So you aren’t a scientist. Simple enough. I do read with interest your arguments. Gotta link for “communications rising”? I’d like to read that.
Actually, I thought I had heard that the RSS group did not always find their interactions with Spencer and Christy to be so smooth. I would also wonder whether they ever demanded that Spencer and Christy release their entire computer code. Perhaps they actually behaved in a more civil manner and thus got a more civil response.
Furthermore, your statement about what Mann released of his work using Federal Funds is a complete red herring since I know you know very well that the agency that provided those funds, the National Science Foundation, told M&M in no uncertain terms that what Mann had released should be perfectly adequate for their purposes and what they were asking for was Mann’s intellectual property that he was not required to release. (FYI, eventually, sometime after the Congressional witchhunt was initiated, Mann did release his code even though there was no requirement that he do so.)
aptronym, as always, your posts are interesting. To review the bidding, I had written:
The climate is a driven, chaotic, resonant, constructal, optimally turbulent, tera-watt scale planetary heat engine.
You replied:
*And yet, the direction and magnitude of the greenhouse effect can be derived from a single equation! *
When I asked which equation you replied.
Since the blackbody temperature of the Earth is (approximately) the temperature the Earth would have with no atmosphere and thus no greenhouse effect, I’m not seeing what Stefan-Bolzman has to do with the almost unimaginable complexity of the climate, which has both an atmosphere and a greenhouse effect.
The big dog in this one is the clouds. This is because of all the processes in the climate system, only the clouds have the power to change the amount of incoming solar energy at the surface by a nearly instantaneous kilowatt per square metre. On the equator where I live, on a sunny clear day, there’s well over a kilowatt per square metre of incoming solar energy. But let a thick cloud roll over, and most of that kilowatt plus is either reflected back to space or absorbed in the cloud, in both cases greatly reducing what hits the surface. There is no other climate forcing with that great an effect. The albedo is a huge forcing.
A 1% change in the albedo has a change in forcing roughly equivalent to that postulated for a doubling in CO2. If the albedo changed by 3%, it would be more change than that postulated by the IPCC in their worst nightmare. That’s why I say clouds are the big dog on the block.
Finally, you say “we know how large CO[sub]2[/sub] is as a factor”. Unfortunately, there are not one but two unknowns in that statement. First, although everyone uses 3.7 W/m2 as the forcing from a CO2 doubling, this number comes from the very early 1988 climate model of James Hansen … which means we don’t “know” that number in the same sense that we “know” the force of gravity. One we can measure. The other is an educated guess.
Second, the effect of CO2 depends on how sensitive the climate is to CO2 forcing. Again, we don’t “know” this number the way we “know” the average distance to the moon. Because the climate sensitivity to CO2 is a model result, we cannot “know” it in the common sense of the word, as something that we can measure. It also is an educated guess.
So no, we can’t be sure of the size of the effect of CO2. But whatever it is, it is small … because if not, if it were large, by now we would have been able to prove the assumed connection between CO2 and temperature. The fact that we have not been able to do so, despite years of study and decades of data, indicates that we are not dealing with a “large” effect.
My best to you,
w.
I agree…And, indeed that was my point. However, my point is that this is true not only when you are looking at the pre-2000 data but also when you are looking at the post-2000 data. You seem to be very accepting of deviations pre-2000 but then get very freaked out by any short-term variability post-2000.
I’d have to see your actual analysis justifying these claims before commenting in detail, but I already see a number of problems with your claim:
(1) First of all, I think you’ve been a bit sloppy in determining the trend in Stott et al. If you look closely at their figure, you will see the rise is about 2.5°C over the period 2000 to 2100 (or, alternatively about 3.0°C over the period from 1980 to 2100). So, the trend is more like 0.25°/decade, not 0.3°C/decade. [In fact, when I draw a line of that slope on the graph, I find that…if anything…the trend might be a tad below 0.25°/decade.] This may be a relatively small error, but since you are making a distinction between how the post-2000 trend differs from 0.2°/decade vs. how it differs from 0.3°/decade, this error is not insignificant.
