We know that it [change in solar irradiance] doesn't explain the warming this century.
Doesn't fully explain warming this century.
Correct. Changes in total solar irradiance is, at most, a small contribution to global warming-- a few percent at most. We agree on this now?
Let me point something out: the amount of funding of climate science, and the amount of funding of organizations denying climate science, is roughly the same. Basically: for every scientist working on understanding climate, there is one person dedicated full-time to discrediting their work.
But the odd thing is: despite all the funding, none of work funded to attack climate science has yet come up with an alternate theory that is successful in explaining the data-- not even one that looks like it may some day come close to being successful.
With no actual evidence, you are assuming ideological and institutional bias as in input assumption. You're assuming NOAA is biased. NASA is biased. The National Science Foundation is biased. The National Climatic Data Center is biased. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project is biased. The British Met office (formerly the Meteorological Office) is biased. The Climate Research Unit is biased. The Japanese Meteorological agency is biased. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is biased. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization is biased. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is biased. The Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie is biased
Um, yes.A preponderance of biased organizations doesn't rebut my point.
Actually, I was listing the organizations doing work in climate science to point out how absurd what you were proposing is. All of the people actually doing science are biased? Do you really believe that? You don't have any credible evidence that any of these scientific organizations are biased, much less all of them.
Have you considered being as skeptical toward the people who are attempting to discredit the science as you are to the actual science? Who is telling you that all these scientific organizations are biased, and why would you believe them?
But, yes, if you assume that pretty much everybody who has ever studied the field is biased, and you can ignore their work... well, yes, you can ignore a heck of a lot of data, yes indeed.
That's why I'm waiting for future data.
Sorry, but no, you're not. No possible amount of data can ever convince you once you have decided that every science agency in the world is lying and you will only believe science that is not coming from scientists.
Oranges may be natural medicine, but they're not homeopathy.
The theory of homeopathy is that you cure a disease with a drug that reproduces the symptoms of that disease (that's the prefix "homo" in homeopathy-- "same"). So, oranges would only be useful as a homeopathy remedy if eating oranges gives you the symptoms of scurvy....and then homeopathy takes that drug and dilutes it until not a single molecule originating in an orange is in the drug. The homeopathy cure for scurvy would be "take a drink of water from a glass of water that was filled from a glass of water that was filled from a glass of water that had one drop of orange juice in it.
that variation in irradiance is plus or minus one tenth of one percent
Which is 1.3 watts per square meter at the top of the atmosphere. That's almost the same as the current estimate of heating forcing from from elevated levels of CO2.
Nice back of the envelope calculation! but you're off by a factor of 6.
Solar irradiance is absorbed by the disk area of the earth, pi r^2. But the earth's surface area is 4 pi r^2. And the solar energy absorbed is multiplied by the (1-albedo). So you're off by 4/(1-a), where a is about 0.30 to 0.35.
... and then you're assuming the difference between zero solar activity, and current solar activity. But over the time scale over which the global warming we're discussing occurs, the change in TSI isn't that high. Here's a graph of the historical Total Solar Irradiance: http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/... and the variation between 1900 and 2015 is considerably less than that.
I hate to keep harping on the same things, but the effect of solar variability has been analyzed in mind-numbing detail in the last few decades, and it just isn't there.
Two obvious problems with the assertion. First, decades aren't a very long span of time. We don't know how much solar variability there has been before we started reliably measuring it late last century.
We know that it doesn't explain the warming this century.
Second, there's still that matter of the ideological and institutional bias
With no actual evidence, you are assuming ideological and institutional bias as in input assumption. You're assuming NOAA is biased. NASA is biased. The National Science Foundation is biased. The National Climatic Data Center is biased. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project is biased. The British Met office (formerly the Meteorological Office) is biased. The Climate Research Unit is biased. The Japanese Meteorological agency is biased. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is biased. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization is biased. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is biased. The Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie is biased
These have all made models and measurements confirming the greenhouse effect....isn't it slightly stretching credibility that all of these institutions-- and many others-- on four continents, all happen to be biased, and all biased in exactly the same way?
But, yes, if you assume that pretty much everybody who has ever studied the field is biased, and you can ignore their work... well, yes, you can ignore a heck of a lot of data, yes indeed.
While there is indeed a higher total solar irradiance (TSI) with higher solar activity, that variation in irradiance is plus or minus one tenth of one percent. If, as you suggest, this is driving the observed warming, then there is a huge amplifier in the system. But if there's a huge amplifier in the system, you have to explain why this doesn't amplify the contribution of infrared re-radiated by greenhouse gasses. Why would some input forcing get amplified, and other input forcing not amplified? We measure all of this. When the scientists say "this effect can't account for the warming," this is because they are dealing with measured quantities.
(I will also note that TSI has a different warming signature from greenhouse effect: the greenhouse effect changes increase night time temperatures much more than TSI)
Basically, what you're saying boils down to "I won't pay attention to what the scientists actually say, and I haven't done a back of the envelope calculation showing it's plausible that they might be wrong, but I just refuse to believe them."
I'm a lukewarmist, I believe there is some effect.
And I'm a scientist. I look at the data.
But this is a huge factor to downplay.
One tenth of one percent.
