Yearly Archives: 2010

Warming Forecasts

Forecasting

456 Comments

One of the defenses often used by climate modelers against charges that climate is simple to complex to model accurately is that “they do it all the time in finance and economics.”  This comes today from Megan McArdle on economic forecasting:

I find this pretty underwhelming, since private forecasters also unanimously think they can make forecasts, a belief which turns out to be not very well supported.  More than one analysis of these sorts of forecasts has found them not much better than random chance, and especially prone to miss major structural changes in the economy.   Just because toggling a given variable in their model means that you produce a given outcome, does not mean you can assume that these results will be replicated in the real world.  The poor history of forecasting definitionally means that these models are missing a lot of information, and poorly understood feedback effects.

Sounds familiar, huh?  I echoed these sentiments in a comparison of economic and climate forecasting here.

Temperature Measurement

Why It Is Good to Have Two Sides of A Debate

20 Comments

With climate alarmists continuing to declare climate debate to be over and asking skeptics to just go away, we are reminded again why it is useful to have two sides in a debate.  Few people on any side of any question typically are skeptical of data that support their pet hypotheses.    So, in order to have a full range of skepticism and replication applied to all findings, it is helpful to have people passionately on both sides of a proposition.

I am reminded of this seeing how skeptics finally convinced the NOAA that one of its satellites had gone wonky, producing absurd data (e.g. Great Lakes temperatures in the 400-600F range).  Absolutely typically, the NOAA initially blamed skeptics for fabricating the data

NOAA’s Chuck Pistis went into whitewash mode on first hearing the story about the worst affected location, Egg Harbor, set by his instruments onto fast boil. On Tuesday morning Pistis loftily declared, “I looked in the archives and I find no image with that time stamp. Also we don’t typically post completely cloudy images at all, let alone with temperatures. This image appears to be manufactured for someone’s entertainment.”

Later he went on to own up to the problem, but not before implying at various times that the data is a) trustworthy  b) not trustworthy  c) placed online by hand with verification and d) posted online automatically with no human intervention.

This was the final NOAA position, which is absurd to me:

“NOTICE: Due to degradation of a satellite sensor used by this mapping product, some images have exhibited extreme high and low surface temperatures. “Please disregard these images as anomalies. Future images will not include data from the degraded satellite and images caused by the faulty satellite sensor will be/have been removed from the image archive.”

OK, so 600F readings will be thrown out, but how do we have any confidence the rest of the readings are OK.  Just because they may read in a reasonable range, e.g, 59F, the NOAA is just going to assume those readings are OK?

Climate Science Process

Just When I Thought I Had Seen the Worst Possible Peer-Reviewed Climate Work…

4 Comments

This is really some crazy-bad science in a new study by Welch et al on Asian rice yields purporting to show that they will be reduced by warmer weather.  This is an odd result on its face, given that rice yields have been increasing as the world has warmed over the last 50 years.

Now, it is possible that temperature-related drops in yields have been offset by even larger improvements in other areas that have increased yields, but one’s suspicion-meter is certainly triggered by the finding, especially since the press release on the study says that yields have already been cut 10-20% in some areas, flying in the face of broader yield data.

Willis Eschenbach dove into it, and found this amazing approach.  How this passed peer-review muster is just further evidence as to how asymmetrical peer review is in climate (ie if you have the “right” findings, they will pass all kinds of slop)

First, it covers a very short time span. The longest farm yield datasets used are only six years long (1994-99). Almost a fifth of the datasets are three years or less, and the Chinese data (6% of the total data) only cover two years (1998-1999)….

But whichever dataset they used, they are comparing a two year series of yields against a twenty-six year trend. I’m sorry, but I don’t care what the results of that comparison might be. There is no way to compare a two-year dataset with anything but the temperature records from that area for those two years. This is especially true given the known problems with the ground-station data. And it is doubly true when one of the two years (1998) is a year with a large El Niño.

In fact, he goes on to point out that simultaneous to the two-year trend in China showing yields falling  (I still can’t get over extrapolating from a 2 year farm yield trend) temperatures in China did very different things than their long-term averages might predict

For example, they give the trend for maximum temps in the winter (DecJanFeb) for the particular location in China (29.5N, 119.47E) as being 0.06°C per year, and the trend for spring (MarAprMay) as being 0.05°C per year (I get 0.05°/yr and 0.04°C/yr respectively, fairly close).

But from 1998 to 1999, the actual DJF change was +2.0°C, and the MAM change was minus 1.0°C (CRU TS Max Temperature dataset). As a result, they are comparing the Chinese results to a theoretical trend which has absolutely no relationship to what actually occurred on the ground.

Further, though Eschenbach only mentions it in passing, there likely is another large problem with the data.  The researchers do not mention what temperature station they are using data from, but if past global warming study methodology is any guide, the station could be hundreds of miles away from the farms studied.

Temperature Measurement

Computers are Causing Global Warming

1 Comment

At least, that is, in Nepal.  Willis Eschenbach has an interesting post looking into the claim that Nepal has seen one of the highest warming rates in the world (thus threatening Himalayan glaciers, etc etc).  It turns out there is one (1) GISS station in Nepal, and oddly enough the raw data shows a cooling trend.  Only the intervention of NASA computers heroically transforms a cooling trend into the strong warming trend we all know must really be there because Al Gore says its there and he got a Nobel Prize, didn’t he?

GISS has made a straight-line adjustment of 1.1°C in twenty years, or 5.5°C per century. They have changed a cooling trend to a strong warming trend … I’m sorry, but I see absolutely no scientific basis for that massive adjustment. I don’t care if it was done by a human using their best judgement, done by a computer algorithm utilizing comparison temperatures in India and China, or done by monkeys with typewriters. I don’t buy that adjustment, it is without scientific foundation or credible physical explanation.

