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The Forum > Article Comments > A climate model for every season > Comments

A climate model for every season : Comments

By Mark S. Lawson, published 25/9/2009

Scientists really have no idea what drives climate.

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This is an excellent article. The only constants I have been able to get out of the debate so far is that believers in anthropogenic global warming are fervently dogmatic and when confronted with alternative hypotheses immediately attack the proposer rather than countering the argument. Abusive ad hominem attacks always make me suspicious of the validity of the attacker's argument.s
Posted by EQ, Friday, 25 September 2009 9:40:46 AM
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EQ

Dogma is founded in blind faith. Contrary to what you imply, science is not.

"Alternative hypotheses" have been refuted time and time again.

"Attack the proposer"?

Tell me, who do you think "attacks" the vast majority of scientists that just go about their work testing the hypothesis and find AGW to be even more robust.

And who do you think "attacks" the the messenger (IPCC)?
Posted by Q&A, Friday, 25 September 2009 10:04:15 AM
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The author shows the climatological incoherence underlying the carbon alarmism. In short, everything depends on picking utterly arbitrary time-frames.

But an equal incoherence affects the underlying ethical assumptions of the alarmists.

This is because positive science is incapable of supplying value judgements. So even if there were no issue as to the positive science, *nothing* would follow from that as a matter of policy, which requires value judgements. There would still remain all the ethical and positive questions underlying the use of coercion for social co-operation. Who would benefit? Who should? How would a given human life be balanced against a given non-human life? How would one know? Who should be authorised to judge? What if the person affected doesn't agree?

How would the ecological benefits of warming, for example in all micro-climates of Eurase and the Americas, be weighed against the ecological disadvantages? For humans? For non-humans? Would there be a discount for future utility as against present - would the life of a stranger a million years hence be counted equal to a life foregone now? If so, why? If not, why not?

What reason is there to think that the central planning of production required to control all carbon emissions, would not be worse for all relevant human values, than responding by way of more, not less economic and personal liberty?

The alarmist argument is ethically, economically and ecologically incoherent, as well as incoherent as a matter of climatology.

Q&A
In case you didn't notice, your post consists entirely of
a) personal argument, and
b) appeal to absent authority.

You make no attempt to deal with the substantive issues in the author's post, except to imply that someone, somewhere has got it satisfactorily covered. But that's not good enough.

The scam is up. Global warming will go down as the biggest pious fraud in the history of the world. The mediaeval selling of indulgences had nothing on this crowd.
Posted by Peter Hume, Friday, 25 September 2009 11:01:36 AM
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Peter Hume,

Yes, the Earth's climate system is complex, we know that already. The author says we "really have no idea what drives climate".

Bollocks. We have a very good idea, the nuances are very much in debate but hey, that's how science works.

Mark Lawson cites the research by Meehl et al. They conclude (quote):

"The role of the Quasi-biennial Oscillation (QBO) in the response to solar forcing has been noted in earlier studies. A set of experiments with the two WACCM model versions with a prescribed QBO was carried out (results from those experiments will be presented in a subsequent paper).

However, the results for the climate system response to solar forcing are qualitatively similar to those presented here without the QBO, but the prescribed QBO shows improvements in the stratospheric response compared to observations.

Though the solar-forced eastern equatorial SST anomalies shown are about half the amplitude of those associated with ENSO, they are relevant for understanding decadal time-scale variability in the Pacific.

This response also cannot be used to explain recent global warming because the 11-year solar cycle has not shown a measurable trend over the past 30 years." End quote.

Now, which part needs further explanation?

Wait. Better still ... rock up to Copenhagen and spring this "biggest pious fraud in the history of the world" on them.
Posted by Q&A, Friday, 25 September 2009 11:16:52 AM
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If the 'climate warmers' are wrong then the world will transition to a range of new, clean and mosty sustainable energy sources quite smoothly, at some expense but also at considerable profit to the early adopters. Just as it transitioned from timber to coal, canals to railroads, gas to electricity, ships to planes, pencils to computers.

If the 'climate skeptics' are wrong, there will be massive drought, inundation and famines, tens of millions will be displaced and hundreds of millions will starve. US and UK defence bodies warn of the possibility of nuclear confict.

Who would you prefer was wrong?
Posted by JulianC, Friday, 25 September 2009 11:53:05 AM
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Oh dear yet another right winger who thinks he can smeer the facts and tell us the Earth is flat.
Posted by Kenny, Friday, 25 September 2009 1:49:24 PM
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Q&A - I'm quite impressed that you must have bought the paper in the journal Science to which I refer in the article. Your quote is not in the general article or the abstract. But that is by the by, the research is not really relevent to the theme of the article - that global warmers have admitted to the current hiatus in temperatues and have produced several different explanations of that warming. I merely mentioned it as one promising line of research into the puzzle of why very small variations in the sun's energy output has such a large influence. All the scientists quoted are respected authorities and all have wildly different stories. Its hardly worth exploring the differences except to say that, obviously, the field is very far from settled.
Given the very unsettled theory, lack of warming in the past decade and lack of evidence that what warming has occured is artificial in some way, adopting strong policy based on the theory would seem to be premature. We are talking billions of dolalrs and the climate scientists can't find one story and stick to it.
By the by if they really said the 11 year solar cycle has show no measurable trend over the past 30 years they will be very embarrassed that you found that quote, given what the sun is doing, at the mo - nothing much.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Friday, 25 September 2009 2:08:54 PM
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I think the author of this article is likely to be in the same position as journalists once employed by the British nuclear energy authority to convince people that just a little bit of radiation isn't a bad thing. In other words he hopes that readers will accord him some credibility at the same time as it is blatantly obvious that his bread is buttered by precisely those interests in whose interest it is to maintain unsustainable levels of production and consumption based on nineteenth century technologies.

I take the view that scientists, climatologists included, are rationally trained and not inclined to panic. Journalists, on the other hand, have nothing like the public standing of the former profession.

Pull the other one mate.
Posted by anthonykn, Friday, 25 September 2009 3:06:52 PM
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anthonykn and Kenny - The thrust of the article is simply to point out that global warmers have acknowledged that the temperature record isn't following script and they have'nt got their story straight on why that is so. The references and reasoning are all quite clear. Mostly I have only cited global warmers themselves.
In fact, the only response you can make is a sneering political denounciation, which is what you have done. It is sad that the debate should fall to that level, or that you would think your responses are some sort of answer. Do you have any arguement to make on the facts or is that it?
Posted by Curmudgeon, Friday, 25 September 2009 5:17:56 PM
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The author has apparently been a science writer for the AFR. Based on the monumental lack of understanding of climate science demonstrated in this article, and, worse, willingness to make giant and nonsensical leaps to incorrect conclusions, my estimation of the AFR has just fallen.

I counted 6 completely false statements and 7 serious misunderstandings.

Moreover, the central line of argument of the article - that there is significant scientific doubt that the world is warming, and that human activities are primarily responsible - is just flat wrong.
Posted by Matt Andrews, Friday, 25 September 2009 5:52:43 PM
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Mr Mark Lawson,
please do some reading around and get to know what your fellow climate sceptics are saying because you're embarrassing yourself.

You repeat one of my FAVOURITE pieces of sceptic propaganda which is that warming ceased in 1998.

First of all, the May 2007 New Scientist listed the top 26 myths promoted by sceptic propaganda and "cooling since 1998" was of course included. In other words, this was debunked years ago. Why are you still circulating this dishonest claptrap?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462

Not only is the myth of cooling since 1998 factually incorrect (as 2005 was hotter and 2007 was as hot) but even FELLOW sceptics are starting to warn against repeating this myth, in case you all shortly look foolish.

At the 2009 Heartland Institute conference Dr Patrick J Michaels explained that long term climate trends were still up, but that short term El Nino and solar heating trends bumped 1998 up above the mean, and then following cooling La Nina cycles let the trends drop a bit. He warned that when the El Nino cycle switches back we could see even STRONGER warming, and then said:

"Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all…
If you loose credibility on this issue you lose this issue!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

Ummm, Mr Lawson, you lose.

El Nino is returning. Temperatures this year or next could break the records. We don't have to wait very long. But hey? Look on the bright side! A few years after that when the La Nina comes back, you can always write about how "global temperatures have been cooling since 2010, as 2010 reached a new high point and it has been cooling since". I just wonder if your sceptical audience will be dense enough to swallow that ridiculous cherry-picking routine a second time?

So do you want to check out that youtube clip where one of your fellow sceptics rebukes the Heartland institute for spreading this myth, or are you just going to continue on your way making a complete fool of yourself?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Friday, 25 September 2009 10:20:10 PM
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Oh dear, not again. I really wish some journalists would give up trying to "do science". It doesn't help when you take an a priori position and then try and filter scientific abstracts through that perspective.

Look Mark, I appreciate that you think you know what these scientific authors that you quoted are on about, but it's quite clear that you don't. More than one of those papers provide support for feedback mechanisms being responsible for amplifying warming trends, whether they be triggered by CO2 events or not. This is something that I have seen you argue against many times. So, now I am confused as to whether you are arguing for including feedback mechanisms or not in climate models.

As to the Meehl et al. paper you provided at the last, I would suggest that you buy the whole paper and read it before you attempt publish this sort of thing again. The last line is a doozy.

I'll save you some money:
"This response also cannot be used to explain recent global warming because the 11-year solar cycle has not shown a measurable trend over the past 30 years".

Get that? No measurable trend in the solar cycle in 30 years. And they give a reference for that too, maybe you should read it.

J. Lean, G. Rottman, J. Harder, G. Kopp. SORCE Contributions to New Understanding of Global Change and Solar Variability. Sol. Phys. 230, 27 (2005)
Posted by Bugsy, Saturday, 26 September 2009 12:22:18 AM
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Matt Andrews and Eclipse Now - I regret there were no misunderstandings and no errors. The article is very clear and straight forward. The warming side has admitted that temperatures have flatlined at best or declined at worst (from their point of view) and are scrambling to explain this. The statements I quoted, from the warming swide, make this clear. It is also clear that there are several different stories.
If you have an argument to make with the statements then what are they? To quote old New Scientist assertions, particularly those made before the cooling trend really became clear in the past couple of years and warmers could still laugh off the trend, is pointless.
True el nino is back and so temperatures will be higher for the next few months, but basically they just are not following script. Time for the die hard to work on getting their stories straight.
Posted by curmudgeonathome, Saturday, 26 September 2009 12:31:48 AM
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Enough of your data diddling Mark Lawson. Scientist Richard Deebe also advised:

“It’s possible that other greenhouse gases such as methane could have contributed to the (PETM) warming……. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.”

Other vicious climate circles have occurred in the distant past and CO2 has been implicated in four of the five largest mass extinctions of life on Earth: Ordovician, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic and Triassic-Jurassic.

Meanwhile the latest study in Conservation Biology claim that the Earth is in the throes of its “sixth great extinction event” and Australia and the Pacific are becoming the worst regions on the planet for the destruction of animals and plants.

The study, said that since records began, Australian agriculture had changed or destroyed half the woodlands and forests of the country. Logging has degraded more than two-thirds of the remaining forest and land clearing and overlogging of forests have been highlighted as the greatest threats to land-based flora and fauna in the Oceania region, according to their review of 24,000 scientific papers.

The report sets out several recommendations to slow the decline by introducing laws to limit land clearing, logging and mining; reducing carbon emissions and pollution; and limiting bottom trawling in the oceans. How will that impact on your “free” market buddies Mark?

In addition, scientists at Griffith University last month determined that global warming has cut the average snow cover at Australia’s highest altitude snow course, Spencer’s Creek in the Snowy Mountains, by 30 per cent to 40 per cent in the last 50 years.

Salinity is rampant and major rivers are on life support due to carbon based emissions and other toxic chemicals dumped there by industries out of control so enough of your tedious endeavours to dupe. The discerning among us have less concern on whether it's warming or freezing. It's the empirical evidence that disturbs them most and that overwhelming evidence causes your diddlers to appear quite hilarious - so I guess at least they're good for a giggle?
Posted by Protagoras, Saturday, 26 September 2009 2:00:05 AM
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Then NASA reports that 1998 was the hottest year on record in a super-El Nino year, the largest El Nino humanity has ever witnessed. However, according to NASA 2005 BEAT 1998 WITHOUT the help of an El Nino, and 2007 equalled 1998. What cooling?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y15UGhhRd6M
To claim that the world has been cooling since 1998 can only be justified by narrowing in on that year and stretching your temperature range out to 2004, falling conveniently short of 2005. It's a misleading selective use of data called cherry-picking, and would not pass 1st year science courses if submitted as a paper.

From climate sceptic Dr Patrick J Michaels again:

"Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all…
If you loose credibility on this issue you lose this issue!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 26 September 2009 9:23:09 AM
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Dear Mark Lawson

No, I did not buy the Meehl et al paper.
Being an active scientist in the discipline and member of respective academies and organisations, I receive the papers as a matter of course (often in advance and sometimes for review).

As others have noted, you are completely ignorant of the science or have a more malevolent agenda. I would say a bit of both given your propensity to cherry-pick, take things out of context and deliberately distort or misrepresent what scientists actually report – despite your protestations or affirmations to the contrary.

Either way, your credibility as a ‘straight-shooting’ journalist has flown out the window, imho. Indeed, I would suggest you are giving Andrew Bolt (Herald Sun shock-jock columnist) a run for his money. If the journalistic standard you have shown in this OLO piece is typical of your efforts for the Australian Financial Review, then I can only despair.

By the by ... in your article, on a number of occasions, you refer to a Senator Field.
Many OLO regulars may be wondering if you suffer from the same affliction as the sad, sombre Senator Fielding?

You have done this a number of times now (Dr Noel Keenleyside immediately comes to mind). Nevertheless, I find it disturbing that a journalist (even of your 'calibre') can’t get the facts right, let alone have the capacity to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s ... as real scientists are expected to do whenever we make an utterance (another reason I use a pseudonym ... by the by :)

Whether you believe in AGW or not is irrelevant, Mark.
Adopting strong ‘climate change’ policies (energy, food, water, defence, transport, health, trade, etc, etc) is required by all stakeholders ... and is NOT premature. However, if your views and assessment is representative of the human condition, I am not optimistic.

Oh, by the by ... sun spots are back (group 1026 & 1027) - each capable of producing Senator Fielding’s ubiquitous solar flares. Do try and keep up :)
Posted by Q&A, Saturday, 26 September 2009 10:09:53 AM
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The author inadvertently points out the reality of climate science in that the influences affecting our climate are many and varied and may never be able to be completely understood and predicted. That doesnt mean we should ignore what we do know and risk catastrophe and death. Only a fool would take such a gamble.
Posted by mikk, Saturday, 26 September 2009 10:42:37 AM
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There are never-ending claims from those who refuse to extend their reading beyond denial blogs (e.g. "Watts Up With That", infamous among climate scientists for shameless cherry-picking of data and spectacular ignorance of the science) that the warming trend is under significant scientific doubt.

Depart the "denialosphere" and return to the real world, however, and you'll find this is 100% false.

Yes, natural variability over the short-to-medium term is a feature of temperature. There is nothing in the temperature record to date that constitutes a significant departure from the long term warming trend.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

It might be useful to review this discussion of temperature data:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/what-if/

More fundamentally, we have empirical observations of the big-picture energy imbalance that the planet is experiencing: the amount of energy received by the Earth is greater than the amount of energy released by the Earth. See a brief explanation here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Measuring-Earths-energy-imbalance.html

Given this imbalance, it's basic physics that the planet is warming, and it will continue to warm over the medium-to-long term until, some centuries or millenia after greenhouse gas levels have stabilised, a new equilibrium state is reached at a higher global temperature.

That does not mean that this process will necessarily be gradual; if anything, the paleoclimate record shows that sudden climate disruptions are more common than long and gradual changes.
Posted by Matt Andrews, Saturday, 26 September 2009 12:57:46 PM
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Matt, it's worth restating;

Anthony Watts is infamous too (not just his blog) ... he is most definitely NOT a climate scientist.

Watts is a former TV weather-man with NO recognised credentials in any of the climate sciences. His claim to infamy is that he has popularised the anti-global warming meme.

Watts has attained virtual messiah status with the likes of the Heartland Institute, culminating in "Dr Watts" himself giving presentations at Heartland's annual (I should say twice yearly) "climate conferences", usually coinciding with the genuine international conferences.
Posted by Q&A, Saturday, 26 September 2009 1:54:34 PM
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I thought for a while that OLO had been colonised by climate sceptics, but they must all be watching the AFL grand final judging on this thread to date.

Usual arguments from the AGW enthusiasts - references to papers are taken to "prove" something without once arguing the points logically, and plenty of ad hominem attacks on the other side, mixed with claims to scientific eminence by at least one of the posters.

Yet what Mark has pointed out ought to be uncontroversial. We know that other forcings are stronger than CO2, it's just that this has never publicly been accepted by the AGW enthusiasts before.

If citing papers is all the go, this one by Douglass and Christie ought to be published by now http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf and it purports to demonstrate that the forcing effect of CO2 is what you would expect on the radiative physics, but that there are no amplifications. In which case we're looking at a temperature increase that will max out at 2 degrees. No big problem there.

What those criticising Mark seem not to understand is that the argument is not about whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not, but what other greenhouse mechanisms do in reaction to a bit of warming. That's the bit that we don't understand and which is just represented in the models by a guess which is normally positive.

So how about engaging with the argument rather than just spraying irrelevant references and insults around?
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 26 September 2009 3:05:14 PM
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If I read you right Graham, are both you and Mark arguing that there is evidence for greenhouse mechanisms that we don't understand yet? One of the papers that Mark cited in his article certainly seems to think so, what's more they also seem to think that it would act in a feedback manner.

In light of this revelation, why is it that I don't think I have ever seen either of you argue for more research dollars to be put into climate science to find out what they are. These unknown mechanisms have the potential to be catastrophic, are they not?
Posted by Bugsy, Saturday, 26 September 2009 5:25:22 PM
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>>I thought for a while that OLO had been colonised by climate sceptics

it most definitely has. well done, mr. young. expertise garnered from your howard days?

>> Usual arguments from the AGW enthusiasts ...

well, i enthusiastically choose the word and the integrity of the climate science community over yours and lawson's.

>> without once arguing the points logically,

neither you nor lawson nor i have the expertise for "arguing the points logically". you want
debate over difficult scientific questions to be reduced to 300 word grabs by puffed-up amateurs?

what i do note is the sleazy manner in which lawson uses words such as "admitted", as if the dishonest scientists are being flushed out by the crusading lawsons.

>> That's the bit that we don't understand ...

nonsense. the suggestion that you or lawson are dispasssionate observers, merely evaluating the evidence, is self-evidently ludicrous. you're both quite literally in the business of denial.

>>So how about engaging with the argument rather than just spraying irrelevant references and insults around?

give me one reason why i should consider the cherry-picked arguments of partisan hacks, rather than the work of thousands of scientists.
Posted by bushbasher, Saturday, 26 September 2009 6:09:25 PM
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Strip away the personal argumentation; the arbitrary time-frames; the mistaken idea that science supplies values judgments; and the superstitious worship of omnipotent government, and there is nothing left of the AGW argument.

One reiterated argument is that no-one but climatologists are qualified to interpret the data. Any other scientific or educated view is dismissed as not ‘significant’, or even malicious. Like ancient seers versed in bird-lore, only climatologists can read the gizzards apparently.

This is then held out as ‘scientific’ justification for their conclusion - that there should be total world government control of all human economic activity.

They consult their oscillation index and it has become the index of everyone else’s liberties. It tells them – scientifically – how urgent it is for everyone else to obey big government intrusion into any and every area of life.

The one thing on which all parties are agreed, is that the significance of the data depends entirely on what time-frame you choose. But the appropriateness of the time-frame is not given by the data; it is entirely a matter of human values on which the climatologists are no more qualified to pronounce than anyone else.

Even if the globe is warming, so what? Isn’t the bloody temperature allowed to vary any more?

The climatologists can’t even predict the climate *today*. What makes you think they can predict the ecology and microclimate and ‘see which grain will grow, and which will not’?

They jump from their climatological premise, to the economic and ecological conclusion that central planning of all human economic activity is the unquestionable solution.

The profound intellectual and moral bankruptcy of this dopey illogic seems to escape them.

JulianC
Can you tell the difference between the transitions from timber to coal, canals to railroads, gas to electricity, etc.; and your proposed transition to non-carbon fuels?

If you can’t tell the difference, it means you are not qualified to comment, because the difference proves that, unlike those earlier transitions, this one would not be a suitable means to the ends its proposers intend *even in their own terms*.

What is it?
Posted by Peter Hume, Saturday, 26 September 2009 10:03:38 PM
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Peter Hume,
As much as you'd like them to be, physics and chemistry aren't political. There's no Big Brother scary "communist under the bed" conspiracy theory here. You don't need to come across all McCarthyist and put us on trial for even being *associated* with caring about the climate.

"climatologists can read the gizzards apparently. " Well, yeah, in this discipline anyway. Do you go to your dentist to service your car, or your interior decorator to do your brain surgery? If you go to a geologist like Plimer you'll get all sorts of half truths and downright lies. Stick with the peer-reviewed mob and you'll get some good intel.

Your rants about time frames are meaningless twaddle and semantics to ignore the fact that the "cooling since 1998" argument is cherrypicking idiocy on the grandest of scales. Instead of being embarrassed for your team, you're now getting petty and irrelevant.

When you write: "Even if the globe is warming, so what? Isn’t the bloody temperature allowed to vary any more?" I can only guess that you haven't bothered checking the actual peer reviewed climate data. You've made up your mind, and no science is going to determine otherwise. You will not investigate how many people depend on glacial melt-water, you will not admit to the possibility of various 'bad things' happening under BAU.

So say "central planning" all you like, you're only revealing how your political bias refuses to acknowledge any new scientific data in a massive display of cognitive dissonance. You're proving your own opinion invalid as you rant.

No new scientific data to evaluate. Nothing to see in that post. Just another paranoid conspiracy rant, move along, move along.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 26 September 2009 10:47:52 PM
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"As much as you'd like them to be, physics and chemistry aren't political."

I am the one denying it remember? No political conclusions follow from them.

"Stick with the peer-reviewed mob and you'll get some good intel."

No political conclusions follow from them.

"Your rants about time frames are meaningless twaddle and semantics to ignore the fact that the "cooling since 1998" argument is cherrypicking idiocy on the grandest of scales."

The choice of *any* time frame is cherrypicking, because the positive data do not supply the value judgments.

The relevance of the "cooling since 1998" argument is that it contradicts the predictions of the global warming brigade who claimed the globe is warming so much and so clearly that there is a planet-wide emergency.

"When you write: "Even if the globe is warming, so what? Isn’t the bloody temperature allowed to vary any more?" I can only guess that you haven't bothered checking the actual peer reviewed climate data.

You seem to be under the false impression that the data supply the value judgments. They don't.

"You've made up your mind, and no science is going to determine otherwise. You will not investigate how many people depend on glacial melt-water, you will not admit to the possibility of various 'bad things' happening under BAU."

Under the mind-reading and personal argumentation, your argument presupposes that you have privileged knowledge of the climatological, ecological and economic outcomes for every relevant person in the world both for the government intervention, and the non government intervention scenarios; and have the superior ethical competence to decide on their behalf.

You don't. Under the fantasy of total knowledge, total control, and moral superiority is a superstitious belief in the magic of government that has no basis in reality.
Posted by Peter Hume, Saturday, 26 September 2009 11:48:29 PM
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Bugsy, everyone in the climate debate knows that there are mechanisms that are poorly understood, or not understood at all. I've brought attention to that myself in the past http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/003405.html.

I doubt whether they are "catastrophic" because the history of the earth for the last few million years suggests that life under much higher concentrations of CO2 will flourish on earth.

As for more funding, I think there should be. I've argued in the past that there should be much more funding for more diverse views on AGW. The problem with the debate is that the "partisan hacks" who see an opportunity in greenhouse to push a whole range of agendas ensure that it is difficult to get funding for projects that don't pay lipservice to their view of the world.

