It has been an interesting conversation and I debated replying but I have to say one thing.
The "GlacierGate" error was found and reported by a scientist who worked on the report. It was a simple typo and should have read 2350. The report should have been proofread better but steps are being taken to address that for the next IPCC report. Rejecting the whole AR4 report over 1 or even 10 minor errors out of tens of thousands of points is like getting an F on a test you scored 99.9% correct on. I'm sure since that error surfaced people have been pouring over the report trying to find others and if anything truly egregious had been found we would have heard about it by now.
You have no idea how climate modeling works, at least for the GCM's (General Circulation Models aka Global Climate Models). The models are independent of the data not calibrated by it. The models are built by combining the physical calculations of the various factors known to affect climate and if a discrepancy with the historical data is found they try to determine why and improve the physics of that particular issue which they then put back in to the model. It's not calibrating like zeroing a meter or something.
Of course climate models just model climate, not weather. Climate only describes the bounds of the weather system. Another way to look at it is that climate is the carrier signal that the weather rides on like the audio signal on a radio carrier wave.
How about ozone? Without the stratospheric ozone layer which absorbs 93-99% of the high energy ultra-violet light the surface would become pretty unlivable.
The AGW scientists aren't just saying AGW is happening, they are saying the only way to stop it is to give the government complete control over all economic activity...
No, what scientists say if they say anything is the best way to control global warming it to stop emitting such large quantities of CO2. They leave the issue of complete government control to others.
It's never too late to do something. The more you do and the sooner you do it the better, easier and cheaper the result but as long as we keep spewing CO2 into the atmosphere it'll keep getting worse.
Go to the NOAA/NCDC web site to get their code. It's available. Go the the NASA/GISS web site for their data and the Model E code, one of the major GCM's. Read the published papers for methodology. It's mostly out there if you care to put in the work to examine it. There are links to lots of data and code on this page.
I think the specific thing you are referring to is the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper in Climate Research in 2003. It was a paper that should not have been published without major revisions. Among the criticisms of the paper they used precipitation proxies where they should have used temperature proxies and they took regional temperature changes as global changes. Half of the editorial staff resigned when the publisher wouldn't allow the chief editor to print a rebuttal of the paper. Even the publisher eventually admitted it should not have been published without revision. Like the editorial staff Phil Jones questioned why anyone would want to have their name associated with a journal that would publish such junk. Maybe that's why the journal went downhill.
The majority of sources cited in AR4 were peer reviewed (12900/18500 according to one {skeptic} source). The IPCC AR4 report has 3 sections.
Working Group I is about the physical science basis of climate change. I believe you'll find that nearly everything cited in the WG1 section is peer reviewed and anything that wasn't probably could have been.
WG II is about the impacts and our vulnerability to climate change. There are more non-peer reviewed references in this section but I'd be surprised if the peer reviewed cites didn't outnumber them still.
WG III is about mitigation, what we can do about it. By its very nature it has some political aspects to it and cited many government, NGO, and business sources as well as peer reviewed papers. This is where you will find most of the non-peer reviewed cites in the AR4 report.
Finally, a paper is not necessarily worthless just because it is not peer reviewed. I think you have to examine it on a case by case basis to determine its worth.
What may be catastrophic about AGW is not simply that it's occurring. As you note the Earth has gone through large climate changes before. The catastrophic part is that it looks like we'll see changes in 200 years that would take thousands of years during a natural climate shift. Natural systems aren't well adapted to handle that rapid of a change. The human race is almost totally dependent on many of those natural systems for its health and well being for the time being. Any disruption of those systems is likely to be disruptive to our civilization. We'll adapt I imagine but some of it probably won't be fun.
When you talk about the AR4's "devastating" projections are you taking into account the time frame? For instance it projects sea level rise of something like 0.5 meters by 2100. That's like 1/5 inch per year. (More recent projections however project 1-2 meters of SLR by 2100.) The change is slow on human time scales but it keeps going. More of the AR4 projections have been found to be conservative than overstated.
If I'm still around and functional in 20 years I'll buy you dinner in the restaurant of your choice just to celebrate that.
I'm not aware of any seriously bad science from Michael Mann. If you're referring to his original hockey stick graph it has been substantially borne out by any number subsequent studies using different data sets.
