Foxgoose raises the issue as to whether this is a type of astroturfing. The answer is no, it is not. Astroturfing is the use of paid employees to give the appearance of popular, grassroots support whereas Reality Drop attempts to give tools to the assumed pre-existing popular acceptance of, and willingness to do something about AGW. If, in fact, that popular acceptance does not exist, the “Reality Drop” project will fail.
And, Foxgoose, I believe your prior comment was deleted because it made suggestions of fraudulent activity (astroturfing) contrary to the comments policy, and that your currently displayed comment will be deleted as all moderation complaints are. The later is because they are necessarily off topic, and because once a moderator has seen them, they have served their legitimate purpose. Such complaints, if reasonable, can and have in the past promoted debate among moderators about the correct interpretation of comments policy.
This comment may well be deleted as a reply to a deleted comment (and as a comment on comments policy). I hope Foxgoose has time to read it before that happens.
—
(My bold)
Since this is a comment about deleted comments, perhaps RT should delete this too.
John Cook likes to manipulate the comments threads so that a nice clean message is presented. My comments will no doubt be deleted in due course. My questions were pertaining to The Australian article on Pachauri, asking the question of whether he was misrepresented.
I posed the heretical thought that unless he had complained, no one really knows. The correct answer, though, is yes, because he wasn’t delivering the message according to SkS.
In a similar vein, the deleted commenter I refer to above asked the reasonable question, is this astrofturfing.
I am referring to the Reallty Drop software app that allows automated answers to questions on so called Denier blogs. The app lines you up with threads, computer assisted trolling if you like
I would call this astrofturfing, but not according to Tom Curtis. To be an AstroTurf, you have to be paid, just like all of us are paid by Big Oil (still waiting for that cheque though)
They talk a lot about conspiracy biut it is them that are the paranoid conspiracy theorists.
>”My questions were pertaining to The Australian article on Pachauri”
That was the topic in the title but most of Dana’s post was about heat going into the ocean. My comments questioning that were deemed off-topic of course and liberally snipped or deleted altogether. The SkS OHC graphic posted by an acolyte in comments was allowed to stay on the other hand but when I inserted Ira Glickson’s gif on atm temperatures (including the standstill) vs IPCC projections, that was also deemed “off-topic”.
As Andy alludes, the actual moderation policy is irrelevant. “Moderation” is just an opportunity to censure so that “a nice clean message is presented”. Problem is, that nice clean message is looking increasingly dirty and baseless.
If you read Shub’s post that I link to above, this completely vindicates these views that blog comments are a “resource” that can be manipulated to suit the agenda.
Tom Curtis fully expects his comment to be deleted, as it is irrelevant to the post. The concept that “Reality Drop” may be considered astro-turfing never even came up in discussion, according to the Orwellian post edit.
I wonder whether the reference to my “abusive html” will stay ( I cut and pasted some stuff into their WYSIWYG editor, so some markup errors may have occurred)
The mere concept of “abusive html” has my head spinning as much as “recursive fury”
In the other thread I asked if Foxgoose’s question about astroturfing would get snipped
Three hours later or so…
Foxgoose at 09:07 AM on 3 March, 2013
(-snip-)
Moderator Response: [DB] Your previous comment was deleted because it made suggestions of fraudulent activity (astroturfing) contrary to the comments policy. This current comment was snipped due to moderation complaints. This site’s comments policy has not changed…and neither has your laissez-faire attitude towards adherence to it.
So suggestions of “astro-turfing” imply fraud and therefore will be snipped
Interesting that they consider “astro-turfing’ as fraudulent, yet they are quite happy to pump propaganda into schools. For example, mail dropped DVDs of “An Inconvenient Truth”, have been sent to thousands of schools in the USA and Canada.
AIT contains so many errors and so little fact it is laughable.
I know this might be tedious for readers, but here goes
Same thread, Pachauri and his supposed misrepresentation by the Australian
Tom Curtis at 17:21 PM on 3 March, 2013
Phil Shehan, not at all off topic, IMO. It also shows that when Monckton told a mob in Sydney,
“So to the bogus scientists who have produced the bogus science that invented this bogus scare I say, we are coming after you, we are going to prosecute you and we are going to lock you up!”
it was not just hyperbole. Monckton by his actions, and Nova by here approval, show that given the ability, the denier movement will resort to any legal expedient to ensure nobody hears the truth about climate change.
It may be considered unfair to tarnish all deniers with this brush, but until Watts, the Pielke’s, Lindzen etc renounce Monckton and his totalitarian methods and flamboyent disregard for truth, they must be considered to approve of them. He who remains silent, consents.
the denier movement will resort to any legal expedient to ensure nobody hears the truth about climate change”
Like deleting comments that are “off topic”, Tom?
He who remains silent, consents
So unless you publicly state in public that you disassociate yourself from Monckton, or anyone else for that matter that SkS disagrees with you are “consenting to their views”
These Stalinist muppets seem to have very little sense of self-awareness.
>”So to the bogus scientists who have produced the bogus science that invented this bogus scare I say, we are coming after you, we are going to prosecute you and we are going to lock you up!”
This doesn’t sound like Monckton’s language. The provenance of the supposed quote according to Graham Readfern “At one point during the tour, Monckton told a boisterous partisan crowd:[hotlinked]” is an ABC broadcast of the event:-
I seem to recall that Monckton did actually say something along those lines at a rally in Sydney.
He does say some pretty crazy stuff at times, just like “death train” Hansen
I see Lucia has reached Detective Rank at least. I clicked the link in her tweet, got:-
lucia just crushed this climate change myth by making a Reality Drop on the news story below. Learn more or register now to help win the climate conversation.
MYTH #45
DENIERS SAY:
“So 1998 was a warm year, but since then, global warming has stopped.”
Now in the comment thread there’s 18 instances (see Sean71) of this “Reality” (and a quizzical “pparents” wondering why duplicate comments? it makes no sense):-
“Global warming means there’s less snow overall. But it could also bring more extreme snowstorms. http://clmtr.lt/cb/pIL”
BTW Andy, a high impact tactic appears to be the use of a descriptive name e.g.
Hug a Polar bear
Green for life
Pot-good, oil-bad
Kumbaya [2 “Drops” in the same thread]
Kill all CO2
Agenda 21
Al Gore for Emperor!
Kill oil industry
Sky is falling
RabidGreenie
create2030
Ah, I see. YOU are “aspiringcaptain”. I thought you’d been awarded the rank of Aspiring Captain before I checked out all the ranks and saw your latest comment (penny drops). Lofty aim indeed.
I don’t think I’ll be wasting any more time on Al Gore’s Reality Droppings.
It is an interesting exercise to go through the process, though
Some issues:
(1) All links go through the domain http://clmtr.lt/ which flags it to both machines and humans as “droppings spam”. Easy to block the domain as Anthony Watts has done
(2) It seems possible to generate credits by clicking on your own links. I did this to see where the links went to (redirect to realitydrop.org). and was surprised to see credits accumulate. Basic blog software doesn’t allow you to vote on your own comments (using cookies) so this is a basic error.
(3) The game theme, combined with the badges, is very childish. Gore et al must seriously underestimate the intelligence of sceptics. If they think kids are interested in this then they are misguided
I hope Al Gore finds something better to do with his life.
I’m done too but good to know. If nothing else it’s a news board with different articles than Google climate science news say, Not as much “denier” stuff as I would like unfortunately.
I would add,
(4) How does an article get 101 “Drops” when there’s no comment thread.
Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link
New York Times
101 DROPS
This article is related to the following myth:
Carbon dioxide is not the primary driver of climate change
SkS founder and major domo, John Cook, posted three articles this week: (1) Conspiracy Theorists Respond to Evidence They’re Conspiracy Theorists With More Conspiracy Theories, (2) Reality Drop – using social media to rapidly respond to climate misinformation, and (3) Why SkS withdrew from the Bloggies. The article about the Bloogies award garnered the most comments which provides Cook with a new set of behavioral data to analyze and report on.
Google have a little in-joke on recursion. Try Googling for “recursion” Comes up with “did you mean recursion?”
No ad hominem attacks. Personally attacking other users gets us no closer to understanding the science. For example, comments containing the words ‘religion’ and ‘conspiracy’ tend to get moderated. Comments using labels like ‘alarmist’ and ‘denier’ as derogatory terms are usually skating on thin ice.
I counted 18 instances of the word “denier” on the Pachauri thread, many from Tom Curtis. I complained about this (unaware of this part of the policy) and they all jump to defend it.
No accusations of deception. Any accusations of deception, fraud, dishonesty or corruption will be deleted. This applies to both sides. You may critique a person’s methods but not their motives.
Several instances of the word “fraud” on the Pachauri thread, aimed at Monckton (which is also off topic)
I was also interested in the term “both sides”. They clearly see this as a binary war, without any middle ground
China Takes a Leading Role in Solving Climate Change (Dana)
Carbon Dioxide the Dominant Control on Global Temperature and Sea Level Over the Last 40 Million Years (Rob Painting)
Drost, Karoly, and Braganza Find Human Fingerprints in Global Warming (Dana)
What doesn’t change with climate? (Ari Jokimäki) The educational opportunities in addressing misinformation in the classroom (John Cook)
Just stumbled on the 6 February snapshot of the ‘Dueling Scientists at The Oregonian’ thread that still has comments accessible that have been replaced in the current thread version. All you need is a link to one old comment ID # and the old structure is still in place e.g.:-
Just open 2 Tabs and view old vs new side-by-side. The different versions seem to be the string elements 77&&n=1853 and 98&&n=1889 in the respective comment addresses (what are they accessing?).
I stumbled on this revelation while looking up Tom Curtis’ 68 comment where he employs a (very long) reservoir and tap analogy (complete with splendid graphic) and assumes the (OLR) tap is being slightly closed by GHGs (“slightly closing the lower tap”). Problem is, observations show otherwise:-
‘Man-made global warming theory is falsified by satellite observations’
Global warming theory proposes that CO2 traps longwave (infrared) radiation in the troposphere to reduce outgoing longwave radiation [OLR] to space. However, satellite measurements since 1975 indicate that global OLR has instead increased by about 1.3 Wm-2. This is in direct contradiction to global warming theory that “trapping” of radiation by CO2 should have instead reduced* OLR by .93 Wm-2 since 1975.
I don’t think that glitch was the reason for the SKS “Mods” replacing Tom’s comment though. Tom’s comment was just collateral damage when they had to get rid (so they thought) of mine. Turned out to be inadvertently prudent though.
Over the last 7 years, “global” warming has been going into the [Indian] ocean, and 70% (2.8×10^22) of the 7 yr World: 0 – 2000 meters heat increase (4×10^22 Joules) has gone into the 0 – 700 m layer of the Indian Ocean.
Question is: where did it come from? Pacific? Hydrovents? Skydragon?
“Then when Lewandowsky et al copied the text of geoffchambers’ comment, they inadvertently combined the quote from Fuller with the body of geoffchambers’ comment. In other words, they combined parts of comments from two different people into a single quote. As though that wasn’t bad enough, neither comment can be viewed by readers of the paper as the comments were both edited/deleted by moderators of the site associated with two primary authors of this paper!”
Oh! what a tangled web we weave. When first we practice to deceive! – Sir Walter Scott
More anti-Norway-fossil-fuel than pro-EU in that article Andy.
They want to get away from “the slightly US-AUS-UK-centric focus of SkS” – must be a traffic problem. Maybe they could address the awkward question of Germany’s coal-fired future next?
Statnett looks to have 100% financial commitment to rescuing Germany’s renewables, whether that will turn out to be a good investment or not – I’m thinking not. But there’s no reason whatsoever for them to pour money into a non-hydro, non-oil and gas hole in Norway.
And yes, like Norway is going to turn their back on their economic prize supporting all manner of people and industry in their own country – even an evil Big Oil software developer on the other side of the world with, perversely, a liking for cold weather sports.
Even if Norway did become the “storage battery” for EU wind projects, it could probably charge whatever it liked.
Denmark already exports a lot of its unused wind energy to Norway at low rates, then pays through the nose to get that energy back from Norway when it actually needs it.
KfW, Statnett and TenneT sign agreement for new subsea cable connection Norway – Germany
With this cable wind power and solar power can be exported from Germany to Norway when there is a surplus of this, while Norway can export hydropower to Germany when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. This again will support the ambitions for more renewable energy and increased energy supply in the region, and thus EU’s climate and energy goals, both on a short and long term.
[Looks like Norway is on a winner “when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow”]
What is the business model behind NORD.LINK/NorGer?
A cable connection between Norway and Germany takes advantage of the price differences of electricity on the two power markets. Like in daytime, when electricity prices are highest in Germany, Norwegian electricity can be exported via the cable to the German market. While at night, when consumption is low, the price in Germany is often lower. Electricity then flows to consumers in Norway. Because the power systems supplement each other, greater efficiency will be realised. Additionally the flow depends on the season of the year: In winter the prices in Norway are high and in Germany low so that Germany can export electricity to Norway. In summer, when the price in Norway is lower, it runs in the opposite direction.
Now I see why Norway is shouldering the greater cost. I didn’t think the model would be that much in Norway’s favour but it does seem to be on the better receiving end of the synergies. I was mindful of Poland (it think it is) building load control into their network on the border with Germany i.e. Poland couldn’t do anything with Germany’s renewable overflow but Norway can.
But can Norway take ALL the overflow from Holland, Denmark and Germany simultaneously?
What is the economic feasibility of multiple transmission cables?
A study commissioned by Nordic interests and conducted by Thema Consulting and Econ Pöyry indicates it would be profitable to lay far more cables between Norway and Germany, but only up to 8 GW of capacity – far below SRU’s estimate of 42 GW. Typically, each cable has a capacity of 700 MW, so a great many cables would be needed. Combined capacity from Norway to Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands is currently less than 2 GW.
The profitability of laying multiple cables lies in energy price disparities between Germany and Norway. Due to the volume of wind power in Germany, prices fluctuate far more than in Norway, where they are relatively stable. This works to the advantage of pumped storage power producers as well as grid companies. If too many cables are laid, however, profitability would be lost since energy prices between Norway and the Continent would even out.
I don’t know how much pumped storage would be required, if at all. If Norway shuts down its domestic hydro generation whilst the Germans are producing wind energy, the dams stay full, and Norway turns back on the taps when the German’s need it.
If PS is required, then I guess more valleys will have to be flooded, which I expect will get quite a bit of pushback in Norway.
It is a big win for Norway, whichever way you look at it
Sometimes I regret not staying there when I had the chance in my mid twenties
A Scott may not be wise to back Don Easterbrook on the GISP2 issue. I disputed Don’s graph (or a similar one) directly by email a year or two ago because he’s not right I don’t think. Don was intractable. Can’t say I want to go back down that rabbit hole but I’ve still got the emails with all the details if I had to.
Rob Painting March 23, 2013 at 12:57 pm
[…]
Atmospheric warming takes up 2-3% of global warming and can deviate from the long-term oceanic warming trend over short time frames, but it will self-correct and follow the ocean heating trend. So expect a spike in global surface air temperatures when we enter the next period of El Nino-dominant weather.
>”Skeptical Science will have a post on this soon.”
OK here it is. Rob Painting is spruiking the Balmaseda paper at HT and Nuccitelli’s starry-eyed non-critique at SKS. No individual basin analysis, No basin-to-basin comparisons. Tisdale should have a field-day with this. Apparently, global warming has “accelerated”:-
>”The slowed surface air warming over the past decade has lulled many people into a false and unwarranted sense of security”
No, we just understand the cycles operating.
>”So what’s causing this transfer of heat to the deeper ocean layers? The authors suggest that it is a result of changes in winds related to the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and more frequent La Niña events.”
Well lets help Balmaseda et al with where and what heat transfers have been observed in each ocean basin:-
700-2000m OHC World gain last 7 yrs 1.967×10^22 J (Oct – Dec data)
Hmmm….. So the least amount of heat has gone below 700m in the Pacific (the largest) over the last 7 yrs and the most (more than twice as much) has been in the Atlantic, but Pacific conditions explain the Atlantic situation. I’m not sure that I follow this.
>”So the slowed warming at the surface is only temporary, and consistent with the ‘hiatus decades’ described by Meehl et al. (2011).”
“slowed warming”? “temporary”? Both the upper Pacific and Atlantic are cooling in the ARGO era, the upper Indian warming significantly and contributing 70% of total over the last 7 yrs (but peaking 4Q2010/3Q2011), the aggregate at standstill (“hiatus”) last 4 yrs:-
>”Perhaps the most important result of this paper is the confirmation that while many people wrongly believe global warming has stalled over the past 10–15 years, in reality that period is “the most sustained warming trend” in the past half century. Global warming has not paused, it has accelerated.”
Pacific and Atlantic upper ocean heat is not being replenished from solar sourced input (and certainly not by the Skydragon). The Indian has been accumulating via circulation currents. Aggregate ocean warming is peaking (not “accelerating”) consistent with maximum planetary enthalpy occurring at the end of solar Grand Maximum and not because of a fire breathing Skydragon – unless the Skydragon has taken up residence in the Indian Ocean perhaps.
All of these guys (including Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén) are about to get a lesson in input => reservoir => output processes very soon.
Some woolly and contradictory responses to questions in the thread e.g.
#6
Craig King at 20:30 PM on 25 March, 2013
What brought about the shift from increasing atmospheric temperatures to increasing ocean temperatures?
[good question]
Will this change be sustained or will the air go back to rapid warming again?
[another good question]
Presumably the oceans are being warmed by the atmosphere, or alternatively the atmosphere is being cooled by the ocean acting as a heat sink. With the reduced warming of the atmosphere will the warming of the oceans slow down or is the CO2 concentration warming the oceans independently of the air temperature?
[a VERY good question]
[…]
Sorry for all the questions but the paper seems aimed at specialists who probably know all this wheras I am just an inquisitive amateur.
[good luck trying to learn at SkS Craig]
Moderator Response: (Rob P) See this SkS post: How Increasing Carbon Dioxide Heats the Ocean. [Minnett theory]
I am also curious about what would cause the proposed increased heat content of the oceans to “come out” and thus warm the climate. My curiosity is built around the assumption that the warmer air mass must have transferred heat to the ocean ( warmer to colder ) and that raises the thought that the atmosphere would have to get colder than the ocean for it ( the air ) to be warmed by the sea.
[unfortunately Craig doesn’t know the ocean is already warmer than the air by about 3 C on average – but SkS wont tell him that]
In the meantime the atmospoheric CO2 continues to rise leading to a warmer atmosphere.
[well that’s the theory but not happening – good point]
Craig, here’s Levitus et al. 2012. The methodology section will give you part of the answer. [Levitus doesn’t answer the question]
CO2 does not warm the oceans independent of the indirect downward longwave radiation mechanism (increased skin temp forces a “deepening” of the convective temp gradient) and the direct method of surface layer mixing.
[Minnett theory, not in Levitus, still doesn’t answer the question]
Craig King – In short, ocean variations such as the ENSO affect the rate of heat absorption by the oceans – La Nina exposing colder waters to the surface, warming the ocean faster but cooling the atmosphere, while El Nino slows ocean warming leaving more of the energy imbalance in the atmosphere. Given that >93% of warming is going into the oceans, ~2.3% into the atmosphere, even a small rate change in ocean warming relative to the total greenhouse gas imbalance will have a huge effect on air temperatures.
[baloney, the warming is solar-sourced, ENSO is egress not ingress]
Note that the energy flow is sun -> ocean -> atmosphere -> space, not the atmosphere -> ocean. A warming atmosphere causes ocean warming by slowing that energy flow from the ocean to the atmosphere. But if ENSO and other variations bring cold water to the surface, reducing atmospheric heating, air temperatures will then drop.
[hooray! (sort of but contradictory at the same time), but what “warming atmosphere” now? and that energy flow is opposite to the IPCC mechanism – oops]
[should be sun -> ocean -> atmosphere [and] space too]
In other words, the atmosphere is to the ocean as the tail is to the dog – tied to ocean temperatures, but far more variable, even moving backwards at times.
[and the sun is feeding the dog – good analogy].
A quick question Richard. If the ocean were to release this stored heat into the atmosphere, would the cooler ocean then absorb more atmospheric CO2 from the atmosphere?
>”…would the cooler ocean then absorb more atmospheric CO2 from the atmosphere?”
Yes. There will be some threshold of basin-specific upper OHC at which point CO2 ceases outgassing from that basin at the rate it has been and a change of phase becomes evident (an inflexion). I have no idea when that will be but it will be sometime before about 2042 when the next solar Grand Minimum is predicted (minimum enthalpy/total energy).
Mauna Loa is Pacific basin CO2 (not global) so watch that (note there’s 2, one’s the ‘surface’ metric, the other at altitude) for the Pacific (see below).
What we have been witnessing since the LIA is a process of increasing planetary enthalpy (total energy, mostly in the ocean) from minimum to maximum. One of the effects (I don’t consider it a feedback above about 200ppm) is ocean outgassing from the warming ocean.
Now that the 1920 – 2012 solar Grand Max has come to an end the process goes into reverse, including feedback effects, because energy input to the system will decrease progressively for about 30 – 40 years. Abdussamatov describes the new regime as an energy “deficit”. The deficit began about 1990 when solar output reached bicentennial peak:-
As you can see, the bicentennial component is going over a cliff with the very low SC 24 peak 2013.
The energy deficit effect has been evident in the Pacific and Atlantic upper ocean in the ARGO era and now looks evident in the upper Indian since 4Q2010/3Q2011 (see Tisdale plot up-thread). Just a matter of time before CO2 follows suit.
Mike we need to distinguish between the “apparent” “acceleration” that appears in the aggregate OHC metric that Balmaseda et al look at and what is actually happening when the analysis is basin-specific.
It’s only in the last 4 years that the “apparent” “acceleration” turned into a standstill (“hiatus” – Meehl et al) in the upper ocean aggregate. 0-2000m peaked 1Q2012 but may still go a little higher.
But yes, difficult getting through some thick skulls that the Pacific and Atlantic have been losing heat in the ARGO era (which Balmaseda et al would have found if they’d looked) so it is impossible to make an anthro attribution to those two basins this century.
”Perhaps the most important result of this paper is the confirmation that while many people wrongly believe global warming has stalled over the past 10–15 years, in reality that period is “the most sustained warming trend” in the past half century. Global warming has not paused, it has accelerated.”
Is your comment the best summary of their reasoning, or would you have a link to another?
RT your quote from my comment is from SkS as denoted by >”
My response to that specific quote was the following snippet from the longer comment:-
“Pacific and Atlantic upper ocean heat is not being replenished from solar sourced input (and certainly not by the Skydragon). The Indian has been accumulating via circulation currents. Aggregate ocean warming is peaking (not “accelerating”) consistent with maximum planetary enthalpy occurring at the end of solar Grand Maximum and not because of a fire breathing Skydragon – unless the Skydragon has taken up residence in the Indian Ocean perhaps.
All of these guys (including Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén) are about to get a lesson in input => reservoir => output processes very soon.”
+ + +
You ask:-
>”Is your comment the best summary of their reasoning, or would you have a link to another?”
At this stage my comment is the best I can give you because the Balmaseda paper has only just hit the stands as has the SkS post on it and the “confirmation” they conclude. I suspect Tisdale will maul both eventually but my comment (whether in toto or just that specific snippet) is my own reasoning, although entirely consistent with basin analysis from NODC data, solar papers, thermodynamics/enthalpy, and Tisdale’s work etc.