When you have people like Krugman and Hansen arguing that "dissenters", whatever the hell that poorly defined term really means, are criminals it shows the level of hysteria and malevolence around. What scientist is going to put a career at risk by running foul of people like that. Look at the abuse served up to Plimer, who is a senior and respectable scientist, because he dares to question the views of people like Karoly and Lambeck in Australia.

Bushbasher, if you don't understand the science enough to argue about it, then you have no place in the argument. You're not even qualified enough to work out which "experts" to believe. Ditto Eclipse.

So how about you guys get back to the substance of Mark's article rather than trying to throw a blizzard of rhetorical sand in everyone's eyes?
Posted by GrahamY, Sunday, 27 September 2009 4:46:38 AM
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If you really believe that there should be more funding for climate research Graham, then I expect you to enunciate that clearly in future, rather than remaining quiet when many of your other correspondents accuse scientists of just "riding the gravy train". If you truly want a change in direction of what those funds go on, why don't you clearly argue for that without giving the funding bodies ample reason to merely ignore you?

There is a disconnect between the first and second paragraphs in your last posting Graham, that highlights the fuzziness in your thinking. The first is obviously not talking about CO2, and that mechanisms are unknown or poorly understood, and the second paragraph arguing that CO2 is well enough understood that it is 'unlikely' to be catastrophic. Either you believe that the current warming trends are caused by CO2 or they are not and are caused by mechanisms hitherto unknown, which is it? If they are not CO2 based, on what evidence do you base your 'non-catastrophic' risk assessments on then?

The last few million years have seen the Australian continent change from being covered in rainforest to being covered in desert and open dry eucalypt forests, so I guess it really depends on what 'flourish' means to you and who will be the winners and who the losers out of the rearrangement of the environment that you envision.
Posted by Bugsy, Sunday, 27 September 2009 8:10:14 AM
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>>Bushbasher, if you don't understand the science enough to argue about it, then you have no place in the argument.

wrong. it's a meta-argument.

>> You're not even qualified enough to work out which "experts" to believe

a) yes i am
b) the "experts" are overwhelmingly saying we gotta problem.

by the way, nice use of quotes, you "hack".
Posted by bushbasher, Sunday, 27 September 2009 9:27:24 AM
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GrahamY: "Look at the abuse served up to Plimer, who is a senior and respectable scientist, because he dares to question the views of people like Karoly and Lambeck in Australia"

This sentence demonstrates that you simply haven't read the material.

The criticism of Plimer is *not* because he has tried to challenge the consensus view (he completely failed to make any substantial argument against it, but that's beside the point). The criticism has been that he has used spectacularly dishonest and unscientific methods.

How he continues to hold an academic position, after what he's been caught doing, is beyond me.

The fact that all the contrarians can come up with at this point is conspiracy theories should be telling you something.
Posted by Matt Andrews, Sunday, 27 September 2009 12:12:46 PM
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**Peter Hume**
The peer reviewed science is saying we need to lower Co2 emissions or the temperature is going up up up.

"The relevance of the "cooling since 1998" argument is that it contradicts the predictions of the global warming brigade who claimed the globe is warming so much and so clearly that there is a planet-wide emergency."
So when a fellow climate sceptic warns that the earth is NOT cooling since 1998, what do you make of that? When he says you're going to kill climate scepticism if you stick with that argument, what do you make of that?

Here's one of your fellow climate sceptics stating that when El Nino returns we could have even WARMER years than 1998 (which NASA says 2007 was anyway).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

Now we get to the real twaddle.
"Under the mind-reading and personal argumentation, your argument presupposes that you have privileged knowledge of the climatological, ecological and economic outcomes for every relevant person in the world... etc"

Under this rationale you wouldn't have ANY form of insurance because you demand omniscient, prescient information about exactly WHEN your house is going to burn down before you'll take any action to insure it.

Indeed, this weird philosophy of yours excludes ANY risk management behaviours like monitoring statistics for occupation health and safety outcomes, medical outcomes, etc. General statistics are not good enough. You want total detailed knowledge for every specific individual. No Government policy ever has or ever can function under that requirement.

The science is clear, Co2 traps heat, and depending on the amount of heat this could be various degrees of bad, really bad, and downright scary. The loonies deny this, but the peer review process is showing what they really are, dishonest loonies.

Your demands are irrational and childish. "I want to know EXACTLY what is going to happen before I'll do ANYTHING!" Grow up.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Sunday, 27 September 2009 1:31:55 PM
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Q&A - If you are a scientist in the field you have lost all detachment, and I take it from the strength of the response I have hit a nerve with the article. All the points made in it are clear and straightforward and mostly supported by quotes from the warmist side of the argument. You did not attempt to rebut any of the arguments but sneer, and aubse, and pick on small points. The reference to sunspots is typical in that sunspots have nothing to do with the argument, and only tangential to the article. The problem is that you simply don't have any creditable counter argument. The science is unravelling and all you can do is seer at me for pointing it out.
Posted by curmudgeonathome, Sunday, 27 September 2009 5:09:58 PM
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Part One:

Climate modelling is based on a number of simulations none of which can claim to be the ultimate proof of climate change and/or the final world on AGW.

Science has done much to help the environment particularly with major discoveries and understanding negative events like the impact of CFCs and other ozone depleting substances on the stratosphere. And the health and environmental impacts of greater UV radiation. In this case the science was more conclusive.

For those of us who are not scientists or only have a basic grasp of science (and this does not seem to matter as even the experts are grappling with the issue) all we can do is read with a critical eye.

Personally I do think some of the CC debate is alarmist but there is evidence that low lying islands are experiencing a rise in sea levels. Some areas of the globe are experiencing unprecedented low temperatures although there seems to be agreement about the increase in 'unpredictable' and unseasonal storms.

Climate does change. The bottom line is that if we act as if CC is real and work to reduce greenhouse gases - it is a good thing for many other reasons including pollution and reducing man-made heat in the atmosphere. Natural climate forces don't need any further help from humans.

In other words, working towards sustainability, reducing our need for fossil fuels, (population discussions have to be had as well) has positive spin off benefits even if AGW is proven to be the greatest hoax of all time.
Posted by pelican, Sunday, 27 September 2009 5:35:13 PM
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Part Two:

We know that man does effect his environment. Since industrialization we have seen the increase in pollution of water, air and soil creating long term impact on human health and environments. We have also seen wonderful innovation in medical and environmental science to offset some of these negative impacts, each development bringing with it in some cases equal number of sceptics and believers. Healthy scepticism or belief is not a bad thing if not agenda driven. (Think Monsanto).

You do have to wonder how serious governments are when issues of population and social equity/welfare are missing from greater discussions on CC. The ETS system relies on goverments in consulation with scientists, to come up with the CAP for its cap and trade system. Who decides what the CAP will be given the obvious variance and dissension within the science community?
Posted by pelican, Sunday, 27 September 2009 5:35:59 PM
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“Bushbasher, if you don't understand the science enough to argue about it, then you have no place in the argument. “

Graham and Mark Lawson – That specifically applies to you both since the consensus is that climate change is largely the result of anthropogenic carbon emissions. A consensus is widely accepted as a “majority” opinion therefore your persistence in corrupting the science demeans your position.

Further, your denialist side includes a significant proportion of the largest polluters on the planet, however, you appear happy to consort with known eco-criminals, refusing to acknowledge that anthropogenic pollution includes anthropogenic emissions of CO2 too –that’s scientific. Do you know the difference between a VOC and a sock?

On a domestic note, Australia is regarded as a first world country with a stringent environmental regulatory system. The system (the Environmental Protection Act) was legislated during the 70s “for the prevention, control and abatement of pollution and environmental harm, for the conservation, preservation, protection, enhancement and management of the environment and for matters incidental to or connected with the foregoing.”

Yet scientists from NASA wrote to Barrack Obama this year, stating that Australia’s use of coal and carbon emissions policies guarantee the "destruction of much of the life on the planet.” The letter states: "Australia sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet."

Touche NASA!

This revelation no doubt is comforting to your polluting buddies for it is the large polluters who dictate to the senior bureaucrats in our Departments’ of Environment who are and always have been, the rent boys for Australia’s largest eco-vandals! That is precisely why Australia earned the ignominious title of the largest polluter per capita on the planet.

I will again remind posters of the more recent environmental abuse perpetrated on Australia's fragile environment by local and internationally known corporate criminals and I shall continue doing so until these vandals and their sycophants cease their side-step shoe shuffling, denying the grim state of Australia's environment and the urgent need for the capping of hazardous industrial emissions.

contd…….
Posted by Protagoras, Sunday, 27 September 2009 8:22:49 PM
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21st Century – A truncated account on the violations of human rights and environmental vandalism in Australia:

1. Magellan Metals – poisoning of Esperance: Marine samples showed lead readings 29,000 times in excess of maximum recommended levels and elevated nickel levels were 6,000 times in excess of recommended levels.

2. Magellan Metals were responsible for the deaths of 9,000 native birds in 2007 from its mismanagement of its lead operations.

3. Barrick and Newmont Mining’s JV operations - Kalgoorlie Consolidated Goldmines, dumped 14 tonnes of mercury on the hapless residents of Kalgoorlie over two years.

4. Jakarta Indonesia: — Newmont Mining Corporation agreed to pay $30 million to Indonesia in a settlement of a civil lawsuit in which the government charged that the company had polluted a bay with arsenic and mercury.

The settlement will have no effect on a criminal trial of the company and its Indonesian director, that is now under way in the province of Northern Sulawesi.

5. Newcrest Mining killed 6,500 native animals in a six week period whilst laying a gas pipe for its operations in the Pilbara.

6. Two hundred and fifty Australians lodge lawsuit in the Supreme Court in the United States, with allegations that Alcoa has caused death, terminal diseases and environmental devastation in surrounding communities at its Wagerup operations. Department of Environment had ignored community complaints for twenty years against a company which also rapes WA’s jarrah forest to extract bauxite.

7. The Fremantle Ports Authority has begun using 174,000 cubic metres of contaminated industrial material to reclaim ocean bed, creating land for property development.

The report reveals that samples of groundwater at the site are contaminated with copper, cobalt, nickel and zinc above Marine Water Quality Guidelines and arsenic and tributylin (TBT) approaching these limits. Soil samples revealed the presence of heavy hydrocarbon contamination as well as traces of mercury and the class A carcinogen – benzo a pyrene.

Welcome Graham and Mark to the never-ending fight against greed, corruption, injustice, propaganda and pollution...

"For those who can make you believe absurdities, will make you commit atrocities" (Voltaire)
Posted by Protagoras, Sunday, 27 September 2009 8:36:49 PM
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Bugsy, if you want to make a case for more money for climate research, go ahead. My argument is that there is not enough money being spent testing the catastrophic CO2 theories, and too much being spent on studies just because they claim some tenuous link with climate change. I've never argued for more money overall.

You haven't picked-up on fuzzy thinking. Your post implied that the unknown factors "would act in a feedback manner". I just took your argument and pointed out that CO2 had been higher in the past but none of the feedbacks had ever been sufficiently positive as to create a catastrophic effect. You don't have to know what the feedbacks are exactly, just point to the hard empirical evidence.

Temperature rise is caused by a combination of factors, one of which is CO2. It's not an either/or situation. The historical record points to CO2 having a very weak overall effect with CO2 concentrations following temperature change, not preceding it.

Bushbasher, I guess if you don't have the information or the skills to be in an argument you have to be in a meta argument, but you're still disqualified. And how do you define "expert"? Anyone you choose to believe?

Matt Andrews, they're pretty serious charges against Plimer levied without one shred of supporting evidence. How about you put your case up instead of just making assertions?

Protagoras, we're not talking about pollution, we're talking about CO2 emissions. The total CO2 content of the atmposphere has never been much lower at any time in earth's history. But I checked one of your examples because I thought I knew something about it. It's true that Newmont paid the Indonesian government $30 M, but you'd have to think it was a case of blackmail on the part of the Indonesian government. When the CEO of the company was charged the Indonesian court found the bay wasn't polluted and the company was in compliance with its licence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyat_Bay.
Posted by GrahamY, Sunday, 27 September 2009 11:39:35 PM
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It's late where I am now but I can see you've all had an exciting weekend.

In Rumsfeld's words, climate science is "a known unknown", that is, we know we don't know everything about it. Putting aside the huffing and puffing from some that we know enough. We don't, that's why the models all turn out different results.

The climate (and weather) conspire to embarrass those that claim they know all. Weather is different, or is it just so complex that it is beyond us to predict beyond a few days.

The media reports (from scientists?) extreme hot, severe cyclonic event events are due to AGW, but then there is silence when there is an extreme cold event - the community sense something is not quite right? Selective refutation is not helpful.

Hence the rise of the skeptics.

It's interesting that when a journalist makes skeptical noises, he is castigated for not being a climate scientist, but if a greenpeace salesman, a lawyer, a retired business planner, book sellers etc make claims - none of the critics, above, make any noise at all, let alone remind them they are speaking out of turn.

Selective outrage, or is it just another avenue of attack when all else appears to fail?

A lot of dodging and weaving folks, lot's of personal attacks and of course snide comments, but that's standard.

Mark and Graham have a point though, many AGW believers want to get into technical link wars, because that's what they are comfortable with, (factual claim, refutal, insult, counter-insult etc standard web forum battle tactics) and are not addressing the point, that climate is not as well understood as many think it is.

I guess if you accept climate science is not well understood, then for an AGW believer, it brings doubt, dare I say, skepticism into the argument naturally?

I don't want to gamble on our future, I want money invested to cope with climate change, not to tilt at windmills to change the climate.
Posted by rpg, Monday, 28 September 2009 7:25:25 AM
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Mark
Yes, you have hit a nerve. I'll explain why (and address some of the other comments) when I get back ... away till end of week.
Posted by Q&A, Monday, 28 September 2009 9:07:22 AM
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RPG, the 'extreme cold' events you claim are ignored from the data ALL show up on the temperature reports from NASA, they really do. You just don't want to admit that while there are a few local 'extreme cold events' the vast majority of trends across this planet are UP!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

So please either justify this unwarranted slander on climate institutions or retract this unfounded and paranoid 'opinion' of yours. (And answering the 9 questions in the peak oil thread might also help your credibility. You said you knew something about it and had an 'informed opinion' but still haven't answered those 9 fundamental questions).
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9466&page=4

RPG said: “A lot of dodging and weaving folks, lot's of personal attacks and of course snide comments, but that's standard.”
You complain that we are into personal attacks, but here is what is happening.
1. RPG asserts stuff without any evidence.
2. We highlight that you've asserted stuff without any evidence.
3. You cry "Not fair, personal attack!" but...
Where's the evidence?

So please watch the Youtube above which has NASA’s *worldwide* temperature mapped out.

RPG said: “Mark and Graham have a point though, many AGW believers want to get into technical link wars, because that's what they are comfortable with, (factual claim, refutal, insult, counter-insult etc standard web forum battle tactics) and are not addressing the point, that climate is not as well understood as many think it is.”
We want to get into these wars because, um, we’re right and you’re wrong and all the data says we’re right, so why the heck would we ignore all that data because isn’t this a *scientific discussion* about the *data* and not about *your opinion*.

You’re coming across as a whiny little boy not allowed to break the rules. Please try and ask yourself whether you are just asserting your opinion all the time, or whether *anything* you say is backed by *solid data you can refer us to*!
Posted by Eclipse Now, Monday, 28 September 2009 9:36:38 AM
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The increasing coverage of the polar icecaps and Greenland and the tremendous increase in glaciers world wide would prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to all but the meanest intelligence that we are facing a another ice age.
What evil forces make the majority of climatologists disbelieve the truth right before their eyes?
Posted by 124c4u, Monday, 28 September 2009 10:49:34 AM
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To round up many of the posts are way off the mark of the original article but, to repeat, the article I wrote is clear and straight forward and supported by quotes mainly from the warming side. The problem is that the warming side has admitted that temperatues have flatlined-declined in the past decade and have come up with several different stories to explain away the change.
The only responses from the warmers in these posts has been sneering, allegations of errors where there are none (or worse insisting that one point in the story is in error when it isn't), outright insults - the label "eco-criminal" is interesting, considering what the article says - or ranting about unrelated subjects. There has been no refutation of the thrust of the story. No one has even come close. I thank those who have taken the trouble to write in support and refute the oftgen wierd posts promoted by this article... The orthodoxy is near collapse
Posted by Curmudgeon, Monday, 28 September 2009 11:38:31 AM
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Quite frankly Mark, it's very difficult to take you seriously when you selectively quote from abstracts of papers that actually provide empirical and historical data for the very things that you scoff at scientists for wanting to include in their calculations.

That is, positive feedback mechanisms.

First you say they don't exist or at least there is no evidence for them, now you say that they do and here's the evidence for them. In either case you are saying that we shouldn't worry about that CO2, so at least you are consistent on that point.
Posted by Bugsy, Monday, 28 September 2009 1:11:25 PM
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I think I've cracked it.

Global warming is the direct result of the rapidly increasing volume of hot air being generated by discussion on global warming.

Did someone mention positive feedback mechanisms?
Posted by Pericles, Monday, 28 September 2009 1:55:54 PM
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124c4u,
that's a very strange assertion given that all that data tells us you're totally wrong. Have you got a source or are you just voicing 'your opinion' (as so many sceptics here seem to be doing). Why, just today in my email came this gem of information about NASA's satellite measurements of Antarctica's ice melt increasing and the ice pack thinning.

http://spacefellowship.com/2009/09/25/nasa-ice-satellite-maps-profound-polar-thinning/

Did you even check the WIKI?
"Rising sea levels will reduce the stability of ice shelves, which have a key role in reducing glacial motion. Some Antarctic ice shelves are currently thinning by tens of metres per year, and the collapse of the Larsen B shelf was preceded by thinning of just 1 metre per year.[9] Further, increased ocean temperatures of 1 °C may lead to up to 10 metres per year of basal melting.[9] Ice shelves are always stable under mean annual temperatures of −9 °C, but never stable above −5 °C; this places regional warming of 1.5 °C, as preceded the collapse of Larsen B, in context.[9]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_sheet_dynamics#Effects_of_climate_change_on_ice_sheet_dynamics

Curmudgeon / Mark,
how many times have I asked you to address the fact that Phd in climatology (and fellow sceptic) Dr Michaels has said NOT to push the "colder since 1998" myth because you're going to get killed on this when temperatures rise in a few years?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y15UGhhRd6M

(Just ignore 90% of the century's temperatures and focus only in on a few years after 1998! Real scientific integrity!)

Also, why does NASA record 2005 as above 1998 and 2007 equal to it?
Or are you just being 'selective' in your own use of data again?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

You complain of 'sneering and allegations of errors where there are none' and yet completely avoid the data.

Will you recant this ridiculous anti-science position of yours if 2010 and 2011 break new temperature records? Who will have egg on their face when the El Nino turns around and combines with global warming to reveal even HIGHER temperature spikes? Certainly not the 'orthodoxy' you think is near death, when Dr Michaels is warning you sceptics are about to get killed on the fallacious 1998 argument.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Monday, 28 September 2009 2:07:20 PM
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Eclipse Now and Bugsy -
And how many times have I pointed out that the few years after 1998 (actually more than a decade) are crucial, because that's just when the IPCC started getting serious about forecasting temperatures and, the moment they did, the physical system did something different. Its the only way to judge forecasts.. so if the forecasts are wrong that means the assumptions on which they are based are wrong ... the proper way to read the graphs is that temperatures were rising until around the turn of the century then they started declining.. you can then say we are still above a certain point in the 1990s, but that doesn't help us very much. So they were high during the Medieval warming period (lot of evidence to say they were higher), they fell during the little ice age and now they are high again, thankfully..
In any case, as noted in the article, the point about declining-steady state temperatures has been admitted so if you're still arguing it you are among the few.
Bugsy - how can it be selective quoting? The point about using the quotes is to show how may different viewpoints there are among the warners in a supposedly settled piece of science. And its clear that there are. If you can show how all those quite different viewpoints can be unified - rather than try to deny that there are differences - I'd be quite interested to see your reasoning.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Monday, 28 September 2009 5:03:42 PM
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From Mark Lawson’s post: -
Extract from Penny Wong’s response.

“When changes in surface air temperature are considered, it is important to note that at time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend caused by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases. For example, global average surface temperatures clearly increased between 1975 and 2008 but some shorter periods, such as 1981-1989, showed no warming. Such behaviour is consistent with the outputs of climate models such as those assessed by the IPCC”.

Probably from Easterling & Wehner,” Is the climate warming or cooling?”

http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/csi/images/GRL2009_ClimateWarming.pdf

What the authors of this paper failed to mention was that in the 1980’s & 1990’s the El Chichon & Pinatubo volcanoes explain a lot of the flat trends. There have been no major volcanoes since Pinatubo (1981).

Lucia at “The Blackboard” critiqued this paper.

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/how-to-obfuscate-forget-to-mention-volcanoes/”

Conclusion.
“Oddly, when placing the trend since 1998 into the context of historical variations, Easterling and Wehner did not consider the volcano connection.
This is unfortunate.
Their article appeared to have been aimed at silencing chatter in the blogosphere. But when climatologists at blogs or in the peer review literature try to explain away the recent short term slow warming by explaining that low trends were also observed during the 80s and 90s (but fail to mention that these excursions are explained by the eruptions of Pinatubo and El Chichon), the collective nose of the blogosphere is likely to snort. The collective mind of the blogosphere shares the tacit knowledge that volcanoes erupted in the 80s and 90s and that climatologists often attribute the temperature declines during those periods to the volcanic eruptions. To whatever extent the blogosphere has a collective mind, it can recognize when climatologists are feeding them apples and calling them oranges.
With regard to the introduction in EW, the blogosphere is likely to respond with “can you give examples of negative trends not caused by volcanic eruptions that are also embedded during periods of brisk warming”?
The answer to that question is: “Ehrmm… no”.”

Feeding them apples & calling them oranges indeed.
Posted by G Larsen, Monday, 28 September 2009 5:53:39 PM
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Typo in above comment.

Pinatubo was in in June 1991, not 1981.
Posted by G Larsen, Monday, 28 September 2009 6:01:42 PM
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Mark Lawson is wrong in almost every respect.
Enough said.
Posted by Ken Fabos, Monday, 28 September 2009 6:30:32 PM
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“Protagoras, we're not talking about pollution, we're talking about CO2 emissions.”

Graham we are talking about pollution but it’s clear you don’t understand the science despite telling other posters to push off because you insist it is they who don’t get the science.

When you mitigate pollution, you mitigate carbon dioxide emissions.

Pollution and anthropogenic CO2 are inextricably linked. Whether you continue denying this, is irrelevant to the science but your denial just makes you look silly.

Fossil fuels are basically carbon and hydrogen. When hazardous fossil fuels are burned the carbon is oxidized to produce carbon dioxide and the hydrogen is oxidized to water.

Carbon dioxide is an unavoidable product of complex atmospheric chemical reactions to air pollution.

Anthropogenic pollution is the precise reason we are having this debate on carbon dioxide.

This basic science explanation is provided for your benefit (see paragraph six and seven especially):

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/physical_science/chemistry/carbon_monoxide.html&edu=high
Posted by Protagoras, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 2:02:08 AM
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Protagoras, I don't need a primer on how hydrocarbons are oxdised to form various carbon compounds and water. If you think that burning (oxidising) organic material to produce energy in a process which creates CO2 is pollution then you'd better stop breathing now because you're polluting the world. (I'm going to resist a snide remark at this point).

This would be the first case in the world where anyone has asserted that a completely harmless gas which is vital to life on earth is pollution. Pollution is something which is damaging to life on earth, by its nature, or because of its unnaturally high concentration. CO2 doesn't fulfill either of those two conditions.

In fact at these concentrations it is vital to maintaining healthy plant growth and a reasonable temperature range. We live in CO2 constrained times with levels falling perilously close to the level at which plants have trouble growing.

Maybe you are working on a different definition of pollution, if so, please tell us what it is. No links, just a short paragraph will do.

I notice you haven't come back on the Newmont issue. So I take it you concede that the propaganda you were quoting was wrong in that case?
Posted by GrahamY, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 8:18:55 AM
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Wow Graham where did you drag this little bit of information up?

