kick up at around 1850 or so when humans started relasing sequestered carbon in large quantities.

None of my comments should be construed to mean I think that humans are not contributing to climate change or that I'm fine with pollution. But this is nothing new, either.

Then honestly what to fuck do you mean? You seem to be confusing a lot of different things. For a start the phrase "AGW folks" is utterly meaningless. Are you talking about scientists, politicians, lobbyists, journalists, bloggers, environmentalists? What?

Free oxygen is toxic to obligate anaerobic organisms, and the rising concentrations may have wiped out most of the Earth's anaerobic inhabitants at the time. Cyanobacteria were therefore responsible for one of the most significant extinction events in Earth's history."

What's the relevance of that?

Re:And 4)

[Shadwhawk]

The 'ideal' temperature of Earth is one where nearly-sea-level communities, where a vast portion of humanity live, aren't flooded, forcing enormous migrations. The breadbaskets of the world should still stay productive, and the deserts should stay roughly where they are. A warming planet might open up a lot of Siberia and Canada to farming, but how long would it take to get large farms going, and how much of the wilderness would be ruined? The ideal temperature isn't about Earth--it can survive anything we can throw at it. The ideal temperature is about supporting 7+ billion humans without huge die-offs, and if we can avoid it, triggering mass extinctions.

Re:And 4)

[popo]

Exactly this.

Earth's climate will absolutely change because it has never not been changing. That's why the whole "climate change is real" argument is so asinine. Of course it's real. The only question at all is anthropogenesis. But even without anthropogenesis, the climate is guaranteed to change adversely for humans -- because that's what Earth's climate does.

In one hundred thousand years, the climate will absolutely 100% be different -- with or without humans, industry or fossil fuels.

And the chances of Earth remaining in a human-friendly, temperate zone indefinitely are zero.

What humanity needs to come to grips with is that our planet was not designed for us. The opposite is true: We were designed for a brief, fleeting set of climatic conditions that with 100% certitude will not persist indefinitely.

Re:And 4)

[coofercat]

As David Attenborough said on a similar subject "that's sort of not the point". The point is that if temperatures are rising, human encouraged or not, we're still in trouble. Whilst cutting pollution to zero might not stop the rise, it presumably would reduce it and thus doing something about it would make sense as it would prolong the time we have with the world sort of as it is now.

I know enough about history to know the Romans (in part) came to England because they could grow wine here. We're getting back to having vineyards here, but they're relatively new and not at their peak yet. However, the question is... do we want to live in a world that has long since past? Maybe we can and do, but maybe our way of life depends on the current environment more than we'd care to admit.

Re:And 4)

[Mab_Mass]

What is the temperature of the Earth *supposed* to be?

This whole question misses the point. As you correctly observe, there is not temperature that the Earth is *supposed* to be, and in fact there have been wild fluctuations in the Earth's temperature over the past million+ years.

The trouble with man-made climate change isn't that the Earth is going through changes. The trouble is that the Earth is going through a very rapid temperature change that will have significant impacts on humanity (as well as the rest of the world).

These rapid changes will do things like cause glacial melt, increase the severity and variability of weather, change habitable zones for various species, etc.

Those changes in turn lead to water shortages, sea level rise, death and destruction due to storms, pests and pathogens moving to places where they haven't been before, etc. Those factors will have a huge impact on human habitation and the global economy.

Will the Earth survive? Of course. It has been through much worse. That's not the point.

The point is that there is a huge cost to humans with the pace of the shifting climate, and we can either eat the costs trying to minimize the shift or we can eat the cost in terms of displaced people, drought, famine, etc.

The responses being advocated mainly involve shifting away from fossil fuels (which are a fixed, non-renewable resource) towards an economy of energy production that comes from renewables. Isn't this a good idea anyway?

Re:And 4)

[funwithBSD]

Maybe you should take a different view that actually fits the data:

That the fluctuations are normal for earth, and stop trying to fix a problem that has not been proven.

People use to ice skate on the Themes as well, during the little ice age. Neither time period had enough humans to create those conditions, so humans are not a significant part of the equation.

Unless you think medieval industry caused the mini ice age.

Re:And 4)

[turkeyfish]

"potentially moving fertile crop zones hundreds of miles"

It is always bemusing to see people think that because global warming will create higher temperatures in previously colder places that food crops can simply be grown in these newly warmed environments. The fact is that much of the reason food crops grow where they do in addition to evolutionary adaptation to specific habitats, is the fact that sufficient moisture and adequate quality soils are also available. Good quality soils can take hundreds or even thousands of years to develop. Many high latitude environments have very poor soils, often having been scoured by glaciers for thousands of years. Likewise, flowering and consequently pollination is affected by day/night length as well as by temperature, so simply because high latitude environments may become warm enough for crops to grow doesn't mean that flowering or pollination will be possible in these newly warmed environments.

The threat from human induced global warming is not simply that humans are warming the planet by burning fossil fuels, but rather very much about how fast we are warming the planet. We are currently warming the planet between 100 and 1000 times faster than would occur naturally and as a consequence we are disrupting the very ecological relationships upon which humans depend for their survival. Although its probably true that a few humans will survive and linger in the kind of Mad Max world we are creating for current and subsequent generations, but the vast majority of humanity is already on the road to extinction within a few hundred years at the current rate of change.