The silly SkS aspect is that they keep banging on about “global warming going into the ocean” (and the “confirmation”) as if no-one but them knows that. Daft because the first place anyone with any knowledge of the planetary thermodynamic process (solar input -> heat sink -> output to atm and space) would look is to the planet’s greatest heat sink – the ocean! Pieke Snr has been saying that for years and even the SkS commenters note that in the thread.
But what they (Balmaseda et al/SkS) can’t see by their coarse analysis is that it is now impossible for the IPCC to make an anthro attribution to the upper Pacific and Atlantic in the 21st century – which they don’t. What’s happening below 700m (or even 300m) is irrelevant if the upper Pacific and Atlantic are cooling.
I dissect some important issues in it that I haven’t seen anyone else address yet i.e. real IPCC ocean attribution scrutiny hasn’t even started in earnest because everyone’s been looking at atmospheric attribution issues – those becoming somewhat moot now of course.
Over the years I’ve seen a statement similar to the one made by MarkR in the SkepticalScience post The 2012 State of the Climate is easily misunderstood (my boldface):
“Global surface temperatures were the 8th or 9th highest recorded, partly because the first two months were cool-ish thanks to a La Nina in the Pacific, where cooler waters sit on the top of the ocean and suck up heat from the atmosphere.”
The error in MarkR’s statement, which has been repeated many times before, may stem from the assumption that La Niñas are the opposite of El Niños. That is, it is well known that El Niño events release enormous amounts of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. I assume the flawed logic is that La Niña events must then remove heat from the atmosphere.
The vast majority of heat released from the ocean to the atmosphere, however, occurs through evaporation.
It’s likely those assuming that La Niñas “suck up heat from the atmosphere” are thinking only in terms of “sensible heat flux”.
SENSIBLE VERSUS LATENT HEAT
[…]
As illustrated [Figure 1], the sensible heat flux is primarily positive (the average is +2.7 watts/meter^2 for the period of January 1979 to September 2013), meaning the heat is flowing from ocean to atmosphere. Occasionally, there have been short periods where the sensible heat flux is negative, according to the reanalysis, and they occurred often during La Niñas, but they are not limited to La Niña events.
Now let’s compare the sensible heat flux and the latent heat flux at the surface of the NINO3.4 region. See Figure 2. For the period of January 1979 to September 2013, the average latent heat flux at the surface is about 118 watts/meter^2, or about 42 times greater than the sensible heat flux, according to the reanalysis. And regardless of the state of the tropical Pacific (El Niño, La Niña or ENSO-neutral), there is always a substantial positive latent heat flux along the eastern and central equatorial Pacific, meaning evaporation is always taking place in the NINO3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific…and it always greatly outweighs the sensible heat flux.
El Niño and La Niña events are focused on the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, but they directly impact the entire tropical Pacific. So, as a reference, Figure 3 compares sensible heat flux and the latent heat flux at the surface of the tropical Pacific (24S-24N, 120E-80W). Again, the latent heat flux dwarfs the sensible heat flux at all times. The average latent heat flux from the surface of the tropical Pacific is about 138 watts/m^2, while the average sensible heat flux is only about 9 watts/m^2.
Bottom line: the equatorial Pacific and tropical Pacific are always releasing heat to the atmosphere, even during La Niña events. Or, in other words, a La Niña does not suck heat from the atmosphere.
“Much of the CO2 released into the atmosphere and the heat trapped by the CO2 goes into the ocean sooner or later – approximately 90 per cent of the excess heat has been taken up by the ocean over the last 40 years,” explains Frölicher.
That’s a help, thanks RC. Sorry I lost track of the author.
Your response to SkS is informative. What, though, is the essence of their reasoning, or evidence, that leads to the conclusion I quoted in my question to you? Or just tell me to read the paper if I must (if we can). I’ve just seen your next comment (8:21 pm), with links, come through. Thanks.
Note the twin peak in the Indian Ocean series even though it was rising significantly up to 4Q2010 i.e. even the upper Indian looks to have reached a standstill.
Of the anthro attribution, Nuccitelli writes:-
>” * Some recent studies have concluded based on the slowed global surface warming over the past decade that the sensitivity of the climate to the increased greenhouse effect is somewhat lower than the IPCC best estimate. Those studies are fundamentally flawed because they do not account for the warming of the deep oceans.”
Again, so what about the deep ocean if the upper layers of 2 of the 3 major ocean basins have been cooling over the last decade? It’s impossible in that case to make an anthro attribution for the 21st century.
Just to highlight some silliness RT, you might like to think about a reply I made to Nice One in a showdown over the exact same topic at JoNova that’s been going on for a couple of days:-
Richard C (NZ)
March 26, 2013 at 10:41 am
BTW, your counter-theory seems to be that solar-sourced energy was introduced to the ocean initially, then it left the ocean uninhibited to the atmosphere (but not to space?), then it returned to the ocean after being redirected by GHGs, but it didn’t leave again as it did before due to some sort of restriction that kicks in second time round, so instead it went down to the deep ocean.
As Jo puts it – “good luck with your [counter-]theory”.
Lewandowsky, Cook claim 78,000 skeptics could see conspiracy survey at Cooks site where there is no link
How 78,000 equals zero
Lewandowsky et al go out on a limb to say skeptics may have made 78,000 visits that month and could have seen that survey link (if only there had been one there):
“Prevalence of “skeptics” among blog visitors All of the blogs that carried the link to the survey broadly endorsed the scienti fic consensus on climate change (see Table S1). As evidenced by the comment streams, however, their readership was broad and encompassed a wide range of view on climate change. To illustrate, a content analysis of 1067 comments from unique visitors to http://www.skepticalscience.com, conducted by the proprietor of the blog, revealed that around 20% (N = 222) held clearly “skeptical” views, with the remainder (N = 845) endorsing the scienti c consensus. At the time the research was conducted (September 2010), http://www.skepticalscience.com received 390,000 monthly visits. Extrapolating from the content analysis of the comments, this translates into up to 78,000 visits from “skeptics” at the time when the survey was open (although it cannot be ascertained how many of the visitors actually saw the link.) […]”
But, as Barry Woods and DHG both discovered and Geoff Chambers pursued relentlessly, it appears no link was ever posted on SkepticalScience. Steve McIntyre points out the total number of skeptics doing the survey on Cook’s site can thus be ascertained — and it is exactly zero. It’s hard to believe any scientist would think they would get away with this. The paper will surely have to be withdrawn. (But will the government funding be withdrawn? The Australian Research Council (ARC) needs to answer some very awkward questions.)
222 “translates” “into up to 78,000 visits from “skeptics” ” in September 2010. And these are active commenters so the figure would be higher counting visits by sceptics that didn’t comment (as I usually don’t on brief visits just to see what their latest posts are). I’m thinking this may be a little optimistic on Cook’s part.
Probably the last thing I would have done at SkS (and that not at all) would have been to participate in the survey even if I had seen the link – which was impossible anyway.
In an email to Cook on February 14, 2013, I sent a detailed review of the above events and asked Cook to defend himself, concluding my email as follows:
“Not to put too fine a point on it, it appears to me that you lied, when you asserted that your correspondence with Lewandowsky on 28 August 2010 was “forensic evidence” that showed that you had posted a link at Skeptical Science to the Lewandowsky survey on that day. I use the word “lie” because you had clearly examined the 28 August 2010 correspondence at the time of your email to Chambers and knew that this correspondence did not show that you had posted a link at Skeptical Science to the Lewandowsky survey on 28 August 2010 or any other day.
Before I make any public statements about this matter, I am offering you an opportunity to rebut the belief that the statement bolded above was a lie.”
Cook did not respond.
[…]
Last fall, long before Lewandowsky had expanded his accusations of “conspiracist ideation” to include the UK Met Office, one of Lewandowsky’s coauthors (presumably Cook) observed that Lewandowsky’s critics were actually accusing him of “lying/deceiving/incompetence” rather than “conspiracy”:
“Maybe we should address more head-on the inevitable criticism that they’re not accusing you of conspiracy because lying/deceiving/incompetence doesn’t necessarily involve conspiring.”
On this point at least – the need for Lewandowsky to address issues of “Lying/deceiving/incompetence” – even Lewandowsky’s coauthors and critics appear to have found common ground.
Answering my own question (maybe), “ser” is one of the Spanish verbs for ‘to be’ so Jorge would ‘be’ Kafka. And it turns out one Jorge Seca is a reviewer of a Franz Kafka biography and a translator of books:-
Tricky reading between Spanish lines so I’m not sure that I’ve joined the dots. If I have, rather odd that Jorge Seca has taken an interest in Lewandowsky but looking at the books he has translated his interest probably comes via psychology.
Word gets around apparently – Lewandowsky’s infamy has spread to at least one other sphere.
This profile page summarizes all known activity of the person Jorge Kafkazar related to Climate Change. This person may have appeared in articles supporting this topic, against it, or in a separate context: this biographical entry simply demarks this person as appearing in content suggesting contextual association with Climate Change.
Despite hellish summer, Russia says “nyet” to AGW | Watts Up With …
…… What is happening now is not some kind of unusual special case , he said , adding that life flourished on Earth at the time of dinosaurs Full story here h t to WUWT reader Jorge Kafkazar ……
(149 words by wattsupwiththat.com)
Since 1990, the Club de l’Horloge awards each year the “Lysenko Prize” to an author or person who “has contributed the most to scientific and historical misinformation, using ideological methods and arguments.”
Gavin Schmidt, a much misunderstood character in the global warming debate, has demonstrated his good faith and honourable intentions by issuing a denunciation of Skeptical Science.
Bishop Hill notes this interesting bit about Gavin Schmidt and Dana Nuccitelli, and rather than try to rewrite the excellent dry wit in a few sentences going on here, well I’ll just let you read what he said at Bishop Hill:
This issue has been discussed at BH quite a bit. Since the Probability Distribution Functions (pdf) of climate sensitivity tend to have long tails – i.e they are asymmetric – the modal value (i.e the most popular, or the peak of the graph) is always less than the mean value.
With a symmetric normal distribution, the modal and mean would be the same.
Therefore, comparing modal values of one CS pdf with the mean values of another CS pdf is wrong.
One of the strangest things about Dana Nuccitelli’s article about the Lewis 2013 paper is its twin-pronged attack – alleging that Lewis misrepresented the match between the mode of his estimate and that of Aldrin et al, and suggesting that the Lewis result is an outlier.
In the graph below, I have redrawn Lewis 2013 and a selection of other papers: Aldrin et al, Forster and Gregory, and Troy Masters’ new paper. The IPCC’s 2-4.5deg range is shown as the shaded area.
With Lewis’s PDF sitting in the middle of the bunch, Nuccitelli’s position is shown to be baseless. I’ve added a line through the mode of Lewis, which you can see matches Aldrin et al almost exactly. So when Nuccitelli says Lewis is misrepresenting the match between his findings and Aldrin’s, it’s easy to see that this is, ahem, a stretch.
There are other papers that could be shown on the plot – Ring et al, Lindzen and Choi and so on, but I think this handful is good enough to make the point: there is simply no way Lewis 2013 can be seen as an outlier.
The Leopard In The Basement – “Possibly they could say the paper is an outlier in the degree of pointiness of the hump (technical?) But I noticed that Dana Nuccitelli didn’t adopt this graphical approach to show this, he seems to rather take the approach of a mangled word construction that can only be described by borrowing the words of Gavin Schmidt, as “sleight of hand” ;)”
Nic Lewis (replying to Speed)- “It is Nuccitelli , not me, who is misrepresenting the position and being misleading. One of his own regular contributors, Tom Curtis, takes him to task about this.”
# # #
Nuccitelli has not thought this through – now he’s dug a hole for himself. especially when the likes of Tom Curtis breaks ranks.
One of the strangest things about Dana Nuccitelli’s article about the Lewis 2013 paper is its twin-pronged attack – alleging that Lewis misrepresented the match between the mode of his estimate and that of Aldrin et al, and suggesting that the Lewis result is an outlier.
In the graph below, I have redrawn Lewis 2013
Who is “I”?
Two references are inserted; what is their significance?
What is the meaning of ###?
>”Two references are inserted; what is their significance?”
Nuccitelli was trying to create the impression that Lewis 2013 was an outlier from other CS papers, Aldrin et al in particular. But in fact both papers are similar in terms of mode (the black vertical line in plot below) not mean (which would be a little to the right of the black line). Nuccitelli compared the mode of Lewis to the mean of Aldrin (or maybe other war round) which is not an apples to apples comparison.
Montford provided three other “outliers” to show Lewis was in a group, but there are other papers in the same outlier group and the group is growing. This is the issue that many are saying must be addressed by revising CS (e,g, Judith Curry).
>”What is the meaning of ###?”
That is the end of copied article, quotes within the article, links pertaining to the article (e.g. significant graphs and the article link itself). After ### is my commentary on all three – article/quotes/graphs.
Expect some odd comments from me over the next six months but much less quantity – I’m doing 10 hr nightshifts over the kiwifruit season. I think i’ve crammed all the issues of the moment into the latest posts anyway, there’s not much more to be said now but just a matter of observing the climate in the context of the issues.
BTW the drought has broken here in the BOP. Flooding everywhere, cars floating, and I was lucky to get home from Te Puke this morning. A stormwater man-hole cover blew off in the middle of the Packhouse at around 5:30am and there was a foot high fountain of water gushing out for a while. Makes for interesting work stories. I know of a Mt Maunganui Packhouse that would have been ankle deep all through and I heard on the news several industrial sites were inundated, not to mention domestic dwellings (e.g. my next-door neighbour).
Dana, Aldrin et al quote a mean CS of 2 C. Lewis quotes the mode of the Aldrin PDF on climate sensitivity as 1.6 C, which is correct. The confusion arises because he is citing a different value.
Lewis, in fact, has a penchant for quoting the mode of climate sensitivity analyses because it is, as he says, the maximum likilihood result. Personally I do not think it is the best value to quote. Rather the median (where it can be determined), ie, the 50/50 mark is far more informative if you must quote a single number. Of course, with a long tailed PDF, the mode will always be less than both the median and the mean of the PDF. Without going so far as to say that is Lewis’ reason for preferring it, that does make it a tremendously convenient number for “skeptics” to quote.
Dana Nuccitelli Misleads and Misinforms in His First Blog Post at The Guardian
Posted on April 25, 2013 by Bob Tisdale
The Guardian has a new blog called Climate Consensus – The 97%. The two primary authors are to be Dana Nuccitelli, a regular contributor at SkepticalScience, and John Abraham, Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas.
Dana Nuccitelli’s first post at his new blog at The Guardian is titled “Why is Reuters puzzled by global warming’s acceleration?” His article is subtitled, “‘Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown,’ said Reuters. But warming is speeding up, and scientists can explain it.” Nuccitelli’s first post at The Guardian is reminiscent of his posts at SkepticalScience—that is, it’s misleading and full of misinformation.
[…]
OCEAN HEAT CONTENT
Nuccitelli begins his post with a picture from space of the Pacific Ocean with the caption:
Oceans, such as the Pacific pictured here from space, are absorbing much of the warming the planet is currently experiencing. NASA/ Roger Ressmeyer/ Corbis
Then the first sentence of his post reads:
The rate of heat building up on Earth over the past decade is equivalent to detonating about 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs per second.
Based on Nuccitelli’s opening illustration and statement, we should expect the ocean heat content of the Pacific Ocean to be showing a monumental amount of warming over the past 10 years. But, as shown in Figure 1, the ocean heat content data for the Pacific Ocean from pole to pole (90S-90N, 120E-80W) shows cooling. Right from the get go, data disagrees with Nuccitelli’s representations. [Figure 1]:-
Reuters didn’t connect the dots between these two articles, telling us one week that oceans help explain the surface warming slowdown, and the next week claiming the slowdown is puzzling climate scientists. However, these ‘slowdowns’ happen on a regular basis. You can find one every 5 to 10 years in the surface temperature data, as illustrated in a graphic I created nicknamed ‘The Escalator‘.
[…]
Now, if we merge all of the data from Figures 6 through 8, we have a more realistic view on how, when and why global surface temperatures warmed—a more realistic escalator. See Figure 9. There was no cherry picking involved, just a little common sense to highlight the primary causes of global warming since 1960. [Figure 9]:-
Ocean heat content data for the Pacific Ocean contradicts Dana Nuccitelli’s opening statement and illustration. The ocean heat content data for the tropical Pacific show that Mother Nature is responsible for the fuel for El Niño events. Ocean Heat Content data and satellite-era sea surface temperature data also indicate the oceans warmed naturally, but you have to understand that ENSO works as a recharge-discharge oscillator (with La Niña as the recharge mode and El Niño as the discharge mode) to see Mother Nature’s handiwork. And as illustrated, Dana Nuccitelli’s Escalator is simply another way for global warming enthusiasts to hide how global temperatures actually warmed since 1976. In short, data contradicts Dana Nuccitelli’s first post at The Guardian’s new blog.
The results show a skewed commenter profile. As a whole, there are 59 skeptical commenters, amounting to about 9.5% of total. Individually, skeptics range from 5-11% of commenters between blogs, with one venue (Hot Topic) showing 19% skeptics. Closer examination shows this to be made up by just 10 commenters. Non-skeptics are close to 80%, i.e., 480 of 614. Neutral posters are 9%, and indeterminate 3%. Of the 59, more than half are from comments posted at one blog (Deltoid).
I wonder what this “closer examination” at HotTopic entailed?
John Cook, proprietor of the website Skeptical Science, recently published a paper with the help of members of his site. They describe their study as examining the abstracts of “over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers” and finding “a 97% consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming.” This study has received media fanfare, and even Barack Obama, the President of the United States, tweeted about it.
We’ve been having fun on this site about this study, but what I say next I cannot say with any humor. It is simply too serious. Skeptical Science recently invited people to rate the 12,000+ abstracts via Skeptical Science’s interactive rating system so people could “measure the climate consensus” themselves. An additional feature of the system allows users to view the abstracts, as well as the ratings given by the people behind the paper.
The guidelines for rating these abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65 [0.5%], out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.
The “consensus” they’re promoting says it is more likely humans have a negligible impact on the planet’s warming than a large one.
Seen in comments under the Dana Nuccitelli/Mark Reynolds Sac Bee Op-Ed (where they cite the 97% paper in support of “Now that the science is settled that humans are causing global warming”): ‘Climate debate is settled; carbon tax is vital’
juggler65 ,
“Oh no. It looks like we’re all going to die, again. I think this is something like the third time, in the last two weeks, that we were all going to die.”
I looked up a map of the 5 major ocean gyres to visualize Rob Painting’s speculation in ‘Looming Climate Shift’:
“The transport of heat down into the surface to deep ocean occurs via the subtropical ocean gyres (green ellipses in Figure 1). These are large rotating masses of water, in each ocean basin, where ocean currents converge at their centre and are forced downwards, taking warm surface water with them. Future SkS posts will deal with the ocean gyres and how they operate, but note that changes in the winds which power the ocean gyres affect the transport of heat down into the ocean, and also the transport of heat from the tropics to the polar regions. Intensified tropical easterly trades winds, for instance, spin up the ocean gyres leading to greater downward, and poleward, heat transport (see Roemmich [2007]).”
Note “transport of heat down into the surface to deep ocean” is an air => sea surface => deep ocean process i.e. anthropogenic forcing (supposedly). The 5 major ocean gyres:
“Decadal Spinup” is the actual Roemmich description and it refers to the sea surface height (SSH) at the centre of the gyre which rises during spinup (i.e. upwelling, not downdraft) and if gyres are “rotating masses of water”, warm surface water is not necessarily being “forced downwards” at the centre unless there is actually a vortex funneling down at the centre as in whirlpool funneling. Vortex is the proper term for any whirlpool that has a downdraft. No downdraft, no funneling. Roemmich et al (2007) do not mention any downdraft in the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre, neither do they mention “greater downward, …….heat transport”:
‘Decadal Spinup of the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre’
ROEMMICH, GILSON, DAVIS, SUTTON, WIJFFELS, and RISER (2007)
Ocean whirlpools with downdrafts do exist from time to time (seasonally) and have been studied and documented but they are on a MUCH smaller scale than gyres. I’ll be very interested when “Future SkS posts will deal with the ocean gyres” if Rob Painting asserts there is a downdraft effect at the centre of the major gyres especially when (quoting Wiki ‘Subpolar gyres’) “Surface currents generally move outward from the center of the system. This drives the Ekman transport, which creates an upwelling of nutrient-rich water from the lower depths”. Upwelling and downdraft are exactly opposite.
Also from Wiki ‘South Pacific Gyre’: “The currents act to isolate the center of the gyre from nutrient upwelling” and “In the center of the South Pacific Gyre, the sedimentation rate is 0.1 to 1 m (0.3 to 3.3 ft) per million years. The sediment thickness (from basement basalts to the seafloor) ranges from 1 to 70m, with thinner sediments occurring closer to the center of the Gyre”. No mention of any downdraft but a mention of upwelling.
I note too that the gyres have shrunk in Rob Painting’s Figure 1. I’m inclined to think Rob is painting himself and SkS into a corner on this speculation.
Couldn’t resist Andy, Rob’s whole chain of events is taking on a phantasmagorical nature.
In my mental imagery of it I keep seeing a massive whirlpool in the middle of the ocean with the odd ship being sucked down into it – along with all that heat.
Note also that the direction of energy flow in “transport of heat down into the surface to deep ocean” (air => sea surface => deep ocean) is opposite to the direction of the Minnett theory that Rob links to in ‘Some Background Context’ (“This reduces the typical rate of heat loss from the ocean to the atmosphere above, and therefore causes the oceans to grow warmer over time”) which is ocean => air heat loss.
Poor Rob is tying himself in knots trying to integrate AGW into ocean heat.
Rob Painting cites Meehl et al (2013) and we’ll probably be regaled with it for some time to come so it is worth being familiar with. Unfortunately there is so much numb-skull rationale in it that it defies (my) synopsis:
‘Externally forced and internally generated decadal climate variability associated with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation’
Gerald A. Meehl, Aixue Hu, Julie Arblaster, John Fasullo, and Kevin E. Trenberth
IPO is near equivalent to PDO. Basically they’ve figured out what most sceptics already know (positive phase IPO = warming, negative phase = hiatus/cooling – duh) and they then proceed by future model scenario that leaves TSI at Grand Maximum levels, an assumed radiative imbalance, and with a model that doesn’t mimic 21st century observation anyway, to try to integrate AGW into it all and show anthropogenic deep ocean heating e.g. page 9:
“The composite SST trend decades have a similar energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, with the hiatus decades (Fig. 2a) and accelerated warming decades (Fig. 2b) showing an imbalance of about 1 Wm-2, comparable to the imbalance for all other decades and no significant difference between them. Therefore, in all decades there is about 1 Wm-2 being directed into the climate system and the planet is warming. If all of heat from this energy imbalance were directed into the oceans, this would amount to about 16.09 x 1022 J decade-1.”
It is nonsense to say “If all of heat from this energy imbalance were directed into the oceans” because the energy is already in the oceans, that is why there is a TOA radiative imbalance and OHC accumulation. The energy is not being released in sufficient quantity to balance high input. If they ramped down solar input as is happening in the real world right now, the imbalance (their model assumption) will eventually reach equilibrium and maybe go the other way (a little more leaving than input).
