I'm from the mid-Atlantic and the hockey teams I've heard about only play 82 games in a season
So hockey teams don't practice, and there's only one team per building, and that's all the rink is ever used for? I've never played (or even watched) hockey, but that sounds strange.
After some searching, I came up with this list of supposedly the ten oldest jokes, as compiled by a University of Wolverhampton study commissioned by the TV channel "Dave":
------- 1. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap (1900 BC - 1600 BC Sumerian Proverb Collection 1.12-1.13)
2. How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish (An abridged version first found in 1600 BC on the Westcar Papryus)
3. Three ox drivers from Adab were thirsty: one owned the ox, the other owned the cow and the other owned the wagon's load. The owner of the ox refused to get water because he feared his ox would be eaten by a lion; the owner of the cow refused because he thought his cow might wander off into the desert; the owner of the wagon refused because he feared his load would be stolen. So they all went. In their absence the ox made love to the cow which gave birth to a calf which ate the wagon's load. Problem: Who owns the calf?! (1200 BC)
4. A woman who was blind in one eye has been married to a man for 20 years. When he found another woman he said to her, "I shall divorce you because you are said to be blind in one eye." And she answered him: "Have you just discovered that after 20 years of marriage!?" (Egyptian circa 1100 BC)
5. Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his real name is nobody. When Odysseus instructs his men to attack the Cyclops, the Cyclops shouts: "Help, nobody is attacking me!" No one comes to help. (Homer. The Odyssey 800 BC)
6. Question: What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon and three at evening? Answer: Man. He goes on all fours as a baby, on two feet as a man and uses a cane in old age (Appears in Oedipus Tyrannus and first performed in 429 BC)
7. Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey - his purse is what restrains him (Egyptian, Ptolemaic Period 304 BC - 30 BC)
8. Augustus was touring his Empire and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. Intrigued he asked: "Was your mother at one time in service at the Palace?" "No your Highness," he replied, "but my father was." (Credited to the Emporer Augustus 63 BC - 29 AD)
9. Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died." (Dated to the Philogelos 4th/5th Century AD)
10. Asked by the court barber how he wanted his hair cut, the king replied: "In silence." (Collected in the Philogelos or "Laughter-Lover" the oldest extant jest book and compiled in the 4th/5th Century AD) -------
I suspect that #2 is actually a double entendre, since "spearing fish" was an Egyptian euphemism for having sex (the word for "to spear" also means "impregnate", while the word for "throwstick" also means "to beget". The Nile marshes themselves were considered a symbol of fertility because of an association with Hathor.
The oldest joke from Britain was:
"What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? Answer: A key."
Sure, there's a lot of garbage on YouTube. But they're also a lot of great stuff. I've been introduced to more great music on YouTube than anywhere else lately... and I don't spend much time on YouTube. First it was Sigur Ros (incredible Icelandic ambient), then it was The Timeout Drawer ("space rock" with a slow build to a high crescendo), and lately Dean DiMarzo -- probably one of the most musically-talented high schoolers I've ever seen, a kid who does his own guitar, keyboard, drums, vocals, and mixing. Here he is embarrassing the parents of other kids while playing Boehmian Rhapsody in his high school band, here he does a drum cover of Daft Punk, and here's him shredding a Halo cover.
Well, if you want to disregard what the Wegman Report says, that's up to you.
Oh, god, don't get me started on the Wegman Report. Let's start by pointing out that the NRC and the NAS analyzed the Mann paper and confirmed it, and that there have been numerous reconstructions since Mann et al, all of which show the same general shape -- but using different data (including, now, boreholes, which are a much less opaque science than dendrochronology). No fewer than four papers rebutted McIntyre and McKitrick, and when they tried to publish a counter to some of their criticism, they failed to pass peer-review.
Republican representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield, two prominent global warming deniers, arranged the Wegman report. They picked Peter Spencer, another political denier, to arrange the process. The National Academies of Sciences itself offered to conduct an independent investigation, but they rejected this because they wouldn't have enough control over the process. Actual climate scientists were banned from the process. McIntyre remained in contact with Wegman throughout the entire process of drafting conclusions, while Mann was not, automatically biasing the outcome -- something that McIntyre tried to keep secret for years, but was only recently exposed. The committee *picked its own peer reviewers*. I could go on and on. When the National Academies of Science saw how it was being conducted, they sent a letter expressing their concerns. It was promptly ignored. They ultimately launched their own investigation.
But it's all a moot point, since McIntyre has widely been rebutted in the peer-reviewed literature since, and hasn't been able to pass peer-review in response, as well as different lines for historical climate reconstruction coming up with the same curve.
This is only true if there are no adjustments made to the temperature reading AND the "cooler" temperature is greater than the heating effect. If these aren't true, then obviously it would depend on the amount of the adjustment and amount of error in the reading.
Wait, so what's your argument then? Adjusted, the warming is shown. Unadjusted, the warming is shown. Are you arguing that there should be adjustment, but just not the ones currently used?
You know very well that the # wasn't significant in the argument. It's fine to eliminate grossly incorrect readings this way. It's another thing entirely to adjust a good reading because the surrounding stations have more error.
Since when is that happening?
You have a remarkable confidence that this algorithm is very accurate. You can read the conclusion of here
Pass peer review on that or it's worthless. Everyone *else* has to pass peer-review. No exception for critics.
