We get loudmouthed know-nothings like Shelton Ehrlich at our homeowner association meetings. All they do is make a lot of noise and annoy everyone else. If our loudmouths started ranting about global-warming at our HOA meetings instead of complaining about leaf-blowers and such, they'd probably get front-page coverage too. But for the sake of my neighbors, I won't tell *them* that.
I've read a couple of the papers that Mann was all worked up about.
And you know what, those papers were garbage. Freshman f***up garbage. As term papers, they would have earned an undergraduate a grade south of a "C-" at any respected university.
The papers in question are:
1) "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years", Soon, W., Baliunas, S. (2003)
2) "Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature", McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter
Google them up, download them and read them.
If you cannot identify "showstopper" blunders in each paper (they both contain whopper errors), then you have no business participating in this discussion.
Oh wait! Are those the same models that were used to predict a steady increase in global temperatures? You know, the ones that didn't predict the coldest winter the northern hemisphere in decades or more?
Does the term "ensemble average" mean anything to you?
The video is of a lecture given at the American Geophysical Union 2009 Fall Meeting. The lecture was given by a professional scientist, for an audience of scientists -- so you get the straight scientific scoop (not the dumbed-down Al Gore version).
The lecturer (Dr. Richard Alley) is an AGU Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Highlights:
Shortly after the beginning of the lecture (a little over 3 and 1/2 minutes into the video), Dr. Alley shows an email cc'd to him by a Penn State alum who is demanding that he be dealt with severely for "crimes against the... the citizens of the world". Just a little taste of the looniness that climate-scientists have to put up with.
There's a nice debunking of the silly "CO2 lags warming, therefore CO2 cannot cause warming" talking-point, starting at about 35:30.
The "cosmic ray" hypothesis is very nicely taken apart starting about 42 minutes into the video.
Starting at about 45:40 is the "money-quote" recap -- a quick two-minute-ish summary of why CO2 *must* be the primary driver of the Earth's temperature.
During the Q&A session, Prof Alley was asked where we might end up if we burned up all the economically recoverable fossil fuels. His reply included the word "Cretaceous". "Cretaceous" means sea-levels 250+ feet higher than today's, no polar ice-caps, and 100F sea-surface temperatures. We are talking about the potential of 65+ million years of climate-change compressed into a few centuries here. And all this was delivered straight from the lips of a leading scientist (not a Gore/Greenpeas type). That's a sobering thought, folks.
The papers that Mann and Co wanted to "censor" really are complete garbage (I've personally read a couple of them).
But to understand *why* they are garbage, you need to have an undergraduate-level understanding of science and math (Earth science, some calculus, some statistics, etc.). The papers in question had *no* business being published in a professional journal. They wouldn't even make the grade as undergraduate term papers!
Anyone with an undergraduate-level "common-sense" understanding of Earth-science and statistics should be able to flag several major "show-stopper" problems with this paper's methodology.
This paper contains a blunder that someone who understands calculus at the freshman level should know better than to make. Hint: What does the time-derivative operation do to long-term trend information (i.e. the global-warming signal) in temperature data? Another hint (and this one's giving away the store): The time-derivative operation acts as a high-pass filter.
And here's an excerpt from the paper that should have any upper-division EE major howling with laughter: To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!
Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
It is fortunate that CRU is not the only organization computing global temperatures.
NASA/GISS has an independent global-temperature program, and they've been much more open with the general public than CRU has. All of the information you need to replicate (or "audit" if you prefer) NASA's work is available at http://data.giss.nasa.gov./ They use publicly-available raw temperature data, homogenize it with their open-source code, and compute global average temperatures. Their global temperature computations show a bit more warming than CRU's computations do.
This shows the value of having multiple, independent organizations performing the same (or similar) work. If one organization's credibility is in doubt, then its results can be cross-checked with the other organizations' results.
CRU definitely did "step in it" in their dealings with "gadfly" skeptics. Had they taken NASA's approach ("here are all the data and code -- knock yourselves out"), this would not have blown up as badly as it did.
Now for all the skeptics out there -- those of you who have downloaded and tested any climate code, submitted patches, constructive suggestions, etc. to the code developers, please stand up and give us a shout-out!
Don't be shy or modest -- even if you've done nothing more than submit a one-line change to a makefile, let's hear about it!