(2) Second of all, as I believe you yourself have noted, one has to be very careful in determining error bars in trends in correlated data…and this becomes especially true if one is looking on timescales that are not very long compared the length of time the data appears to be correlated over. So, I would have to see your calculation in detail. What other discussions I have seen (e.g., this one in RealClimate or one in Tamino’s blog suggest that this is too short a period over which to draw any real conclusion).
(3) Third of all, even if there is a statistically-significant deviation in the trend, there are still other issues to consider. One, which I believe you have also pointed out before, is that even a 95%-significant test can be dicey in cases where one is able to choose things like the length of the data you look at. For example, just by chance, you would expect to see such deviation occurring 1 in 20 times…and if you look at several different periods over which to determine your trend, it only becomes more likely. A second issue (probably not really complete independent of the correlated data issue above) is there can be variations in the trend over periods due to various effects…e.g., due to the solar cycle if it does indeed have any effect (and whether or not it does is still quite unclear).
(4) Whenever you do a calculation, as I am sure you will agree, it is good to have a reality-check. One reality check in this case would be to simply plot the additional global temperature data since 1999 vs. Stott’s simulation on Fig. 1 of Stott and see if it looks like it is diverging from the simulation in any visually-significant way. I haven’t tried to actually make this plot but I was able to sort of visualize it by looking at the Hadcrut3 plot and compare it to Fig. 1 of Stott and it was immediately clear to me that there is unlikely to be such a deviation at all. In fact, as near as I can determine, the temperature over the period between 2000 and 2007 in the data is probably going to end up being higher than it is in the Stott et al. simulation. I mean…just look at that simulation and note how the temperatures post-2000 were predicted for the next ~15 years or so to lie below the 1998 peak in the instrumental temperature record except for one single year…and many are even below, even significantly below, the 1995 peak (whereas in the real temperature data, only one year…2000…has been below the 1995 peak…and that one just barely)!
(5) A second reality-check: Are there regions of 7 years or more in the Stott simulation where you find a trend very significantly different than his average trend of ~0.25°/decade. I think there are. One example is for the period running from the peak in 2007 to around 2014 where it seems likely that the trend will actually be negative.
Well, I would prefer if you would explain to me what “I see no comparable statistically significant divergence in the entire rest of the Stott record” means. Where is the analysis to back this up? Heck, I haven’t even seen you try to plot the data out to 2007 on the same graph as the Stott simulation…which I think alone would likely show you how your claim of any significant divergence is fallacious.
I appreciate it! Nice as always to discuss these things with you, intention.
Yes, I am a scientist, and a reasonably competent one by world standards. That is to say, I do scientific research which is published in reputable scientific journals and is accepted by the general scientific community at large.
In fact, I’m a scientist of a breed common enough to have its own name, an “amateur scientist”. Amateur merely means someone who does what they do for the love of the game, rather than for monetary reward. The reason why I do science does not exclude me from being a scientist. An amateur athlete is still an athlete.
Nor is amateur status a measure of ability. Tiger Woods, at the top of his amateur game, was better than most professionals. And historically, many of the worlds greatest scientists were amateur scientists.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying I am as good as they are/were.
But I am a scientist.
Simple enough.
w.
By the way, one more thing: I just calculated the trends in the HadCrut3 and NASA GISS Land+ocean global data sets over various time periods ending in 2007. I did not try to compute an error bar in the trends because of the issues with correlations…but just looking at the variation in the trend with start year shows how large a difference it can make.
For example, for Hadcrut3, a start year of 2001 gives a slightly negative (~-0.02 C per decade) trend but a start year of 2001 gives a trend of ~+0.12 C per decade and starting in 1999 gives a trend of ~+0.18 C per decade (a start year of 1998 then drops it down again although it is still positive). And, for the NASA GISS results, these trends seem to be offset up from what I quoted by roughly +0.15 C per decade!
However, the trends settle down once you start looking over longer periods of time. For example, the NASA GISS and Hadcrut3 trends agree to within about 0.04 C per decade by 12 years and they are essentially identical by 20 years.