Their basic, but inadvertent premise (solar input at constantly high levels relative to historic lows), negates the entire modeling exercise if it is to be translated to the real-world (and if that is even possible). They’re assuming, as is Scafetta for example, that the IPO oscillation and warm-cool cycle will continue to be overlaid on an underlying long-term rising trend that they attribute to AGW (actually rising solar input that has just started falling away from high levels from around 2009) so that after this current hiatus, temperatures will then accelerate upwards just like late 1970s or the early 1900s.
Not going to happen this time though because their premise is false.
Re “…future model scenario …… with a model that doesn’t mimic 21st century observation anyway”
‘Meehl et al (2013) Are Also Looking for Trenberth’s Missing Heat’
by Bob Tisdale
OVERVIEW
Rob Painting of SkepticalScience recently published the post A Looming Climate Shift: Will Ocean Heat Come Back to Haunt Us? Many of you will find his post entertaining.
But this post is not about the SkepticalScience post. This post discusses the recent paper Rob Painting cited: Meehl et al (2013) […]
…..this post includes a model-data comparison of the trends in satellite-era sea surface temperatures for the Pacific versus the outputs (ensemble mean and individual ensemble members) of the CCSM4 model used by Meehl et al (2013) […]
The problem: Meehl et al (2013) are using a climate model (NCAR CCSM4) that doesn’t properly simulate the coupled ocean-atmosphere processes that drive El Niños and La Niñas. As far as I know, there are no climate models that properly simulate El Niño and La Niña processes. […]
……….a comparison graph of downward shortwave radiation (sunlight) versus downward longwave (infrared) radiation for the period of 1979 to present, along the equatorial Pacific (5S-5N, 120E-80W), based on the NCEP-DOE Reanalysis-2. See Figure 3.
The downward longwave radiation (red curve) serves as a reasonable proxy for the El Niño and La Niña events. Notice that downward longwave (infrared) radiation decreases during La Niña events. That of course means its variations do not support the model-based supposition that infrared radiation is creating the additional warm water that is being forced below depths of 700 meters. In the real world, it’s downward shortwave radiation (sunlight) that increases during La Niña events. […]
In Figure 13, I’ve added the ensemble mean (the average of the 6 model runs) of the NCAR CCSM4 models stored in the CMIP5 archive. (The NCAR CCSM4 was the climate model employed by Meehl et al (2013) for their study. And CMIP5 is the archive being used by the IPCC for its upcoming 5th Assessment Report.)
As shown, the warming rates of the average of the model outputs show no resemblance to how the Pacific actually warmed. […]
Animation 1 includes comparison graphs of the data to the six individual ensemble members and to the ensemble mean. Not one of the ensemble members captures the warming pattern correctly. ………. (You may need to click start the animation.)
Climate scientists are scrambling to explain why surface temperatures have not warmed since the 1997/98 El Niño. Meehl et al (2013) is yet another example. Fundamentally, Meehl et al (2013) is climate model-aided speculation. It is a failed attempt to explain how and why global surface temperatures cool (or remain flat) when La Niña events dominate and to explain that the warming continues but it occurs out of sight and out of mind below the depths of 700 meters. […]
Meehl et al suggest that manmade global warming continues but it’s being driven to depths below 700 meters by La Niñas. But the warm water created during La Niñas results from an increase in sunlight, not infrared radiation.
All of these factors dictate that studies such as Meehl et al (2013) have no value. Meehl et al (2013) employed fatally flawed models in an attempt to determine how and why the warming of surface temperatures has stalled and they employed those same fatally flawed climate models in an effort to determine where Kevin Trenberth’s missing heat might have gone—which assumes the missing heat even exists.
“I was not able to find any suggestion in Meehl et al (2013) that the heat driven below the depths of 700 meters would somehow come back to haunt us as some alarmists suggest nonsensically”
The DSR causation vs DLR non-causation shoots down the wider (outside SkS) alarmist argument for anthropogenic ocean warming e.g. Alley and Mann (Obama sycophants in this case):
‘Coming crisis demands action’
By Richard Alley and Michael Mann
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced new measures to combat global warming.
Vigorous discussions about whether these are the best policy responses are almost sure to follow. These discussions are likely to be more productive if they start from the solid scholarship showing that we will be better off if we respond wisely to the coupled challenges of energy and environment.
“The Earth’s temperature continues to rise despite a slight dimming of the sun and increased blocking of some sunlight by particles from dirty smokestacks and volcanoes.”
And,
“Over the past decade, warming of the air has slowed as more heat has transferred into the deep ocean, and the previous decade saw accelerated air warming with less going into the deep sea.”
And,
“The recent slowdown in warming the air bought us time, but our CO2 is still pushing us toward hotter temperatures in air and water.”
‘A Very Ridiculous Comment by the Author of a Recent SkepticalScience Post’
by Bob Tisdale
I returned to a recent post at SkepticalScience to examine what the author had to say about two papers: Meehl et al (2011) and Meehl et al (2013). [We discussed Meehl et al (2013) here.] I am now convinced SkepticalScience should be renamed UtterNonsense or TheCluelessLeadingTheClueless. The SkepticalScience post I’m referring to is A Looming Climate Shift: Will Ocean Heat Come Back to Haunt Us?, and the author is Rob Painting.
[…]
“The consequences of a shutdown of the wind-driven ocean circulation could be very profound”????? He has got to be kidding.
The tragedy: The “climate change communicator” who asked the question, someone who by their own admission does not have a scientific background, actually thanked Rob Painting for the answer. Will the “climate change communicator” now broadcast that nonsense through his communication channels?
The most telling part: No one else commenting on the thread questioned Rob Painting’s statement.
[…] For wind-driven ocean circulation to shut down, is Rob Painting suggesting the waters in the tropics will no longer be warmer than they are in the mid-latitudes? And is he also suggesting the Earth will stop rotating? Those things would have to occur for his proposed shutdown to occur. Considering that SkepticalScience is an alarmist website, is he suggesting that all this will be caused by increases in manmade greenhouse gases?
‘Agnotology, Climastrology, and Replicability Examined in a New Study’
by dana1981
A new paper is currently undergoing open public review in Earth System Dynamics (ESD) titled Agnotology: learning from mistakes by Benestad and Hygen of The Norwegian Meteorological Institute, van Dorland of The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and Cook and Nuccitelli of Skeptical Science. ESD has a review system in which anybody can review a paper and submit comments to be considered before its final publication. So far we have received many comments, including from several authors whose papers we critique in our study, like Ross McKitrick, Craig Loehle, and Jan-Erik Solheim.
Interactive comment on “Agnotology: learning from mistakes” by R. E. Benestad et al.
C. Loehle
“This paper makes two fundamental assumptions that are false. The first is that the science of climate change is “settled” and that this consensus cannot be questioned. The second, which therefore follows, is that anyone questioning this consensus does so willfully and malevolently (intentionally promoting ignorance).”
“The second assumption is pernicious. It asserts that anyone who disagrees with this (sloppy) consensus in any particular is not merely wrong, but willfully wrong; that is, is engaged in disinformation or propaganda. “Agnotology” is thus just a fancy way of saying “denier.” Overall, the manuscript is simply a litany of complaints about papers the authors don’t like. Yet in no case do the authors bother to truly refute anything, they simply argue that this or that “might” have a problem or uses a method they disapprove of. They are essentially requiring the reader to take their word for it that these papers are wrong. But science, to paraphrase the Royal Society’s motto, “takes no man’s word” for anything. Everything should be demonstrated. I do not recognize these or any other scientists as having the authority to dismiss mine or any work on their say-so.”
Interactive comment on “Agnotology: learning from mistakes” by R. E. Benestad et al.
R. McKitrick
“The BHDCN paper is a bait-and-switch, in which the authors propose a scholarly essay on the methodology of science, then proceed to deliver something quite different: a scattershot of shallow commentary on a list of climatology papers with which they disagree. It is perfectly valid to publish critiques of papers, but they should be written as such, not offered parenthetically in an essay supposedly on another topic. We are asked to take it as “proven” that the authors of this paper have so decisively rebutted all the papers in their Appendix that we can now turn to a philosophical debriefing on the question of why they ever got published in the first place. Yet as proof, all the Appendix offers is a rehash of old, and mostly unpublished, blog posts. The whole paper is thus a waste of readers’ time.”
“The usage of the concept of “agnotology” is confused and contradictory. They introduce the term in paragraph 1 on page 452 as the counterpart of epistemology, that is, as a branch of philosophy. Then they use it in paragraph 2 as a method (“An agnotological study of the climate sciences can shed light…”). Then it is used synonymously with replication analysis and as a rhetorical technique (“the communication of misleading claims is a case of agnotology.” para 2 p. 463). Its use in the heading of Section A4 implies it is a form of misrepresentation. Finally the title itself implies agnotology means learning from mistakes, but the paper does not allege “mistakes”, instead it alleges widespread research malfeasance, such as ignoring data that doesn’t fit a hypothesis or ignoring known physical theories.”
“Presumably, “agnotology” means an absence of information and a lack of basis for knowing. Yet all the authors’ examples allege the opposite situation, namely cases in which (BHDCN assert) there is so much information, and matters are so decisively settled, that we can now assume the debates are all over and BHDCN won them all. There is no special philosophical issue behind their analysis, it is just garden-variety argumentation, most of it at a very trivial level. The agnotology angle appears to be a contrivance to try and make a weak paper sound erudite.”
“The authors repeatedly discuss replication as an essential part of science, insinuating that the papers they critique are at fault regarding disclosure of data and methods. Yet they provide no evidence that non-disclosure was an issue for the papers they study. The authors of the papers they critique appear to have made their methods and data freely available, and BHDCN do not claim that their work was thwarted by non-disclosure. While they point out that replication work is rare, they don’t present any case studies in which replication was actively impeded by failure to release data and/or code. Examples of such studies would be Dewald et al. (1986) and Anderson et al. (1994).”
“Worse, BHDCN insinuate that their analysis of MM04 and MM07 was hampered by secrecy, by ending their discussion on page 490 with the statement: “Another problem was the lack of openness and transparency, which prevented finding out why the conclusions in some of these cases differed to attempts to replicate (Le Page, 2009).” This is completely misleading. The Le Page article refers to an unrelated incident involving different authors, whereas the data and code for MM04 and MM07 have always been available, and nobody has ever claimed to be unable to replicate the findings. I have pointed this out to BHDCN in response to their previous drafts and it is very objectionable to see them repeat their falsehood here once again.
>”…a scattershot of shallow commentary on a list of climatology papers with which they disagree” [McKitrick]
And,
>”..a litany of complaints about papers the authors don’t like” [Loehle]
Viz:
* Case 1: Humlum et al. (2011a) – ignoring data which do not agree with the conclusions.
* Case 2: Scafetta (2012a) – unclear physics and non-objective analytical design
* Case 3: Loehle and Scafetta (2011) – unclear physics and inappropriate curve-fitting
* Case 4: Solheim et al. (2011) – ignoring negative tests
* Case 5: Scafetta and West (various) – wrongly presumed dependencies and no model evaluation
* Case 6: Douglass et al. (2007) – misinterpretation of statistics
* Case 7: McKitrick and Michaels (2004) – failure to account for the actual degrees of freedom
* Case 8: Veizer (2005) – missing similarities
* Case 9: Humlum et al. (2013) – looking at wrong scales
* Case 10: Cohn and Lins (2005) – circular reasoning
* Case 11: Scafetta (2010) – lack of plausible physics
* Case 12: McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) – incorrect interpretation of mathematics
* Case 13: Beck (2008) – contamination by other factors
* Case 14: Miskolzi (2010) – incomplete account of the physics
* Case 15: Svensmark, Friis-Christensen, and Lassen (various) – differences in pre-processing of data
* Case 16: Svensmark (2007), Shaviv (2002), and Courtillot et al. (2007) – selective use of data
* Case 17: Yndestad (2006) – misinterpretation of spectral methods
‘Agnotology: learning from mistakes’
R. E. Benestad, H. O. Hygen, R. van Dorland, J. Cook, and D. Nuccitelli (2013)
The Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) et al has lodged a petition for a writ of certiorari (review basically) from the US Supreme Court of the EPA’s evidence for the endangerment finding – how long before the style of psuedo-scientific critique (Benestad et al, 2013) similarly ends up in legal dispute i.e. in this case, legal scrutiny of another party’s assertions where professional reputations are at stake?
‘Quantifying the consensus on global warming in the literature’:
a comment by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Capsule
The latest paper apparently showing 97% endorsement of a consensus that more than half of recent global warming was anthropogenic really shows only 0.3% endorsement of that now-dwindling consensus.
Abstract
Cook et al. (2013) stated that abstracts of nearly all papers expressing an opinion on climate change endorsed consensus, which, however, traditionally has no scientific role; used three imprecise definitions of consensus interchangeably; analyzed abstracts only; excluded 67% expressing no opinion; omitted some key results; misstated others; and thus concluded that 97.1% endorsed the hypothesis as defined in their introduction, namely that the “scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)”. The authors’ own data file categorized 64 abstracts, or only 0.5% of the sample, as endorsing the consensus hypothesis as thus defined. Inspection shows only 41 of the 64, or 0.3% of the entire sample, actually endorsed their hypothesis. Criteria for peer review of papers quantifying scientific consensus are discussed.
2) Including all of the following three categories:-
1,Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%
2,Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise
3,Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it.
Only 65 papers out of 12000+ appear under category 1, so I though I would investigate what is in the other two categories. And under category 2, I found this paper by A Carlin.
A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change
[…] I suppose, in theory, the paper acknowledges that AGW may exist, but to claim that it “endorses the consensus” is so far from the truth to be not only misleading, but almost fraudulent.
Unfortunately this is the sort of nonsense you get when the babies who read Skeptical Science are allowed to rate the papers, on which the survey is based.
Dr Alan Carlin is the “EPA Whistleblower” (in terms of the endangerment finding). See ‘EPA Whistleblower Criticizes Global Warming Science and Policy in New Peer-Reviewed Study’ in the USA thread:
‘Alan Carlin Destroys John Cook’s Credibility (If He Ever Had Any!)’
By Paul Homewood
I ran a post yesterday about how John Cook’s infamous “97%” paper had incorrectly classified a paper by Alan Carlin as “endorsing the consensus on AGW” . But it seems I was already beaten to it by Popular Technology, who flagged this up, along with many other similar misclassifications. They also asked for comments from the scientists concerned, and Alan Carlin did not pull his punches:-
Dr. Carlin, your paper ‘A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change‘ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize”.
Is this an accurate representation of your paper?
Carlin: “No, if Cook et al’s paper classifies my paper, ‘A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change’ as “explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize,” nothing could be further from either my intent or the contents of my paper. I did not explicitly or even implicitly endorse AGW and did quantify my skepticism concerning AGW. Both the paper and the abstract make this clear.” […]
“I would classify my paper in Cook et al’s category (7): Explicit rejection with quantification.”
“This revelation about Dana working for a company that supports “big oil” in the form of oil and gas exploration and production may very well revoke Dana’s “green card”.
And ironically, Tetra Tech is big in mining too, for those that want to trash talk about Steve McIntyre’s work in the mining industry.”
My post over at the Nottingham University ‘Making Science Public’ blog has ruffled some feathers. This was caused in no small part by Mike Hulme’s intervention:
“Ben Pile is spot on. The “97% consensus” article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister [Ed Davey] should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to that adopted in Anderegg et al.’s 2010 equally poor study in PNAS: dividing publishing climate scientists into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living (or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?”
“…it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister [Ed Davey] should cite it”
Pile:
“If this survey had not influenced the arguments of Obama and Davey, and thus perhaps influenced UK policy, I might actually feel sorry for the paper’s authors and their fans. Instead, seeing for myself just how shallow their thinking is, and how transparent their politicking is, I am more terrified that it is so easy for such a collection of mediocre minds to achieve such prominence, merely by flattering politicians with such rank pseudo science.”
I think John Cook did do a physics degree. That article was rather painful. Declaring JC’s blog as a “denier blog” and then singing the praises of Desmogblog and various other smear/propaganda didn’t suggest that they were a very open minded bunch
Yes my bad, an undergraduate education in physics from the University of Queensland and a post-graduate honors year studying solar physics.
However,
“It was 2007, and Cook was working from his home in web programming and database programming, something he still does to earn a living, generally working with small local Australian businesses — local doctors, beauty salons, cartoonists, and promotional product companies.”
“John is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He originally studied physics at the University of Queensland. After graduating, he majored in solar physics in his post-grad honours year. In 2011, he co-authored the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand with Haydn Washington, published by Earthscan. In 2013, he co-authored the college textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis with Tom Farmer, published by Springer.”
His career after academic-only physicist looks to have been website/database development and (man-made) climate change “communication”. I see next to no SkS cognizance (except for lame dismissal) of the solar role in climate even after a year studying solar physics post graduation. So there doesn’t seem to be much spillover from academic activities and qualifications to his new career path.
One could also say Dr Hannibal Lechter was a brilliant psychiatrist. True, but rather misses his other more influential course-of-life developments somewhat.
‘Richard Tol: half Cook’s data still hidden. Rest shows result is incorrect, invalid, unrepresentative.’
Jo Nova
[Richard Tol] I first contacted Mr Cook on 31 May 2013, requesting data that should have been ready when the paper was submitted for peer review on 18 January 2013. His foot-dragging, condoned by senior university officials, does not reflect well on the University of Queensland’s attitude towards replication and openness. His refusal to release all data may indicate that more could be wrong with the paper.
Therefore, I hereby request, once again, that you release rater IDs and time stamps.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Tol
cc. Mr John Story, chancellor, University of Queensland
Professor Peter Knight, president, Institute of Physics
“If, on the other hand, this was a survey of the raters’ beliefs and skills, rather than a survey of the abstracts they rated, then Mr Cook is correct that their identity should remain confidential. But this undermines the entire paper: It is no longer a survey of the literature, but rather a survey of Mr Cook and his friends.”
Mr Cook and his friends:
Cook, Nuccitelli, Green, Richardson, Winkler, Painting, Way, Jacobs and Skuce (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024
John Cook’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Closing the Consensus Gap generated the most buzz (number of comments) of the articles posted on SkS this past week. It is a summary of Cook’s lengthier article, Closing the consensus gap: Public support for climate policy published by the prestigious Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In both articles, Cook discusses the SkS paper Quantifying the Consensus and why there was a need for it
Amazing how they authored their own credibility demise by unprofessional, unethical, unscientific approach and execution – for all the world to read.
Viz (as quoted by Andrew):
“We’re basically going with Ari’s porno approach……”
And,
“I have to say that I find this planning of huge marketing strategies somewhat
strange when we don’t even have our results in and the research subject is not
that revolutionary either (just summarizing existing research).”
‘Study: Claimed warmist consensus of 97.1% actually only 0.3%!’
by Steve Milloy
Science & Education (Springer)
August 2013
‘Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change’
David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
“Inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.”
Cooks ’97% consensus’ disproven by a new peer reviewed paper showing major math errors’
‘by Anthony Watts
UPDATE: While this paper (a rebuttal) has been accepted, another paper by Cook and Nuccitelli has been flat out rejected by the journal Earth System Dynamics [and several other places – see comments]. See update below. – Anthony
“0.3% climate consensus, not 97.1%”
[……PRESS RELEASE – September 3rd, 2013……….]
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change
David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education.
Bishop Hill writes: [http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/9/3/benestad-et-al-rejected.html]
The Benestad (Cook, Nuccitelli) et al paper on “agnotology”, a bizarre concoction that tried to refute just about every sceptic paper ever written has been rejected by Earth System Dynamics
[…..ESD rejection…….]
Which is all fine and well, but then you get the paragraphs below, which seem to me to be almost as strange as the Benestad article itself:
[…..bizarre discourse……..]
Not having been on the end of many editorial decision notices myself I’m perhaps not best placed to say how normal such a stream of conciousness is in scientific discourse. But it seems very odd to me.
I think we know why David Legates made it into the gallery (well, among other things anyway):
“In the latest volley, from Legates et al 2013, John Cook’s “97% consensus” survey has become the case study in agnotology. Based on incorrect results, a flawed method, and a logical fallacy, it kept key facts hidden while sloppily blending vague language into a form that is easily and actively misinterpreted. That it passed peer-review is another damning indictment of peer review.”
Australian Climate Madness has some good observations on SkS
John Cook, also writing in The Australian, simply rehashes the same old tired arguments we have seen so many times before, plugging his junk-science ’97% consensus’ paper to justify his incessant alarmism. At no point is there any acknowledgement from Cook about the problems with the IPCC process, and the unexpected halt in warming, which is becoming too big for even the mainstream media to ignore.
He also oddly fails to disclose his authorship of the climate activist website Skeptical Science (Curry, on the other hand, is open about her blog) – is he embarrassed by its zealotry, perhaps? Cook also claims his “server” was “hacked” and emails were “stolen” last year, when in fact it appears more likely a back door was simply left open at the SkS website, and the files were inadvertently made public. This is a cheap attempt to portray his critics as prepared to engage in unethical or illegal behaviour when in fact it was a self-inflicted wound.
The only positive is that Cook manages to avoid the “D” word for a change. Well done…
On the right side bar at NoTricksZone there’s a link to “Climate Bet For Charity”. Pete’s update:
‘Honeycutt-Nuccitelli Climate Bet Progress Report…So Far New Decade Is Cooler Than The Last…Ready To Concede?’
By P Gosselin on 8. Juni 2013
To mark the start of the new decade, NoTricksZone and its readers made a climate bet (see right side bar) against two warmists from Skeptical Science: Rob Honeycutt and Dana Nuccitelli (and others). Also see update-5. The warmists are pledging more than $14,000.00!
[…]
The bet is on whether or not the current 2011-2020 decade would be warmer or cooler than the previous 2001-2010 decade. NTZ and its readers say it will be cooler or the same. Messieurs Honeycutt and Nuccitelli say it’s going to get warmer for sure. After all, man is spewing more CO2 into the atmosphere than ever. The money won will be donated to a charity for children in need.
Almost two and half years have now passed and I think it’s a good time to see how the bet is coming along. Thanks to Robin Pittwood and his Kiwi Thinker blog, we now have preliminary results for the first 2 years and 5 months.
Clearly in the chart above we see that the current decade is running a bit cooler than the last one.
I think I’ll point to this in Stuff comments under the latest AR5 report article for a bit of fun, especially given the expectation from the solar recession that this would be the case.
Last datapoint is 2011.67, 1365.56 but it’s clear that SC 24 after 2008/9 will be down markedly (maybe 0,5 W.m2 at 2013 maximum) from the previous 3 cycles and who knows where the minimum will end up given the end of SC 23 was down by about 0.3 W.m2?
That’s a cooler regime than the 1st decade 21st century locked in for over a decade ahead unless the sun wakes up and a pretty good bet at NTZ I think.
No visit to the Skeptical Science website is complete without having one of their smug “escalator” graphics shoved down your throat.
Not content with the temperature escalator, which paints anyone who questions their zealous devotion to “The Cause” as a simpleton, they have now come up with the sea ice escalator, along similar lines.
So finally, ladies and gentlemen, we present the Australian Climate Madness version of [drum roll, please], The Escalator!!!
A rather fascinating insight into SkS from Steve McIntyre, and contains some frank discussion of the problems with Mann’s hockey stick from the SkS team
Concludes with Cook’s “call to action”
So skeptics that I suggest we focus on, assuming we launch with 12 skeptics (welcome changes):
Pat Michaels
Fred Singer
Steve McIntyre
Roger Pielke Sr
Freeman Dyson
Chris de Freitas
Unless you think others are more deserving of being on the list.