Even comparing calm/windy days will be influenced by the location of the unit (walls close by) and topological influences.
The heat island effect extends to the upper troposphere. Those are some giant walls. And, FYI, there has been more lower tropospheric warming than there has been surface warming, which doesn't fit the heat island explanation at all.
Proof by Innuendo. There's science for you. Are you actually trying to argue that algorithms are better than calibration?
Red herring. Of course perfect, flawless calibration is ideal. But we live in the real world where budgets and practicality mean that's not an option. So you do the best that you can with the data that you have.
If you assume all this is due to CO2 (ie there is no solar forcing)
Both of those are untrue. First off, there's *always* solar forcing. Did you mean *changes* in solar forcing? They're intensely studied, too. Secondly, CO2 is just one of a number of GHGs, and there are a lot of non-GHG factors considered as well, everything from carbon-black to contrails. Third, assume nothing; CO2 forcing is calculated mathematically, experimentally, and historic planetary CO2 responses are studied as well.
You do realize how small the amplitude of the PDO is, right? Not Even Close. And most of the effects of the PDO is chaotic rather than cyclic.
In the 1940's the PDO shifted from warm to cool(just like it did in the past couple years) and at the time the Arctic ice was thin enough to allow shipping through the area, AND we had record sizes of the Antarctic ice shelves breaking off... Then it got cold...again..
Between the 1940s and present -- two warm phases -- the temperature (including Pacific SSTs) has risen greatly. So attempts to blame this on the PDO are transparently false.
That'd be less humorous/horrifying if the climatologists didn't recently admit they have indeed been seeing a cooling trend since 2000; note, not "cooler weather" but statistically a cooling *trend*.
What climatologists are you talking about? Anyone can run the numbers for themselves and see that's not the case. The average *rate of temperature rise* has dropped, and that is due to a decline of water vapor -- but that's *stratospheric* water vapor, not tropospheric.
Cost to maintain a station: zero or near-zero dollars. Cost to tear down a station: nonzero
Answer above. It costs virtually nothing to keep it, but sending out a team to tear it down does cost money. And the data from it isn't automatically worthless; it's just not generally used or is corrected for. In general, the economic course of action is to simply add new stations rather than replace old ones. Eventually the worst ones do come down, but it's not something that gets rushed.
Whatever you do don't automatically throw away data claiming that it's junk and should be ignored.
So bad data should be included? Or should humans manually pick what's good or bad? No, what is used is peer-reviewed algorithms that are validated six ways from Sunday by comparing how the stations perform under all kinds of different conditions vs. when those conditions don't occur, comparing data between stations with different hardware, different enclosure types, etc to see if there are any systematic biases. Whenever a new bias is encountered, it is compensated for. This is how the peer-review process is supposed to work. But so many people insist on politicizing this damned issue. Quantum physicists don't have to deal with this crap. But everyone and their brother fancies themselves an amateur climatologist.
The sort of warming being talked about only decreases sub-freezing temperatures by a week or two in the near term. There's still plenty of freezing weather (except in tropical and borderline-subtropical regions). But there's a lot more moisture.
What is your point? That a meteorologist or a computer programmer cannot in any circumstances prove a climatologist wrong? They can't say the the use of statistics in the model is flawed, or there is a coding error in the model? I didn't realize that climatologists were born perfect.
This is one of the dumber statements I've seen in this discussion. Suppose you have 4 stations in a geographic area. 2 are out in the middle of fields way away from any development (and been this way for the last 80+ years) and 2 right next to human development. Do you not see a) which two (all other things being equal) of the 4 stations are going to give you better temperature data b) what the net effect of deleting/algorithmically adjusting the data from the data from the fields is going to be?
1) Here's where naive approaches like yours fail. The stations out in the middle of fields tend to be different, more expensive kinds of sensors than the ones close to human settlement. The cheaper ones tend to report *cooler* temperatures than the more expensive, standalone sensors. So the "urban" stations actually show *less* global warming if averaged in a naive approach.
2) There's a *lot* more than 4 stations in most regions which have correlated temperature anomalies. In the US, generally dozens.
3) The heat island effect *is* cancelled algorithmically, and this is verified by, among other things, comparing calm and windy days.
For something that is supposedly "validated", we are seeing an awful lot of instances of incorrect usage.
Yes, by people like Watts.
What "trends" are you talking about? Like the trend line of 1995-2009 (-0.12C per decade - yes, that's a minus - from Phil Jones no less)? Or are you talking about the one since 1850?
3) Phil Jones is one climate scientist among several thousand. He is not the god of climate science.
4) Wrong. Jones says that there is a +0.12C warming trend for that time, but it's not long enough to be statistically significant. And he's right. It's idiotic how so many people keep trying to read trends into a couple years of extremely noisy data. El Nino in particular adds a *lot* of short-term noise. The "-0.12 trend" is for 2002 to present, which is an even shorter time period and even less statistically significant -- as Jones points out.
Are you saying a station next to a heat pump discharge is going to give you accurate readings?
1) Which is why you *algorithmically eliminiate bad stations*. The problem is that you criticize them when you think that they're using said stations, but also criticize them when they mathematically eliminate them. It's a no-win situation that you're trying to put them in.
