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First Five Months of 2015 Hottest on Record

Ouroboros

Coincidentia oppositorum
You don't have to convince me to oppose bail-outs.
...
We don't have unlimited resources. We cannot do everything.
The issue is what we do with the money allocated.
Whatever money is given to Tesla & its customers, that same money could do more good elsewhere.
Example:
Allowing businesses to expense conversion from fluorescent to LED lighting would reduce fossil fuel usage more.
But gov says it can't afford to give us this.
I can pretty much agree with you on these things.

Solar panels are an entirely independent issue.
If they're worth doing, then they're worth doing for general applications (eg, toasters, TVs), & not just electric cars.
If Musk gets involved in these, it doesn't change the economics & environmental impact of Tesla's cars.
Actually, they are. SolarCity makes solar panels, also for homes, and the new battery they're developing is for houses. Basically, have a solar panel, charge your house battery over day, and use it by night.

I'm not against electric cars.....Hell, I like'm.
But we need other technologies too.
Absolutely.

And I agree with you on the subsidies. It's one thing if the gov't gives a "kick start" loan or package, another to keep on feeding a business that doesn't hold up on its own.

Electrics are great for short haul low demand driving.
Batteries (& all conceivable new technologies) are costly, & don't have the energy density to handle long distance or trucking applications.
Also, batteries are extreme pollutants. So it's not a great solution, I agree with you. The point is though that people and companies are trying. If we believe pollution isn't a problem, we won't have the drive (as humans) to even bother.

There are additional ways to cut pollution & fossil fuel use....
- Lighter weight materials, eg, Ford's new aluminum bodied trucks, HSLA steels.
- Engine technology: higher compression ratios, Atkinson cycle, diesel, semi-adiabatic designs, infinitely variable transmissions, electric traction drive, Stirling cycle hybrids, etc, etc.
- Better aerodynamics.
- More car pooling.
- Higher fuel taxes (This drives conservation.)
- Fuel cell powered electrics.
- More hybrids.
- Higher housing/business density to enable more public transportation. This also helps open land conservation.
- I'll come up with more if you need.
All good points. I have no issue or resistance to them. That's my whole point. Being aware of pollution and having concerns about it is a driving force behind both industry and people. If we reject issues of pollution, we won't have reasons to do anything. That's how the first half of the century was. Worry free industry. Suddenly it hits us. Now, if our climate is affected as well by our actions, then we have even more reasons to work on solutions. If we believe climate is A-Okay and we don't have to do anything, we have less reason and motivation to try to do anything.

The masses of humans tend to only act when the danger is staring us in the face. This time, if AGW is true (I say "if" here), then we have to start acting before that point.

I'm a skeptic of anthropogenic global warming as well. But I'm also a skeptic of the deniers. I believe the truth is in between. I believe that it's very possible that the warming is in a natural cycle, but we have made it worse. So we're not the cause, per se, but we're helping it along and speeding it up. Now, regardless of what the cause is, when the deniers try to take down the alarmists, they send a signal to people that everything is really okay. Don't trust the scientists. They're wrong. We're all fine and nothing's going to happen. People are lulled into security and won't make decisions that would be beneficial to us all. The alarmists on the other hand are screaming so loud about changing all policies and life styles and on and on, and probably they're making a bigger deal out of these things than what it really is. It seems like it's not going to hit us tomorrow. We have some time. But we have to do it. We have to work on it. We can't feel secure and not do anything, even if it's not imminent danger tomorrow morning.
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
I picked up a new car last fall, and I debated going electric but decided to go another route instead. I got a Ford Focus and am getting an average of 35 in the city, 39 on the expressway doing 70, and 42 on the highway doing 55. I finally was able to convince my wife that we do have stores up here in da U.P. so we don't have to bring everything up from downstate.
 

David M

Well-Known Member
Ok...for those who don't like the anomaly graphs,,,,or satellite data source....here is one of absolute temperature from 1881 to 2013....using ground based thermometer....scary yeah? ...lol

image69.png

So a graph that, if you look closely, shows a slow and steady increase in temperature. This helps your argument how?
 

Ben Dhyan

Veteran Member
So a graph that, if you look closely, shows a slow and steady increase in temperature. This helps your argument how?
David, you haven't been following the narrative....there is no argument wrt average global temperature increase...everyone agrees there has been about 0,7 C temperature increase over the last 130 years since records began....the graph as you note, indicates that increase..
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
You mean, solar activity as the explanation to global warming?

Solar activity is clearly the result of global warming. [EDIT: Wait, Reverse that, other way around. Global warming is clearly the result of solar activity (thanks to Ben and to Willy Wonka, the former for picking up on CLEARLY idiotic statement and the latter a movie providing me with an a propos paraphrase here] No sun, no warming (and no life). This is why it is important to be more specific (for example, AGW is caused by the ways in which the effects of solar activity on atmospheric thermodynamics are altered via human GHG emissions that (and this is the most important part, as without it the emission levels would cause trivial warming) yield various feedbacks with a net positive effect.

The problem is that the methods through which we calculate this net feedback effect is by creating models of simulations of past temperatures with all the relevant parameters we know of (natural emissions, human emissions, cloud coverage, ocean heat retention, etc.), setting the values of those we know, and seeing how we have to adjust those we don't to yield the actual temperatures. In general, we can't reproduce past temperatures in our models without a strong positive net feedback.

This is what I read on NASA's website about global warming and the sun:

Well, I can't provide most of what I've read about cosmic rays and the climate (let alone the sun and climate change) as it isn't in electronic form and/or requires a fairly technical knowledge. But I have attached a few papers on two ways in which solar magnetic flux influences climate: cloud coverage and ozone depletion. I have many more peer-reviewed papers from journals and volumes if you wish.


