As the summary notes, tests show that the method works quite well. You are trying to dismiss data and science with incredulity. This provides only a superficial rebuttal.
Perhaps you should read the relevant sources. I'm not sure that you should expect to get a crash course in spectroscopy or kriging in the comments section.of Slashdot. The good news is that tests show that it works quite well.
Exactly wrong. The CRUTemp reconstruction that is shown by this latest report to be biased low was developed by the group that was involved in the 'climategate' scandal. So if you want to dismiss something based on that, you should dismiss the CRUTemp reconstruction that shows half the warming of this latest work.
Actually, this just quantifies something we already knew. By ignoring polar regions the CRUTemp reconstructions seriously underestimate warming. See polar amplification.
Here are 17 years of the current measurements: NASA GISS VS CRUTemp. NASA GISS uses the nearest available station to fill in gaps. CRUTemp just drops any region not covered. It doesn't look like "no warming" on either of them. Not sure where you got that.
But the figures from these closest one's were already used in previous estimates?
yes - the NASA reconstruction that uses closest available data to fill in the gaps already shows much more warming than the UK data that just drops missing regions. Here is the difference between the two: NASA GISS VS. CRUTemp
However, if you leverage satellite data to fill in the gaps you get a much more precise result.
If you think we should invest more in Earth sciences then you should lobby your politician. Incidentally, these researchers did use 'real measurements' (from satellites) to fill in the unobserved regions.
You raise a good point. Among scientists there is really no controversy about whether global warming will result from increased CO2. It will. That is basic physics. The controversy is in the political arena. I suspect the reason is vested interests. Entrenched businesses benefit from action to mitigate terrorism but suffer from action to mitigate climate change.
The method used works well over the oceans - is that where they omitted data and the used the prediction method? But it works "particularly well" where we have no actual data to validate it...
no - while the infilling that NASA uses works well over the oceans. The hybrid method (leveraging satellite data) works particularly well over the unobserved regions.
And yes - they do have data to validate it. Read the preceding paragraph:
The most important part of our work was testing the skill of each of these approaches in reconstructing unobserved temperatures. To do this we took the observed data and further reduced the coverage by setting aside some of the observations. So to test the skill of the various methods they just compare the results against the data that they set aside during the tests.
The only thing in TFS is that they cover 85% of the globe, where does the "half" come from?
From the paper, which actually found 2.5 times as much warming by leveraging satellite data as the CRUtemp does by ignoring the unobserved region. The paper shows that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet. This is not an unexpected finding: see polar amplification
The first link in the summary links to the paper published by the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.. The youtube video makes the science accessible to the layman.
It is also worth noting that the Heartland institute and many of these same players once shilled for the tobacco industry - downplaying the link between smoking and lung cancer. Once that well dried up they found clients in the fossil fuel industry. Their climate change report focuses on the 3% of papers that they consider favourable to their position and ignores the vast literature on the subject. By cherry picking they are able to paint a rosier picture than those who consider the full body of scientific evidence.
We don't have to wait for some future technology (I'm still waiting for my flying car...). We have cheap and available technologies today that are underutilized.
There is no evidence that the rate of sea level rise is increasing
No evidence except for the measurements and data. Here's a graph from NOAA.
Sea level rose rapidly 10,000 years ago at the end of the last glacial period. They have been fairly stable for the last 8000 years until levels began to climb again in the 20th century.
Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 1 to 2.5 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) per year since 1900.
ocean levels are now predicted to rise something like 4" over 100 years (NOT four feet as the government website sadly parrots)
That can't be right. The current rate of sea level rise is 3.6 mm/year. The rate is accelerating - it was 1.7 mm/year in the early 70's. 3.6 mm/year * 100 years is over 1 foot. With continued acceleration 4 feet sounds reasonable. 4 inches is not. - http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf
Comments like this are exactly the kind of dreck that pollutes these message boards. A small number of motivated ideologues can overrun a message board - all while claiming to represent "most people".
As far as giving people the opportunity to debate you, who would engage with this rhetoric? On the other hand, I can understand the magazines reluctance to let such a comment stand. Even though nothing of substance is said, it can leave the reader with the impression that science is bullocks. Not somethign that a science magazine is interested in promoting.