At best that is shoddy quality control of an off-the-rails computer algorithm. At worst, the aforesaid monkeys were having a really bad hair day. Either way I say adjusting the Kathmandu temperature record in that manner has no scientific underpinnings at all. We have one stinking record for the whole country of Nepal, which shows cooling. GISS homogenizes the data and claims it wasn’t really cooling at all, it really was warming, and warming at four degrees per century at that

In updates to the post, Eschenbach and his readers track down what is likely driving this bizarre adjustment in the GISS methodology.

Warming Forecasts

Garbage In, Money Out

58 Comments

In my Forbes column last week, I discuss the incredible similarity between the computer models that are used to justify the Obama stimulus and the climate models that form the basis for the proposition that manmade CO2 is causing most of the world’s warming.

The climate modeling approach is so similar to that used by the CEA to score the stimulus that there is even a climate equivalent to the multiplier found in macro-economic models. In climate models, small amounts of warming from man-made CO2 are multiplied many-fold to catastrophic levels by hypothetical positive feedbacks, in the same way that the first-order effects of government spending are multiplied in Keynesian economic models. In both cases, while these multipliers are the single most important drivers of the models’ results, they also tend to be the most controversial assumptions. In an odd parallel, you can find both stimulus and climate debates arguing whether their multiplier is above or below one.

How similar does this sound to climate science:

If macroeconometrics were a viable paradigm, we would have seen major efforts to try to bring this sort of model up to date from its 1975 time warp. However, for reasons I have documented, the profession has decided that this macroeconometric project was a blind alley. Nobody bothered to bring these models up to date, because that would be like trying to bring astrology up to date.

This, from Arnold Kling about macroeconomic models could have been written just as well to describe the process for running climate models

Thirty-five years ago, I was Blinder’s research assistant, doing these sorts of simulations on the Fed-MIT-Penn model for the Congressional Budget Office. I think they are still done the same way. See lecture 13. Here are some of the things that Blinder had to tell his new research assistant to do.1. Make sure that there were channels in the model for credit market conditions to affect consumption and investment.

2. Correct the model’s past forecast errors, so that it would track the actual behavior of the economy over the past two years exactly. With the appropriate “add factors” or correction factors, the model then produces a “baseline scenario” that matches history and then projects out to the future. For the future, a judgment call has to be made as to how rapidly the add factors should decay. That is mostly a matter of aesthetics.

3. Simulate the model without the fiscal stimulus. This will result in the model’s standard multiplier analysis.

4. Make up an alternative path for what you think would have happened in credit markets without TARP and other extraordinary measures. For example, you might assume that mortgage interest rates would have been one percentage point higher than they actually were.

5. Simulate the model with this alternative scenario for credit market conditions.

6. (4) and (5) together create a fictional scenario of how the economy would have performed had the government not taken steps to fight the crisis. According to the model, this fictional scenario would have been horrid, with unemployment around 15 percent.

In the case of climate, the equivalent fictional scenario would be the world without manmade CO2, but the process of tweaking input variables and assuming one’s conclusions is the same.

Climate Science Process

You Know it Has to Be A Skeptic Writing When You See This

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I have followed Roy Spencer’s work for a while on trying to measure climate feedback effects from satellite data.  In general, I give him Kudos for actually working on what is really THE critical problem that separates climate catastrophe from climate rounding error.  It is good someone is working on this, rather than, say, how global warming might affect toad mating, or whatever.

I have never been totally convinced by this part of Spencer’s work.  Again, I give him kudos for trying to isolate the effect of single variables in a complex system through actual observation, rather than the lazy approach of running experiments inside computer models of dubious accuracy.  I am not convinced he has achieved this, but I must admit I have not spent a ton of time working it through.

Anyway, Spencer has a long discussion of his methodology in answer to some critics.  I reserve judgment until I have studied it further.  But I was captivated by this bit:

On the positive side, though, MF10 have forced us to go back and reexamine the methodology and conclusions in SB08. As a result, we are now well on the way to new results which will better optimize the matching of satellite-observed climate variability to the simple climate model, including a range of feedback estimates consistent with the satellite data. It is now apparent to us that we did not do a good enough job of that in SB08.

Really?  You shared your data, were criticized, and are modifying your approach based on this criticism?  I thought from the study of the habits of mainstream climate scientists the correct scientific procedure was to 1) hide your data like it was Russian nuclear secrets; 2) prevent any opposing view from getting published; and 3) defend a flawed methodology by getting 10 of your friends to use the same methodology and summarize it all in an IPCC spaghetti graph.

Climate Science Process, Temperature History

Does This Sound Familiar to Anyone?

20 Comments

Greg Mankiw on scoring the federal stimulus package:

the CEA took a conventional Keynesian-style macroeconomic model and used those set of equations to estimate the effect the stimulus should have had.  Essentially, the model offers an estimate of the policy’s effect, conditional on the model being a correct description of the world.  But notice that this exercise is not really a measurement based on what actually occurred.  Rather, the exercise is premised on the belief that the model is true, so no matter how bad the economy got, the inference is that it would have been even worse without the stimulus.  Why?  Because that is what the model says.  The validity of the model itself is never questioned.

Does this sound like climate science or what?  The same models that are used to predict future temperature increases are used to decide how much of past warming was dues to Co2 and how much was due to natural effects.  Here is the retrospective IPCC chart which assigns more than 100% of post-1950 warming to CO2 (since the blue “natural forcings” is shown to go down, see more here)

Here is the stimulus version, showing flat employment, but positing that the stimulus created jobs because employment “would have gone down without it” (sound familiar?)