I hate to keep harping on the same things, but the effect of solar variability has been analyzed in mind-numbing detail in the last few decades, and it just isn't there. Try the summary in chapter 8 of the WG-1 report http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
And when you dismiss all data that doesn't agree with you-- which is what you're doing-- then it is completely impossible to ever overturn your conspiracy theory that all the science ever done on climate happens to be wrong.
Let me also note that apparently, it is possible to observe solar activity prior to direct observation by measuring carbon 14 in tree rings as a proxy. As a result, it is claimed that there were other periods of lowered solar activity from about 1000 AD through to the Maunder minimum.
So, what you're now saying is that the little ice age is not due to the Maunder minimum, but you're hypothesizing that it might have been due to some other sunspot minimum for which we have only proxy data.
Unfortunately, (1) proxy data on solar activity is somewhat harder to interpret (see, for example, review article here: http://solarphysics.livingrevi... )
(2) nobody looking at the record of proxy reconstruction has been able to find a firm correlation to global climate (although there are some regional climate correlations), (3) there still isn't any accepted mechanism connecting sunspot number to climate,
For example, there were periods of alleged reduced solar activity between 1280 and 1350 and between 1460 and 1550.
This analysis looks like you have a result you want, and you're going back through the data trying to select data to try to fit the result. If this were actual science, you would need a correlation coefficient. How well does the variation in (proxies for) sunspot number fit the variation in (proxies for) climate?
All of the scientists doing the actual studies of this sort say the effects seen are far too small to explain the current warming trend: see, for example Solanki et al. 2004 study of sunspot numbers over the past 11,000 years and climate: http://www.nature.com/nature/j... "we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades", or the review of dozens of studies here: http://www.skepticalscience.co...
But, returning to the topic, we seem to agree: the little ice age cannot be attributed to the Maunder minimum.
And when you dismiss all data that doesn't agree with you-- which is what you're doing-- then it is completely impossible to ever overturn your conspiracy theory that all the science ever done on climate happens to be wrong.
In fact, it's not. This is currently the best hypothesis that fits the data, including the dates. There may be a better hypothesis later. This is the way science is done; you gather data, make a hypothesis that fits the data, and see if later work confirms or overturns the hypothesis.
Paleoclimate resesearch, and most specifically modelling the climate variations in the late middle ages is indeed difficult, because not only don't we have contemporary measurements of all the input parameters, we don't have good measurements of the temperature, either. (Modelling contemporary climate is much more accurate-- we have lots of data on both the input (the solar output is well measured) and the climate (not just average temperatures, but diurnal variation, seasonal variation, latitude and longitude variation, etc. all of which must fit the modelling, although the AGW debaters only ever look at the year-by-year changes.)
The paper referenced, however does use a pretty convincing proxy for temperature change in the little ice age: they looked at the dead flora preserved in the Arctic ice cap. This dates the little ice age to a start in 1375-1400, with a second cooling period around 1450 AD. That is about the time when the Vikings abandoned their settlements in Greenland (they kept Church records; the last document in Greenland (a marriage certificate) was dated 1408.)
Unfortunately, this is THREE HUNDRED YEARS before the Maunder minimum. So it's really hard to think that the Maunder minimum caused the little ice age.
So, here's the summary. 1. There is no well-understood mechanism connecting sunspot numbers to climate. 2. The only connection between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age is a rough coincidence in timing. 3. But the more detailed examination of timing shows that the little ice age started much earlier.
It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age".
Well, except nobody knowns whether the Maunder minimum even had anything to do with the little ice age, except for the coincidence of timing. The best understanding at the moment is that the little ice age was due to volcanic eruptions: http://news.agu.org/press-rele...
It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age". Do the electromagnetic bursts from the sunspots also have something to do with the regulation of earth's temperature?
People have been looking for a solar cycle-weather connection for years, but not really finding one.
Not solar output falling 60%, which would lead to completely frozen Earth, but solar activity, i.e. the 11 year sunspot cycle. Predicting levels near or at those found during the Maunder minimum. This does imply some reduced level of solar output.
About plus or minus 0.1% change in total solar irradiance between solar maximum and solar minimum:
Well, except that every solar cycle since I can remember, I've heard somebody predicting that the next solar cycle is about the start a new Maunder minimum, and it will mean mini ice age. Every one. This one is a prediction based on fitting a model only to the last three cycles. i'm not impressed. For reference, here's the MSFC page on solar cycle modelling: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa....
Apollo 6 had two engines shut down early, but the upper stage burned longer to compensate, so the vehicle still made orbit. The S-IVB didn't restart in orbit-- but since that was after it already made orbit, that counts as an in-space propulsion failure, not a launch vehicle failure.
Apollo 13 had a second-stage engine shut down early, but, again, the other engines burned longer to compensate, and the launch was a success. Launch wasn't the problem with Apollo 13.
So, I'd rate Saturn-V at 100% success rate as a launch vehicle, if the criteria for success is "getting the payload successfully into orbit".
Of course, with only 13 launches, it's not had as long a record as many other vehicles.
Atlas-V and Delta-IV been doing pretty good, though: so far both have had a 100% record for reaching orbit, although each one has had one launch with an underperforming upper stage that put it into lower-than-planned orbits.
So they are saying that this sub-group's purchases of new products is indeed predictive of failure.
Yes, that's what they said.
However another explanation of the data is that many products fail early, and thus many of the people who buy products early in the release cycle ("early adopters") will buy many products that will fail. Is the set of "early adopters who adopted products that then failed in the market place" a set that can predict future failure in the marketplace? Well, they didn't show that.