Beta version of Karmic: Two upgrades (HP, Vaio), one fresh install (Dell) went almost without a hitch.
There was one very annoying issue: Obnoxious "clicking" sounds coming from the HP's speakers (Intel sound hardware). A quick google search led to a quick fix (mind you, this would most likely have stumped someone new to Linux). That being said, I *did* upgrade to a beta version of 9.10 -- hopefully the problem was fixed for the final release.
Overall, very happy. After upgrading the HP machine (Intel video hardware), graphics performance improved dramatically (9.04 had performance issues with certain Intel video hardware).
Wireless worked "out of the box" on all machines.
The Sony has only 512M memory -- performance (including the Compiz goodies) is quite satisfactory on that laptop.
Anyway, that's my experience: OMMV.
Ubuntu's *almost* ready for the average end-user. What it needs most is the type of vendor handholding available to Windows and OSX users.
If all Windows users had to install their own OS, then you'd probably see plenty of complaints/problems there too (even a 99 percent success rate would make for large absolute numbers of unhappy users).
This is a flat-out right-wing lie. Let's see you back up your accusations with some real evidence. And if you think you are going to try to pull a McKitrick on me by citing this paper (http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/mcintyre.grl.2005.pdf), I'm ready to take you on.
This is the right-wing smear machine at work. The hockey-stick was not "made up" -- in spite of the attacks on it, the original 1998 version was a reasonably good "first crack" at reconstructing past temperatures from proxy data. It was a "first of its kind" effort with plenty of room for improvement, but in no way was it fraudulent or "made up. Followup research using improved techniques refined and improved on the original hockey-stick, but in no way debunked it. And that's exactly the way science works: Pioneering research is published, and if this pioneering research has real scientific validity, followup research that builds upon and improves the original work will be published. And that's exactly what happened here -- the first hockey-stick paper spawned a bunch of additional temperature reconstruction papers that improved on that original work. In fact, one of the original hockey-stick authors just published an improved version of the hockey-stick last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The right-wing's attack on the hockey-stick research has been consistently rude, stupid, and offensive. The wingnuts who led the political attacks on the hockey-stick researchers are all disgusting pieces of work.
James Hansen is one of the most widely published, widely-cited climate-scientists in the world. (Consult scholar.google.com for more). Calling Hansen "unscientific" betrays a breathtaking ignorance in Earth-science/climate-science. The only thing Moryath's post proves is that many compsci students get a very poor education in the physical sciences.
Peter Sinclair (aka greenman3610 over at youtube.com) produced a video that did a nice job of dismantling some of Anthony Watts surfacestations claims. How did Watts reply? He filed a bogus DMCA complaint and as a result, youtube pulled Sinclair's latest video. Google up the phrase "Watts up with Watts" and follow an appropriate link to see for yourself.
Now what's all this about information wanting to be free????
Don't forget about the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, etc. etc. All of these organizations (and more) have issued public statements saying that global-warming is real and that humans are largely responsible for it.
Anyone who dismisses those who are concerned about global warming as "whack jobs" is a pig-ignorant wingnut who should either be ignored or laughed at.
Cerf isn't just some sort of closeted programming nerd. He is an industry-recognized leader who is fully cognizant of the implications of policy decisions on the use and growth of the Internet.
He most certainly is someone folks should pay attention to.
And frankly, I consider the views of Cerf and folks like him to be far more relevant than the views of inbred Alaska militia members.
Slashdot Mirror
Wesearchers Wace to Wecover Wadioactive Rabbits
(Centuwion, why do they titter so?)
Having seen both of the papers in question, I can tell you that they wouldn't pass muster as undergraduate term papers at Podunk U.
The fact that those papers somehow made it into reputable journals is the real scandal.
We get loudmouthed know-nothings like Shelton Ehrlich at our homeowner association meetings. All they do is make a lot of noise and annoy everyone else. If our loudmouths started ranting about global-warming at our HOA meetings instead of complaining about leaf-blowers and such, they'd probably get front-page coverage too. But for the sake of my neighbors, I won't tell *them* that.
Their wireless hot-spot celebrates "Toby's" partying habits with this SSID: "Toby has a drinking problem"
...the proposal to eliminate 12th-grade in Utah public schools.