When someones opinion on global warming is based on their ideology rather than sound science I'm okay with calling it denial. There are honest skeptics out there that I was not referring to but they're not the ones making most of the noise.
You work with what you have. The temperature records they are working with have been collected over the past 150 years or so by hundreds of different entities around the world without any consideration of some of the things they're being used for now. It'd be great if we could go back and redo the observations but we can't. Of course the more recent the observations the better confidence we have in them especially since the 1950s.
Lots of raw data is available at the National Climate Data Center. Interestingly processing that raw data without making adjustments for the vagaries of the data collection process produces substantially the same answer as the processed data does.
I'm not to "anyone". There are honest skeptics out there that I can respect but too many people's opposition to global warming is because the proposed remedies don't fit their political/economic/social ideology instead of having some real science to back themselves up. I'm comfortable with calling that denial. As the NAS letter says scientists face harassment that has little to do with refuting their science.
Ha! I knew someone would call me on that. It's an unfortunate error I make from time to time. I hope you noticed I spelled it correctly in the body.
You know the vast majority of data on climate, I'm sure over 95% of it, is freely available if you care to look for it. The small part of it that isn't freely available is not enough to make much difference one way or another.
Ok, but I'm old enough it's 50-50 whether I'll still be among the living in 20 years.
But you can play yourself. It's not enough though to just cherry pick one exceptional year, you have to consider something like at least a 10 year average compared to another 10 year average.
Well, your example of a yardstick is ridiculous (and you should have used a meterstick to measure nanometers anyway:) as is your use of +/- 10 C. Thermometers accurate to tenths of a degree have existed for over 200 years. When measuring temperature trends repeatable accuracy is more important than absolute accuracy because you're measuring the change over time.
But seriously take a statistics class. The more measurements you have the better your accuracy.
Yeah, the GRACE system is seriously cool. Two satellites in the same orbit 137 miles apart with a microwave ranging system that can detect changes in distance between the two of 1 micron (human hair is about 50 microns in diameter). Gravity differences will tug first one then the other satellite as they pass over an area allowing scientists to derive mass changes in the ice sheet. Here's a article about it.
I was wrong about the sea level rise from Antarctic ice sheet loss. It's only about 0.4 mm/year right now but that's accelerating. There is plenty of the ice loss in Western Antarctica coming from south of the peninsula at the Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Ice Tongue and there is some loss in Eastern Antarctica too. The ice isn't melting so much as flowing into the sea faster thus thinning the ice sheet. The current ice age cycle theory is that temperature increases are started by Milankovich cycles and one of the major positive feedbacks is CO2 released from the oceans as they warm up. For more than the past million years atmospheric CO2 has cycled between 180 and 300 ppm until the past 100 years where it has shot up to 390 ppm.
I guess I believe the climate scientists when they say that CO2 is the single biggest factor in the warming that we've observed. I haven't seen anything I consider credible that refutes that. CO2 is also the factor we have the greatest control over (along with methane and some other minor GHGs like CFCs). The 90 ppm rise in atmospheric CO2 in the last 100 years is a rise that would take several thousand years in natural cycles. I don't see how the recent fast rise is not going to be disruptive to biosystems that are adapted to much slower changes in the past. You're right that humans are adaptable but it wouldn't surprise me if the population was under 5 billion by 2100. I think we'll see mass extinction over the next 100 years not just from the stress of global warming but other human disruption of natural systems such as over harvesting. It could get pretty ugly.
Climate defines the bounds within with weather and other natural variability operates. That natural variability can temporarily override the warming signal from CO2 but eventually it catches up.
If you wanted it to be easily readable you'll print 1 measurement per line. By my reckoning the minimum length for a printed record is over 30 characters, Station ID (6), date (10), time (8), temperature (5) plus spaces to make it readable. So maybe you could get 2 per line. But the original record probably includes things like barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, precipitation, humidity and who knows what else.
I expect the number of weather stations going back over 100 years is in the high 100's if not over 1000. 100 years ago is 1910 after all. There were probably well over 100 in the US alone at that time.
If the errors are randomly distributed on the bell curve then you can easily achieve a 0.01 C resolution with enough measurements. That's basic statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
It has been an interesting conversation and I debated replying but I have to say one thing.
The "GlacierGate" error was found and reported by a scientist who worked on the report. It was a simple typo and should have read 2350. The report should have been proofread better but steps are being taken to address that for the next IPCC report. Rejecting the whole AR4 report over 1 or even 10 minor errors out of tens of thousands of points is like getting an F on a test you scored 99.9% correct on. I'm sure since that error surfaced people have been pouring over the report trying to find others and if anything truly egregious had been found we would have heard about it by now.
You have no idea how climate modeling works, at least for the GCM's (General Circulation Models aka Global Climate Models). The models are independent of the data not calibrated by it. The models are built by combining the physical calculations of the various factors known to affect climate and if a discrepancy with the historical data is found they try to determine why and improve the physics of that particular issue which they then put back in to the model. It's not calibrating like zeroing a meter or something.
Of course climate models just model climate, not weather. Climate only describes the bounds of the weather system. Another way to look at it is that climate is the carrier signal that the weather rides on like the audio signal on a radio carrier wave.
How about ozone? Without the stratospheric ozone layer which absorbs 93-99% of the high energy ultra-violet light the surface would become pretty unlivable.
No, what scientists say if they say anything is the best way to control global warming it to stop emitting such large quantities of CO2. They leave the issue of complete government control to others.
It's never too late to do something. The more you do and the sooner you do it the better, easier and cheaper the result but as long as we keep spewing CO2 into the atmosphere it'll keep getting worse.
Go to the NOAA/NCDC web site to get their code. It's available. Go the the NASA/GISS web site for their data and the Model E code, one of the major GCM's. Read the published papers for methodology. It's mostly out there if you care to put in the work to examine it. There are links to lots of data and code on this page.
I think the specific thing you are referring to is the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper in Climate Research in 2003. It was a paper that should not have been published without major revisions. Among the criticisms of the paper they used precipitation proxies where they should have used temperature proxies and they took regional temperature changes as global changes. Half of the editorial staff resigned when the publisher wouldn't allow the chief editor to print a rebuttal of the paper. Even the publisher eventually admitted it should not have been published without revision. Like the editorial staff Phil Jones questioned why anyone would want to have their name associated with a journal that would publish such junk. Maybe that's why the journal went downhill.
The majority of sources cited in AR4 were peer reviewed (12900/18500 according to one {skeptic} source). The IPCC AR4 report has 3 sections.
Working Group I is about the physical science basis of climate change. I believe you'll find that nearly everything cited in the WG1 section is peer reviewed and anything that wasn't probably could have been.
WG II is about the impacts and our vulnerability to climate change. There are more non-peer reviewed references in this section but I'd be surprised if the peer reviewed cites didn't outnumber them still.
WG III is about mitigation, what we can do about it. By its very nature it has some political aspects to it and cited many government, NGO, and business sources as well as peer reviewed papers. This is where you will find most of the non-peer reviewed cites in the AR4 report.
Finally, a paper is not necessarily worthless just because it is not peer reviewed. I think you have to examine it on a case by case basis to determine its worth.
What may be catastrophic about AGW is not simply that it's occurring. As you note the Earth has gone through large climate changes before. The catastrophic part is that it looks like we'll see changes in 200 years that would take thousands of years during a natural climate shift. Natural systems aren't well adapted to handle that rapid of a change. The human race is almost totally dependent on many of those natural systems for its health and well being for the time being. Any disruption of those systems is likely to be disruptive to our civilization. We'll adapt I imagine but some of it probably won't be fun.
When you talk about the AR4's "devastating" projections are you taking into account the time frame? For instance it projects sea level rise of something like 0.5 meters by 2100. That's like 1/5 inch per year. (More recent projections however project 1-2 meters of SLR by 2100.) The change is slow on human time scales but it keeps going. More of the AR4 projections have been found to be conservative than overstated.
If I'm still around and functional in 20 years I'll buy you dinner in the restaurant of your choice just to celebrate that.
I'm not aware of any seriously bad science from Michael Mann. If you're referring to his original hockey stick graph it has been substantially borne out by any number subsequent studies using different data sets.
For once I'd like to see some real evidence of Mann's "persecution" of other sciences. And no, some comment in an email is not evidence by itself.
When someones opinion on global warming is based on their ideology rather than sound science I'm okay with calling it denial. There are honest skeptics out there that I was not referring to but they're not the ones making most of the noise.
You work with what you have. The temperature records they are working with have been collected over the past 150 years or so by hundreds of different entities around the world without any consideration of some of the things they're being used for now. It'd be great if we could go back and redo the observations but we can't. Of course the more recent the observations the better confidence we have in them especially since the 1950s.
Lots of raw data is available at the National Climate Data Center. Interestingly processing that raw data without making adjustments for the vagaries of the data collection process produces substantially the same answer as the processed data does.
Argh! Should be [I'm not referring to just "anyone".]
I'm not to "anyone". There are honest skeptics out there that I can respect but too many people's opposition to global warming is because the proposed remedies don't fit their political/economic/social ideology instead of having some real science to back themselves up. I'm comfortable with calling that denial. As the NAS letter says scientists face harassment that has little to do with refuting their science.
Ha! I knew someone would call me on that. It's an unfortunate error I make from time to time. I hope you noticed I spelled it correctly in the body.
You know the vast majority of data on climate, I'm sure over 95% of it, is freely available if you care to look for it. The small part of it that isn't freely available is not enough to make much difference one way or another.
+1 Insightful
Ok, but I'm old enough it's 50-50 whether I'll still be among the living in 20 years.
But you can play yourself. It's not enough though to just cherry pick one exceptional year, you have to consider something like at least a 10 year average compared to another 10 year average.
Too bad the denialosphere doesn't have to live up to the same standards of integrity that scientists have to.
I said it can temporarily override the warming signal. Lets talk about it in 20 years and see what you have to say.
Well, your example of a yardstick is ridiculous (and you should have used a meterstick to measure nanometers anyway :) as is your use of +/- 10 C. Thermometers accurate to tenths of a degree have existed for over 200 years. When measuring temperature trends repeatable accuracy is more important than absolute accuracy because you're measuring the change over time.
But seriously take a statistics class. The more measurements you have the better your accuracy.
Yeah, the GRACE system is seriously cool. Two satellites in the same orbit 137 miles apart with a microwave ranging system that can detect changes in distance between the two of 1 micron (human hair is about 50 microns in diameter). Gravity differences will tug first one then the other satellite as they pass over an area allowing scientists to derive mass changes in the ice sheet. Here's a article about it.
I was wrong about the sea level rise from Antarctic ice sheet loss. It's only about 0.4 mm/year right now but that's accelerating. There is plenty of the ice loss in Western Antarctica coming from south of the peninsula at the Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Ice Tongue and there is some loss in Eastern Antarctica too. The ice isn't melting so much as flowing into the sea faster thus thinning the ice sheet. The current ice age cycle theory is that temperature increases are started by Milankovich cycles and one of the major positive feedbacks is CO2 released from the oceans as they warm up. For more than the past million years atmospheric CO2 has cycled between 180 and 300 ppm until the past 100 years where it has shot up to 390 ppm.
I guess I believe the climate scientists when they say that CO2 is the single biggest factor in the warming that we've observed. I haven't seen anything I consider credible that refutes that. CO2 is also the factor we have the greatest control over (along with methane and some other minor GHGs like CFCs). The 90 ppm rise in atmospheric CO2 in the last 100 years is a rise that would take several thousand years in natural cycles. I don't see how the recent fast rise is not going to be disruptive to biosystems that are adapted to much slower changes in the past. You're right that humans are adaptable but it wouldn't surprise me if the population was under 5 billion by 2100. I think we'll see mass extinction over the next 100 years not just from the stress of global warming but other human disruption of natural systems such as over harvesting. It could get pretty ugly.
Climate defines the bounds within with weather and other natural variability operates. That natural variability can temporarily override the warming signal from CO2 but eventually it catches up.
If you wanted it to be easily readable you'll print 1 measurement per line. By my reckoning the minimum length for a printed record is over 30 characters, Station ID (6), date (10), time (8), temperature (5) plus spaces to make it readable. So maybe you could get 2 per line. But the original record probably includes things like barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, precipitation, humidity and who knows what else.
I expect the number of weather stations going back over 100 years is in the high 100's if not over 1000. 100 years ago is 1910 after all. There were probably well over 100 in the US alone at that time.
ClimateBalmer, I like it!
If the errors are randomly distributed on the bell curve then you can easily achieve a 0.01 C resolution with enough measurements. That's basic statistics.