This shows how you can get pretty much any trend you want, depending on which data set and time period you look at when that time period is short, but that once the time period gets longer (>~12 - 15 years) the trends become much more robust.
jshore, I gave an analysis previously using the old Mark I Eyeball because the sad truth is that I cannot do a proper analysis of the Stott paper. Why? Well, there’s not enough data there, an altogether too common failing of climate science papers these days.
For example, they say:
Now, that’s all well and good. However, the devil is in the details, and they have not provided a single detail on the values used for their forcings, either for the natural or anthro case. This is a trivial exercise, it’s a few columns of figures, which they could easily have included as Supplementary Online Information.
Without them, however, their study is useless. You see, before we can tell if their outputs are reasonable or not, we have to know if their inputs are reasonable or not. It’s the old GIGO theme writ large.
Nor is this at all an unreasonable concern. Some of the forcings used by James Hansen’s GISS models, for example, bear very little relationship to reality. Their “aerosol forcing” starts at 0 in 1880, increases linearly to 1950, increases linearly (but faster) to 1990, and then goes perfectly flat to 2000. This forcing has no known relationship to reality. No forcing goes from a very rapid increase in 1989 to absolutely flat in 1990.
So it is quite clear that Hansen et. al have not used actual data, but have merely picked numbers, numbers that make their model fit reality. I strongly suspect that Stott et. al have done the same … but I can’t tell, because they have not published the numbers they used.
It is clear, however, that the rise 1970 - 2100 is quite constant. In fact, they comment that “The rate of change of global mean temperature predicted over the 21st century is similar to that already encountered (both in observations and in model simulations) since 1970 …”
As you point out, this post 1970 rate of modeled rise is closer to 2.5°/century than 3°/century. They do give enough data to measure that, their century long trend is 0.24 ± 0.2°C/decade (95% CI).
Now, as I have said, the current trend in temperatures this century is about flat. It is not statistically different from zero. It is, however, already statistically different from the trend of the Stott models. But even though it is a statistically significant difference, that is a pretty short time period.
However, the trend from 1970 to the present is also statistically different from the modeled trend. The HadCRUT3 surface temperature trend 1970 to the present is 0.17° ± 0.3°/decade (95% CI), compared to the modeled trend of 0.24 ±0.2° decade. So whether we look at the last decade or the last 38 years, the model is not doing a very good job.
More analysis than that, as I said, is not possible because of the paucity of their data.
w.
PS - all significance figures adjusted for autocorrelation, otherwise the difference between the trends would be incorrectly reported as being even greater.
Well, I would make the following points:
(1) That estimate is a little high compared to what most of the reconstructions suggest, which is a rise of about 0.9° to 1.3°C. (I know you are no fan of those reconstructions…but then where are you getting your figure from?)
(2) Much of that rise has occurred in the last 30 years or so and so aspects of the system (especially sea level rise) have not yet equilibrated with this change.
(3) Surely you do not expect the effects to just be linear in the temperature change? It seems likely within a certain range, ecosystems and such can adapt but once it goes too far and fast, things could turn bad quickly.
(4) There are other stresses on ecosystems (and other things such as water supplies) that are working at the same time. E.g., habitat fragmentation will make it hard for species to migrate. And, reduced water supplies because of less snowpack will put strains on human systems, as well as ecosystems.
(5) Effects, especially ones involving sea level rise, will continue well after 2100.
(6) Scientists who actually study this seem to have reached rather different conclusions than you.
(7) Since there is lots of variability in weather, it is difficult to see and positively attribute ill effects until the signal becomes quite large.
Well, the trigger for the ice ages was the small changes in orbital forcing. But, what is dramatic is how different the world was when the global temperature was only about 5 or 6 C lower.
I’ve been pondering what bothers and confuses me about your response and I think it basically comes down to this: You speak very eloquently on this messageboard about uncertainty and how little is known about the climate system (and presumably also its interactions with ecosystems and human systems). However, when I asked this question of you, your answer revealed, first of all, that you implicitly seem to be on the side favoring a low climate sensitivity…at or below the low end of the IPCC range, since you defined being wrong as the temperature getting up to the middle of the range.