2) The "bad" stations tend to show *less* warming than the good stations. So "whoops" on your part.
you do not think the urban heat island effect is real?
1) The urban heat island effect is algorithmically cancelled, and the cancellation verified by, among other things, comparing windy days to calm days.
2) There exists a closely monitored "reference network" for a reason, you know.
Right. Because when I want to find out the current state of science, I turn to the Heartland Institute and the "usual suspects" among the 3% of climate scientists that disagree with AGW who they paid to write it.
Actually, there's a lot of self-amplifying chaotic processes involved... which is one of the reasons we do such a poor job at modeling hurricanes. Speaking of hurricanes, a single strong hurricane can do a tremendous amount of ocean mixing and heat transfer on its own.
Climatology has about as much overlap with biology and geology as it does with meteorology. Meteorologists start at current and look into the future until the locations, intensities, etc of various systems ceases to reliably match up. Climatologists start at any point in time (past or present) and extend the trends past the chaos to compile averages of events, not when said specific events will occur. Meteorologists don't care about the "why". They don't care why the level of insolation is what it is, why the current average level of water vapor is 5% higher than it was in the 1970s, etc; a meteorologist would never even dream of looking at sunspot levels in their forecast, or how the current level of galactic cosmic radiation is affecting our climate. These sorts of things are critical to climatology. The fact that decreased rainfall in China would mean increased dust levels over the Pacific which would seed greater algal growth which would lower CO2 levels which would alter temperatures in the US doesn't even begin to factor into the equation to a meteorologist. But that sort of thing is very important to climatologists. Meteorological models are greatly simplified because of this; climatologists don't use anything like the GFS. Meteorologists wouldn't dream of looking at tree rings, or ice cores, or boreholes. I could keep on going.
He won the Peace Prize, not a Nobel Prize in a science. Once again, it's the science and the views of scientists in the field that we care about. What is hard for you to understand about this?
I think he's trying to claim that they don't rely on first principles, which is complete nonsense. Actually, what's most notable about the models is how *few* parameters there are. Very little is dealt with statistically -- primarily cloud formation, as we still don't have a good handle on it. Cloud formation easily has the biggest error bars of all feedbacks -- although even the 95th percentile case is still well under the GHG forcing levels.
getting all bitter and attacking anyone that questions global warming by calling them "deniers"
They are deniers. They deny AGW. A person who denies something, in English, is a "denier".
and quoting Al Gores fantasy film isn't going to get you any credability.
Wow, you really *are* obsessed with Gore, that whenever anyone mentions the word "inconvenient", that means that their entire post is really cribbed from Al Gore and therefore invalid. Just... wow.
the people publishing the peer reviewed articles won't publish anything anti global warming.
Right -- it's a giant conspiracy, and the most prestigious scientific journals on the planet (Science, Nature, etc) are all in on it. Can you see why it's hard to take you people seriously?
climate gate you've got evidence that "peers" are in fact pushing an agenda of their own and actively seeking to derail any descenting views.
What about SwiftHack -- for thinking McIntyre and McKitrick was crap? Sorry, but almost the entire climate science community thinks that, and that it never should have been published. They're just generally more tactful when they think what they say is going to be public. The papers' conclusions were the result of selectively hand-narrowing down the datasets to only ones that will give you a straight line. The red noise claim is easily demonstrable nonsense.
Yeah, I've heard it. It is said by idiots who don't know anything about weather.
Read Changnon et al, 2006. 61-80% of major (over 6") snow events in the US occurred in warmer-than-average years, among other things. Warmer weather in temperate, subarctic, and arctic climates leads to more snow. It only leads to less snow in tropical climates and borderline-subtropical climates.
There is no temperature in which it's "impossible" to snow. But it does become decreasingly likely as temperatures fall. Ever looked at a precipitation map of Antarctica? Most of the continent is a desert. Only the coastal areas and peninsula get relevant snowfall; the air just can't hold enough moisture for it to snow much inland.
1) How did the IPCC come into this? We were discussing how the different peer-reviewed temperature datasets are built up. Oh, that's right, you wanted to change the subject to whatever talking points you had handy.
2) "wasn't even derived from a single fact" -- Yes, it was. The New Scientist got the digits reversed. It was a typo that got spread. Saying that it "wasn't even derived from a single fact" is false; it was derived from the date of 2350.
3) It wasn't an "off-the-cuff number". It was a number from an upcoming paper.
4) "IPCC trusts WWF" -- first off, the IPCC explicitly *is* allowed to use industry, NGO, and governmental sources, not just peer-reviewed sources. This is typically only done in WG2 and WG3, which, contrary to how this is being played, are *not* about the science of global warming. WG1 is about the science of global warming, and is much more heavily reviewed. WG2 is basically a news report, and WG3 is how to avert AGW. Over, even in WG2 and WG3, the overwhelming percent of cites are peer-reviewed papers. If you want to attack the science of AGW, you need to attack WG1. And furthermore...
5) the complaints are about a handful of places in a *three thousand page report*. And we're not talking about a handful of *pages* in a 3,000 page report; just a handful of *claims* (there are generally a couple dozen claims per page). So, it's your turn: write a 3,000 page report with dozens of claims per page without a single error, *then* complain to me about a lack of perfection. If you want to show that the IPCC report (let alone WG1, if you want to attack the science rather than the news) is unreliable, you're going to need a *much* greater error rate than ~0.003%.
