Go read the actual article: she was fired for writing about the contents of a transcript of an interrogation she read.
This was undoubtedly at least SECRET codeword information, and she posted it on a network where, with certainty, not everyone on the network had been "read into" the compartment. In other words, she violated "need to know."
So they pulled her clearance, and since clearance was required for her job, they fired her.
She's lucky they didn't arrest her. Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
No, actually, those were thinly veiled insults. Really, look up ad hominem. You don't actually know what it means.
As far as CO2 being "not responsible for forcing" I said it looked like it might be, and stated exactly and quantitatively what my reasons for uncertainty were. That's science.
Not that I expect you will believe Wikipedia (and I don't consider them to be the ultimate arbiter myself), but they do agree with my assessment that the NAS report supports the position that majority of global warming in the last 50 years is due to anthropogenic factors. The nice thing about that article is that it links to other sites where you can verify what they're saying.
But then, I've actually read the NAS report, and don't agree it says that. Read it yourself, and make your own decision. Don't take it on faith.
McIntyre's site is not an opposing site. Pielke's site is an opposing site (and hence is not middle of the road). McIntyre's site is that of someone whose hands are in the till of ExxonMobil.
So if McIntyre's site isn't an opposing site, I suppose that means they're not in opposition. The business about Exxon is, indeed, an ad hominem circumstantial. Look it up, child.
In any case, McIntyre's work is well-supported, is being increasingly published in major peer-reviewed journals, and has been sufficiently strong as to force more careful evaluation of Mann et al. Trying to exclude it entirely is not the scientific approach.
No, there is not. However, you do strongly imply that it is a minor factor by bringing up the warming of Mars (which is actually due, in large part at least, to the precession of its apogee), and trying to claim that CO2 forcing was invented after the fact to explain the heating, when in fact CO2 forcing was addressed during the time when Time magazine was worried about global cooling. (Note: climatologists were NOT worried about global cooling in the 70's.)
If you want to make up arguments, do it on your own. And, er, where did global cooling come in? I haven't mentioned it.
As far as "major" or "minor" factor, my opinion, based on actual examination of the mathematics, is somewhere between 0 and 30 percent of the total. It would be zero if we eventually confirmed the supposition that dendrochronology is under-estimating the temperatures in 1000AD by a degree or so --- which would correspond to the error it would give if you applied the same methodology to current tree ring data. It would be about 30 percent if you look at the difference in slope between the period before 1900 and the period after. Thirty percent corresponds to Pielke's own informal estimates.
But what I really think is that real science demands that we not declare we "know" something when the error bars dominate the data.
I have read McIntyre's criticisms, and understand them fairly well. Basically, he's picking out a few suspect points and claiming that those suspect points invalidate the whole hockey stick. The reality is that the hockey stick survives even in the absence of the points that McIntyre finds suspect.
Then you haven't understood them. You also haven't actually read the NAS report, have you?
There are several very strong reasons to question the "hockey stick", and in fact the NAS report specifically says the extension of temperature predictions back before about 900AD via proxies is very poorly supported. Among them, and one that I find pretty convincing since I've got a background in simulation and modelling as well as information theory, is David Stockwell's observation that purely random numbers of the sort that would correspond to temperature data will generate a "hockey stick".
Now, notice that neither Stockwell, nor (if you look back at my comments) I have said that there is no CO2-based forcing, nor that there is no anomolous warming. That would be a statement that goes beyond the evidence. But Stockwell's work shows that even in the absence of any signal, any information, Mann's techniques lead to a "hockey stick" of similar magnitude to the one in the original paper.
Which means, young paduan, that the technique has no "skill": it doesn't actually identify anything about the data.
So, this is your ad hominem attack. I do have religious convictions at stake here.
Well, no, that's not an ad hominem. "Ad hominem" means "directed to the person." I'm noting that your argument is more like religious conviction than science.
I believe in the scientific process.
As long as it doesn't disagree with what you already believe.
What's more, I believe in the integrity of the majority of the scientific community.
So? Read the NAS report, or any of the scientific criticisms of Gore's movie. It
You seem to be having a little comprehension problem.
First off, if you look back through this topic, you'll see that I've consistently been saying "read the actual article and decide for yourself." I also consistently identified the RealClimate folks and McIntyre's site as opposing sites, and Pielke's site as more middle of the road. So yes, I'm trying to give some balanced information. Reading just RealClimate doesn't do that.