[..]
I bet Gareth could get us some good de Freitas quotes. Michaels should be easy. The tough one is McIntyre.
Have you ever wanted to know what it takes to be a hacker? Well you’re in luck. I’m here to tell you. I’m going to give you a step-by-step guide to how I got myself reported to the Feds by a major university.
If you don’t already know, I recently received a threatening letter from the University of Queensland which, amongst other things, threatened a lawsuit if I showed anyone the letter.
[…]
You see, a couple years ago, the secret forum on the Skeptical Science website was hacked. You can read all about it in a lengthy series of posts they wrote about it, starting here.
[…]
Anyway, the important thing is after their secret forum was hacked, they moved their forum to a new, secret location: http://www.sksforum.org. This secret-secret forum stayed secret for a while because nobody cared. Then one day Skeptical Science published a post with a few links which included the secret-secret forum’s URL. I saw the domain name and decided to check it out.
There wasn’t much to see. There was just a login page with an image on it. The image happened to be located in the directory http://www.sksforum.org/images/. Out of curiosity, I went to that directory. I found a number of images. I didn’t think much of them at first. Then I saw an image of John Cook, owner of the site, photoshopped into a Nazi uniform:
That creeped me out. I was even more creeped out when I found there were other images which depicted the Skeptical Science team with similar Nazi imagery. Naturally, I told people about these images. Most people were either disturbed or amused by the images, but Skeptical Science representatives were upset. They claimed I had hacked them,……..
[…]
You see, months back I noticed referral links from the secret-secret forum in my logs. They were in the form of, sksforum.org/thread.php?t=14499&p=18772. When I’d click on them, I’d be redirected to one of my own pages.
I quickly realized the links I was seeing were redirection links for the links people were posting in the secret-secret forum. I figured if I could see the ones going to my own site, I could probably see the ones going to other sites. I was right. Changing the number after p= resulted in a different redirection link. Not only that, but each new redirection link was one number higher than the previous.
That meant I could look at every external link anyone posted on the forum by repeatedly adding +1 to that value
[…]
I thought it’d be amusing to keep track of what the Skeptical Science team was linking to in their secret-secret forum. After all, it’s pretty silly to have a secret-secret forum while making information about what you’re discussing in the forum public.
[…]
I didn’t have any login information. An amateur might try brute-force guessing, but I’m too clever a hacker to resort to such a crude approach. Instead, I grabbed a can of Red Bull, scarfed down a Twinkie and got ready to write some awesome haxor code.
By which I mean, I looked at the list I had, found this entry:
Since the page was publicly accessible, I decided to follow its links. I saved what I saw. And now, the Feds are coming after me. They’re going to shove a black bag shoved over my head, transport to some deep, dark hole into which I’ll disappear for all eternity, and the Skeptical Science team will create a new, secret-secret-secret-secret forum. This time they might even learn not to make pages publicly accessible if they want to keep those pages hidden.
In the meantime, you can be a l33t haxor like me too. The University of Queensland claimed I hacked “the site where the IP was housed.” The site where the data was stored is the site I found URLs for. All I did to that site was try a few pages to see if it’d let me access any. I’m confident you could do that too.
In fact, I think you already have. I’m sure at some point in your life you rose to the level of a stupid script kiddie and copied the URL of a site. I bet you’ve gone beyond that though. I bet you managed, at some point in your life, to rise to the level of true haxor and pasted the URL of a site into your navigation bar.
But I have an inkling you’ve gone beyond that. The inkling is small, but it tells me at some point you became truly l33t and hit the Enter button.
>”I recently received a threatening letter [cease-and-desist] from the University of Queensland which, amongst other things, threatened a lawsuit if I showed anyone the letter.”
See the saga in this ‘Students desire knowledge’ thread:
‘Chronology of Tol’s Request for Cook et al 2013 Data’
Notes by SM, July 28, 2014
Introduction
Last year, Richard Tol requested John Cook’s ratings data, including anonymized rater ID and
timestamp. The data recently released by Brandon Shollenberger shows that the majority of
ratings (54%) were done by coauthors of the paper and a further 34% by acknowledgees
identified in the paper. The data also shows that the rater IDs were anonymized in the native
datafiles and that no special processing would have been required to respond to Tol’s request.
The data also shows that the native datafiles contained datestamps.
‘Cooking stove use, housing associations, white males, and the 97%’ [From Climate Depot]
José Duarte, 08/28/2014
The Cook et al. (2013) 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change.
Let’s go ahead and walk through that sentence again. The Cook et al 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change. I only spent ten minutes with their database — there will be more such papers for those who search. I’m not willing to spend a lot of time with their data, for reasons I detail further down.
This paper is vacated, as a scientific product, given that it included psychology papers, and also given that it twice lied about its method (claiming not to count social science papers, and claiming to use independent raters), and the professed cheating by the raters. It was essentially voided by its invalid method of using partisan and unqualified political activists to subjectively rate climate science abstracts on the issue on which their activism centers — a stunning and unprecedented method. I’m awaiting word on retraction from the journal, but I think we already know that this paper is vacated. It doesn’t represent knowledge of the consensus.
I discovered that the following papers were included as endorsement, as “climate papers”, again in just ten minutes of looking. They are classified as either implicit or explicit endorsement, and were evidently included in the 97% figure:
Chowdhury, M. S. H., Koike, M., Akther, S., & Miah, D. (2011). Biomass fuel use, burning technique and reasons for the denial of improved cooking stoves by Forest User Groups of Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary, Bangladesh. International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 18(1), 88–97.
Ding, D., Maibach, E. W., Zhao, X., Roser-Renouf, C., & Leiserowitz, A. (2011). Support for climate policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement. Nature Climate Change, 1(9), 462–466.
Egmond, C., Jonkers, R., & Kok, G. (2006). A strategy and protocol to increase diffusion of energy related innovations into the mainstream of housing associations. Energy Policy, 34(18), 4042–4049.
Gruber, E., & Brand, M. (1991). Promoting energy conservation in small and medium-sized companies. Energy Policy, 19(3), 279–287.
Ha-Duong, M. (2008). Hierarchical fusion of expert opinions in the Transferable Belief Model, application to climate sensitivity. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 49(3), 555–574.
Palmgren, C. R., Morgan, M. G., Bruine de Bruin, W., & Keith, D. W. (2004). Initial public perceptions of deep geological and oceanic disposal of carbon dioxide. Environmental Science & Technology, 38(24), 6441–6450.
Reynolds, T. W., Bostrom, A., Read, D., & Morgan, M. G. (2010). Now what do people know about global climate change? Survey studies of educated laypeople. Risk Analysis, 30(10), 1520–1538.
Semenza, J. C., Ploubidis, G. B., & George, L. A. (2011). Climate change and climate variability: personal motivation for adaptation and mitigation. Environmental Health, 10(1), 46.
Jose Duarte has another post looking at John Cook’s 97% ‘consensus’ paper.
[List of papers above reproduced]
Duarte is again openly referring to the paper as fraudulent. Yet this paper was cited approvingly by Ed Davey and Barack Obama. And the Institute of Physics is standing by it. Shameless, every one of them.
“Nuccitelli thinks that if a psychology paper uses the phrase “climate change denial”, it might count as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change. We should linger on that. This is a staggering level of stupidity with respect to what would count as scientific evidence of AGW [emphasized]. The implied epistemology there is, well, I don’t know that it has a name. Maybe it’s some kind of postmodernist view of reality being based on belief, anyone’s belief (except for the beliefs of skeptics) — perhaps a grotesque misreading of Kuhn. Even if we thought reality was best understood via consensus, it’s not going to be created by consensus, and the only consensus we would care about would be that of climate scientists. That Marxist or neo-Marxist sociologists pepper their paper with “climate change denial” does not add to our confidence level about AGW — it is not evidence of anything but the ideology of two American sociologists. It doesn’t test the energy balance model, or revise or validate or estimates of transient climate sensitivity. It has no input into our knowledge of AGW. In any case, I’m stunned by Nuccitelli’s behavior in these rater forum pages, and his behavior as a climate science writer – he and Jenny McCarthy should jointly surrender to some sort of authority.”
“I think some of you who’ve defended this “study” got on the wrong train. I don’t think you meant to end up here. I think it was an accident. You thought you were getting on the Science Train. You thought these people — Cook, Nuccitelli, Lewandowsky — were the science crowd, and that the opposition was anti-science, “deniers” and so forth. I hope it’s clear at this point that this was not the Science Train. This is a different train. These people care much less about science than they do about politics. They’re willing to do absolutely stunning, unbelievable things to score political points. What they did still stuns me, that they did this on purpose, that it was published, that we live in a world where people can publish these sorts of obvious scams in normally scientific journals. If you got on this train, you’re now at a place where you have to defend political activists rating scientific abstracts regarding the issue on which their activism is focused, able to generate the results they want. You have to defend people counting psychology studies and surveys of the general public as scientific evidence of endorsement of AGW. You have to defend false statements about the methods used in the study. Their falsity won’t be a matter of opinion — they were clear and simple claims, and they were false. You have to defend the use of raters who wanted to count a bad psychology study of white males as evidence of scientific endorsement of AGW. You have to defend vile behavior, dishonesty, and stunning hatred and malice as a standard way to deal with dissent.”
[Stevens and Mauritzen abstract] – “A controversial hypothesis [Lindzen & Choi Iris Effect] suggests that the dry and clear regions of the tropical atmosphere expand in a warming climate and thereby allow more infrared radiation to escape to space. This so-called iris effect could constitute a negative feedback that is not included in climate models. We find that inclusion of such an effect in a climate model moves the simulated responses of both temperature and the hydrological cycle to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations closer to observations”
[John Abraham] – ‘Changes in water vapor and clouds are amplifying global warming’
“What the present paper [Trenberth, Zhang, Fasullo, and Taguchi] shows is that future changes to clouds will cause slightly more warming. Scientists describe clouds as a “positive feedback” on global warming. This finding is consistent with the work of Dr. Andrew Dessler. He had published work here and here showing changes in clouds are making the Earth warm more than otherwise expected.
The results of this study harken back to prior work by one well-known skeptic Richard Lindzen who published work on climate feedbacks in 2009, and by another well-known skeptic Roy Spencer who wrote an article in 2011. Those works, among others, reportedly show that the Earth is less sensitive to increases in greenhouse gases. This new work confirms the opposite; it turns out Dr. Dessler was correct after all.”
Hansen et al (2005) have an estimate for planetary oceanic thermal inertia (as do others in the literature).
Here’s a synopsis for the record. The article, and Hansen et al, make a crazy miss-attribution but the point is the lag time between planetary energy input change and atmospheric temperature response:
Mostly citing the above-linked Science study by Hansen et al Earth’s thermal climate inertia is often quoted as being ’40 years’ [“10 -100 years” – Trenberth]. The study [Hansen et al 2005 – see link in article] says something quite different though. It offers a confidence range between 25 and 50 years – with 37.5 years as most likely value.
>”a confidence range between 25 and 50 years – with 37.5 years as most likely value”
I think this is a very realistic estimate, it is longer than some others e.g. Abdussamatov’s 20 yr ocean-only and 14+/-6 land+ocean, and certainly a lot longer than “time constant” experts from other fields (think Electrical Engineers and David Evans N-D Solar Model series – many heated arguments over the oceanic time constant).
For example, solar change occurred circa 2005 and is continuing. Using Hansen et al’s lag time estimate, we should start looking for a temperature response in the atmosphere starting around 2030.
In other words, the acid test for the alternative solar conjecture DOES NOT EVEN BEGIN until 2030 according to Hansen et al (2005), contrary to most IPCC solar specialists and thermodynamic illiterates like John Cook’s Skeptical Science blog who demand an almost instantaneous atmospheric temperature response to solar change.
For what it’s worth (probably nothing), I’m inclined to start looking for a temperature response to solar change over the 2020s i.e. a lag time stating at 20 yrs gives 2005 + 20 = 2025, a little sooner than Hansen et al imply.
‘New methods are improving ocean and climate measurements’
Posted on 20 June 2016 by John Abraham [Skeptical Science, The Guardian]
“I have often said that global warming is really ocean warming. As humans add more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, it causes the Earth to gain energy. Almost all of that energy ends up in the oceans. So, if you want to know how fast the Earth is warming, you have to measure how fast the oceans are heating up.”
We wanted to know whether we could correct that archive of ocean temperature measurements to account for measurements made in cold waters. To solve this problem, I teamed up with world-class scientists Dr. Lijing Cheng and Rebecca Cowley.
Lijing Cheng is a rapidly rising international scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently producing some of the best research on the Earth’s energy imbalance.
Rebecca Cowley is a data expert from CSIRO in Australia. Her group is recognized as among the best in ocean heat content measurements and data quality.
I agree “that global warming is really ocean warming” but I certainly do NOT agree that “as humans add more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, it causes the Earth to gain energy” and that “almost all of that energy ends up in the oceans”.
The earth’s energy balance clearly shows that both the TOA (+0.6) and Surface imbalance (+0.6) is simply solar forcing at the surface (+0.6). There is no net LW radiative energy transfer down into the surface, the LW flux and transfer (-52.4) is up away from the surface. It is impossible for theoretical human forcing at TOA (+2.3) to be the driver of either the earth’s energy balance or ocean warming.
Lijing Cheng should know this (“He is currently producing some of the best research on the Earth’s energy imbalance”), if he does he obviously didn’t try to get it through to John Abraham.
SkS is almost a self-parody now
(Discussing the Reality Drop project)
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1900
#10 Tom Curtis at 10:08 AM on 3 March, 2013
Foxgoose raises the issue as to whether this is a type of astroturfing. The answer is no, it is not. Astroturfing is the use of paid employees to give the appearance of popular, grassroots support whereas Reality Drop attempts to give tools to the assumed pre-existing popular acceptance of, and willingness to do something about AGW. If, in fact, that popular acceptance does not exist, the “Reality Drop” project will fail.
And, Foxgoose, I believe your prior comment was deleted because it made suggestions of fraudulent activity (astroturfing) contrary to the comments policy, and that your currently displayed comment will be deleted as all moderation complaints are. The later is because they are necessarily off topic, and because once a moderator has seen them, they have served their legitimate purpose. Such complaints, if reasonable, can and have in the past promoted debate among moderators about the correct interpretation of comments policy.
This comment may well be deleted as a reply to a deleted comment (and as a comment on comments policy). I hope Foxgoose has time to read it before that happens.
—
(My bold)
Since this is a comment about deleted comments, perhaps RT should delete this too.
Do you think I should? I can’t work it out, my head hurts too much from trying to follow your logic.
I was joking of course. As I posted on the warming thread, Shub did a good analysis here
http://nigguraths.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/skepticalscience-rewriting-history/
John Cook likes to manipulate the comments threads so that a nice clean message is presented. My comments will no doubt be deleted in due course. My questions were pertaining to The Australian article on Pachauri, asking the question of whether he was misrepresented.
I posed the heretical thought that unless he had complained, no one really knows. The correct answer, though, is yes, because he wasn’t delivering the message according to SkS.
In a similar vein, the deleted commenter I refer to above asked the reasonable question, is this astrofturfing.
I am referring to the Reallty Drop software app that allows automated answers to questions on so called Denier blogs. The app lines you up with threads, computer assisted trolling if you like
I would call this astrofturfing, but not according to Tom Curtis. To be an AstroTurf, you have to be paid, just like all of us are paid by Big Oil (still waiting for that cheque though)
They talk a lot about conspiracy biut it is them that are the paranoid conspiracy theorists.
>”My questions were pertaining to The Australian article on Pachauri”
That was the topic in the title but most of Dana’s post was about heat going into the ocean. My comments questioning that were deemed off-topic of course and liberally snipped or deleted altogether. The SkS OHC graphic posted by an acolyte in comments was allowed to stay on the other hand but when I inserted Ira Glickson’s gif on atm temperatures (including the standstill) vs IPCC projections, that was also deemed “off-topic”.
As Andy alludes, the actual moderation policy is irrelevant. “Moderation” is just an opportunity to censure so that “a nice clean message is presented”. Problem is, that nice clean message is looking increasingly dirty and baseless.
If you read Shub’s post that I link to above, this completely vindicates these views that blog comments are a “resource” that can be manipulated to suit the agenda.
Tom Curtis fully expects his comment to be deleted, as it is irrelevant to the post. The concept that “Reality Drop” may be considered astro-turfing never even came up in discussion, according to the Orwellian post edit.
I wonder whether the reference to my “abusive html” will stay ( I cut and pasted some stuff into their WYSIWYG editor, so some markup errors may have occurred)
The mere concept of “abusive html” has my head spinning as much as “recursive fury”
It gets weirder and weirder.
In the other thread I asked if Foxgoose’s question about astroturfing would get snipped
Three hours later or so…
So suggestions of “astro-turfing” imply fraud and therefore will be snipped
Interesting that they consider “astro-turfing’ as fraudulent, yet they are quite happy to pump propaganda into schools. For example, mail dropped DVDs of “An Inconvenient Truth”, have been sent to thousands of schools in the USA and Canada.
AIT contains so many errors and so little fact it is laughable.
I know this might be tedious for readers, but here goes
Same thread, Pachauri and his supposed misrepresentation by the Australian
the denier movement will resort to any legal expedient to ensure nobody hears the truth about climate change”
Like deleting comments that are “off topic”, Tom?
He who remains silent, consents
So unless you publicly state in public that you disassociate yourself from Monckton, or anyone else for that matter that SkS disagrees with you are “consenting to their views”
These Stalinist muppets seem to have very little sense of self-awareness.
>”So to the bogus scientists who have produced the bogus science that invented this bogus scare I say, we are coming after you, we are going to prosecute you and we are going to lock you up!”
This doesn’t sound like Monckton’s language. The provenance of the supposed quote according to Graham Readfern “At one point during the tour, Monckton told a boisterous partisan crowd:[hotlinked]” is an ABC broadcast of the event:-
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3807130.html
I looked up the transcript linked to by Readfearn here:-
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3807130.html
That supposed quote is not in the written transcript.
I seem to recall that Monckton did actually say something along those lines at a rally in Sydney.
He does say some pretty crazy stuff at times, just like “death train” Hansen
I see Lucia has reached Detective Rank at least. I clicked the link in her tweet, got:-
lucia just crushed this climate change myth by making a Reality Drop on the news story below. Learn more or register now to help win the climate conversation.
MYTH #45
DENIERS SAY:
“So 1998 was a warm year, but since then, global warming has stopped.”
https://realitydrop.org/#myths/45?article=57148&user=lucia
Lucia’s post:-
https://realitydrop.org/#myths/45?article=57148&user=lucia
“Gosh. How could this go wrong?”
I (aspiringcaptain) have apparently crushed some myths on Reality Drop
I just opened some links. Oh well, it is a beta..
Al Gore and the climate choir, having a little singalong
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1iVDHiOEBvw
(Cringe)
Oooooh…..aspiring CAPTAIN. Let me know when you get your “wings”.
Carnage in the comment threads e.g. this story:-
‘Congress Cancels Global Warming Hearing Because of Snowstorm’
https://realitydrop.org/#
17 DROPS
So we go to the article:-
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/congress-cancels-global-warming-hearing-because-of-snowstorm/
Now in the comment thread there’s 18 instances (see Sean71) of this “Reality” (and a quizzical “pparents” wondering why duplicate comments? it makes no sense):-
“Global warming means there’s less snow overall. But it could also bring more extreme snowstorms. http://clmtr.lt/cb/pIL”
BTW Andy, a high impact tactic appears to be the use of a descriptive name e.g.
Hug a Polar bear
Green for life
Pot-good, oil-bad
Kumbaya [2 “Drops” in the same thread]
Kill all CO2
Agenda 21
Al Gore for Emperor!
Kill oil industry
Sky is falling
RabidGreenie
create2030
This is fun. Good luck with your aspirations………
You can see my badges here
https://realitydrop.org/#players/aspiringcaptain/badges
I quite like “Climate Architect” and “Order of the Green Circle”
The others are just weird,
Ah, I see. YOU are “aspiringcaptain”. I thought you’d been awarded the rank of Aspiring Captain before I checked out all the ranks and saw your latest comment (penny drops). Lofty aim indeed.
I was looking at anibalcardenas’s Badges (15)
https://realitydrop.org/#players/anibalcardenas/badges
I’m anibalcardenas
90658 points
99 drops, 1084 clickbacks
PLACE: 1st place, 100% percentile
RANK: CAPTAIN
I’m aspiringcaptain
92 points
7 drops, 0 clickbacks
PLACE: 394th place, 83.8% percentile
RANK: ROOKIE
You’ve aways to go Andy but Newbie, Welcome and 92 points is not bad going just by opening 7 links.
“Climate Architect” and “Order of the Green Circle” are noble aspirations I have to agree, but I like the look of “Heat Seeker” myself.
I thought a world ranking of less that 400 was pretty good for opening 7 URLs
it does seem rather easy to spam
The 24 hr leaderboard disappeared after Hilary Ostrov et al started discussing Lucia’s meteoric rise on Lucia’s Twitter thread.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/reality-drop/
Now I’m sad. I was looking forward to seeing who else of note would join Lucia in the gaming game.
Lucia – “Unfortunately, for some unexplained reason, my account was unceremoniously cancelled”
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/special-blackboard-version-of-drop-reality-cartoon/
I don’t think I’ll be wasting any more time on Al Gore’s Reality Droppings.
It is an interesting exercise to go through the process, though
Some issues:
(1) All links go through the domain http://clmtr.lt/ which flags it to both machines and humans as “droppings spam”. Easy to block the domain as Anthony Watts has done
(2) It seems possible to generate credits by clicking on your own links. I did this to see where the links went to (redirect to realitydrop.org). and was surprised to see credits accumulate. Basic blog software doesn’t allow you to vote on your own comments (using cookies) so this is a basic error.
(3) The game theme, combined with the badges, is very childish. Gore et al must seriously underestimate the intelligence of sceptics. If they think kids are interested in this then they are misguided
I hope Al Gore finds something better to do with his life.
I’m done too but good to know. If nothing else it’s a news board with different articles than Google climate science news say, Not as much “denier” stuff as I would like unfortunately.
I would add,
(4) How does an article get 101 “Drops” when there’s no comment thread.
Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link
New York Times
101 DROPS
This article is related to the following myth:
Carbon dioxide is not the primary driver of climate change
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/science/earth/at-ice-age-end-a-smaller-gap-in-warming-and-carbon-dioxide.html
Anthropogenic Ocean Heating? Part 1: Skeptical Science Offside
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kol9es16MgoyxdL_4f2jwf1Bxqp6CyOtQnSCfNC-j6U/edit?usp=sharing
Ctrl c/v to copy/paste.
Part 2 on the way. I’ll sent both to JN and Tallbloke then (will also drop in the OHC Open Thread).
Thanks Richard, I’ll read this over the next day or two. Good effort
Anthropogenic Ocean Heating?
Part 1: Skeptical Science Offside (v2)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kol9es16MgoyxdL_4f2jwf1Bxqp6CyOtQnSCfNC-j6U/edit?usp=sharing
Part 2: The Improbable IPCC Mechanism
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S91YV1Z8aT-qD9Ydj_kn8JAM3R-l-H5eK9LZwMuAsOE/edit?usp=sharing
Part 3: Rahmstorf, Schmittner and Nuccitelli
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KRTABbfREFs-1bYfzUdLzikf22N_Dp2wbBBQXzCfb5c/edit?usp=sharing
Ctrl c/v to copy/paste. Please report any typos, broken links, dumb stuff etc.