Group 1: Between 0% and 25% flops (25th percentile) in the classification set
Group 2: Between 25% and 50% flops (50th percentile) in the classification set
Group 3: Between 50% and 67% flops (75th percentile) in the classification set
Group 4: Over 67% flops in the classification set
Those particular numbers (one in four, two in four, two in three, >2/3) are indicative: the study set consists of people who made only three or four choices. (If it were larger numbers, the cut points wouldn't be such even numbers)
This is not significant.
And, more significantly, that's way too few to tell if membership in a set is predictive.
Certainly some early adopters pick products that don't take off, and mathematically some of these will have done it multiple times. But the article claims that some people are actually predictors-- that their product choices have predictive value for product failure. Is this actually true? It's easy to select out a set of people who have bought failed products, and then cull out of that set the ones who have not also sometimes bought successful products. But is this group statistically able to make future predictions? I'm doubtful. Clearly, the way to not select products that don't grab a market niche... is to not be an early adopter. Lots of products fail; if you're an early adoptor, you're likely to be adopting failed products. If you instead wait to see where a product is going before buying-- you never buy products that fail a month after launch. FWIW, the original article is here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
Possibly in some other thread somewhere, but in multiple replies to me in this thread you made no "specific mention" of where you claim to have gotten your data.
OK, I did a search of other threads, and see that in fact in a post responding to somebody else, in a different fork, you did make an attempt to back up your assertions.
First take-away point: you can't expect people to be familiar with something you posted in response to a different person, in a different fork.
Most of your comments were addressed by riverat1, who points out that you misinterpreted what was pretty clearly stated by the IPCC report.
What I deduce from your comments is that no, you didn't read any of the IPCC reports, but you did skim them to quote mine, without bothering to actually try to understand what you were reading.
OK, that's a start. I suggest next you actually read some of these reports. Then you will be able to comment from a position of knowledge, instead of ignorance, and the discussion may at least be somewhat higher level.
riverat1 doesn't address one comment. You wrote: what's important [about climate sensitivity estimates] "is they keep shrinking as we learn more."
Refining estimates is, of course, how science works-- but, in fact, they haven't been shrinking. The reference you give is a blog that seems to have cherry picked a dozen estimates over a very short time period-- out of perhaps thousands of climate models run over fifty years by dozens of groups on five contents. The first real estimate-- by "real", I mean "using experimentally measured values of IR absorption, and numerically integrating, instead of approximating"-- is of course Manabe and Weatherald 1967. Their estimate, with no feedback other than the assumption of constant humidity, was 2.25C per doubling. The 1979 National Academy of Sciences estimate was 3 C, plus or minus 1.5 C. Since then, the IPCC has been compiling the results of many models to come up with "best guess" estimates of climate sensitivity. These have been: 1990 IPCC: 1.5 - 4.5 C ( "best guess" of 2.5) 2nd IPCC: "No strong reasons have emerged to change" these estimates 3rd IPCC: 1.5 - 4.5 C. 4th IPCC: 2 - 4.5 C 5th IPCC: 1.5C - 4.5C
(These actual IPCC WG-1 reports give detailed explanation of what they mean by "likely," and citations and figures showing where the estimates come from, as well as discussion of the high and low outliers.)
What is astonishing about climate sensitivity is how little they have changed since the National Academy of Sciences assessment in 1979. Basically, the models have been getting progressively finer scale, with more nodes and more and more of the second and third-order effects incorporated, but the overall result has not changed.
In fact, the original 1967 estimate, 2.25C, is still within the error bars-- it's quite remarkable how Manabe's very simply model (simple by today's standards: a top-of-the-line supercomputer model by 1967 standards) still holds up.
How about you stop grandstanding and discuss the post where I specifically mentioned where in the IPCC reports I got my info.
I would... except you didn't.
Possibly in some other thread somewhere, but in multiple replies to me in this thread you made no "specific mention" of where you claim to have gotten your data. Not only did you not "specifically mention where," you didn't even say which IPCC report you think you got your information from (in fact, this is the first post you've made that suggests that you know that there even is more than one IPCC report.)
I have a suggestion: I suggest you try analyzing blogs that attack climate science with just as much skepticism as you are applying to the actual climate science. You're showing one-sided skepticism: skeptical of the science, but completely credulous of the attacks on the science.
That blog post you link is full of misdirection and not-quite-right analysis. The graph by Bloomberg cites that the data graphed comes from the GISS. In fact, it is from a 2005 paper, Hansen, et al. "Climate simulations for 1880-2003 with GISS model E." Clim. Dyn., 29, 2007, pp. 661-696). The Watt's up post, though: what's up with that? He wrote a long and superficially detailed analysis... without linking a single reference. Why no references? It looks like he doesn't want you to check what he did. His motto is, apparently, "trust me... and don't verify".
Why does he not link to the source of all the data he is analyzing? Doesn't that even slightly make you wonder?
Then, he says it's "convenient" that the graphed data stops at 2005. Well, it's not terribly suspicious: since the paper referenced was published in 2005, it would be surprising if the data didn't stop in 2005). He then shows a graph that purportedly shows "the widening divergence between models and reality" that purportedly starts in 2005. No link to the actual source of that data, though it's easy enough to find. He prints that graph-- the largest graph in the criticism-- without mentioning that it's not even graphing the same thing as the article he's criticizing.