Can you explain what NASA GISStemp is then?

A simulation. It's a technical but EXTREMELY important distinction. We have readings of various sorts from various instruments in various places over various intervals of time. That is the temperature data/record. Even if we ignore nonlinear distributions, variance in recording accuracy, variance in spatiotemporal representation, etc., we are still left with the fact that the instruments used neither measure what we want (non-local readings) nor measure temperature the way we wish. I've attached a paper on the effect of human changes to surface processes (farming, urbanization, etc.) that cause increases in surface temperatures which are completely unrelated to AGW (anthropogenic global warming). So we take the data, and then use it to simulate what we think it would have measured (we simulate the temperature record).

Are you saying that the heat records we're having currently are just temperature simulations?
No, they're also proxy records (usually not both).

Now, if the explanation to global warming isn't anthropogenic, but caused by the sun, radiation, or something else, does that mean that global warming and heat records aren't happening?
The effect of GHGs in the atmosphere has been studied for over a century. We know that increases in the concentration of certain gases in the atmosphere cause warming, and we know we emit these gases and that a portion of these emissions remain in the atmosphere. So we are clearly causing warming. However, no climate scientist thinks that this is something to worry about. It's the feedback that is the central issue. The problem is that we derive the values for the feedbacks that we turn into a single net positive feedback based upon what we know about the temperatures we simulate and our understanding of the physics and general processes involved. The models that worry us result from excluding well-studied phenomena like the effect of GCRs, by correcting surface readings via e.g., bad estimates of anthropogenic surface processes mostly limited to the UHI effect derived in the 80s.

Does the explanation and cause to global warming negate that we're having a global warming?
Nobody knows what is causing global warming per se- hence the fact that several years ago the reason we didn't see a warming trend was due to the 1998 ENSO that caused a peak which, when it stopped, made it appear as if temperatures weren't increasing (why don't they use nonlinear regression that don't use the mean as the measure of central tendency upon which variance is based or any number of superior methods, I don't know). But after over 15 years of no significant trend and terrible predictive power, we needed a new reason. The IPCC report suggested the research indicates the "hiatus" may be due to miscalculations in oceanic heat retention. More recently, it's because we have accounted for problems in surface temperature biases that if corrected would increase the temperature simulations (albeit while ignoring the best temperature record we have- satellite).
Humans are almost certainly causing problematic warming. It is just as certain that we don't know enough about what we are doing, how it affects the collection of complex systems that make up the climate (from stars that exploded millions and millions of years ago to nonlinear forcings from human GHG emission interactions on water vapor concentrations).
 

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  • Cosmoclimatology- a new theory emerges.pdf
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  • Cosmic rays, clouds and climate.pdf
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  • A solar pattern in the longest temperature series.pdf
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  • Link nature between low cloud amounts and cosmic rays through wavelet analysis.pdf
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  • a link between the flux of galactic cosmic rays and Earth's climate.pdf
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  • Cosmic Rays and Climate.pdf
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  • correlations of clouds, cosmic rays and solar irradiation over the earth.pdf
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  • EVIDENCE FOR INFLUENCE OF ANTHROPOGENIC SURFACE PROCESSES.pdf
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Ben Dhyan

Veteran Member
LOM...you need to edit...opening sentence....Solar activity is the cause...not effect. Good post though...enjoyed it..
 

Ouroboros

Coincidentia oppositorum
Solar activity is clearly the result of global warming. [EDIT: Wait, Reverse that, other way around. Global warming is clearly the result of solar activity (thanks to Ben and to Willy Wonka, the former for picking up on CLEARLY idiotic statement and the latter a movie providing me with an a propos paraphrase here] No sun, no warming (and no life). This is why it is important to be more specific (for example, AGW is caused by the ways in which the effects of solar activity on atmospheric thermodynamics are altered via human GHG emissions that (and this is the most important part, as without it the emission levels would cause trivial warming) yield various feedbacks with a net positive effect.
:thumbsup:

The problem is that the methods through which we calculate this net feedback effect is by creating models of simulations of past temperatures with all the relevant parameters we know of (natural emissions, human emissions, cloud coverage, ocean heat retention, etc.), setting the values of those we know, and seeing how we have to adjust those we don't to yield the actual temperatures. In general, we can't reproduce past temperatures in our models without a strong positive net feedback.
Wow. Sounds crazy. Why can't we just read the values from the sensors and just do an average? What's the need to run the temperatures through some algorithms to create a new temperature that we don't know is true or not? I really thought that when they calculated these averages that it was the only they thing did, not altered the numbers. So essentially, you're saying that we're not having a higher average temperature then?

Well, I can't provide most of what I've read about cosmic rays and the climate (let alone the sun and climate change) as it isn't in electronic form and/or requires a fairly technical knowledge. But I have attached a few papers on two ways in which solar magnetic flux influences climate: cloud coverage and ozone depletion. I have many more peer-reviewed papers from journals and volumes if you wish.
I will most definitely look at them later today. However, my understanding is that the cloud research only showed that there was a small contribution, but didn't explain the larger changes.

A simulation. It's a technical but EXTREMELY important distinction. We have readings of various sorts from various instruments in various places over various intervals of time. That is the temperature data/record. Even if we ignore nonlinear distributions, variance in recording accuracy, variance in spatiotemporal representation, etc., we are still left with the fact that the instruments used neither measure what we want (non-local readings) nor measure temperature the way we wish. I've attached a paper on the effect of human changes to surface processes (farming, urbanization, etc.) that cause increases in surface temperatures which are completely unrelated to AGW (anthropogenic global warming). So we take the data, and then use it to simulate what we think it would have measured (we simulate the temperature record).
Yeah. I can see the problem. It's like putting the sensors in all volcanos vs putting the all in ice tundras. How and where you put them is important, and local influence has to be somehow removed from the number.