Will send this series to Joanne Nova and Roger Weatherall (TallBloke).
Google have a little in-joke on recursion. Try Googling for “recursion” Comes up with “did you mean recursion?”
Also, The bloogies is kind of catchy too
.
SkS Comment Policy
I counted 18 instances of the word “denier” on the Pachauri thread, many from Tom Curtis. I complained about this (unaware of this part of the policy) and they all jump to defend it.
Several instances of the word “fraud” on the Pachauri thread, aimed at Monckton (which is also off topic)
I was also interested in the term “both sides”. They clearly see this as a binary war, without any middle ground
Coming Soon
China Takes a Leading Role in Solving Climate Change (Dana)
Carbon Dioxide the Dominant Control on Global Temperature and Sea Level Over the Last 40 Million Years (Rob Painting)
Drost, Karoly, and Braganza Find Human Fingerprints in Global Warming (Dana)
What doesn’t change with climate? (Ari Jokimäki)
The educational opportunities in addressing misinformation in the classroom (John Cook)
Creepy
Just stumbled on the 6 February snapshot of the ‘Dueling Scientists at The Oregonian’ thread that still has comments accessible that have been replaced in the current thread version. All you need is a link to one old comment ID # and the old structure is still in place e.g.:-
65 Tom Curtis at 17:35 PM on 6 February, 2013
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=77&&n=1853#90426
Becomes,
65 MA Rodger at 21:35 PM on 28 February, 2013
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=98&&n=1889#91290
And my reply to Tom,
68 Richard C (NZ) at 19:43 PM on 6 February, 2013
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=77&&n=1853#90432
Becomes,
68 KR at 06:45 AM on 1 March, 2013
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=98&&n=1889#91307
Just open 2 Tabs and view old vs new side-by-side. The different versions seem to be the string elements 77&&n=1853 and 98&&n=1889 in the respective comment addresses (what are they accessing?).
I stumbled on this revelation while looking up Tom Curtis’ 68 comment where he employs a (very long) reservoir and tap analogy (complete with splendid graphic) and assumes the (OLR) tap is being slightly closed by GHGs (“slightly closing the lower tap”). Problem is, observations show otherwise:-
‘Man-made global warming theory is falsified by satellite observations’
Global warming theory proposes that CO2 traps longwave (infrared) radiation in the troposphere to reduce outgoing longwave radiation [OLR] to space. However, satellite measurements since 1975 indicate that global OLR has instead increased by about 1.3 Wm-2. This is in direct contradiction to global warming theory that “trapping” of radiation by CO2 should have instead reduced* OLR by .93 Wm-2 since 1975.
>>>>>>> [Warning: linear trend]
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/man-made-global-warming-theory-is.html
I don’t think that glitch was the reason for the SKS “Mods” replacing Tom’s comment though. Tom’s comment was just collateral damage when they had to get rid (so they thought) of mine. Turned out to be inadvertently prudent though.
An astounding example of rewriting history.
SkS have a glitch in their “global” warming going into the ocean meme.
3-month heat content from 1955 to present
* Basin time series
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/basin_data.html
– World: 0 – 2000 meters (Oct-Dec) , 0 – 700
2005.875 , 12.637 , 7.849959
2012.875 , 16.630 , 10.641594
– Atlantic: 0 – 2000 meters (Oct-Dec) , 0 – 700
2005.875 , 6.256 , 4.896
2012.875 , 6.882 , 4.491
– Pacific: 0 – 2000 meters (Oct-Dec) , 0 – 700
2005.875 , 4.188 , 3.291
2012.875 , 4.227 , 2.858
– Indian: 0 – 2000 meters (Oct-Dec) , 0 – 700
2005.875 , 2.194 , 1.094
2012.875 , 5.520 , 3.923
Over the last 7 years, “global” warming has been going into the [Indian] ocean, and 70% (2.8×10^22) of the 7 yr World: 0 – 2000 meters heat increase (4×10^22 Joules) has gone into the 0 – 700 m layer of the Indian Ocean.
Question is: where did it come from? Pacific? Hydrovents? Skydragon?
Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook, making stuff up
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/09/stephan-lewandowsky-and-john-cook-making-things-up/
Ha!
“Then when Lewandowsky et al copied the text of geoffchambers’ comment, they inadvertently combined the quote from Fuller with the body of geoffchambers’ comment. In other words, they combined parts of comments from two different people into a single quote. As though that wasn’t bad enough, neither comment can be viewed by readers of the paper as the comments were both edited/deleted by moderators of the site associated with two primary authors of this paper!”
Oh! what a tangled web we weave. When first we practice to deceive! – Sir Walter Scott
What SkS asks
“Does Norway lack political commitment to renewables?”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/renewables-policy-norway.html
What reality tells us:
99% of Norway’s electricity comes from hydro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Norway
Norway’s Statnett is embroiled in this potential boondoggle to the tune of 1 – 2 bn euros, 50% of a 3 party project including Holland:-
‘Can Norway help Germany store green energy?’
http://www.dw.de/can-norway-help-germany-store-green-energy/a-16050689
And yes, odd of SkS to ask.
SkS may be joining the pro-EU cause too, maybe
More anti-Norway-fossil-fuel than pro-EU in that article Andy.
They want to get away from “the slightly US-AUS-UK-centric focus of SkS” – must be a traffic problem. Maybe they could address the awkward question of Germany’s coal-fired future next?
Yes Statoil is evil. It must be, they are about to start using my software
(Mwa ha ha ha – evil laugh)
Statnett looks to have 100% financial commitment to rescuing Germany’s renewables, whether that will turn out to be a good investment or not – I’m thinking not. But there’s no reason whatsoever for them to pour money into a non-hydro, non-oil and gas hole in Norway.
And yes, like Norway is going to turn their back on their economic prize supporting all manner of people and industry in their own country – even an evil Big Oil software developer on the other side of the world with, perversely, a liking for cold weather sports.
Even if Norway did become the “storage battery” for EU wind projects, it could probably charge whatever it liked.
Denmark already exports a lot of its unused wind energy to Norway at low rates, then pays through the nose to get that energy back from Norway when it actually needs it.
Statnett 2011 ‘Highlights’:-
Norwegian-Dutch market coupling
Construction started on interconnector between Norway and Denmark
http://2011.statnett.com/hoydepunkter-2011/
KfW, Statnett and TenneT sign agreement for new subsea cable connection Norway – Germany
With this cable wind power and solar power can be exported from Germany to Norway when there is a surplus of this, while Norway can export hydropower to Germany when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. This again will support the ambitions for more renewable energy and increased energy supply in the region, and thus EU’s climate and energy goals, both on a short and long term.
http://www.tennet.eu/nl/news/article/kfw-statnett-and-tennet-sign-agreement-for-new-subsea-cable-connection-norway-germany.html
[Looks like Norway is on a winner “when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow”]
What is the business model behind NORD.LINK/NorGer?
A cable connection between Norway and Germany takes advantage of the price differences of electricity on the two power markets. Like in daytime, when electricity prices are highest in Germany, Norwegian electricity can be exported via the cable to the German market. While at night, when consumption is low, the price in Germany is often lower. Electricity then flows to consumers in Norway. Because the power systems supplement each other, greater efficiency will be realised. Additionally the flow depends on the season of the year: In winter the prices in Norway are high and in Germany low so that Germany can export electricity to Norway. In summer, when the price in Norway is lower, it runs in the opposite direction.
http://www.nordlinknorger.net/faq/artikler/
# # #
Now I see why Norway is shouldering the greater cost. I didn’t think the model would be that much in Norway’s favour but it does seem to be on the better receiving end of the synergies. I was mindful of Poland (it think it is) building load control into their network on the border with Germany i.e. Poland couldn’t do anything with Germany’s renewable overflow but Norway can.
But can Norway take ALL the overflow from Holland, Denmark and Germany simultaneously?
Ah, I see (answering my own question):-
What is the economic feasibility of multiple transmission cables?
A study commissioned by Nordic interests and conducted by Thema Consulting and Econ Pöyry indicates it would be profitable to lay far more cables between Norway and Germany, but only up to 8 GW of capacity – far below SRU’s estimate of 42 GW. Typically, each cable has a capacity of 700 MW, so a great many cables would be needed. Combined capacity from Norway to Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands is currently less than 2 GW.
The profitability of laying multiple cables lies in energy price disparities between Germany and Norway. Due to the volume of wind power in Germany, prices fluctuate far more than in Norway, where they are relatively stable. This works to the advantage of pumped storage power producers as well as grid companies. If too many cables are laid, however, profitability would be lost since energy prices between Norway and the Continent would even out.
http://www.cedren.no/News/Article/tabid/3599/ArticleId/1079/Can-Norway-be-Europe-s-green-battery.aspx
I don’t know how much pumped storage would be required, if at all. If Norway shuts down its domestic hydro generation whilst the Germans are producing wind energy, the dams stay full, and Norway turns back on the taps when the German’s need it.
If PS is required, then I guess more valleys will have to be flooded, which I expect will get quite a bit of pushback in Norway.
It is a big win for Norway, whichever way you look at it
Sometimes I regret not staying there when I had the chance in my mid twenties
For SkS comment deletion nerds, this one is one to watch
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1914&p=2#92173
according to Shub
http://nigguraths.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/skeptical-chicken/
A Scott may not be wise to back Don Easterbrook on the GISP2 issue. I disputed Don’s graph (or a similar one) directly by email a year or two ago because he’s not right I don’t think. Don was intractable. Can’t say I want to go back down that rabbit hole but I’ve still got the emails with all the details if I had to.
Apart from that – same ol’, same ol’ at SkS.
Rob Painting March 23, 2013 at 12:57 pm
[…]
Atmospheric warming takes up 2-3% of global warming and can deviate from the long-term oceanic warming trend over short time frames, but it will self-correct and follow the ocean heating trend. So expect a spike in global surface air temperatures when we enter the next period of El Nino-dominant weather.
Skeptical Science will have a post on this soon.
http://hot-topic.co.nz/why-is-federated-farmers-promoting-climate-denial-during-a-major-drought/#comment-37192
“ocean heating trend”? Standstill in the upper ocean last 4 yrs. 2000m might have peaked 1Q2012.
“El Nino-dominant weather”? Given the PDO went into cold mode last decade, El Nino-dominant weather is not for another 20 – 30 yrs.
“a spike”? These guys are really sweating for a big El Nino now, the SkS post should be a cracker.
>”Skeptical Science will have a post on this soon.”
OK here it is. Rob Painting is spruiking the Balmaseda paper at HT and Nuccitelli’s starry-eyed non-critique at SKS. No individual basin analysis, No basin-to-basin comparisons. Tisdale should have a field-day with this. Apparently, global warming has “accelerated”:-
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html
>”The slowed surface air warming over the past decade has lulled many people into a false and unwarranted sense of security”
No, we just understand the cycles operating.
>”So what’s causing this transfer of heat to the deeper ocean layers? The authors suggest that it is a result of changes in winds related to the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and more frequent La Niña events.”
Well lets help Balmaseda et al with where and what heat transfers have been observed in each ocean basin:-
700-2000m OHC World gain last 7 yrs 1.967×10^22 J (Oct – Dec data)
Atlantic 1×10^22 (50.8%)
Pacific 0.47×10^22 (23.9%)
Indian 0.497×10^22 (25.26%)
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Map_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.gif
Hmmm….. So the least amount of heat has gone below 700m in the Pacific (the largest) over the last 7 yrs and the most (more than twice as much) has been in the Atlantic, but Pacific conditions explain the Atlantic situation. I’m not sure that I follow this.
>”So the slowed warming at the surface is only temporary, and consistent with the ‘hiatus decades’ described by Meehl et al. (2011).”
“slowed warming”? “temporary”? Both the upper Pacific and Atlantic are cooling in the ARGO era, the upper Indian warming significantly and contributing 70% of total over the last 7 yrs (but peaking 4Q2010/3Q2011), the aggregate at standstill (“hiatus”) last 4 yrs:-
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/19-argo-era-ohc-atl-ind-pac.png?w=960&h=623
http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/images/OHCA_curve_2012.png
>”Perhaps the most important result of this paper is the confirmation that while many people wrongly believe global warming has stalled over the past 10–15 years, in reality that period is “the most sustained warming trend” in the past half century. Global warming has not paused, it has accelerated.”
Pacific and Atlantic upper ocean heat is not being replenished from solar sourced input (and certainly not by the Skydragon). The Indian has been accumulating via circulation currents. Aggregate ocean warming is peaking (not “accelerating”) consistent with maximum planetary enthalpy occurring at the end of solar Grand Maximum and not because of a fire breathing Skydragon – unless the Skydragon has taken up residence in the Indian Ocean perhaps.
All of these guys (including Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén) are about to get a lesson in input => reservoir => output processes very soon.
>”The Indian has been accumulating via circulation currents”
82% of total ocean heat gain over the last 7 yrs has been in the Indian Ocean. 70% in the upper layer and 12% below 700m.
Some woolly and contradictory responses to questions in the thread e.g.
#6
Craig King at 20:30 PM on 25 March, 2013
What brought about the shift from increasing atmospheric temperatures to increasing ocean temperatures?
[good question]
Will this change be sustained or will the air go back to rapid warming again?
[another good question]
Presumably the oceans are being warmed by the atmosphere, or alternatively the atmosphere is being cooled by the ocean acting as a heat sink. With the reduced warming of the atmosphere will the warming of the oceans slow down or is the CO2 concentration warming the oceans independently of the air temperature?
[a VERY good question]
[…]
Sorry for all the questions but the paper seems aimed at specialists who probably know all this wheras I am just an inquisitive amateur.
[good luck trying to learn at SkS Craig]
Moderator Response: (Rob P) See this SkS post: How Increasing Carbon Dioxide Heats the Ocean. [Minnett theory]
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html#92630
#8
Craig King at 23:08 PM on 25 March, 2013
I am also curious about what would cause the proposed increased heat content of the oceans to “come out” and thus warm the climate. My curiosity is built around the assumption that the warmer air mass must have transferred heat to the ocean ( warmer to colder ) and that raises the thought that the atmosphere would have to get colder than the ocean for it ( the air ) to be warmed by the sea.
[unfortunately Craig doesn’t know the ocean is already warmer than the air by about 3 C on average – but SkS wont tell him that]
In the meantime the atmospoheric CO2 continues to rise leading to a warmer atmosphere.
[well that’s the theory but not happening – good point]
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html#92650
#9
DSL at 23:09 PM on 25 March, 2013
Craig, here’s Levitus et al. 2012. The methodology section will give you part of the answer. [Levitus doesn’t answer the question]
CO2 does not warm the oceans independent of the indirect downward longwave radiation mechanism (increased skin temp forces a “deepening” of the convective temp gradient) and the direct method of surface layer mixing.
[Minnett theory, not in Levitus, still doesn’t answer the question]
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html#92650
#11
KR at 00:30 AM on 26 March, 2013
Craig King – In short, ocean variations such as the ENSO affect the rate of heat absorption by the oceans – La Nina exposing colder waters to the surface, warming the ocean faster but cooling the atmosphere, while El Nino slows ocean warming leaving more of the energy imbalance in the atmosphere. Given that >93% of warming is going into the oceans, ~2.3% into the atmosphere, even a small rate change in ocean warming relative to the total greenhouse gas imbalance will have a huge effect on air temperatures.
[baloney, the warming is solar-sourced, ENSO is egress not ingress]
Note that the energy flow is sun -> ocean -> atmosphere -> space, not the atmosphere -> ocean. A warming atmosphere causes ocean warming by slowing that energy flow from the ocean to the atmosphere. But if ENSO and other variations bring cold water to the surface, reducing atmospheric heating, air temperatures will then drop.
[hooray! (sort of but contradictory at the same time), but what “warming atmosphere” now? and that energy flow is opposite to the IPCC mechanism – oops]
[should be sun -> ocean -> atmosphere [and] space too]
In other words, the atmosphere is to the ocean as the tail is to the dog – tied to ocean temperatures, but far more variable, even moving backwards at times.
[and the sun is feeding the dog – good analogy].
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html#92666
That was fun.
A quick question Richard. If the ocean were to release this stored heat into the atmosphere, would the cooler ocean then absorb more atmospheric CO2 from the atmosphere?
Magoo, answering your question:-
>”…would the cooler ocean then absorb more atmospheric CO2 from the atmosphere?”
Yes. There will be some threshold of basin-specific upper OHC at which point CO2 ceases outgassing from that basin at the rate it has been and a change of phase becomes evident (an inflexion). I have no idea when that will be but it will be sometime before about 2042 when the next solar Grand Minimum is predicted (minimum enthalpy/total energy).
Mauna Loa is Pacific basin CO2 (not global) so watch that (note there’s 2, one’s the ‘surface’ metric, the other at altitude) for the Pacific (see below).
What we have been witnessing since the LIA is a process of increasing planetary enthalpy (total energy, mostly in the ocean) from minimum to maximum. One of the effects (I don’t consider it a feedback above about 200ppm) is ocean outgassing from the warming ocean.
Now that the 1920 – 2012 solar Grand Max has come to an end the process goes into reverse, including feedback effects, because energy input to the system will decrease progressively for about 30 – 40 years. Abdussamatov describes the new regime as an energy “deficit”. The deficit began about 1990 when solar output reached bicentennial peak:-
http://nextgrandminimum.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/figure-2-tsi-variations.png?w=640&h=475
As you can see, the bicentennial component is going over a cliff with the very low SC 24 peak 2013.
The energy deficit effect has been evident in the Pacific and Atlantic upper ocean in the ARGO era and now looks evident in the upper Indian since 4Q2010/3Q2011 (see Tisdale plot up-thread). Just a matter of time before CO2 follows suit.
Cheers Richard.
“Global warming has not paused, it has accelerated.”
Who are the “deniers” now? Perhaps they are magicians (with a pet Skydragon).
Mike we need to distinguish between the “apparent” “acceleration” that appears in the aggregate OHC metric that Balmaseda et al look at and what is actually happening when the analysis is basin-specific.
It’s only in the last 4 years that the “apparent” “acceleration” turned into a standstill (“hiatus” – Meehl et al) in the upper ocean aggregate. 0-2000m peaked 1Q2012 but may still go a little higher.
But yes, difficult getting through some thick skulls that the Pacific and Atlantic have been losing heat in the ARGO era (which Balmaseda et al would have found if they’d looked) so it is impossible to make an anthro attribution to those two basins this century.
Richard C,
Is your comment the best summary of their reasoning, or would you have a link to another?
RT your quote from my comment is from SkS as denoted by >”
My response to that specific quote was the following snippet from the longer comment:-
“Pacific and Atlantic upper ocean heat is not being replenished from solar sourced input (and certainly not by the Skydragon). The Indian has been accumulating via circulation currents. Aggregate ocean warming is peaking (not “accelerating”) consistent with maximum planetary enthalpy occurring at the end of solar Grand Maximum and not because of a fire breathing Skydragon – unless the Skydragon has taken up residence in the Indian Ocean perhaps.
All of these guys (including Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén) are about to get a lesson in input => reservoir => output processes very soon.”
+ + +
You ask:-
>”Is your comment the best summary of their reasoning, or would you have a link to another?”
At this stage my comment is the best I can give you because the Balmaseda paper has only just hit the stands as has the SkS post on it and the “confirmation” they conclude. I suspect Tisdale will maul both eventually but my comment (whether in toto or just that specific snippet) is my own reasoning, although entirely consistent with basin analysis from NODC data, solar papers, thermodynamics/enthalpy, and Tisdale’s work etc.
The silly SkS aspect is that they keep banging on about “global warming going into the ocean” (and the “confirmation”) as if no-one but them knows that. Daft because the first place anyone with any knowledge of the planetary thermodynamic process (solar input -> heat sink -> output to atm and space) would look is to the planet’s greatest heat sink – the ocean! Pieke Snr has been saying that for years and even the SkS commenters note that in the thread.
But what they (Balmaseda et al/SkS) can’t see by their coarse analysis is that it is now impossible for the IPCC to make an anthro attribution to the upper Pacific and Atlantic in the 21st century – which they don’t. What’s happening below 700m (or even 300m) is irrelevant if the upper Pacific and Atlantic are cooling.
RT I refer you also to my 3 part series:-
Anthropogenic Ocean Heating?
Part 1: Skeptical Science Offside (v2)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kol9es16MgoyxdL_4f2jwf1Bxqp6CyOtQnSCfNC-j6U/edit?usp=sharing
Part 2: The Improbable IPCC Mechanism
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S91YV1Z8aT-qD9Ydj_kn8JAM3R-l-H5eK9LZwMuAsOE/edit?usp=sharing
Part 3: Rahmstorf, Schmittner and Nuccitelli
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KRTABbfREFs-1bYfzUdLzikf22N_Dp2wbBBQXzCfb5c/edit?usp=sharing
Ctrl c/v to copy/paste
I dissect some important issues in it that I haven’t seen anyone else address yet i.e. real IPCC ocean attribution scrutiny hasn’t even started in earnest because everyone’s been looking at atmospheric attribution issues – those becoming somewhat moot now of course.
‘La Niñas Do NOT Suck Heat from the Atmosphere’
by Bob Tisdale
Over the years I’ve seen a statement similar to the one made by MarkR in the SkepticalScience post The 2012 State of the Climate is easily misunderstood (my boldface):
The error in MarkR’s statement, which has been repeated many times before, may stem from the assumption that La Niñas are the opposite of El Niños. That is, it is well known that El Niño events release enormous amounts of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. I assume the flawed logic is that La Niña events must then remove heat from the atmosphere.
The vast majority of heat released from the ocean to the atmosphere, however, occurs through evaporation.
It’s likely those assuming that La Niñas “suck up heat from the atmosphere” are thinking only in terms of “sensible heat flux”.
SENSIBLE VERSUS LATENT HEAT
[…]
As illustrated [Figure 1], the sensible heat flux is primarily positive (the average is +2.7 watts/meter^2 for the period of January 1979 to September 2013), meaning the heat is flowing from ocean to atmosphere. Occasionally, there have been short periods where the sensible heat flux is negative, according to the reanalysis, and they occurred often during La Niñas, but they are not limited to La Niña events.
Now let’s compare the sensible heat flux and the latent heat flux at the surface of the NINO3.4 region. See Figure 2. For the period of January 1979 to September 2013, the average latent heat flux at the surface is about 118 watts/meter^2, or about 42 times greater than the sensible heat flux, according to the reanalysis. And regardless of the state of the tropical Pacific (El Niño, La Niña or ENSO-neutral), there is always a substantial positive latent heat flux along the eastern and central equatorial Pacific, meaning evaporation is always taking place in the NINO3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific…and it always greatly outweighs the sensible heat flux.
Figure 2 http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/figure-28.png?w=640&h=437
El Niño and La Niña events are focused on the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, but they directly impact the entire tropical Pacific. So, as a reference, Figure 3 compares sensible heat flux and the latent heat flux at the surface of the tropical Pacific (24S-24N, 120E-80W). Again, the latent heat flux dwarfs the sensible heat flux at all times. The average latent heat flux from the surface of the tropical Pacific is about 138 watts/m^2, while the average sensible heat flux is only about 9 watts/m^2.
