Manmade Climate Change Discussion

[Methuselah]

Besides the cryptic nonsense are you implying that you'll only accept records which show record breaking warmth and anything else regardless of the source you'll ignore, because if you are you've lost the argument and no matter what spin and agenda you attach to your ramblings, they are and will remain irrelevant.

So your implying we only take account of the warm records and any cold ones are weather. Cuckoo, Cuckoo!!

Eh? Surely you know what a 'ratio' is?

[Methuselah]

Indeed, but that's irrelevant Pete as if we are seeing cold records broken and proclaiming that's  weather then regardless of ratios the same has to imply for warm records. Talk about making the rules up as you go along, first the missing heat content, now we can only look at warm records because there are more of them, for now. What happens if/when those records are equal, or heaven forbid the cold ones outnumber the warm ones. do we move the goalpost again or maybe rebrand global warming, climate change, again?

No, it's not irrelevant at all; it's the overall ratio that interests me, not the individual records taken in isolation...

[Crepuscular Ray]

GW, are you saying we should ignore any data that doesn't back a warming trend, because if you are then we are heading into a dangerous place which I'm sure most proponents of AGW won't agree with?

No, he's not. He's saying perhaps you should investigate to see whether there is any other record of bats dying in such numbers from excessive heat in earlier years. I really can't see how you managed to misread that into his post.

 

Plus, what happened to the rules about sceptics not posting in the warmy thread?

[knocker]

http://forum.netweather.tv/topic/76448-scepticism-of-man-made-climate-change/page-48#entry2893239

 

Or of course one could look at the surface Global highlights.

 

• [*]

The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for November 2013 was record highest for the 134-year period of record, at 0.78°C (1.40°F) above the 20^th century average of 12.9°C (55.2°F). [*]The global land surface temperature was 1.43°C (2.57°F) above the 20^th century average of 5.9°C (42.6°F), the second highest for November on record, behind 2010. For the global oceans, the November average sea surface temperature was 0.54°C (0.97°F) above the 20^th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F), tying with 2009 as the third highest for November. [*]The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the September–November period was 0.68°C (1.22°F) above the 20^th century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F), the second warmest such period on record, behind only 2005. [*]The September–November worldwide land surface temperature was 1.08°C (1.94°F) above the 20^th century average, the third warmest such period on record. The global ocean surface temperature for the same period was 0.52°C (0.94°F) above the 20^th century average, tying with 2009 and 2012 as the fourth warmest September–November on record. [*]The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the year-to-date (January–November) was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20^th century average of 14.0°C (57.2°F), tying with 2002 as the fourth warmest such period on record.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2013/11

[Gray-Wolf]

No, he's not. He's saying perhaps you should investigate to see whether there is any other record of bats dying in such numbers from excessive heat in earlier years. I really can't see how you managed to misread that into his post.

 

Plus, what happened to the rules about sceptics not posting in the warmy thread?

 

Thanks C.R.! I didn't think it was that difficult to understand so it's nice to see positive recognition of what I asked for....... sadly their news-hound has failed in finding them a comparable 'heat stroke event so far ( maybe he's not so much a 'news-hound' as a lapdog lapping up info fed to him by the misleader sites?).

 

What happens when 2014's "large Nino" pushes temps up beyond 98's epic high? ( 2010's 'short nino' nearly managed to?).

 

15yrs of being able to draw downhill line from it's 'Super Nino' peak will be over with the first graph anyone posts showing 98' going uphill to 2014 (LOL)

 

Should we then find the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation going into it's warm ocean surface phase ( the 'step change' scientists were talking about in the late 70's early 80's?) we may find global temps do not return to the pre Nino values esp. if ,as some commentators wonder, the nino throws the PDO back positive too?

 

All this is academic though, we know that global natural forcings will flip back positive sooner rather than later and that the Arctic is now enabling the planet to gain , and hold, more energy than ever before. At some point warming, at past rates of change ( or more?), will resume and we will be forced to accept the scale of change we could have already been fighting to mitigate.