No, they're also proxy records (usually not both).


The effect of GHGs in the atmosphere has been studied for over a century. We know that increases in the concentration of certain gases in the atmosphere cause warming, and we know we emit these gases and that a portion of these emissions remain in the atmosphere. So we are clearly causing warming. However, no climate scientist thinks that this is something to worry about. It's the feedback that is the central issue. The problem is that we derive the values for the feedbacks that we turn into a single net positive feedback based upon what we know about the temperatures we simulate and our understanding of the physics and general processes involved. The models that worry us result from excluding well-studied phenomena like the effect of GCRs, by correcting surface readings via e.g., bad estimates of anthropogenic surface processes mostly limited to the UHI effect derived in the 80s.
Ok. Earlier in this post I got the impression that you didn't believe there's a warming going on, but you do believe there is one.

So the problem isn't really that there's some slight warming going on, made by us, but that suggested effects of it, that it can spiral into crazy high temperatures and such. We don't know if the feedback is really that bad as they say. Am I understanding this right?

Nobody knows what is causing global warming per se- hence the fact that several years ago the reason we didn't see a warming trend was due to the 1998 ENSO that caused a peak which, when it stopped, made it appear as if temperatures weren't increasing (why don't they use nonlinear regression that don't use the mean as the measure of central tendency upon which variance is based or any number of superior methods, I don't know). But after over 15 years of no significant trend and terrible predictive power, we needed a new reason. The IPCC report suggested the research indicates the "hiatus" may be due to miscalculations in oceanic heat retention. More recently, it's because we have accounted for problems in surface temperature biases that if corrected would increase the temperature simulations (albeit while ignoring the best temperature record we have- satellite).
Humans are almost certainly causing problematic warming. It is just as certain that we don't know enough about what we are doing, how it affects the collection of complex systems that make up the climate (from stars that exploded millions and millions of years ago to nonlinear forcings from human GHG emission interactions on water vapor concentrations).
True. I can agree with that.

Still, I believe we should work on technologies that can protect us in a hotter and more serious climate, just as we need to find ways of protecting ourselves from destructive comets. Even if we're not going into a disaster level global warming, at least we can improve industry and machines that we use to minimize our impact on nature (which is probably short of a miracle).
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Wow. Sounds crazy. Why can't we just read the values from the sensors and just do an average?
For two reasons:
1) It is usually agreed that there are three measures of central tendency: mean (average), median (middle value), and mode (most frequently occurring value). Almost always, if you had nothing but the option to choose one of these three for some dataset (salary at a job you are thinking of taking, housing prices, political spectrum in some region, and so on) the most informative would be the mean (average) most of the time. However, once you go beyond this level of analysis, using the mean becomes dangerous very quickly. It is extremely sensitive to a) extreme values b) extreme clusters c) clusters. Basically, if the data isn't approximately linearly distributed, using the mean to compute the "true value" of some series of measurements is going to give you bad results, and sometimes even if it is approximately linearly distributed it will still do this. There is a great textbook I've recommended (and in some cases actual bought for) graduate students taking multivariate statistics classes in the social & behavioral sciences, despite the fact that the text doesn't cover multivariate statistics and is as elementary as it gets: Basic Statistics by Rand Wilcox. At one point he uses an example from a real study in which 105 male students were asked to give the number of sexual partners they would like to have over the next 30 years. Out of the 105 students, 102 responded with a number less than the average.. Why? Here are the responses:
full


The average was high first because one person answered 6,000. However, this is a pretty obvious outlier. The problem is that even getting rid of this value, the average is still a terrible measure here. The most frequently occurring value is 1, and almost all responses are under 10, yet the doublet "cluster" of 150 from two participants is still enough to jack the average way up. Things get much worse when your measurements are highly nonlinearly distributed across BOTH space and time.

2) Simple averaging here is doomed from the start for many reasons. First, averaging at best tells you that given a representative sample, you may get a good measure of what the "real value" is (in this case, what the "real" global temperature was in a given year). But our instruments have not and never were representative samples. The surface records go back to 1850, because only then do we really get something approximating enough coverage to try to calculate global temperatures. But almost all measurements were on land, when most of the surface of our planet is ocean. Also, most of the instruments were from areas of high population, and the most well-studied bias is the urban heat island effect (buildings cause surface temperature increases that are unrelated to global warming but our instruments can't make such distinctions). It turns out that everything from the height of of a thermometer to rural farmland development causes surface temperatures to rise completely independently of AGW. Then there's the problem of missing data and different sampling temporal distributions. In many places, temperature was measured pretty infrequently and unreliably for a long time, so we really only have good coverage for a tiny region of the planet for most of the surface temperature record history. The problem here isn't just the coverage though, it's that in order to create a kind of "average" you have to compare e.g., daily, consistent temperature readings in multiple places in the US, UK, and several other countries compared to far more infrequent measurements in far fewer places elsewhere. Once the biases have been accounted for, missing data points inferred, trends computed based on most likely outcomes given the data we have, etc., we still have the problem of nonlinear spatial distribution: an average of all instrument readings would tell us a lot a very small region of the Earth. So even if we were able to perfectly account for measurement error, bias, missing data, etc., we still have to employ statistical methods to infer what the temperatures would have been for most of the Earth's surface because we didn't actually have any instruments anywhere near most of the Earth's surface.