This kind of retrospective look at causality has the look of science but in fact is nothing of the sort, and can be not much more than guesses laundered to look like facts.

But this may in fact be worse than guessing.  In both cases, these graphs are drawn by folks who think they know the answer (in the first case that CO2 caused all warming, in the second that the stimulus created millions of jobs).  Since in both cases the lower “without” case (either without CO2 or without stimulus) is horrendously, almost impossible to derive and totally impossible to measure, there is good reason to believe it is merely a plug, fixed in value to get the answer they want.  But if I plugged it just on the back of an envelope, everyone would call me out for it, so I plug it in an arcane model where numerous inputs can be tweaked to get different results, to avoid this kind of unwanted scrutiny.

Readers of climate sites will also recognize this criticism of Obama’s self-serving stimulus analysis

Moreover, the fact that other organizations simulating similar models come to similar conclusions is no evidence about the validity of the model’s simulations.  It only tells you the CEA staff did not commit egregious programming errors when running their computer simulations.

Sounds like the logic behind the hockey stick spaghetti graphs, no?

Temperature Measurement

Might As Well Be Walking on the Sun

6 Comments

Steve Goddard and Anthony Watt have a series of posts on an old favorite topic on this site — how data manipulations back in the climate office is creating a lot of the “measured” warming.  This particular example is right here in Arizona, and features several sites my son and I surveyed for Anthony’s site.  They have a followup on another Arizona station here.  Check out all the asphalt:

This is a hilariously bad siting.  It demonstrates how small things can sometimes have big effects.  The MMTS sensor has a very limited cable length.  This does not mean that it only comes with a short cable (begging the question of why they can’t just buy a longer one), but that it can only have a short cable due to signal amplification issues.  As a result, we get this terrible siting because it needs to be close to the building, whereas even a hundred yards away there were much better locations

Carefree is a fairly rural (at least suburban) low density town with lots of undeveloped land.  They had to work to get a siting this bad.  A monkey throwing darts at a map of the area would have gotten a better siting.

Climate Science Process

Absolutely Hilarious

12 Comments

I know I am late on this but I am trying to spool back up on this site so allow me to catch up.  It turned out that that the IPCC’s Amazon claim (that 40% of the rain forest was at risk from global warming) came from the Facebook page of a 12-year-old girl.  OK, just kidding, it didn’t, but the source is not much better — apparently the claim was just thrown up on a web page of a Brazilian activist organization in 1999, and then pulled down in 2003.  Everything since has been one long game of “telephone.”  The whole story is fascinating and worth reading.

Climate Science Process

Great Academics Go Along With the Pack

30 Comments

It would be an understatement to say that much of the focus in villifying skeptics has been on the skeptic’s funding.  The storyline goes that skeptics are only fighting the obvious because they are paid off by oil and coal companies.

But of course, it turns out that global warming alarmists get far more funding than skeptics, likely 100x as much or more (funding for skeptics is at most a million dollar or two a year, and that may be high — funding for alarmists by governments alone is in the billions a year).  The quick reply of leading alarmist scientists is that the money is incidental.

I am generally willing to take them at their word — I find trying to look into other people’s hearts to be a hopeless exercise.  And besides, does anyone really think the folks who, say, believe in or oppose string theory are taking those positions for the money.  If I really had to discuss incentives, I would argue that prestige and wanting to belong are actually stronger motivations for alarmist scientists, as preaching doom seems to lead to fame while being a skeptic seems to lead to academic shunning.

So I have generally avoided the topic of monetary motivation of alarmists, but what am I to think when Penn State makes the case in its report on Michael Mann?  In a rather straight-forward way, they make the case that Mann is a good climate scientist because he is good at obtaining funding

This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research…

Had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his scientific conclusions…

Clearly, Dr. Mann’s reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.

This argument is OK as far as it goes, but implicitly defines a great academic as “someone who goes along with the pack.”  Note that skeptics cannot claim to get  a lot of research grants, because the alarmists control the funding.  Skeptics can’t get into peer-reviewed journals, because, as the East Anglia emails make clear, a small group of alarmist scientists are blocking their publication.  Mann’s research has been judged outstanding by his peers because he agrees with his peers.

In a large sense, Penn State’s only test of Mann’s ability is that he is currently a member in good standing of the small in-crowd that dominates climate science.  His science is good because it comes to the right conclusions.

Unlike many skeptics, I have no desire to “get” Professor Mann.  I don’t need him fired or even investigated by Penn State.  The way to refute him is to refute him, not haul him in front of tribunals.

That being said, Penn State did start and investigation and as such has some responsibility to do the thing right.  And boy was this a joke.   The most charitable thing I can say is that his work is fraught with more questionable decisions and practices and approaches than anything I have ever seen that was taken this seriously.  We could talk about it for days, but here is one example to get you thinking.

Climate Propaganda, Climate Science Process

Its Official: Climate is the First Post-Modern Physical Science

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You can find a lot of different definitions of post-modernism.  Here is one from Wikipedia, which seems appropriate because in some sense at its very core Wikipedia adopts a post-modernist approach to truth.  Post-modernism rejects objective truth, or at least man’s ability ever to identify such truth.   As applied to science, post-modernists would say that what we call scientific “truth” in in fact the results of social, cultural, and political forces within and acting on the scientific community.