<<We live in CO2 constrained times with levels falling perilously close to the level at which plants have trouble growing.>> I'd like to see a source for this please, a most interesting tidbit.

Not enough CO2? Haha. Ok say we have even more CO2, and this is good for plants, how are you going to increase nitrogen fixation at the same time? Because thats what they need.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7086/abs/nature04486.html

Mark, it's selective quoting because you discuss and interpret their abstracts to suit your own argument, but don't bother to read the papers and discuss the authors conclusions. If you did you would find that their viewpoints are not as different as you make out. They just approach the problem from different directions.
Posted by Bugsy, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 9:34:08 AM
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Curmudgeon,
you still haven't answered the 3 questions have you? And the thing is, you are smart enough to *know* you haven't answered the questions! Why the *deliberate* evasion?

1. Why does NASA show 2005 as HOTTER than 1998, and 2007 as drawn with it?

2. If MET data so conclusively proves 'cooling' since 1998, why do they still accept global warming? Oh, I know, they actually look at the TRENDS (so visually obvious if you just look at this graph).
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080923c.html

3. When one of the next few years breaks all previous temperature records, will you then admit you were wrong? Or will you wait until after the El Nino for the inevitable La Nina cooling, narrow your data in to the 4 or 5 years after the El Nino, and shout "LOOK at all the COOLING since 2011!" (The sceptic equivalent of "Look, big shiny thing over there!").

When are you going to look at the *15 and 20 year trends* instead of cherrypicking those *few* years that show the conclusions you want? I could make ANY story I want from the temperature record by choosing short enough trends.

As for the MWP being hotter than today, aye aye aye, why are you digging up a 1990 IPCC graph when the IPCC and literally dozens of climate institutions have since adapted the graph to new data? What was that about dogma stays the same but science evolves with new data? You're only 19 years out of date there pal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrKfz8NjEzU&feature=player_embedded
Posted by Eclipse Now, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 9:48:44 AM
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graham,

>> Bushbasher, I guess if you don't have the information or the skills to be in an argument

don't get uppity. i have a phd in a related field, have attended many professional seminars, by karoly and others. unlike you, i'm simply not parading my amateurism as professionalism.

>> you have to be in a meta argument, but you're still disqualified.

why? you think one has to be an expert to determine an expert? nonsense.

>> And how do you define "expert"? Anyone you choose to believe?

you don't think there objective ways to determine that hansen and karoly are experts, and that you and lawson, and plimer, are not? you think there are not *many* more experts in broad agreement with hansen and karoly?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

but there is no point to this meta-meta-argument. the fact of the matter is that, on this issue, you and lawson are pseudo-intellectual and anti-intellectual sleazebags. as i wrote above, the suggestion that you are dispassionate, objective guys, merely evaluating the evidence, is ludicrous. you are self-evidently partisan hacks pleading your case.

the giveaway is exactly your use of quotes, your reference to "experts", doubting the very existence of experts. curmudgeon does even better:

>> If you are a scientist in the field you have lost all detachment

this would be hilarious if it weren't such a disgusting slur. and it encapsulates exactly your stupidity. you dispute the very existence of expertise. you glorify ignorance. you're the kind of idiots who think electing know-nothing morons like george bush is wise.
Posted by bushbasher, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 9:51:17 AM
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You know Bushbasher, I'm the only person you can get away with flaming on this forum, because I'm the moderator, and your previous post is just a flame.

There is not a scintilla of substance in what you have said. I doubt that you have a PhD in a related field. If you do, it's one where they award them to people who can't write and can't argue. But I'm happy to be proved wrong. Reveal your identity and refer us to proof of your qualifications.

There are very distinguished experts who will dispute what Karoly or Hansen say in a number of areas, and if you can't understand their arguments you have no rational basis for choosing which is the real expert.

Your idea that the majority view decides the truth is ludicrous. So what happens when the majority changes its view? Does the truth change? So before Galileo the earth really was flat and objects really did fall at different speeds depending on their mass?

And if you think I'm pushing a vested interest you'd better demonstrate it.
Posted by GrahamY, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 10:20:20 AM
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graham:

1) no question there was a flaming element, and yes you would have every right to delete my post.

2) the suggestion that my post was merely a flame is absurd. i have every right to question yours and lawson's intellectual integrity on this matter.

the way you guys argue and pseudo-argue is dumb and disgraceful. and curmudgeon's (lawson's?) comment was a dumb, disgusting slur.

3) i have no need to reveal myself, nor my qualifications. i don't choose to do so, and it is irrelevant to my (meta-meta)-argument. the pertinent fact is, you're an amateur.

4) i am not saying majority view decides truth. what i'm saying is that majority expert scientific opinion is our best guess to what is true science, unless you can demonstrate some systemic bias. if you wish to attack the integrity of the climate science community then do so with substance, not unsubstantiated slurs and cherry-picked facts and scare quotes.
Posted by bushbasher, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 10:50:58 AM
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Stop press;

Steve McIntyre has finally gained access to the data used by Mann & co to produce all this rubbish.

Guess what. As expected, the reason it's been kept hidden so long, it's as crooked as a hockey stick.
Posted by Hasbeen, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 11:04:06 AM
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Sigh. So much disinformation, so little time.

Some reading for those who seriously think there is any significant scientific doubt over whether the world is warming, or whether anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause:

Measurements of Earth's energy imbalance show unmistakeable overall net warming:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=67

Here's where the warming is happening, and why short term variation in surface temperature is a very small part of the big picture:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=58

Don't skim; read and understand.

GrahamY, you said "The historical record points to CO2 having a very weak overall effect with CO2 concentrations following temperature change, not preceding it."

That's not correct - it fails to grasp the real picture, which is that we've seen in past interglacial warming episodes an initial weak warming due to orbital changes, leading to CO2 rise, which causes further warming, which triggers feedbacks and more CO2 rise, which leads to more warming, and so on until a new equilibrium is reached.

See http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

Someone asked for more info on Plimer's fraudulent/deceptive approach in "Heaven and Earth". Start here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05/ian_plimer_lies_about_source_o.php
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/plimer2a0.pdf
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/do-you-believe-ian-plimer/
Posted by Matt Andrews, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 11:35:11 AM
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Eclipse Now - sorry I didn't realise you were serious about those questions.
NASA showing 2005 as the peak. Good point. In fact its an open scandle that the GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Science which is a part of NASA) is different from the rest and shows the peak at 2005, rather than 1998. (There are four other data sets, which all show 1998 as the peak.) There have been very strong suggestions that Prof Hanson, as GISS director, has been fiddling the results.. everybody uses Hadley NCDC or the two satellite sites..
Question number two only really the UK Met office can answer.. they are still insisting that things are getting worse but, as I noted, the theory is in disarray and recent temperature tracks don't support their conclusion, so I can't see how they still say what they say.
As for point three... no, there is now substantial evidence that the MWP is warmer, mainly archeological.. grapes being exported from Yorkshire in England, the altitude limit of cultivation directly related to elevation which can be traced, recent work in the andes ect.. There are temperatures graphs that show the opposite but these rely on interpretation - that is, matching the fossil record with present instrument records - by scientists who are not aware, or who may not want to know about, the archeological evidence.
I don't have the links to hand but the recent book Little Ice Age mentions the altitude stuff.. There is also the journal Holocence which has various papers on the cycles of heat and cold..
And rememeber until a few years back, the IPCC was doing its best to deny that the Little Ice Age was a global thing.
If temperatues go up sharply (actually they will go up somewhat over the next few months and then fall again) over the next couple of year they I'll go away. Tbhe real question is will you
Posted by Curmudgeon, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 2:13:51 PM
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“Protagoras, I don't need a primer on how hydrocarbons are oxdised to form various carbon compounds and water. If you think that burning (oxidising) organic material to produce energy in a process which creates CO2 is pollution then you'd better stop breathing now because you're polluting the world. (I'm going to resist a snide remark at this point).”

Graham – You may not want a primer on chemical reactions of atmospheric hydrocarbons but you certainly need one. Unfortunately you cannot give eco-criminals and their sycophants more information than they're prepared to receive.

Perhaps their ignorance is due to the unregulated, rampant releases of arsenic, lead, mercury and cyanide that they spread with gay abandon? Perhaps it could be payback time? Behold....the laws of Karma!

And you know Graham, I strongly suspect discredited dirty digger, Plimer may be exhibiting symptons of lead poisoning from his orebody at Broken Hill too. What say thee?

Hennyways Graham, why don’t you quit while you’re behind? There’s no hope of getting out of the corner you’ve talked yourself into.

If you're incapable of understanding the ecological impacts of digging up and burning fossil fuels, why make a further goose of yourself?

As to your suggestion that I should cease breathing due to exhaling carbon dioxide, may I suggest you access a school curriculum suitable for Year Seven students? It would go something like this:

“Humans exhale carbon dioxide (the rate is approximately 1 kg per day - depending strongly on the person's activity level). This carbon dioxide includes carbon that was originally taken out of the carbon dioxide in the air by plants through photosynthesis - whether you eat the plants directly or animals that eat the plants.

Thus, there is a closed loop, with no net addition to the atmosphere.”
Posted by Protagoras, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 3:25:19 PM
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That's a good point Protagoras.

I suppose that means you'll be out there with the beef industry, when KRudd, & his mates want to apply a carbon tax to their cows, for doing the same thing.

What was that? The same thing doesn't apply to cows, only native animals.

Why is it that I'm not surprised at that?
Posted by Hasbeen, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 5:02:27 PM
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**Curmudgeon**
RE: Hanson's "fiddling". Strong evidence or back off! That guy has already been through a lot of persecution from White House denialists as documented by the CBC's "The Denial Machine" and countless other sources. I'm ashamed of Australian journalists acting like British Tabloids. Will the AFR start Page 3 girls next?

RE: the MWP. Even *IF* it was as warm as today for a little bit,
* what was the source of the warming?
* how long was it for?
If it wasn't sustained long enough then the feedbacks probably didn't have time to kick in and we avoided disaster. As a debunker of this fairly vigorously studied consensus view of there being no MWP, I'd have thought you had access to a strong counter-theory as to what actually does drive climate.

(Not that I'm buying there even WAS a MWP — yet, need *real* evidence).

Climate theory is NOT in disaster because your opening paragraph contests a straw-man. Climate theory NEVER stated that Co2 would gently nudge temperatures a teeny bit every year in defiance of other climate trends. Do you deny that 1998 was a super-strong El Nino? Are you really that recalcitrant? Or do you just not know what an El Nino IS, and how it interacts with climate? Far out man, your paragraph after Penny Wong's quote indicates that you think you can set air temperatures and ocean temperatures at each other's throats when they both contribute to the climate story!

Also, can you please justify this statement?
(much of the theory concerning Milankovich cycles was recently overturned)

What paper? "overturned"? Evidence or it is not so.

Also, the papers that so called 'contradict each other'... at what stage of the peer review process are they? What official responses are there? The more extreme comments on the 55million year old event seem outside the mainstream because I have DEFINITELY read that this was totally consistent with Co2 models.

Mate, how do they even measure Co2 and methane as greenhouse gases? Did you cover that when you did science all those years ago?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 5:39:01 PM
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Protagoras is very desperate when he/she cites the so called lead contamination at Esperance relating somehow to climate change. Speak to many locals at Esperance and they will tell you what a beat up this little incident was. The birds falling out of the sky was attributed to the lead but no conclusive evidence was ever produced. Local farmers had told that this had happened well before lead was shipped out of Esperance during extremely dry periods. The small noisy minority in Esperance who have had their lives improved by the shipping port seemed to get all the press (surprise surprise). This is typical of green propaganda where hysterics rule.
Posted by runner, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 6:37:30 PM
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I’m with GrahamY on this.

If you want to reduce pollution, development alternate forms of energy, eliminate inefficient use of resources –few would begrudge that.But the AGW bandwagon is not ONLY about that –and it’s probably not even MOSTLY about that.

While our politicians sweet talk us about new green industries/jobs –and sketching minimum cost scenarios’ .
The world bank is preaching that the cost of climate change in the developing world will be AUD 547 billion EACH YEAR by 2030.
And, they continue,they already have our politicians IOUs to bankroll it –funny our pollies haven’t talked much about that side of things!

It’s looking more and more like a giant funding-scam which is using AGW as justification.

.
Posted by Horus, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 9:03:00 PM
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"In fact its an open scandle that the GISS [...] is different from the rest and shows the peak at 2005, rather than 1998. [...] There have been very strong suggestions that Prof Hanson, as GISS director, has been fiddling the results"

It's only an "open scandle" (sic) among the flat-earthers and conspiracy theorists who inhabit "Watts Up With That", "Climate Audit" and other outposts of the anti-science "denialosphere".

Back in the real world, among actual scientists and those who bother to familiarise themselves with the science, it's pretty straightforward actually: there are significant differences between Hadley and GISS in how the Arctic region is incorporated into global averages. GISS extrapolates from measuring stations around the Arctic Ocean to make temperature estimates covering the whole Arctic, whereas Hadley only incorporates the coastal areas immediately surrounding Arctic measuring stations, and do not incorporate the Arctic Ocean directly into their averages. Hence there are differences, since the rate of warming in the Arctic has been higher than anywhere else on the planet.

Satellite estimates of temperature run a poor second in data quality to direct surface measurements, due to the nature and extent of the systemic adjustments required in their data.

And, as I mentioned earlier, the land/sea surface temperature is a very small part of the global energy big picture. Again, read this and read it carefully:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-do-we-know-global-warming-is-still-happening.html

As for supposed "very strong suggestions" that "Hanson" (sic) has been "fiddling the results"... no such suggestions have arisen in the scientific arena, actually. GISS has a very high reputation indeed.

Someone is taking the ignorant rantings found on denial blogs waaaay too seriously.
Posted by Matt Andrews, Tuesday, 29 September 2009 10:59:31 PM
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Eclipse Now and Matt Andrews - I regret that suggestions concerning Hanson have arisen because the difference is so obvious and, as he started all this, he has a great deal to answer for. Its not something that can be dealt with in the refereed data, but McKitrick and the other fellow who exposed the hockey stick are always going over the data. You should see the stuff they recently turned up on tree rings. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/27/quote-of-the-week-20-ding-dong-the-stick-is-dead/
Dear dear what a fuss that will cause. They had a real battle to get that data too.. As for where the papers cited in the article are at in the approval process, they are all full scientific papers. The Milankovic cycles don't show much in the fossil record, or just one does, as I understand it but, in any case, the reference is tiny part of the story. I have read this in Plimer but I have also seen it elsewhere. That's it for now fellas - onto other topics..
Posted by curmudgeonathome, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 12:01:39 AM
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can someone tell me why we are worrying about co2 and global warming when water vapour is the major driver of global warming?
Posted by slasher, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 4:18:00 AM
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Ocean regulates climate.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9477

There is considerable comment on this site about CO2 but not about the ocean. Why is this so?
Posted by JF Aus, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 8:42:37 AM
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It really is not surprising that 'scientist have no idea what drives climate'. Rationality went out of much of science when they swallowed the evolution fantasy. Their many explanations for origins are really quite pathetic. Unfortunately the voices of honest scientist who insist on evidence is silenced.
Posted by runner, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 9:47:49 AM
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**Runner**, please, this is not an evolution/creation debate? I'm a Christian evolutionary theist and see Genesis through the Framework lense, as do most Sydney Anglicans. Please stop making out all Christians deny science OK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_interpretation_%28Genesis%29

This paper by Dr John Dickson is also very convincing. It details the number of Christian thinkers before Darwin that were reading Genesis figuratively, and also details the rise of literary criticism that emerges around the time of the discovery of the Enuma Elish which also casts light on the genre of Genesis. This is the majority Anglican view.

http://www.iscast.org/journal/articles/Dickson_J_2008-03_Genesis_Of_Everything.pdf

Back on topic.

**JF Aus**
No no no! The climatologists DO look at the ocean's affects on climate. It is the denialists that try to divorce the ocean and just go "WOW, JUST LOOK at 1998! It's been COOOOOOLING since then!" The real climatologists try to count ALL the forcings, including ocean systems, Co2, methane, solar forcings, albedo changes in terrain, dark carbon soot on snow, etc. That it is COMPLEX doesn't mean it's not TRUE.

Oceans super-spiked 1998 above the anthropogenic trends. Also, oceans "cooled" temperatures following 1998, even though the last decade is the HOTTEST ON RECORD! (Explain that Mark Lawson! Other than character attacks, you didn't explain 2005 being the hottest year on record and NOT being an El Nino year. Hmmmm?)

I'm still waiting for verifiable peer reviewed evidence of the MWP Mark.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 10:48:39 AM
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Eclipse now I'll give Mark a helping hand on the MWP. Here is a peer-reviewed paper showing the Medieval Warm Period "Moberg, A., Sonechkin, D.M., Holmgren, K., Datsenko, N.M. and Karlen, W. 2005. Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature 433: 613-617." More references are just a Google away. BTW I agree entirely with your rebuke to Runner. He makes a mockery of serious Christianity.

Matt Andrews, I am surprised that you should prefer land-based instruments to the satellite data. As far as I know most serious observers of the AGW issue prefer the satellite data because they are not subject to the statistical manipulation that land-based thermometers are.

The land-based thermometers are subject to the urban heat island effect. They attempt to correct for this, but such correction is only subjectively possible, so that stats are suspect. They also move thermometers around, and again this calls for statistical manipulation and subjective assessments to produce a continuous data-set. The land-based thermometers are also not uniformly spread over the globe and can't measure temperature over sea, even though most of the globe is covered in sea. This calls for statistical interpolation, again a perilous undertaking.

There are also continuity issues in the Arctic due to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure to maintain a lot of stations. There are also issues in the Antarctic due to the almost complete lack of thermometers over most of the continent. Again, both of these are solved by manipulating the data.

It's interesting that when you look at Australian weather stations with the longest period of continuous existence you get little or no discernible trend at all. I find this incredible actually, because there should be some warming from CO2, but there you are.

The satellite data suffer from none of these short-comings although they require some small statistical manipulation. Their major problem is that we only have a short period of recordings from them. Over time with a longer dataset they will supersede land-based measurements.
Posted by GrahamY, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 8:13:26 PM
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Hi,
**Genesis**
I'm glad others can see that there are a bunch of Christians that understand Genesis has all sorts of rich figurative narrative in the first 11 chapters, and I'm still working through the archaeological evidence that it is actually a very targeted rebuke to the Babylonian Creation narrative, the Enuma Elish. (See the John Dickson paper above).

Kind of like if I said,

"Australians all let us rejoice, for we are full of greed.
We ignore climate change, for profit, this is our national creed.
Our land abounds in natures gifts, of which we do not care.
What about our grandchildren's inheritance? We don't have to share".

You'd KNOW I was having a go at our national anthem AND having a greenie rant at the same time! That's Genesis to the Enuma Elish.

Now...

**The Moburg** paper on the MWP does not indicate it was even close to today's temperatures. See the red line.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

I thought Australian temperatures were always breaking new records, as with our droughts. I also thought the temperatures tended to accumulate in the north? (Because of the oceans conveying the heat up there? Land mass? Tilt? I don't know WHY it's always the north! Anyone?)
Posted by Eclipse Now, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 9:31:51 PM
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Eclipse now you write
'I'm a Christian evolutionary theist and see Genesis through the Framework lense, as do most Sydney Anglicans.'

No doubt many Anglicans don't believe in the resurrection or the adamic nature. The only thinking that leads a person from these basic truths is stinking thinking. Thankfully the only Sydney Anglican I know is a Science teacher and very much believes in Genesis. Please don't insult true science by claiming evolution fits that bill. Evolution is more faith based than Creation. You are obviously blind to the link between the faith in evolution and faith based man made climate change.
Posted by runner, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 9:38:00 PM
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GrahamY: "As far as I know most serious observers of the AGW issue prefer the satellite data because they are not subject to the statistical manipulation that land-based thermometers are."

If "most serious observers" preferred satellite data rather than surface measurements, why do the IPCC reports and indeed most scientific discussion of the instrumental temperature record use surface measurements such as Hadley and GISS?

The "urban heat island effect" is real, but what "Watts Up With That" et al (the anti-science denial blogs) will not tell you is that the warming trend has been comprehensively validated through correlation of non-urban data with urban data, correlation of still nights with windy nights, and correlation of marine temperature data with land temperature data.

See an introduction to the topic at http://www.skepticalscience.com/Is-the-US-Surface-Temperature-Record-Reliable.html

On the other hand, satellite data is subject to several significant systemic issues. Rather than a large number of sources that can be compared and statistically correlated, there are a small number of sources. The data itself is not a direct measurement of surface temperatures at all, but is a measurement of lower stratospheric and upper tropospheric temperatures. This data is then subject to adjustment based on a series of assumptions about how the upper tropospheric temperature under certain conditions relates to the lower troposphere (the surface). On top of this, the data can be substantially affected by changes in the rate of orbital erosion (the satellite slowly losing altitude). Problems with instrumental calibration have also been an issue. We've seen several cases over the last few years where satellite data has had to be retracted and revised as a result of miscalculation of these factors.

Overall, there is a place for satellite data, and it is useful for some purposes, but it runs a poor second to the surface record in most cases, and certainly for quantifying global trends.

As for the Australian temperature trend, what data are you referring to? The big picture in Australia certainly appears to have been one of warming. See, for instance, http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi
Posted by Matt Andrews, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 10:16:38 PM
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Eclipse Now you have a graph reading problem. If you actually follow the red line you will find that it is higher at the beginning around 1000 AD than it is when it stops around 2000 AD.

You might also notice that some of the other data sets are associated with Briffa. As a result of Steve McIntyre's most recent work you have to discard those datasets for the time being. It appears that the data on which they are based is not representative. There may be a good reason for the selection, but we'll have to wait and see. Joanne Nova has the best explanation http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-historic-proportions/

Something else you might notice is that they supply the last few years on the combined graph by splicing an instrumental temperature record to it. This is a complete no-no. I also wonder where they get that record from as it doesn't look like any of the established datasets which peak or plateau in 1998.

Something else you might like to note on that page is the graph just below of the Holocene period demonstrating that current temperatures are below the average for at least the last 8000 years.

You've got it about 180 degrees wrong on temperature increasing faster nearer the equator. It is supposed to warm more at the poles than the equator, which is one reason there are likely to be fewer severe cyclones with global warming. A decreased temperature differential should lead to slower air movement, all other things being equal. A storm reconstruction using proxy data that I can retrieve for you if you are interested showed more hurricanes during the Little Ice Age than more recently, which is consistent with this hypothesis.

As for Australian temperatures always setting records, I don't think so. You're confusing journalistic write-ups with the facts.
Posted by GrahamY, Wednesday, 30 September 2009 10:19:42 PM
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To Runner (on Genesis),
I don't really care about evolution: it's just a scientific theory that appears to be about to change radically anyway. (Carl Sagan's wife was on the Science Show recently talking about Gene-stealing).

You're twisting Genesis by forcing modern scientific questions onto the passage that simply have NO BUSINESS BEING THERE!

I actually hold to the essential 'basic gospel' truths! The bible is full of different kinds of writing, including history, love poetry, the figurative apocalyptic genre, biography, and other forms. I'm just recognising the GENRE of Genesis for what it is: a figurative description of WHY God made the world, not a historical or scientific narrative on HOW God made the world. It's still God's word, and still true. Moore College is just asking how the original audience would have read it. I don't know why you're so uptight about it and telling me I deny the basic gospel, because we BOTH believe God made the world, God made it good, and mankind wrecked it by rebelling against him. I just think there is actually more *theology* to be gained from the passage reading it as a polemic against the surrounding culture than a strict outline of *what* occurred *when*, which seems arbitrary and lacking meaning.