He leaves off any explanation of where the data comes from probably because the data points graphed are not surface temperature-- this is the temperature in the mid-troposphere: 8–15km in altitude (and, to boot, only in the tropics, not the global average under discussion.)
The graph Watts Up put in without explanation is charting something completely different than the subject being discussed! Now, you can argue (and Christy does) that tropical mid-troposphere temperate is something important to understand and model... but that's a change of subject from what the article being critiqued discusses.
Why doesn't he say that?
The answer is obvious: this is misdirection. He's not trying to spread understanding. He's trying to spread confusion.
Start reading the Watts Up with the same skepticism you are applying to the actual science. Check his references. Look for misdirection and changes of subject. There's a dozen places right in that post you link that you can find things that you ought to find suspicious.
...About the IPCC reports. Indeed I have read them.
No, you haven't.
Your posts show no knowledge of anything except the denier arguments. If you had read the actual work that the denier blogs are attacking, you'd be able to comment with some actual understanding, instead of the comments you are posting with weasel-wording of "I am quoting from memory, I may be wrong." What a great weasel wording! You already told me that you think you might be wrong!
As usual, your side doesn't debate anything, only appeals to authority.
I linked to the source that you stated you were getting your facts from. You were the one appealing to authority: I just posting the link.
You seen to think that by just saying that you will make it true.
As for linking to the IPCC... well that was more than useless.
Since you said you were quoting numbers from the IPCC, I would suggest that linking to the IPCC reports would be relevant. Since you now say it is "more than useless" to link to the source that you claimed to have based your post on, I'd say that your post is "more than useless."
I haven't seen anything to make me think you have actually read any of the IPCC reports-- I suspect your poorly-remembered data is something you poorly-remembered from some political blog somewhere. Have you actually read anything from the IPCC, the work you claim to be quoting?
It's hard to trust anyone who's work is disseminated by the government or media today.
That's an assertion that's hard to challenge in the libertarian atmosphere of slashdot.
Research and reports are spun mercilessly for the gain of whoever needs it.
Indeed, it's always wise to track down the actual original data, and actually look at the data and see what we know, and how well we know it, rather than to trust the media interpretations.
It may not be scientist's fault but when you hear something like "the sky is falling" and then hear it refuted over and over, one starts to take things with a grain of salt.
The media does like to run doom and destruction stories-- they are more of a story than talking about things like "slow increase in temperature over a time scale of decades."
Take, for example, Global Cooling back in the 1970's.
OK, let's take it for an example. There was never a scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s. The American Meteorological Society did a review, trying to look for the origin of that. http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... They summarize: "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
That was refuted with Global Warming in the 2000's
It was not really "refuted" per se, since it was never a scientific consensus in the first place.
and now it's simply Global Climate Change which seems to be a catch-all.
"Global Climate Change" was the term coined by the (first) Bush administration.
I don't deny GCC but I certainly want to see the data.
Excellent! That's the difference between deniers and skeptics: deniers will make any possible excuse to avoid looking at data. As it turns out, there are literally terabytes of data.
I will suggest starting with the Working Group 1 report, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change, which summarizes what is known and how we know it. I'm most familiar with the 4th report (www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html), from 2007, but you might want to go directly to the more recent update, the 5th: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
From there, dive into the data from whichever source you prefer-- I'd suggest possibly the Berkeley Earth data, which does an interesting job of comparing alternative hypotheses against the temperature data: http://berkeleyearth.org/summa...
What's the old adage that Regan grabbed from the Russian's; "Trust but Verify" I think was it.
Excellent. Much better than the denier's motto: "Never trust, never verify, never look at the facts."
Yeah, I'm rather sympathetic with Samsung here. The actual problem is with idiotic updates that break all the stuff you've finally got fixed from the last time an update broke it.
An update should fix the stuff that's broken, not break the stuff that's fixed.
Your model is basically saying that since the artists already did the work, "they're not losing any money or time" if somebody else gives away their music for free.
Yes, you can say that. After all, why should you ever pay any artist? They already did the work, so they aren't losing any money, right? People are merely using their work for free without paying.
Here's the problem: "recognition" doesn't pay bills. It's nice, it's flattering, it's great for the ego, and the net result is you starve. Apple's business model is that artists should be happy that Apple had decided to give their music away for free in order to promote Apple's new business, and they seem surprised that artists actually would prefer to be paid.
Here's a tip for you, for future reference in case it ever happens to you: when you're being told "you work for free, and maybe sometime later I'll pay you", no matter how good it sounds, the deal is always going to be to the advantage of the corporation getting the free work, and not necessarily for you.
Well, Apple backed down, at least a little. Good for them. Horray for Taylor Swift.
Slashdot Mirror
We know that it [change in solar irradiance] doesn't explain the warming this century.
Doesn't fully explain warming this century.
Correct. Changes in total solar irradiance is, at most, a small contribution to global warming-- a few percent at most. We agree on this now?
Let me point something out: the amount of funding of climate science, and the amount of funding of organizations denying climate science, is roughly the same. Basically: for every scientist working on understanding climate, there is one person dedicated full-time to discrediting their work.
But the odd thing is: despite all the funding, none of work funded to attack climate science has yet come up with an alternate theory that is successful in explaining the data-- not even one that looks like it may some day come close to being successful.