Second of all, your own range of uncertainty…actually even going as far out what you would consider as you having been wrong…seemed to extend only up to the mid-range of the IPCC projections terms of temperature…and then even then, not accepting the IPCC’s projections of the consequences of such a temperature rise. To me, that doesn’t sound like very much uncertainty at all. In fact, I would argue that the range of uncertainty that you seemed to reveal there was probably narrower than the range of uncertainty in the IPCC projections (although obviously this is a subjective judgement)…Rather, the big difference in your “probability distribution” of temperatures and effects seems to me not to be that it is broader relative to the IPCC but that it is if anything narrower but shifted significantly in one direction.
In the end, it seems strange to me that someone who thinks that the climate system is so complex and nonlinear and so on and so forth would seem to be so confident that we can monkey around with it significantly without ill effects. I am sure you are well aware, for example, that nonlinear systems can exhibit strange behaviors where, especially under forcing, they can go off into very different states.
By the way, you are not the only one that I have noticed this phenomenon with. When I was first really getting interested in climate science back in early 2001, I went to see Patrick Michaels speak here at a local university. And, what struck me about him was also that, in the end, he was not at all uncertain. In fact, he told us in no uncertain terms what he was pretty confident the climate would do and what the consequences would be. (In fact, his opinion was extremely similar to yours…He basically said warming at the low end of the IPCC projections, mainly in cold dry places, with little adverse effect.)
I see a sort of fundamental dichotomy between the positions of “Oh my god, the climate system is so complicated that how could these modelers possibly be getting it right?” and “Don’t worry, I am quite confident that we don’t need to worry about bad consequences…There probably won’t be any significant consequences, at least not ones that we can’t just easily adapt to.”
Anyway, that is my riff on that. Please feel free to explain to me where I might have misinterpreted what you have said or what you think. As always, I enjoy our discussions.
I would argue that this is exactly why we need to answer the questions in the order listed. I don’t believe that any scientists have asked for people to invest $100 billion. If they have, I will join you in dissenting that $100 billion is an appropriate price tag to pay.
To continue your example, let’s say you came to me and said, “I have created a computer model which will forecast the general trend of the stock market for the next century, my friends and I have tested it”, with no mention of what the implications are, I, and most other level-headed people, would call for some sort of independent review.
I’m arguing that the NAS is such a review. You are arguing that they’re not. Remember the NAS report is not a peer-reviewed journal article - it is a review article prepared by request.
Fair enough. You don’t trust the NAS because of its PNAS, but you agree PNAS has nothing to do with the CCR.
I can agree with that sentiment. The NAS should have taken action on Mann; I don’t consider their lack of action significant in light of there being no precedence, you do. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.
Schneider wouldn’t have had part in the CCR, and I would argue that the argument “the CCR (2001) is unreliable because the same organization later accepted Schneider in 2002” to be a logical fallacy.
I’m not sure the NAS ever advertises particular expertise on climatology. The organization is, or is supposed to be, a collection of the best scientists from all fields, including climatology.
I’m not sure I accept this, other than the bit about PNAS. We all know that authors always suggest friendly reviewers, that’s a given in any scientific field - either you have knowledge of the internal workings and are accusing the editors of intentional bias, or you’re hypothesizing.
Doesn’t “she actively squashed opposition to her beliefs in a most untrustworthy manner” imply more than just a verifiable action? Your accusation is not just that she did something, but how she did it.
Pointing out reliability of non-climatologists seems disingenuous. After all, I could argue that you put forth the same arguments as horrendously-biased oil-funded studies - yet, that wouldn’t change the force of your arguments.
I would counterargue that they’re wrong because they’re trying to create a false dichotomy. The NAS has said that there’s general evidence to support global warming, even if the tree-ring data is taken out. They’ve also said the present climate is statistically no warmer than the past 2000 years. There’s nothing inherently contradictory about those sentences; one of my main points is that global warming can be considered without taking any proxy data at all.
McIntyre and McKitrick’s accusations of schizophrenia come mostly from an assumption that the hockey stick is a major part of AGW theory - I’d argue it’s not. Their whole accusation comes from the fact that they consider the NAS saying “bristlecone pine tree rings are unreliable” and “global warming is true” to be inherently contradictory. Those statements are not.
So, you’d accept the Stern Review?