The Framework view IS what Moore Bible College teaches trainee ministers, and seems to be the growing consensus amongst evangelical scholars which J.I.Packer sums up here.
http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/media/podcast/sydangclassic/creation_evolution_problems

**Christians and Global Warming**.

The ethics lecturer at Moore College Dr Andrew Cameron wrote the following articles. Start with “How sceptical is too sceptical”.
http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/life/apologetics/63_climate_change_part_3_how_sceptical_is_too_sceptical/

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/life/apologetics/58_climate_change_1_steadying_ourselves/

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/life/apologetics/58_climate_change_1_steadying_ourselves/

The former Head of the IPCC is a Christian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Houghton
Interesting interview here.
http://tinyurl.com/yaxw2ul

Christian groups that care about global warming and the climate.
http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk/index.htm
http://www.creationcare.org/
http://christiansandclimate.org/
http://www.restoringeden.org/

Global warming is just one of MANY consequences of our own silly actions. Why do you **really** object to it?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Thursday, 1 October 2009 11:04:04 AM
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Eclipse Now

You write:

'I don't really care about evolution: it's just a scientific theory that appears to be about to change radically anyway'

You seem to make a big fuss about something you don't care about and regard as a 'theory.

You write

'You're twisting Genesis by forcing modern scientific questions onto the passage that simply have NO BUSINESS BEING THERE!'

You are wrong. The only thing I consistently point out is that true science validates the Genesis account much more than the evolution fantasy. The big bang theory is worse than a fairytale. Both are faith based positions. Where have I twisted Genesis?

YOu write

'Global warming is just one of MANY consequences of our own silly actions. Why do you **really** object to it?'

Looking after the environment that God has given is one thing. Believing a bunch of pseudo scientist who have had more false predictions than the Jehovah's Witness is another. Many of their models are based on when the earth did not even exist. Don't you understand that true science is something tested and proved? As stewards of the earth we have a responsibility to care for the planet not to swallow the lies and fantasies of gw high priests. The last 5 years of the earths cooling temperatures have proven a major embarasment to these men. Unfortunately instead of eating humble pie they make up more stories. You obviously were not around when global cooling was to be the doom of the planet in the 80's. Same 'scientific theories' same gullible believers. If you really want to be concerned about gw read 2 Peter. His predictions will be a lot more reliable and stop trying to have a bit both ways.
Posted by runner, Thursday, 1 October 2009 8:53:29 PM
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Away a few days and Mark has 'Bolt'ed and the moderator, chief editor and "expert" climate scientist (metaphorically speaking, of course) has entered into the fray to exert truth, justice and the ‘righteous’ way. God forbid that humanity can influence the environment that it seeks to control and have dominion over.

Mark, as a journalist for more than 30 years (including more than 20 on the Australian Financial Review) you have (still?) been a science writer and editorial writer for the AFR. You are now senior journalist and reports editor. If you are still looking Mark, would it be possible to have this article of yours published in the Australian Financial Review?

I realise you would consider this abuse and ad hom, but metaphorically, you and your cavalry are foot-soldiers for the 'deny-n-delay' army ... having little scientific acumen or indeed, serious scientific credentials pertaing to climate science.

You do however posses articulate, albeit mendacious, flair. Indeed, your major reinforcement can also espouse 'science-speak' knowing all too well that the vast majority of people have a very poor understanding of climate science. You both do this with aplomb, knowing full well it is impossible to explain the science with the constraints we have in place.

I concur with a colleague: he is staggered that a small group of sceptics somehow think it is beyond human power to affect global climate patterns in a time when humans are a global force.

For those still looking, the following link provides some insightful reading

http://www-personal.buseco.monash.edu.au/~BParris/BPClimateChangeQ&As.html

Questions and Answers that address the concerns of many.

Eclipse, take a deep breath ... and my previous advice, please.
Posted by Q&A, Friday, 2 October 2009 7:25:29 PM
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Q&A I thought you were promising to address the issues when you came back. All you have done here is smear Mark (and me for some reason) and link to a blog.

For the record I have never disputed that man's emissions of CO2 will have some effect on the climate. The issue is whether the emissions will cause a catastophe or not, and the empirical evidence is they won't. But my role in most of these debates is to try to ensure that argument proceed on a logical basis, not ad hominem attack and appeals to authority like you indulge in.

Talking about "appeals to authority" no-one could take the page by the economist that you linked to seriously. Take this statement in his second point.

"It is important to emphasise that this is not simply an argument from authority. An argument from authority is weak because it asserts that we should believe something simply because an authority figure says it is true. That is not what is going on here. No-one is saying that we should believe the IPCC simply because of its status as an international institution. The reasons for confidence in the statements of the IPCC and the world’s leading scientific bodies do not rest not on their status as authoritative institutions but on the evidence for their statements. This evidence has already been through the wringer of peer-review publication and has survived post-publication scrutiny by the international scientific community."

This tautology can be summarised as "I'm not arguing from authority because my authority is good authority, and my authority for saying that is the authority of my authority." I also note his extensive reference of unreliable websites like De Smog, Real Climate Deltoid and Greenfyre. As he is an economist I'm surprised he didn't throw John Quiggin in as well.

I'm assuming, because there has been no rebuttal in response to my last post that we accept the reality of the Medieval Warm Period. If you are going to dispute things on this thread Q&A, how about disputing them. No more ad hom please.
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 3 October 2009 4:44:57 PM
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Some responses to GrahamY:

"The issue is whether the emissions will cause a catastophe or not, and the empirical evidence is they won't."

Big call. What evidence is that then? Exactly how does it support this conclusion? What kind of impacts do you think qualify as a "catastrophe"?

"...unreliable websites like De Smog, Real Climate Deltoid and Greenfyre"

Really? Do you have compelling evidence to back your assertion that they are unreliable - or is this just repeated as if it were a priori true, just because assorted anti-science denial blogs say so? In particular, what is your objection to RealClimate.org? Given that its authors are actual climate scientists, including some at the top of their field, it plays a highly authoritative role in the discussion of climate - not, of course, comparable to the real scientific discourse of peer-reviewed literature, but orders of magnitude more reliable than profoundly ignorant sites like "Watts Up With That", "Climate Audit", etc etc., which have a long and rich history of being either simply wrong or utterly misrepresenting the science.

"I'm assuming, because there has been no rebuttal in response to my last post that we accept the reality of the Medieval Warm Period."

That would depend on what you mean by the "reality" of the MWP. It appears that there was a Medieval Warm Period in some parts of Europe and North America, sure.

Was the local temperature in those regions higher at that time than now? Unlikely, given the evidence.

Was the temperature across the whole of Europe and North America higher at that time than now? Extremely unlikely, given the evidence.

Was the global temperature higher at that time than now? No way.

Some bedtime reading which might help shed some light on the whole MWP thing:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/not-alike/
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/medieval-warm-period-was-just-as-warm.php
Posted by Matt Andrews, Saturday, 3 October 2009 10:13:05 PM
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Runner, you're hilarious swallowing the "It's been cooling since 1998 myth". I'd love you to link to a 15 or 20 year trend graph that proves that, rather than the little 4 or 5 year cherry-picking deceit you (and others here) choose is your "god" for this subject. Shame on you for being so dishonest in your handling of the science!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y15UGhhRd6M&feature=related

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14527-climate-myths-global-warming-stopped-in-1998.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17808-climate-myths-any-cooling-disproves-global-warming.html

Also, please explain which climatologists were asserting the world was going to hit an ice age in the 1980s, and what percentage of the climate community these people represented? You read it on some pretty little Creationist blog somewhere did you?

The reality seems to be that the media ran away with a minority view and, shock horror, SENSATIONALISED the story way above its scientific merit. This while the rest of the climate community just sat back and went, "Huh?"

So "tie me to an anthill and smear my ears with jam", it was all media hype and "the public" have a negative opinion of 1970's climatology that's not based on any peer-reviewed reality.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11643-climate-myths-they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s.html

But then again, "the public" includes 10% of Americans that believe they've been abducted by aliens, a significant population that believe the moon landings were faked, and something like 40% that believe there's a government conspiracy to hold back all the evidence for Young Earth Creationism and the world being under 8,000 years old.

I rest my case.

Again, shame on you for propagating the lies and misinformation of the denial-o-sphere.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Sunday, 4 October 2009 6:58:12 AM
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Eclipse Now, do you accept that you didn't read the graph correctly and that it shows a medieval warm period?

Matt Andrews, you are looking for the empirical evidence. It is right in front of you. The earth has prospered under higher temperatures and higher levels of CO2. There has been no tipping point because of CO2 at higher levels, and in fact temperatures have been lower with CO2 at higher levels than it is now.

We also know from ice cores that CO2 does not drive temperature significantly because it increases after temperature increase and decreases after temperature decrease.

However, we also know from experimental evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

With respect to unreliable websites. Greenfyre does not pretend to be anything other than partisan. A good example of Deltoid's lack of credibility is the piece we published from Lambert attacking Bolt for attacking An Inconvenient Truth. It made a large number of factual errors, a number of which were picked up in a British court judgement on whether the film was propaganda.

De Smog specialises in flaming people. For a while, because of its propaganda, I thought that Fred Singer, one of the discoverers of the Van Allen belts was a tobacco industry lobbyist.

Real Climate is a sophisticated astro-turfing operation associated with Environmental Media Services, a PR company that does very well out of spinning environmental causes.

What is your evidence for saying that the Medieval Warm Period was not global? This was accepted by everyone, including the IPCC before Mann's Hockey Stick. Now that the Hockey Stick has been completely discredited the onus is on you to show studies or evidence that say it wasn't global.

The data I referenced says that the temperature was higher than now. On the same page of Wikipedia that Ecplise points to there is also a temperature reconstruction showing that for most of the last 10,000 years it has been warmer than now.

I'm happy to argue the toss with you, but you need to get yourself across the evidence and the arguments first.
Posted by GrahamY, Thursday, 8 October 2009 12:06:51 AM
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“What's your evidence for saying that the Medieval Warm Period was not global?”

Graham – There's ample literature suggesting that the Medieval Warm Period was not global but regional:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031020055353.htm

However, if I were you, I’d refrain from using the MWP as a basis for your GW denial, considering there's limited data currently available on the MWP.

“De Smog specialises in flaming people. For a while, because of its propaganda, I thought that Fred Singer, one of the discoverers of the Van Allen belts was a tobacco industry lobbyist.”

I can fully understand why Q&A becomes frustrated when you peddle such rubbish:

1. DeSmog has a reputation for providing accurate information on climate change

2. Fred Singer IS a tobacco lobbyist:

http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/2040165576-5577.html

3. To accredit Singer with discovering the VA belts is specious.

4. While Singer was a team member, the Van Allen belts were named after American physicist, James Van Allen, who discovered them in 1958. A Soviet researcher, S Vernov, was also accredited with discovering the outer Van Allen belt, based on data sent back from Sputnik 2.

Only Singer brags of “his” discovery of the VA belts.

5. However, Singer was recognised as being the first to publish predictions on the existence of trapped radiation in the earth's magnetic field and was recognised for his research on rocket and satellite technology, remote sensing, cosmic rays etc.

Unfortunately for your argument, Singer exemplifies the ignorance of rocket scientists who were experimenting with the ionosphere without understanding it.

A mishap took place over the south Atlantic where the Van Allen belts dip towards the earth. The second rocket boost of Skylab produced a large burn, causing a massive ionospheric hole as reported by M Mendillo in 1975. Other ignoramuses we know are the maniacs who detonated over 100 nuclear bombs even before they knew of the role the VA belts played in protecting Earth.

Eighty five year old Singer is a member of the predominantly right-wing corporate funded greed merchants and rampaging eco-vandals who've long been discredited by reputable climate scientists. Alas, those facts completely demolish your credibility Graham.
Posted by Protagoras, Thursday, 8 October 2009 3:00:23 PM
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GrahamY,

"Eclipse Now, do you accept that you didn't read the graph correctly and that it shows a medieval warm period?"
Are we even looking at the same graph!?

You seem to think the graph has proved the MWP to be hotter than today.

Except that it doesn't really SHOW us today... the trends of the last few decades are so condensed that only one real measurement, the black line of the UK met office shows up.

As in, it REALLY shows UP... the black line is off the charts but you can see where the projection ends up for 2004 (marked by *). It absolutely blitzes *anything* in the MWP.

But hey, if you just put your thumb over the last inch of the graph you won't have to admit that unfortunate fact and will have perfected the art of cherry-picking, and be ready for the big leagues, maybe a presentation at the Heartland institute? Sorry about the attitude, but I just can't believe your still questioning me about that graph, I thought you were joking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
Posted by Eclipse Now, Thursday, 8 October 2009 7:58:36 PM
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Eclipse now, you asked for peer-reviewed evidence of the MWP and I gave it to you. Now you're trying to shift the goalposts. You can't take an instrumental record and splice it onto a reconstruction. That is just bad science. If you want to take the reconstruction up to the present then you have to use the proxies up until the present.

But even if I accept your argument (which I don't) that it is warmer now than the Medieval Warm Period that doesn't negate the Medieval Warm Period. So are you going to admit that there was a Medieval Warm Period or are you going to continue to be a denier?
Posted by GrahamY, Thursday, 8 October 2009 9:34:51 PM
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"But even if I accept your argument (which I don't) that it is warmer now than the Medieval Warm Period that doesn't negate the Medieval Warm Period. So are you going to admit that there was a Medieval Warm Period or are you going to continue to be a denier?"

*Look* at the *end of the graph*.

If there even was a warming trend in the MWP, I deny that the peer reviewed science says it was warmer than it is now. You can't just select one study and say "That's the peer reviewed proof!" I don't have time to read through all the studies in that graph, as the GFC has hit our company and I'm currently looking for work. But what I can say is that the trends at the end of the graph need to be expanded and focused on a bit more clearly as it's hard to read.

Other studies as listed by Tim Flannery in Weather Makers show the MWP to be a LOCAL event in Europe that was then extrapolated out to the rest of the world. It's Euro-centric and totally unscientific to just extrapolate out like that. The studies indicate the planet may have actually been COOLER in the Stratosphere resulting in less energy to move the atmosphere around resulting in trapped, patchy local climate conditions which, strangely enough, on this occasion made Europe warmer. (And avoid the Greenland myth, the ice there is hundreds of thousands of years old).

The National Academy of Science for America has debunked the MWP and confirmed the Hockey Stick. Other studies have done the same.

"No longer just a hockey stick, but a whole hockey team". ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrKfz8NjEzU&feature=channel_page

Anyway, with you as one of the moderators here we at least know why OLO is publishing so many anti-science denial pieces.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Friday, 9 October 2009 8:25:37 AM
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GrahamY said "Eclipse now, you asked for peer-reviewed evidence of the MWP and I gave it to you."

...and...

"But even if I accept your argument (which I don't) that it is warmer now than the Medieval Warm Period that doesn't negate the Medieval Warm Period."

The very paper cited ( http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MobergEtAl2005.pdf ) clearly illustrates that the MWP was not warmer than today.

From the concluding paragraph of the paper: "We find no evidence for any earlier periods in the last two millennia with warmer conditions than the post-1990 period — in agreement with previous similar studies".

See more discussion of this paper here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/moberg-et-al-highly-variable-northern-hemisphere-temperatures/

Graham, you appear to be setting up a straw-man argument - that there was no warming whatsoever, in any region, in medieval times. Is anyone actually trying to say that? There's good evidence that there was a medieval warming period in parts of Europe and parts of North America. The point is that it wasn't as warm then in those regions as now, and global temperatures are certainly higher now than they were then.

You also said "We also know from ice cores that CO2 does not drive temperature significantly because it increases after temperature increase and decreases after temperature decrease."

Incorrect. This is a common misunderstanding of the situation. Actually, increased CO2 was both a result, and a cause, of interglacial warming. Orbital forcings caused the initial small warming, but then after CO2 levels went up it became the major forcing for the rest of the warming, as positive feedbacks came into play to produce a new equilibrium at a higher temperature (and CO2 level). See an introduction to the topic here:
http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

You also said "Now that the Hockey Stick has been completely discredited"...

That, as much as anything else you've written here, demonstrates that you sole source of information on climate science is denialist blogs.

In the real world, the "hockey stick" is widely accepted among climate scientists, and has been comprehensively validated from a wide variety of sources. Try actually reading the MWP articles I linked to earlier.
Posted by Matt Andrews, Friday, 9 October 2009 4:55:45 PM
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Eclipse Now, you said there was no peer-reviewed literature that confirmed the Medieval Warm Period, so I provided your with one. Now you say it's not good enough to show a Medieval Warm Period but to prove it was warmer than now, and you use a graph from Wikipedia to "prove" your point. But it doesn't do that because none of the proxies show a temperature greater than today's. The line at the end suggests today is hotter, but it is not a proxy and so doesn't count because you can't splice different types of measure together like that.

Then you suggest that the temperature increase was limited to some parts of Europe. So here are two peer-reviewed references showing the MWP in Peru and New Zealand - different ocean and different hemisphere. Rein B., Lückge, A., Reinhardt, L., Sirocko, F., Wolf, A. and Dullo, W.-C. 2005. Wilson, A.T., Hendy, C.H. and Reynolds, C.P. 1979.

After you've done that please check out the Wegman Inquiry into the Hockey Stick and you'll find that it has been discredited, at the highest level - bad data selection and bad maths.

And I challenge you to find one article on On Line Opinion that is "anit-science". I am very much an enlightenment thinker and I've spent a lot of my career trying to provide some scientific rigour to the study of public opinion and history. That really is a nasty and unwarranted slur.

In fact this whole site is based on a version of the scientific method where advocates for different positions can come and argue their case against one another. You seem to think that your opinion should never be challenged. That is not scientific.
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 10 October 2009 9:09:56 AM
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Matt Andrews, I suggest you go and read Wegman too. You might also want to look up the studies I refer to before advancing the canard that the MWP was confined to a small part of Europe. You're the one who appears to be relying on secondary sources provided by partisan websites.

So let's get onto the argument about CO2 and temperature. This graph is in the reference you refer to http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/co2_temp.gif so I'll use it. It doesn't come up to the present judging on the CO2 concentration which tops out around 285 ppm versus the current 385 ppm or thereabouts.

What the graph clearly demonstrates is that CO2 fluctuates markedly with temperature. What it doesn't show is that it follows temperature both on the way up, and the way down. Now, while you might be able to plausibly but innacurately argue that CO2 drives temperature on the way up, you can't do that on the way down. You have to concede that despite it's radiant properties CO2 is over-powered by something on the way down.

If the measures came up to the present with CO2 concentrations above 350 ppm you would also have to concede that CO2 doesn't appear to be having much effect on current temperature.

Interesting to note in terms of the previous argument about the MWP that from this graph it has been warmer than now in each of the last 4 maxima and that the last 10,000 years has been unusually warm in the last 450,000 years. Also that the greatest risk of temperature change is on the downside not the upside.
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 10 October 2009 9:37:34 AM
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GrahamY,

I'll try and clarify my terms. I don't believe that today's data confirms a MWP that disrupts the basic shape of the Hockey-Stick graph. There might be a MWP minute mound, but not a mammoth mountain.

So I completey reject your reading of the graph. You stated:

"Eclipse Now you have a graph reading problem. If you actually follow the red line you will find that it is higher at the beginning around 1000 AD than it is when it stops around 2000 AD."

This is not an art interpretation class.

As the "Climate Crock of the week' youtube channel I subscribe to says, "So the denialist bases their case on this report. Let's try something radical and — I don't know — actually READ the report!"

As Matt Andrews kindly showed, the paper your *red line* is based on concludes:

"We find no evidence for any earlier periods in the last two millennia with warmer conditions than the post-1990 period — in agreement with previous similar studies"."
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MobergEtAl2005.pdf

Ooops.

So are you doing science, or artistic interpretation? What about basic **comprehension**?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 10 October 2009 9:38:43 AM
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>> After you've done that please check out the Wegman Inquiry into the Hockey Stick

i did that

>> and you'll find that it has been discredited

no, i found no such thing.

one non-peer-reviewed report on some of the methods of one paper on one approach to the hockey stick does not discredit the hockey stick.

graham, for one who wishes to promote scientific literacy, you seem to understand very little of the scientific method, the scientific community, or how either works. it's almost as if you were an amateur ...
Posted by bushbasher, Saturday, 10 October 2009 1:04:02 PM
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"graham, for one who wishes to promote scientific literacy, you seem to understand very little of the scientific method, the scientific community, or how either works. it's almost as if you were an amateur ..."

No no no! I claim that title proudly! ;-) I'm not a scientist at all, and am definitely a lay reader in all this.

The thing that really bugs me is when non-climatologists assert climate change is still an open debate when all they've got is 'some blog I read'. Then they start misquoting reports as proving a MWP as warmer than today, when the actual report proves the EXACT OPPOSITE.

So Graham,
any other peer reviewed reports that confirm a MWP warmer than today? ;-)

You either intentionally misquoted the report above, or didn't bother reading it and just linked to it because a denialist blog somewhere linked to it. If it's the later, can you see why us lay people that are watching this issue prefer to go with known, peer-reviewed names in the business that are doing real science rather than the lying, backstabbing, deceitful and disguising Denialist blogs that are largely sponsored by fossil fuel companies?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 10 October 2009 2:56:35 PM
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Eclipse Now, basic rule of analysis - the data has primacy, not what the researcher says about the data. The graph shows the MWP as warmer than where it ends. Furthermore, if you actually look at the paper, link above courtesy of MA, you'll see that it compares its results with the Hockey Stick, as well as criticising the methodology of the Hockey Stick. You'll see that the Hockey Stick misses most of the MWP as well as the Little Ice Age. As you should appreciate the graph is not "art" but a graphical representation of real figures - i.e. maths.

And if you correctly read the quote you are relying on it doesn't say that the MWP was colder than now, just not warmer. I have never said it was warmer, just that it existed, that is another issue again.

In response to Bush Basher I should point out that the Wegman Committee was appointed by the US Congress and was a review of the Mann et al paper. It was in effect peer review, not a paper in its own right. Except that Wegman is a real statistician, whereas Mann et all aren't, yet the Hockey Stick is actually a statistical artifact. So Mann failed peer review, except that of his friends in the climate science community.

BTW, Eclipse, checked your site out. Appears you are in the pay of the green activists, so I wouldn't go accusing people on the other side of the debate as having vested interests while you don't! People in Greenhouses, as they say...

Still waiting responses to all the other information I provided in my last posts.
Posted by GrahamY, Sunday, 11 October 2009 11:52:21 AM
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Oh how I wish I were funded by some greenie agency, as our graphic design business has been hit by the GFC. But the REAL funding that distorts the science has always come from big oil.

"The funding of an array of think tanks and institutes that house climate sceptics and deniers also worried Britain's premier scientific body, the Royal Society. It found that in 2005 Exxon distributed nearly $3 million to 39 groups that "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change". It asked Exxon to stop the funding and its protests helped force Exxon's recent retreat."

http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/who-is-behind-climate-change-deniers-20080802-3ou6.html?page=-1

GrahamY: "And if you correctly read the quote you are relying on it doesn't say that the MWP was colder than now, just not warmer. I have never said it was warmer, just that it existed, that is another issue again."

That's the heart of it isn't it? Because today's temperatures are not the REAL issue, as serious as they are, it's tomorrow's temperatures and preventing 2 degrees increase which will trigger all those nasty tipping points we fear.

The current temperature effects are bad enough as shown by the coming ice-free Arctic in summer months, *ancient* glaciers withdrawing, etc. But tomorrow's temperatures? That's the real worry.

But just in case other readers have just stumbled across this thread, we are discussing your interpretation of this paper which ends:

"We find no evidence for any earlier periods in the last two millennia with warmer conditions than the post-1990 period — in agreement with previous similar studies"."
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MobergEtAl2005.pdf

So MWP? Not so much. Again I need to ask why you even raised it, and what you *think* it proves?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Sunday, 11 October 2009 1:39:04 PM
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Jeez Explodes Now, stop with all the dodging and sactimonious preaching - just answer the man's questions!

Number 1 being - Can you bring yourself to admit there was a MWP?

Well was there or wasn't there - not whether it was warmer or cooler than it is now - did it exist?

Stop squirming and trying to attack on other levels and grounds, stick to the point, don't lose your temper again (and again) and if you are wrong be big enough to admit it.

That's the heart it - you just can't admit you are wrong.