Second, you'll find nothing I wrote that says anything to contradict the notion that there is some contribution to "global warming" from CO2. The fact that I specifically point out Pielke should, in itself, disabuse you of the notion that I had that in mind. If you had a clue.
That said, though, third, you should look up the "ad hominem circumstantial": the source of funding doesn't mean diddly to the science. McIntyre has made specific criticisms of Mann et al.'s statistical methods, all of which were supported by the NAS report. If you're competent to read them and understand them, you can follow those links to the sources, and come to your own conclusions.
It looks to me, though, that you're most interested in protecting your religious convinctions. If so, stick to your fellow Church of the Hockey Stick members' sites; far be it from to me question someone's dogma.
May I suggest the "Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stick" controversy" by real actual working publishing scientists.
May I suggest you read something other than "Dummies Guides" by the very people whose work is being criticized? See, eg, Climate Audit --- or Roger Pielke's Climate Science, which notes in the head comment:
The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.
Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.
Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.
The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.
In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.
Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.
A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.
Pielke (Roger Sr) is Professor and State Climatologist at Colorado State university, and has "published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 50 chapters in books, and co-edited 9 books." So you might want to reserve your sneers about "working scientists" until you actually know what you're talking about.
Okay, first off, the person who said "just stop caring" and all the people who modded him up are idiots.
Panic and Anxiety disoreders are not a joke. They are a poorly understood physiological problem that is (as you discovered) way unpleasant.
I'm guessing the special process includes a medical and/or psychiatric examination, but if not, hie thyself off to a doctor.
Don't associate it with the test --- it's not actually all that highly correlated with stress. I had a panic attack, my first one, in church during a boring sermon.
Separating out the impact of human activity from natural climate variation is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, the IPCC concluded there is a "discernible human influence" on climate. This means the observed global warming is unlikely to be the result of natural variability alone and that human activities are at least partially responsible.
So, they say it's hard to tell if there's a lot of influence. It then cites the IPCC study --- which happens to be the same group of people as run RealClimte, and whose work is criticized in the NAS report.
Because human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to climb, and because they remain in the atmosphere for decades to centuries (depending on which gas), we're committing ourselves to a warmer climate in the future. The IPCC projects an average global temperature increase of 1-4.5F (0.6-2.5C) in the next fifty years, and 2.5-10.4F (1.4-5.8C) in the next century. Temperatures in some parts of the globe (e.g., the polar regions) are expected to rise even faster. Even the low end of the IPCC's projected range represents a rate of climate change unprecedented in the past 10,000 years.[Emphasis mine.]
Look, it's really worth reading around a bit in the literature, and not just on RealClimate. For example, read Pielke's site --- he's respectable, he's not associated with either end of the spectrum (more or less represented by Al Gore and Real Climate on one end, and Climate Audit on the other.)
Read about the anomalies in the behavior of the proxies in the 20th century --- tree rings don't seem to show the same reaction to temperature in warm periods like the last 100 years, versus cold periods like 1500-1600. Some of these studies suggest that the proxy data used by IPCC and MBH may have a systematic error of about -1 degree in warmer periods --- which, if true, would completely eliminate the "unusual warming" signal in itself, and turn "global warming" into normally cyclic climate changes.
Or have a look at Dave Stockwells work (eg here and here) which shows pretty clearly that the same statistical process used by the MGH and IPCC methods, applied to random "pink noise" --- random data in which small variations are more probable than large variations --- will show a dramatic "hockey stick".
Check out some of the (not very widely publicized) dissenters like hits:
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
While the gods must consider An Inconvenient Truth the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over Al Gore's new film. This is not just because the ex-vice-president commits numerous basic science mistakes. They are also concerned that many in the media and public will fail to realize that this film amounts to little more than science fiction..... In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice cores show that CO2 increases don't precede, and therefore don't cause, warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise -- by as much as 800 years. Even in the past century, the co
Another important thing to notice is that you're using Wikipedia as an authority on a currently controversial topic. This is not usuallty a sign of careful rigor.
As long as you read Climate Audit and Climate Science as well. RealClimate is the blog of the most vigorous defenders of the "hocket stick" and associated studies; "Climate Audit" is the blog of the most vigorous critics; and Pielke's "Climate Science" is a blog by a top scientist in the field, who is skeptical of both sides and probably the best example of someone actually doing science in the whole thing.
