Does the divergence problem mean we cannot rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature in the past? Briffa 1998 shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends.
This is a general trend with the divergence problem - trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. Before the 1960s, the northern and southern trees tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. This suggests the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and restricted to recent decades.
No, "Mike's nature trick" refers to a mathematical technique used to plot instrument data along with reconstructed data. It's a trick of the trade. It is explained in Mann's paper. Nothing omitted or obscured.
Scientists (including climate scientists) welcome criticism as long as it's constructive and scientific in nature. That's how science improves. Too much "criticism" of climate science comes from people who have little scientific knowledge and tries to use long debunked arguments or is political (scientist are in league with the communists/socialists). It wastes scientists time to try and respond to that sort of drivel.
Muller was a real skeptic. He had questions about the science but once he ran the numbers himself he was willing to accept that the others were right all along. The problem you have with denegrating Mann's original "Hockey Stick" graph is that there have been a number of studies since then from different researchers that use different sets of proxies that all pretty much agree with it. So if Mann faked the data for his hockey stick graph then he got lucky and got it right.
Good for you. How do you like that extra 10 or 20% tacked on to your hospital bill to cover the cost of people showing up at the Emergency Room to get treatment that they can't otherwise pay for? One way or another you're paying whether you like it or not.
What amuses me is how the "skeptics" jumped all over the recent tree ring report from Northern Scandinavia that said the area was probably warmer during the MWP than previously suspected and immediately extrapolate that to cover the whole globe. If it supports them a scientific study is all good, if not then it's venal scientists looking out only for there personal gain.
I agree, copyrights (and patents for that matter) should be owned by the people who created the work and only them. If they want to hire a corporation to manage there rights in regard to IP that's fine but ownership should only rest in the original creators hands (although I would probably give their heirs a 10 year window after their deaths for any work that is less than 10 years old already).
I guess you can believe what you want. If you want me to believe your numbers on volcanoes and CO2/SO2 you're going to have to refer me to the specific paper or papers you got them from. I've spent an hour searching and haven't found anything that matches up with your claims. I did find one paper from AGU in 2011 that estimated that St. Helens in 1980 and Pinatubo in 1991 released 0.01 and 0.05 gigatons of CO2 respectively during their major eruptions. That's a far cry from what you're saying.
So again, if you want me to believe your numbers you're going to have to point me to the specific paper or papers to got them from.
You said 2 tenths of a gigaton. That's only 200 million tons no matter how you cut it.
Mount Saint Helens emitted less than 1 cubic mile of material and it wasn't all magma. Pinatubo, the biggest eruption in the last 100 years only emitted about 2.4 cubic miles of material. Most eruptions don't even come close to the size of Pinatubo.
I have a hard time believing your numbers about how much CO2/SO2 can come from magma. Do you have a reference for that?
Finally, if what you say is true there would have been a big spike in atmospheric CO2 levels from the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991. That didn't happen. There was a spike in SO2 but CO2 and SO2 have opposite effects on temperatures. The SO2 from the eruption did cause a measurable cooling for a couple of years.
Science says volcanoes typically emit about 242 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
I don't have time to get into the details of you fuel consumption numbers but the numbers published say humans emit around 30 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, over 100 times the emissions of volcanoes.
Um... Check your units. Giga is a prefix for billion. Therefore 0.2 gigatons is 200 MILLION tons. I don't have time to go through all the links on the page you cited to find the numbers. Perhaps you could be more specific.
The graph in you eia.gov link it shows about 6.5 billion metric tons of carbon in the year 2000. Note that the caption on that graph says "CO2 Emissions (Million Metric Tons Carbon)". The carbon atom in CO2 is 27.27% of the total weight of the molecule. So 6.5 gigatonnes of carbon translates to about 24 gigatonnes of CO2 in the year 2000. More up to date numbers show around 30 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions in the past few years which as I said translates to around 8 gigatonnes of carbon.
You really need to look more carefully at what your sources are really saying in regards to units and what's being actually referenced.
Please cite your sources. I found one reference that said St. Helens emitted about 1.5 million metric tons of SO2 during the major eruption of May 18. Last year humans emitted over 30 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. If you reduce that to just the carbon it was about 8 billion metric tons. So all of my sources agree what I said was accurate. I'm not going to accept your figures unless you can cite some authoritative sources. Bet you can't.