With no actual evidence, you are assuming ideological and institutional bias as in input assumption. You're assuming NOAA is biased. NASA is biased. The National Science Foundation is biased. The National Climatic Data Center is biased. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project is biased. The British Met office (formerly the Meteorological Office) is biased. The Climate Research Unit is biased. The Japanese Meteorological agency is biased. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is biased. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization is biased. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is biased. The Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie is biased
Um, yes.A preponderance of biased organizations doesn't rebut my point.
Actually, I was listing the organizations doing work in climate science to point out how absurd what you were proposing is. All of the people actually doing science are biased? Do you really believe that? You don't have any credible evidence that any of these scientific organizations are biased, much less all of them.
Have you considered being as skeptical toward the people who are attempting to discredit the science as you are to the actual science? Who is telling you that all these scientific organizations are biased, and why would you believe them?
But, yes, if you assume that pretty much everybody who has ever studied the field is biased, and you can ignore their work... well, yes, you can ignore a heck of a lot of data, yes indeed.
That's why I'm waiting for future data.
Sorry, but no, you're not. No possible amount of data can ever convince you once you have decided that every science agency in the world is lying and you will only believe science that is not coming from scientists.
Oranges may be natural medicine, but they're not homeopathy.
The theory of homeopathy is that you cure a disease with a drug that reproduces the symptoms of that disease (that's the prefix "homo" in homeopathy-- "same"). So, oranges would only be useful as a homeopathy remedy if eating oranges gives you the symptoms of scurvy. ...and then homeopathy takes that drug and dilutes it until not a single molecule originating in an orange is in the drug. The homeopathy cure for scurvy would be "take a drink of water from a glass of water that was filled from a glass of water that was filled from a glass of water that had one drop of orange juice in it.
that variation in irradiance is plus or minus one tenth of one percent
Which is 1.3 watts per square meter at the top of the atmosphere. That's almost the same as the current estimate of heating forcing from from elevated levels of CO2.
Nice back of the envelope calculation! but you're off by a factor of 6.
Solar irradiance is absorbed by the disk area of the earth, pi r^2. But the earth's surface area is 4 pi r^2. And the solar energy absorbed is multiplied by the (1-albedo). So you're off by 4/(1-a), where a is about 0.30 to 0.35.
... and then you're assuming the difference between zero solar activity, and current solar activity. But over the time scale over which the global warming we're discussing occurs, the change in TSI isn't that high. Here's a graph of the historical Total Solar Irradiance:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/...
and the variation between 1900 and 2015 is considerably less than that.
I hate to keep harping on the same things, but the effect of solar variability has been analyzed in mind-numbing detail in the last few decades, and it just isn't there.
Two obvious problems with the assertion. First, decades aren't a very long span of time. We don't know how much solar variability there has been before we started reliably measuring it late last century.
We know that it doesn't explain the warming this century.
Second, there's still that matter of the ideological and institutional bias
With no actual evidence, you are assuming ideological and institutional bias as in input assumption. You're assuming NOAA is biased. NASA is biased. The National Science Foundation is biased. The National Climatic Data Center is biased. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project is biased. The British Met office (formerly the Meteorological Office) is biased. The Climate Research Unit is biased. The Japanese Meteorological agency is biased. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is biased. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization is biased. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is biased. The Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie is biased
These have all made models and measurements confirming the greenhouse effect. ...isn't it slightly stretching credibility that all of these institutions-- and many others-- on four continents, all happen to be biased, and all biased in exactly the same way?
But, yes, if you assume that pretty much everybody who has ever studied the field is biased, and you can ignore their work... well, yes, you can ignore a heck of a lot of data, yes indeed.
While there is indeed a higher total solar irradiance (TSI) with higher solar activity, that variation in irradiance is plus or minus one tenth of one percent. If, as you suggest, this is driving the observed warming, then there is a huge amplifier in the system.
But if there's a huge amplifier in the system, you have to explain why this doesn't amplify the contribution of infrared re-radiated by greenhouse gasses. Why would some input forcing get amplified, and other input forcing not amplified?
We measure all of this. When the scientists say "this effect can't account for the warming," this is because they are dealing with measured quantities.
(I will also note that TSI has a different warming signature from greenhouse effect: the greenhouse effect changes increase night time temperatures much more than TSI)
Basically, what you're saying boils down to "I won't pay attention to what the scientists actually say, and I haven't done a back of the envelope calculation showing it's plausible that they might be wrong, but I just refuse to believe them."
I'm a lukewarmist, I believe there is some effect.
And I'm a scientist. I look at the data.
But this is a huge factor to downplay.
One tenth of one percent.
I hate to keep harping on the same things, but the effect of solar variability has been analyzed in mind-numbing detail in the last few decades, and it just isn't there. Try the summary in chapter 8 of the WG-1 report
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
And when you dismiss all data that doesn't agree with you-- which is what you're doing-- then it is completely impossible to ever overturn your conspiracy theory that all the science ever done on climate happens to be wrong.
Let me also note that apparently, it is possible to observe solar activity prior to direct observation by measuring carbon 14 in tree rings as a proxy. As a result, it is claimed that there were other periods of lowered solar activity from about 1000 AD through to the Maunder minimum.
So, what you're now saying is that the little ice age is not due to the Maunder minimum, but you're hypothesizing that it might have been due to some other sunspot minimum for which we have only proxy data.