In fact, Roger Pielke at Climate Science is one of the foremost authorities on climate and especially on various forcing functions on climate. In response to the NAS study, he says, today:
Ignoring these science questions provides the perspective that the Report is intended to promote a particular perspective on climate science, rather than providing a balanced presentation on the issues. Indeed, the statement in Boston Globe that,
"Our conclusion is that this recent period of warming is likely the warmest in a (millennium),'' said John Wallace, one of the 12 members on the panel and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington",
clearly shows such a biased view. The Report is a disappointment in not adequately addressing the accuracy of the global surface temperature trend data. Since its accuracy is at the foundation of the entire Report, the absence of such an evaluation very substantially weakens the value of the Report in climate science.
Yes. Your made up number isn't bad, by the way, it's only an order of magnitude off. Now, if the gradient 1500-1900 is around 0.1 degrees/century, and from 1900 to 2000 is 0.4 deg/century, then only 0.3 degree can be allocated reasonably to anthropogenic causes.
But what people keep quoting is the total difference between 1500 (the bottom of the Little Ice Age) and 2000 (an admittedly warm period.)
Interestingly --- and I just noticed this myself --- what Pielke suggests is that at most 30 percent of the term change can be ascribed to anthropogenic sources. That surns out to match these back-of-envelope numbers quite well.
Then go back and read the details. Frankly, I'm kind of appalled that they have so many caveats in the details, and then weaken them so in the conclusion.
... and when you read it, remember that RealClimate is an advocacy site for the pro-anthropogenic warming theory.
Have a look at climate audit, which is a critical site, and Roger Pielke's Climate Science; Pielke is a famous climatologist and more middle of the road, accepting some anthropogenic warming, but questioning whether it's at all dominant in apparent overall warming.
Congratulations, you've successfully posted four paragraphs, and been wrong in all of them.
The data shows a flat line for several hundred years, then a "hocky stick" increase coinciding with our use of fossil fuel, to use the term in TFA.
It's a little off to call those data. Those curves are reconstructions of temperatures from proxy data, like tree rings. What's more, as was pointed out above, feeding statistically appropriate noise to the reconstruction methods used by Mann et al. rsults in a statistically indistinguishable "hocket stick."
Now, this doesn't mean there has been no warming --- in fact, we're pretty durn certain that it's warmer now than it was when Isaac Newton was alive. The Thames doesn't freeze solid like it used to. What it does mean is that the methods of Mann et al. can't distinguish data that shows warming from data that is uniformly random. In other words: warming, yes; hockey stick, no.
That is the crux of the issue.
Except for the part about "not true."
Now I know people who would probably fire back with the cliche "correlation doesn't imply blah blah blah", and then shut their brains off. The cliche is overused, and correlation ABSOLUTELY DOES point fingers at possible sources of the observed trend (that's called the Conclusion of the Results, or rather the interpretation of the experts).
Except the actual report doesn't say that.
The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium" because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.
The "actual interpretations of the experts" are that they have little confidence in the conclusion that global temperatures have actually increased dramatically or unexpectedly. (Again, that doesn't mean they haven't. It just means that we don't know, and the actual data and the reconstructions from the data don't tell us.)
Since NO OTHER MEASUREMENTS trend the same way, the choices are fairly limited as to what could be causing it.
On the contrary, since reconstructions of plain random numbers provide the same "hockey stick" results as the data, the reconstructions of Mann et al. don't actually tell us anything.
Sadly, I don't think four misstatements in four paragraphs is a/. record, but thanks for playing anyway.
Read the actual paper, and you'll find that, instead of all the very firm statements in the Yahoo article, there are lots of caveats, and the note that temperature reconstructions back further than 400 years are very chancy.
As to the greenhouse gas hypothesis, there are a couple of real problems with it: (1) about 60 percent of the temperature increase happened between 1500 and 1900. The notion that there was a lot of unusual greenhouse gases in that interval is questionable at best. (2) there is significant data suggesting "global warming" of similar order of magnitude on Mars and other planets. (3) most of the argument that greenhouse gases are causing the warming are based, first and foremost, on the assumption that there is unusual warming, which is not a very strong conclusion, as noted by the report. Reasoning from "there has been global warming" to "there is an anthropogenic reason for global warming" to "anthropogenic causes for global warming are proven by the global warming" is circular.
The instrumentally measured warming of about 0.6C during the 20th century is also reflected in borehole temperature measurements, the retreat of glaciers, and other observational evidence, and can be simulated with climate models. Large-scale surface temperature reconstructions yield a generally consistent picture of temperature trends during the preceding millennium, including relatively warm conditions centered around A.D. 1000 (identified by some as the "Medieval Warm Period") and a relatively cold period (or "Little Ice Age") centered around 1700. The existence and extent of a Little Ice Age from roughly 1500 to 1850 is supported by a wide variety of evidence including ice cores, tree rings, borehole temperatures, glacier length records, and historical documents. Evidence for regional warmth during medieval times can be found in a diverse but more limited set of records including ice cores, tree rings, marine sediments, and historical sources from Europe and Asia, but the exact timing and duration of warm periods may have varied from region to region, and the magnitude and geographic extent of the warmth are uncertain.