Wow, really? The oil industry is "non-committal"? You realize that they switched from "opposed" to "non-committal" a couple years ago, right?
Plus, they're geologists.
American Association of State Climatologists
One, state climatologists are political appointees. Two, the organization has no current statement. Three, their last statement was from 2001, and barely counts as non-committal.
American Geological Institute
I have trouble seeing this as "non-committal": "The American Geological Institute (AGI) strongly supports education concerning the scientific evidence of past climate change, the potential for future climate change due to the current building of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and the policy options available. Understanding the interactions between the solid Earth, the oceans, the biosphere, and the atmosphere both in the present and over time is critical for accurately analyzing and predicting global climate change due to natural processes and possible human influences."
Plus, they're geologists.
American Institute of Professional Geologists
A tiny organization of geologists (only 5,500 members -- compare to over 100k for the American Geological Institute).
Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences
They're not taking an official position, but the statement is pretty clear on where they stand: "We contribute to the global problem of changing climate by our emissions of greenhouse gases - especially carbon dioxide - from industrial processes. A warming Earth has significant problems for Canada - instability in agricultural productivity, sinking of northern infrastructrure into melting permafrost, greater vulnerability of low-lying coastlines to storms. While the Canadian Geoscience Council is not at this time taking a particular position specifically on the issue of global warming, the Council is establishing a position on the use of geological sinks to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2."
Plus, they're geologists.
Sorry, but if that's the best you can do, why even bother? You clearly got those entries from here, but didn't bother to mention how dwarfed they were by those who support AGW -- both in number and in scale of organizations and organizational prestige.
So then your sources are a Russian think tank (who, by the way, tried to publish papers on their claims, but failed to pass peer-review on them), and now a meteorologist (*very* different from a climatologist) and a computer programmer? Really?
Here's why the idiots who push these "omitting stations" claims can't pass peer-review on them: they're *supposed* to omit stations. It's not done manually; it's done algorithmically. The primary reason for this is yet another thing that the deniers fault them for, without realizing that their two attacks are in direct contradiciton with one another: that a lot of the stations are bad. So what they do is first look for regional trends. A heat wave hitting NYC will also tend to hit Philadelphia, but not Los Angeles. So you find the correlation in temperature anomalies between stations. You then have it look for individual stations that buck the trend. You also have it look for individual stations that suddenly experience a persistent discontinuity. Stations with problems are automatically either corrected for or eliminated, so long as each region that shows consistent correlated temperatures has representative stations. The results of this are then validated by a number of subsequent papers. For example, urban heat island effect elimination is demonstrated by comparing trends on windy days with those on calm days (heat island effect is diminished on windy days).
Additionally, there are a few "inconvenient" facts for the people who push these arguments. One, the same trends show up when you just dumb-average all stations, or just rural stations, or just urban stations. Even more inconvenient is that the stations that Watts' team of deniers flags as "bad" show *more* warming than those that he flags as "good". Why? Because the "bad" stations tend to be located near human settlement, and are generally a cheaper type of sensor than the fully-standalone ones that tend to be in "good" locations. The cheaper sensors have a small tendency to report cooler temperatures than the better, standalone ones.
I swear, I'll never understand your obsession with Gore. It's the views of ~97% of climate scientists that we care about. Gore's opinions have no more bearing on the science than Christopher Monckton's or Michael Crichton's do.
Last year the climatologists were touting their predictions that washington DC would never see snow again.
Yes, I remember those climatologists -- if I remember right, they were Patrick McDoesntexist and Jonathan Strawman.
Since the beginning, there has been a wide recognition that winters will get shorter but wetter (for example, National Assessment Synthesis Team, 2001). Atmospheric moisture has increased over 5% since 1970, corresponding with warmer seas, as forecast by the models. Ever heard the phrase "too cold to snow"? Most snow, especially most large snowstorms occurs in warmer weather (Changnon et al, 2006). This is combined with the fact that storm tracks are generally shifting northward (also as forecast by the models).
Seriously -- in your world, is it not global warming unless Winter Ceases To Exist? I mean, really?
Actually the language was to prevent Congress from enacting any laws which favored one religion over another, so as long as all religions get the same tax exemptions then your statement is ignorant.
So one should be able to form an atheist organization and launch tax-exempt political fundraising and campaigning, in your view?
Which is more likely: that a singularity just sprang into existence, or that an infinitely more complex deity sprang into existence then created the world?
Personally, I subscribe to the Anthropic Principle. In particular, if all possible universes exist, we will come to exist and perceive only a universe which is compatible with our coming to exist.
I wonder what the percentage was back when Bush was president
I don't know the final tally, but as of 2005 during the "nuclear option" threat, the Democrats had confirmed 208 of Bush's judicial nominees and filibustered 10.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm from the mid-Atlantic and the hockey teams I've heard about only play 82 games in a season
So hockey teams don't practice, and there's only one team per building, and that's all the rink is ever used for? I've never played (or even watched) hockey, but that sounds strange.
If you don't like ambient or space rock, why did you click the links? I took care to label the genres.