Yup. You need to adjust for angle of incidence. As you note we are not far now from a collapse. If you want to use 1.3W/m^2 globally, that's fine, though I'm not sure why you would prefer it. How does that compare to 1.78W/m^2 for carbon? Solving for C, it looks like we would need to bury all the carbon released in the last 20 years just to cover for the loss of albedo. There is no cost effective way to bury carbon. Now do you get it?
You think that scientific consensus is reached by vote? Interesting. This explains some of your earlier comments.
I think this conversation has run its course. To summarize your position:
You believe that "True" Scotsmen/// scientists will look at the data and understand that sometimes you only know a range, choosing an exact number is not possible.
You recognize that the scientific consensus as outlined in the IPCC AR4 finds sensativity to be between 2C and 4.5C, with a most likely value of 3C - but...
you would prefer that the consensus was developed by vote rather than by a thorough review of the literature.
You understand that the lowest end of the range (and the result found by this latest Norwegian study) puts us at the 2C threshold by 2050. Anything but the lowest value in this range puts us in considerably more danger.
So if the change in albedo alone were enough to cause a runaway effect that was unrecoverable, then it would have already happened
Do you have anything to back that up? That doesn't even seem intuitively correct, let alone something that you could show.
Look at the area between the climatalogical average ice extent curve and curve for any year in the 80's or 90's. (see the bottom left quadrant of http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic). Sometimes the area is positive, sometimes negative, but always it is small. The albedo change year to year is negligible.
Now look at the difference for any year this decade compared to climatology. Extend solar irradiance (1365.5-1366.5 W/m^2 depending on the year) over that area. Now extend that over the part of the year with arctic daylight. Big number eh? Now compare that to CO2 (5.35 x ln (C/C0) W/m^2) over the surface of the Earth 24x7 for a year. How much CO2 do you need to bury to compensate the change in albedo (solve for C0)? Now do you get it?
Slashdot Mirror
Solar output was relatively high from 1950 until about 1985, but has been falling ever since. The following link plots solar output vs temperatures: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp-dts/mean:12/offset:1.40/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:136/scale:0.024/plot/pmod/offset:-1365.35/mean:136/scale:3
By fringe I guess you mean WUWT? The most popular denial site on the internet? Who does that leave? Who are the mainstream deniers?
As the summary notes, tests show that the method works quite well. You are trying to dismiss data and science with incredulity. This provides only a superficial rebuttal.
Perhaps you should read the relevant sources. I'm not sure that you should expect to get a crash course in spectroscopy or kriging in the comments section.of Slashdot. The good news is that tests show that it works quite well.
Exactly wrong. The CRUTemp reconstruction that is shown by this latest report to be biased low was developed by the group that was involved in the 'climategate' scandal. So if you want to dismiss something based on that, you should dismiss the CRUTemp reconstruction that shows half the warming of this latest work.
Both are true. The oceans are warming and so is the arctic. Not sure why you would consider this a contradiction.
Actually, this just quantifies something we already knew. By ignoring polar regions the CRUTemp reconstructions seriously underestimate warming. See polar amplification.
Here are 17 years of the current measurements: NASA GISS VS CRUTemp. NASA GISS uses the nearest available station to fill in gaps. CRUTemp just drops any region not covered. It doesn't look like "no warming" on either of them. Not sure where you got that.
But the figures from these closest one's were already used in previous estimates?
yes - the NASA reconstruction that uses closest available data to fill in the gaps already shows much more warming than the UK data that just drops missing regions. Here is the difference between the two: NASA GISS VS. CRUTemp
However, if you leverage satellite data to fill in the gaps you get a much more precise result.
by 'guesses' I think you mean 'leverages satellite data'
If you think we should invest more in Earth sciences then you should lobby your politician. Incidentally, these researchers did use 'real measurements' (from satellites) to fill in the unobserved regions.
You raise a good point. Among scientists there is really no controversy about whether global warming will result from increased CO2. It will. That is basic physics. The controversy is in the political arena. I suspect the reason is vested interests. Entrenched businesses benefit from action to mitigate terrorism but suffer from action to mitigate climate change.
The method used works well over the oceans - is that where they omitted data and the used the prediction method? But it works "particularly well" where we have no actual data to validate it...
no - while the infilling that NASA uses works well over the oceans. The hybrid method (leveraging satellite data) works particularly well over the unobserved regions.