What's the need to run the temperatures through some algorithms to create a new temperature that we don't know is true or not?
Because AGW is a theory about how human emissions affect atmospheric conditions and produce feedback effects in other systems relevant to the climate (e.g., oceanic dynamics). It has nothing to do with the rise in temperatures in New York City, New York, compared to almost no rise in over a century in more rural or suburban areas of New York. If you compare temperature records for big cities over the last 150 years to those towns, farmlands, etc., the difference is extreme. However, even farming and housing development in suburban areas increase surface temperatures in ways that are totally unrelated to human emissions, AGW, or what we want to know about the climate (i.e., we want to know what the temperature is in the atmosphere around the globe, not a bunch of readings that are artificially high because of too much concrete or because the instrument was placed too near a heat vent).

So essentially, you're saying that we're not having a higher average temperature then?

There's almost no doubt that global temperatures have increased since the industrial period. But they haven't done so consistently. They dipped for a while around the 30s right when our theory says they should have been rising (it takes a while for the CO2 build-up to have an effect), and then rose until around 1998, when the "hiatus" started. However, there is one method of temperature measurement that doesn't suffer from local biases (i.e., it doesn't actually measure the heat around it, but a non-local, spread-out out variable that gives us hemispheric readings of the atmosphere: satellite MSU readings. Unfortunately, these only go back to ~1970. It is extremely difficult to determine how much global temperatures have risen and how much of this rise we caused, but it is highly likely that we caused some and as of yet all evidence indicates that we have no other explanation for the rise other than that increased GHG emissions caused a positive feedback effect.


However, my understanding is that the cloud research only showed that there was a small contribution, but didn't explain the larger changes.

Cloud dynamics have been one of the most difficult pieces of the puzzle. For instance, even granting that galactic cosmic rays cause cloud seeding, what really matters is at what level in the atmosphere. So far, there is significant evidence of a correlation between the cloud coverage we suspect matters most and the solar magnetic flux, as well as a postulated mechanism to account for this that has been tested and shows promise. So we have estimates as high as half or more of the observed warming attributed to natural forcings due to changes in cloud coverage thanks to solar magnetic flux. However, even though the IPCC and mainstream climate science is starting to take this seriously, that changes in the sun's magnetic "shield" caused a large portion of the observed warming is a minority position.


but you do believe there is one.
Yes. And I believe we need to spend more time and resources to alternative energy, including nuclear (which is our best chance at substantial decreases in reliance on fossil fuels, is far safer than most think, is not just underused but also badly used (most of our plants are quite old because any time there are plans to build a new one there is massive outcry), and can allow us to drastically reduce emissions at least temporarily until we find an even better alternative.


We don't know if the feedback is really that bad as they say. Am I understanding this right?

There are a few different estimates for the feedback parameter that are widely recognized. Unfortunately, thanks to politics, the usual amount of academic squabbling to protect one's reputation and defend one's work has been rocketed way beyond the norm. Climate scientists don't like releasing code, data, files, etc., because they know there are hundreds of amateurs and many professionals just waiting to tear it apart or, even worse, to leap upon insignificant errors or trivial findings and make unwarrented claims. So they have tended to police themseleves and censor not only what they tell the public, but what research is allowed to be published. It's a vicious cycle that I honestly don't see an end to or a solution to (obviously, the solution would be for scientists to do what they do and have the only politics be the usual academic politics, rather than legions of amateurs, scores of politicians, and who knows how many scientists who toe the party line even though they don't think things are quite as bad as commonly reported. Also, the data is a mess and the systems in question are very complex, highly interconnected, and thus it is expected that our models will be reflect a greater degree of uncertainty than is typical. The problem is that if climate scientists just said this, then this would be taken as an indication by a large portion of the public, many public figures, the media, etc., as an indication that the models are useless, when in fact "all models are wrong, but some are useful" (Box). I've spent months and months over many years (not consitently; I always give up) trying to build models or to replicate those of others. There are just too many unknowns, particular for someone like me who has access only to public records and occasionally some shared data with conditions concerning its use. I've even attended a few conferences/seminars, and have watched many more. The scientists are far more willing to talk about the degree of uncertainty in front of colleagues than to the public, because we know "all models are wrong. Complex systems are already complex- the added politics is like dropping napalm on a massive oil spill.
 

Ben Dhyan

Veteran Member
Thank you LOM for providing us with your excellent explanations and background on the politics and technical issues present with agw climate science..
 

SkepticThinker

Veteran Member
How NOAA rewrote climate data to hide global warming pause

How NOAA rewrote climate data to hide global warming pause


"The number of excuses for the global warming pause or hiatus had grown to more than 66 when the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) added yet another one to the list in a just-published study in Science."

Excuses? Or just explanations.


There has been no "pause" in the warming - even before this new study came out that I cited, you still couldn't say global warming has stopped or "paused." At most you could say it had slowed down a bit.

In their argument that came out yesterday, NOAA said that long-existing instrument bases have masked rising sea surface temperatures. Once they "readjusted" the data, the warming hiatus disappeared. By cooling the past, they were able to make the most recent years even warmer.

Okay so they’re implying that scientists basically just made up data by putting "readjusted" in quotes.

What they did was make the data more reliable and accurate than it was before. A lot of the data for sea surface temperatures apparently comes from measurements taken by ships that are out at sea. They used to measure the water temperature by dropping a bucket over the side of the ship and taking the temperature of the water in the bucket. But starting in the 1930’s a lot of ships started measuring the temperature of water around the engine intakes of the ship and so water temperatures were recorded as warmer than they actually were, thus creating an artificial shift in the data. When NOAA improved their data set, they corrected for this problem by adding more data taken from buoys and newly digitized paper records from the 19th and 20th centuries, among other things. The authors of your article describe this as "readjusting" the data to make the warming hiatus disappear as if there were some sinister intentions involved when in actuality all we have here is a bunch of scientists trying to improve the accuracy of the temperature records. Very sinister indeed.