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
It's pretty obvious that the answer to my question is a resounding "no!"
I've read a couple of the papers that Mann was all worked up about.
And you know what, those papers were garbage. Freshman f***up garbage. As term papers, they would have earned an undergraduate a grade south of a "C-" at any respected university.
The papers in question are:
1) "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years", Soon, W., Baliunas, S. (2003)
2) "Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature", McLean, J. D., C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter
Google them up, download them and read them.
If you cannot identify "showstopper" blunders in each paper (they both contain whopper errors), then you have no business participating in this discussion.
Does the term "ensemble average" mean anything to you?
...that *everyone* should watch: http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
The video is of a lecture given at the American Geophysical Union 2009 Fall Meeting. The lecture was given by a professional scientist, for an audience of scientists -- so you get the straight scientific scoop (not the dumbed-down Al Gore version).
The lecturer (Dr. Richard Alley) is an AGU Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Highlights:
Shortly after the beginning of the lecture (a little over 3 and 1/2 minutes into the video), Dr. Alley shows an email cc'd to him by a Penn State alum who is demanding that he be dealt with severely for "crimes against the ... the citizens of the world". Just a little taste of the looniness that climate-scientists have to put up with.
There's a nice debunking of the silly "CO2 lags warming, therefore CO2 cannot cause warming" talking-point, starting at about 35:30.
The "cosmic ray" hypothesis is very nicely taken apart starting about 42 minutes into the video.
Starting at about 45:40 is the "money-quote" recap -- a quick two-minute-ish summary of why CO2 *must* be the primary driver of the Earth's temperature.
During the Q&A session, Prof Alley was asked where we might end up if we burned up all the economically recoverable fossil fuels. His reply included the word "Cretaceous". "Cretaceous" means sea-levels 250+ feet higher than today's, no polar ice-caps, and 100F sea-surface temperatures. We are talking about the potential of 65+ million years of climate-change compressed into a few centuries here. And all this was delivered straight from the lips of a leading scientist (not a Gore/Greenpeas type). That's a sobering thought, folks.
But in doing so, they've removed the global-warming signal (the long-term trend)!
OK, why don't *you* give it a shot?
Please explain the misapplication of the derivative operation in a manner that an 8th-grader could grasp.
And better yet, why don't you actually try to *convince* some people who reject climate science with this explanation?
Get back to me with your results.
The papers that Mann and Co wanted to "censor" really are complete garbage (I've personally read a couple of them).
But to understand *why* they are garbage, you need to have an undergraduate-level understanding of science and math (Earth science, some calculus, some statistics, etc.). The papers in question had *no* business being published in a professional journal. They wouldn't even make the grade as undergraduate term papers!
Here's a link to the first paper: http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf
Anyone with an undergraduate-level "common-sense" understanding of Earth-science and statistics should be able to flag several major "show-stopper" problems with this paper's methodology.
Here's a link to the second paper: http://climatedebatedaily.com/southern_oscillation.pdf
This paper contains a blunder that someone who understands calculus at the freshman level should know better than to make. Hint: What does the time-derivative operation do to long-term trend information (i.e. the global-warming signal) in temperature data? Another hint (and this one's giving away the store): The time-derivative operation acts as a high-pass filter.
And here's an excerpt from the paper that should have any upper-division EE major howling with laughter:
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
The real scandal is that this paper actually made into the Journal of Geophysical Research!
Is it any wonder that Mann and Co. were pissed?
But how do you explain all this to your average Sarah Palin follower? That's the scientists' conundrum here.
It is fortunate that CRU is not the only organization computing global temperatures.
NASA/GISS has an independent global-temperature program, and they've been much more open with the general public than CRU has. All of the information you need to replicate (or "audit" if you prefer) NASA's work is available at http://data.giss.nasa.gov./ They use publicly-available raw temperature data, homogenize it with their open-source code, and compute global average temperatures. Their global temperature computations show a bit more warming than CRU's computations do.
This shows the value of having multiple, independent organizations performing the same (or similar) work. If one organization's credibility is in doubt, then its results can be cross-checked with the other organizations' results.
CRU definitely did "step in it" in their dealings with "gadfly" skeptics. Had they taken NASA's approach ("here are all the data and code -- knock yourselves out"), this would not have blown up as badly as it did.