After some searching, I came up with this list of supposedly the ten oldest jokes, as compiled by a University of Wolverhampton study commissioned by the TV channel "Dave":
-------
1. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap (1900 BC - 1600 BC Sumerian Proverb Collection 1.12-1.13)
2. How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish (An abridged version first found in 1600 BC on the Westcar Papryus)
3. Three ox drivers from Adab were thirsty: one owned the ox, the other owned the cow and the other owned the wagon's load. The owner of the ox refused to get water because he feared his ox would be eaten by a lion; the owner of the cow refused because he thought his cow might wander off into the desert; the owner of the wagon refused because he feared his load would be stolen. So they all went. In their absence the ox made love to the cow which gave birth to a calf which ate the wagon's load. Problem: Who owns the calf?! (1200 BC)
4. A woman who was blind in one eye has been married to a man for 20 years. When he found another woman he said to her, "I shall divorce you because you are said to be blind in one eye." And she answered him: "Have you just discovered that after 20 years of marriage!?" (Egyptian circa 1100 BC)
5. Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his real name is nobody. When Odysseus instructs his men to attack the Cyclops, the Cyclops shouts: "Help, nobody is attacking me!" No one comes to help. (Homer. The Odyssey 800 BC)
6. Question: What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon and three at evening? Answer: Man. He goes on all fours as a baby, on two feet as a man and uses a cane in old age (Appears in Oedipus Tyrannus and first performed in 429 BC)
7. Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey - his purse is what restrains him (Egyptian, Ptolemaic Period 304 BC - 30 BC)
8. Augustus was touring his Empire and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. Intrigued he asked: "Was your mother at one time in service at the Palace?" "No your Highness," he replied, "but my father was." (Credited to the Emporer Augustus 63 BC - 29 AD)
9. Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died." (Dated to the Philogelos 4th /5th Century AD)
10. Asked by the court barber how he wanted his hair cut, the king replied: "In silence." (Collected in the Philogelos or "Laughter-Lover" the oldest extant jest book and compiled in the 4th/5th Century AD)
-------
I suspect that #2 is actually a double entendre, since "spearing fish" was an Egyptian euphemism for having sex (the word for "to spear" also means "impregnate", while the word for "throwstick" also means "to beget". The Nile marshes themselves were considered a symbol of fertility because of an association with Hathor.
The oldest joke from Britain was:
"What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? Answer: A key."
Sure, there's a lot of garbage on YouTube. But they're also a lot of great stuff. I've been introduced to more great music on YouTube than anywhere else lately... and I don't spend much time on YouTube. First it was Sigur Ros (incredible Icelandic ambient), then it was The Timeout Drawer ("space rock" with a slow build to a high crescendo), and lately Dean DiMarzo -- probably one of the most musically-talented high schoolers I've ever seen, a kid who does his own guitar, keyboard, drums, vocals, and mixing. Here he is embarrassing the parents of other kids while playing Boehmian Rhapsody in his high school band, here he does a drum cover of Daft Punk, and here's him shredding a Halo cover.
Well, if you want to disregard what the Wegman Report says, that's up to you.
Oh, god, don't get me started on the Wegman Report. Let's start by pointing out that the NRC and the NAS analyzed the Mann paper and confirmed it, and that there have been numerous reconstructions since Mann et al, all of which show the same general shape -- but using different data (including, now, boreholes, which are a much less opaque science than dendrochronology). No fewer than four papers rebutted McIntyre and McKitrick, and when they tried to publish a counter to some of their criticism, they failed to pass peer-review.
Republican representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield, two prominent global warming deniers, arranged the Wegman report. They picked Peter Spencer, another political denier, to arrange the process. The National Academies of Sciences itself offered to conduct an independent investigation, but they rejected this because they wouldn't have enough control over the process. Actual climate scientists were banned from the process. McIntyre remained in contact with Wegman throughout the entire process of drafting conclusions, while Mann was not, automatically biasing the outcome -- something that McIntyre tried to keep secret for years, but was only recently exposed. The committee *picked its own peer reviewers*. I could go on and on. When the National Academies of Science saw how it was being conducted, they sent a letter expressing their concerns. It was promptly ignored. They ultimately launched their own investigation.
But it's all a moot point, since McIntyre has widely been rebutted in the peer-reviewed literature since, and hasn't been able to pass peer-review in response, as well as different lines for historical climate reconstruction coming up with the same curve.
This is only true if there are no adjustments made to the temperature reading AND the "cooler" temperature is greater than the heating effect. If these aren't true, then obviously it would depend on the amount of the adjustment and amount of error in the reading.
Wait, so what's your argument then? Adjusted, the warming is shown. Unadjusted, the warming is shown. Are you arguing that there should be adjustment, but just not the ones currently used?
You know very well that the # wasn't significant in the argument. It's fine to eliminate grossly incorrect readings this way. It's another thing entirely to adjust a good reading because the surrounding stations have more error.
Since when is that happening?
You have a remarkable confidence that this algorithm is very accurate. You can read the conclusion of here
Pass peer review on that or it's worthless. Everyone *else* has to pass peer-review. No exception for critics.
Even comparing calm/windy days will be influenced by the location of the unit (walls close by) and topological influences.
The heat island effect extends to the upper troposphere. Those are some giant walls. And, FYI, there has been more lower tropospheric warming than there has been surface warming, which doesn't fit the heat island explanation at all.