What is it with eco fascists that they not only cannot face reality but feel they have to blather on about the future that evidently only they are privy to, another Nostrodamus no doubt? (This is rhetorical and requires no answer.)
Posted by odo, Sunday, 11 October 2009 6:38:26 PM
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Nice character attack there ODO, and not one of my questions about the MWP was answered. But for your information, if you really want to know what I think about the MWP, have you even read the last few pages of interaction? It's all there if you bother to read it.

You want the world to be YES or NO but it isn't that simple. I'll try and break it down for you. From my layman's reading of what the real scientists are saying...

YES there was a small MWP, but NO I don't think it was warmer than now.

YES parts of Europe were *comparatively* warmer than 'usual' during the hockey-stick period, but NO, this does not apply to the whole world as the globe was actually COOLER back then! So the Hockey Stick remains. Real climatologists are saying the MWP was either a LOCAL event, or not significant enough to cancel out the overall message of the hockey stick.

And most of all, NO I'm NOT falling for some silly strawman that implies that climate cannot EVER change without human activity. Of course it can, and has, and does, when the other natural forcings are acting upon climate.

It's just that anthropogenic climate forcings are much stronger (this time).
Posted by Eclipse Now, Sunday, 11 October 2009 6:56:52 PM
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When he's attacking others Eclipse demands peer-reviewed evidence, but just airily refers to "real scientists" when launching his "rebuttals". I asked for comment on a couple of peer-reviewed studies from the southern hemisphere which show the MWP. No response. Just assertions. Still waiting.

I've tried to stay clear of EN's literary approach to the Moberg study because that's not how you do science. But if EN insists on the literary approach rather than the mathematical one, then I'll take him to task for taking his quotes out of context.

Moberg also says:"Our reconstruction shows larger multicentennial variability than most previous multi-proxy reconstructions1–4,7, but agrees well with temperatures reconstructed from borehole measurements12 and with temperatures obtained with a general circulation model13,14."

So they disagree substantially with the Hockey Stick

"This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue."

This can be summarised as "Don't put all your money on CO2."

On another note I've just noticed that Protagoras has defamed Fred Singer in a post above. He has never been a tobacco lobbyist. In the interests of free speech I am going to leave her quote there - many make this claim so it is good to have it out in the open. But I am going to ask her for an apology, and if no apology is forthcoming I will take disciplinary action. OLO does not exist as a high profile platform from which you can make defamatory claims against those you disagree with.
Posted by GrahamY, Sunday, 11 October 2009 9:49:40 PM
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GY

Protagoras has not defamed Fred Singer. Mr Singer has long been affiliated with Tobacco Industry lobbyists.

"Tobacco Industry Contractor

In 1993, Singer collaborated with Tom Hockaday of Apco Associates to draft an article on "junk science" intended for publication. Apco Associates was the PR firm hired to organize and direct The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition for Philip Morris. Hockaday reported on his work with Singer to Ellen Merlo, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Philip Morris.[13]

In 1994, Singer was Chief Reviewer of the report Science, economics, and environmental policy: a critical examination published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI). This was all part of an attack on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency funded by the Tobacco Institute over a risk assessment on environmental tobacco smoke. [14] At that time, Mr. Singer was a Senior Fellow with AdTI.[15] "

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer

Whether or not climate change can be definitively shown to be a direct result of anthropogenic origin, you cannot evade the simple fact that earth's resources are finite, we are polluting the atmosphere, oceans, rivers and over-populating the earth.
Posted by Fractelle, Monday, 12 October 2009 8:23:30 AM
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OLO

"I asked for comment on a couple of peer-reviewed studies from the southern hemisphere which show the MWP."
Can you please remind me which ones it was? There have been a lot of links here lately.

GrahamY wrote: "This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue." This can be summarised as "Don't put all your money on CO2."

This is just another denialist straw-man as no one in the climate community DOES do put all their money on CO2! Show me an IPCC report that has CO2 as 100% of the climate forcings please, or retract this comment.

I'm still trying to get to the bottom of what you think all this *proves*, even if we accept the MWP the way you read it.

EG: What did this paper conclude about the extent of the MWP and what were these multi-centennial forcings?
What percentage of today's warming do they account for? What ARE these forcings?
What is their summary statement on the physics of Co2 and methane and the Radiative Forcing Equation?
Does it RULE OUT CO2 (and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases) as one of many forcings?
What importance does it assign to these factors?
What are their views on future climate trends?

It seems like you're pointing your finger screaming "LOOK AT THIS WIGGLE" so we don't look at the overall 2000 year climate trend, and the basic physics of Co2 & methane as today's dominant drivers of the Radiative Forcing Equation
Posted by Eclipse Now, Monday, 12 October 2009 1:57:52 PM
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
Posted by JF Aus, Monday, 12 October 2009 7:08:18 PM
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It's called reading EVERYTHING in the article you quote, so try this bit.

"Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself."

But maybe reading is not your thing, because this thread has repeatedly discussed the fact that even leading SCEPTICS are warning against trotting out the 1998 argument because you're all going to look like such utter idiots when the temps skyrocket past that!

So because you're having trouble remembering MAJOR points covered in this thread I'll repeat it here.

"At the 2009 Heartland Institute conference (of global warming sceptics), well known climate denialist Dr Patrick J Michaels explained that El Nino and La Nina cycles can, in the short term at least, disguise the longer term trends and concluded:

"Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all…
If you loose credibility on this issue you lose this issue!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

So I can only feel for you JF Aus. Ooops.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Monday, 12 October 2009 7:39:48 PM
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EclipseNow,

I read but don't take in too much in debate here so far because what is being said is mostly a waste of time to both read and consider. It's my point of view that makes it that way for me. Consider my reasoning.

I believe in AGW but I do not believe it is caused by fossil fuel emissions.

In my opinion based on empirical evidence, increased ocean warmth is being caused by increased ocean algae proliferated by unprecedented quantities of sewage nutrients.

A major problem is one sided and incomplete science and media gagging of government dumping. Look at the following example in today's news:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26196453-30417,00.html

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/12/2711618.htm?site=news

It seems it is tabu for science to mention government dumped sewage nutrient pollution from entire cities and towns. Amazing.
Posted by JF Aus, Monday, 12 October 2009 8:43:43 PM
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Eclipse Now, what would your non-scientific, YouTube-informed, layperson's reaction be to a hockey stick effect produced by a total of five specially selected trees from a larger sample that showed no such effect
Posted by whitmus, Monday, 12 October 2009 10:26:51 PM
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>> In response to Bush Basher I should point out that the Wegman Committee was appointed by the US Congress

doing what for the price of fish? you're arguing the integrity and authority of the us congress? the republican congress in the bush era? oh yes, the honesty and integrity of that congress is a beacon for all to follow.

oh, wait. why don't we look at exactly who in congress was responsible for the wegman report? oh, it's joe barton. yep, good ol' objective joe barton. you think joe might have had some influence on the precise terms of the committee?

>> and was a review of the Mann et al paper. It was in effect peer review,

which just happened to fit in with the pre-determined position of good ol' joe barton.

>> not a paper in its own right.

it was nonetheless a paper on one very specific issue and was not peer-reviewed.

>> Except that Wegman is a real statistician, whereas Mann et all aren't,

correct

>> yet the Hockey Stick is actually a statistical artifact.

no. this is where you begin with a valid (albeit contestable and contested) criticism, and you leap to a totally unsubstantiated conclusion.

this is exactly the denial mindset, that any valid criticism somehow debunks the whole scientific process. one congressional committee with a clear agenda, producing a narrow non-peer-reviewed work does not, cannot, invalidate all the work on the hockey stick. to suggest so one has to be totally ignorant of the scientific method, or a denialist loon, or both.

>> So Mann failed peer review,

no, it did not. peer review does not guarantee the correctness or reliability of any one paper, or of all that that paper contains. mann's paper acknowledged outright the limits and uncertainties in its methods.

>> except that of his friends in the climate science community.

the kind of snide, conspiratorial and empty swipe that denialists like you just love.
Posted by bushbasher, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 9:45:12 AM
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Wow, I haven't seen such obvious censorship in quite a while Graham.

Are you afraid of litigation from Fred Singer?
Posted by Bugsy, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 11:35:56 AM
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So Bugsy, do you think it is fine to defame people? Well I don't. Irrespective of whether Dr Singer might sue me or not. You all get a pretty good go at what you can publish here, as demonstrated by the rant of Bushbasher's above. Putting limits to that debate which are defined by the law is not censorship, it's called moderation.

I gather from Bushbasher's post that he also discredits the Stern Report and the Garnaut Report because neither of those is peer-reviewed and both were set-up by governments. In the heirarchy of credibility I would have thought something set-up by a parliament should have more credibility, but no doubt I'll be disabused (emphasis on the second half of the word).

Wegman criticised the Hockey Stick for two reasons - one was the algorithm used which produced a hockey stick no matter what data you put into it. This is because it gave a heavier weighting to more recent data than older data. The other was for poor selection of the datasets. A single bristle cone represented the whole of the southern hemisphere! So it was indeed an artifact of statistics. He also criticised the peer-review process for being exactly what I said it was.

I don't think it is possible to argue with Eclipse. His typical syllogism runs "X said this, X is a person of significance, therefore you are wrong" without any references to the principles underlying X's statement and whether they make sense. In some ways he is no different from Runner. They both have texts and are the sole interpreters of what the texts mean. So it is impossible to engage, unfortunately.
Posted by GrahamY, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 1:12:36 PM
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graham, others may fall for your bait and switch, but i won't. everything i say stands, and clearly demonstrates the denial lunacy in which you engage.
Posted by bushbasher, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 2:48:50 PM
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Question: Is it more defaming for a scientist to be accused of being associated with the tobacco industry or to be accused of defrauding scientific data?

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9484#151821

I have a perception of selective "moderation" here Graham.

Another question: am I allowed to have multiple OLO accounts? When I joined I was under the impression that this was against the forum rules, this has changed I take it?
Posted by Bugsy, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 3:27:18 PM
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GrahamY wrote:

"I don't think it is possible to argue with Eclipse. His typical syllogism runs "X said this, X is a person of significance, therefore you are wrong" without any references to the principles underlying X's statement and whether they make sense. In some ways he is no different from Runner. They both have texts and are the sole interpreters of what the texts mean. So it is impossible to engage, unfortunately."

Nice character attack there, but putting aside why on earth I'd delve into the twisted logic behind fossil fuel funded anti-science deviant blogs when they've ALREADY been REPEATEDLY debunked by the peer reviewed literature, can I just remind the list that you've again dodged the real issues by turning your attention to attacking me?

For your convenience I've copied in here (again) the matters that remain outstanding:

I'm still trying to get to the bottom of what you think all this discussion about the MWP *proves*, even if we accept the MWP the way you read it.

EG: What did this paper conclude about the extent of the MWP and what were these multi-centennial forcings?

What percentage of today's warming do they account for?

What ARE these forcings?
W
hat is their summary statement on the physics of Co2 and methane and the Radiative Forcing Equation?

Does it RULE OUT CO2 (and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases) as one of many forcings?

What importance does it assign to these factors?

What are their views on future climate trends?

It seems like you're pointing your finger screaming "LOOK AT THIS WIGGLE" called the MWP so we don't look at the overall 2000 year climate trend, and the basic physics of Co2 & methane as today's dominant drivers of the Radiative Forcing Equation.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 5:17:50 PM
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JF Aus,
I applaud your concern for the oceans and share concern for the way we treat our sewerage. We currently "mine the soil" of nutrients, eat the food we grow, and then flush all those nutrients out to sea. Peak minearl phosphorus and potassium are on the way. Experts at Sydney's UTS are saying it will take 20 years to retrofit sewerage systems to capture those nutrients into closed nutrient cycles.

Interestingly Aldous Huxley even understood this back in 1928.
&#8232;From “Point Counter Point”.

“With your intensive agriculture,” he went on, “you’re simply draining the soil of phosphorus. More than half of one per cent a year. Going clean out of circulation. And then the way you throw away hundreds of thousands of tons of phosphorus pentoxide in your sewage! Pouring it into the sea. And you call that progress. Your modern sewage systems!” His tone was witheringly scornful. “You ought to be putting it back where it came from. On the land.” Lord Edward shook an admonitory finger and frowned. “On the land, I tell you.”

“But all this has nothing to do with me,” progrested Webley.

“Then it ought to,” Lord Edward answered sternly. “That’s the trouble with you politicians. You don’t even think of the important things. Talking about progress and votes and Bolshevism and every year allowing a million tons of phosphorus pentoxide to run away into the sea. It’s idiotic, it’s criminal. it’s … it’s fiddling while Rome is burning.” He saw Webley opening his mouth to speak and made haste to anticipate what he imagined was going to be his objection. “No doubt,” he said, “you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks. But what’ll you do when the deposits are exhausted?”

He poked Everard in the shirt front. “What then? Only two hundred years and they’ll be finished. You think we’re being progressive because we’re living on our capital. Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre – squander them all. That’s your policy."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Counter_Point

So on this we agree. On climate, sadly, not so much.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 7:41:46 PM
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The Lowy Institute has only 52% seeing GW as a major threat, down from 68% two years ago.
Posted by whitmus, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 8:53:26 PM
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Explodes Now, you of all people should be last to make comments or come acroess all hurt about character attacks or even light comments. After your recent very public exploration of extreme bad temper at anyone disagreeing with you, I'm surprised you are allowed to post at all.

The MWP happened, that effect may happen again, it may not. It's good for you to admit something like that as it now opens up, for you, the potential for other liklyhoods from information, not just from AGW sites which all, like the anti-AGW sites, have agenda not always abuot science but often to gain funding to pay various mortgages and school fees. People, including scientists are human after all.

Graham has a good point, you need to look at the data, not just the conclusions of the writers - the IPCC has a Jack and Jill summary of the reports, and a lot of the writers disagree with their conclusions being "blended" into the mix such that a vanilla, and political, outcome is produced.

Be careful of "heros", is probably a good motto, when someone gains superior status in the science world, even if he is not from that region, Al Gore, Tim Flannery, Bono etc they tend to become morally superior and hypocritical.

So back to Mark's original point, now that we can put the MWP thing aside, scientists today do not know enough about what drives climate, they know some things, yes but not all. Clearly this is true since there is discussion about it, it is not like making horseshoes, a known thing and no longer studied.

Time will tell, and we'll all pay for it in Australia because the science here is being used to justify higher taxes, which may or may not be used to fight "climate change". (I say let the climate change!)

BTW - how will you know if the good fight is being won? If your lifestyle is severely impacted? Will that feel better, is that what this is about, paying penence?
Posted by odo, Tuesday, 13 October 2009 10:44:36 PM
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Eclipse Now,

Thank you but my concern is not for the ocean, it is for the people who depend on it for nutrition and trade, especially in places like the neighbouring Solomon Islands where I have long term friends in real trouble.

You have a good understanding of phosphate. I don't agree with the 20 years to retrofit sewage systems, anyway 20 years is less, add infinitum, than it will take for an ETS to solve the problem.

Please tell me is a few words why you think we do not agree on climate.
Posted by JF Aus, Wednesday, 14 October 2009 7:50:11 AM
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JF Aus quotes a BBC article quoting Mojib Latif as saying the world is cooling for the next few decades. Those who want to know what point Mojib was ACTUALLY making, before the denialists started sneering all over the blogosphere, should check out his actual speech documented here. (He has an outrageous problem pronouncing 'R's, but we'll forgive him because he is such a well respected climatologist).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8&feature=sdig&et=1255382545.77

**ODO** tries to paint me into a corner where I only follow certain select climate alarmist voices in the wilderness. The reality is ODO has joined a paranoid conspiratorial worldview up there with Fox Mulder and the government hiding Aliens at Roswell.

Rather than being a minority view, there is now not a single science academy on the planet that denies global warming.

Consider this: "With the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.[72]"

A *few* science groups are neutral (such as American Association of Petroleum Geologists, imagine a petroleum association being "neutral"?), but none actually dissent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

On the other hand, these are just *some* of the consenting scientific organisations that agree with global warming, and you’ll find it’s all the world's most prestigious scientific organisations.

Since 2001, 32 national science academies have come together to issue joint declarations confirming anthropogenic global warming, and urging the nations of the world to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The signatories of these statements have been the national science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, the Caribbean, China, France, Ghana, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Sweden, Tanzania, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

**SO MY QUESTION TO ODO**, if I am following the majority consensus of all the science academies on the planet, who on earth are YOU treating as YOUR climate gurus? (No need to reply, the above post already demonstrates what a hypocrite you are.)
Posted by Eclipse Now, Wednesday, 14 October 2009 7:23:47 PM
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Eclipse Now,

In that You Tube video as per you last post, look closely at the satellite image of the ocean. Look closely like a doctor examines an xray.

Do you see the shade of green and the blue of the ocean? Do you see the different shades of green within the green?

To me the green appears to be algae, quite a lot of it too.
Posted by JF Aus, Wednesday, 14 October 2009 8:23:59 PM
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Eclipse, what do you make of the MWP? You were the one demanding peer-reviewed papers saying it existed. I just obliged. What is the case you are trying to make out? For what it's worth I think the graph of the last 450,000 years showing it has been much colder for the vast majority of that time is much more significant.

Of course the Moberg study doesn't speculate about forcings etc. Can you show me the answer to all your questions in the Mann et al paper which created the Hockey Stick? If not, why would you expect another paper on the same measurement issue to produce that information?

I've also checked out the Wikipedia entry you refer to as proof that no scientific associations oppose the IPCC consensus. Now I warn students against relying on Wikipedia, which just for your benefit I should point out is not peer reviewed, but the views of the organisations that it counts as neutral are not much different from my own. Are you now going to accept that all I say is calmly and well reasoned (as it is)? Or are you going to claim me as a supporter of the IPCC (which I'm not)?
Posted by GrahamY, Wednesday, 14 October 2009 8:50:37 PM
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**JF Aus**,
sorry, you're going to have to do better than that. The sceptics have deliberately taken everything he said out of context. Just ignoring that fact and pointing at a green point in the oceans doesn't excuse misquoting an expert in climatology, and ignoring his graphs for projections to 2100, and shouting "world cooling for next 20 years!" which is NOT really what he said.

**GrahamY**, if you can't answer my questions about the MWP then you have no case. The only reason the MWP would *mean anything* is if it revealed a major forcing that climatologists had ignored. The MWP would also need to be shown as warmer than today to demonstrate a natural forcing that could be driving climate in this geological period that was stronger than greenhouse gases.

And don’t forget, industrial greenhouse gases have not had their full say in our global temperature yet. Energy is still accumulating in our oceans and atmosphere. So the MWP forcings would have to be *very powerful*, as yet undetected, and yet somehow influencing today’s climate in a mysterious way that coincides with our massive release of greenhouse gases who’s Radiative Forcings can be tested and calculated repeatedly in a lab.

So dodge around the questions I asked you, because whatever you do don't acknowledge that they are the issues necessary to prove the MWP *means anything*.

Previous ice-ages returning WOULD be really "significant" if they suddenly returned. But we know that Milankovitch cycles produced those ice ages, and we know they are not due for the next 30 thousand years. We DON'T have 30 thousand years to prepare for a billion people starving across Asia after the glaciers have retreated.

I’m glad you are not openly hostile to climate science. Here is a history of climate science back to the 19th century that details how our understanding of climate evolved and what it is based on.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

The basics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

Good luck.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Thursday, 15 October 2009 8:44:29 AM
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Eclipse Now,

Best you indicate which BBC article you say I posted and that you are referring to. I do not understand what 'fact' you now claim I am ignoring. Indeed, you are ignoring the green and appear to have dismissed it as just a colour.

I find green ocean (colour) algae is absorbing and transporting energy and that this has not been taken into account and measured by climate change science. You Eclipse Now are missing evidence right now, even though it is right there in front of you via the satellite video.

It is algae that is accumulating energy in the ocean.
Posted by JF Aus, Thursday, 15 October 2009 9:19:03 AM
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Yeah, I didn't really expect much of a response Graham.

At least I got what I expected.
Posted by Bugsy, Thursday, 15 October 2009 10:39:40 PM
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JF Aus,
in one sense you are right. Water takes 1000 times more energy to heat than the atmopshere, so as Co2 concentrations build up in our atmosphere and trap in extra energy (as measured by the Radiative Forcing Equation) that extra heat is slowly transferred to our oceans.

So in one sense, global warming is the story of ocean heating.

But nothing you have suggested about increased algae rings true as a mechanism for global warming. Increased nutrients in the oceans can actually create dead zones where only certain types of algae or even bacteria survive. Annoxic oceans is a RESULT of global warming, not a cause.

For more detail please watch "Crude, the amazing story of oil".

http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/

But what you REALLY have to do is find a peer-reviewed paper describing the mechanism by which algae increases planetary temperatures. You are trying to assert that all the world’s climatologists have somehow missed this ONE phenomena only you seem to have stumbled upon. So either write up the paper yourself and submit it to the climate guys, or get off my case!

Most of the world’s science academies endorse the Anthropogenic Climate Change greenhouse gas model of the IPCC, only a few are 'neutral' and none actually contest it.

So while you are writing up your counter-proposal, you also have to disprove the spectrometry of greenhouse gases, and the maths in the Radiative Forcing Equation which measures by how much greenhouses gases have increased and correspondingly how much extra energy is being trapped by those greenhouses, while you demonstrate your precious algae is the mechanism of climate change. Good luck with all that! ;-)

PS: This whole algae theory of yours just seems a random fixation. In that case, why not just pick on increased opiate production in Afghanistan? ;-) "There's so much, it's like, sending out too many warm cosmic vibes of love and stuff, and so like heating the planet? You hearing me maaaaan?" Yeah, we all hear you. ;-)
Posted by Eclipse Now, Friday, 16 October 2009 12:22:46 PM
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Eclipse Now,

What case have you got that I should get off?

I am not into science like you are. You are not into the ocean like I am. Why not be polite and understanding?

A few days ago I asked an 8 year old, if you take 3 equal sized glasses and fill one with clean water, one with milk and one with pea soup, then boil them together and turn off the heat at the same time for each, which one will hold heat the longest. Answer was the pea soup, then the milk.

In the ocean it is currents that transport the warm algae from one place to another. Why sneer at or dismiss algae as a possible factor in AGW?

Eclipse Now, you tell me if IPCC science has or has not assessed impact or not of increased algae in the ocean. What do climatologists know about ocean algae proliferated by nutrient pollution. My theory you say, I see it is with my own eyes. Is it theory if I see the sun rise and set?

Your nominated peer reviewed system is not perfect. New discoveries unknown to science can be made.

I can add to what I have already said and would like to see Australian science prove what is necessary as you say. Delay will however allow overseas science to lead the way. There is various impact from the algae problem and solutions are needed absolutely urgently.
Posted by JF Aus, Friday, 16 October 2009 7:36:49 PM
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JF Aus, I'm not a scientist! Please don't think I'm somehow qualified to assess this stuff myself... I run miles in stark terror when I see equations.

What I'm saying is that from the real scientists I read, the peer-reviewed guys have answers to every (legitimate) question from the Denialists, and the Denialists have got diddly-squat.

And my guess is that the scientists would say the pea-soup has a much thicker density than a light algae bloom on top of an ocean. But do watch the Crude DVD, it is well worth it.

Seriously, if you can, just watch this video and about a minute in it will SHOW you with your own eyes how Co2 can trap heat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Un69RMNSw&feature=related

Please watch it.

The industrial revolution and resulting exponential increase of fossil fuel use in the 20th century increased Co2 in the atmosphere from 280ppm to 385 parts per million. Doesn't sound like a lot, but when one realises earth's atmosphere is something like 5,000,000,000,000,000 tons, you can see that raising it 105 parts per million of 5 quadrillion is still a heck of a lot of **Co2 tonnage** which will trap a bunch more heat.

(Which is what the Radiative Forcing Equation measures, or so the experts tell me.)
Posted by Eclipse Now, Friday, 16 October 2009 7:50:21 PM
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JF don't let Eclipse talk down to you. He has zip understanding of physical processes as demonstrated by his assertion that "Water takes 1000 times more energy to heat than the atmopshere" and "that extra heat is slowly transferred [from the atmosphere] to our oceans". It gave me a laugh this morning. Peer review please Eclipse, seeing you seem to think that is the only test of truth!