Unfortunately,
(1) proxy data on solar activity is somewhat harder to interpret (see, for example, review article here: http://solarphysics.livingrevi... )
(2) nobody looking at the record of proxy reconstruction has been able to find a firm correlation to global climate (although there are some regional climate correlations),
(3) there still isn't any accepted mechanism connecting sunspot number to climate,
For example, there were periods of alleged reduced solar activity between 1280 and 1350 and between 1460 and 1550.
This analysis looks like you have a result you want, and you're going back through the data trying to select data to try to fit the result. If this were actual science, you would need a correlation coefficient. How well does the variation in (proxies for) sunspot number fit the variation in (proxies for) climate?
All of the scientists doing the actual studies of this sort say the effects seen are far too small to explain the current warming trend: see, for example Solanki et al. 2004 study of sunspot numbers over the past 11,000 years and climate: http://www.nature.com/nature/j... "we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades", or the review of dozens of studies here: http://www.skepticalscience.co...
But, returning to the topic, we seem to agree: the little ice age cannot be attributed to the Maunder minimum.
And when you dismiss all data that doesn't agree with you-- which is what you're doing-- then it is completely impossible to ever overturn your conspiracy theory that all the science ever done on climate happens to be wrong.
In fact, it's not. This is currently the best hypothesis that fits the data, including the dates. There may be a better hypothesis later. This is the way science is done; you gather data, make a hypothesis that fits the data, and see if later work confirms or overturns the hypothesis.
Paleoclimate resesearch, and most specifically modelling the climate variations in the late middle ages is indeed difficult, because not only don't we have contemporary measurements of all the input parameters, we don't have good measurements of the temperature, either. (Modelling contemporary climate is much more accurate-- we have lots of data on both the input (the solar output is well measured) and the climate (not just average temperatures, but diurnal variation, seasonal variation, latitude and longitude variation, etc. all of which must fit the modelling, although the AGW debaters only ever look at the year-by-year changes.)
The paper referenced, however does use a pretty convincing proxy for temperature change in the little ice age: they looked at the dead flora preserved in the Arctic ice cap. This dates the little ice age to a start in 1375-1400, with a second cooling period around 1450 AD. That is about the time when the Vikings abandoned their settlements in Greenland (they kept Church records; the last document in Greenland (a marriage certificate) was dated 1408.)
Unfortunately, this is THREE HUNDRED YEARS before the Maunder minimum. So it's really hard to think that the Maunder minimum caused the little ice age.
So, here's the summary.
1. There is no well-understood mechanism connecting sunspot numbers to climate.
2. The only connection between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age is a rough coincidence in timing.
3. But the more detailed examination of timing shows that the little ice age started much earlier.
It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age".
Well, except nobody knowns whether the Maunder minimum even had anything to do with the little ice age, except for the coincidence of timing. The best understanding at the moment is that the little ice age was due to volcanic eruptions: http://news.agu.org/press-rele...
It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age". Do the electromagnetic bursts from the sunspots also have something to do with the regulation of earth's temperature?
People have been looking for a solar cycle-weather connection for years, but not really finding one.
Not solar output falling 60%, which would lead to completely frozen Earth, but solar activity, i.e. the 11 year sunspot cycle. Predicting levels near or at those found during the Maunder minimum. This does imply some reduced level of solar output.
About plus or minus 0.1% change in total solar irradiance between solar maximum and solar minimum:
http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...
Well, except that every solar cycle since I can remember, I've heard somebody predicting that the next solar cycle is about the start a new Maunder minimum, and it will mean mini ice age. Every one.
This one is a prediction based on fitting a model only to the last three cycles. i'm not impressed.
For reference, here's the MSFC page on solar cycle modelling: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa....
Apollo 6 had two engines shut down early, but the upper stage burned longer to compensate, so the vehicle still made orbit.
The S-IVB didn't restart in orbit-- but since that was after it already made orbit, that counts as an in-space propulsion failure, not a launch vehicle failure.
Apollo 13 had a second-stage engine shut down early, but, again, the other engines burned longer to compensate, and the launch was a success. Launch wasn't the problem with Apollo 13.
So, I'd rate Saturn-V at 100% success rate as a launch vehicle, if the criteria for success is "getting the payload successfully into orbit".
Of course, with only 13 launches, it's not had as long a record as many other vehicles.
Nice video here: http://gizmodo.com/watch-all-1...
Well, maybe more expensive Russian rockets cost what they do for a reason?
Well, that reason is certainly not reliability-- Russian rockets have been pretty failure prone lately.
http://spacenews.com/proton-fa...
http://spacenews.com/progress-...
http://spacenews.com/russian-s...
Atlas-V and Delta-IV been doing pretty good, though: so far both have had a 100% record for reaching orbit, although each one has had one launch with an underperforming upper stage that put it into lower-than-planned orbits.
So they are saying that this sub-group's purchases of new products is indeed predictive of failure.
Yes, that's what they said.
However another explanation of the data is that many products fail early, and thus many of the people who buy products early in the release cycle ("early adopters") will buy many products that will fail. Is the set of "early adopters who adopted products that then failed in the market place" a set that can predict future failure in the marketplace? Well, they didn't show that.
It's easy to predict the past.
