PDO explains twentieth century warming?

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MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

tomclarke wrote:What I mean is that regional variation is vey noticeable but less significant for the overall energy budget.
A 1% difference in temp (say from 300 K to 303K) causes a 4% difference in radiation.

Say the Northern hemisphere is 1 deg warmer than the Southern with the Northern at an average of 300K. That is a 1.3% difference in radiation.

And still the real radiation budget has to be calculated from actual temperatures raised to the fourth power times areas. So even what I presented above is not the real picture. And of course it depends on the phase of the moon (moon temperature) the temperature of space, etc.
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IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

One thing that climateaudit.org has successfully argued about is that the 'hockey stick' chart is flawed for several reasons. Firstly, the software Michael Mann uses to generate it for the IPCC report is inherently flawed, you can stick pink noise into his software and get a hockey stick pattern (proven fact) because it inherently biases stronger toward data at the end of the series.

Another problem with it is the data is not centered. It cherry picks the highs, rather than, for instance, going with a running average. What this means is that any period of increased volatility in temperatures is going to appear as an increase in temperatures rather than an increase in volatility, even if averages remain the same.

It also flips the signs on extreme lows. If for instance, a drop of -2 degrees is measured that is an extreme, Mann's software sees that as a 2 degree increase.

Mann has done everything possible to produce fraudulent results, and everybody else vested in ensuring that anthropogenic global warming is 'proven' is doing their best to cover for him.

They also follow a do what i say, not what i do, routine. For instance, the solar minimum of the past two years has combined with the North Atlantic Occillation to cause a major global cooling the past few years. If you try to argue for global cooling now using the data and methods the AGW cheerleaders use, they attack your methods when you use them, but not when they use them.

AGW is not science, it is a political agenda of the Club of Rome, intent on using pseudoscience cargo-cultism to push the US to adopt eurosocialism in the form of energy taxes to fund a welfare state.

Whatever climate change is happening is a result of solar cycles. Do some research on NASAs predictions for Solar Cycle 25.....

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

OK,

So let us compare the arguments from climateaudit & realclimate. Let us look at the detail (boring I know, but necessary) and try to reach an independent conclusion.

Re the hockeystick graph it seems agreed that the Mann analyss used some questionable methodology. Wegman et al highlighted this. And here is a discussion and a few other graphs, diff version of PCA (or no PCA at all) all looking very hockey-stick like....

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... n-hearing/

There is a common strand to the climateaudit objections. Take one part of the overall evidence, poke holes in it, claim the authors are deliberately distorting the truth, use this character assasination instead of a critical assessment of the whole corpus.

It reads well on blogs (like this one) but it does not convince me. So far whenever I have looked at these "GW is rubbish" ideas they all relate to a small part of the overall picture which is questionable. Typically future research then supercedes the anomalous data.

For example the anomalous satellite data indicating cooling - now explained, the anomalous ocean temp data (subs retracted by its authors) etc etc.

So yes this is a debate much corupted by politics. But who, looking openly at both sides of the argument (say take one story and read climateaudit, realclimate + all the relevant posts on each site - which often follow the debate with much more detail then the polemic headline blogs - remains anti-GW?

Best wishes, Tom

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Post by MSimon »

tomclarke wrote:OK,

So let us compare the arguments from climateaudit & realclimate. Let us look at the detail (boring I know, but necessary) and try to reach an independent conclusion.

Re the hockeystick graph it seems agreed that the Mann analyss used some questionable methodology. Wegman et al highlighted this. And here is a discussion and a few other graphs, diff version of PCA (or no PCA at all) all looking very hockey-stick like....

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... n-hearing/

There is a common strand to the climateaudit objections. Take one part of the overall evidence, poke holes in it, claim the authors are deliberately distorting the truth, use this character assasination instead of a critical assessment of the whole corpus.

It reads well on blogs (like this one) but it does not convince me. So far whenever I have looked at these "GW is rubbish" ideas they all relate to a small part of the overall picture which is questionable. Typically future research then supercedes the anomalous data.