The first is a round figure he plucked out of the air, and the second would be a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. But I bet Eclipse didn't do well at physics or chemistry.

You can't argue with someone who says "I don't understand this field, but these people I have heard of say this, and you ought to believe them because I do." It's no different from Runner putting a bible into your hand and telling you that all you need to know is there.

How do you deal with peer reviewed papers that contradict the ones you cite? Well, if you don't understand the concepts you just say "my peer review is better than their peer review" which is pretty much what we have here.

Or you try to divert attention, which is what he is doing with the MWP. You try to hide the fact you didn't know what you were talking about by saying that merely turning up a fact doesn't contradict your assertion, you have to have a whole theory of everything to explain that fact.

I have a problem with your algae because I just can't see the mechanism. How do you say that Algae increase absorption of light energy in the first place, and how does that energy get transferred into the sea?
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 17 October 2009 8:23:51 AM
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Eclipsed Now,

Re “The industrial revolution and resulting exponential increase of fossil fuel use in the 20th century increased Co2 in the atmosphere from 280ppm to 385 parts per million”

I would think it would be near impossible to show that the increase in CO2 was the result of industrialisation. Especially given that by all accounts I’ve scanned , by far the greatest percentage of CO2 arises from natural sources –and the measure of such natural sources has been minimal to non-existent over much of the period in question.

It has been my observation that the proponents of AGW make a lot of assumptions/ guess’s.
And other’s who are not scientists, not “qualified to assess [the] stuff” , latch onto it and doctrinise it, because it suits other agendas they have –what is your secret agenda?

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Posted by Horus, Saturday, 17 October 2009 8:44:26 AM
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**GrahamY**
Attack me, I'm an easy target.

Whatever you do **don't** answer the vital questions about the MWP that I've asked you repeatedly. I'm not side-tracking, I'm asking you to prove relevance.

EG: Climatologists freely admit there have been *far hotter* periods in earth's history, with *much* higher levels of Co2 from natural causes. But this does nothing to diminish our current cause for alarm, and in many cases confirms it.

As for the oceans, did I make a mistake? I have heard different figures, but it must depend on what they are discussing... how much water compared to how much air, contexts of that water, etc? Please do share if it is different to my layman's understanding from the following sources.

"Dr Domingues says the oceans store more than 90 per cent of the heat in the Earth’s climate system and act as a temporary buffer against the effects of climate change."
http://www.csiro.au/news/OceansWarming.html

"Even though oceans hold 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere does, the atmosphere moves heat around much more quickly which evens out their effectiveness"

"The oceans are crucial because they store so much heat. It takes more than 1000 times as much energy to heat a cubic metre of water by 1 °C as it does the same volume of air."
http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/016ns_009.htm

This link also summarises alarming studies into effects of ocean warming, including El Nino, droughts in Africa, etc.

**Horus** go back to the basics please.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/carbon_cycle_version2.html

The thing I find about you Denialists is that every time I track down the peer-reviewed answer you guys are caught out lying, or twisting half-truths. You should be embarrassed by the poor state of Denialist propaganda. I don't have to be a scientist to know when someone has been caught out lying.

EG: In the other thread: "They predicted cooling in the 70's". What an outright misrepresentation of the majority opinion of climate community from the 70's! It's insulting and rude, but did Mark retract it from this other OLO sponsored Denialist piece? Of course not. Shame shame. And shame on OLO for publishing this rubbish.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 17 October 2009 5:57:07 PM
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Eclipse the ocean drives atmospheric temperature, not the other way around. You can't prove your point by quoting others who are also scientifically illiterate, even if they do write for journals that call themselves "New Scientist".

The basic mechanism is this. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere at wavelengths which have very little effect on its temperature. It is then absorbed by the earth and the oceans. They then heat-up and re-radiate most of the energy, a large proportion of which is in the infrared band and can be absorbed by gases in the atmosphere, of which water vapour is the most significant (somewhere around 95%).

The sea is hotter than the atmosphere on average so there can be no net transfer of energy to it from the atmosphere. The re-radiation of infra-red in the direction of the sea will slightly increase its temperature. As there is a causal relationship between the temperature of the sea and the temperature of the air, then air temperature should be a good proxy for sea temperature. So until the atmospheric temperature failed to behave as predicted no-one was too worried about the temperature of the ocean.

In 2007 after around 8 years of plateaued or decreasing atmospheric temperature, suddenly we got these claims that the extra heat was "in the system" and was contained in the sea. But if this is true, we should be able to measure the increase in temperature. Unfortunately for this theory there has been a decrease in ocean temperature over the last few years as measured by the Argo buoy system.

El Ninos and La Ninas exist because of energy differentials and distributions in the ocean, not necessarily because it is hotter or colder in toto.

You really don't seem to get On Line Opinion. We are a forum for ideas and we publish a broad range. People whose views you probably approve of are in the majority on global warming here. We don't vouch for the accuracy of every thing that every author says, and nor should we. Anymore than peer-reviewed journals vouch for everything that they publish.
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 17 October 2009 6:49:13 PM
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You forgot to mention having as many accounts as you want and being able to defame AGW proponents with impunity.
Posted by Bugsy, Saturday, 17 October 2009 6:56:09 PM
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1. Good point Bugsy.

2. Relevance of the MWP? While you're looking down your nose at my technical ineptitude, you could at least bother answering the questions that prove relevance.

3. "The sea is hotter than the atmosphere on average so there can be no net transfer of energy to it from the atmosphere. The re-radiation of infra-red in the direction of the sea will slightly increase its temperature."

Well I'm glad we got there eventually. No net transfer of energy except... when there's global warming increasing the atmosphere's re-radiating more infra-red back into the ocean.

So other than rambling on a heck of a lot longer than I did, what's new?

Tell me, how much is this "slightly" you mention? Anything like this...

"The ocean is warming about 50 per cent faster than reported two years ago, according to an update of the latest climate science.
A report compiling research presented at a science congress in Copenhagen in March says recent observations are near the worst-case predictions of the 2007 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In the case of sea-level rise, it is happening at an even greater rate than projected - largely due to rising ocean temperatures causing thermal expansion of seawater."

"While that looks like a modest figure, that would correspond to something like 15 to 20 times more heat going into the ocean than has gone into the atmosphere," Professor Steffen said.
"Well over half of the increase in ocean temperature occurred in the last 10 years, so the system is accelerating."

* Sea level is predicted to rise by about a metre by 2100, though it notes models of the behaviour of polar ice sheets are in their infancy.
* Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have not been substantially higher than now for at least the last 20 million years.
* Global average surface temperature will hardly drop in the first thousand years after greenhouse gas emissions are cut to zero.

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/rising-ocean-temperatures-near-worstcase-predictions-20090619-cmcs.html
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 17 October 2009 8:50:09 PM
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Eclipsed Now,

Here’s an example of climate change proponents tripping over themselves:

1)Steven Chu -US Secretary of Energy (TIME Aug 24,2009-p32)
--"When I asked Chu about the earth-is-actually-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past twelve years and 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post--1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures; "See? It's gone down! The earth must be cooling!" But then he got serious, almost plaintive:” You know, it's totally irresponsible. You're not supposed to make up facts"

The message here is the earth is not cooling –even in the short-term. And to even suggest it is “irresponsible”.

2) Then we have our own resident OLO –expert-- Eclipse Now:
“Not only is the myth of cooling since 1998 factually incorrect..."

Message again loud and clear (he’s learnt by heart all his Climate Change For Children notes)The only problem is, the science has moved on – he’s been eclipsed !

3) This NewsScientist (12 Sept 2009 – p10) reporting a gathering of 1500 climate scientists at the UN’s World Climate Change Conference in Geneva “last week”.

Firstly : Mojib Latif – Author for the IPCC & climate change physicist .
“Latif predicts that in the next few years a natural cooling trend will dominate …the cooling would be down to cyclical changes in the atmosphere& ocean currents know as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) & the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO)…the NAO was probably reasonable for some of the strong warming seen around the globe IN THE PAST THREE DECADES . “But how much? The jury is still out,” …The NAO is now moving into a that phase that will cool the planet “
Secondly: Pope- “Another favourite climate belief was overturned when Pope warned the conference that the dramatic Artic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming .Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than 2008 or 2008.”

HO HUM!
Posted by Horus, Saturday, 17 October 2009 10:03:35 PM
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Eclipse Now,

I am not an academically qualified scientist either but that can be an advantage. Instead of being trained to focus on a specific field of expertise, lay thinking is often lateral and it is possible to see and understand some things a trained mind might miss.

In my opinion AGW is occurring. Of course pea soup is much thicker than ocean algae but how much thicker? Algae blooms on top of the ocean you refer to are just a small part of the total mass. Micro algae exists generally but now in unprecedented quantity in some ocean currents and in bays and lagoons. General micro algae permeates deeper that just in surface waters.

Algae is matter that exists in addition to ocean water. Matter has ability to absorb heat. Additional matter has ability to transfer additional heat. Ocean currents transport algae including absorbed heat. Young people have not seen previously blue water that is now often green or shades of green. A change has occurred, how much green algae is involved in that change may one day be indicated by science. How watery is the pea soup? Even a slight amount of vegetable matter can make a difference retaining warmth for a longer time, time enough for a current to transport that algae and warmth from one area to another.

Ocean algae is producing CO2. Can you figure that one? Has anyone noted IPCC assessment of CO2 produced by ocean algae?

Eclipse Now, sorry I have not heard the You Tube link you posted as my sound system is down.
Posted by JF Aus, Sunday, 18 October 2009 11:45:00 AM
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Having established the reasons why Fred Singer's views on AGW require assessment with considered skepticism, the following article discusses the whys and wherefores of the impact of CO2 levels on our atmosphere in the current state of the planet's water and ice levels. As there are varying levels of understanding regarding this impact, I found this essay to be very succinct and helpful.

""Modern-day levels of carbon dioxide were last reached about 15 million years ago," Tripati says, when sea levels were at least 25 meters higher and temperatures were at least 3 degrees C warmer on average. "During the middle Miocene, an [epoch] in Earth's history when carbon dioxide levels were sustained at values similar to what they are today [330 to 500 ppm], the planet was much warmer, sea level was higher, there was substantially less ice at the poles, and the distribution of rainfall was very different."

Further, "at no time in the last 20 million years have levels of carbon dioxide increased as rapidly as at present," Tripati adds; CO2 concentrations have climbed from 280 ppm to 387 ppm in the past 200 years. And "our work indicates that moderate changes in carbon dioxide levels of 100 to 200 parts per million were associated with major climate transitions and large changes in temperature"—indicative of a very sensitive climate."

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-sensitive-is-climate-to-carbon-dioxide&sc=CAT_ENGYSUS_20091015

The article concludes:

""Climate systems are well linked worldwide, such as sea-level, CO2, ice sheet[s], the Asian monsoon, regional temperature and precipitation," Cheng (Paleoclimatologist Hai Cheng of the University of Minnesota) says. "So a change in one of them could trigger changes in others." And that might mean the climate is too sensitive to tolerate current levels of CO2 without changing the conditions that have allowed human civilization to flourish in the past 10,000 years.
Posted by Fractelle, Sunday, 18 October 2009 4:31:40 PM
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Bugsy

GY can throw ad hominems at any with whom he disagrees; behaviour of which we are all guilty occasionally.

Back to playing-the-ball'.

Fred Singer disagreed with the prevailing wisdom of the scientific community regarding passive-smoking, in the early 1990's and currently denies AGW.

"Singer ... appeared on a tobacco industry list of people who could write op-ed pieces defending the industry’s views, according to a peer-reviewed commentary by Derek Yach and Stella Aguinaga Bialous, W.H.O."

(http://www.tobaccoscam.ucsf.edu/pdf/9.6-JunkScience-Yach.pdf - pages 2 & 3 under heading Distortions)

Singer is undoubtedly an intelligent and highly qualified man:

"In the 1940s and 50s, Singer designed the first instruments used in satellites to measure cosmic radiation and ozone. He invented the backscatter photometer ozone-monitoring instrument for early versions of US weather satellites. By the early 1960s he was a leading figure in the early development of earth observation satellites, .... establishing and becoming the first Director of the National Weather Bureau's Satellite Service Center (1962-64)".

Nevertheless he remains at odds yet again with scientific consensus; as one of the few qualified scientists that vested interests (GE, Ford, GM, Exxon, Shell, Sun Oil, Lockheed Martin and IBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer) have in their arsenal of denial of anthropogenic influence of the ecosystem known as planet Earth.

His confirmed associations with the "usual-suspects" in the above mentioned industries and with Tobacco industry (as referenced above) does leave much room for doubt as to his credibility regarding the impact of human pollution on our planet.

Healthy scepticism is vital to any claims, especially those as critical as climate-change, however it is prudent to simply check on whose interests are being served or represented.

The majority of credible scientific organisations may be wrong about the extent of AGW or even that humans have any impact at all on climate.

However, we can stop polluting (which would reduce algae blooms JF Aus) as well as moving towards renewable resources. Is that so wrong?
.
.
.
.
Note:

This post was originally posted prior to the one above and reworded in accordance with OLO guidelines.
Posted by Fractelle, Sunday, 18 October 2009 6:01:45 PM
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**JF Aus**
I asked you to watch "Crude".
http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/
Massive oceanic algae blooms actually COOL the earth. Watch Part 3, only 30 minutes.

**Fractelle** Good points, especially on Singer’s strange behaviour. One just has to read the wiki and follow the footnotes to check just how bizarre this fellow’s views are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer#Views

**Horus**
1) You raise 1998 again? Really? Wow.

This *was* the hottest decade on record.

NASA *did* record 2005 as *hotter* than 1998.

Even fellow Denialists are worried about pushing this myth. You must have missed previous discussion about it.

Denialist Dr Patrick J Michaels explained that El Nino and La Nina cycles can, in the short term at least, disguise the longer term trends and concluded:

"Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all…
If you loose credibility on this issue you lose this issue!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

Learn to tell the difference between reading 6 year data-picked trends and climate change over 15 to 20 year trends.

2) I have repeatedly stated that I am not even a scientist, let alone climate expert, just that I can call a crock when I see one.

For example, quoting only *part* of the picture that you want to admit. EG: You quote Mojib Latif.

Again, we’ve already discussed this on this thread.

But I have to ask, did you just rip this "Mojib Latif" quote off some Denialist blog because it sounded good and serves your purpose for this 5 minutes of this debate? Did you actually read his speech in context?

This is just another example of Denialists cherry-picking the bits they want to hear without actually taking home the *complete* message that even a 10 year old could comprehend.

Watch this youtube for his actual speech, and then tell me about his projections for *this century*.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8&feature=sdig&et=1255382545.77
Posted by Eclipse Now, Sunday, 18 October 2009 6:53:26 PM
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Eclipsed Now

Re: “You quote Mojib Latif. Again, we’ve already discussed this on this thread.”

No we haven’t, leastways YOU haven’t , YOU’VE sidestepped it like a geriatric sidestepping something he was afraid of walking through.

The crux/crucial issue here is you & your fellow parishioner Chu say there is no such thing as a cooling --even a temporary cooling.
Yet Mojib says yes there is, he has evidence , and it may last for decades –further the heating we’ve seen over the last thirty years may be in a large part due to natural cycles!

There is no avoiding it -- someone (or you) has got it wrong –who might that be do you suppose?

By the way these little marks ”…” mean that what is inside is a direct quote.
There is not fudging, no paraphrasing , no abbreviation – it’s a frigin direct quote!
So don’t try to pull that one about me cherry picking!

Fractelle ,
Agree with you 100%
Reduce pollution.
Develop alternate energy
Reduce waste
Yes yes yes !
But this in not what AGW is really about.
Ask the world bank about their reparation program!
Ask the AGW preaches why are they’re –re-badging --- every ill under the sun as a consequence of climate change, and turning a blind eye to over population, bad farming practises & stupid development programs!
Posted by Horus, Sunday, 18 October 2009 9:43:41 PM
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An email exchange with Dr Mojib Latif

http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/02/an-email-exchange-with-mojib-latif/
Posted by Q&A, Sunday, 18 October 2009 10:29:33 PM
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Thanks Q&A, great link which completely answers Horus. However I’d also like to respond that the irony here is that Mojib's original presentation was to address the kind of Cherrypicking Horus and the media sometimes get into.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8&feature=sdig&et=1255382545.77

(Does "Cherrypicking, Horus and the Media" sound like a B-grade rock band to anyone else, or is it just me?)

Mojib's talk could be re-titled: “The real life climate complexities Denialists and the media don’t want to accept, causing Cherrypicking”.

As for Horus saying quote marks somehow removes any accusation of Cherrypicking… I just had to laugh. Do he even know what Cherrypicking means?

"Cherry picking is the act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

Which can simply be quoting out of context. It's still cherrypicking! You could be quoting directly from the IPCC for all I care, but the moment you zoom in and choose the few wiggles on a line that suit your point, while ignoring all the other data, you’ve Cherrypicked! That’s whether you’re arguing it has been cooling since 1998 when it is the hottest decade on record, or trying to say global warming is bunk from a few choice paragraphs from Mojib’s talk, taken TOTALLY out of context.

Mojib said you guys have a simplistic view of a “slowly evolving process, and monotonic process, okay, so each year is warmer than the preceding year”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8&feature=sdig&et=1255382545.77

It’s as if you believe temperature increases will ALWAYS correlate EXACTLY to rises in Co2, which is a retarded straw-man characterisation of the real complexities of climate science.

Horus, actually read Q&A’s link or I’ll not bother to read any of your replies.
http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/02/an-email-exchange-with-mojib-latif/
Posted by Eclipse Now, Monday, 19 October 2009 9:01:59 AM
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It seems clear the Latif stuff has got Eclipsed on the back foot, hence EVEN MORE shouting, insults, smug righteous tone, talking down to everyone, and rambling madness. He's making the story up as he goes along, just like the global warming con. He admits to not being a climatologist or even a scientist. I'm wondering if he has qualifications in any academic discipline at all.

His wiki definition of cherry picking describes well the Briffa affair, but we haven't heard him on that. Is he cherry picking his accusations of cherry picking?

[Deleted for flaming]
Posted by whitmus, Monday, 19 October 2009 1:13:57 PM
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Whitmus,
I admit to being cranky with dishonest bloggers that quote *real* climatologists out of context and try to force their words into something else. What part of that behaviour is OK with you?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Monday, 19 October 2009 8:22:34 PM
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Eclipse Now, re Latif

The significance of the Keenlyside, Latif et al paper is that it shows modelers are now taking into account ocean basin heat cycles and not just treating them as random fluctuations. Big step forward.

I have a hard copy of the May 2008 paper but an electronic copy is behind a pay wall. Here's a Powerpoint presentation showing the same charts etc.

http://www.agci.org/dB/PPTs/08S1_NKeenlyside_0624.pdf

For the best to date (IMO), elucid presentation of the case for natural factors being the predominate cause of the 1980's & 1990's warming read Peter Taylor's "Chill", "A Reassessment of Global Warming", Clairview, 2009. In the main he sources peer reviewed articles & relates his arguments to the IPPC reports.

Peter is a "committed environmentalist and scientist", "On the basis of his studies of satellite data, cloud cover, ocean & solar cycles, Peter Taylor concludes that the main driver of recent global warming has been an unprecedented combination of natural events".
Posted by G Larsen, Monday, 19 October 2009 8:33:31 PM
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Fractelle, I'd be interested where I have been ad hominem on this thread. Can you provide me with a reference?

I'd also be interested in a rebuttal of Singer's view of the EPA's report on environmental cigarette smoke. All the people who point to his "involvement" with tobacco fail to point out that he was being paid as a scientist, and that his science was good. It's like labelling a solicitor criminal for giving good advice to a housebreaker. That is ad hominem.

Eclipse, my links on peer review papers showing the MWP were a check on your claim that they didn't exist. Now for some more fact-checking. Q&A posts a link which purports to say that Mojib Latif did not say that it is likely to cool for the next 20 years. We are told by you that it is the rate of increase in temperature that is predicted to decrease, not temperature itself.

But if you look at the figures in the link rather than the spin you find a table that lists the HadCru projections versus his projections (or that's what it appears to be saying, happy to be corrected). You find that the average anomaly between 1990 and 2000 was 0.19C, and that for this decade it is projected to be 0.10C, and for the next decade 0.18C. As both these figures are less than the 1990 anomaly, unless I am reading something wrong, those decades would be cooler in absolute terms than the preceding decade.

You also claimed that increase in sea levels was accelerating. So another fact check leads to http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global.jpg which shows that increase in sea level is below trend at the moment.

You've also missed the whole point of the issue of ocean heat. It doesn't get it from the atmosphere. It gets it from the sun. It heats the atmosphere, not vice-versa.
Posted by GrahamY, Monday, 19 October 2009 9:29:24 PM
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Fractelle,

Graham is of course right, I don't see him engaging ad hominems very often, if at all.

But I was not complaining about ad hominems, I was voicing an opinion of what I percieve as him engaging in capricious and selective "moderation" by wielding the 'defamation' clause. This thread is a great example. I agree with you Graham, defamation is not a nice thing to do, so why do you let your mate Mark get away with it? Why is he not hit with the banhammer? Not only does he engage in defamation, of a potentially worse kind than protagoras', he runs multiple accounts. Am I allowed multiple accounts Graham? I would like to know, just for the record.
Posted by Bugsy, Monday, 19 October 2009 9:41:12 PM
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Eclipse,

I don't have much time to waste on you, especially after that post.

In context, Latif is a still a problem, at least for you "ol' pal", and shows what a proverbial dog's breakfast climate science has become. You have belittled anyone who has been curious about the, at most, plateauing of temps in last decade and argued against it with much sarcasm! Now that Latif is backing a decline, instead of acknowledging that it validates those who've read the graphs in this way, and you admitting you were wrong, we discover that we should not be looking at actual temperature (T1) at all, but some imaginary temp (T2) that is being masked. Well, pardon us for looking at actual temps - that is what you've been going on about all this time isn't it? - only to discover you've moved the goalposts. (Doctor: You're obese. Patient: But I'm not fat at all. Doctor: No, but your healthy eating and exercising is masking your obesity.) Along with the dubious splicing of different proxy data, we now have something called T2 - some estimate of TRUE temp, different from real temp. Well, when did we start measuring T2? How is it defined? You can't just jump between the two as it suits - it ain't science
Posted by whitmus, Monday, 19 October 2009 10:01:45 PM
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Eclipsed Now,

Re : (Does "Cherrypicking, Horus and the Media" sound like a B-grade rock band to anyone else, or is it just me?)

It’s just you Eclipsed!
You’ve been sniffing too many green house gasses.

On my part it took me a while to settle on what your band might be called, I first thought of –Cool Change– but that was too timid.
Then,by Jove I got it –the perfect name : The H2Ss ,you and Q&A could be called the H2Ss!It says it all, it has an uber-cool sound and it encapsulates all your qualities in a nutshell.

Now from hard rock to hard questions Eclipse:
Q&As link doesn’t get you off the hook, the “interview” can be summarized in one sentence : “Mojib, old chap, yyyyour still one of us… aaaaaren’t you?”

The issue is not whether Mojib Latif believes in AGW . The issue is whether of not he indicated there would/could be a cooling period.
And to quote from Q&As censored ,smoothed out “interview” : “ I made this very clear, there is quite some uncertainty about the short-term evolution”

But, we all know there is no uncertain for you Eclipsed.
see no cooling,, hear no cooling, speak no cooling [full stop]
You are truly man of science and reason!
Posted by Horus, Monday, 19 October 2009 10:13:15 PM
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fractelle, i'm not sure graham's silly whack at me is really ad hominem. it's just very speculative and, at least by graham-the-scientist standards, wrong. however, i do love graham's fluid notion of defamation. and i really, really love graham's image of himself as the honest science investigator, the objective evaluator of the experts. the truly hilarious aspect is when he wishes to use biblical cherrypicking as the comparison. he seems genuinely oblivious to the fact that he himself is doing exactly that kind of cherrypicking.
Posted by bushbasher, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 9:04:58 AM
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Bugsy and GrahamY

GY & ad hominems, true Graham is far too canny to indulge in obvious personal attacks, it is his snide little comments that rankle, comments liberally sprinkled through this thread like:

<< Bushbasher, if you don't understand the science enough to argue about it, then you have no place in the argument. You're not even qualified enough to work out which "experts" to believe. Ditto Eclipse. >>

Ironic considering that Graham is no more scientifically qualified than any of the above he denigrates. Dear Graham can't even grasp the basics of ecology:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2207&page=0#47389

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2207&page=0#47474

Given Graham's understanding of human intrusion and impact on previously uninhabited (by contemporary human development) ecosystems, I happen to think it is a bit rich when Graham questions the reasoning abilities of those with whom he disagrees.

