What does it take to make an institution change its mind?

It seemed like an elegant solution to a severe medical condition. When a sudden arterial blockage occurs the heart starts beating wildly – and futilely. To conserve limited blood oxygen doctors administer beta blocks to slow the heart.

In theory it should have helped patients suffering a heart attack. It turns out that in practice administering beta blockers in this situation does more harm than good.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-health-care/?em

There was probably no way of knowing in advance that treating victims of arterial blockage with beta blockers was going to turn out to do more harm than good. At very least people might have expected it would do no harm even if it did no good. But sometimes the world does not conform to our "models."

The question is, should it have taken so long to discover that the administration of beta blockers was likely to be harmful?

And if you think the beta blocker debate is an isolated case, consider this story, also from the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/health/06brod.htm

Should you have that quadruple bypass surgery?

Spindoc, my ears were burning.

I have modified my views on a number of topics I am not expert in. Mostly I look and learn but sometimes comment on stuff I am familiar with.

The following lists some of the data sets you may be interested in, enjoy! If you use any raw data, it would be good to let me know how you conduct any time series analysis e.g. how you correct/calibrate for earth's bumps and wobbles.

Surface temperatures:

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

National Climate Data Centre
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.php

Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#datdow

European Climate Assessment & Dataset Network
http://eca.knmi.nl/

Good for data prior to 1880
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ndp041/ndp041.html.

Satellite-based atmospheric temperature estimates:

Remote Sensing Systems
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html

University of Alabama at Huntsville
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/

University of Washington/RSS
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/fu-mt-rss-monthly-anom.txt

University of Maryland
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~kostya/CCSP/

Sea Ice:
Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadisst/data/download.html

National Snow and Ice Data Centre
http://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/

Sea ice extent from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

Sea Level:

Sea level site of the University of Colorado
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/results.php

Also try the various satellite sites at NASA

Snow Cover:

Global snow lab
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/index.php

Total Solar Irradiance (TSI):

Satellite data
ftp://ftp.pmodwrc.ch/pub/data/irradiance/composite/DataPlots/

http://www.acrim.com/Data Products.htm

http://remotesensing.oma.be/solarconstant/sarr/SARR.txt

paleoclimatology reconstruction

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt

Greenhouse Gases:

Mauna Loa
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html

World data centre for greenhouse gases

http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/

Daily/hourly CO2 levels
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/


Data Archiving Pages:

Earth System Research Laboratory/Climate Data Centre
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/data/gridded/

Data centre for other paleo stuff
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/data.html

Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/

NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Centre
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/MD_index.shtml


Do a search at BOM
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/

Good for look see:

Netherlands Meteorology Institute
http://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi?someone@somewhere

NOAA
http://dapper.pmel.noaa.gov/dchart/

Argo itself
http://www.usgodae.org/argo/argo.html

Computer Model Results:

You don’t want IPCC, here it is anyway
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php

Let me know if you have trouble with any of the links
qanda

The ETS and the Carbon Reduction Scheme will fail and is further evidence that successive governments remain captured by industry.

Mass fish and bird kills continue around the planet, above natural rates. According to eminent palaeontologist, Leakey, 30,000 species of animals, plants and insects are becoming extinct each year.

With regard to rivers and oceans, can someone show me one which has not been seriously contaminated by the hand of man?

The Swan and Canning Rivers in WA are all but finished. The Murray River remediation is costing millions to remove pollution. The Sydney Harbour remains contaminated by dioxins – the remediation process a joke.

The Arctic Inuits are the most contaminated on the planet - a result of their marine diet. Ocean dead zones have drastically increased and indigenous people around the world have had their rivers, lands and crops trashed by mining companies from developed countries.

Salinity and desertification in Australia and beyond are encroaching on once fertile lands. The deserts, I think, will win!

Yet the chatter continues on about global warming. “Rational, logical argument?” Am I missing something here or is the GW debate merely a distraction and delay strategy?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/05/2535188.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2006/04/10/1612273.htm

http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=77&ContentID=125819

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,25263513-948,00.html

http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=2145

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/17/2448553.htm

Q&A provided an impressive list of great sites to visit, thanks. Well worth working through if anyone has the time. Thank you all.

So, did I get the Eureka Moment? Absolutely! Many of the sites I’d already researched, however, there was one in particular I’d visited before but missed what I was looking for. It was at the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/

Let me explain. I accept there are anomalies in Global Mean Surface Temperature (see BOM), one circa 1940 and from 1970 to 1997. I accept the increase in Atmospheric Carbon Concentrations 1800 to 2000. Scary stuff.

Atmospheric Carbon is increasing (see CDIAC), 280 ppm in 1550, 316 by 1959, 360 by 1993 and 371 by 2000, no argument here. However, there is no correlation whatsoever between the two sets of factual research data. AC increased 22.5% 1750 to 1984 and by 6.8% 1994 to 2008. Absolutely no correlation with warming?

So, what I needed to break the nexus was total Fossil Fuel Combustion data from 1500 to 2000, and there it was. Total FFC 1850 to 1990 is 270 x 10 pwr9 tc (cubic metric tons). But get this, 124 x 10 pwr9 tc or 42% of total FFC is from LUC (Land Use Changes) As at 1998 data, the per annum FFC is 6.4 x 10 pwr9 tc, however, 2.1 x 10 pwr9 is from LUC.

Question, if since 1850 we have grown FFC from .5 to 6.4 x 10 pwr9 tc p.a., an increase by a factor of 12.8, why has the atmospheric carbon only grown by a factor of less than .3?

The answer is that our biosphere has been dealing with the rest, big time. I’m off the fence, AGW exists.

Now I’m absolutely terrified our governments are meddling with symptoms, the .3 factor. Our main problem is quantifying the Global Carbon Mixing/Cycling which is 12.8 times more important. The ETS is not a solution; it is an unsustainable and ineffective diversion

Fellow OLO’ers, you have a convert, please be gentle with me.

:-)

Romany, I understand. At the time, my sister in Dorset UK phoned me and said it was snowing on the beach ... something she has never seen there in 50+ years! Also (at the same time) my son was in Germany at the time of the Economic Forum in Davos. He is a keen snow-boarder but unfortunately, he had to travel 150km out of his way to find snow! The locals thought it "perplexing".

Meanwhile back in Malaysia, my extended family (and 50,000 others) were evacuated from their town because they were experiencing the worst floods in the area on record!

Extreme weather events are chaotic, and are expected as more energy is put into the climate system. Climate on the other hand, is weather statistically 'smoothed' over longer time frames - typically 30 yrs. Statistically, the trend is still up.

We can't blame any one chaotic weather event on climate change. We can say with a high level of confidence that the frequency (and intensity) of these weather events will increase - and they are.

Global warming does not mean every successive year is warmer than the previous (some will be colder) - there are still natural variations at play. Anthropogenic global warming does mean that human activity superimposes itself (e.g. green house gases) on natural climatic variation.