Figure 3 http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/figure-35.png?w=640&h=435
Bottom line: the equatorial Pacific and tropical Pacific are always releasing heat to the atmosphere, even during La Niña events. Or, in other words, a La Niña does not suck heat from the atmosphere.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/la-ninas-do-not-suck-heat-from-the-atmosphere/
###
Not just SkS or La Niñas e.g.
http://www.sciencecodex.com/underestimated_future_climate_change-123640
That’s a help, thanks RC. Sorry I lost track of the author.
Your response to SkS is informative. What, though, is the essence of their reasoning, or evidence, that leads to the conclusion I quoted in my question to you? Or just tell me to read the paper if I must (if we can). I’ve just seen your next comment (8:21 pm), with links, come through. Thanks.
>”What, though, is the essence of their reasoning, or evidence, that leads to the conclusion I quoted in my question to you?”
The essence is Figure 1 from the paper, as Dana Nuccitelli writes:-
>”The main results of the study are illustrated in its Figure 1.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com//pics/BTK13Fig1.jpg
The full post link again:-
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html
Now compare Balmaseda et al Figure 1 to Tisdale’s plot of ARGO-era 0-700m, Pacific/Atlantic/Indian:-
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/19-argo-era-ohc-atl-ind-pac.png?w=960&h=623
Note the twin peak in the Indian Ocean series even though it was rising significantly up to 4Q2010 i.e. even the upper Indian looks to have reached a standstill.
Of the anthro attribution, Nuccitelli writes:-
>” * Some recent studies have concluded based on the slowed global surface warming over the past decade that the sensitivity of the climate to the increased greenhouse effect is somewhat lower than the IPCC best estimate. Those studies are fundamentally flawed because they do not account for the warming of the deep oceans.”
Again, so what about the deep ocean if the upper layers of 2 of the 3 major ocean basins have been cooling over the last decade? It’s impossible in that case to make an anthro attribution for the 21st century.
Just to highlight some silliness RT, you might like to think about a reply I made to Nice One in a showdown over the exact same topic at JoNova that’s been going on for a couple of days:-
Richard C (NZ)
March 26, 2013 at 10:41 am
BTW, your counter-theory seems to be that solar-sourced energy was introduced to the ocean initially, then it left the ocean uninhibited to the atmosphere (but not to space?), then it returned to the ocean after being redirected by GHGs, but it didn’t leave again as it did before due to some sort of restriction that kicks in second time round, so instead it went down to the deep ocean.
As Jo puts it – “good luck with your [counter-]theory”.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/man-made-global-warming-disproved/#comment-1258482
The theory I’m referring to being the solar-centric explanation and the “counter-theory” being anthropogenic forcing.
Nice One now says:-
“I think a warmer atmosphere & sea surface allows the ocean below to cool less”
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/man-made-global-warming-disproved/#comment-1258725
So she’s onside with SkS now (sort of) but offside with the IPCC. Much confusion in the ranks.
She’s also offside with Rahmstorf, Schmittner and Nuccitelli (see Part 3 of the series up-thread).
Lewandowsky, Cook claim 78,000 skeptics could see conspiracy survey at Cooks site where there is no link
How 78,000 equals zero
Lewandowsky et al go out on a limb to say skeptics may have made 78,000 visits that month and could have seen that survey link (if only there had been one there):
“Prevalence of “skeptics” among blog visitors All of the blogs that carried the link to the survey broadly endorsed the scienti fic consensus on climate change (see Table S1). As evidenced by the comment streams, however, their readership was broad and encompassed a wide range of view on climate change. To illustrate, a content analysis of 1067 comments from unique visitors to http://www.skepticalscience.com, conducted by the proprietor of the blog, revealed that around 20% (N = 222) held clearly “skeptical” views, with the remainder (N = 845) endorsing the scienti c consensus. At the time the research was conducted (September 2010), http://www.skepticalscience.com received 390,000 monthly visits. Extrapolating from the content analysis of the comments, this translates into up to 78,000 visits from “skeptics” at the time when the survey was open (although it cannot be ascertained how many of the visitors actually saw the link.) […]”
But, as Barry Woods and DHG both discovered and Geoff Chambers pursued relentlessly, it appears no link was ever posted on SkepticalScience. Steve McIntyre points out the total number of skeptics doing the survey on Cook’s site can thus be ascertained — and it is exactly zero. It’s hard to believe any scientist would think they would get away with this. The paper will surely have to be withdrawn. (But will the government funding be withdrawn? The Australian Research Council (ARC) needs to answer some very awkward questions.)
More >>>>>>>
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/03/lewandowsky-cook-claim-78000-skeptics-could-see-conspiracy-survey-at-cooks-site-where-he-didnt-even-put-up-a-link/
222 “translates” “into up to 78,000 visits from “skeptics” ” in September 2010. And these are active commenters so the figure would be higher counting visits by sceptics that didn’t comment (as I usually don’t on brief visits just to see what their latest posts are). I’m thinking this may be a little optimistic on Cook’s part.
Probably the last thing I would have done at SkS (and that not at all) would have been to participate in the survey even if I had seen the link – which was impossible anyway.
Lewandowsky Doubles Down
Steve McIntyre
In an email to Cook on February 14, 2013, I sent a detailed review of the above events and asked Cook to defend himself, concluding my email as follows:
“Not to put too fine a point on it, it appears to me that you lied, when you asserted that your correspondence with Lewandowsky on 28 August 2010 was “forensic evidence” that showed that you had posted a link at Skeptical Science to the Lewandowsky survey on that day. I use the word “lie” because you had clearly examined the 28 August 2010 correspondence at the time of your email to Chambers and knew that this correspondence did not show that you had posted a link at Skeptical Science to the Lewandowsky survey on 28 August 2010 or any other day.
Before I make any public statements about this matter, I am offering you an opportunity to rebut the belief that the statement bolded above was a lie.”
Cook did not respond.
[…]
Last fall, long before Lewandowsky had expanded his accusations of “conspiracist ideation” to include the UK Met Office, one of Lewandowsky’s coauthors (presumably Cook) observed that Lewandowsky’s critics were actually accusing him of “lying/deceiving/incompetence” rather than “conspiracy”:
“Maybe we should address more head-on the inevitable criticism that they’re not accusing you of conspiracy because lying/deceiving/incompetence doesn’t necessarily involve conspiring.”
On this point at least – the need for Lewandowsky to address issues of “Lying/deceiving/incompetence” – even Lewandowsky’s coauthors and critics appear to have found common ground.
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/28/lewandowsky-doubles-down/
The anagram of the week award goes to jorgekafkazar for
Stephan Lewandowsky = what Lysenko spawned
https://twitter.com/etzpcm/status/318128274486206466
“Kafkaser” ?
>“Kafkaser” ?
Answering my own question (maybe), “ser” is one of the Spanish verbs for ‘to be’ so Jorge would ‘be’ Kafka. And it turns out one Jorge Seca is a reviewer of a Franz Kafka biography and a translator of books:-
http://babel36.wordpress.com/tag/jorge-seca/
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-author=Jorge%20Seca&page=1&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cp_27%3AJorge%20Seca
Tricky reading between Spanish lines so I’m not sure that I’ve joined the dots. If I have, rather odd that Jorge Seca has taken an interest in Lewandowsky but looking at the books he has translated his interest probably comes via psychology.
Word gets around apparently – Lewandowsky’s infamy has spread to at least one other sphere.
Dang! Got this wrong, he’s kafkazar – not kafkaser.
Jorge Kafkazar here:-
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/28/the-ipcc-doctrine-of-implicit-confidentiality/#comment-246345
Also here:-
Jorge Kafkazar: Person DB Profile
This profile page summarizes all known activity of the person Jorge Kafkazar related to Climate Change. This person may have appeared in articles supporting this topic, against it, or in a separate context: this biographical entry simply demarks this person as appearing in content suggesting contextual association with Climate Change.
http://climatechange.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin//profiler?key=Frederick_Osborn&pt=2
http://climatechange.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin//profiler?key=Frederick_Osborn&pt=2#blogposts
Despite hellish summer, Russia says “nyet” to AGW | Watts Up With …
…… What is happening now is not some kind of unusual special case , he said , adding that life flourished on Earth at the time of dinosaurs Full story here h t to WUWT reader Jorge Kafkazar ……
(149 words by wattsupwiththat.com)
Provenance:-
#
jorgekafkazar says:
March 28, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Lewandowsky should be nominated for the Lysenko Prize. [Yes, there is such a thing.]]
#
jorgekafkazar says:
March 28, 2013 at 5:55 pm
Did you ever notice that if you rearrange the letters in “What Lysenko Spawned” you get “Stephan Lewandowsky?”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/28/mcintyres-dissection-of-the-cook-lewandowsky-lyingdeceivingincompetence-complex/#comment-1259909
Lysenko Prize
Since 1990, the Club de l’Horloge awards each year the “Lysenko Prize” to an author or person who “has contributed the most to scientific and historical misinformation, using ideological methods and arguments.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_de_l%27Horloge
Now they’re posting student’s essays (quoting SKS):-
This article was written by a student in the Science Communication program at the University of Western Australia.
‘It’s getting hotter – despite cooling from cosmic rays’
http://www.skepticalscience.com/getting-hotter-despite-cooling-from-cosmic-rays.html
“Hotter” apparently being a euphemism for cooler:-
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/rss-land/from:2001/plot/rss/from:2001/trend
Gavin Schmidt slams Skeptical Science
Gavin Schmidt, a much misunderstood character in the global warming debate, has demonstrated his good faith and honourable intentions by issuing a denunciation of Skeptical Science.
>>>>>>>>
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/18/gavin-schmidt-slams-skeptical-science.html
Gavin skeptic mode: ON – for Skeptical Science
Bishop Hill notes this interesting bit about Gavin Schmidt and Dana Nuccitelli, and rather than try to rewrite the excellent dry wit in a few sentences going on here, well I’ll just let you read what he said at Bishop Hill:
>>>>>>>>
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/18/gavin-skeptic-mode-on-for-skeptical-science/
H/t Magoo
This issue has been discussed at BH quite a bit. Since the Probability Distribution Functions (pdf) of climate sensitivity tend to have long tails – i.e they are asymmetric – the modal value (i.e the most popular, or the peak of the graph) is always less than the mean value.
With a symmetric normal distribution, the modal and mean would be the same.
Therefore, comparing modal values of one CS pdf with the mean values of another CS pdf is wrong.
From BH,
Lewis 2013 as an “outlier”
One of the strangest things about Dana Nuccitelli’s article about the Lewis 2013 paper is its twin-pronged attack – alleging that Lewis misrepresented the match between the mode of his estimate and that of Aldrin et al, and suggesting that the Lewis result is an outlier.
In the graph below, I have redrawn Lewis 2013 and a selection of other papers: Aldrin et al, Forster and Gregory, and Troy Masters’ new paper. The IPCC’s 2-4.5deg range is shown as the shaded area.
With Lewis’s PDF sitting in the middle of the bunch, Nuccitelli’s position is shown to be baseless. I’ve added a line through the mode of Lewis, which you can see matches Aldrin et al almost exactly. So when Nuccitelli says Lewis is misrepresenting the match between his findings and Aldrin’s, it’s easy to see that this is, ahem, a stretch.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/19/lewis-2013-as-an-outlier.html
There are other papers that could be shown on the plot – Ring et al, Lindzen and Choi and so on, but I think this handful is good enough to make the point: there is simply no way Lewis 2013 can be seen as an outlier.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/19/lewis-2013-as-an-outlier.html
The Leopard In The Basement – “Possibly they could say the paper is an outlier in the degree of pointiness of the hump (technical?) But I noticed that Dana Nuccitelli didn’t adopt this graphical approach to show this, he seems to rather take the approach of a mangled word construction that can only be described by borrowing the words of Gavin Schmidt, as “sleight of hand” ;)”
Nic Lewis (replying to Speed)- “It is Nuccitelli , not me, who is misrepresenting the position and being misleading. One of his own regular contributors, Tom Curtis, takes him to task about this.”
# # #
Nuccitelli has not thought this through – now he’s dug a hole for himself. especially when the likes of Tom Curtis breaks ranks.
The link to the graph after “stretch” should be:-
http://www.bishop-hill.net/storage/thumbnails/902844-22497527-thumbnail.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1366394975482
Richard C,
Who is “I”?
Two references are inserted; what is their significance?
What is the meaning of ###?
It’s difficult to follow your argument.
Cheers.
>”Who is “I”?”
Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill)
>”Two references are inserted; what is their significance?”
Nuccitelli was trying to create the impression that Lewis 2013 was an outlier from other CS papers, Aldrin et al in particular. But in fact both papers are similar in terms of mode (the black vertical line in plot below) not mean (which would be a little to the right of the black line). Nuccitelli compared the mode of Lewis to the mean of Aldrin (or maybe other war round) which is not an apples to apples comparison.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/storage/thumbnails/902844-22497527-thumbnail.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1366394975482
Montford provided three other “outliers” to show Lewis was in a group, but there are other papers in the same outlier group and the group is growing. This is the issue that many are saying must be addressed by revising CS (e,g, Judith Curry).
>”What is the meaning of ###?”
That is the end of copied article, quotes within the article, links pertaining to the article (e.g. significant graphs and the article link itself). After ### is my commentary on all three – article/quotes/graphs.
Should be – “(or maybe other [way] round)”.
Expect some odd comments from me over the next six months but much less quantity – I’m doing 10 hr nightshifts over the kiwifruit season. I think i’ve crammed all the issues of the moment into the latest posts anyway, there’s not much more to be said now but just a matter of observing the climate in the context of the issues.
BTW the drought has broken here in the BOP. Flooding everywhere, cars floating, and I was lucky to get home from Te Puke this morning. A stormwater man-hole cover blew off in the middle of the Packhouse at around 5:30am and there was a foot high fountain of water gushing out for a while. Makes for interesting work stories. I know of a Mt Maunganui Packhouse that would have been ankle deep all through and I heard on the news several industrial sites were inundated, not to mention domestic dwellings (e.g. my next-door neighbour).
Happy news indeed!
There is an update to the mode/median issue on SkS at BH here:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/22/sks-quietly-withdraws-allegation.html
#16
Tom Curtis at 04:07 AM on 19 April, 2013
Dana, Aldrin et al quote a mean CS of 2 C. Lewis quotes the mode of the Aldrin PDF on climate sensitivity as 1.6 C, which is correct. The confusion arises because he is citing a different value.
Lewis, in fact, has a penchant for quoting the mode of climate sensitivity analyses because it is, as he says, the maximum likilihood result. Personally I do not think it is the best value to quote. Rather the median (where it can be determined), ie, the 50/50 mark is far more informative if you must quote a single number. Of course, with a long tailed PDF, the mode will always be less than both the median and the mean of the PDF. Without going so far as to say that is Lewis’ reason for preferring it, that does make it a tremendously convenient number for “skeptics” to quote.
https://www.climateconversation.org.nz/open-threads/climate/controversy-and-scandal/skeptical-science/#comment-193079
[see subsequent comments for discussion of this]
Dana Nuccitelli Misleads and Misinforms in His First Blog Post at The Guardian
Posted on April 25, 2013 by Bob Tisdale
The Guardian has a new blog called Climate Consensus – The 97%. The two primary authors are to be Dana Nuccitelli, a regular contributor at SkepticalScience, and John Abraham, Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas.
Dana Nuccitelli’s first post at his new blog at The Guardian is titled “Why is Reuters puzzled by global warming’s acceleration?” His article is subtitled, “‘Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown,’ said Reuters. But warming is speeding up, and scientists can explain it.” Nuccitelli’s first post at The Guardian is reminiscent of his posts at SkepticalScience—that is, it’s misleading and full of misinformation.
[…]
OCEAN HEAT CONTENT
Nuccitelli begins his post with a picture from space of the Pacific Ocean with the caption:
Oceans, such as the Pacific pictured here from space, are absorbing much of the warming the planet is currently experiencing. NASA/ Roger Ressmeyer/ Corbis
Then the first sentence of his post reads:
The rate of heat building up on Earth over the past decade is equivalent to detonating about 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs per second.
Based on Nuccitelli’s opening illustration and statement, we should expect the ocean heat content of the Pacific Ocean to be showing a monumental amount of warming over the past 10 years. But, as shown in Figure 1, the ocean heat content data for the Pacific Ocean from pole to pole (90S-90N, 120E-80W) shows cooling. Right from the get go, data disagrees with Nuccitelli’s representations. [Figure 1]:-
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/01-argo-era-pacific-ohc.png?w=960&h=600
[…]
THE ESCALATOR
Nuccitelli goes on to write:
Reuters didn’t connect the dots between these two articles, telling us one week that oceans help explain the surface warming slowdown, and the next week claiming the slowdown is puzzling climate scientists. However, these ‘slowdowns’ happen on a regular basis. You can find one every 5 to 10 years in the surface temperature data, as illustrated in a graphic I created nicknamed ‘The Escalator‘.
[…]
Now, if we merge all of the data from Figures 6 through 8, we have a more realistic view on how, when and why global surface temperatures warmed—a more realistic escalator. See Figure 9. There was no cherry picking involved, just a little common sense to highlight the primary causes of global warming since 1960. [Figure 9]:-
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/09-realistc-escalator-in-global-temps.png?w=960&h=602
[…]
CLOSING
Ocean heat content data for the Pacific Ocean contradicts Dana Nuccitelli’s opening statement and illustration. The ocean heat content data for the tropical Pacific show that Mother Nature is responsible for the fuel for El Niño events. Ocean Heat Content data and satellite-era sea surface temperature data also indicate the oceans warmed naturally, but you have to understand that ENSO works as a recharge-discharge oscillator (with La Niña as the recharge mode and El Niño as the discharge mode) to see Mother Nature’s handiwork. And as illustrated, Dana Nuccitelli’s Escalator is simply another way for global warming enthusiasts to hide how global temperatures actually warmed since 1976. In short, data contradicts Dana Nuccitelli’s first post at The Guardian’s new blog.
>>>>>>>>
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/25/dana-nuccitelli-misleads-and-misinforms-in-his-first-blog-post-at-the-guardian/#more-84832
Lewandowsky et al 2013: surveying Peter to report on Paul
Shub Niggurath
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/05/lewandowsky-et-al-2013-surveying-peter-to-report-on-paul/
I wonder what this “closer examination” at HotTopic entailed?
‘On the Consensus’
Written by: Brandon Shollenberger
John Cook, proprietor of the website Skeptical Science, recently published a paper with the help of members of his site. They describe their study as examining the abstracts of “over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers” and finding “a 97% consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming.” This study has received media fanfare, and even Barack Obama, the President of the United States, tweeted about it.
We’ve been having fun on this site about this study, but what I say next I cannot say with any humor. It is simply too serious. Skeptical Science recently invited people to rate the 12,000+ abstracts via Skeptical Science’s interactive rating system so people could “measure the climate consensus” themselves. An additional feature of the system allows users to view the abstracts, as well as the ratings given by the people behind the paper.
The guidelines for rating these abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65 [0.5%], out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.
The “consensus” they’re promoting says it is more likely humans have a negligible impact on the planet’s warming than a large one.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/
and thus The Consensus Project is born
http://www.theconsensusproject.com/
Never mind the valid criticisms, just keep on lying SkS
Cook’s 97% consensus study falsely classifies scientists’ papers according to the scientists that published them
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/21/cooks-97-consensus-study-falsely-classifies-scientists-papers-according-to-the-scientists-that-published-them/
Cook’s 97% Consensus Study Game Plan Revealed
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/06/cooks-97-consensus-study-game-plan.html
Seen in comments under the Dana Nuccitelli/Mark Reynolds Sac Bee Op-Ed (where they cite the 97% paper in support of “Now that the science is settled that humans are causing global warming”): ‘Climate debate is settled; carbon tax is vital’
juggler65 ,
“Oh no. It looks like we’re all going to die, again. I think this is something like the third time, in the last two weeks, that we were all going to die.”
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/06/05/5471547/climate-debate-is-settled-carbon.html#comment-921247584
SkS are struggling to find ways to say the same thing every week now, and they’re pushing on string:
‘Media Overlooking 90% of Global Warming’ – Dana 25 June
http://www.skepticalscience.com/clarifying-continuation-global-warming.html
‘A Looming Climate Shift: Will Ocean Heat Come Back to Haunt us?’ – Rob Painting 24 June
http://www.skepticalscience.com/A-Looming-Climate-Shift-Will-Ocean-Heat-Come-Back-to-Haunt-us.html
‘Is More Global Warming Hiding in the Oceans?’ – Dana 22 June
http://www.skepticalscience.com/more-global-warming-hiding-in-oceans.html
I looked up a map of the 5 major ocean gyres to visualize Rob Painting’s speculation in ‘Looming Climate Shift’:
“The transport of heat down into the surface to deep ocean occurs via the subtropical ocean gyres (green ellipses in Figure 1). These are large rotating masses of water, in each ocean basin, where ocean currents converge at their centre and are forced downwards, taking warm surface water with them. Future SkS posts will deal with the ocean gyres and how they operate, but note that changes in the winds which power the ocean gyres affect the transport of heat down into the ocean, and also the transport of heat from the tropics to the polar regions. Intensified tropical easterly trades winds, for instance, spin up the ocean gyres leading to greater downward, and poleward, heat transport (see Roemmich [2007]).”
Note “transport of heat down into the surface to deep ocean” is an air => sea surface => deep ocean process i.e. anthropogenic forcing (supposedly). The 5 major ocean gyres:
http://essayweb.net/geology/quicknotes/images/ocean_gyres.png
“Decadal Spinup” is the actual Roemmich description and it refers to the sea surface height (SSH) at the centre of the gyre which rises during spinup (i.e. upwelling, not downdraft) and if gyres are “rotating masses of water”, warm surface water is not necessarily being “forced downwards” at the centre unless there is actually a vortex funneling down at the centre as in whirlpool funneling. Vortex is the proper term for any whirlpool that has a downdraft. No downdraft, no funneling. Roemmich et al (2007) do not mention any downdraft in the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre, neither do they mention “greater downward, …….heat transport”:
‘Decadal Spinup of the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre’
ROEMMICH, GILSON, DAVIS, SUTTON, WIJFFELS, and RISER (2007)
http://flux.ocean.washington.edu/riser_web/web-pubs/roemmich.etal.JPO.s-pacific.paper.pdf
Ocean whirlpools with downdrafts do exist from time to time (seasonally) and have been studied and documented but they are on a MUCH smaller scale than gyres. I’ll be very interested when “Future SkS posts will deal with the ocean gyres” if Rob Painting asserts there is a downdraft effect at the centre of the major gyres especially when (quoting Wiki ‘Subpolar gyres’) “Surface currents generally move outward from the center of the system. This drives the Ekman transport, which creates an upwelling of nutrient-rich water from the lower depths”. Upwelling and downdraft are exactly opposite.
Also from Wiki ‘South Pacific Gyre’: “The currents act to isolate the center of the gyre from nutrient upwelling” and “In the center of the South Pacific Gyre, the sedimentation rate is 0.1 to 1 m (0.3 to 3.3 ft) per million years. The sediment thickness (from basement basalts to the seafloor) ranges from 1 to 70m, with thinner sediments occurring closer to the center of the Gyre”. No mention of any downdraft but a mention of upwelling.
I note too that the gyres have shrunk in Rob Painting’s Figure 1. I’m inclined to think Rob is painting himself and SkS into a corner on this speculation.
Rob is painting himself …
Well named then
Couldn’t resist Andy, Rob’s whole chain of events is taking on a phantasmagorical nature.
In my mental imagery of it I keep seeing a massive whirlpool in the middle of the ocean with the odd ship being sucked down into it – along with all that heat.
Note also that the direction of energy flow in “transport of heat down into the surface to deep ocean” (air => sea surface => deep ocean) is opposite to the direction of the Minnett theory that Rob links to in ‘Some Background Context’ (“This reduces the typical rate of heat loss from the ocean to the atmosphere above, and therefore causes the oceans to grow warmer over time”) which is ocean => air heat loss.
Poor Rob is tying himself in knots trying to integrate AGW into ocean heat.
Rob Painting cites Meehl et al (2013) and we’ll probably be regaled with it for some time to come so it is worth being familiar with. Unfortunately there is so much numb-skull rationale in it that it defies (my) synopsis:
‘Externally forced and internally generated decadal climate variability associated with the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation’
Gerald A. Meehl, Aixue Hu, Julie Arblaster, John Fasullo, and Kevin E. Trenberth
http://www.cawcr.gov.au/staff/jma/Decadal.trends.Meehl.JClim.2013.pdf
IPO is near equivalent to PDO. Basically they’ve figured out what most sceptics already know (positive phase IPO = warming, negative phase = hiatus/cooling – duh) and they then proceed by future model scenario that leaves TSI at Grand Maximum levels, an assumed radiative imbalance, and with a model that doesn’t mimic 21st century observation anyway, to try to integrate AGW into it all and show anthropogenic deep ocean heating e.g. page 9:
“The composite SST trend decades have a similar energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, with the hiatus decades (Fig. 2a) and accelerated warming decades (Fig. 2b) showing an imbalance of about 1 Wm-2, comparable to the imbalance for all other decades and no significant difference between them. Therefore, in all decades there is about 1 Wm-2 being directed into the climate system and the planet is warming. If all of heat from this energy imbalance were directed into the oceans, this would amount to about 16.09 x 1022 J decade-1.”
It is nonsense to say “If all of heat from this energy imbalance were directed into the oceans” because the energy is already in the oceans, that is why there is a TOA radiative imbalance and OHC accumulation. The energy is not being released in sufficient quantity to balance high input. If they ramped down solar input as is happening in the real world right now, the imbalance (their model assumption) will eventually reach equilibrium and maybe go the other way (a little more leaving than input).
Their basic, but inadvertent premise (solar input at constantly high levels relative to historic lows), negates the entire modeling exercise if it is to be translated to the real-world (and if that is even possible). They’re assuming, as is Scafetta for example, that the IPO oscillation and warm-cool cycle will continue to be overlaid on an underlying long-term rising trend that they attribute to AGW (actually rising solar input that has just started falling away from high levels from around 2009) so that after this current hiatus, temperatures will then accelerate upwards just like late 1970s or the early 1900s.
Not going to happen this time though because their premise is false.
Re “…future model scenario …… with a model that doesn’t mimic 21st century observation anyway”
‘Meehl et al (2013) Are Also Looking for Trenberth’s Missing Heat’
by Bob Tisdale
OVERVIEW
Rob Painting of SkepticalScience recently published the post A Looming Climate Shift: Will Ocean Heat Come Back to Haunt Us? Many of you will find his post entertaining.
But this post is not about the SkepticalScience post. This post discusses the recent paper Rob Painting cited: Meehl et al (2013) […]
…..this post includes a model-data comparison of the trends in satellite-era sea surface temperatures for the Pacific versus the outputs (ensemble mean and individual ensemble members) of the CCSM4 model used by Meehl et al (2013) […]
The problem: Meehl et al (2013) are using a climate model (NCAR CCSM4) that doesn’t properly simulate the coupled ocean-atmosphere processes that drive El Niños and La Niñas. As far as I know, there are no climate models that properly simulate El Niño and La Niña processes. […]
……….a comparison graph of downward shortwave radiation (sunlight) versus downward longwave (infrared) radiation for the period of 1979 to present, along the equatorial Pacific (5S-5N, 120E-80W), based on the NCEP-DOE Reanalysis-2. See Figure 3.
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-36.png?w=960&h=636
The downward longwave radiation (red curve) serves as a reasonable proxy for the El Niño and La Niña events. Notice that downward longwave (infrared) radiation decreases during La Niña events. That of course means its variations do not support the model-based supposition that infrared radiation is creating the additional warm water that is being forced below depths of 700 meters. In the real world, it’s downward shortwave radiation (sunlight) that increases during La Niña events. […]
In Figure 13, I’ve added the ensemble mean (the average of the 6 model runs) of the NCAR CCSM4 models stored in the CMIP5 archive. (The NCAR CCSM4 was the climate model employed by Meehl et al (2013) for their study. And CMIP5 is the archive being used by the IPCC for its upcoming 5th Assessment Report.)
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/figure-132.png
As shown, the warming rates of the average of the model outputs show no resemblance to how the Pacific actually warmed. […]
Animation 1 includes comparison graphs of the data to the six individual ensemble members and to the ensemble mean. Not one of the ensemble members captures the warming pattern correctly. ………. (You may need to click start the animation.)
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/animation-1.gif?w=960&h=606
CLOSING
Climate scientists are scrambling to explain why surface temperatures have not warmed since the 1997/98 El Niño. Meehl et al (2013) is yet another example. Fundamentally, Meehl et al (2013) is climate model-aided speculation. It is a failed attempt to explain how and why global surface temperatures cool (or remain flat) when La Niña events dominate and to explain that the warming continues but it occurs out of sight and out of mind below the depths of 700 meters. […]
Meehl et al suggest that manmade global warming continues but it’s being driven to depths below 700 meters by La Niñas. But the warm water created during La Niñas results from an increase in sunlight, not infrared radiation.
All of these factors dictate that studies such as Meehl et al (2013) have no value. Meehl et al (2013) employed fatally flawed models in an attempt to determine how and why the warming of surface temperatures has stalled and they employed those same fatally flawed climate models in an effort to determine where Kevin Trenberth’s missing heat might have gone—which assumes the missing heat even exists.
>>>>>>
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/26/meehl-et-al-2013-are-also-looking-for-trenberths-missing-heat/
“I was not able to find any suggestion in Meehl et al (2013) that the heat driven below the depths of 700 meters would somehow come back to haunt us as some alarmists suggest nonsensically”
The DSR causation vs DLR non-causation shoots down the wider (outside SkS) alarmist argument for anthropogenic ocean warming e.g. Alley and Mann (Obama sycophants in this case):
‘Coming crisis demands action’
By Richard Alley and Michael Mann
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced new measures to combat global warming.
Vigorous discussions about whether these are the best policy responses are almost sure to follow. These discussions are likely to be more productive if they start from the solid scholarship showing that we will be better off if we respond wisely to the coupled challenges of energy and environment.
Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2013/06/27/3668264/coming-crisis-demands-action.html#storylink=cpy
The relevant assertions being:
“The Earth’s temperature continues to rise despite a slight dimming of the sun and increased blocking of some sunlight by particles from dirty smokestacks and volcanoes.”
And,
“Over the past decade, warming of the air has slowed as more heat has transferred into the deep ocean, and the previous decade saw accelerated air warming with less going into the deep sea.”
And,
“The recent slowdown in warming the air bought us time, but our CO2 is still pushing us toward hotter temperatures in air and water.”
‘A Very Ridiculous Comment by the Author of a Recent SkepticalScience Post’
by Bob Tisdale
I returned to a recent post at SkepticalScience to examine what the author had to say about two papers: Meehl et al (2011) and Meehl et al (2013). [We discussed Meehl et al (2013) here.] I am now convinced SkepticalScience should be renamed UtterNonsense or TheCluelessLeadingTheClueless. The SkepticalScience post I’m referring to is A Looming Climate Shift: Will Ocean Heat Come Back to Haunt Us?, and the author is Rob Painting.
[…]
“The consequences of a shutdown of the wind-driven ocean circulation could be very profound”????? He has got to be kidding.
The tragedy: The “climate change communicator” who asked the question, someone who by their own admission does not have a scientific background, actually thanked Rob Painting for the answer. Will the “climate change communicator” now broadcast that nonsense through his communication channels?
The most telling part: No one else commenting on the thread questioned Rob Painting’s statement.
[…] For wind-driven ocean circulation to shut down, is Rob Painting suggesting the waters in the tropics will no longer be warmer than they are in the mid-latitudes? And is he also suggesting the Earth will stop rotating? Those things would have to occur for his proposed shutdown to occur. Considering that SkepticalScience is an alarmist website, is he suggesting that all this will be caused by increases in manmade greenhouse gases?
Oy vey!
>>>>>>>
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/01/a-very-ridiculous-comment-by-the-author-of-a-recent-skepticalscience-post/
‘Agnotology, Climastrology, and Replicability Examined in a New Study’
by dana1981
A new paper is currently undergoing open public review in Earth System Dynamics (ESD) titled Agnotology: learning from mistakes by Benestad and Hygen of The Norwegian Meteorological Institute, van Dorland of The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and Cook and Nuccitelli of Skeptical Science. ESD has a review system in which anybody can review a paper and submit comments to be considered before its final publication. So far we have received many comments, including from several authors whose papers we critique in our study, like Ross McKitrick, Craig Loehle, and Jan-Erik Solheim.
>>>>>>
http://www.skepticalscience.com/benestad-2013-agnotology.html
‘Agnotology: learning from mistakes’
R. E. Benestad, H. O. Hygen, R. van Dorland, J. Cook, and D. Nuccitelli
Interactive Discussion Status: Open (until 04 Jul 2013)
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/451/2013/esdd-4-451-2013-discussion.html
Interactive comment on “Agnotology: learning from mistakes” by R. E. Benestad et al.
C. Loehle
“This paper makes two fundamental assumptions that are false. The first is that the science of climate change is “settled” and that this consensus cannot be questioned. The second, which therefore follows, is that anyone questioning this consensus does so willfully and malevolently (intentionally promoting ignorance).”
“The second assumption is pernicious. It asserts that anyone who disagrees with this (sloppy) consensus in any particular is not merely wrong, but willfully wrong; that is, is engaged in disinformation or propaganda. “Agnotology” is thus just a fancy way of saying “denier.” Overall, the manuscript is simply a litany of complaints about papers the authors don’t like. Yet in no case do the authors bother to truly refute anything, they simply argue that this or that “might” have a problem or uses a method they disapprove of. They are essentially requiring the reader to take their word for it that these papers are wrong. But science, to paraphrase the Royal Society’s motto, “takes no man’s word” for anything. Everything should be demonstrated. I do not recognize these or any other scientists as having the authority to dismiss mine or any work on their say-so.”
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/C253/2013/esdd-4-C253-2013.pdf
Interactive comment on “Agnotology: learning from mistakes” by R. E. Benestad et al.
R. McKitrick
“The BHDCN paper is a bait-and-switch, in which the authors propose a scholarly essay on the methodology of science, then proceed to deliver something quite different: a scattershot of shallow commentary on a list of climatology papers with which they disagree. It is perfectly valid to publish critiques of papers, but they should be written as such, not offered parenthetically in an essay supposedly on another topic. We are asked to take it as “proven” that the authors of this paper have so decisively rebutted all the papers in their Appendix that we can now turn to a philosophical debriefing on the question of why they ever got published in the first place. Yet as proof, all the Appendix offers is a rehash of old, and mostly unpublished, blog posts. The whole paper is thus a waste of readers’ time.”
“The usage of the concept of “agnotology” is confused and contradictory. They introduce the term in paragraph 1 on page 452 as the counterpart of epistemology, that is, as a branch of philosophy. Then they use it in paragraph 2 as a method (“An agnotological study of the climate sciences can shed light…”). Then it is used synonymously with replication analysis and as a rhetorical technique (“the communication of misleading claims is a case of agnotology.” para 2 p. 463). Its use in the heading of Section A4 implies it is a form of misrepresentation. Finally the title itself implies agnotology means learning from mistakes, but the paper does not allege “mistakes”, instead it alleges widespread research malfeasance, such as ignoring data that doesn’t fit a hypothesis or ignoring known physical theories.”
“Presumably, “agnotology” means an absence of information and a lack of basis for knowing. Yet all the authors’ examples allege the opposite situation, namely cases in which (BHDCN assert) there is so much information, and matters are so decisively settled, that we can now assume the debates are all over and BHDCN won them all. There is no special philosophical issue behind their analysis, it is just garden-variety argumentation, most of it at a very trivial level. The agnotology angle appears to be a contrivance to try and make a weak paper sound erudite.”
“The authors repeatedly discuss replication as an essential part of science, insinuating that the papers they critique are at fault regarding disclosure of data and methods. Yet they provide no evidence that non-disclosure was an issue for the papers they study. The authors of the papers they critique appear to have made their methods and data freely available, and BHDCN do not claim that their work was thwarted by non-disclosure. While they point out that replication work is rare, they don’t present any case studies in which replication was actively impeded by failure to release data and/or code. Examples of such studies would be Dewald et al. (1986) and Anderson et al. (1994).”
“Worse, BHDCN insinuate that their analysis of MM04 and MM07 was hampered by secrecy, by ending their discussion on page 490 with the statement: “Another problem was the lack of openness and transparency, which prevented finding out why the conclusions in some of these cases differed to attempts to replicate (Le Page, 2009).” This is completely misleading. The Le Page article refers to an unrelated incident involving different authors, whereas the data and code for MM04 and MM07 have always been available, and nobody has ever claimed to be unable to replicate the findings. I have pointed this out to BHDCN in response to their previous drafts and it is very objectionable to see them repeat their falsehood here once again.
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/C261/2013/esdd-4-C261-2013-supplement.pdf
>”…a scattershot of shallow commentary on a list of climatology papers with which they disagree” [McKitrick]
And,
>”..a litany of complaints about papers the authors don’t like” [Loehle]
Viz:
* Case 1: Humlum et al. (2011a) – ignoring data which do not agree with the conclusions.
* Case 2: Scafetta (2012a) – unclear physics and non-objective analytical design
* Case 3: Loehle and Scafetta (2011) – unclear physics and inappropriate curve-fitting
* Case 4: Solheim et al. (2011) – ignoring negative tests
* Case 5: Scafetta and West (various) – wrongly presumed dependencies and no model evaluation
* Case 6: Douglass et al. (2007) – misinterpretation of statistics
* Case 7: McKitrick and Michaels (2004) – failure to account for the actual degrees of freedom
* Case 8: Veizer (2005) – missing similarities
* Case 9: Humlum et al. (2013) – looking at wrong scales
* Case 10: Cohn and Lins (2005) – circular reasoning
* Case 11: Scafetta (2010) – lack of plausible physics
* Case 12: McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) – incorrect interpretation of mathematics
* Case 13: Beck (2008) – contamination by other factors
* Case 14: Miskolzi (2010) – incomplete account of the physics
* Case 15: Svensmark, Friis-Christensen, and Lassen (various) – differences in pre-processing of data
* Case 16: Svensmark (2007), Shaviv (2002), and Courtillot et al. (2007) – selective use of data
* Case 17: Yndestad (2006) – misinterpretation of spectral methods
‘Agnotology: learning from mistakes’
R. E. Benestad, H. O. Hygen, R. van Dorland, J. Cook, and D. Nuccitelli (2013)
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/451/2013/esdd-4-451-2013.pdf
The Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) et al has lodged a petition for a writ of certiorari (review basically) from the US Supreme Court of the EPA’s evidence for the endangerment finding – how long before the style of psuedo-scientific critique (Benestad et al, 2013) similarly ends up in legal dispute i.e. in this case, legal scrutiny of another party’s assertions where professional reputations are at stake?
0.3% consensus, not 97.1%
‘Quantifying the consensus on global warming in the literature’:
a comment by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Capsule
The latest paper apparently showing 97% endorsement of a consensus that more than half of recent global warming was anthropogenic really shows only 0.3% endorsement of that now-dwindling consensus.
Abstract
Cook et al. (2013) stated that abstracts of nearly all papers expressing an opinion on climate change endorsed consensus, which, however, traditionally has no scientific role; used three imprecise definitions of consensus interchangeably; analyzed abstracts only; excluded 67% expressing no opinion; omitted some key results; misstated others; and thus concluded that 97.1% endorsed the hypothesis as defined in their introduction, namely that the “scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)”. The authors’ own data file categorized 64 abstracts, or only 0.5% of the sample, as endorsing the consensus hypothesis as thus defined. Inspection shows only 41 of the 64, or 0.3% of the entire sample, actually endorsed their hypothesis. Criteria for peer review of papers quantifying scientific consensus are discussed.
http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/cook-wrong-on-consensus-monckton_1.html
‘Getting To The Bottom Of Cook’s 97% Lie’
By Paul Homewood
[…] Cook arrives at his 97% by:-
1) Excluding all the “don’t knows”.
2) Including all of the following three categories:-
1,Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%
2,Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise
3,Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it.
Only 65 papers out of 12000+ appear under category 1, so I though I would investigate what is in the other two categories. And under category 2, I found this paper by A Carlin.
A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change
[…] I suppose, in theory, the paper acknowledges that AGW may exist, but to claim that it “endorses the consensus” is so far from the truth to be not only misleading, but almost fraudulent.
Unfortunately this is the sort of nonsense you get when the babies who read Skeptical Science are allowed to rate the papers, on which the survey is based.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/getting-to-the-bottom-of-cooks-97-lie/
Dr Alan Carlin is the “EPA Whistleblower” (in terms of the endangerment finding). See ‘EPA Whistleblower Criticizes Global Warming Science and Policy in New Peer-Reviewed Study’ in the USA thread:
https://www.climateconversation.org.nz/open-threads/climate/regions/usa/#comment-214778
‘Alan Carlin Destroys John Cook’s Credibility (If He Ever Had Any!)’
By Paul Homewood
I ran a post yesterday about how John Cook’s infamous “97%” paper had incorrectly classified a paper by Alan Carlin as “endorsing the consensus on AGW” . But it seems I was already beaten to it by Popular Technology, who flagged this up, along with many other similar misclassifications. They also asked for comments from the scientists concerned, and Alan Carlin did not pull his punches:-
Dr. Carlin, your paper ‘A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change‘ is categorized by Cook et al. (2013) as; “Explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize”.
Is this an accurate representation of your paper?
Carlin: “No, if Cook et al’s paper classifies my paper, ‘A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change’ as “explicitly endorses AGW but does not quantify or minimize,” nothing could be further from either my intent or the contents of my paper. I did not explicitly or even implicitly endorse AGW and did quantify my skepticism concerning AGW. Both the paper and the abstract make this clear.” […]
“I would classify my paper in Cook et al’s category (7): Explicit rejection with quantification.”
Continues>>>>>>>
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/alan-carlin-destroys-john-cooks-credibility-if-he-ever-had-any/
‘Dana Nuccitelli’s ‘vested interest’ ? – oil and gas’
Posted on July 22, 2013 by Anthony Watts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/22/dana-nuccitellis-vested-interest-oil-and-gas/
“This revelation about Dana working for a company that supports “big oil” in the form of oil and gas exploration and production may very well revoke Dana’s “green card”.
And ironically, Tetra Tech is big in mining too, for those that want to trash talk about Steve McIntyre’s work in the mining industry.”
Hilarious isn’t it. The Hardly surprising though, especially after Al Gore’s hypocrisy.
‘Tom Curtis Doesn’t Understand the 97% Paper’
Posted by Ben Pile on July 27, 2013
My post over at the Nottingham University ‘Making Science Public’ blog has ruffled some feathers. This was caused in no small part by Mike Hulme’s intervention:
“Ben Pile is spot on. The “97% consensus” article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister [Ed Davey] should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to that adopted in Anderegg et al.’s 2010 equally poor study in PNAS: dividing publishing climate scientists into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living (or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?”
>>>>>
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/07/tom-curtis-doesnt-understand-the-97-paper.html
>”Anon. unwittingly reveals that the consensus paper is a strategy”
‘Cook’s 97% Consensus Study Game Plan Revealed’
Popular Technology.net
“We beat the consensus drum often and regularly and make SkS the home of the perceived strengthening consensus.”
“To achieve this goal, we mustn’t fall into the trap of spending too much time on analysis and too little time on promotion.”
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/06/cooks-97-consensus-study-game-plan.html
Hulme:
“…it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister [Ed Davey] should cite it”
Pile:
“If this survey had not influenced the arguments of Obama and Davey, and thus perhaps influenced UK policy, I might actually feel sorry for the paper’s authors and their fans. Instead, seeing for myself just how shallow their thinking is, and how transparent their politicking is, I am more terrified that it is so easy for such a collection of mediocre minds to achieve such prominence, merely by flattering politicians with such rank pseudo science.”
Society of Environmental Journalists:
Skeptical Science……….”is published by physicist John Cook”
http://judithcurry.com/2013/07/30/denier-blogs/#more-12367
I think John Cook did do a physics degree. That article was rather painful. Declaring JC’s blog as a “denier blog” and then singing the praises of Desmogblog and various other smear/propaganda didn’t suggest that they were a very open minded bunch
Yes my bad, an undergraduate education in physics from the University of Queensland and a post-graduate honors year studying solar physics.
However,
“It was 2007, and Cook was working from his home in web programming and database programming, something he still does to earn a living, generally working with small local Australian businesses — local doctors, beauty salons, cartoonists, and promotional product companies.”
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/12/skeptical-science-founder-john-cook/
And,
“John is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He originally studied physics at the University of Queensland. After graduating, he majored in solar physics in his post-grad honours year. In 2011, he co-authored the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand with Haydn Washington, published by Earthscan. In 2013, he co-authored the college textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis with Tom Farmer, published by Springer.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/team.php
His career after academic-only physicist looks to have been website/database development and (man-made) climate change “communication”. I see next to no SkS cognizance (except for lame dismissal) of the solar role in climate even after a year studying solar physics post graduation. So there doesn’t seem to be much spillover from academic activities and qualifications to his new career path.
One could also say Dr Hannibal Lechter was a brilliant psychiatrist. True, but rather misses his other more influential course-of-life developments somewhat.
Scientific American:
“Dana Nuccitelli, a physicist who writes at the Skeptical Science blog…”
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/07/30/more-carbon-emissions-less-global-warming/
If you are a fan if downfall parodies, then this one posted by Anthony watts about the SkS team is pretty good
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/07/inside-the-skeptical-science-secret-tree-house-bunker/
‘Richard Tol: half Cook’s data still hidden. Rest shows result is incorrect, invalid, unrepresentative.’
Jo Nova
[Richard Tol] I first contacted Mr Cook on 31 May 2013, requesting data that should have been ready when the paper was submitted for peer review on 18 January 2013. His foot-dragging, condoned by senior university officials, does not reflect well on the University of Queensland’s attitude towards replication and openness. His refusal to release all data may indicate that more could be wrong with the paper.
Therefore, I hereby request, once again, that you release rater IDs and time stamps.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Tol
cc. Mr John Story, chancellor, University of Queensland
Professor Peter Knight, president, Institute of Physics
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/richard-tol-half-cooks-data-still-hidden-rest-shows-result-is-incorrect-invalid-unrepresentative/#more-30203
# # #
Richard Tol:
“If, on the other hand, this was a survey of the raters’ beliefs and skills, rather than a survey of the abstracts they rated, then Mr Cook is correct that their identity should remain confidential. But this undermines the entire paper: It is no longer a survey of the literature, but rather a survey of Mr Cook and his friends.”