# of flops chosen (position in set)
Group 1: Between 0% and 25% flops (25th percentile) in the classification set
Group 2: Between 25% and 50% flops (50th percentile) in the classification set
Group 3: Between 50% and 67% flops (75th percentile) in the classification set
Group 4: Over 67% flops in the classification set
Those particular numbers (one in four, two in four, two in three, >2/3) are indicative: the study set consists of people who made only three or four choices. (If it were larger numbers, the cut points wouldn't be such even numbers)
This is not significant.
And, more significantly, that's way too few to tell if membership in a set is predictive.
Certainly some early adopters pick products that don't take off, and mathematically some of these will have done it multiple times.
But the article claims that some people are actually predictors-- that their product choices have predictive value for product failure.
Is this actually true? It's easy to select out a set of people who have bought failed products, and then cull out of that set the ones who have not also sometimes bought successful products. But is this group statistically able to make future predictions?
I'm doubtful. Clearly, the way to not select products that don't grab a market niche... is to not be an early adopter. Lots of products fail; if you're an early adoptor, you're likely to be adopting failed products. If you instead wait to see where a product is going before buying-- you never buy products that fail a month after launch.
FWIW, the original article is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
Possibly in some other thread somewhere, but in multiple replies to me in this thread you made no "specific mention" of where you claim to have gotten your data.
OK, I did a search of other threads, and see that in fact in a post responding to somebody else, in a different fork, you did make an attempt to back up your assertions.
First take-away point: you can't expect people to be familiar with something you posted in response to a different person, in a different fork.
Most of your comments were addressed by riverat1, who points out that you misinterpreted what was pretty clearly stated by the IPCC report.
What I deduce from your comments is that no, you didn't read any of the IPCC reports, but you did skim them to quote mine, without bothering to actually try to understand what you were reading.
OK, that's a start. I suggest next you actually read some of these reports. Then you will be able to comment from a position of knowledge, instead of ignorance, and the discussion may at least be somewhat higher level.
riverat1 doesn't address one comment. You wrote:
what's important [about climate sensitivity estimates] "is they keep shrinking as we learn more."
Refining estimates is, of course, how science works-- but, in fact, they haven't been shrinking. The reference you give is a blog that seems to have cherry picked a dozen estimates over a very short time period-- out of perhaps thousands of climate models run over fifty years by dozens of groups on five contents. The first real estimate-- by "real", I mean "using experimentally measured values of IR absorption, and numerically integrating, instead of approximating"-- is of course Manabe and Weatherald 1967. Their estimate, with no feedback other than the assumption of constant humidity, was 2.25C per doubling. The 1979 National Academy of Sciences estimate was 3 C, plus or minus 1.5 C. Since then, the IPCC has been compiling the results of many models to come up with "best guess" estimates of climate sensitivity. These have been:
1990 IPCC: 1.5 - 4.5 C ( "best guess" of 2.5)
2nd IPCC: "No strong reasons have emerged to change" these estimates
3rd IPCC: 1.5 - 4.5 C.
4th IPCC: 2 - 4.5 C
5th IPCC: 1.5C - 4.5C
(These actual IPCC WG-1 reports give detailed explanation of what they mean by "likely," and citations and figures showing where the estimates come from, as well as discussion of the high and low outliers.)
What is astonishing about climate sensitivity is how little they have changed since the National Academy of Sciences assessment in 1979. Basically, the models have been getting progressively finer scale, with more nodes and more and more of the second and third-order effects incorporated, but the overall result has not changed.
In fact, the original 1967 estimate, 2.25C, is still within the error bars-- it's quite remarkable how Manabe's very simply model (simple by today's standards: a top-of-the-line supercomputer model by 1967 standards) still holds up.
How about you stop grandstanding and discuss the post where I specifically mentioned where in the IPCC reports I got my info.
I would... except you didn't.
Possibly in some other thread somewhere, but in multiple replies to me in this thread you made no "specific mention" of where you claim to have gotten your data. Not only did you not "specifically mention where," you didn't even say which IPCC report you think you got your information from (in fact, this is the first post you've made that suggests that you know that there even is more than one IPCC report.)
I have a suggestion: I suggest you try analyzing blogs that attack climate science with just as much skepticism as you are applying to the actual climate science. You're showing one-sided skepticism: skeptical of the science, but completely credulous of the attacks on the science.
That blog post you link is full of misdirection and not-quite-right analysis. The graph by Bloomberg cites that the data graphed comes from the GISS. In fact, it is from a 2005 paper, Hansen, et al. "Climate simulations for 1880-2003 with GISS model E." Clim. Dyn., 29, 2007, pp. 661-696). The Watt's up post, though: what's up with that? He wrote a long and superficially detailed analysis... without linking a single reference. Why no references? It looks like he doesn't want you to check what he did. His motto is, apparently, "trust me... and don't verify".
Why does he not link to the source of all the data he is analyzing? Doesn't that even slightly make you wonder?
Then, he says it's "convenient" that the graphed data stops at 2005. Well, it's not terribly suspicious: since the paper referenced was published in 2005, it would be surprising if the data didn't stop in 2005). He then shows a graph that purportedly shows "the widening divergence between models and reality" that purportedly starts in 2005. No link to the actual source of that data, though it's easy enough to find. He prints that graph-- the largest graph in the criticism-- without mentioning that it's not even graphing the same thing as the article he's criticizing.
He leaves off any explanation of where the data comes from probably because the data points graphed are not surface temperature-- this is the temperature in the mid-troposphere: 8–15km in altitude (and, to boot, only in the tropics, not the global average under discussion.)