Some elements of post-modernism actually provide a useful critique of science.  Its focus on biases and resulting observational blindness to certain results that falsify ones pre-conceived notions are useful caveats in a scientific process.  But the belief that a rational scientific process is not just difficult but impossible leads to all kinds of crazy conclusions.  Many in hard core postmodern circles would argue that since objective truth is impossible anyway, scientific findings should be guided by what is most socially useful. As Steven Schneider of Stanford says vis a vis climate:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

And speaking of Steven Schneider, he is coauthor of a recent study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that has really made it plain to me that climate is becoming the first post-modern physical science.  Just note the incredible approach to his study, and how much it mirrors the precepts of post-modernism:  To decide who is right and wrong in climate science between skeptics and alarmists, the study authors have … wait for it .. counted them and measured their relative influence in academic circles.  Since the authors count more alarmists than skeptics, and judge that the alarmists are more influential in academic circles, then they must be right!  After all, truth is determined by those with the most political and cultural influence, not by silly stuff like testing hypotheses against observational data.

Postscript: I think a lot of the skeptic backlash against this study is overwrought, examples here and here.  To paraphrase another climate publication, this study is “not evil, just silly.”

Climate Science Process

A Physical Scientist Looks at Dendroclimatology

10 Comments

I don’t want to make the mistake of over-interpreting fairly balanced remarks by Michael Kelly of Cambridge, nor of taking quotes out of context as daggers to throw at climatologists.  But I did find his reactions interesting as he read through some Briffa and Jones papers — they seem to match the reactions of many non-climate scientists who tend to have the same type reactions if they really read through some of the work, rather than just issuing statements of moral support without much investigations.

All that being said, here are some of his admittedly offhand reactions after reading through some of the papers.  The entire document is worthy of reading through, as linked by Bishop Hill.

There are however some more detailed qualifications:

(i) I take real exception to having simulation runs described as experiments (without at least the qualification of ‘computer’ experiments). It does a disservice to centuries of real experimentation and allows simulations output to be considered as real data. This last is a very serious matter, as it can lead to the idea that real ‘real data’ might be wrong simply because it disagrees with the models! That is turning centuries of science on its head.

(ii) The reading of the papers was made rather harder by the quality of the diagrams, and the description of the vertical axes on a number of graphs. When numbers on the vertical axis go from -2 to +2 without being explicitly labelled as percentage deviations, temperature excursions, or scaled correlation coefficients, there is potential for confusion.

(iii) I think it is easy to see how peer review within tight networks can allow new orthodoxies to appear and get established that would not happen if papers were written for and peer reviewed by a wider audience. I have seen it happen elsewhere. This finding may indeed be an important outcome of the present review….

(2) On a personal note, I chose to study the theory of condensed matter physics, as opposed to cosmology, precisely on the grounds that I could systematically control and vary the boundary conditions of my ob-ject of study as an integral part of making advances. An elegant theory which does not fit good experimental data is a bad theory. Here the starting data is patchy and noisy, and the choices made are in part aesthetic, or designed to help a conclusion. rather than neutral. This all colours my attitude to the limited value of complex simulations that cannot by exhaustively tested against ‘real’ data from independent experiments that control all but one of the variables.
(3) Up to and throughout this exercise, I have remained puzzled how the real humility of the scientists in this area, as evident in their papers, including all these here, and the talks I have heard them give, is morphed into statements of confidence at the 95% level for public consumption through the IPCC process. This does not happen in other subjects of equal importance to humanity, e.g. energy futures or environmental degradation or resource depletion. I can only think it is the ‘authority’ appropriated by the IPCC itself that is the root cause.

These questions to Briffa could have come from McIntyre:

(I) How can we be reassured about the choice of which raw data from which stations are to be selected, detrended and then included in the tree-ring data bases? Is there an algorithm that establishes the inclusion/exclusion? If I were setting out to establish the lowest possible net temperature rise over the last century is consistent with the available data, what fraction of tree-ring-data would then be included/excluded? Could I coerce the data to support a null hypothesis on global warming?

(2) In the range of papers we have reviewed, you have used a variety of statistical techniques in what is a heroic effort to get signals from noisy and patchy data. To what extent has this variety of techniques be reviewed and commented upon by the modern statistical community for their effectiveness, right use and possible weaknesses?

Climate Science Process

I’m Waiting, I’m Waiting, I’m Waiting…

45 Comments

I received this press release via email.  The title is:

Carbon Dioxide Has Played Leading Role in Dictating Global Climate Patterns

OK, so I read.

Increasingly, the Earth’s climate appears to be more connected than anyone would have imagined. El Niño, the weather pattern that originates in a patch of the equatorial Pacific, can spawn heat waves and droughts as far away as Africa.

Now, a research team led by Brown University has established that the climate in the tropics over at least the last 2.7 million years changed in lockstep with the cyclical spread and retreat of ice sheets thousands of miles away in the Northern Hemisphere. The findings appear to cement the link between the recent Ice Ages and temperature changes in tropical oceans.

Apparently, I must not understand something.  The study seems to trumpet as a huge finding that tropical ocean temperatures on Earth dropped at the same time that temperatures dropped in the upper latitudes and Earth experienced ice age glaciation.  Uh, OK.  Is it really surprising that when part of the Earth got much colder, other parts of the Earth got colder too.?  Isn’t the simplest explanation that whatever made it cold in the poles made it cold at the equator too?  Wouldn’t a solar change act this way?

The research team, including scientists from Luther College in Iowa, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and the University of Hong Kong, analyzed cores taken from the seabed at four locations in the tropical oceans: the Arabian Sea, the South China Sea, the eastern Pacific and the equatorial Atlantic Ocean.