I get into this more below.

This assessment has drawn heavy criticism from both sides of the bitter climate debate, but one thing no one disputes: NOAA may have overstepped its authority in rewriting climate history and relying on faulty data sets.

No one disputes this? How have they rewritten climate history, by including more data (and more reliable data at that) in their analyses? They were relying on faulty data sets before they overhauled the system.

By making the early 1900s colder, and using only land-based temperature stations and less-reliable ocean temperatures, NOAA can now readjust the past to chart a new future.

This is like what the third or fourth claim they’ve made that climatologists have basically just pulled data out of their asses and I’m not even past the second paragraph.

This new study also comes at a time when President Obama has shifted his focus to climate change, not to mention the EPA's proposed plans to completely revamp the country's power plant system through new regulations.

And now we have a conspiracy claim, and so late in the article.

One thing is clear: NOAA didn't rely on satellite temperatures, which clearly shows a global warming pause for the past 19 years. or the much more reliable ARGO buoys for ocean temperatures.

Actually what the NOAA actually did recently was to change the data set in such a way as to ADD MORE DATA TO IT. They digitized old paper records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so they could be incorporated into the computer system, which gives us more information to work with, which makes it more reliable, not less. They also incorporated some way to monitor potential errors at existing temperature stations around the US which again, makes the data more reliable, not less.

"These three developments result in a climate division dataset that uses many more stations than ever before, more advanced computational techniques, and, most importantly, a more accurate climate division dataset."

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2014/2/supplemental/page-5/

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/transitioning-gridded-climate-divisional-dataset

They were able to fix a discrepancy in the way sea surface temperatures had been taken by ships starting in the 1930s that had resulted in faulty data. Again, this works towards making data more reliable, not less.

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus

According to The Daily Caller, "new satellite-derived temperature measurements show there’s been no global warming for 18 years and six months."

Their source is the Daily Caller? This is an article you want me to seriously consider and they’re quoting the Daily Caller.

Satellite data is preferable because it measures the first two miles of the lower atmosphere, and is accurate to within .001 degrees Celsius.

All the available data combined together would be most preferable, would it not? Why just focus on satellite measurements? Oh right, because you think it suppports your assertion that global warming has stopped or "paused."

Physicist Carl Mears, who works with satellite data at Remote Sensing Systems has this to say about satellite data,

"My particular dataset (RSS tropospheric temperatures from MSU/AMSU satellites) show less warming than would be expected when compared to the surface temperatures. All datasets contain errors. In this case, I would trust the surface data a little more because the difference between the long term trends in the various surface datasets (NOAA, NASA GISS, HADCRUT, Berkeley etc) are closer to each other than the long term trends from the different satellite datasets. This suggests that the satellite datasets contain more "structural uncertainty" than the surface dataset."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/24/ted-cruz-says-satellite-data-show-the-globe-isnt-warming-this-satellite-scientist-feels-otherwise/

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged two years ago that the rise in Earth's mean surface temperatures had begun to slow since 1998, and since then everything from volcanic activity to solar output to the oceans absorbing the extra heat have been put forward to explain the pause. Others believe the missing heat is hiding in the Deep Oceans, far from any sort of sensors or temperature gauges. NOAA is one of four independent organizations that gather and analyze global temperatures, and the three other groups have all detected a slowdown in the rate of global warming, which is why the IPCC mentioned the "hiatus" in the first place.

This is addressed here, in an article written by one of the scientists involved in the study:

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus

One of the proposed reasons for the this slowdown was that the heat is accumulating in the oceans. But when they try to gather the most reliable temperature data available from the oceans, you get your underwear all in a twist and cry that scientists are making stuff up.

And what's with all the focus on the year 1998? Cherrypicking dates out of thin air isn't how you do proper science. Why ignore the much longer term trends that still show warming?

The study, led by Thomas Karl, of NOAA's Climatic Data Center, said once the data was 'adjusted' and the biases accounted for, "this hiatus or slowdown simply vanishes." Karl et al insists that global average surface temperature has climbed 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit each decade since 1950, without interruption, due to the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide emissions.

Jay Lawrimore, chief of the Data Set Branch for Weather and Climate at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information said this,

"This work highlights the importance of data stewardship and continuously striving to improve the accuracy and consistency of temperature data sets.


While these improvements in the land and ocean temperature record reveal a rate of warming greater than previously documented, we also found that our computed trends likely continue to underestimate the true rate of warming. This is due at least in part to a lack of surface temperature observations in large parts of the Arctic where warming is occurring most rapidly.

Preliminary calculations of global temperature trends using estimates of temperatures in the Arctic indicate greater rates of warming than the 1998-2014 trend of 0.19F per decade reported in this study. Future data set development efforts will include a focus on further improvements to the temperature record in this area of the world."

https://theconversation.com/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus-42807

Not everyone agrees. Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech who doesn't find this analysis at all convincing, writes, "While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on." She went on to say that it "seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements — ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend."

Here's a discussion about the accuracy of measurements obtained from ARGO buoys. Apparently some studies indicate cooling in the ocean depths while others indicate warming, while studies that incorporate more types of data show warming. It talks about long term trends versus short term trends and how focusing on short term trends ignores the bigger picture:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?a=67

Three climatologists at the CATO Institute released a joint statement about the NOAA adjustment report: "While this will be heralded as an important finding, the main claim that it uncovers a significant recent warming trend is certainly dubious. The significance level (.10) is hardly normative and the use of it certainly will prompt many readers to question the reasoning behind the use of such a lax standard."