Re:Data doesn't fit political needs! New Model STA

[silentcoder]

Could it because those underlying assumptions are the most basic laws of physics and chemistry ?
If global warming by human activity is WRONG - then the question is moot since our understanding of thermodynamics is ENTIRELY FALSE and cars and power plants don't exist to emit CO2 in the first place.

Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[tbannist]

Those claims would be more interesting if some references were provided. For example, I seem to remember some people who are often referred to as statisticians (actually a minerals prospector and an economist) doing something similar, but it turns out instead of "proving" that the hockey stick wasn't real, they proved that they couldn't follow the documented procedures.

Two problems with this article

[bradley13]

There are three problems with this article:

First and foremost, this result is achieved with "corrected commercial ship temperature data", " corrected ship-to-buoy calibrations", and other adjustments. However, I don't see any information on where we can go to examine their adjustment techniques.

Second, the statements at the end of the article make it plain that the goal of the authors is to show even more warming. This is not a neutral investigation, but an investigation with a desired outcome.

Finally, with their new adjustments, they claim to have established a warming rate of around 0.1 degree/decade, and they also say that this is what the warming was from 1950 to 1999. Oddly, they then claim that this is "more than twice the IPCC's estimate". Now that's just weird. The IPCC never predicted so little warming. The IPCC originally predicted ten times that amount, or around 4 to 5 degrees per century (See page xxii, figure 8 in the IPCC report); later reports did revise that down, but never by an order of magnitude.

So: we have people massaging data again, but they are also apparently trying to massage history. Credibility? Somewhere around zero.

Re:Two problems with this article

[mixed_signal]

First: There is additional supplemental material linked from the article, e.g. http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Second: Can you point these out specifically and what indicates this is the authors' "goal" ? Their stated goal is to review the temperature data set. They're reporting what they found. And the data is there to see.

Finally: You're confusing the estimate of the warming in the 20th century with the IPCC's forward estimate of warming in the 21st century. The authors of the paper are stating that the revisions to the data set based on aligning buoy with other temperature measurements mainly affects the period from 1998 forward, where significantly more buoy data was added to the set, that the data for the prior period isn't affected much by these adjustments, and that the resulting trends are similar throughout the period, thus the "hiatus" was an artifact of misaligned data in the data set.

Perhaps you should read up on how the data sets are merged and aligned before assuming it's "massaging." It should all be open and published for review. For example, ERSST version 4 is available here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/d...

 

Re:Two problems with this article

[riverat1]

First and foremost, this result is achieved with "corrected commercial ship temperature data", " corrected ship-to-buoy calibrations", and other adjustments. However, I don't see any information on where we can go to examine their adjustment techniques.

As mixed_signal point out that sort of stuff is detailed in the supplemental material that accompanies most published scientific papers.

Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[darronb]

Well, here's the thing. You've got to take the best you've got. I'm not an expert, so I'm going to defer to those that are.

(This is not specifically to you, just a general response)

I'm reasonably scientifically literate, and I'm a fairly good problem solver. So are lots of people. The problem is, people can run through any random train of thought they want to reach some conclusion that sounds logical as hell, and still with no real background in what they're talking about, they can be wildly wrong because... big surprise... they don't actually know what they're talking about. While a lot of stuff sounds simple most things actually aren't.

So, if you don't know the background, you generally should not offer an opinion. Sure, in the west everyone thinks they're fully entitled to their opinion (maybe), and that their opinion is as valid as anyone else's (dead wrong). Seriously, you're just screwing everybody around you by taking respect in your analytical skill and offering an opinion. If a problem SEEMS simple to you, and you're wondering why the experts are so damn wrong... that's a warning sign not that there's some global conspiracy, but that you're missing some big part of the puzzle.

Really.. if there were huge holes in the science, you can bet a lot of scientists (not pundits or armchair theorists) would be screaming about it. Scientists aren't 100% going to get behind "protecting their interests" by towing a line.... if you're a scientist and you can offer credible reasons why most everyone else is full of crap, you're going to be set for life on funding from companies and organizations who REALLY want climate change to go away as a topic. The fact that the huge amount of money spent looking for problems in the science is only able to show results that are easily disputed as mistaken or cherry picking is telling. The science is looking reasonably solid to me on just that basis. At least, solid enough to be considering what can be done if it's right and doing something.

Of course the models are going to be inaccurate. A big part of the problem is the intuitive reaction for lots of otherwise quite rational people is to think "How can they know what the weather will be in 100 years when they can't even get next weekend's forecast right?"... and that becomes the core to their skepticism.

You have to actually look at the science, the feeds to the models, and the processes involved to understand there's probably something there. It's not the same type of forecasting.

To me, this is very much like saying "How can electronics possibly work if you idiots can't even predict exactly where an electron is going to be?" Guess what, you don't need to. Perfectly reasonable science can be built even if the discrete elements of that science are buried in uncertainty.

Re: Please clarify...