The cores tell the story. Sedimentary cores taken from the ocean floor in four locations show that climate patterns in the tropics have mirrored Ice Age cycles for the last 2.7 million years and that carbon dioxide has played the leading role in determining global climate patterns. The researchers zeroed in on tropical ocean surface temperatures because these vast bodies, which make up roughly half of the world’s oceans, in large measure orchestrate the amount of water in the atmosphere and thus rainfall patterns worldwide, as well as the concentration of water vapor, the most prevalent greenhouse gas.

Looking at the chemical remains of tiny marine organisms that lived in the sunlit zone of the ocean, the scientists were able to extract the surface temperature for the oceans for the last 3.5 million years, well before the beginning of the Ice Ages. Beginning about 2.7 million years ago, the geologists found that tropical ocean surface temperatures dropped by 1 to 3 degrees C (1.8 to 5.4 F) during each Ice Age, when ice sheets spread in the Northern Hemisphere and significantly cooled oceans in the northern latitudes. Even more compelling, the tropics also changed when Ice Age cycles switched from roughly 41,000-year to 100,000-year intervals.

Again, so what?  What am I missing here guys? Why is this astonishing?  But the interesting part to me is that all the data is on developping a proxy for sea surface temperatures.  Don’t know if it is accurate, but it seems a good endeavor.  Fully worthwhile of the effort.

But remember the title.  What about CO2?  And through the article we keep getting teasers like this:

Based on that new link, the scientists conclude that carbon dioxide has played the lead role in dictating global climate patterns, beginning with the Ice Ages and continuing today.

And this

Candace Major of the National Science Foundation agrees: “This research certainly supports the idea of global sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide as the first order of control on global temperature patterns,” she says. “It also points to a strong sensitivity of global temperature to the levels of greenhouse gases on very long timescales, and shows that resulting climatic impacts are felt from the tropics to the poles.”

All they did was develop a tropical temperature proxy and show the tropics got colder during ice ages.  Duh.  I mean, isn’t this really just a reality check — we developed a proxy and we think its pretty good because the temperatures drop right when we think they should.   I kept waiting for the evidence that CO2 had anything to do with this.  This is all I get, and comes not from their study but a link to data from a completely different data set having nothing to do with their study:

Climate scientists have a record of carbon dioxide levels for the last 800,000 years–spanning the last seven Ice Ages–from ice cores taken in Antarctica. They have deduced that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere fell by about 30 percent during each cycle, and that most of that carbon dioxide was absorbed by high-latitude oceans such as the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. According to the new findings, this pattern began 2.7 million years ago, and the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by the oceans has intensified with each successive Ice Age. Geologists know the Ice Ages have gotten progressively colder–leading to larger ice sheets–because they have found debris on the seabed of the North Atlantic and North Pacific left by icebergs that broke from the land-bound sheets.

“It seems likely that changes in carbon dioxide were the most important reason why tropical temperatures changed, along with the water vapor feedback,” Herbert said.

What?  How does he determine this?  My sense is that we are back to the old 800-year lag / ice core issue where scientists are confusing cause and effect between temperature and CO2 levels.  I am willing to credit dropping CO2 levels (through ocean absorption) as a positive feedback effect, though I would argue that it is small just as they seem to argue that it is large.   The key, though, is that nothing in their data supports a sensitivity number for CO2 at all, just a rough possible causal relationship where even the direction of the causation is unknown.

One fatal flaw of this argument is that while people can make an argument for CO2 as an amplifier (either weak or strong), no one can explain how it might trigger the beginning of an Ice Age or warming recovery, and without this there is no way to call CO2 the main driver of these changes.  Maybe these guys have found the evidence of the trigger?

Herbert acknowledges that the team’s findings leave important questions. One is why carbon dioxide began to play a major role when the Ice Ages began 2.7 million years ago. Also left unanswered is why carbon dioxide appears to have magnified the intensity of successive Ice Ages from the beginning of the cycles to the present. The researchers do not understand why the timing of the Ice Age cycles shifted from roughly 41,000-year to 100,000-year intervals.

Oops, maybe not.  But surely they understand the mechanism

“We think we have the simplest explanation for the link between the Ice Ages and the tropics over that time and the apparent role of carbon dioxide in the intensification of Ice Ages and corresponding changes in the tropics,” said Timothy Herbert of Brown University and the lead author of the paper in Science. Herbert added, “but we don’t know why. The answer lies in the ocean, we’re pretty sure.”

Oops, maybe not.

OK, as a public service, I will create a more truthful summary of the study:

Some clever scientists discovered a way to use the remains of marine organisms in core samples to develop a proxy for ocean surface temperatures over the last 2.7 million years.  These temperature proxies seem to reality check well, dropping during exactly the periods we believe to have been ice ages.  The reconstructed temperature record is not inconsistent with theories of high climate sensitivity to CO2, which, though the scientists did not actually study the problem, they felt the need to mention to get attention and funding.

CO2 Abatement

But What About Positive Feedbacks?

8 Comments

Just what we need — in order to solve a problem greatly exaggerated by computer models that likely will prove to have little predictive ability — we are asked to adopt a “solution” whose costs are just forty cents a day per person.  That’s right — global warming averted for 40 cents a day.  And how do we know the costs will be low?  A computer model of course, from the EPA, which says the economic impact of substantially raising energy prices will be low.

Update: I found the trick.  Apparently the model gets a 50% reduction in greenhouse gasses in the US with a trivial (e.g. 25-cent per gallon of gas, 3-cent per kwh of electricity) affect on prices.  See updates to this post.  Wow, that must be a really high sensitivity of output to prices.  Where have we heard issues about overly high sensitivity assumptions in computer models before?

Climate Science Process

Scholarship at Mount Allison University

23 Comments

This came to me via email today from an email address at Mount Allison University:

Funny thing that you are going againts 99% of peer reviewed journal. It is why we do not give retards like you any place it the academic world.