They should get together and write a paper on it. I anxiously await its publication.This is how good science is done.

"I would argue the study is misleading on the implications of its results," said Piers Forster, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Leeds, in England. "This study has not 'magicked' the hiatus away or somehow corrected the IPCC." Indeed, scientists who have investigated the warming hiatus said the study's "key shortcoming is that it does what mainstream climate scientists accuse climate skeptics of doing: cherry-picking start and end dates to arrive at a particular conclusion."

The study in question goes back to 1880, while the people complainign that the data is cherrypicked to arrive at a particular conclusion are using 1998 as their starting date. Quite the difference, isn't it?

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus

Gerald Meehl, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told Mashable in an email that "My conclusion is that even with the new data adjustments, there still was a nominal hiatus period that lasted until 2013 with a lower rate of global warming than the warming rate of the last 50 years of the 20th century, and a factor of two slower warming than the previous 20 years from the 1970s to 1990s."

How about the overall long term trend?

Lisa Goddard, director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, also told Mashable that "the study does not support the conclusion that global warming didn't slow down for a relatively short time period. 'It is clear that Karl et al. have put a lot of careful work into updating these global products,' Goddard said in an email. 'However, they go too far when they conclude that there was no decadal-scale slowdown in the rate of warming globally. This argument seems to rely on choosing the right period — such as including the recent record-breaking 2014.'"

Why wouldn't they include data from 2014 when updating the system to include the newest available data?

Another climate researcher, Peter Thorne, a climate researcher at Naynooth University in Ireland, said in an interview that "more investments should go toward establishing redundant, carefully calibrated temperature-observing networks where data is currently sparse, such as the Arctic, much of Africa and especially the oceans."

Even more surprising is that climate scientists who believe that man is solely responsible for the planet warming less than a degree Celsius in the past 100 years also rejected NOAA's assessment that the slowdown is not occurring. "It is a bit misleading to say there is no hiatus,"
said climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"This new study suggests that the slowdown in the rate of warming may be much less pronounced than in the global temperature records that were available for the IPCC to assess,"
said Professor Tim Osborn of the University of East Anglia, which handles the UK dataset with the Met Office Hadley Centre. "The IPCC's assessment wasn't wrong, but perhaps the emphasis would be slightly different if the assessments were carried out afresh with the new studies since 2013 that could now be considered."

"I would caution against dismissing the slowdown in surface warming on the basis of this study … There are other data sets that still support a slowdown over some recent period of time, and there are intriguing geographical patterns such as cooling in large parts of the Pacific Ocean that were used to support explanations for the warming slowdown," Osborn added.


As Judith Curry
writes, "In my opinion, the gold standard data set for global ocean surface temperatures is the UK data set, HadSST3. A review of the uncertainties is given in this paper by John Kennedy. Note, the UK group has dealt with the same issues raised by the NOAA team. I personally see no reason to the use the NOAA ERSST data set, I do not see any evidence that the NOAA group has done anywhere near as careful a job as the UK group in processing the ocean temperatures."

As Marc Morano of the site
Climate Depot noted in an interview with National Geographic, "NOAA's new study will have "virtually no impact in the climate debate. … This latest study merely adds to the dueling data sets and of course time lines in the climate debate."

I'm not surprised that other scientists have issues with the study because , this is how science works. Now these people will go out and do studies of their own, they'll work to improve existing data sets and measurements and so on and we will glean more and more information about climate change.
 
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Ben Dhyan

Veteran Member
"The number of excuses for the global warming pause or hiatus had grown to more than 66 when the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) added yet another one to the list in a just-published study in Science."

Excuses? Or just explanations.


There has been no "pause" in the warming - even before this new study came out that I cited, you still couldn't say global warming has stopped or "paused." At most you could say it had slowed down a bit.

In their argument that came out yesterday, NOAA said that long-existing instrument bases have masked rising sea surface temperatures. Once they "readjusted" the data, the warming hiatus disappeared. By cooling the past, they were able to make the most recent years even warmer.

Okay so they’re implying that scientists basically just made up data by putting "readjusted" in quotes.


What they did was make the data more reliable and accurate than it was before. A lot of the data for sea surface temperatures apparently comes from measurements taken by ships that are out at sea. They used to measure the water temperature by dropping a bucket over the side of the ship and taking the temperature of the water in the bucket. But starting in the 1930’s a lot of ships started measuring the temperature of water around the engine intakes of the ship and so water temperatures were recorded as warmer than they actually were, thus creating an artificial shift in the data. When NOAA improved their data set, they corrected for this problem by adding more data taken from buoys and newly digitized paper records from the 19th and 20th centuries, among other things. The authors of your article describe this as "readjusting" the data to make the warming hiatus disappear as if there were some sinister intentions involved when in actuality all we have here is a bunch of scientists trying to improve the accuracy of the temperature records. Very sinister indeed.

I get into this more below.

This assessment has drawn heavy criticism from both sides of the bitter climate debate, but one thing no one disputes: NOAA may have overstepped its authority in rewriting climate history and relying on faulty data sets.

No one disputes this? How have they rewritten climate history, by including more data (and more reliable data at that) in their analyses? They were relying on faulty data sets before they overhauled the system.

By making the early 1900s colder, and using only land-based temperature stations and less-reliable ocean temperatures, NOAA can now readjust the past to chart a new future.

This is like what the third or fourth claim they’ve made that climatologists have basically just pulled data out of their asses and I’m not even past the second paragraph.