[silentcoder]

Nobody said it makes them bigger. It is however a prerequisite. Insects have exoskeletons. That puts an upper limit on their size relative to the oxygen content of the air. More oxygen allows bigger insects to be capable of existing. A dragonfly that big today would suffocate.

Re: Data doesn't fit political needs! New Model ST

[tmosley]

"Scientists aren't paid to believe anything"

That is where you are completely wrong. Granting institutions blacklist ANYONE who comes out against AGW, no matter the field. Whether or not AGW is real, or comes from the proposed mechanism is irrelevant. If you speak out against it, right or wrong, you lose everything. This is ten-fold the case with climate scientists. Other branches might be able to seek funding elsewhere, whether from unaligned industry sources or the extremely biased Koch Brothers, but climate scientists don't have even that meager fallback.

I am a scientist. I have applied for and received million dollar grants. There are key words that are often used increase the probability of funding. "Global Warming" is one of them.

As much as scientists like to poke holes in theories, they absolutely will not do it when their funding is at stake. Even the most brutal attack dog doesn't bite the hand that feeds. And if he does, well, you know what happens.

Re:Don't buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the original report, the error bands are included.

"It is also noteworthy that the new global trends are statistically significant and positive at the 0.10 significance level for 1998–2012 (Fig. 1 and table S1) using the approach described in (25) for determining trend uncertainty. In contrast, IPCC (1), which also utilized the approach in (25), reported no statistically significant trends for 1998-2012 in any of the three primary global surface temperature datasets. Moreover, for 1998–2014, our new global trend is 0.106± 0.058C dec1, and for 2000–2014 it is 0.116± 0.067C dec1 (see table S1 for details). This is similar to the warming of the last half of the 20th century (Fig. 1). A more comprehensive approach for determining the 0.10 significance level (see supplement) that also accounts for the impact of annual errors of estimate on the trend, also shows that the 1998–2014 and 2000–2014 trends (but not 1998–2012) were positive at the 0.10 significance level."

Incorrect Article Title

[EmagGeek]

TFT should read: "NOAA Alters Climate Date to Hide Pause in Global Warming."

Global warmings

[jimmydigital]

This paper is a real breakthrough. It's the clearest evidence yet of global warming that's directly attributable to the actions of man. This is a time of great celebrations!

Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[turkeyfish]

"Now AGW on the other hand still depends mostly on flawed/incomplete computer models,"

That being so, will you kindly explain why virtually all the world's glaciers, ice fields, and ice sheets are melting at rates that are dramatically higher than have ever previously been measured?

We know it can't be the sun, since solar output changes far too little to account for the magnitude of the energy required to melt all that ice.

We know it isn't related to Milankovitch or other orbital cycles, since these hypotheses predict the Earth should be presently cooling.

Even if you could in somewhat show that that climate models are flawed and incomplete, which would make you a superstar in the world of climate science, if you could prove it, you would still need to explain why all that ice is melting so quickly. Keep in mind that the current rate of global mean temperature increase is about 36 times the rate observed during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the redwood forests in Wyoming became predominantly palm forests over the course of about 10,000 to 30,000 years and the entire North American mammal fauna changed abruptly.

"Inaccurate" and "flawed" climate models are the least of the AWG deniers problem as they have NO EXPLANATION why all the ice is melting so quickly.

Re:Don't buy it

[NotDrWho]

The data didn't agree with their hypothesis, so they found a way to fix the data so it did. That's how the scientific method is supposed to work. IT'S SCIENCE, PEOPLE!

Re: Difference between Warmists and Rapturists

[BCGlorfindel]

Those claims would be more interesting if some references were provided. For example, I seem to remember some people who are often referred to as statisticians (actually a minerals prospector and an economist) doing something similar, but it turns out instead of "proving" that the hockey stick wasn't real, they proved that they couldn't follow the documented procedures.

McIntyre & McKitrick aren't statisticians at all, so no argument there. Science shouldn't be about credentials, but if it is...

McShane and Wyner ARE statisticians and they published this paper in The Annals of Applied Statistics regarding Mann's statistic uasge for proxy reconstruction methods. The abstract follows, mostly because it pretty much speaks for itself:
Predicting historic temperatures based on tree rings, ice cores, and other natural proxies is a difficult endeavor. The relationship between proxies and temperature is weak and the number of proxies is far larger than the number of target data points. Furthermore, the data contain complex spatial and temporal dependence structures which are not easily captured with simple models.

In this paper, we assess the reliability of such reconstructions and their statistical significance against various null models. We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.

We propose our own reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere average annual land temperature over the last millennium, assess its reliability, and compare it to those from the climate science literature. Our model provides a similar reconstruction but has much wider standard errors, reflecting the weak signal and large uncertainty encountered in this setting.

Mann et al. of course filed a rebuttal, which more or less amounts to declaring that statisticians know nothing about handling climate data, and furthermore that McShane and Wyner used completely inappropriate statistical methods.

I've read the rebuttals and McShane and crew seem to be the most on the ball in the exchange from my reading, with Mann et al's arguments seeming to be tangential to the central meat of the article and concerns identified, but go read it yourself.