Whoops! I completely forgot to point out the exaggeration. So the quote I posted is what Lindzen says to the U.S. Senate and also what is supported by his own published works and the general peer-reviewed literature. Yet, when the scrutiny of government testimony and peer review is off, he writes this in the Wall Street Journal:
Notice something missing? Suddenly, it seems that nobody’s sure about any anthropogenic impact!
Directly compare it to this estimation of CO[sub]2[/sub]-based warming in his own peer reviewed publication:
I agree with the first statement, disagree with the second. The difference is between future predictions and past rationalizations.
The future predictions are all over the place, as you point out, but I think we can all agree that all the predictions are positive, even in the case where we go back to the Stone Age immediately and stop emitting CO[sub]2[/sub] completely.
However, I’d argue that the ways that we have affected (past tense) the climate are much more clear. We know how much CO[sub]2[/sub] we’ve put into the atmosphere, if not since 1850, then definitely since 1950.
Remember, I’m drawing a very clear line here between what we know/think has happened and what we know/think will happen. I have no problems with people poking uncertainty at the latter - I’ll join in as well. But I really think there’s little debate about the former.
Shouldn’t there be a “probably” or “we think it likely” or some such in there? Not that I’m disputing the possibility, but absolute statements like this don’t do much for me in deciding an issue since I know enough to know there are no absolutes.
I have to agree that scientists who know more about the subject have reached the conclusion that the Earth has been generally warming for some period of time now. And I agree that they’ve mostly concluded that we are in part responsible for that warming.
The part that seems dubious is that we must believe that their conclusions are based entirely on the science and not on personal issues of the scientists involved. If it’s common knowledge that people pad their resume to get a job, why should we think scientists are immune from padding their conclusions to get more sensational results.
I’m not saying that we should disbelieve scientists, just pointing out that we have very little data on the actual effects of the fact that popularity of one’s research has a great deal to do with whether one gets funding for said research. This leaves this whole area up to speculation. I for one don’t see much chance of this situation being resolved when research resources are limited as they will likely always be. In the end I have to have trust (or faith) in one side or the other. It’s likely that such faith will be placed in those I would have agreed with before I reviewed the science, which does nothing to resolve the issue. I keep thinking about the stories of tectonic action being a taboo thing until those who believed in whatever they believed before then went away. It’s not that the main body of scientists are always wrong and the little guy is always right, but there have been so many cases where it went that way it’s hard to just go with the majority.
How about here? Notice the price tag is $135 Billion worth of equipment in the US. More of the controversy here . So you’ll join in the dissent?
-Eben
As you noted later, Earth’s albedo reduces incoming radiation. With an albedo of 0.3, the Stefan-Boltzman law now gives a blackbody temperature of the Earth as 255 K rather than 278 K.
Only if you accept a lower radiative forcing of CO[sub]2[/sub]. Even proponents of the theory (e.g. Palle) argue that a 1% change is about equal to the radiative forcing from current increases (~28%) of CO[sub]2[/sub].
As a long-term average, the albedo has had far less effect than one would imagine from the past few years’ data (e.g. CERES). We have global dimming from the 1960’s to 1980’s, then Earthshine measurements showed a brightening from the mid-1980’s to 2000, and now the satellite data is showing increases in albedo from 2000 to 2005. As far as I know, there has been little effort to try and reconcile the different data sets, but it would be hard to argue that there’s been an overwhelming effect of albedo.
Keep in mind also that the IPCC report quantifies albedo changes as being low. Is there a scientific reason (apart from “I don’t trust the IPCC”) why you’d disagree with that?
I don’t. Correct me if I’m wrong, but radiative forcing is calculated independently of doubling. I don’t know why everyone likes to use this doubling number, but radiative forcing is, or at least should be, calculated from RF = k*ln(C/C[sub]o[/sub]).
Is there a different equally- or more-educated guess that you’d like to put forth? Because so far you haven’t countered that the radiative forcing measurements are wrong or even uncertain in direction, only that they are uncertain in magnitude.
Not with those links. You’re confusing ozone depletion and global warming.