I must confess to an error.  I am having a very stressful, busy time at work, and yes… though I usually ignore this stuff, I went and fed the troll.  I wrote back

Fortunately I slipped my way through Princeton and Harvard before the academic world realized I was a “retard.”  I suppose academia works differently in California — back in the day when I was back East, the correct academic response to something one did not agree with was to actually cite the offending passage as well as to muster proof of one’s position.  I suppose it does not surprise me that scholarship in California Canada is now defined as yelling “retard.”  Perhaps you could refer to a specific chart at this link so I get a better idea where my heresy is:  http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2010/01/catastrophe-denied-the-science-of-the-skeptics-position.html

Warren Meyer

Update:  Sorry, of course the University is in Canada, not California.  I love the name – one wonders if it is named for a local landmark or an annual event.

Warming Forecasts

Computer Model Fail

8 Comments

From the New Scientist:

What’s special about this latest dip is that the sun is having trouble starting the next solar cycle. The sun began to calm down in late 2007, so no one expected many sunspots in 2008. But computer models predicted that when the spots did return, they would do so in force. Hathaway was reported as thinking the next solar cycle would be a “doozy”: more sunspots, more solar storms and more energy blasted into space. Others predicted that it would be the most active solar cycle on record. The trouble was, no one told the sun.

The first sign that the prediction was wrong came when 2008 turned out to be even calmer than expected. That year, the sun was spot-free 73 per cent of the time, an extreme dip even for a solar minimum. Only the minimum of 1913 was more pronounced, with 85 per cent of that year clear.

As 2009 arrived, solar physicists looked for some action. They didn’t get it. The sun continued to languish until mid-December, when the largest group of sunspots to emerge for several years appeared. Finally, a return to normal? Not really.

Even with the solar cycle finally under way again, the number of sunspots has so far been well below expectations. Something appears to have changed inside the sun, something the models did not predict. But what?

Of course, Anthony Watt has been pointing this out for over two years, even pointing to a discontinuity in the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index as one sign.

The people who model the sun, and failed, are not bad people.  It is an excercise worth attempting.  It turns out we just don’t know enough about the sun to accurately model its behavior.  Models are only as good as our understanding of the natural processes.  Something to think about with climate models.

Uncategorized

Defending Science, Not Global Warming Science Per Se

6 Comments

This quote from an upcoming paper by Mike Hulme has been making the blog rounds of late:

Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields.

I have not really written on this statement because its such old news.  This has been known for years, just not broadly reported.  So its good that this is getting more attention, but this is one reason I have not been blogging much on this site lately — while I am happy that things skeptics have known for years are finally reaching more popular media, I am not that interested in reporting on every such “revelation.”  “World is round, story at 11” does not really get me that excited.

However, I did want to answer one question I get a lot from audiences when I speak about the whole consensus thing.  Because many climate scientists and scientists in other fields and other academics do pile on and sign letters and petitions in support of the catastrophic global warming hypothesis.  People ask me how I can be right when there are so many showing support for the opposite position.

What I tell them is that these folks are not really showing support for the catastrophic global warming position in the sense that they have studied and reviewed the science in depth and found it compelling.  What they are really doing when they make these statements or sign letters is showing support for science itself.  The irony is they are doing just the opposite, but let me explain.

I was not a big fan of George W. Bush.  But universities absolutely, almost to a person, hated him with a crazy-deep passion.  They became convinced (right or wrong) that he was the leader of a Christian fundamental effort to subvert all science in favor of religious orthodoxy.  The leaders of the catastrophic global warming movement have been very successful in feeding off this passion, and portraying opposition to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory as part and parcel of this religious fundamentalist attack on all science.  They have successfully linked, in the minds of academics and many of the public, that disagreeing with James Hansen or critiquing the Hockey stick is the equivalent of being anti-science.

So when some biology professor at Berkely signs a statement in support of catastrophic global warming theory, it does not mean that she has looked at the strong positive feedback assumptions in climate models and found them reasonable.  It means she believes herself to be supporting science against the medieval barbarians at the gate.

The irony is that in fact they are doing the opposite.  In trying to oppose religious orthodoxy they have in fact supported scientists who treat their pet theory like a religious orthodoxy, and all opposition to it as heresy.   And in trying to support science, they have supported folks who have broken many of the most fundamental rules of modern science, including the avoidance of replication, the hiding of results and data, and corruption of the peer review process.

This may be why I underestimated the impact of the CRU email release.  In retrospect, I can imagine all those scientists that used to sign these petitions looking at what the CRU emails and thinking, “this is what I have defended as true science?”

Climate Science Process

A Lot of IPCC Authors Will Be Familiar With This Tactic

48 Comments

Claiming “scientific consensus” and “peer reveiw” for findings that have neither

The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium — something they actually oppose.

The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.

Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.

“None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report,” oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. “What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation.”

Salazar apologized to those experts Thursday.

Skeptic Summaries

My Interview on Climate with Esquire Middle East

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I received an email-based interview request on climate a while back from Esquire Middle East.  I have decided to include my whole response below.  The questions they ask are nearly as informative as anything I say, as they betray that the editors of the publication have pretty much bought into not only global warming alarmism, but all the memes alarmists use to discredit skeptics.  Its pretty clear all they know about the skeptic’s position is what they hear from alarmists about skeptics.  Anyway, I responded to this from a hotel room in Kentucky and didn’t give it my best but I think it may be interesting to you.  The questions are in bold, my answers in normal font.

Do you believe that global warming and climate change are a grave problem to the world at the moment ?

IF NO

What gives you reason to believe that global warming and climate change are not really happening?