Now, I hope that I have made my reasoning for my objections clear.

As for evidence Fred Singer being paid for his erroneous opinions on passive smoking, thus far, there is none for payment for comment by the tobacco lobby. That Singer has associations with the vested interests of the business-as-usual crowd (GE, Ford, GM, Exxon, Shell, Sun Oil, Lockheed Martin and IBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer), as I have referenced previously, is on public record. The conclusion I left for others to draw from my earlier post:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9484&page=0#153284

Additional information regarding Singer's associations are succinctly reiterated by George Monbiot in his book, "Heat"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2

"Singer's article, entitled Junk Science at the EPA, claimed that "the latest 'crisis' - environmental tobacco smoke - has been widely criticised as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet". He alleged that the Environmental Protection Agency had had to "rig the numbers" in its report on passive smoking. This was the report that Philip Morris and APCO had set out to discredit a month before Singer wrote his article.

I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company..."
Posted by Fractelle, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 10:04:30 AM
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**G Larsen**
I agree that it is a step *forward* and not a step backwards, as all the Denialistas wish to frame it.

Regarding Peter Taylor I'd ask, "Show us your peer-review." Sounds like just another blogger getting some of the Denialist dollar, just like our friend Plimer.

**GrahamY**
You still haven't demonstrated the *relevance* of the MWP argument Denialists try to spruik.

Also, regarding the oceans, did you or did you not acknowledge that they are *in part* heated by re-directed infra-red?

**Whitmus** and **Horus**
The issue is not whether he believes in climate change, but what he has modelled about the long term projections. The issue is not whether 1998 was the hottest year on record (but we'll just ignore those backyard boys from NASA on 2005 hey, nudge nudge wink wink?) but *why* it was the hottest year.

It is perfectly consistent to accept the testable, demonstrable radiative forcings of Co2 trapping more heat to our planet, while also acknowledging other forcings. Show me an IPCC report with CO2 as the ONLY forcing will you?

No, climatologists are constantly modelling various other forcings, with both heating and cooling.

Here we have a legitimate paper discussing a strong cooling forcing, and you guys want to take that to invalidate *all* of climate science? Why? Is it too complex for you to accept that El Nino boosted 1998 above the background warming, and La Nina then reduced following short-term temperatures below that trend? Is it hard to grasp that climatologists are modelling *multiple* complex systems and there may be short term surprises in the unfolding story of global warming? You're like kids ignoring the basic physics of Co2 and chanting, "SEEEEEEEE, SEEEEEE, that bit of the graph got cooler!"

Well, duh! Go ahead and cherrypick your next reply, it will just confirm everything I've been saying.

For everyone else NOT blinded by Denialist propaganda, please see Mojib's temperatures for 2050, on page 3
http://www.wmo.int/wcc3/sessionsdb/documents/PS3_Latif.pdf

BTW, see Page 4. How is it fair of us to do that to Sub-Saharan Africans?
Posted by Eclipse Now, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 11:05:45 AM
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I share your sentiments bushbasher.

It is the very 'science' that people think they know that prevents them from understanding it in the first place. For example, just because Mark Lawson/curmudgeon-at-home-and-elsewhere (or GrahamY and Eclipse Now for that matter) links to a paper doesn't mean he/they understand it, or indeed can see the flaws in it.

As we have seen, most so called "sceptics" (or is it 'rationalists' now?) often take the 'science' out of context. As a consequence, they misrepresent or distort what the scientists say. The bun fight between GrahamY and Eclipse Now a case in point.

Whether Mark Lawson did this (misrepresentation/distortion) intentionally or not I cannot say, but there are powerful forces that would benefit from denying AGW and delaying any mitigation measures. Having said that, I can understand why some people believe that Man cannot possibly have as much influence over the climate as has been suggested. They will try everything in their arsenal to show otherwise - I wish them well.
Posted by Q&A, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 5:09:15 PM
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Eclipse,

You have said repeatedly here that when El Nino returns we will see records go through the roof in 2010 or 2011, you have cited Patrick Michaels on this, said how foolish a group of people you have labelled denialists will look when this happens, and expressed your fears for the climate in 2020.

In light of Latif's statements, do you stand by this, in which case isn't it Latif who will look rather foolish, or do you back Latif over the coming "greater warming".

Just a clarification of your view will do.
Posted by whitmus, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 7:09:12 PM
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Eclipsed Now,
I think you’ve badly lost the plot .

1) You are on record on this forum of lecturing that there is no such thing as a short term cooling – now you’re wiggling like a earth worm on a hot concrete path trying to get away from it.

It’s no good referring us to 2050 “predictions” –we are measuring you against what is supposed to happen in the intervening years : you say heating, Mojiob says cooling.

I’m afraid there is nothing else for it ---you’re banished from playing with Mojibs group – next playlunch, please go and play by yourself!

2) “ 1998 was the hottest year on record…” LOL

----The hottest year on record –what, ALL OVER THE WORLD—what ingenious Mickey Mouse formula did you use to determine that?
---- Tell us how long have records been kept for the location(s) in question , then when you have told us that, tell us the estimated age of the earth?

3) “ How is it fair of us to do that to Sub-Saharan Africans (SSAa)?”

ROFL
You’re joshing me...aren’t you, Eclipse?

The regions both north and south of the Sahara have been suffering from creeping desertification for thousands of years . Numerous petrograms in the region attest that what once was lush forest or savannah a few thousand years ago is now deep, dry desert

Translation: it all started l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g before industrial was even dreamed of!

So please tell us how you have determined that GHGs released into the atmosphere, by human activity, is the source of SSAs woes?


And tell us how you have discounted such factors as :
1) Growing populations
2) Poor farming practises
3) Civil unrest in the regions concerned
Posted by Horus, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 7:17:38 PM
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What I have repeatedly said in many forums, and different threads on this particular forum, is that I really hope the *peer reviewed* science comes up with a few "safety valves" that we had not anticipated.

In other words, while the physics of Co2 and other greenhouse gases seems well understood by the scientific community, the earth is a very, very complex system, and I for one *hope* Latif is right!

However, the rest of the scientific community are fairly unanimous that while they might not have modelled every little perturbation on the temperature graph, they do have a general consensus about the overall TRENDS.

Latif has stated that he's fairly confident in a bit of cooling for maybe one decade, but then expresses less confidence about his model for any longer periods.

But as I've repeatedly said, I'm interested in the 15 to 20 year trends, not the smaller wiggles.

**Horus**
My "No cooling" statements are responding to the demented 1998 argument. Instead of joining the Denialists and pointing at 1998 and yelling "Look at the cooling afterwards!" the experts seem to say "Look at it returning from a super-spike to abnormally hot!"

So the last decade was still the hottest on record. (I always thought that expression was fairly self-evident, being primarily about what we have on the record?!!)

So 1998 was one subject. Make sure you ignore NASA's 2005 though, it might complicate things. ;-)

Latif's model is regarding some FUTURE COOLING that we *might see*. It hasn't happened yet, so don't crow that global warming is over.

Anyway, it's cooler, that is, maybe a slowing in the progression of warming, maybe even cooler than the last decade. This is different to the 1998 strawman, this is actual new data.

And the irony of what Latif was actually saying about the media, and your predictable reaction, could not be more profound.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 8:29:01 PM
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Eclipse,

Oh what a tangled web. You’ve cornered yourself and are madly throwing up smokescreens.

EN: “What I have repeatedly said in many forums…is that I really hope the *peer reviewed* science comes up with a few "safety valves" that we had not anticipated.”

So! Are you implying you DIDN’T say the above? I can cut and paste quotes from the record if you like.

EN: “while the physics of Co2 and other greenhouse gases seems well understood by the scientific community, the earth is a very, very complex system, and I for one *hope* Latif is right!”

Wow, what an empty comment! I asked you to clarify your view as you have expressed opposing views with equally abusive certainty, and you now have the nerve to mention complexity. Nice escape artist. A bet each way eh? So long as it's set up so others can't win. Not science.

EN: “Latif has stated that he's fairly confident in a bit of cooling for maybe one decade, but then expresses less confidence about his model for any longer periods. “

Sorry a “bit of cooling”, or slowing in warming? Oh, so why should we be interested in his temps for 2050?

EN: “But as I've repeatedly said, I'm interested in the 15 to 20 year trends, not the smaller wiggles.”

NO, you specifically referred to the significance of 2010 and 2011 as being enough to make “denialists” look like “idiots”.

EN: “Anyway, it's cooler, that is, maybe a slowing in the progression of warming, maybe even cooler than the last decade. This is different to the 1998 strawman, this is actual new data.”

NO ECLIPSE. You quoted Michaels and talked of “even greater warming” with characteristic abusiveness.

EN: “the irony of what Latif was actually saying about the media, and your predictable reaction, could not be more profound.”

No, the irony is on you. You have, as Horus picked up, lost the plot
Posted by whitmus, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 10:28:20 PM
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Eclipse Now,

Firstly, I agree there will be greater warming, because science is generalizing and result of that is not leading to relevant required knowledge and due solutions. Evidence of this generalizing and impact is clear to me since viewing the ABC science part 3 program you referred to.

Apologies again for delay in reply to the ABC item but I had a sound breakdown. I need time to think and study further. Presently I am on the road without a printer. A very busy full schedule is also a handicap replying here in full, nevertheless I will eventually get back to you on this thread.
Posted by JF Aus, Wednesday, 21 October 2009 7:03:59 AM
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**JF Aus**
hey, we all have technical issues from time to time. I do recommend Part 3 of "Crude" on algae, as it is clearly demonstrates how it is a cooling mechanism. The whole movie is about algae, oil, and global warming.

**Q&A**
All I'm saying is that a little basic comprehension of the Executive Summaries of *real* climate science reveals the many Denialist myths for what they are: empty, attention-seeking old has-beens out to make a quick buck off the gullible and stubborn. Go Plimer! ;-)

While you’re here: what’s your opinion on the ocean debate Q&A?

It seems that GrahamY wants us to believe that the oceans are never heated by the atmosphere because the oceans are *always* hotter than the atmosphere. How can that be true? Why do we go surfing in summer? Because the oceans are *hotter* than the atmosphere? ;-)

Are not Australia's coastal city temperatures milder than inland summer temperatures because the ocean is COOLER than the atmosphere? Cheers Q&A

**Whitmus**
You're just miffed because Latif made a fool of you by predicting *exactly* your behaviour in his scathing assessment of Denialist media and people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8&feature=sdig&et=1255382545.77

If you want a simplistic 5 year olds view of the universe then I can't be bothered.

I've already held your hand and walked you through how rebuking the 1998 strawman is different to discussing an individual model of a *new* oceanic cooling period. D'uh!

If you want to accept Latif's individual model which predicts cooling for a decade so over all the other climate models which predict warming (including that sceptic we've already mentioned who warns against the 1998 myth), then do YOU also want to be consistent and accept that by 2100 we're utterly stuffed according to Latif?

You're the one dancing about celebrating his *good* news that there's cooling ahead. But what about after that when his *bad* news kicks in? Or are you just cherry picking AGAIN?

At least I can celebrate Latif's cooling model consistently.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Wednesday, 21 October 2009 12:40:48 PM
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Sigh...waste of time. So I'll try to keep it short and simple for ya.

EN: "You're just miffed because Latif made a fool of you by predicting *exactly* your behaviour in his scathing assessment of Denialist media and people."

Could you point out how and where? If you're suggesting I've pounced on it as invalidation of global warming, please illustrate where. Or are you just making this up?

EN: "If you want to accept Latif's individual model which predicts cooling for a decade so over all the other climate models which predict warming (including that sceptic we've already mentioned who warns against the 1998 myth), then do YOU also want to be consistent and accept that by 2100 we're utterly stuffed according to Latif?"

Please point out where I said I accepted Latif's model. Or did you just make this up? (It's you who've said you accept Latif's model, but I challenged that it's consistent with what you've said elsewhere, but you avoided that, hey).

EN: "You're the one dancing about celebrating his *good* news that there's cooling ahead. But what about after that when his *bad* news kicks in? Or are you just cherry picking AGAIN?"

Please point out where I did this, or did you just make it up?

In the absence of evidence, I'll assume you're admitting to misrepresentations.
Posted by whitmus, Wednesday, 21 October 2009 9:28:30 PM
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This has been an interesting thread. I think we've managed to establish a number of things. Mojib Latif and his exchange with the blogger demonstrate the thesis of the article - the models aren't particularly good at prediction. He doesn't think that global warming has stopped, but he's sufficiently rigorous and honest to accept that we have cooled, that his models didn't predict it and that they are not particularly predictive at all.

We've also established that there was a MWP and that it was global. Plus the graph going back 450,000 years proves that there is nothing particularly odd about our temperature at the moment, except that it has been warm for so long - long before man's emissions of CO2 became an issue. I think, because it hasn't been contradicted, that we've also shown that sea level increase hasn't been accelerating.

EN now appears to have a problem with the laws of thermodynamics based on his experience of going for a summer surf. He also misquotes me. What I said was that the average sea temperature is higher than that of the atmosphere (the figure is about 0.8 degrees), not that in every single place at every single time the sea is "always" hotter than the air. Colder things do not heat hotter things - second law of thermodynamics.

His example is wrong for a number of reasons. His summer surf is but one small data point which doesn't go anywhere near representing the whole. Even during summer he will find that if he goes surfing after dark that the sea is generally much warmer than the evening air. If he goes to the Antarctic the sea will never be below zero, even though the air will be for long periods of time. You have to join all the dots up. And then he ignores the evaporative effect so can't understand why sea breezes are cooler than inland winds.
Posted by GrahamY, Wednesday, 21 October 2009 10:42:11 PM
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**Witmus**
If you don't accept his projections, why have you made such a fuss over him? I assume to try and point out how utterly divided all climate models are? Pfffft. You're screaming blue murder over some smallish wiggles in the overall trend. Once again, look at the overall trend for this century, and tell me what he says by 2100. As for the next decade, talk about building mountains out of molehills if that's all you've got to throw at climate science.

But it proves nothing against climate science. If anything, it shows how rigorous it is and how it actually adapts to the latest data, while Denialists are stuck in the same old models from their same old dogma. Nothing evolves in their understanding, because they're not doing science but domga.

I for one hope Latif is right, and if global temperatures follow his graphs as ACCURATELY AS THEY ALREADY HAVE FOLLOWED PREVIOUS CLIMATOLOGIST MODELS LIKE HANSEN'S, then will you admit you were wrong around 2015 to 2020?

**GrahamY**
"he's sufficiently rigorous and honest to accept that we have cooled,"
Sorry, but I didn't get that from the talk. We HAVE cooled already, past tense? No. Please show me where he said that.

He is modelling ocean temperatures for the next decade or so, as in the *future*. This is the distinction I've been trying to make with Witmus.

I'm just pointing out in a thread this "hot" that it might be a good idea to steer right away from 'selective quoting' of any kind. We all have to phrase things *very* carefully, especially the Denialists, because of their reputation for repeatedly misquoting peer-reviewed authors.

“surfing after dark”
Ha! Never done it in my life. Those Bondi beaches are ALWAYS empty during the day hey? Just like your argument above.

These temperatures ARE odd, you have to go back over 20 million years to get today’s temperatures, and you haven’t established that it was AS warm as today in the MWP or that today’s temperature *trends* are normal. Today is one thing, Latif’s model for 2050? Another!
Posted by Eclipse Now, Thursday, 22 October 2009 8:38:02 AM
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Eclipse, please read the material you rely on. In the link that Q&A provided there were average anomaly figures from Latif which were lower for this decade and the next than the 90s. He's also correctly quoted as saying that it has cooled. An incorrect inference from what he says is that he believes warming has stopped. He doesn't, he believes it will commence again somewhere next decade or after, but admits that his models aren't very good at short range predictions.

We will never know exactly how warm the MWP was. We have enough trouble working out what the global temperature is now with all these sensors all over the place. But a reasonable position, based on the peer reviewed papers, as well as historical evidence, is that it was comparable to today. Furthermore it is generally acknowledged that we are at the cool end of the Holocene. That is that in the last 10,000 years temperature was frequently higher. You can see that on the graph showing temperature and CO2 for the last 450,000 years. This means you don't have to go back 20 million years to get to today's temperatures.

You've got a hide criticising other people for "misquoting".

And I see you've decided to accept defeat, or at least fold your tent, on the issue of heat transference between the atmosphere and the ocean.
Posted by GrahamY, Thursday, 22 October 2009 9:57:35 AM
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Eclipse (apt name),
In the absence of the supportive evidence requested, I accept your acknowledgment of misrepresentation, to which you have now added.

EN: "If you don't accept his projections, why have you made such a fuss over him?"

Did I say I don't accept his projections? Did you just make this up?

EN: "I for one hope Latif is right, and if global temperatures follow his graphs as ACCURATELY AS THEY ALREADY HAVE FOLLOWED PREVIOUS CLIMATOLOGIST MODELS LIKE HANSEN'S, then will you admit you were wrong around 2015 to 2020?"

Wrong about what? You really need to start actually being clear, Eclipse. Century trends? 15 - 20 years? Six to 11 years time? Next two years? Make up your mind.

And why should I submit to some test in your black/white, right/wrong, good/evil world, when if temps drop to 2015 you will just say "see, Latif was right" or if they go up, "see, someone else was".

Hey, one of today's astrologers was absolutely right - "you will waste your time talking into a vacuum.
Posted by whitmus, Thursday, 22 October 2009 1:58:02 PM
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**Whitmus**
You're the one that raised Latif, not me. Now you're acting confused as to why you did? EG: "Did I quote Latif to disprove global warming (or at least prove how inconsistent their models are) or didn't I?"

**GrahamY**
I have already quoted papers on ocean warming. If you don't want to read them, that's your business.

You're hiding behind generalisations.

EG: In SOME places the ocean is warmer than the atmosphere, but in many places the atmosphere is warmer than the oceans.

[quote]Temperature changes vary over the globe. Since 1979, land temperatures have increased about twice as fast as ocean temperatures (0.25 °C per decade against 0.13 °C per decade).[15] Ocean temperatures increase more slowly than land temperatures because of the larger effective heat capacity of the oceans and because the ocean loses more heat by evaporation.[16][/quote]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

"The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for June, breaking the previous high mark set in 2005, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Additionally, the combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for June was second-warmest on record. The global records began in 1880."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090725120303.htm

"Taking the average of the five model runs, the team found that over the last decade, heat content in the top 750 meters of the ocean increased by 6.0 plus or minus 0.6 watt-years per square meter. (A watt year is the amount of energy delivered by one watt of power over one year.) What kind of energy imbalance would it take to generate that much heat? The models predicted that as of 2003, the Earth would have to be absorbing about 0.85 watts per square meter more energy than it was radiating back into space—an amount that closely matched the measurements of ocean warming that Willis had compiled in his previous work. The Earth, they conclude, has an energy imbalance.
“I describe this imbalance as the smoking gun or the innate greenhouse effect,” Hansen says. “It’s the most fundamental result that you expect from the added greenhouse gases."
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/HeatBucket/heatbucket3.php
Posted by Eclipse Now, Friday, 23 October 2009 10:41:41 AM
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Oh dear! Hard to know what to make of Eclipse, so I'll just post this for the record, and info of others.

EN: "You're the one that raised Latif, not me."

This is incorrect. EN referred to Latif on this thread on Monday, 12 October 2009 at 7:39:48 PM, and subsequently at the following times:

Wednesday, 14 October 2009 7:23:47 PM
Sunday, 18 October 2009 6:53:26 PM
Monday, 19 October 2009 9:01:59 AM

All this before I responded on Monday, 19 October 2009 at 1:13:57 PM

EN: "Now you're acting confused as to why you did?"

No, in my subsequent post I stated that I believed Latif presented a problem for EN. Each of his responses has only confirmed this.

EN: "EG. 'Did I quote Latif to disprove global warming (or at least prove how inconsistent their models are) or didn't I?'"

I can't respond to this as it is unclear to me who EN is quoting. These things (" ") are quotation marks. They are used to indicate a quotation.

All this from a bloke who wrote, and I quote, "I admit to being cranky with dishonest bloggers that quote *real* climatologists out of context and try to force their words into something else. What part of that behaviour is OK with you?"
Posted by whitmus, Friday, 23 October 2009 2:51:33 PM
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Whitmus, you're right, you did not raise it first but JF Aus first mentioned it by just posting this BBB article without any comment.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

You then had 2 banal posts totally ignored. I explained to JF Aus the difference between the Denialist 1998-2008 myth and Latif's *future* models, you ranted so bad half your post was DELETED!

After your outburst, I calmly admitted to being cranky with dishonest bloggers that quote out of context.

Then YOU posted

"Latif is a still a problem... and shows what a proverbial dog's breakfast climate science has become."
Monday 19th October

You can't seem to distinguish between 1998-2008 and the FUTURE.

(Graham, please quote Latif if you think he stated 1998-2008).

Did 1998 to 2008 "cool" Can you at least answer that GrahamY and Witmus?

But Whitmus has to decide if the Latif model really invalidates climate science as a "dogs breakfast" or represents EXACTLY the kind of peer reviewed scientific advance that we see in genuine science which takes into account new data.

Denialist Dogma doesn't really propose testable, workable counter-theories. It just sneers from the sidelines.

Gee, wouldn't it be ironic if the real climatologists modelled a decade's cooling and a leading SCEPTIC once again proved to be inaccurate and modelled warming because he was so frightened of being stuck with the 1998 myth? But wouldn't it also be *tragic* if Latif turned out to be right about 2100. The good news for Witmus is he won't be around to see it. The bad news for my kids is someone let Witmus have the vote.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Friday, 23 October 2009 4:24:54 PM
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EN: "Whitmus, you're right..."

Yes, I was. I think that was an admission. Eclipse could have just stopped there, but instead of the customary apology, continued for some reason known only to him with some waffle or other that didn't alter the fact.

It did get interesting though, when he wrote:

"Then YOU posted

'Latif is a still a problem... and shows what a proverbial dog's breakfast climate science has become.'
Monday 19th October"

It seems EN is determined to prove just how dishonest and hypocritical he is, omitting the words "for you" (that is, for EN), completely altering the meaning.

Why did he do that I wonder? He gets cranky at that sort of behaviour.

Anyway, thankfully, Eclipse doesn't seem to have much confidence in Latif's short term projections, and said himself that Latif had less confidence in his models in the longer term to 2100, so I think I'll take my chances, rather than listen to EN's dishonesty.
Posted by whitmus, Friday, 23 October 2009 6:29:09 PM
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Witmus,
I did not mean to change the meaning of your entry. I’ll try again.

"In context, Latif is a still a problem, at least for you "ol' pal", and shows what a proverbial dog's breakfast climate science has become. You have belittled anyone who has been curious about the, at most, plateauing of temps in last decade and argued against it with much sarcasm! Now that Latif is backing a decline, instead of acknowledging that it validates those who've read the graphs in this way, and you admitting you were wrong, we discover that we should not be looking at actual temperature (T1) at all, but some imaginary temp (T2) that is being masked."

1. I do not belittle curiosity, but scold Denialist myths, one of which is the "cooling since 1998" myth.
"Each of the last 12 years (1997-2008) was one of the warmest on record, although the last two years have grown cooler, not warmer (see chart below). These years could be the warmest years for the last several thousand years according to the temperature record, not just since 1880, but the most recent data is the most accurate.[3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_since_1880

2. Will you or GrahamY please show me where Latif states 2008 is the start of the cooling trend HE is discussing? I just don't have time to look.