Mr Cook and his friends:
Cook, Nuccitelli, Green, Richardson, Winkler, Painting, Way, Jacobs and Skuce (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024
SkS Highlights 25 August 2013
John Cook’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Closing the Consensus Gap generated the most buzz (number of comments) of the articles posted on SkS this past week. It is a summary of Cook’s lengthier article, Closing the consensus gap: Public support for climate policy published by the prestigious Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In both articles, Cook discusses the SkS paper Quantifying the Consensus and why there was a need for it
http://www.skepticalscience.com/2013-SkS-Weekly-Digest_34.html
One wonders whether the “Atomic Scientists” have been following Richard Tol’s ‘Quantifying the Consensus’ exposé above
Andrew Montford has written a short paper on the SkS consensus for the GWPF
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2013/09/Montford-Consensus.pdf
Amazing how they authored their own credibility demise by unprofessional, unethical, unscientific approach and execution – for all the world to read.
Viz (as quoted by Andrew):
“We’re basically going with Ari’s porno approach……”
And,
“I have to say that I find this planning of huge marketing strategies somewhat
strange when we don’t even have our results in and the research subject is not
that revolutionary either (just summarizing existing research).”
‘Study: Claimed warmist consensus of 97.1% actually only 0.3%!’
by Steve Milloy
Science & Education (Springer)
August 2013
‘Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change’
David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
“Inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.”
http://junkscience.com/2013/09/02/study-claimed-warmist-consensus-of-97-1-actually-only-0-3/
Cooks ’97% consensus’ disproven by a new peer reviewed paper showing major math errors’
‘by Anthony Watts
UPDATE: While this paper (a rebuttal) has been accepted, another paper by Cook and Nuccitelli has been flat out rejected by the journal Earth System Dynamics [and several other places – see comments]. See update below. – Anthony
“0.3% climate consensus, not 97.1%”
[……PRESS RELEASE – September 3rd, 2013……….]
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change
David R. Legates, Willie Soon, William M. Briggs, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9
Abstract
Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education.
================================================================
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/03/cooks-97-consensus-disproven-by-a-new-paper-showing-major-math-errors/
UPDATE: – Cook and Nuccitelli paper rejected:
Bishop Hill writes: [http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/9/3/benestad-et-al-rejected.html]
The Benestad (Cook, Nuccitelli) et al paper on “agnotology”, a bizarre concoction that tried to refute just about every sceptic paper ever written has been rejected by Earth System Dynamics
[…..ESD rejection…….]
Which is all fine and well, but then you get the paragraphs below, which seem to me to be almost as strange as the Benestad article itself:
[…..bizarre discourse……..]
Not having been on the end of many editorial decision notices myself I’m perhaps not best placed to say how normal such a stream of conciousness is in scientific discourse. But it seems very odd to me.
>”In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013)” is this (I think)
‘Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change: A Response to Legates, Soon and Briggs’
Daniel Bedford, John Cook
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11191-013-9608-3
‘Scientists slam claims of cooler climate’
by Nick Perry
“That assessment was backed by Dr John Cook from the University of Queensland, who warned such statements misrepresented the findings of the IPCC.”
http://news.smh.com.au/national/scientists-slam-claims-of-cooler-climate-20130916-2tv7w.html
Well, well, what do we have here – “Dr” John Cook.
Tom Nelson picked this up at the ABC too.
“Climate Misinformers”
Includes:
Judith Curry
Richard Lindzen
Richard Muller
http://skepticalscience.com/skeptics.php
OK, so Muller is now a “denier”, get it warmist trolls?
Odd, Only one Idso and David Legates but not Willie Soon. Perhaps those are only the photogenic Climate Misinformers (*).
I count 43 NIPCC Climate Change Reconsidered II authors/Climate Misinformers (*) missing from the gallery:
https://www.climateconversation.org.nz/open-threads/un/nipcc/#comment-238699
No photos? I can help:
Sherwood B. Idso at Smog Blog:
http://www.desmogblog.com/sherwood-b-idso
Willie Soon at CFACT:
http://www.cfactcampus.org/2013/03/25/cfact-challenges-global-warming-status-quo/
[*Spell check helpfully underlines “Misinformers” in red]
I think we know why David Legates made it into the gallery (well, among other things anyway):
“In the latest volley, from Legates et al 2013, John Cook’s “97% consensus” survey has become the case study in agnotology. Based on incorrect results, a flawed method, and a logical fallacy, it kept key facts hidden while sloppily blending vague language into a form that is easily and actively misinterpreted. That it passed peer-review is another damning indictment of peer review.”
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/09/cooks-97-consensus-is-a-case-study-of-agnotology-ignorance-and-misinformation/
Curiously (again), David Evans made it but Joanne Nova didn’t. I think she’ll be miffed.
Australian Climate Madness has some good observations on SkS
http://australianclimatemadness.com/2013/09/21/curry-vs-cook-with-a-bit-of-flannery/
On the right side bar at NoTricksZone there’s a link to “Climate Bet For Charity”. Pete’s update:
‘Honeycutt-Nuccitelli Climate Bet Progress Report…So Far New Decade Is Cooler Than The Last…Ready To Concede?’
By P Gosselin on 8. Juni 2013
To mark the start of the new decade, NoTricksZone and its readers made a climate bet (see right side bar) against two warmists from Skeptical Science: Rob Honeycutt and Dana Nuccitelli (and others). Also see update-5. The warmists are pledging more than $14,000.00!
[…]
The bet is on whether or not the current 2011-2020 decade would be warmer or cooler than the previous 2001-2010 decade. NTZ and its readers say it will be cooler or the same. Messieurs Honeycutt and Nuccitelli say it’s going to get warmer for sure. After all, man is spewing more CO2 into the atmosphere than ever. The money won will be donated to a charity for children in need.
Almost two and half years have now passed and I think it’s a good time to see how the bet is coming along. Thanks to Robin Pittwood and his Kiwi Thinker blog, we now have preliminary results for the first 2 years and 5 months.
Clearly in the chart above we see that the current decade is running a bit cooler than the last one.
>>>>>>
http://notrickszone.com/2013/06/08/honeycutt-nuccitelli-climate-bet-progress-report-so-far-new-decade-is-cooler-than-the-last-ready-to-concede/
CRU confirms this on page 1 of ‘Global Temperature Record’ by Phil Jones:
“The first two years of the present decade (2011 and 2012) are cooler than the average for 2001-2010,”
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/documents/421974/1295957/Info+sheet+%231.pdf/c612fc7e-babb-463c-b5e3-124ac76680c5
I think I’ll point to this in Stuff comments under the latest AR5 report article for a bit of fun, especially given the expectation from the solar recession that this would be the case.
PMOD TSI composite from 1978:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/from:1978
Last datapoint is 2011.67, 1365.56 but it’s clear that SC 24 after 2008/9 will be down markedly (maybe 0,5 W.m2 at 2013 maximum) from the previous 3 cycles and who knows where the minimum will end up given the end of SC 23 was down by about 0.3 W.m2?
That’s a cooler regime than the 1st decade 21st century locked in for over a decade ahead unless the sun wakes up and a pretty good bet at NTZ I think.
Blimey! Skeptical Science Admits Current Decade Running 0.053°C Cooler Than Last Decade!
By P Gosselin on 29. November 2013
http://notrickszone.com/2013/11/29/blimey-skeptical-science-admits-current-decade-running-0-053c-cooler-than-last-decade/
‘The Skeptical Science Escalator … of Alarmism’
By Simon
No visit to the Skeptical Science website is complete without having one of their smug “escalator” graphics shoved down your throat.
Not content with the temperature escalator, which paints anyone who questions their zealous devotion to “The Cause” as a simpleton, they have now come up with the sea ice escalator, along similar lines.
So finally, ladies and gentlemen, we present the Australian Climate Madness version of [drum roll, please], The Escalator!!!
CLICK HERE to watch animation
http://australianclimatemadness.com/2013/09/16/the-skeptical-science-escalator-of-alarmism/
Hehe, that’s good!
97% topical in OZ at the moment:
‘Wendy Bacon’s Warmist Wonderland’
The UTS academic’s 222-page study of Australian newspapers’ treatment of climate change is far worse than silly. It is more than a bit sinister
by Tony Thomas
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2013/11/wendy-bacons-warmist-wonderland/
’97 per cent of warmists cite a 97 per cent that’s false’
by Andrew Bolt
Reader James on a deceptive meme that’s repeated by warmists with little seeming interest in the truth:
“I have submitted this to ABC Fact Checkers”
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/97_per_cent_of_warmists_cite_a_97_per_cent_thats_false/#131753
# # #
Note that one of the last acts of the Keven Rudd government was to give ABC AU$10m for “fact checking”.
Behind the SkS curtain
http://climateaudit.org/2013/11/20/behind-the-sks-curtain/
A rather fascinating insight into SkS from Steve McIntyre, and contains some frank discussion of the problems with Mann’s hockey stick from the SkS team
Concludes with Cook’s “call to action”
‘Climate Prat of 2013 – We have a winnah!’
Written by Pointman
“You’re pure-blood Dana. Say it loud, say it proud, you’re the climate prat of 2013.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/climate-prat-of-2013-we-have-a-winnah/
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/climate-arse-of-2013.html
Wanna Be Hackers?
Izuru (Brandon Schollenberger)
Have you ever wanted to know what it takes to be a hacker? Well you’re in luck. I’m here to tell you. I’m going to give you a step-by-step guide to how I got myself reported to the Feds by a major university.
If you don’t already know, I recently received a threatening letter from the University of Queensland which, amongst other things, threatened a lawsuit if I showed anyone the letter.
[…]
You see, a couple years ago, the secret forum on the Skeptical Science website was hacked. You can read all about it in a lengthy series of posts they wrote about it, starting here.
[…]
Anyway, the important thing is after their secret forum was hacked, they moved their forum to a new, secret location: http://www.sksforum.org. This secret-secret forum stayed secret for a while because nobody cared. Then one day Skeptical Science published a post with a few links which included the secret-secret forum’s URL. I saw the domain name and decided to check it out.
There wasn’t much to see. There was just a login page with an image on it. The image happened to be located in the directory http://www.sksforum.org/images/. Out of curiosity, I went to that directory. I found a number of images. I didn’t think much of them at first. Then I saw an image of John Cook, owner of the site, photoshopped into a Nazi uniform:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/1_herrcook.jpg?w=314&h=504
That creeped me out. I was even more creeped out when I found there were other images which depicted the Skeptical Science team with similar Nazi imagery. Naturally, I told people about these images. Most people were either disturbed or amused by the images, but Skeptical Science representatives were upset. They claimed I had hacked them,……..
[…]
You see, months back I noticed referral links from the secret-secret forum in my logs. They were in the form of, sksforum.org/thread.php?t=14499&p=18772. When I’d click on them, I’d be redirected to one of my own pages.
I quickly realized the links I was seeing were redirection links for the links people were posting in the secret-secret forum. I figured if I could see the ones going to my own site, I could probably see the ones going to other sites. I was right. Changing the number after p= resulted in a different redirection link. Not only that, but each new redirection link was one number higher than the previous.
That meant I could look at every external link anyone posted on the forum by repeatedly adding +1 to that value
[…]
I thought it’d be amusing to keep track of what the Skeptical Science team was linking to in their secret-secret forum. After all, it’s pretty silly to have a secret-secret forum while making information about what you’re discussing in the forum public.
[…]
I didn’t have any login information. An amateur might try brute-force guessing, but I’m too clever a hacker to resort to such a crude approach. Instead, I grabbed a can of Red Bull, scarfed down a Twinkie and got ready to write some awesome haxor code.
By which I mean, I looked at the list I had, found this entry:
2929 http://…/tcp_results.php
And put it into my browser’s navigation bar. Lo and behold, this page appeared:
[SkS 97% Consensus Project]
http://hiizuru.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/5-16-tcp_page.png?w=308&h=613
Since the page was publicly accessible, I decided to follow its links. I saved what I saw. And now, the Feds are coming after me. They’re going to shove a black bag shoved over my head, transport to some deep, dark hole into which I’ll disappear for all eternity, and the Skeptical Science team will create a new, secret-secret-secret-secret forum. This time they might even learn not to make pages publicly accessible if they want to keep those pages hidden.
In the meantime, you can be a l33t haxor like me too. The University of Queensland claimed I hacked “the site where the IP was housed.” The site where the data was stored is the site I found URLs for. All I did to that site was try a few pages to see if it’d let me access any. I’m confident you could do that too.
In fact, I think you already have. I’m sure at some point in your life you rose to the level of a stupid script kiddie and copied the URL of a site. I bet you’ve gone beyond that though. I bet you managed, at some point in your life, to rise to the level of true haxor and pasted the URL of a site into your navigation bar.
But I have an inkling you’ve gone beyond that. The inkling is small, but it tells me at some point you became truly l33t and hit the Enter button.
Be careful. The Feds might come after you next.
http://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/wanna-be-hackers/
>”I recently received a threatening letter [cease-and-desist] from the University of Queensland which, amongst other things, threatened a lawsuit if I showed anyone the letter.”
See the saga in this ‘Students desire knowledge’ thread:
https://www.climateconversation.org.nz/2014/04/students-desire-knowledge/#respond
‘Chronology of Tol’s Request for Cook et al 2013 Data’
Notes by SM, July 28, 2014
Introduction
Last year, Richard Tol requested John Cook’s ratings data, including anonymized rater ID and
timestamp. The data recently released by Brandon Shollenberger shows that the majority of
ratings (54%) were done by coauthors of the paper and a further 34% by acknowledgees
identified in the paper. The data also shows that the rater IDs were anonymized in the native
datafiles and that no special processing would have been required to respond to Tol’s request.
The data also shows that the native datafiles contained datestamps.
http://www.climateaudit.info/correspondence/foi/queensland/narrative%20of%20tol%20data%20request.pdf
18 pages.
‘Cooking stove use, housing associations, white males, and the 97%’ [From Climate Depot]
José Duarte, 08/28/2014
The Cook et al. (2013) 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change.
Let’s go ahead and walk through that sentence again. The Cook et al 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change. I only spent ten minutes with their database — there will be more such papers for those who search. I’m not willing to spend a lot of time with their data, for reasons I detail further down.
This paper is vacated, as a scientific product, given that it included psychology papers, and also given that it twice lied about its method (claiming not to count social science papers, and claiming to use independent raters), and the professed cheating by the raters. It was essentially voided by its invalid method of using partisan and unqualified political activists to subjectively rate climate science abstracts on the issue on which their activism centers — a stunning and unprecedented method. I’m awaiting word on retraction from the journal, but I think we already know that this paper is vacated. It doesn’t represent knowledge of the consensus.
I discovered that the following papers were included as endorsement, as “climate papers”, again in just ten minutes of looking. They are classified as either implicit or explicit endorsement, and were evidently included in the 97% figure:
Chowdhury, M. S. H., Koike, M., Akther, S., & Miah, D. (2011). Biomass fuel use, burning technique and reasons for the denial of improved cooking stoves by Forest User Groups of Rema-Kalenga Wildlife Sanctuary, Bangladesh. International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 18(1), 88–97.
Ding, D., Maibach, E. W., Zhao, X., Roser-Renouf, C., & Leiserowitz, A. (2011). Support for climate policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement. Nature Climate Change, 1(9), 462–466.
Egmond, C., Jonkers, R., & Kok, G. (2006). A strategy and protocol to increase diffusion of energy related innovations into the mainstream of housing associations. Energy Policy, 34(18), 4042–4049.
Gruber, E., & Brand, M. (1991). Promoting energy conservation in small and medium-sized companies. Energy Policy, 19(3), 279–287.
Ha-Duong, M. (2008). Hierarchical fusion of expert opinions in the Transferable Belief Model, application to climate sensitivity. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 49(3), 555–574.
Palmgren, C. R., Morgan, M. G., Bruine de Bruin, W., & Keith, D. W. (2004). Initial public perceptions of deep geological and oceanic disposal of carbon dioxide. Environmental Science & Technology, 38(24), 6441–6450.
Reynolds, T. W., Bostrom, A., Read, D., & Morgan, M. G. (2010). Now what do people know about global climate change? Survey studies of educated laypeople. Risk Analysis, 30(10), 1520–1538.
Semenza, J. C., Ploubidis, G. B., & George, L. A. (2011). Climate change and climate variability: personal motivation for adaptation and mitigation. Environmental Health, 10(1), 46.
Continues>>>>>>>
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/cooking-stove-use-housing-associations-white-males-and-the-97#comments
‘More on Cook’s 97%’
Bishop Hill, Aug 29, 2014
Jose Duarte has another post looking at John Cook’s 97% ‘consensus’ paper.
[List of papers above reproduced]
Duarte is again openly referring to the paper as fraudulent. Yet this paper was cited approvingly by Ed Davey and Barack Obama. And the Institute of Physics is standing by it. Shameless, every one of them.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/
‘A psychologist’s scathing review of John Cook’s ‘97% consensus’ nonsensus paper’
Anthony Watts, August 29, 2014
[Excerpt’s from essay above]
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/29/a-psychologists-scathing-review-of-john-cooks-97-consensus-nonsensus-paper/
Duarte:
“Nuccitelli thinks that if a psychology paper uses the phrase “climate change denial”, it might count as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change. We should linger on that. This is a staggering level of stupidity with respect to what would count as scientific evidence of AGW [emphasized]. The implied epistemology there is, well, I don’t know that it has a name. Maybe it’s some kind of postmodernist view of reality being based on belief, anyone’s belief (except for the beliefs of skeptics) — perhaps a grotesque misreading of Kuhn. Even if we thought reality was best understood via consensus, it’s not going to be created by consensus, and the only consensus we would care about would be that of climate scientists. That Marxist or neo-Marxist sociologists pepper their paper with “climate change denial” does not add to our confidence level about AGW — it is not evidence of anything but the ideology of two American sociologists. It doesn’t test the energy balance model, or revise or validate or estimates of transient climate sensitivity. It has no input into our knowledge of AGW. In any case, I’m stunned by Nuccitelli’s behavior in these rater forum pages, and his behavior as a climate science writer – he and Jenny McCarthy should jointly surrender to some sort of authority.”
Duarte (again):
“I think some of you who’ve defended this “study” got on the wrong train. I don’t think you meant to end up here. I think it was an accident. You thought you were getting on the Science Train. You thought these people — Cook, Nuccitelli, Lewandowsky — were the science crowd, and that the opposition was anti-science, “deniers” and so forth. I hope it’s clear at this point that this was not the Science Train. This is a different train. These people care much less about science than they do about politics. They’re willing to do absolutely stunning, unbelievable things to score political points. What they did still stuns me, that they did this on purpose, that it was published, that we live in a world where people can publish these sorts of obvious scams in normally scientific journals. If you got on this train, you’re now at a place where you have to defend political activists rating scientific abstracts regarding the issue on which their activism is focused, able to generate the results they want. You have to defend people counting psychology studies and surveys of the general public as scientific evidence of endorsement of AGW. You have to defend false statements about the methods used in the study. Their falsity won’t be a matter of opinion — they were clear and simple claims, and they were false. You have to defend the use of raters who wanted to count a bad psychology study of white males as evidence of scientific endorsement of AGW. You have to defend vile behavior, dishonesty, and stunning hatred and malice as a standard way to deal with dissent.”
Duarte (in a nutshell):
“This study [Cook et al. (2013)] is a teachable moment, a future textbook example of scientific scams.”
[Bishop Hill] – ‘Iris hypothesis bridges model-observation gap’
[Stevens and Mauritzen abstract] – “A controversial hypothesis [Lindzen & Choi Iris Effect] suggests that the dry and clear regions of the tropical atmosphere expand in a warming climate and thereby allow more infrared radiation to escape to space. This so-called iris effect could constitute a negative feedback that is not included in climate models. We find that inclusion of such an effect in a climate model moves the simulated responses of both temperature and the hydrological cycle to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations closer to observations”
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/4/21/iris-hypothesis-bridges-model-observation-gap.html
[John Abraham] – ‘Changes in water vapor and clouds are amplifying global warming’
“What the present paper [Trenberth, Zhang, Fasullo, and Taguchi] shows is that future changes to clouds will cause slightly more warming. Scientists describe clouds as a “positive feedback” on global warming. This finding is consistent with the work of Dr. Andrew Dessler. He had published work here and here showing changes in clouds are making the Earth warm more than otherwise expected.
The results of this study harken back to prior work by one well-known skeptic Richard Lindzen who published work on climate feedbacks in 2009, and by another well-known skeptic Roy Spencer who wrote an article in 2011. Those works, among others, reportedly show that the Earth is less sensitive to increases in greenhouse gases. This new work confirms the opposite; it turns out Dr. Dessler was correct after all.”
http://www.skepticalscience.com/changes-in-water-vapor-clouds-amplifying-warming.html
“Confirms” Dessler was correct? I don’t think so John.
Also note the contradiction “are amplifying” and “future changes”.
White man speak with forked tongue.
Hansen et al (2005) have an estimate for planetary oceanic thermal inertia (as do others in the literature).
Here’s a synopsis for the record. The article, and Hansen et al, make a crazy miss-attribution but the point is the lag time between planetary energy input change and atmospheric temperature response:
>”a confidence range between 25 and 50 years – with 37.5 years as most likely value”
I think this is a very realistic estimate, it is longer than some others e.g. Abdussamatov’s 20 yr ocean-only and 14+/-6 land+ocean, and certainly a lot longer than “time constant” experts from other fields (think Electrical Engineers and David Evans N-D Solar Model series – many heated arguments over the oceanic time constant).
For example, solar change occurred circa 2005 and is continuing. Using Hansen et al’s lag time estimate, we should start looking for a temperature response in the atmosphere starting around 2030.
In other words, the acid test for the alternative solar conjecture DOES NOT EVEN BEGIN until 2030 according to Hansen et al (2005), contrary to most IPCC solar specialists and thermodynamic illiterates like John Cook’s Skeptical Science blog who demand an almost instantaneous atmospheric temperature response to solar change.
For what it’s worth (probably nothing), I’m inclined to start looking for a temperature response to solar change over the 2020s i.e. a lag time stating at 20 yrs gives 2005 + 20 = 2025, a little sooner than Hansen et al imply.
‘New methods are improving ocean and climate measurements’
Posted on 20 June 2016 by John Abraham [Skeptical Science, The Guardian]
We wanted to know whether we could correct that archive of ocean temperature measurements to account for measurements made in cold waters. To solve this problem, I teamed up with world-class scientists Dr. Lijing Cheng and Rebecca Cowley.
Lijing Cheng is a rapidly rising international scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently producing some of the best research on the Earth’s energy imbalance.
Rebecca Cowley is a data expert from CSIRO in Australia. Her group is recognized as among the best in ocean heat content measurements and data quality.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-methods-improving-ocean-climate-measurements.html
# # #
I agree “that global warming is really ocean warming” but I certainly do NOT agree that “as humans add more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, it causes the Earth to gain energy” and that “almost all of that energy ends up in the oceans”.
The earth’s energy balance clearly shows that both the TOA (+0.6) and Surface imbalance (+0.6) is simply solar forcing at the surface (+0.6). There is no net LW radiative energy transfer down into the surface, the LW flux and transfer (-52.4) is up away from the surface. It is impossible for theoretical human forcing at TOA (+2.3) to be the driver of either the earth’s energy balance or ocean warming.
Lijing Cheng should know this (“He is currently producing some of the best research on the Earth’s energy imbalance”), if he does he obviously didn’t try to get it through to John Abraham.