I don’t deny they are happening, and neither do any other science-based skeptics.  Alarmists like to tell the public that skeptics are taking these positions, in order to discredit them.  The climate is always changing without any help from man — a good example is the drying up of North Africa over the last centuries.  The period from 1600-1800 was among the coldest in the last 5000 years, so it is natural we would see warming in recovery from this.

Is there any scientific evidence to support that global warming and climate change is not really that harmful

I wrote a 90-minute presentation on this so it is hard to be brief.  But here are a couple of thoughts1.  I don’t deny greenhouse gas theory, that man’s CO2 can cause some incremental warming.  The greenhouse gas theory has to be real, or the world would be much colder right now.  No, what I deny is the catastrophe, that temperatures a hundred years hence will be five or ten degrees Celsius higher due to man’s co2

Interestingly, I think most everyone on the scientific end of the debate agrees that the direct warming from man’s Co2 acting alone will be relatively modest – on the order of a degree Celsius by the year 2100 according to the IPCC.  Yeah, I know this seems oddly low — you never hear of global warming numbers as low as 1 degree — but it is actually a second theory, independent of greenhouse gas theory, that drives most of the warming.  This second theory is that the climate is dominated by strong positive feedbacks that  multiply the warming from CO2 many fold, and increase a modest 1 degree C of warming from man’s CO2 to catastrophic levels of 5 or even 10 degrees.

The example I use is to think of climate as a car.  Co2 from man provides only a nudge to the car.  The catastrophe comes from a second theory that the car (representing the climate) is perched precariously on the top of a hill with its brakes off, and a nudge from CO2 will start it rolling downhill until it crashes at the bottom.

When people say the science is settled, they generally mean greenhouse gas theory.  But that means only the nudge is settled.  What is far from settled is the second theory of strong net positive feedback in the climate, ie the theory the climate is perched on top of a hill.  It is unusual for long-term stable but chaotic systems to be dominated by such strong positive feedbacks.  In fact, only the most severe contortions allow scientists to claim their high-sensitivity models of catastrophic warming are consistent with the relatively modest warming of the past century.

2.  The amount of unusual climate change we are seeing is GROSSLY exaggerated.  We seem to be suffering under a massive case of observer bias in assessing any current effects of climate change.  Extreme events, which have always existed, are used by both sides of the debate as supposed proof of long term global trends.  But there is little useful we can learn about trends at the tails of the distribution, and it turns out that the means of key weather events in the US, from droughts to wet weather to tornadoes to hurricanes, show no meaningful trends.

We have this incredible hubris that by watching a chaotic system for about 20 years, we fully understand it. But climate has 30-year cycles, 200 year cycles, 1000-year cycles, etc.  We don’t even know what is normal, so how can we say we are seeing things that are abnormal.  We have seen a lot of melting sea ice in the Arctic, but we think we may have seen as much in the 1930’s, but we didn’t have satellites to watch the ice.  And Antarctic Sea ice has been higher than normal while Arctic has been below normal.

Hurricanes are another great example.  Al Gore swore that Hurricane Katrina was man-made, but it turns out there is actually a declining worldwide trend in hurricane and cyclone activity and energy, so much so that we hit the lowest level in 2009 since we started measuring by satellite 30 years ago.

Or take sea level rise.  Sea levels are rising today and glaciers are shrinking.  Sea levels are rising because they were rising in 1950 and in 1920 and in 1880 and in 1850.  Sea levels have been steadily rising 1-3mm a year since about 1820 and the end of the little ice age.  Ditto glacier retreat, which began around 1800 and has continued steadily to today, though the pace of retreat has slowed of late.

Imagine we wanted to look at customer visitation at a local restaurant that just closed after 60 years in business.  If we watched for only a few hours, we might miss the huge variability of the crowds from early morning through each mealtime rush.  Watch only for a day, and we might miss the seasonal variation, as vacationers pack the restaurant in March.  Watch for just a year, and we might have missed the long, slow decline in visitation that eventually led to the restaurant closing.  In climate, we are trying to decide if there is a long term decline at the restaurant after watching for the equivalent of only a few hours.

The reporting on whether manmade climate change is already happening is just awful.  We see something happen that we can’t remember happening in the last 20 years and declare it to be “abnormal” and therefore “manmade.”  Its absurd, and amazing to me that we skeptics are called anti-scientific when the science being practiced is so awful.  The problem is that for academics, who are always scrambling for funds, climate change has become the best source of money.  So you can’t just say you are studying acne, you have to say you are studying the effect of manmade climate change on acne.  Essentially, we have told the academic world that they can get much more money for their work if they claim to see climate change.  So is it any surprise they find it under every rock?

Are most scientists wrong?

I find judging science by counting scientists to be unproductive, so I have no idea.  I will say that a lot of folks who sign petitions in support of the alarmist position have not really looked carefully at the science, they are merely showing support because they have been told skeptics are a bunch of religious fundamentalist anti-science types, so they want to express their support for science.  It is ironic, as we found in the Climategate emails, that in fact they are supporting bad science, a small core group of scientists who have resisted normal scientific process of sharing data and replication

For some reason, we love to scare ourselves.  Or, more likely, many people, particularly younger folks, like to feel that there is some way they can save the world, to deal with their own feelings of insignificance.  And one can’t save the world unless it is in crisis.  Every generation has these crises, and they are almost always overblown.  Look at Paul Ehrlich — he has been wrong about 20 times.  He said a billion people would die of starvation by 1980.  He is just about never right, but people still lap up every thing he says.  Because folks like him give people a sense of mission.  And when you demonstrate to them that there is no crisis, they are not relieved (as one would expect someone to be when they find a crisis does not exist) — they are angry that you took their mission away from them.