Don't worry, we're doing that experiment at the macro scale right now. The results will be interesting (in the sense of "May you live in interesting times.")
Solar variation is easily measured, in detail since satellites went up in the 1970s, fairly regularly from the surface back into the 1950s and less regularly back into the 1800s. It can also be estimated from sunspot records that go back about 400 years. From measurements we know the Sun currently hasn't varied enough to account for current global warming. In fact if anything solar output is declining right now and has been since a peak around the middle of the 20th Century.
Orbital variation, precession and other Milankovitch Cycle cycles act on multi-millennial time scales (the shortest being over 25,000 years for a full cycle). They are not particularly relevant on century time scales.
... they are guesses based on necessarily incomplete models...
I think you have it backwards. Models are tools we use to test our understanding of the physical science we've discovered through observation. Models aren't perfect but they're better than any other method we have and so far they're not doing that bad. Every year Real Climate posts an update and commentary on a comparison of climate model output to actual date. Here is the latest one updated with 2011 data.
Really, you should know better than that by now. In an average year volcanoes emit about 1% as much CO2 as humans. Even the largest eruption in the last 100 years, Pinatubo in 1991 only emitted about 3% as much CO2 as humans that year.
I basically agree with what you said but I think you overstated the effect of the Colorado River on water in Northern Mexico. The Colorado empties into the Gulf of California which is in the northeast corner of Mexico and not all that far from the Pacific Ocean. The Rio Grande on the other hand runs along the border for about 1,000 miles from El Paso to the Gulf. Maybe you meant that.
Slashdot Mirror
Arg! s/there/their/
I think you just came up with a whole new line of porn films. Maybe you should copyright the idea.
Well, now most if not all of the information the FOI requests were after are available and it doesn't change a thing.
It's all explained in the published papers. Nothing nefarious about it.
To quote Skeptical Science:
Does the divergence problem mean we cannot rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature in the past? Briffa 1998 shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends.
This is a general trend with the divergence problem - trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. Before the 1960s, the northern and southern trees tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. This suggests the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and restricted to recent decades.
No, "Mike's nature trick" refers to a mathematical technique used to plot instrument data along with reconstructed data. It's a trick of the trade. It is explained in Mann's paper. Nothing omitted or obscured.
Scientists (including climate scientists) welcome criticism as long as it's constructive and scientific in nature. That's how science improves. Too much "criticism" of climate science comes from people who have little scientific knowledge and tries to use long debunked arguments or is political (scientist are in league with the communists/socialists). It wastes scientists time to try and respond to that sort of drivel.
(And if you plot the rate vs. time, do you get a hockeystick?)
LOL
Muller was a real skeptic. He had questions about the science but once he ran the numbers himself he was willing to accept that the others were right all along. The problem you have with denegrating Mann's original "Hockey Stick" graph is that there have been a number of studies since then from different researchers that use different sets of proxies that all pretty much agree with it. So if Mann faked the data for his hockey stick graph then he got lucky and got it right.
Here is a graph that shows Mann's original graph (in blue) along with 9 others. Notice that Mann's graph doesn't stand out from the others.
Good for you. How do you like that extra 10 or 20% tacked on to your hospital bill to cover the cost of people showing up at the Emergency Room to get treatment that they can't otherwise pay for? One way or another you're paying whether you like it or not.
What amuses me is how the "skeptics" jumped all over the recent tree ring report from Northern Scandinavia that said the area was probably warmer during the MWP than previously suspected and immediately extrapolate that to cover the whole globe. If it supports them a scientific study is all good, if not then it's venal scientists looking out only for there personal gain.
Google execs better change their plans if they were going to vacation in Mexico any time soon.
I agree, copyrights (and patents for that matter) should be owned by the people who created the work and only them. If they want to hire a corporation to manage there rights in regard to IP that's fine but ownership should only rest in the original creators hands (although I would probably give their heirs a 10 year window after their deaths for any work that is less than 10 years old already).
The average passenger car simply does not weigh enough to damage the highway appreciably.
Unless they're using studded tires (allowed November through March in Oregon).
My username says it all.