 

There will be some vexed folk then asking tough questions of the paid misleaders then I can tell you! I wonder how their faithful will deal with that turn in fortunes?

[Gray-Wolf]

The warmies are now claiming we should only use warm weather events as evidence and ignore cold ones as we now have to look at the ratios. Lol, so we now have missing heat content that remains AWOL and now we can only accept weather events that support the warming agenda. Stop the world I want to get off as the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum.

 

Has anyone in here been making claims that might have caused such a misunderstanding? I have had a quick look back and cannot see any so I'm wondering if anyone has had posts removed?

 

I did note Pete mentioning the increasing rate we see 'warm weather records' being set over the past few decades (compared to the rate of 'cold weather' ones?) could that be the source of the confusion? Well I don't think so as this is 'common knowledge' and beyond contention.

 

So I now wonder why we would focus on the area of the records that do not show this rate of increase? Surely the interest lies in the portion of the data that is acting oddly? Isn't that how we go about discovering things?

 

Maybe we've hit on why the other place is so sadly out of touch with reality? If they 'ignore' the increasing trends ( like record high temp records, extreme weather events, deep ocean temps, sea ice loss in the Arctic, record drought conditions in the U.S. SW,record Australian year etc,etc) then we may well be left wondering what all the fuss is about?

Edited January 12, 2014 by Gray-Wolf

[BornFromTheVoid]

An interesting piece on how the "scientists were predicting global cooling in the 70s" meme came to be.

 

How the "Global Cooling" Story Came to Be

Nine paragraphs, written for Newsweek in 1975, continue to trump 40 years of climate science. Its a record that has its author amazed

 

BOSTON – Temperatures have plunged to record lows on the East Coast, and once again Peter Gwynne is being heralded as a journalist ahead of his time. By some.

Gwynne was the science editor of Newsweek 39 years ago when he pulled together some interviews from scientists and wrote a nine-paragraph story about how the planet was getting cooler.

Ever since, Gwynne's "global cooling" story – and a similar Time Magazine piece – have been brandished gleefully by those who say it shows global warming is not happening, or at least that scientists – and often journalists – don't know what they are talking about.

Fox News loves to cite it. So does Rush Limbaugh. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has quoted the story on the Senate floor.

Gwynne, now 72, is a bit chagrinned that from a long career of distinguished science and technology reporting, he is most remembered for this one story.

 

The rest in here http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be

[knocker]

 Stuff on Smoothing from Tamino

 

 

In the last post we looked at smoothing time series by focusing mainly, or exclusively, on local data, i.e., data which are nearby (in time) to the moment at which we’re trying to estimate the smooth. This is usually accomplished by having an observation window or weighting function which is centered at the moment of estimation, and we let this window “slide†through time to generate smoothed estimates at all times. We even showed that fitting a polynomial or a Fourier series globally (i.e. to all the data at once) gives results which are, for times not near the edges of the observation window, nearly the same.

But we also identified a problem with local fits, that if we insist the “smoothing window†be entirely (or even mostly) within the “observation window†(which does after all seem like a good idea) then, unlike with global fits, we don’t get higher uncertainty near the beginning and end of the observation window — because we don’t get any estimate at all. We lose a slice of time near the start, and near the end. We saw this with the simplest local smooth (the “moving averageâ€), and it holds for others as well.

 

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/smooth-3/

Edited January 12, 2014 by knocker

[Methuselah]

I've just relocated 7 posts into the sceptics' thread. Please stick to the rules...

[knocker]

Caerbannog666

 

I don't know who this guy is but he's swopped some interesting tweets with Mike Mann and he's upset Tony Watts so he must be okay.

 

Tony Watts says that I'm this guy. I deeply resemble that. My revenge: the GHCN Virtual Machine, http://tinyurl.com/NASA-HANSEN4  - background shows rural data results.

Southern California · wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/13/fri…

 

 

Not difficult at all for a competent programmer/analyst to prove that CRUTEM is *not* broken.