What do you think is causing temperature changes on a scale never seen before?

Wow, you really are brainwashed.  You have an assumption that we are seeing temperature changes on a scale never seen before, and so skeptics must start from this.  But in fact the runup in temperatures from 1978-1998 that is the main “proof” of global warming is similar in scale and slope and duration to at least two other temperature increases between 1850 and 1950 which most definitely were not of anthropogenic origins.  See here:   http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2010/03/oh-maybe-ocean-occilations-are-important.html.  There are many issues with which reasonable people can disagree, but your contention about temperature increases being unprecedented is simply wrong and accepted as wrong by about everyone.

What did you think to the results of Copenhagen?

*shrug*  Copenhagen had little to do with climate and was much about lesser developed nations trying to extract money from wealthier nations.  Climate was just a pretext — do you really think Robert Mugabe or Hugo Chavez care about climate change?

Why do governments seem so concerned with the issue?

The fear of man-made catastrophic climate change gives government officials their best leverage since the repudiation of communism to substantially increase the power of themselves and their government.

If fossil fuels will run out anyway, surely we should move to find alternatives. Why not now?

You are welcome to.  Entrepreneurs around the world have been trying to do so for decades.  Wealth beyond measure is there for the person or company who is able to do it.  What are you going to do to speed it up if such a huge incentive already exists?  The government sometimes feels like it can just have its way and wish things into being.  It never works.If the technology is not ready, no amount of government prodding or mandating will make it ready.  All we will get is more wasted spending and more dead-end technology investments and more public funds poured into the hands of the politically connected.  Why hurry if we are not ready?  There are still fossil fuels for decades.  Why increase the costs to every consumer to hurry this transition to no purpose?

There are perhaps a billion people in the world, particularly in Asia, on the verge of emerging from poverty.  They are only able to do so by burning every fossil fuel they can get their hands on.  The alternatives that exist today are rich people’s toys, expensive sources of power that we can afford because they ease our guilt somehow.  The poor don’t have this luxury.

Even if it is not guaranteed that manmade emissions are to blame, wouldn’t it be wise to act anyway? It’s a hell of a gamble to our children’s future.

Should we spend a trillion dollars on space lasers in case of an alien invasion of Earth? Why not, its a hell of a gamble to our children’s future.  We can’t go pre-emptively fix every low-probability problem just because someone claims it might be a catastrophe.  Why fix a hypothetical environmental problem when there are 10 other real ones impacting people today that we are ignoring.

The statement you are making only makes sense if the transition if free or low cost.  But substantially eliminating fossil fuel use is tremendously expensive.  In fact, it is more expensive at this point with current technology than anything the world has ever done.  Folks who claim the costs are low are either ignorant or lying.  Every major economy will see trillions of dollars of lost output.  But forget the rich nations.  Remember the billion people emerging from poverty.  Strong world action will essentially consign these people to stay in poverty.  Do you want your kids 1 degree cooler at the cost of putting a billion people into poverty?  It is not the simple question you make it out to be.

Don’t we have a duty to protect or planet for future generations?(i.e. save it from deforestation, pollution etc)

Sure, but as I stated above, we have all kinds of duties to future generations, and not all of them have to do with the environment.  But I would argue that the current obsession with small changes to trace levels of CO2 in the atmosphere has in fact gutted the environmental movement.  Nothing else is getting done.  Take deforestation.  My personal interest is in protecting wilderness, and my charity of choice is land trusts that preserve the Amazon.  But do you know the #1 cause of deforestation in the Amazon over the last decade?  It was the Brazilian ethanol program, which is supposed to be fighting CO2, but now has been shown to do little or nothing for CO2 and it is incentivizing farmers to clear the Amazon to plant more switchgrass and other ethanol crops.  Ditto in the US, where ethanol programs are raising food prices and adding to deforestationI would argue that CO2 is not even in the top 10 worst environmental problems in the world.  Take clean water in Africa, which I do consider a top 10 problem.  The only way Africans are going to get clean water is from using cheap energy to pump and treat water, cheap energy whose only really realistic source is from fossil fuels.

My prediction– 10-20 years from now, environmentalists are going to look back on the current global warming hysteria as the worst thing ever to happened to the environmental movement.
Further comments

Again, this is very off the cuff.  I really delve into the science here:  http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2010/01/catastrophe-denied-the-science-of-the-skeptics-position.html

SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
OK, so every one of these questions are probing – they are hitting at perceived weaknesses in the skeptic’s position.  Fine, it is good when the media is critical.  But compare the questions above to the total softballs lobbed at alarmists.

IF YES

How bad is climate change at the moment?
What did you think to the results of Copenhagen?
Is it increasing at an uncontrollable rate? Or is there still a chance to reduce climate change and alter its predicted course of events?
Do you have any comments on the recent e-mail leak scandal that was publicized?
What do you think about the rising levels of climate change skepticism?
How could and/or will climate change or similarly global warming affect the Middle East region in particular the Arabian peninsula?
What about other vulnerable countries?
What can the average citizen do more or less to help reduce climate change and its impact?
What do you predict will happen to major cities in the world if the problem of global warming is not addressed immediately?
How will an increase in global warming change the earth’s natural weather activities i.e. how will people and animals be affected, ecosystems, the weather….
How can we move forward on this issue?
Are you confident we can find a solution?
What are the chances of a new technology saving us? (for example, carbon capture)
Is carbon trading effectively passing the buck? Does it actually help

Only one is arguably critical — the one about the CRU emails — and look at the softball way in which it is asked.  The journalists here make no secret of which side they are one.