And yes - they do have data to validate it. Read the preceding paragraph: The most important part of our work was testing the skill of each of these approaches in reconstructing unobserved temperatures. To do this we took the observed data and further reduced the coverage by setting aside some of the observations. So to test the skill of the various methods they just compare the results against the data that they set aside during the tests.
That should read: found 2.5 times as much warming by leveraging satellite data than the CRUtemp does by ignoring the unobserved region.
The only thing in TFS is that they cover 85% of the globe, where does the "half" come from?
From the paper, which actually found 2.5 times as much warming by leveraging satellite data as the CRUtemp does by ignoring the unobserved region. The paper shows that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet. This is not an unexpected finding: see polar amplification
The first link in the summary links to the paper published by the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.. The youtube video makes the science accessible to the layman.
It is also worth noting that the Heartland institute and many of these same players once shilled for the tobacco industry - downplaying the link between smoking and lung cancer. Once that well dried up they found clients in the fossil fuel industry. Their climate change report focuses on the 3% of papers that they consider favourable to their position and ignores the vast literature on the subject. By cherry picking they are able to paint a rosier picture than those who consider the full body of scientific evidence.
We don't have to wait for some future technology (I'm still waiting for my flying car...). We have cheap and available technologies today that are underutilized.
Modded troll? Really?
There is no evidence that the rate of sea level rise is increasing
No evidence except for the measurements and data. Here's a graph from NOAA.
Sea level rose rapidly 10,000 years ago at the end of the last glacial period. They have been fairly stable for the last 8000 years until levels began to climb again in the 20th century.
Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 1 to 2.5 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) per year since 1900.
Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry indicate a rate of rise of 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year. - See http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html
ocean levels are now predicted to rise something like 4" over 100 years (NOT four feet as the government website sadly parrots)
That can't be right. The current rate of sea level rise is 3.6 mm/year. The rate is accelerating - it was 1.7 mm/year in the early 70's. 3.6 mm/year * 100 years is over 1 foot. With continued acceleration 4 feet sounds reasonable. 4 inches is not. - http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf
This is just the mag trying to silence dissent. I happen to agree with evolution but I have no problem debating it with people who do not.
Is this the kind of insightful and nuanced comment that you are going to miss:
You: People like you and responses like this are why most people don't buy into the AGW scam. Thanks for showing us all how pathetic your religion really is.
Comments like this are exactly the kind of dreck that pollutes these message boards. A small number of motivated ideologues can overrun a message board - all while claiming to represent "most people".
As far as giving people the opportunity to debate you, who would engage with this rhetoric? On the other hand, I can understand the magazines reluctance to let such a comment stand. Even though nothing of substance is said, it can leave the reader with the impression that science is bullocks. Not somethign that a science magazine is interested in promoting.
Yup. You need to adjust for angle of incidence. As you note we are not far now from a collapse. If you want to use 1.3W/m^2 globally, that's fine, though I'm not sure why you would prefer it. How does that compare to 1.78W/m^2 for carbon? Solving for C, it looks like we would need to bury all the carbon released in the last 20 years just to cover for the loss of albedo. There is no cost effective way to bury carbon. Now do you get it?
You think that scientific consensus is reached by vote? Interesting. This explains some of your earlier comments.
I think this conversation has run its course. To summarize your position:
So if the change in albedo alone were enough to cause a runaway effect that was unrecoverable, then it would have already happened
Do you have anything to back that up? That doesn't even seem intuitively correct, let alone something that you could show.
Look at the area between the climatalogical average ice extent curve and curve for any year in the 80's or 90's. (see the bottom left quadrant of http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic). Sometimes the area is positive, sometimes negative, but always it is small. The albedo change year to year is negligible.
Now look at the difference for any year this decade compared to climatology. Extend solar irradiance (1365.5-1366.5 W/m^2 depending on the year) over that area. Now extend that over the part of the year with arctic daylight. Big number eh? Now compare that to CO2 (5.35 x ln (C/C0) W/m^2) over the surface of the Earth 24x7 for a year. How much CO2 do you need to bury to compensate the change in albedo (solve for C0)? Now do you get it?