That's what prompted me to try it myself. People who have attacked NASA/NOAA/CRU global temp work should be ashamed.

 

 

crunched CRU3&4, GHCN2&3 via EZ program I wrote, got similar results 4 all: https://imageshack.com/i/jjghcnandcruj

 

https://twitter.com/caerbannog666

[knocker]

A truly sad day

 

Retirement of a Dr* Salesman

 

After a hard day down the lint mines realigning brackets, its nice to turn to the comic section and such greats as----------------

[knocker]

Is the climate getting more extreme?

 

This analysis shows that warming up the world makes things more stable - at least in the short time frames of the temperature record.

 

I think there may well be a certain amount of truth in this. A combination of intensity and frequency equates to more stability. Is this what this is saying?

 

 

Something that, unlike the cold wave, is a truly unprecedented is the dry spell in California and Oregon, which is causing unprecedented winter wildfires in Northern California." Part of the reason that this week's cold wave did not set any all-time or monthly cold records is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so in a warming climate. As Andrew Freedman of Climate Central wrote in a blog post yesterday, "While the cold temperatures have been unusual and even deadly, climate data shows that intense cold such as this event is now occurring far less frequently in the continental U.S. than it used to. This is largely related to winter warming trends due to man-made global warming and natural climate variability." For example, in Detroit during the 1970s, there were an average of 7.9 nights with temperatures below zero. But this decade, that number has been closer to two nights.

[VillagePlank]

Well, the impetus was really reading about extreme weather events on climate fora.

 

It *is* relevant since climate is the average of weather, but we, including me, often attribute a weather extreme to a change in climate one way or the other. My results show that climate variabilty - natural variability, if you like - is getting slimmer. This surprised me, since I'd often thought that warmer climate means more extreme weather feeding back into the climate signal - this isn't the case (weather extremes are not extreme enough to overide either natural variability nor the underlying climate signal, unless there are countless cold records not reported) so I've now changed my opinion. Also, of note, is that ever increasing heat records are an artefact of the mathematical underlying warming trend, not some physical process that has changed (such as Arctic Ice decline) and this subsequently questions, although I did not make it explicit, the rampant physical feedforwards (amplifications) implicit in climate modelling.

Edited January 13, 2014 by Sparkicle

[VillagePlank]

Maybe we've hit on why the other place is so sadly out of touch with reality? If they 'ignore' the increasing trends ( like record high temp records, extreme weather events, deep ocean temps, sea ice loss in the Arctic, record drought conditions in the U.S. SW,record Australian year etc,etc) then we may well be left wondering what all the fuss is about?

 

Empirical evidence shows the opposite to be true.

 

Increasing weather extremes (if that's what's going on) give the climate more stability. Increasing weather heat records also have not affected the climate record insomuch that they are not sufficiently extreme away from the mean that they affect it overall - if they are, then there are sufficiently amount of cold records to offset the heat records: neither of these can be true since the running standard deviation is falling. If it were stable, but high, we'd see sufficient cold records offsetting the hot records. This is not observed.

 

See my post, other thread.

Edited January 13, 2014 by Sparkicle

[knocker]

Regarding climate modelling what is your take on Tamino's posts on smoothing, #1484, as this is way outside my area of expertise. Bearing in mind of course you are not a fan of Tamino.

[VillagePlank]

Regarding climate modelling what is your take on Tamino's posts on smoothing, #1484, as this is way outside my area of expertise. Bearing in mind of course you are not a fan of Tamino.

 

Will look at it soon. Up to my eyeballs at the moment! (incidentally, I detest Mr Watts much more!!)

Edited January 13, 2014 by Sparkicle

[knocker]

Will look at it soon. Up to my eyeballs at the moment! (incidentally, I detest Mr Watts much more!!)

 

Ah, we are singing from the same hymn sheet.