3. If REAL cooling occurs according to Latif's model I would be grateful for any breaks that the natural system and peer-reviewed science gives us. But what about 2100 in this model?

4. There Latif is hardly "a problem for me ol' pal" but is instead just another model urging extreme action because the oceans have such long lead times. If they take longer to heat, they also take longer to cool. = trouble.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 24 October 2009 1:42:41 PM
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Eclipse, none of those links that you provide has any bearing on the issue. The oceans heat the atmosphere, and not vice-versa. That oceans have got hotter says nothing about the relationship, and that is the most that any of these links says.

You don't seem to have even a basic grasp of climate science. And no idea about physics. You can't disguise that by more or less randomly reproducing quotes from websites that just happen to mention the terms in dispute. Here is a diagram with an energy budget http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/images/Erb/components2.gif. You will see that most of the energy is absorbed by the sea and the earth. Most of the increase in atmospheric temperature comes from the reradiation of that energy back into space. A small proportion comes directly from the sun.

If the atmosphere was hotter than the surface you would get no transfer of heat outwards, it would go inwards!

Should you have problems understanding this I have a perpetual motion machine you might like to buy.

The problem with this debate is that so many flat earthers like you have climbed on board and run around the Internet abusing people who are trying to make sense of it calling them "denialists" because the climate change narrative fits their prejudices.
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 24 October 2009 2:58:19 PM
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Eclipse, a number of points.

1. Radiative forcing due to human activity is currently about 1.6 Watts/m2 of Earth’s surface. You know the significance, others either don’t want to know or latch on to a ‘new’ paper that would dispute it (as we have seen) even though the ‘new’ paper has not had the chance to withstand the rigors of the scientific review process. Some of these 'new' papers are only published in the 'blogosphere'.

2. The best ballpark figure of climate sensitivity (and there is robust research being done, despite claims and counter-claims by all and sundry that “the science is settled” or “AGW is a hoax”) is 0.8 degrees C warming for each W/m2 forcing. This would lead to an expected current 1.3 degrees C warming since the 19th century. However, “we” have not attained this level of warming because climate sensitivity refers to the warming after equilibrium with the oceans and the terrestrial biosphere has been established (another point implicit in your ‘defence’, more commonly known as ‘warming still in the pipeline’).

3. Based on models and observed ocean heat uptake data, we are only seeing 50-70% of the warming (at the current rate of GHG emissions) because of the inertia of the oceans. Put simply, if we plug the numbers into the equations, we get 0.7 to 0.9 degrees C anthropogenic (isotope studies) warming since the 19th century. Guess what, observed global warming since the 19th century falls within that range.

4. Mark Lawson rabbets on about the ‘climate models’ knowing full well that there are many climate models (not all using the same parameters) to derive some ‘temperature’ somewhere. Guess what, they all show similar trends to the observed and recorded data. This is covered well in the AR4. I think it very disingenuous that the author infer that ‘climate scientists’ don’t have a clue of what they’re doing or contradict each other’s findings when he himself can’t understand or report correctly (even if tangentially) what the scientists are saying.

Cont’d
Posted by Q&A, Saturday, 24 October 2009 5:28:44 PM
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Cont’d

5. Having said that, it is important (for all sorts of reasons) why we would like to ‘predict’ weather patterns a few years out, particularly if we can do it region by region. Unfortunately, at these time scales, noise masks the signal. It is not surprising that the ‘deny-n-delay brigade’ will use these bumps and wiggles to foist their ‘science’ on an already confused and afraid society.

________

<<none of those links that you provide has any bearing on the issue>> pot, meet kettle.

The “issue” got lost way back. It seems the ‘current’ issue is rubbing EN in doggy-doo.

In my opinion, GrahamY and Eclipse are 2 sides of the same coin – neither have the expertise in any of the ‘climate sciences’ but both purport to know enough about the “issue” to slam-dunk each other.

Graham, you again accuse others of the very things you engage in yourself – to others, this could appear a tad hypocritical, particularly on matters of your hobby horse.

<<The oceans heat the atmosphere, and not vice-versa>>

Graham, you still don’t have a grasp of coupled land/ocean/atmosphere systems. Please stop pretending that you do. I might be able to have a meaningful discussion with you when you have demonstrated an understanding that it works both ways (remember the Hadley and Walker Circulation cells?)

Should you have problems understanding this (land/ocean/atmosphere coupled system) I have a perpetual motion machine ... yada yada yada.

<<The problem with this debate is that so many flat earthers like you have climbed on board and run around the Internet abusing people who are trying to make sense of it calling them "denialists" because the climate change narrative fits their prejudices.>> Bravo Graham, another example of the aforesaid.

I know you are not a “denialist” Graham and I understand you are trying to make sense out of very complex science ... but, just because you don’t understand it as well as you think you do doesn’t make it less robust
Posted by Q&A, Saturday, 24 October 2009 5:34:47 PM
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Eclipse,

Well done on showing you do have some understanding of the concepts of "before' and "after".

Sigh, as I understand it, Latif was talking about th epossibility of short term variability (up to even two decades) within longer term trends, while conceding his models have little predictive strength beyond the short term (2015). (There's a lot that could be investigated in that alone).

This is a problem for you as it quite allows for any recent plateauing that you simultaneously blindly deny while expressing no interest in little wiggles (?), you state that a short term wiggle in 2010 and 2011 will makes "denialists" look like idiots (?), and ask me whether I will I admit I'm wrong (about what?) "around" 2015-2020. Dog's breakfast anyone?

And if Latif is an example of a rigorous climate scientist incorporating the latest data, great. Without this data, weren't those curious about plateauing thus quite justified in the absence of it? Why the denial, unless it's not about science but agenda driven dogma?
Posted by whitmus, Saturday, 24 October 2009 6:06:00 PM
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Q&A,

"It seems the ‘current’ issue is rubbing EN in doggy-doo."

Do you think it could perhaps be a coupled system? Or maybe we're just rubbing his nose in his own doggy-doo.
Posted by whitmus, Saturday, 24 October 2009 6:36:48 PM
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Witmus,
I'm done wasting time on you.
Latif nailed your kind.

Hi Q&A,
I appreciate your posts and gladly agree that I'm no expert. The only reason I post is when I see something that is so patently absurd that I've seen debunked by the real experts, or that is just so obviously not true from life experience.

For instance, if I'm to understand Graham's fixation with the oceans, he's trying to argue that the 2nd law of thermodynamics means the oceans CAN'T EVER be warmed by the atmosphere. This is an example of where I just have to call "rubbish".

"The average maximum (daytime) temperature at Observatory Hill was 26.4°C, or 0.4°C above the historic average1of 26.0°C, making it the 7th consecutive January with above average maximum temperatures. "

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/nsw/archive/200701.sydney.shtml

and then...

"Unusually cool water temperatures were experienced off Sydney's beaches during January.  Water temperatures recorded by Manly Hydraulics Laboratory's waverider buoy (MHL, data funded by Department of Natural Resources), located 12km NE of Sydney Heads, have been well below normal for this time of year, hovering around 17 - 21°C for most of the month, compared to the usual 22°C for January.  The water temperature fell to 17.3°C on 8 January, the lowest recorded in January since MHL records commenced in 1992."

Ooops. Gosh, so the whole month of January the ATMOSPHERE was warmer than the OCEANS by about 5 to 9 degrees? What was that 2nd law of thermodynamics again, and why does it prevent the atmosphere ever warming the oceans? ;-)

Graham, just turn off your Denialist computer and go for a walk along the beach tonight. It will cool down your overheated head, and you might even meet a 350 protester to help you out with a few facts.

No doubt sea, land and air interactions are incredibly complicated with a variety of temperature differentials in different locations to model. I just wanted to point out Graham's basic contention seems completely implausible to anyone who has ever body-surfed.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 24 October 2009 7:53:34 PM
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Eclipse, you just can't help yourself. I didn't ever say that the sea was at all times and all places warmer than the atmosphere. I said that on average it is. So the ocean warms the atmosphere, not vice versa, but there are local variations. You're making a straw case, and then you're making it worse by cherry-picking.

So you grab the average maximum temperature rather than the average temperature, and compare it to an abnormally low water temperature, and then you extrapolate to the whole globe. Take the average temperature of both over the entire period and see how far apart they are.

I assume you've heard of the Gulf Stream and how it keeps the UK much warmer than it would otherwise be. That's a much better example of how oceans and atmosphere work.

I wouldn't go relying on Q&A as he has no expertise in this area. He just pretends to have. You can tell that he doesn't because he never tackles the issue being argued.

On which point I notice no-one has tackled the graphical NASA energy budget. I presume that is because you'd rather try and confuse the issue with irrelevant examples rather than deal with the issues logically. The graph clearly shows that most of the energy hits the earth (74% of what isn't reflected)and then goes back into space via a variety of means mostly via the atmosphere. For these transference mechanisms to work you need the ocean to be hotter than its atmosphere.

The idea that there is heat from CO2 hiding in the oceans and it will come out and restart global warming is ascientific nonsense.
Posted by GrahamY, Saturday, 24 October 2009 9:03:31 PM
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GrahamY,
"applied it to the whole globe"
No, that's EXACTLY what I'm criticising YOU for doing! YOU want to just assert (without linking to any source documents) that the average ocean temperature is ALWAYS higher than the troposphere.

I provided one clear link as to where it was not, so you spit the dummy and start more personal attacks.

MY MAIN POINT is that I'm at least admitting there are points where the air is warmer than the water, while you won’t. YOU want to over-simplify and generalise this, not me.

I only tried to demonstrate that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is NOT *always* a barrier to extra RFE heat moving into the oceans.

Sure seasonal variations would change the equation. Sometimes Sydney’s air is hotter than the water, and in winter it seems the water is warmer than the air. There’s latitudinal variations, with the Gulf Stream warming Europe in winter. This stuff looks incredibly complex, and I'm not going to even pretend that I sit up at night reading papers that model it.

But I will say that from my brief googling around of climate studies measuring the RFE energy imbalance also warming the ocean warming presents a theory consistent with the real world data, of those oceans warming. (Even if they do not reveal *when and where* the extra heat in the air moves into the oceans in a manner us laymen can understand).

As for global averages? If you really want to play that game then how about this?

Troposphere...
"troposphere, average atmospheric temperature .... value at the surface, about 290K (63°F; 17°C)"
http://tinyurl.com/39ewr7

Ocean
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center reported Thursday that the average global ocean temperature reached 62.6 degrees in July – replacing the previous high temperature record set in 1998.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1740691/july_global_ocean_temperatures_reach_record_high/index.html
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/21/average-ocean-temperatures-highest-ever/

Ooops, the HOTTEST ocean record ever is 0.4 degrees cooler than the troposphere.

And while we are on it, how about you coming up with a nice neat counter-theory as to why the oceans are warming so consistently with the RFE? That would be great.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Sunday, 25 October 2009 2:14:03 PM
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Eclipse, you can't repeal the laws of nature by citing studies that you either incorrectly characterise, or which are probably wrong themselves. No number of peer-reviewed studies can make the sun rise in the west, or have gravity vary at anything other than the rate of r squared. If you get a study that purports to do one of those things, discard it.

As you have trouble dealing with physical laws this link http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/o_atm.html might make life easier for you. They are some notes from a lecture on the subject of "Ocean-Atmosphere" coupling. In particular note the sentence: "On average the ocean is about 1 or 2 degrees warmer than the atmosphere so on average ocean heat is transferred from ocean to atmosphere by conduction." As someone who you might think of as a "real" scientist has said it perhaps you will accept it as true.

There is no way that heat can be transferred from something colder to something warmer. As heat is transferred from the ocean to the atmosphere, the atmosphere must on average be colder. If someone tells you otherwise they don't know what they are talking about.
Posted by GrahamY, Monday, 26 October 2009 3:26:31 PM
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Graham, access to OLO’s server was indeed problematic. The downtime gave me time to reflect on points you have challenged me on. At the outset; I am not an oceanographer, atmospheric physicist, biogeochemist, climatologist, paleoclimatologist etc ... I defer to those experts on various issues as they impact on my field of expertise (hydrological cycle). My research interest is in land/ocean/atmosphere coupled systems.

I am glad you looked it up. The topic you linked to for Eclispe is quite good (albeit somewhat dated).

________

Re: Wed, 30th Sept.

1. Graham, there will be more extreme ‘weather events’ with global warming. Yes, a decreased temperature differential would lead to slower air movement (all else being equal), but the inference you make is wrong.

2. The number of high temperature records has been increasingly outstripping the number of low temperature records, by a margin of between 2 and 3 to 1 over the last 10 years.

For maximum temperatures, the change in the frequency of records almost exactly matches what would be expected given the background warming trend. You can test this by seeing what would happen to the 'records' if you stripped out a trend of 0.15 C/decade. You will find that in the de-trended data there would be no trend in the records.

Interestingly, for minimum temperatures the rate of change of record-breaking is less than the mean temperature trend would suggest - it's consistent with a trend of about 0.08 C/decade rather than the 0.15 that we actually see.

_______

Re: Sat 3rd October

1. GHG emissions will not cause catastrophic climate change, yet. What we are concerned about is “squealing”;

http://www.sciencecodex.com/dead_ahead_similar_early_warning_signals_of_change_in_climate

It would be prudent to tread very carefully, don’t you think?

2. <<This tautology can be summarised as "I'm not arguing from authority because my authority is good authority, and my authority for saying that is the authority of my authority.>>

That is your opinion, Graham. I agree with the statement of the chief economist of World Vision, you obviously don’t.

Cont’d
Posted by Q&A, Thursday, 29 October 2009 5:38:02 PM
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Cont’d

3. I am reminded that you prefer the ‘non-partisan’ Jenifer’s, Joanna’s and Anthony Watts’ blog sites, I am not surprised.

4. It’s not about the science anymore Graham, it’s about politics, economics and sociology – most people have moved on to ‘debate’ adaptation and mitigation.

5. What makes you think I dispute the MWP?

_______

Re: Sat 17th October

Graham, you said “the ocean drives atmospheric temperature, not the other way around” – I cringed.

You followed this on 18th October with “It doesn't get it from the atmosphere. It gets it from the sun. It heats the atmosphere, not vice-versa.” – I cringed even more.

You repeated it again on the 24th (with more slurs and implicit flames yourself) so I rejoined the fray with my comment:

<< I might be able to have a meaningful discussion with you when you have demonstrated an understanding that it works both ways (remember the Hadley and Walker Circulation cells?)>>

Have another read of that syllabus Graham.

Btw (and this has nothing to do with the ‘issue’), a couple of years ago scientists on the Mir space station were able to demonstrate that heat can go from cold to hot ... amazing.

_______

Eclipse

<< if I'm to understand Graham's fixation with the oceans, he's trying to argue that the 2nd law of thermodynamics means the oceans CAN'T EVER be warmed by the atmosphere. This is an example of where I just have to call "rubbish". >>

You have to remember we are dealing with a complex non-linear (Earth) system. Of course the atmosphere can heat the oceans AND vice-versa. I suggest you read the full syllabus Graham linked to, go through the topics, and then make your case. Here it is again (and it does talk about climate change).

http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/syllabus.html
Posted by Q&A, Thursday, 29 October 2009 5:47:24 PM
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Thanks GrahamY and Q&A, I enjoyed the summary article although it was more geared to explaining the *normal* processes of heat dispersal through the atmospheric and ocean cycle, and how and where that heat bounces off the earth.

The article did not account for climate change.

It DID mention 'averages' that spelt out the average normal transactions in a steady state earth, but as we know from empirical data, the ocean is warming.

Why is that Graham?

It catalogued the main way the ocean receives heat (the sun's rays) and the 3 main ways it disperses that heat. So far so good.

But when discussing "Net back radiation" it made some very interesting points about greenhouse gases, and so I can only infer that artificially increasing those gases only increases the following mechanism of warming.

"Much of the radiation from the atmospheric gases, also in the infrared range, is transmitted back to the ocean, reducing the net long wave radiation heat loss of the ocean. The warmer the ocean the warmer and more humid is the air, increasing its greenhouse abilities. Thus it is very difficult for the ocean to transmit heat by long wave radiation into the atmosphere; the greenhouse gases just kick it back, notably water vapor whose concentration is proportional to the air temperature. Net back radiation cools the ocean, on a global average by 66 watts per square meter."

The oceans are not so much being heated by greenhouse gases, but inhibited in their cooling. Is that how you read it Q&A?

Lastly, if you actually read the article you quote, although difficult good old *Conduction* of air heat to oceans is still possible where seasons and locations allow. Remember Sydney's MAXIMUM air being 5 to 9 degrees hotter than the oceans MAXIMUM temperature in January? (Interesting how 5-9 degrees warmer doesn't matter when it's maximums ;-) Heat transfer is difficult, but possible.

So why ARE the oceans warming Graham? ;-)
Posted by Eclipse Now, Thursday, 29 October 2009 9:55:10 PM
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Yes, why are the oceans warming, and what is causing that increased warmth?

Eclipse Now, I have looked at the video about oil you referred to in an earlier post, excellent sound effects/music and very interesting.

My response? I see science generalizing by considering algae is plankton. When I went to school there was animal, mineral and vegetable. In the ocean making films I see algae is vegetable matter and that plankton is animal life.

I have observed a very significant increase in algae/vegetable matter but have not observed any increase of plankton/animal life.

I think lack of clarity (and reality) about the difference between algae and plankton and impact of each is a likely reason IPCC science is missing impact of algae.

In my opinion algae has gone unseen as matter absorbing solar heat and transferring that heat from one part of the ocean to another.
Posted by JF Aus, Friday, 30 October 2009 7:41:50 AM
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How many tons of extra algae are there compared to normal algae? What does the algae actually DO with the incoming solar energy? Where is it interrupting the normal heat exchanges in the ocean and how is it leading to warming?

According to "Crude", the algae is absorbing Co2, dying, and eventually taking it to the bottom of the ocean, and is therefore lowering the greenhouse problem, not increasing it. You're entitled to your opinion, but until the questions above are answered and measured against the peer review process, I'm not buying it.

meanwhile, Scientific American has an article about yet another study confirming the hockey stick.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=still-hotter-than-ever&sc=CAT_ENGYSUS_20091029
Posted by Eclipse Now, Friday, 30 October 2009 11:30:09 AM
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Eclipse

<< The oceans are not so much being heated by greenhouse gases, but inhibited in their cooling. Is that how you read it Q&A? >>

No.

Click all the links for ‘climate science’ 101 (not all students pass)
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/syllabus.html

Graham must be busy (and I see Mark/Curmud/Curmudathome is also lurking) so I will bounce this off you:
Graham said to you:

<< As a result of Steve McIntyre's most recent work you have to discard those datasets for the time being. It appears that the data on which they are based is not representative. Joanne Nova has the best explanation ...”

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-historic-proportions/

Posted elsewhere but pertinent in response (Graham);

"Science is made up of people challenging assumptions and other peoples’ results with the overall desire of getting closer to the ‘truth’.

There is nothing wrong with people putting together new chronologies of tree rings or testing the robustness of previous results to updated data or new methodologies.

What is objectionable is the conflation of technical criticism with unsupported, unjustified and unverified accusations of scientific misconduct.

Steve McIntyre keeps insisting that he should be treated like a professional. But how professional is it to continue to slander scientists with vague insinuations (Graham) and spin made-up tales of perfidy out of the whole cloth instead of submitting his work for peer-review?

He continues to take absolutely no responsibility for the ridiculous fantasies and exaggerations that his supporters broadcast (Graham) in the blogosphere and mainstream media, apparently being happy to bask in their acclaim rather than correct any of the misrepresentations he has engendered (Graham).

Peer-review is nothing sinister and not part of some global conspiracy, but instead it is the process by which people are forced to match their rhetoric to their actual results.”

McIntyre and his followers don’t do this.

This is what Keith Briffa has to say about the denialosphere’s distortion, misrepresentation and “flame” (Graham).

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
Posted by Q&A, Friday, 30 October 2009 6:55:36 PM
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Yoooohoooo? Graham? Why ARE the oceans warming (if the 2nd law of thermodynamics forbids it?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3dYhC_AlYw&feature=sdig&et=1256918165.19
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 31 October 2009 6:33:44 AM
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Away for a week or so.

Eclipse, the ocean is a huge heat sink, they are generally warming but not as much as you might think. Josh Willis has a very good take on it but as per usual, the 'doubters' distort and misrepresent his findings ... so much so they claim him as one of their own. Hilarious, really.

I'll be interested in what Graham has to say about Keith Briffa's response to the ludicrous claims in the 'denialosphere', including that by Nova, Marohasy, Watts et al. Heck, even Graham Young appears to be supporting them in batting for McIntyre's life's quest.
Posted by Q&A, Saturday, 31 October 2009 7:28:01 AM
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Thanks for the link Q&A. I for one remain unmoved by Briffa's defence at least insofar as the data diddling has me any more convinced of the certainty with which such research has achieved its predetermined agenda of eliminating the troublesome MWP. It seems to be very much still in the speculative enquiry stage with plenty of healthy skepticism and scrutiny. Oh, and there's no distortion and misrepresentation in the alarmosphere, eh?

Eclipse, you're a nice bloke, delighting in my imminent demise some time this century. I'd say it's probably a certainty but who knows - life expectancy is increasing rapidly. And courageous too, dissing Graham from behind a mask of anonymity. I see you've acknowledged your issues, but as yet not addressed them, but I understand it would be a long process. When they're not laughable, your posts are rationally and heuristically vacuous.
Posted by whitmus, Saturday, 31 October 2009 2:38:44 PM
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(yawns)
Posted by Eclipse Now, Saturday, 31 October 2009 3:08:44 PM
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I enjoyed this contrary view on climate modelling and also your earlier article on forecasting, which encouraged me to read through the IPCC physics panel's report. I hope you keep writing on this topic.
Posted by Cliff B, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 11:26:20 AM
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Eclipse, are you still sleeping?
Posted by JF Aus, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 11:30:05 AM
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No, I was just bored by Witmus not having any substance in his posts, which lately are largely just unfounded character attacks and anti-science rants.

I'm also not going to be worrying about the algae. ;-)

It's just not a major planetary threat. According to the movie Crude massive algae blooms is a RESULT of warming, not a cause, and indeed helps cool the planet.

Also, human grown algae on land might become a small market-niche fuel supply. (I happen to think that most transport will have to become electric over the next few decades, but there will be 8some* small niche for liquid fuels.)

Algae is a global warming *solution*, not a problem.

(Note: I maintain concern for the health of ocean ecosystems, but that is an entirely different topic).
Posted by Eclipse Now, Wednesday, 4 November 2009 11:57:48 AM
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whitmus

<<I for one remain unmoved by Briffa's defence at least insofar as the data diddling has me any more convinced of the certainty with which such research has achieved its predetermined agenda of eliminating the troublesome MWP.>>

Difficult sentence to digest, but what “data diddling” are you accusing Keith Briffa of doing?

<<predetermined agenda of eliminating the troublesome MWP”>> I’m interested. While I have seen statements like this on various blog sites, I have yet to see one in any scientific forum. Could you perhaps provide a link to only one (or cite a journal paper) that includes such a defamatory statement?

<<Oh, and there's no distortion and misrepresentation in the alarmosphere, eh?>>

I realise you are new to OLO, whitmus - and were replying to my post. However, before you go insinuating that I think there is no distortion or misrepresentation in the “alarmosphere”, maybe you should link to a post where I have said it doesn’t go on. Let me make it easier for you (I have a long history) ... it does!

It annoys me that ‘arm-chair’ experts continually spruik their own pseudo-science without understanding what the real experts are saying, Mark Lawson and Graham Young two cases in point. When they are confronted with science that disputes or rebuts their guff, they bail out or change the ‘issue’.

This tactic of distortion, misrepresentation and obfuscation is very effective. It ‘presents’ a state of confusion for the lay observer when in fact there is little in the scientific community. This is unfortunate because in the eyes of joe average, the science is being overshadowed by political, economic, socio-cultural and religious dogma.

Oh, I commented on temperature records a few posts back:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9484#154208

my time series trend analysis was based on the data for Australia. It is not too dissimilar for temperature records in other regions.
Posted by Q&A, Thursday, 5 November 2009 3:10:53 PM
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