This new study also comes at a time when President Obama has shifted his focus to climate change, not to mention the EPA's proposed plans to completely revamp the country's power plant system through new regulations.

And now we have a conspiracy claim, and so late in the article.

One thing is clear: NOAA didn't rely on satellite temperatures, which clearly shows a global warming pause for the past 19 years. or the much more reliable ARGO buoys for ocean temperatures.

Actually what the NOAA actually did recently was to change the data set in such a way as to ADD MORE DATA TO IT. They digitized old paper records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so they could be incorporated into the computer system, which gives us more information to work with, which makes it more reliable, not less. They also incorporated some way to monitor potential errors at existing temperature stations around the US which again, makes the data more reliable, not less.

"These three developments result in a climate division dataset that uses many more stations than ever before, more advanced computational techniques, and, most importantly, a more accurate climate division dataset."

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2014/2/supplemental/page-5/

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/transitioning-gridded-climate-divisional-dataset

They were able to fix a discrepancy in the way sea surface temperatures had been taken by ships starting in the 1930s that had resulted in faulty data. Again, this works towards making data more reliable, not less.

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus

According to The Daily Caller, "new satellite-derived temperature measurements show there’s been no global warming for 18 years and six months."

Their source is the Daily Caller? This is an article you want me to seriously consider and they’re quoting the Daily Caller.

Satellite data is preferable because it measures the first two miles of the lower atmosphere, and is accurate to within .001 degrees Celsius.

All the available data combined together would be most preferable, would it not? Why just focus on satellite measurements? Oh right, because you think it suppports your assertion that global warming has stopped or "paused."

Physicist Carl Mears, who works with satellite data at Remote Sensing Systems has this to say about satellite data,

"My particular dataset (RSS tropospheric temperatures from MSU/AMSU satellites) show less warming than would be expected when compared to the surface temperatures. All datasets contain errors. In this case, I would trust the surface data a little more because the difference between the long term trends in the various surface datasets (NOAA, NASA GISS, HADCRUT, Berkeley etc) are closer to each other than the long term trends from the different satellite datasets. This suggests that the satellite datasets contain more "structural uncertainty" than the surface dataset."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/24/ted-cruz-says-satellite-data-show-the-globe-isnt-warming-this-satellite-scientist-feels-otherwise/

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged two years ago that the rise in Earth's mean surface temperatures had begun to slow since 1998, and since then everything from volcanic activity to solar output to the oceans absorbing the extra heat have been put forward to explain the pause. Others believe the missing heat is hiding in the Deep Oceans, far from any sort of sensors or temperature gauges. NOAA is one of four independent organizations that gather and analyze global temperatures, and the three other groups have all detected a slowdown in the rate of global warming, which is why the IPCC mentioned the "hiatus" in the first place.

This is addressed here, in an article written by one of the scientists involved in the study:

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus

One of the proposed reasons for the this slowdown was that the heat is accumulating in the oceans. But when they try to gather the most reliable temperature data available from the oceans, you get your underwear all in a twist and cry that scientists are making stuff up.

And what's with all the focus on the year 1998? Cherrypicking dates out of thin air isn't how you do proper science. Why ignore the much longer term trends that still show warming?

The study, led by Thomas Karl, of NOAA's Climatic Data Center, said once the data was 'adjusted' and the biases accounted for, "this hiatus or slowdown simply vanishes." Karl et al insists that global average surface temperature has climbed 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit each decade since 1950, without interruption, due to the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide emissions.

Jay Lawrimore, chief of the Data Set Branch for Weather and Climate at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information said this,

"This work highlights the importance of data stewardship and continuously striving to improve the accuracy and consistency of temperature data sets.


While these improvements in the land and ocean temperature record reveal a rate of warming greater than previously documented, we also found that our computed trends likely continue to underestimate the true rate of warming. This is due at least in part to a lack of surface temperature observations in large parts of the Arctic where warming is occurring most rapidly.

Preliminary calculations of global temperature trends using estimates of temperatures in the Arctic indicate greater rates of warming than the 1998-2014 trend of 0.19F per decade reported in this study. Future data set development efforts will include a focus on further improvements to the temperature record in this area of the world."

https://theconversation.com/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus-42807

Not everyone agrees. Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech who doesn't find this analysis at all convincing, writes, "While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on." She went on to say that it "seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements — ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend."

Here's a discussion about the accuracy of measurements obtained from ARGO buoys. Apparently some studies indicate cooling in the ocean depths while others indicate warming, while studies that incorporate more types of data show warming. It talks about long term trends versus short term trends and how focusing on short term trends ignores the bigger picture:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?a=67

Three climatologists at the CATO Institute released a joint statement about the NOAA adjustment report: "While this will be heralded as an important finding, the main claim that it uncovers a significant recent warming trend is certainly dubious. The significance level (.10) is hardly normative and the use of it certainly will prompt many readers to question the reasoning behind the use of such a lax standard."

They should get together and write a paper on it. I anxiously await its publication.This is how good science is done.

"I would argue the study is misleading on the implications of its results," said Piers Forster, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Leeds, in England. "This study has not 'magicked' the hiatus away or somehow corrected the IPCC." Indeed, scientists who have investigated the warming hiatus said the study's "key shortcoming is that it does what mainstream climate scientists accuse climate skeptics of doing: cherry-picking start and end dates to arrive at a particular conclusion."

The study in question goes back to 1880, while the people complainign that the data is cherrypicked to arrive at a particular conclusion are using 1998 as their starting date. Quite the difference, isn't it?