[Gray-Wolf]

Am I getting this straight here? The background temp has risen so the 'extreme' ,as defined by looking at past experience in cooler global times, is not that 'extreme' now we are in warmer global times?

 

so this then makes 'cold extremes' harder to come by if the 'start point', for any given cold event, comes from a position of raised for temps? ( if we saw a 30c drop in temps when the 'start point was 10c then the same 'event' milds out if the start point is 20c?)

 

Basically you appear to be saying that as global temps rise this provides a cushion for warm 'extremes' ( and slowly removes any chance of 'old' cold extremes being broken as regular as used to occur before we warmed?) but does not stop the old 'max temp.' records from falling?

 

EDIT: Maybe it is a case for needing to use other measures to chart the change in 'weather events' if 'averages' are not highlighting the change?

Edited January 13, 2014 by Gray-Wolf

[VillagePlank]

Am I getting this straight here? The background temp has risen so the 'extreme' ,as defined by looking at past experience in cooler global times, is not that 'extreme' now we are in warmer global times?

 

so this then makes 'cold extremes' harder to come by if the 'start point', for any given cold event, comes from a position of raised for temps? ( if we saw a 30c drop in temps when the 'start point was 10c then the same 'event' milds out if the start point is 20c?)

 

Basically you appear to be saying that as global temps rise this provides a cushion for warm 'extremes' ( and slowly removes any chance of 'old' cold extremes being broken as regular as used to occur before we warmed?) but does not stop the old 'max temp.' records from falling?

 

EDIT: Maybe it is a case for needing to use other measures to chart the change in 'weather events' if 'averages' are not highlighting the change?

 

Not really. No.

 

The quantity of extreme heat events is to be expected in a warming climate. Indeed, I would go as far to say that the quantity of such events is a better indicator of trend than the normal linear regression model. If the frequency of events is increasing the temperature is increasing. This we know, but the reasoning behind (some commentators) that this is because of a fundamental change in the biosphere rather than just a mathematical artefact of an increasing trend is thoroughly refuted. My reasoning behind this is clear to see on the other thread.

 

However, we know the temperature by and large is increasing. So we *expect* more heat records than cold records to be broken. If these heat records are increasing above the normal underlying trend we should be able to see this as an increase in the running standard deviation all other things being equal. This is not observed. There is no runaway 'OMG' there is such a sufficient quantity of heat records being broken that we should all panic. It just isn't there.

 

Furthermore: the difference between the strongest outliers of either hot or cold is reducing and is reducing throughout the entire climate temperature series, so whilst records are being broken they are being broken by less than they have been in the past, leading to the suggestion that a warming trend leads to a more stable climate. I considered that the standard deviation might be reducing because more heat records than cold records are being broken thus reducing the spread of values. However, least squares cuts the average between them ensuring that a near identical number of cold records are considered with hot records. The fact is true - the variability of the climate is reducing: well, at least, the extremeties of the variability is.

 

Think about it as measuring the magnitude of the records being broken, not that they are or they are not.

Edited January 13, 2014 by Sparkicle

[VillagePlank]

For those who don't visit the other thread. Very interesting relationship between mean 30 year temperatures and 30 yr standard deviations

 

http://forum.netweather.tv/topic/76448-scepticism-of-man-made-climate-change/?p=2894561

 

Worth a read: any ideas??

[Gray-Wolf]

I'm not quite sold yet Sparks? It appears that 'past extreme events' come as the result of extreme natural forcing events? many of the records set appear to be over 80 years previous with only a few challenging more recent adjustments to the 'highest max recorded' ?

 

It appears that we have done the bulk of our warming since the 70's and so have quite a way to go before the 'extreme natural events' have enough time to show up in the records ( or are you saying that this more 'stable climate' has over ridden these natural events??).

 

In the late 70's some scientist were saying we were undergoing a 'state change' in our climate and , as such, maybe we should wait until the 2070's to see if we see an increase in the 'extremes' in line with how 'extreme' the extremes used to appear?

 

When we enter our next 'Naturally augmented' warming spurt ( the next 'state change'?) we may well see this helping hand from nature push records to such extremes?

 

The past decades have not seen such extreme natural pushes in a warm direction, due to unsympathetic natural set ups ( barring the 98' super nino of course!), so I'd suggest we wait until we see a conflagration of Natural warm forcings ,aiding in the 'records ' being set, before we put this one to bed?

 

As an aside it might be intersting to see just how the Arctic 'extreme heat' records have reacted over the past 30yrs?

[BornFromTheVoid]

Empirical evidence shows the opposite to be true.

 

Increasing weather extremes (if that's what's going on) give the climate more stability. Increasing weather heat records also have not affected the climate record insomuch that they are not sufficiently extreme away from the mean that they affect it overall - if they are, then there are sufficiently amount of cold records to offset the heat records: neither of these can be true since the running standard deviation is falling. If it were stable, but high, we'd see sufficient cold records offsetting the hot records. This is not observed.

 

See my post, other thread.

 

Well, from my limited understanding, does your post not attempt to show that monthly temperature variability globally is becoming, well, less variable? (I've shown similar in posts about the CET).

 

Does that mean less extreme though? I think a more in depth analysis (of which I'm incapable) on the monthly temperatures ranking against the probability of them being, say, in the top or bottom 5% on record, might be useful in this regard? Or similar with a statistically significant set of regional temperature records?

 

There's also tropical storms, precipitation, tornadoes, winds, etc, at various timescales to consider.

 

How does your last graph look using your second derivative method, rather than the linear trend? 

 

Finally, you start out from the basis of:

As is often asserted by a vast army of commentators, a warmer climate means more extreme weather

 

And then finish with the conclusion:

Empirical evidence only shows that a warming climate makes the climate more stable.

 

Climate and weather, as you well know, are different! Using the 30 year mean standard deviation is a measure of climate, not weather. So you may have shown less climate variability about a high order polynomial trend, but that says little about the weather imo.

[VillagePlank]

I am not trying to sell anything to anybody. My methods are clear, my analysis is clear, and my conclusions apparently follow. I could be wrong - and I'd be delighted to be shown how. Thanks.

[VillagePlank]

Well, from my limited understanding, does your post not attempt to show that monthly temperature variability globally is becoming, well, less variable? (I've shown similar in posts about the CET).

 

Does that mean less extreme though? I think a more in depth analysis (of which I'm incapable) on the monthly temperatures ranking against the probability of them being, say, in the top or bottom 5% on record, might be useful in this regard? Or similar with a statistically significant set of regional temperature records?

 

There's also tropical storms, precipitation, tornadoes, winds, etc, at various timescales to consider.

 

How does your last graph look using your second derivative method, rather than the linear trend? 

 

Finally, you start out from the basis of:

As is often asserted by a vast army of commentators, a warmer climate means more extreme weather

 

And then finish with the conclusion:

Empirical evidence only shows that a warming climate makes the climate more stable.

 

Climate and weather, as you well know, are different! Using the 30 year mean standard deviation is a measure of climate, not weather. So you may have shown less climate variability about a high order polynomial trend, but that says little about the weather imo.

 

It's annual temperature anomalies. Sorry for not making that clear. The point I was trying to make (unsuccessfully, apparently) is that rising extremes in weather should be visible in the climate 30 year standard deviation. They aren't - for whatever reason that might be, I just don't know.

 

Last graph with mean temperature anomalies is interesting though - certainly didn't expect to see that one!

Edited January 13, 2014 by Sparkicle

[BornFromTheVoid]

It's annual temperature anomalies. Sorry for not making that clear. The point I was trying to make (unsuccessfully, apparently) is that rising extremes in weather should be visible in the climate 30 year standard deviation. They aren't.

 

Oh, sorry. Presumption is the mother of all .... well, I think we know that phrase!

Still, could you try the analysis with monthly data? I also don't see how you've analysed weather or extremes, just climate variability. Which I agree, is becoming less variable.