There's lots of climate-model source-code available on the web. Much of it has been publicly available for years.
Examples:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/Projekte.209.0.html?&L=3
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5846/1866d/DC1
http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/Projects/modtran.html
Now for all the skeptics out there -- those of you who have downloaded and tested any climate code, submitted patches, constructive suggestions, etc. to the code developers, please stand up and give us a shout-out!
Don't be shy or modest -- even if you've done nothing more than submit a one-line change to a makefile, let's hear about it!
Beta version of Karmic: Two upgrades (HP, Vaio), one fresh install (Dell) went almost without a hitch.
There was one very annoying issue: Obnoxious "clicking" sounds coming from the HP's speakers (Intel sound hardware). A quick google search led to a quick fix (mind you, this would most likely have stumped someone new to Linux). That being said, I *did* upgrade to a beta version of 9.10 -- hopefully the problem was fixed for the final release.
Overall, very happy. After upgrading the HP machine (Intel video hardware), graphics performance improved dramatically (9.04 had performance issues with certain Intel video hardware).
Wireless worked "out of the box" on all machines.
The Sony has only 512M memory -- performance (including the Compiz goodies) is quite satisfactory on that laptop.
Anyway, that's my experience: OMMV.
Ubuntu's *almost* ready for the average end-user. What it needs most is the type of vendor handholding available to Windows and OSX users.
If all Windows users had to install their own OS, then you'd probably see plenty of complaints/problems there too (even a 99 percent success rate would make for large absolute numbers of unhappy users).
This is a flat-out right-wing lie. Let's see you back up your accusations with some real evidence. And if you think you are going to try to pull a McKitrick on me by citing this paper (http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/mcintyre.grl.2005.pdf), I'm ready to take you on.
This is the right-wing smear machine at work. The hockey-stick was not "made up" -- in spite of the attacks on it, the original 1998 version was a reasonably good "first crack" at reconstructing past temperatures from proxy data. It was a "first of its kind" effort with plenty of room for improvement, but in no way was it fraudulent or "made up. Followup research using improved techniques refined and improved on the original hockey-stick, but in no way debunked it. And that's exactly the way science works: Pioneering research is published, and if this pioneering research has real scientific validity, followup research that builds upon and improves the original work will be published. And that's exactly what happened here -- the first hockey-stick paper spawned a bunch of additional temperature reconstruction papers that improved on that original work. In fact, one of the original hockey-stick authors just published an improved version of the hockey-stick last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The right-wing's attack on the hockey-stick research has been consistently rude, stupid, and offensive. The wingnuts who led the political attacks on the hockey-stick researchers are all disgusting pieces of work.
James Hansen is one of the most widely published, widely-cited climate-scientists in the world. (Consult scholar.google.com for more). Calling Hansen "unscientific" betrays a breathtaking ignorance in Earth-science/climate-science. The only thing Moryath's post proves is that many compsci students get a very poor education in the physical sciences.
Peter Sinclair (aka greenman3610 over at youtube.com) produced a video that did a nice job of dismantling some of Anthony Watts surfacestations claims. How did Watts reply? He filed a bogus DMCA complaint and as a result, youtube pulled Sinclair's latest video. Google up the phrase "Watts up with Watts" and follow an appropriate link to see for yourself.
Now what's all this about information wanting to be free????
Don't forget about the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, etc. etc. All of these organizations (and more) have issued public statements saying that global-warming is real and that humans are largely responsible for it.
Anyone who dismisses those who are concerned about global warming as "whack jobs" is a pig-ignorant wingnut who should either be ignored or laughed at.
Indeed -- Adding more people willy-nilly to a project is like expecting 9 women to make a baby in a month.
Why does ice volume matter? Because thin ice melts away much more quickly than thick ice does.
I don't need to provide no steenking citation. I just made it all up (as you should have been able to determine from the title of my first post).
Of course, with someone like Palin, making up sh*t that's even more absurd than the genuine article is a bit of a challenge.
Cerf isn't just some sort of closeted programming nerd. He is an industry-recognized leader who is fully cognizant of the implications of policy decisions on the use and growth of the Internet.
He most certainly is someone folks should pay attention to.
And frankly, I consider the views of Cerf and folks like him to be far more relevant than the views of inbred Alaska militia members.