Proof by Innuendo. There's science for you. Are you actually trying to argue that algorithms are better than calibration?
Red herring. Of course perfect, flawless calibration is ideal. But we live in the real world where budgets and practicality mean that's not an option. So you do the best that you can with the data that you have.
If you assume all this is due to CO2 (ie there is no solar forcing)
Both of those are untrue. First off, there's *always* solar forcing. Did you mean *changes* in solar forcing? They're intensely studied, too. Secondly, CO2 is just one of a number of GHGs, and there are a lot of non-GHG factors considered as well, everything from carbon-black to contrails. Third, assume nothing; CO2 forcing is calculated mathematically, experimentally, and historic planetary CO2 responses are studied as well.
, one
You do realize how small the amplitude of the PDO is, right? Not Even Close. And most of the effects of the PDO is chaotic rather than cyclic.
In the 1940's the PDO shifted from warm to cool(just like it did in the past couple years) and at the time the Arctic ice was thin enough to allow shipping through the area, AND we had record sizes of the Antarctic ice shelves breaking off... Then it got cold...again..
Between the 1940s and present -- two warm phases -- the temperature (including Pacific SSTs) has risen greatly. So attempts to blame this on the PDO are transparently false.
That'd be less humorous/horrifying if the climatologists didn't recently admit they have indeed been seeing a cooling trend since 2000; note, not "cooler weather" but statistically a cooling *trend*.
What climatologists are you talking about? Anyone can run the numbers for themselves and see that's not the case. The average *rate of temperature rise* has dropped, and that is due to a decline of water vapor -- but that's *stratospheric* water vapor, not tropospheric.
Cost to maintain a station: zero or near-zero dollars.
Cost to tear down a station: nonzero
Answer above. It costs virtually nothing to keep it, but sending out a team to tear it down does cost money. And the data from it isn't automatically worthless; it's just not generally used or is corrected for. In general, the economic course of action is to simply add new stations rather than replace old ones. Eventually the worst ones do come down, but it's not something that gets rushed.
Whatever you do don't automatically throw away data claiming that it's junk and should be ignored.
So bad data should be included? Or should humans manually pick what's good or bad? No, what is used is peer-reviewed algorithms that are validated six ways from Sunday by comparing how the stations perform under all kinds of different conditions vs. when those conditions don't occur, comparing data between stations with different hardware, different enclosure types, etc to see if there are any systematic biases. Whenever a new bias is encountered, it is compensated for. This is how the peer-review process is supposed to work. But so many people insist on politicizing this damned issue. Quantum physicists don't have to deal with this crap. But everyone and their brother fancies themselves an amateur climatologist.
The sort of warming being talked about only decreases sub-freezing temperatures by a week or two in the near term. There's still plenty of freezing weather (except in tropical and borderline-subtropical regions). But there's a lot more moisture.
What is your point? That a meteorologist or a computer programmer cannot in any circumstances prove a climatologist wrong? They can't say the the use of statistics in the model is flawed, or there is a coding error in the model? I didn't realize that climatologists were born perfect.
Obligatory xkcd ref.
This is one of the dumber statements I've seen in this discussion. Suppose you have 4 stations in a geographic area. 2 are out in the middle of fields way away from any development (and been this way for the last 80+ years) and 2 right next to human development. Do you not see a) which two (all other things being equal) of the 4 stations are going to give you better temperature data b) what the net effect of deleting/algorithmically adjusting the data from the data from the fields is going to be?
1) Here's where naive approaches like yours fail. The stations out in the middle of fields tend to be different, more expensive kinds of sensors than the ones close to human settlement. The cheaper ones tend to report *cooler* temperatures than the more expensive, standalone sensors. So the "urban" stations actually show *less* global warming if averaged in a naive approach.
2) There's a *lot* more than 4 stations in most regions which have correlated temperature anomalies. In the US, generally dozens.
3) The heat island effect *is* cancelled algorithmically, and this is verified by, among other things, comparing calm and windy days.
For something that is supposedly "validated", we are seeing an awful lot of instances of incorrect usage.
Yes, by people like Watts.
What "trends" are you talking about? Like the trend line of 1995-2009 (-0.12C per decade - yes, that's a minus - from Phil Jones no less)? Or are you talking about the one since 1850?
1) This, this, and this.
2) Since when do you trust Phil Jones?
3) Phil Jones is one climate scientist among several thousand. He is not the god of climate science.
4) Wrong. Jones says that there is a +0.12C warming trend for that time, but it's not long enough to be statistically significant. And he's right. It's idiotic how so many people keep trying to read trends into a couple years of extremely noisy data. El Nino in particular adds a *lot* of short-term noise. The "-0.12 trend" is for 2002 to present, which is an even shorter time period and even less statistically significant -- as Jones points out.
Are you saying a station next to a heat pump discharge is going to give you accurate readings?
1) Which is why you *algorithmically eliminiate bad stations*. The problem is that you criticize them when you think that they're using said stations, but also criticize them when they mathematically eliminate them. It's a no-win situation that you're trying to put them in.
2) The "bad" stations tend to show *less* warming than the good stations. So "whoops" on your part.
you do not think the urban heat island effect is real?