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus

Gerald Meehl, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told Mashable in an email that "My conclusion is that even with the new data adjustments, there still was a nominal hiatus period that lasted until 2013 with a lower rate of global warming than the warming rate of the last 50 years of the 20th century, and a factor of two slower warming than the previous 20 years from the 1970s to 1990s."

How about the overall long term trend?

Lisa Goddard, director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, also told Mashable that "the study does not support the conclusion that global warming didn't slow down for a relatively short time period. 'It is clear that Karl et al. have put a lot of careful work into updating these global products,' Goddard said in an email. 'However, they go too far when they conclude that there was no decadal-scale slowdown in the rate of warming globally. This argument seems to rely on choosing the right period — such as including the recent record-breaking 2014.'"

Why wouldn't they include data from 2014 when updating the system to include the newest available data?

Another climate researcher, Peter Thorne, a climate researcher at Naynooth University in Ireland, said in an interview that "more investments should go toward establishing redundant, carefully calibrated temperature-observing networks where data is currently sparse, such as the Arctic, much of Africa and especially the oceans."


Even more surprising is that climate scientists who believe that man is solely responsible for the planet warming less than a degree Celsius in the past 100 years also rejected NOAA's assessment that the slowdown is not occurring. "It is a bit misleading to say there is no hiatus,"
said climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"This new study suggests that the slowdown in the rate of warming may be much less pronounced than in the global temperature records that were available for the IPCC to assess,"
said Professor Tim Osborn of the University of East Anglia, which handles the UK dataset with the Met Office Hadley Centre. "The IPCC's assessment wasn't wrong, but perhaps the emphasis would be slightly different if the assessments were carried out afresh with the new studies since 2013 that could now be considered."

"I would caution against dismissing the slowdown in surface warming on the basis of this study … There are other data sets that still support a slowdown over some recent period of time, and there are intriguing geographical patterns such as cooling in large parts of the Pacific Ocean that were used to support explanations for the warming slowdown," Osborn added.


As Judith Curry
writes, "In my opinion, the gold standard data set for global ocean surface temperatures is the UK data set, HadSST3. A review of the uncertainties is given in this paper by John Kennedy. Note, the UK group has dealt with the same issues raised by the NOAA team. I personally see no reason to the use the NOAA ERSST data set, I do not see any evidence that the NOAA group has done anywhere near as careful a job as the UK group in processing the ocean temperatures."

As Marc Morano of the site
Climate Depot noted in an interview with National Geographic, "NOAA's new study will have "virtually no impact in the climate debate. … This latest study merely adds to the dueling data sets and of course time lines in the climate debate."

I'm not surprised that other scientists have issues with the study because , this is how science works. Now these people will go out and do studies of their own, they'll work to improve existing data sets and measurements and so on and we will glean more and more information about climate change.
Good....you are not surprised that other scientists have issues with it.....we can agree on this. Remember too that this is a just another study and does not displace the official observed temperature data used by the UN IPCC which indicates a pause... The way the length of a pause is measured is to start at the present observed temperature and gp back to the time when the trend still shows no warming...that is why the date begins around 1998 for IPCC approved RSS satellite data...it is not cherry picked!

Monckton-jan-2014.png
.

Now the satellite data only begins at 1980, so we can not go any further back with RSS...and the trend is about 0.34 degree C warming over the last 35 years as shown below, which translates to 1.37 degree/century...

Monckton-jan-2014-2.png
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
The fact of the matter, which is based on REAL temperature measurements taken around the world, is that most of the hottest years on record have occurred over the last 20 years, and no song & dance will change that since these are based on REAL measurements taken at ground level. For those saying otherwise, they simply are ignoring what 97% of the climate scientists have concluded and are going with either an ignorance of the subject, a political agenda, or both.

Those who are skeptics, are taking a position that is at least somewhat logical but the deniers simply aren't. They got an agenda-- facts be damned.
 

Ben Dhyan

Veteran Member
The fact of the matter, which is based on REAL temperature measurements taken around the world, is that most of the hottest years on record have occurred over the last 20 years, and no song & dance will change that since these are based on REAL measurements taken at ground level. For those saying otherwise, they simply are ignoring what 97% of the climate scientists have concluded, and are going with either an ignorance of the subject, a political agenda, or both.
No one is disputing that average global temperature over the last 20 years is the hottest on record which go back over a 140 years...but currently there is a pause in temperature increase that is causing the IPCC climate model predictions to deviate from the actual observed. Iow...the IPCC models predicted continued increase in global temperature as a result of increased CO2 emissions....but that is not happening....the observed temperature is not increasing....
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
No one is disputing that average global temperature over the last 20 years is the hottest on record which go back over a 140 years...but currently there is a pause in temperature increase that is causing the IPCC climate model predictions to deviate from the actual observed. Iow...the IPCC models predicted continued increase in global temperature as a result of increased CO2 emissions....but that is not happening....the observed temperature is not increasing....
Last year, and I posted three scientific sources for it on previous posts (NOAA, NASA, and Scientific American), was the hottest on record, and 10 of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1998 (see Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet: The 10 warmest years: Not exactly forever ago ).

End of discussion.
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
You can have the last word....actual observed reality will triumph over unrealistic alarmism....
Well since you believe 97% of all climate scientists are ignorant or dishonest, and you think you know so much more than they, what can I say but just go ahead and just please yourself I guess.
 

Ben Dhyan

Veteran Member
Well since you believe 97% of all climate scientists are ignorant or dishonest, and you think you know so much more than they, what can I say but just go ahead and just please yourself I guess.
100% of climate scientists agree that observed reality trumps predictions if there is a difference..,,,and the planet has warmed about 0.7 C over 140 years and over the last 15 years or so....the warming is somewhat in a hiatus...
 
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