Well, perhaps the IPCC has some probability on it somewhere. I would say it is pretty high given that, aside from any melting of land ice, the thermal expansion of sea water is a pretty straightforward consequence of a heating of the ocean.
Individual scientists certainly have their biases but in order to have this bias pervade the IPCC, the NAS, the analogous academies in the other major nations, etc., etc., you start talking about a pretty big bias…basically a conspiracy. And, the scientific enterprise is set up in ways that make it fairly “unstable” toward having that sort of conspiracy.
Or, to look at it another way: Which is more likely, that the scientific enterprise as a whole has been hijacked in this way or that the few scientists who are vociferously disagreeing, and happen to very often have connections with conservative think-tanks and the light, have strong biases?
Organizations like the NAS were created precisely in order to prevent this thing from happening, i.e., to give policymakers the most objective scientific advice possible so that the use of science to inform public policy would not devolve into each side trotting out their own “pet scientists” to spout their views.
Many of those cases that are brought up, when actually looked at, turn out to have less to them than meets the eye. The true histories are usually more complex than the simplistic presentations of them. And even though it may be true that this sometimes happens (although probably more rarely than people think), I don’t see this sort of claim leading to any useful policy conclusions because how is one to know if any particular instant is one of those rare cases where the main body of scientists are wrong and the few in opposition are right. How do you propose having science be used to inform public policy if not the way that we are doing it now?
I’m pointing out that people with good scientific theories demanding that changes be made that cost people money happens. You seemed skeptical of the claim that such demands had ever been made.
I understand that you probably meant to say “$100 billion in the current theory,” but the point that policy changes based on scientific theories have in the past cost people money should be apparent.
Unquestionably bodies such as the NAS are better than nothing. I even think that we as a country are doing fairly well responding to scientific studies in an appropriate and timely matter. The real problem comes down to the clarity of the issues at stake. Being well aware that more intelligent people are easier to fool (said by many magicians, psychics, etc.) and considering myself to be an intelligent person puts me in the position of wanting to look at the details of theories that may very well effect my life (and lifestyle to a lesser extent).
Long term climate science is either something I have the ability to analyze and study, or it is beyond my current education/ability. If it is beyond my ability then why should I believe that it is within any particular person who is not a climate scientist’s ability to understand? So if it’s beyond my ability, and by extension non-climate scientists, then I’m left with the science coming from a dozen or so climate scientists listed earlier in the thread. It’s easy to see that a dozen people with an inscrutable knowledge could misuse that knowledge for personal gain.
OTOH, if I can understand climate science, I have every reason to believe that any other educated non-climate scientist also can.
My view is that not enough time has passed to prove or disprove the predictability of climate models over the predictability of random chance. So far the predictions of climate models are of the very general such as any fortune teller would throw out, expecting some hits. “There will be changes in the future!” “Someone you know will have an unusual season!” “There will be weather with an H or T in your area this year!” This doesn’t disprove the models, but it doesn’t go a long way towards proving them either.
So now the question really is, am I capable of understanding climate science? If the answer is yes, then I propose I understand enough about it not to want to spend any resources based on predictions of the current models. If the answer is no, then I propose I don’t want to be told what to do by a dozen people I’ve never met.
There are of course many logical problems with my position, but I think that it’s the innate position that many people hold which causes a general questioning of climate science and its results. I’d probably have the same questions regarding plant biology if I knew what those scientists were up to with my resources. 
In the end I’m attempting to give a realist account of behavior in an uncertain, but somewhat educated world. I further state that if proponents of policy change due to AGW wish to convince those like me, they should perhaps be a bit more charismatic and open in doing so without being alarmist. No, it’s not entirely logical, but I think it would be more effective than the current situation.
-Eben
Actually, since (I understand it) climate science is the only scientific field you have worked in, I’ll tell you that it is a failure that goes beyond that particular field. I do like that the web has enabled online supplementary information and hope that scientists start to make more use of it.
Well, I agree that in order to do a full analysis that compares the forcings they assume to what transpired, you would need this information…and that this would be good for a full understanding. However, I was really only asking for clarification on the statistical analysis on the actual Stott simulations as compared to the HadCrut data that you did perform.