1) The urban heat island effect is algorithmically cancelled, and the cancellation verified by, among other things, comparing windy days to calm days.
2) There exists a closely monitored "reference network" for a reason, you know.
Right. Because when I want to find out the current state of science, I turn to the Heartland Institute and the "usual suspects" among the 3% of climate scientists that disagree with AGW who they paid to write it.
Actually, there's a lot of self-amplifying chaotic processes involved... which is one of the reasons we do such a poor job at modeling hurricanes. Speaking of hurricanes, a single strong hurricane can do a tremendous amount of ocean mixing and heat transfer on its own.
Climatology has about as much overlap with biology and geology as it does with meteorology. Meteorologists start at current and look into the future until the locations, intensities, etc of various systems ceases to reliably match up. Climatologists start at any point in time (past or present) and extend the trends past the chaos to compile averages of events, not when said specific events will occur. Meteorologists don't care about the "why". They don't care why the level of insolation is what it is, why the current average level of water vapor is 5% higher than it was in the 1970s, etc; a meteorologist would never even dream of looking at sunspot levels in their forecast, or how the current level of galactic cosmic radiation is affecting our climate. These sorts of things are critical to climatology. The fact that decreased rainfall in China would mean increased dust levels over the Pacific which would seed greater algal growth which would lower CO2 levels which would alter temperatures in the US doesn't even begin to factor into the equation to a meteorologist. But that sort of thing is very important to climatologists. Meteorological models are greatly simplified because of this; climatologists don't use anything like the GFS. Meteorologists wouldn't dream of looking at tree rings, or ice cores, or boreholes. I could keep on going.
He won the Peace Prize, not a Nobel Prize in a science. Once again, it's the science and the views of scientists in the field that we care about. What is hard for you to understand about this?
I think he's trying to claim that they don't rely on first principles, which is complete nonsense. Actually, what's most notable about the models is how *few* parameters there are. Very little is dealt with statistically -- primarily cloud formation, as we still don't have a good handle on it. Cloud formation easily has the biggest error bars of all feedbacks -- although even the 95th percentile case is still well under the GHG forcing levels.
getting all bitter and attacking anyone that questions global warming by calling them "deniers"
They are deniers. They deny AGW. A person who denies something, in English, is a "denier".
and quoting Al Gores fantasy film isn't going to get you any credability.
Wow, you really *are* obsessed with Gore, that whenever anyone mentions the word "inconvenient", that means that their entire post is really cribbed from Al Gore and therefore invalid. Just... wow.
the people publishing the peer reviewed articles won't publish anything anti global warming.
Right -- it's a giant conspiracy, and the most prestigious scientific journals on the planet (Science, Nature, etc) are all in on it. Can you see why it's hard to take you people seriously?
climate gate you've got evidence that "peers" are in fact pushing an agenda of their own and actively seeking to derail any descenting views.
What about SwiftHack -- for thinking McIntyre and McKitrick was crap? Sorry, but almost the entire climate science community thinks that, and that it never should have been published. They're just generally more tactful when they think what they say is going to be public. The papers' conclusions were the result of selectively hand-narrowing down the datasets to only ones that will give you a straight line. The red noise claim is easily demonstrable nonsense.
Yeah, I've heard it. It is said by idiots who don't know anything about weather.
Read Changnon et al, 2006. 61-80% of major (over 6") snow events in the US occurred in warmer-than-average years, among other things. Warmer weather in temperate, subarctic, and arctic climates leads to more snow. It only leads to less snow in tropical climates and borderline-subtropical climates.
There is no temperature in which it's "impossible" to snow. But it does become decreasingly likely as temperatures fall. Ever looked at a precipitation map of Antarctica? Most of the continent is a desert. Only the coastal areas and peninsula get relevant snowfall; the air just can't hold enough moisture for it to snow much inland.
1) How did the IPCC come into this? We were discussing how the different peer-reviewed temperature datasets are built up. Oh, that's right, you wanted to change the subject to whatever talking points you had handy.
2) "wasn't even derived from a single fact" -- Yes, it was. The New Scientist got the digits reversed. It was a typo that got spread. Saying that it "wasn't even derived from a single fact" is false; it was derived from the date of 2350.
3) It wasn't an "off-the-cuff number". It was a number from an upcoming paper.
4) "IPCC trusts WWF" -- first off, the IPCC explicitly *is* allowed to use industry, NGO, and governmental sources, not just peer-reviewed sources. This is typically only done in WG2 and WG3, which, contrary to how this is being played, are *not* about the science of global warming. WG1 is about the science of global warming, and is much more heavily reviewed. WG2 is basically a news report, and WG3 is how to avert AGW. Over, even in WG2 and WG3, the overwhelming percent of cites are peer-reviewed papers. If you want to attack the science of AGW, you need to attack WG1. And furthermore...
5) the complaints are about a handful of places in a *three thousand page report*. And we're not talking about a handful of *pages* in a 3,000 page report; just a handful of *claims* (there are generally a couple dozen claims per page). So, it's your turn: write a 3,000 page report with dozens of claims per page without a single error, *then* complain to me about a lack of perfection. If you want to show that the IPCC report (let alone WG1, if you want to attack the science rather than the news) is unreliable, you're going to need a *much* greater error rate than ~0.003%.
American Association of Petroleum Geologists
Wow, really? The oil industry is "non-committal"? You realize that they switched from "opposed" to "non-committal" a couple years ago, right?
Plus, they're geologists.
American Association of State Climatologists
One, state climatologists are political appointees. Two, the organization has no current statement. Three, their last statement was from 2001, and barely counts as non-committal.
American Geological Institute
I have trouble seeing this as "non-committal": "The American Geological Institute (AGI) strongly supports education concerning the scientific evidence of past climate change, the potential for future climate change due to the current building of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and the policy options available. Understanding the interactions between the solid Earth, the oceans, the biosphere, and the atmosphere both in the present and over time is critical for accurately analyzing and predicting global climate change due to natural processes and possible human influences."
Plus, they're geologists.
American Institute of Professional Geologists
A tiny organization of geologists (only 5,500 members -- compare to over 100k for the American Geological Institute).
Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences
They're not taking an official position, but the statement is pretty clear on where they stand: "We contribute to the global problem of changing climate by our emissions of greenhouse gases - especially carbon dioxide - from industrial processes. A warming Earth has significant problems for Canada - instability in agricultural productivity, sinking of northern infrastructrure into melting permafrost, greater vulnerability of low-lying coastlines to storms. While the Canadian Geoscience Council is not at this time taking a particular position specifically on the issue of global warming, the Council is establishing a position on the use of geological sinks to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2."
Plus, they're geologists.
Sorry, but if that's the best you can do, why even bother? You clearly got those entries from here, but didn't bother to mention how dwarfed they were by those who support AGW -- both in number and in scale of organizations and organizational prestige.
So then your sources are a Russian think tank (who, by the way, tried to publish papers on their claims, but failed to pass peer-review on them), and now a meteorologist (*very* different from a climatologist) and a computer programmer? Really?
Here's why the idiots who push these "omitting stations" claims can't pass peer-review on them: they're *supposed* to omit stations. It's not done manually; it's done algorithmically. The primary reason for this is yet another thing that the deniers fault them for, without realizing that their two attacks are in direct contradiciton with one another: that a lot of the stations are bad. So what they do is first look for regional trends. A heat wave hitting NYC will also tend to hit Philadelphia, but not Los Angeles. So you find the correlation in temperature anomalies between stations. You then have it look for individual stations that buck the trend. You also have it look for individual stations that suddenly experience a persistent discontinuity. Stations with problems are automatically either corrected for or eliminated, so long as each region that shows consistent correlated temperatures has representative stations. The results of this are then validated by a number of subsequent papers. For example, urban heat island effect elimination is demonstrated by comparing trends on windy days with those on calm days (heat island effect is diminished on windy days).
Additionally, there are a few "inconvenient" facts for the people who push these arguments. One, the same trends show up when you just dumb-average all stations, or just rural stations, or just urban stations. Even more inconvenient is that the stations that Watts' team of deniers flags as "bad" show *more* warming than those that he flags as "good". Why? Because the "bad" stations tend to be located near human settlement, and are generally a cheaper type of sensor than the fully-standalone ones that tend to be in "good" locations. The cheaper sensors have a small tendency to report cooler temperatures than the better, standalone ones.
I swear, I'll never understand your obsession with Gore. It's the views of ~97% of climate scientists that we care about. Gore's opinions have no more bearing on the science than Christopher Monckton's or Michael Crichton's do.
Last year the climatologists were touting their predictions that washington DC would never see snow again.
Yes, I remember those climatologists -- if I remember right, they were Patrick McDoesntexist and Jonathan Strawman.
Since the beginning, there has been a wide recognition that winters will get shorter but wetter (for example, National Assessment Synthesis Team, 2001). Atmospheric moisture has increased over 5% since 1970, corresponding with warmer seas, as forecast by the models. Ever heard the phrase "too cold to snow"? Most snow, especially most large snowstorms occurs in warmer weather (Changnon et al, 2006). This is combined with the fact that storm tracks are generally shifting northward (also as forecast by the models).
Seriously -- in your world, is it not global warming unless Winter Ceases To Exist? I mean, really?
Oh, and a dingo took my baby. Therefore, dingos will take everyone's baby.
> It's not really that slow, either. The claim that the batteries will run perpetually is RIDICULOUS. Slashdot occasionally makes me feel ill.
Occasionally? You have a stronger stomach than I, it makes me want to vomit most of the time.
Vomit? It makes me want to cut out my spleen with a dinner fork and stomp on it with high heels!
By the way -- did you know that people who use lots of hyperbole are worse than Hitler?
Actually the language was to prevent Congress from enacting any laws which favored one religion over another, so as long as all religions get the same tax exemptions then your statement is ignorant.
So one should be able to form an atheist organization and launch tax-exempt political fundraising and campaigning, in your view?
Which is more likely: that a singularity just sprang into existence, or that an infinitely more complex deity sprang into existence then created the world?
Personally, I subscribe to the Anthropic Principle. In particular, if all possible universes exist, we will come to exist and perceive only a universe which is compatible with our coming to exist.
I wonder what the percentage was back when Bush was president
I don't know the final tally, but as of 2005 during the "nuclear option" threat, the Democrats had confirmed 208 of Bush's judicial nominees and filibustered 10.
especially Eric Estrada
The guy from CHiPs and Sealab 2021?