Now, notice something: we're talking about a "warming trend" over the last 400 years. That would be the interval from roughly the beginning of the "Little Ice Age" to now. So, in other words, we're now substantially warmer than the low point of a historically unprecedented low temperature interval.
Well, duh. Does the phrase "regression to the mean" ring any bells?
More...
The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium" because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.
In other words, the conclusions of Mann et al. aren't very well supported --- and those are the ones most often used politically.
Probably. Record companies are notorious for being creative in the way they account for sales. Googling "records royalties lawsuit" will give you an idea of how often.
Slashdot Mirror
Go read the actual article: she was fired for writing about the contents of a transcript of an interrogation she read.
This was undoubtedly at least SECRET codeword information, and she posted it on a network where, with certainty, not everyone on the network had been "read into" the compartment. In other words, she violated "need to know."
So they pulled her clearance, and since clearance was required for her job, they fired her.
She's lucky they didn't arrest her. Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
And they say geeks don't have a sense of humor.
Um, actually, a mile high would be a pretty low altitude airship.
Hell, here in Boulder, a mile high would be an underground airship.
No, actually, those were thinly veiled insults. Really, look up ad hominem. You don't actually know what it means.
As far as CO2 being "not responsible for forcing" I said it looked like it might be, and stated exactly and quantitatively what my reasons for uncertainty were. That's science.
Not that I expect you will believe Wikipedia (and I don't consider them to be the ultimate arbiter myself), but they do agree with my assessment that the NAS report supports the position that majority of global warming in the last 50 years is due to anthropogenic factors. The nice thing about that article is that it links to other sites where you can verify what they're saying.
But then, I've actually read the NAS report, and don't agree it says that. Read it yourself, and make your own decision. Don't take it on faith.
McIntyre's site is not an opposing site. Pielke's site is an opposing site (and hence is not middle of the road). McIntyre's site is that of someone whose hands are in the till of ExxonMobil.
So if McIntyre's site isn't an opposing site, I suppose that means they're not in opposition. The business about Exxon is, indeed, an ad hominem circumstantial. Look it up, child.
In any case, McIntyre's work is well-supported, is being increasingly published in major peer-reviewed journals, and has been sufficiently strong as to force more careful evaluation of Mann et al. Trying to exclude it entirely is not the scientific approach.
No, there is not. However, you do strongly imply that it is a minor factor by bringing up the warming of Mars (which is actually due, in large part at least, to the precession of its apogee), and trying to claim that CO2 forcing was invented after the fact to explain the heating, when in fact CO2 forcing was addressed during the time when Time magazine was worried about global cooling. (Note: climatologists were NOT worried about global cooling in the 70's.)
If you want to make up arguments, do it on your own. And, er, where did global cooling come in? I haven't mentioned it.
As far as "major" or "minor" factor, my opinion, based on actual examination of the mathematics, is somewhere between 0 and 30 percent of the total. It would be zero if we eventually confirmed the supposition that dendrochronology is under-estimating the temperatures in 1000AD by a degree or so --- which would correspond to the error it would give if you applied the same methodology to current tree ring data. It would be about 30 percent if you look at the difference in slope between the period before 1900 and the period after. Thirty percent corresponds to Pielke's own informal estimates.
But what I really think is that real science demands that we not declare we "know" something when the error bars dominate the data.
I have read McIntyre's criticisms, and understand them fairly well. Basically, he's picking out a few suspect points and claiming that those suspect points invalidate the whole hockey stick. The reality is that the hockey stick survives even in the absence of the points that McIntyre finds suspect.
Then you haven't understood them. You also haven't actually read the NAS report, have you?
There are several very strong reasons to question the "hockey stick", and in fact the NAS report specifically says the extension of temperature predictions back before about 900AD via proxies is very poorly supported. Among them, and one that I find pretty convincing since I've got a background in simulation and modelling as well as information theory, is David Stockwell's observation that purely random numbers of the sort that would correspond to temperature data will generate a "hockey stick".