I think statements like this last one betray your own biases more than they tell us what Hansen actually did. I agree that it is clear that they have not used actual data…or at least detailed data…but I don’t know how you gleaned that they picked numbers to make their model fit reality. In fact, I think that it is somewhat comforting that, given a lack of very detailed data for aerosol forcing, they chose such very simple relationships. It would have looked more like they were trying to fit if they used more complicated ones. I will also note that by the late 1990s, the average growth rate in the greenhouse gas forcing was more than 10X the growth rate they were using in their linearly-increasing aerosol forcing. So, whether or not the aerosols continued to increase at that rate or stayed flat after 2000 is not going to make a huge difference in the results.
Sounds like a reasonabe estimate to me (although I assume you mean ± 0.02°C in here…with a similar factor of 10 change in your other errorbar estimates).
Indeed it is. And, as such, I imagine the errorbars that you get would depend strongly on your assumptions about the correlation.
Well, that doesn’t seem to be that poor a job to me. (As I noted before, we know from the variation in model results that any particular model is unlikely to be the exact “correct” one…so eventually there will be statistically-meaningful deviations from any particular model. And, it’s really too early to tell much from the post-2000 data.
How have your corrected for autocorrelation? I agree that the error bars would be smaller if you hadn’t. On the other hand, if you have undercorrected for the correlation then the errorbars would be larger.
By the way, I imagine that you are aware [and have strong opinions about 
] this paper that assesses trends since 1990 compared to the scenarios run for the 2001 TAR report and whose abstract reads:
aptronym, thanks for the response. Man, I turn around and there’s nothing but questions and answers. Right now, I’m out the door, just a quick note. Not sure where you or Palle got your figures, here’s mine:
Albedo = amount of solar energy reflected as a percentage of incoming solar energy. Currently it is about 30%.
Change in solar forcing = change in albedo times incoming solar forcing.
Incoming solar forcing = ~ 345 W/square metre
Change in albedo = 1%
Change in forcing = 1% * 345 = 3.45 W/m2, which I described as “roughly equivalent” to 3.7 W/m2.
So if the albedo goes from 30% to 31%, a very small (1%) change, it will roughly balance a doubling of CO2.
Anyhow, aptronym, gotta go, the bad news is I’m off to finish qualifying for my “Open Water II” scuba certificate, I’ll get back to more of your (and jshore’s) interesting observations when I come back and dry off this afternoon.
Best wishes,
w.
I use the method of Nychka, as detailed here..
Right on both counts, my friend. And dang, looks like we have another person suckered into believing that the paper looks at 16 years of temperature data versus scenarios (1990 - 2006). Let me know if you can’t figure out why it’s only about a ridiculously short 6 years of out-of-sample data.
w.
As mentioned, empirical data is all we have, plus the collective knowledge of all the scientists in every field studying this earth - its formations, its lifeforms, its cycles. All the data points to an unprecedented increase in CO2 (as one poster mentioned), an unprecedented movement of glaciers, the indisputable clear-cut melted path across the north polar region, etc., etc., etc.
If we learned anything from Humpty Dumpty, let’s hope we NEVER have the hard proof. By then, it WILL be too late. For all the best scientists won’t be able to put this old earth back together again. Not sure how we’ll make India and China understand, however, as they are just beginning to enjoy their “technological freedom” in this modern era…
The ones who don’t believe today are also the ones convinced that FEMA will save them when the ocean waves are lapping at their once-landlocked front doors.
Would that include the Swiss glaciers that are retreating to reveal forgotten passes; abandoned mines; and various clothes, weapons and other nick nacks from the Medieval and Roman warm periods?
I’m not sure what you are referring to here, but maybe it’s the iminent melting of the frozen north as predicted by scientists in 1934
This link doesn’t work for me.
Well, I imagine what you are going to say which is that the models run for the 2001 report were tuned to fit to the 1990-2000 data. However, if this were the case, they didn’t do the tuning very well since it looks like the temperature observations were already right at the high end of the model envelope by that time…Or, did they diabolically tune the models to underpredict this so that they could later claim things are more dire than the models are showing?!?
For the record, here is what the paper itself says on this issue: