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.
What this reads as is that climatologists weren't able to even use a thermometer properly in the last decade, and yet they were in the decades and centuries previous. It's like they're trying to make people not believe them.
No, what it reads as is there are systematic differences between two different methods* of measuring ocean surface water temperatures. If there are systematic difference then you can make adjustments to one or the other methods observations to bring the two series in line with each other.
*Measuring the temperature in ship cooling water intakes and on buoys.
We finished emerging from the most recent glacial period about 8,000 years ago. Since around 6,000 years ago the Earth has been on a slight cooling trend and Milankovitch Cycles are trending for continued cooling. Other known factors in natural climate forcing have shown no strong trends. The recent spike in temperatures is unexpected given all we know about natural climate forcing. There's been a 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 due to human emissions. Everything we know about physics points to that being the primary cause of the warming.
2-3 feet is a low estimate by 2100. Recent sea level rise has exceeded the model used to calculate that estimate by about 50%.
I understand that. That's why I said "The IPCC projections are largely thought by the scientists in the field to be very conservative estimates."
And beyond that the last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea level was some 60 or 70 feet higher than they are now. It may well be that much sea level rise is already baked in and it's just a matter of how much time it takes to get there. Less than 500 years I'd imagine.
Wow, the conspiracy must really be strong to co-opt every granting institution in the world and keep it together for over 3 decades without anyone discovering the deception. If they're really that good you might as well give up and go along with the program because you'll never defeat them./snark
The understanding is right, its just that there is a meme going around that CO2 is a greenhouse gas in a vacuum means it is a GHG in our atmospere (sic).
Huh!?!?!? Talk about blowing my mind. How can any gas exist in a vacuum? I presume you meant "in a laboratory".
The heat capacity of CO2 has nothing to do with its radiative absorption characteristics which is what traps the heat. Since over 70% of the planet is covered by water humans can do essentially nothing to directly affect the amount of it in the atmosphere. Since water vapor is a condensing gas at normal Earth conditions the level of water vapor is controlled by temperature and any excess water in the atmosphere simply precipitates out in short order.
Ever notice how easily people like you accept results that fit your narrative without skepticism? I doubt you have a clue about how complex it is to derive temperatures from satellite measurements of microwave emissions of oxygen in the atmosphere.
So why do all temperature "corrections" change data in ways that support AGW?
Do you care to back that up with some actual evidence. Or is it just that the only corrections you hear about are the ones that get bandied about in the denialosphere?
One think you should know is that the long term warming trend calculated from raw data is greater than the warming trend calculated from adjusted data so the net result of the adjustments is less global warming.
Climate Change is happening. It has always happened. It's nature. There's nothing we can do about it except adjust to meet the new demands.
The argument that climate change is always happening is a truism but akin to magical thinking. Climate change is a physical phenomenon and therefore always has physical causes. The whole point of science (not just climate science but all physical sciences) is to understand the physical world we live in. Essentially you're saying there's no point in studying climate and using that knowledge to our advantage. That's a pretty defeatist attitude if you ask me.
You may remember when this tactic was tried with the ozone hole. As the hole expended the Greens intoned that even if we repented and stopped using air conditioning immediately, we would fry for generations to come. What actually happened was that we made a minor change in the formulation of our refrigerants, the hole closed up, and was never heard from again. We will never know whether that was correlation or causation.
Jesus! The causal link between CFC's and ozone depletion is well established in science. The ozone hole is still there, it's just quit getting worse. It won't be until the 2nd half of this century before the CFC's in the atmosphere are reduced enough for the ozone layer to get back to where it was in the first half of the 20th century. If you're that misinformed about ozone why would we believe anything you have to say about global warming?
Planting trees is a good thing and helps a little but don't think it's going to cure the problem. By burning coal we're burning the sequestered carbon accumulated by trees over millions of years so it would take a similar amount of time for trees to take it back down.
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.
Yes, there is a certain amount of change already built in to the changes we've wrought but that doesn't mean we can't make it even worse in the future. It's not a binary problem. As long as CO2 keeps increasing the ultimate point we arrive at will be that much worse. Whatever we think about doing the first thing should be to stop making it worse.
The satellite temp record (also with no hokey adjustments to create warming like GISS) also shows NO warming for the past 15-20 years.
Do you have any idea of the amount of processing required to convert the measurements of microwave emissions of O2 in the atmosphere by satellites to temperatures? They have to account for new satellites replacing old ones, orbital variations, sensor degradation, high altitude land and atmospheric water vapor that all affect the measurements. There is far more processing to produce satellite temperature measurements than there is for surface temperatures.
Now AGW on the other hand still depends mostly on flawed/incomplete computer models, and very imperfect (oftentimes wildly inaccurate) actual measurements taken over a very short timespan of maybe 150 years or so (that is, very short relative to the speed of climate change in general).
No, what AGW depends on is physics and the relationship between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and temperature discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s. Everything since then is filling in the details.
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.)
If you're going to use both temperature measurements from ship cooling water intakes and from buoys and there are systematic differences between them then you have to make adjustments to one or the other so you can compare them. The choice of which to adjust is somewhat arbitrary. It's not the actual temperature they care about so much as how it's changing over time and either way yields the same trend.
No one's going to be caught by surprise except when a storm surge gets them because higher sea level puts them in the zone where they weren't before. Nevertheless 5 feet of rise would displace a lot of people around the world. What does South Florida look like with 5 feet of SLR?
The section on projections of sea level rise starts on page 1179 with references for the citations at the end of the chapter. The IPCC projections are largely thought by the scientists in the field to be very conservative estimates.
There were no adjustments to fit a model. Two different methods of measuring sea surface temperatures produced results that were consistently and systematically different from each other so in order to use all if the data you adjust one of them by the difference between the two methods. Since you care about the trend in temperatures it doesn't matter which side you adjust, the trend remains the same.
It's not really a calibration error but a systematic difference in temperatures measured in ship's engine cooling water intakes vs. buoys. In order to use both sets of information together you have to adjust one or the other sets of measurements so they match up with each other. Since in this case we're more interested in the change in temperature than what the temperature is in an absolute sense it doesn't matter which you adjust, the trend will be the same.
You do realize that it's unlikely that anyone alive now will have to move due to rising sea levels?
What a ridiculous statement. Some have already been forced to move because of rising sea levels. It may be so few so far that you can ignore them but with 2-3 feet of sea level rise expected by 2100 there are plenty of people alive today who will be alive then.
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.
The issue is not the temperature (not much at least) but how fast it's changing. If the change we are currently seeing was spread out over 2,000 or 3,000 years instead of 2 or 3 centuries it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Everything would have time to adjust at a more normal pace. The closest analog to the current increase in atmospheric carbon we've found is the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) and the current increase in atmospheric carbon is 10-100 times faster than it was back then.
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.
The problem with that is in the long run they're shooting themselves in the foot. The strength of the US economy is in a strong middle class that is able to spend money. 70% of the US economy is consumer spending and the bulk of that is by the middle class. How can they expect the economy to remain strong if people don't have the money to spend in to it.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
What this reads as is that climatologists weren't able to even use a thermometer properly in the last decade, and yet they were in the decades and centuries previous. It's like they're trying to make people not believe them.
No, what it reads as is there are systematic differences between two different methods* of measuring ocean surface water temperatures. If there are systematic difference then you can make adjustments to one or the other methods observations to bring the two series in line with each other.
*Measuring the temperature in ship cooling water intakes and on buoys.
We finished emerging from the most recent glacial period about 8,000 years ago. Since around 6,000 years ago the Earth has been on a slight cooling trend and Milankovitch Cycles are trending for continued cooling. Other known factors in natural climate forcing have shown no strong trends. The recent spike in temperatures is unexpected given all we know about natural climate forcing. There's been a 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 due to human emissions. Everything we know about physics points to that being the primary cause of the warming.
You got #4 wrong because they didn't adjust the ship temperature numbers down at all, just the buoy numbers up.
2-3 feet is a low estimate by 2100. Recent sea level rise has exceeded the model used to calculate that estimate by about 50%.
I understand that. That's why I said "The IPCC projections are largely thought by the scientists in the field to be very conservative estimates."
And beyond that the last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea level was some 60 or 70 feet higher than they are now. It may well be that much sea level rise is already baked in and it's just a matter of how much time it takes to get there. Less than 500 years I'd imagine.
Wow, the conspiracy must really be strong to co-opt every granting institution in the world and keep it together for over 3 decades without anyone discovering the deception. If they're really that good you might as well give up and go along with the program because you'll never defeat them. /snark
The understanding is right, its just that there is a meme going around that CO2 is a greenhouse gas in a vacuum means it is a GHG in our atmospere (sic).
Huh!?!?!? Talk about blowing my mind. How can any gas exist in a vacuum? I presume you meant "in a laboratory".
The heat capacity of CO2 has nothing to do with its radiative absorption characteristics which is what traps the heat. Since over 70% of the planet is covered by water humans can do essentially nothing to directly affect the amount of it in the atmosphere. Since water vapor is a condensing gas at normal Earth conditions the level of water vapor is controlled by temperature and any excess water in the atmosphere simply precipitates out in short order.
Ever notice how easily people like you accept results that fit your narrative without skepticism? I doubt you have a clue about how complex it is to derive temperatures from satellite measurements of microwave emissions of oxygen in the atmosphere.
So why do all temperature "corrections" change data in ways that support AGW?
Do you care to back that up with some actual evidence. Or is it just that the only corrections you hear about are the ones that get bandied about in the denialosphere?
One think you should know is that the long term warming trend calculated from raw data is greater than the warming trend calculated from adjusted data so the net result of the adjustments is less global warming.
Climate Change is happening. It has always happened. It's nature. There's nothing we can do about it except adjust to meet the new demands.
The argument that climate change is always happening is a truism but akin to magical thinking. Climate change is a physical phenomenon and therefore always has physical causes. The whole point of science (not just climate science but all physical sciences) is to understand the physical world we live in. Essentially you're saying there's no point in studying climate and using that knowledge to our advantage. That's a pretty defeatist attitude if you ask me.
You may remember when this tactic was tried with the ozone hole. As the hole expended the Greens intoned that even if we repented and stopped using air conditioning immediately, we would fry for generations to come. What actually happened was that we made a minor change in the formulation of our refrigerants, the hole closed up, and was never heard from again. We will never know whether that was correlation or causation.
Jesus! The causal link between CFC's and ozone depletion is well established in science. The ozone hole is still there, it's just quit getting worse. It won't be until the 2nd half of this century before the CFC's in the atmosphere are reduced enough for the ozone layer to get back to where it was in the first half of the 20th century. If you're that misinformed about ozone why would we believe anything you have to say about global warming?
Planting trees is a good thing and helps a little but don't think it's going to cure the problem. By burning coal we're burning the sequestered carbon accumulated by trees over millions of years so it would take a similar amount of time for trees to take it back down.
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.
Yes, there is a certain amount of change already built in to the changes we've wrought but that doesn't mean we can't make it even worse in the future. It's not a binary problem. As long as CO2 keeps increasing the ultimate point we arrive at will be that much worse. Whatever we think about doing the first thing should be to stop making it worse.
The satellite temp record (also with no hokey adjustments to create warming like GISS) also shows NO warming for the past 15-20 years.
Do you have any idea of the amount of processing required to convert the measurements of microwave emissions of O2 in the atmosphere by satellites to temperatures? They have to account for new satellites replacing old ones, orbital variations, sensor degradation, high altitude land and atmospheric water vapor that all affect the measurements. There is far more processing to produce satellite temperature measurements than there is for surface temperatures.
Now AGW on the other hand still depends mostly on flawed/incomplete computer models, and very imperfect (oftentimes wildly inaccurate) actual measurements taken over a very short timespan of maybe 150 years or so (that is, very short relative to the speed of climate change in general).
No, what AGW depends on is physics and the relationship between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and temperature discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s. Everything since then is filling in the details.
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.
If you're going to use both temperature measurements from ship cooling water intakes and from buoys and there are systematic differences between them then you have to make adjustments to one or the other so you can compare them. The choice of which to adjust is somewhat arbitrary. It's not the actual temperature they care about so much as how it's changing over time and either way yields the same trend.
No one's going to be caught by surprise except when a storm surge gets them because higher sea level puts them in the zone where they weren't before. Nevertheless 5 feet of rise would displace a lot of people around the world. What does South Florida look like with 5 feet of SLR?
Here you go:
IPCC AR5 WG1 - Chapter 13: Sea Level Change [PDF]
The section on projections of sea level rise starts on page 1179 with references for the citations at the end of the chapter. The IPCC projections are largely thought by the scientists in the field to be very conservative estimates.
There were no adjustments to fit a model. Two different methods of measuring sea surface temperatures produced results that were consistently and systematically different from each other so in order to use all if the data you adjust one of them by the difference between the two methods. Since you care about the trend in temperatures it doesn't matter which side you adjust, the trend remains the same.
It's not really a calibration error but a systematic difference in temperatures measured in ship's engine cooling water intakes vs. buoys. In order to use both sets of information together you have to adjust one or the other sets of measurements so they match up with each other. Since in this case we're more interested in the change in temperature than what the temperature is in an absolute sense it doesn't matter which you adjust, the trend will be the same.
You do realize that it's unlikely that anyone alive now will have to move due to rising sea levels?
What a ridiculous statement. Some have already been forced to move because of rising sea levels. It may be so few so far that you can ignore them but with 2-3 feet of sea level rise expected by 2100 there are plenty of people alive today who will be alive then.
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.
The issue is not the temperature (not much at least) but how fast it's changing. If the change we are currently seeing was spread out over 2,000 or 3,000 years instead of 2 or 3 centuries it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Everything would have time to adjust at a more normal pace. The closest analog to the current increase in atmospheric carbon we've found is the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) and the current increase in atmospheric carbon is 10-100 times faster than it was back then.
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.
The problem with that is in the long run they're shooting themselves in the foot. The strength of the US economy is in a strong middle class that is able to spend money. 70% of the US economy is consumer spending and the bulk of that is by the middle class. How can they expect the economy to remain strong if people don't have the money to spend in to it.