Now, notice that neither Stockwell, nor (if you look back at my comments) I have said that there is no CO2-based forcing, nor that there is no anomolous warming. That would be a statement that goes beyond the evidence. But Stockwell's work shows that even in the absence of any signal, any information, Mann's techniques lead to a "hockey stick" of similar magnitude to the one in the original paper.
Which means, young paduan, that the technique has no "skill": it doesn't actually identify anything about the data.
So, this is your ad hominem attack. I do have religious convictions at stake here.
Well, no, that's not an ad hominem. "Ad hominem" means "directed to the person." I'm noting that your argument is more like religious conviction than science.
I believe in the scientific process.
As long as it doesn't disagree with what you already believe.
What's more, I believe in the integrity of the majority of the scientific community.
So? Read the NAS report, or any of the scientific criticisms of Gore's movie. It
You seem to be having a little comprehension problem.
First off, if you look back through this topic, you'll see that I've consistently been saying "read the actual article and decide for yourself." I also consistently identified the RealClimate folks and McIntyre's site as opposing sites, and Pielke's site as more middle of the road. So yes, I'm trying to give some balanced information. Reading just RealClimate doesn't do that.
Second, you'll find nothing I wrote that says anything to contradict the notion that there is some contribution to "global warming" from CO2. The fact that I specifically point out Pielke should, in itself, disabuse you of the notion that I had that in mind. If you had a clue.
That said, though, third, you should look up the "ad hominem circumstantial": the source of funding doesn't mean diddly to the science. McIntyre has made specific criticisms of Mann et al.'s statistical methods, all of which were supported by the NAS report. If you're competent to read them and understand them, you can follow those links to the sources, and come to your own conclusions.
It looks to me, though, that you're most interested in protecting your religious convinctions. If so, stick to your fellow Church of the Hockey Stick members' sites; far be it from to me question someone's dogma.
May I suggest you read something other than "Dummies Guides" by the very people whose work is being criticized? See, eg, Climate Audit --- or Roger Pielke's Climate Science, which notes in the head comment:
Pielke (Roger Sr) is Professor and State Climatologist at Colorado State university, and has "published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 50 chapters in books, and co-edited 9 books." So you might want to reserve your sneers about "working scientists" until you actually know what you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead and make fun. You'll be old someday.
(They're wrong: typing is the first to go.)
Dear private donut:
You are an idiot.
Yours sincerely
The American Medical Assoication, the American Psychological Association, and every MD who has had to deal with someone with panic/anxiety disorder.
Okay, first off, the person who said "just stop caring" and all the people who modded him up are idiots.
Panic and Anxiety disoreders are not a joke. They are a poorly understood physiological problem that is (as you discovered) way unpleasant.
I'm guessing the special process includes a medical and/or psychiatric examination, but if not, hie thyself off to a doctor.
Don't associate it with the test --- it's not actually all that highly correlated with stress. I had a panic attack, my first one, in church during a boring sermon.
There's a good page on panic attacks at Web MD.
So, they say it's hard to tell if there's a lot of influence. It then cites the IPCC study --- which happens to be the same group of people as run RealClimte, and whose work is criticized in the NAS report.
Look, it's really worth reading around a bit in the literature, and not just on RealClimate. For example, read Pielke's site --- he's respectable, he's not associated with either end of the spectrum (more or less represented by Al Gore and Real Climate on one end, and Climate Audit on the other.)
Read about the anomalies in the behavior of the proxies in the 20th century --- tree rings don't seem to show the same reaction to temperature in warm periods like the last 100 years, versus cold periods like 1500-1600. Some of these studies suggest that the proxy data used by IPCC and MBH may have a systematic error of about -1 degree in warmer periods --- which, if true, would completely eliminate the "unusual warming" signal in itself, and turn "global warming" into normally cyclic climate changes.
Or have a look at Dave Stockwells work (eg here and here) which shows pretty clearly that the same statistical process used by the MGH and IPCC methods, applied to random "pink noise" --- random data in which small variations are more probable than large variations --- will show a dramatic "hockey stick".
Check out some of the (not very widely publicized) dissenters like hits:
Or this:
If all else fails, you can just watch them.
(Hell, I'm 50, fat, and have a bad baclk. Unless I meet one with a serious Daddy thing, I'm not going to date them.)
Another important thing to notice is that you're using Wikipedia as an authority on a currently controversial topic. This is not usuallty a sign of careful rigor.
In fact, Roger Pielke at Climate Science is one of the foremost authorities on climate and especially on various forcing functions on climate. In response to the NAS study, he says, today:
Get some private Pilates lessons. (If you need to find an instructor, there are good resources at The Pilates Method Alliance.)
It helped my back pain when nothing else did, post a car accident.
Pilates Studios are also usually 10-1 female, and they're often young attractive dancer types, so it's fun for that reason as well.
Yes. Your made up number isn't bad, by the way, it's only an order of magnitude off. Now, if the gradient 1500-1900 is around 0.1 degrees/century, and from 1900 to 2000 is 0.4 deg/century, then only 0.3 degree can be allocated reasonably to anthropogenic causes.
But what people keep quoting is the total difference between 1500 (the bottom of the Little Ice Age) and 2000 (an admittedly warm period.)
Interestingly --- and I just noticed this myself --- what Pielke suggests is that at most 30 percent of the term change can be ascribed to anthropogenic sources. That surns out to match these back-of-envelope numbers quite well.
Over similar time periods? Clearly not explained by conditions not present on Earth? Where is this evidence?
You're seriuously asking me for evidence that warming on Mars was not anthropogenic?
Then go back and read the details. Frankly, I'm kind of appalled that they have so many caveats in the details, and then weaken them so in the conclusion.
... and when you read it, remember that RealClimate is an advocacy site for the pro-anthropogenic warming theory.
Have a look at climate audit, which is a critical site, and Roger Pielke's Climate Science; Pielke is a famous climatologist and more middle of the road, accepting some anthropogenic warming, but questioning whether it's at all dominant in apparent overall warming.
I ate a beaver last week.
The data shows a flat line for several hundred years, then a "hocky stick" increase coinciding with our use of fossil fuel, to use the term in TFA.
It's a little off to call those data. Those curves are reconstructions of temperatures from proxy data, like tree rings. What's more, as was pointed out above, feeding statistically appropriate noise to the reconstruction methods used by Mann et al. rsults in a statistically indistinguishable "hocket stick."
Now, this doesn't mean there has been no warming --- in fact, we're pretty durn certain that it's warmer now than it was when Isaac Newton was alive. The Thames doesn't freeze solid like it used to. What it does mean is that the methods of Mann et al. can't distinguish data that shows warming from data that is uniformly random. In other words: warming, yes; hockey stick, no.
That is the crux of the issue.
Except for the part about "not true."
Now I know people who would probably fire back with the cliche "correlation doesn't imply blah blah blah", and then shut their brains off. The cliche is overused, and correlation ABSOLUTELY DOES point fingers at possible sources of the observed trend (that's called the Conclusion of the Results, or rather the interpretation of the experts).
Except the actual report doesn't say that.
The "actual interpretations of the experts" are that they have little confidence in the conclusion that global temperatures have actually increased dramatically or unexpectedly. (Again, that doesn't mean they haven't. It just means that we don't know, and the actual data and the reconstructions from the data don't tell us.)
Since NO OTHER MEASUREMENTS trend the same way, the choices are fairly limited as to what could be causing it.
On the contrary, since reconstructions of plain random numbers provide the same "hockey stick" results as the data, the reconstructions of Mann et al. don't actually tell us anything.
Sadly, I don't think four misstatements in four paragraphs is a
Please to read some of the actual report before you start taking a propaganda film as a primary source.
Read the actual paper, and you'll find that, instead of all the very firm statements in the Yahoo article, there are lots of caveats, and the note that temperature reconstructions back further than 400 years are very chancy.
As to the greenhouse gas hypothesis, there are a couple of real problems with it:
(1) about 60 percent of the temperature increase happened between 1500 and 1900. The notion that there was a lot of unusual greenhouse gases in that interval is questionable at best.
(2) there is significant data suggesting "global warming" of similar order of magnitude on Mars and other planets.
(3) most of the argument that greenhouse gases are causing the warming are based, first and foremost, on the assumption that there is unusual warming, which is not a very strong conclusion, as noted by the report. Reasoning from "there has been global warming" to "there is an anthropogenic reason for global warming" to "anthropogenic causes for global warming are proven by the global warming" is circular.
Now, notice something: we're talking about a "warming trend" over the last 400 years. That would be the interval from roughly the beginning of the "Little Ice Age" to now. So, in other words, we're now substantially warmer than the low point of a historically unprecedented low temperature interval.
Well, duh. Does the phrase "regression to the mean" ring any bells?
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In other words, the conclusions of Mann et al. aren't very well supported --- and those are the ones most often used politically.
Are all artists getting the shaft like this?
Probably. Record companies are notorious for being creative in the way they account for sales. Googling "records royalties lawsuit" will give you an idea of how often.