Corporations are a legal fiction created by the state. As such they should be subject to whatever rules the state chooses to impose on them.
Now if we could just lock them away in the looney bin.
I guess you can believe what you want. If you want me to believe your numbers on volcanoes and CO2/SO2 you're going to have to refer me to the specific paper or papers you got them from. I've spent an hour searching and haven't found anything that matches up with your claims. I did find one paper from AGU in 2011 that estimated that St. Helens in 1980 and Pinatubo in 1991 released 0.01 and 0.05 gigatons of CO2 respectively during their major eruptions. That's a far cry from what you're saying.
So again, if you want me to believe your numbers you're going to have to point me to the specific paper or papers to got them from.
You said 2 tenths of a gigaton. That's only 200 million tons no matter how you cut it.
Mount Saint Helens emitted less than 1 cubic mile of material and it wasn't all magma. Pinatubo, the biggest eruption in the last 100 years only emitted about 2.4 cubic miles of material. Most eruptions don't even come close to the size of Pinatubo.
I have a hard time believing your numbers about how much CO2/SO2 can come from magma. Do you have a reference for that?
Finally, if what you say is true there would have been a big spike in atmospheric CO2 levels from the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991. That didn't happen. There was a spike in SO2 but CO2 and SO2 have opposite effects on temperatures. The SO2 from the eruption did cause a measurable cooling for a couple of years.
Science says volcanoes typically emit about 242 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
I don't have time to get into the details of you fuel consumption numbers but the numbers published say humans emit around 30 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, over 100 times the emissions of volcanoes.
Um... Check your units. Giga is a prefix for billion. Therefore 0.2 gigatons is 200 MILLION tons. I don't have time to go through all the links on the page you cited to find the numbers. Perhaps you could be more specific.
The graph in you eia.gov link it shows about 6.5 billion metric tons of carbon in the year 2000. Note that the caption on that graph says "CO2 Emissions (Million Metric Tons Carbon)". The carbon atom in CO2 is 27.27% of the total weight of the molecule. So 6.5 gigatonnes of carbon translates to about 24 gigatonnes of CO2 in the year 2000. More up to date numbers show around 30 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions in the past few years which as I said translates to around 8 gigatonnes of carbon.
You really need to look more carefully at what your sources are really saying in regards to units and what's being actually referenced.
Please cite your sources. I found one reference that said St. Helens emitted about 1.5 million metric tons of SO2 during the major eruption of May 18. Last year humans emitted over 30 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. If you reduce that to just the carbon it was about 8 billion metric tons. So all of my sources agree what I said was accurate. I'm not going to accept your figures unless you can cite some authoritative sources. Bet you can't.
Don't worry, we're doing that experiment at the macro scale right now. The results will be interesting (in the sense of "May you live in interesting times.")
Here is an up to date comparison of model output to data.
Solar variation is easily measured, in detail since satellites went up in the 1970s, fairly regularly from the surface back into the 1950s and less regularly back into the 1800s. It can also be estimated from sunspot records that go back about 400 years. From measurements we know the Sun currently hasn't varied enough to account for current global warming. In fact if anything solar output is declining right now and has been since a peak around the middle of the 20th Century.
Orbital variation, precession and other Milankovitch Cycle cycles act on multi-millennial time scales (the shortest being over 25,000 years for a full cycle). They are not particularly relevant on century time scales.
I think you have it backwards. Models are tools we use to test our understanding of the physical science we've discovered through observation. Models aren't perfect but they're better than any other method we have and so far they're not doing that bad. Every year Real Climate posts an update and commentary on a comparison of climate model output to actual date. Here is the latest one updated with 2011 data.
Really, you should know better than that by now. In an average year volcanoes emit about 1% as much CO2 as humans. Even the largest eruption in the last 100 years, Pinatubo in 1991 only emitted about 3% as much CO2 as humans that year.
Yeah, and in 3,000 or 4,000 years it might be ice free.
I basically agree with what you said but I think you overstated the effect of the Colorado River on water in Northern Mexico. The Colorado empties into the Gulf of California which is in the northeast corner of Mexico and not all that far from the Pacific Ocean. The Rio Grande on the other hand runs along the border for about 1,000 miles from El Paso to the Gulf. Maybe you meant that.