The graph Watts Up put in without explanation is charting something completely different than the subject being discussed! Now, you can argue (and Christy does) that tropical mid-troposphere temperate is something important to understand and model... but that's a change of subject from what the article being critiqued discusses.
Why doesn't he say that?
The answer is obvious: this is misdirection. He's not trying to spread understanding. He's trying to spread confusion.
Start reading the Watts Up with the same skepticism you are applying to the actual science. Check his references. Look for misdirection and changes of subject. There's a dozen places right in that post you link that you can find things that you ought to find suspicious.
...About the IPCC reports. Indeed I have read them.
No, you haven't.
Your posts show no knowledge of anything except the denier arguments. If you had read the actual work that the denier blogs are attacking, you'd be able to comment with some actual understanding, instead of the comments you are posting with weasel-wording of "I am quoting from memory, I may be wrong." What a great weasel wording! You already told me that you think you might be wrong!
As usual, your side doesn't debate anything, only appeals to authority.
I linked to the source that you stated you were getting your facts from. You were the one appealing to authority: I just posting the link.
Yeah, right. Let's believe anonymous cowards on facebook as reliable sources; they know much more than actual scientists.
Citation needed.
Besides, it has been shown to be wrong.
You seen to think that by just saying that you will make it true.
As for linking to the IPCC... well that was more than useless.
Since you said you were quoting numbers from the IPCC, I would suggest that linking to the IPCC reports would be relevant. Since you now say it is "more than useless" to link to the source that you claimed to have based your post on, I'd say that your post is "more than useless."
I haven't seen anything to make me think you have actually read any of the IPCC reports-- I suspect your poorly-remembered data is something you poorly-remembered from some political blog somewhere. Have you actually read anything from the IPCC, the work you claim to be quoting?
Say, people are beginning to pay attention. High enough, the climate is nice. Possibly not as nice as Jamaica. But nicer than, say, the moon:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...
or
http://www.universetoday.com/1...
The numbers above are from the IPCC (albeit from memory, correct some of they are wrong).
Correct in the last part: some of them are wrong.
The actual IPCC documents are here: http://www.ipcc.ch/publication...
An interesting graphic comparing various sources of climate change is here: http://www.bloomberg.com/graph...
It's hard to trust anyone who's work is disseminated by the government or media today.
That's an assertion that's hard to challenge in the libertarian atmosphere of slashdot.
Research and reports are spun mercilessly for the gain of whoever needs it.
Indeed, it's always wise to track down the actual original data, and actually look at the data and see what we know, and how well we know it, rather than to trust the media interpretations.
It may not be scientist's fault but when you hear something like "the sky is falling" and then hear it refuted over and over, one starts to take things with a grain of salt.
The media does like to run doom and destruction stories-- they are more of a story than talking about things like "slow increase in temperature over a time scale of decades."
Take, for example, Global Cooling back in the 1970's.
OK, let's take it for an example. There was never a scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s. The American Meteorological Society did a review, trying to look for the origin of that. http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... They summarize: "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
That was refuted with Global Warming in the 2000's
It was not really "refuted" per se, since it was never a scientific consensus in the first place.
and now it's simply Global Climate Change which seems to be a catch-all.
"Global Climate Change" was the term coined by the (first) Bush administration.
I don't deny GCC but I certainly want to see the data.
Excellent! That's the difference between deniers and skeptics: deniers will make any possible excuse to avoid looking at data. As it turns out, there are literally terabytes of data.
I will suggest starting with the Working Group 1 report, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change, which summarizes what is known and how we know it. I'm most familiar with the 4th report (www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html), from 2007, but you might want to go directly to the more recent update, the 5th: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
From there, dive into the data from whichever source you prefer-- I'd suggest possibly the Berkeley Earth data, which does an interesting job of comparing alternative hypotheses against the temperature data: http://berkeleyearth.org/summa...
What's the old adage that Regan grabbed from the Russian's; "Trust but Verify" I think was it.
Excellent. Much better than the denier's motto: "Never trust, never verify, never look at the facts."
Yeah, I'm rather sympathetic with Samsung here. The actual problem is with idiotic updates that break all the stuff you've finally got fixed from the last time an update broke it.
An update should fix the stuff that's broken, not break the stuff that's fixed.
Who wants to be Nate Silver will be able to make sense of the polls?
Maybe Nate Silver?
He has a site fivethirtyeight.com/ that interprets poll results, and other numbers in the news
Your model is basically saying that since the artists already did the work, "they're not losing any money or time" if somebody else gives away their music for free.
Yes, you can say that. After all, why should you ever pay any artist? They already did the work, so they aren't losing any money, right? People are merely using their work for free without paying.
Here's the problem: "recognition" doesn't pay bills. It's nice, it's flattering, it's great for the ego, and the net result is you starve. Apple's business model is that artists should be happy that Apple had decided to give their music away for free in order to promote Apple's new business, and they seem surprised that artists actually would prefer to be paid.
Here's a tip for you, for future reference in case it ever happens to you: when you're being told "you work for free, and maybe sometime later I'll pay you", no matter how good it sounds, the deal is always going to be to the advantage of the corporation getting the free work, and not necessarily for you.
Well, Apple backed down, at least a little. Good for them. Horray for Taylor Swift.