For example the anomalous satellite data indicating cooling - now explained, the anomalous ocean temp data (subs retracted by its authors) etc etc.

So yes this is a debate much corupted by politics. But who, looking openly at both sides of the argument (say take one story and read climateaudit, realclimate + all the relevant posts on each site - which often follow the debate with much more detail then the polemic headline blogs - remains anti-GW?

Best wishes, Tom
Well tom,

I don't know if you were here for my all time blunder but I argued very convincingly for a week my position. Then I saw the light.

What did I do?

I apologized to every one for my error and then publicly announced on my blog my blunder.

Now that is what people interested in the truth do. So where is Mann's apology and his revision of his methods? Where is his pulling his erroneous graphs (or at least having them marked as error)?

It gives one the impression that he has an agenda and is not searching for the truth. And the real climate guys seem to have an agenda too. Have they gotten on Mann's case and told him to repent? I haven't heard of it. In fact I believe they still tout Mann as gospel.

And by behaving that way they lose their integrity and get discounted.

If I ever get convinced that AGW is THE answer to our recent warming cycle I will announce it and give my reasons. So far I am not convinced.

Now you can also note what I did with a recent graph I posted. Some one noticed that the smoothing might have end point difficulties. Did I argue otherwise. Nope. I said that such a criticism was a fair cop.

When MacIntyre makes a mistake he announces it on the front page and posts a correction. That is what people with integrity do. If the real climate folks had any integrity that is what they should do. Instead the hockey sticks keep popping up.

Once you lose your reputation your arguments suffer. Most unfortunate.

Or look at how I deal with BFRs. Do I say it is a sure thing? Nope. All I will say (and I'm a huge fan) is that it looks promising and deserves further investigation. If it is a dead end I'll post that fact everywhere.

All I have is my reputation. I intend to keep it.
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Mike Holmes
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Post by Mike Holmes »

That doesn't void Tom's point. Even if Mann is shown thoroughly to be corrupt, for instance, that doesn't mean that everybody on his side of the debate is also corrupt. Or their data bad. Guilt by association?

As long as either side has as part of their argument, "The other side is biased, so it must be wrong!" this is a crap debate. And even if we stipulate that the AGW side started the Ad Hominems, it's still an Ad Hominem to point that out as part of your argument.

The whole Mann thing is akin to Pons and Flieschman. That is, the event is used as ammunition against anything pro cold-fusion (or, heck, fusion in general). Is that fair? Forget fair... does that get us closer to the answer?

Mann is old, old news at this point. Anybody using that event doesn't have an argument, they have a vague opinion.

Frankly, I don't buy that AGW is proven by any means. But it's the arguments that point out that we don't understand the effects of the various possible inputs that are convincing to me. Not attacks on the credibility of some scientists (other than Mann) that I find very credible. They can be both credible, and even correct in the small scale, and yet wrong on the larger scale.

And the idea that there are no studies coming out that are pro-cooling (or pro-zero change) is ludicrous. I read them on almost a daily basis. right alongside studies that indicate warming. Arguments against AGW should stick to pointing out whether or not such data is being included in overall theories. Like the PDO data.

Huh, seems that somebody is paying attention to these things: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 230140.htm

Let's stop pretending that those two web-sites represent their respective sides in their entirity.

Mike

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Post by Mike Holmes »

Here's another with a very ambiguous message about climate:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 113522.htm

Basically we still have lots more to learn. This is what I find convincing.

That's just AGW, however. There are other potential bad side-effects of so much CO2: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 184321.htm

It's just that people are more moved by a direct potential impact to their wallets posed by AGW, than they are by the nebulous effects that acidic oceans could have on an ugly sea creature.

As always, I'm for reducing pollution for the very selfish reason that it means I can breath more easily. Heck, forget CO2, which is obviously non-toxic to us, how about CO? A gas which people use regularly (and very successfully) in suicide attempts, and which has known detrimental health effects. This has, at least, been made much harder with modern catalytic converters, and air is cleaner for it. But zero emissions would be an improvement.

I would agree that AGW is a "narrative" meant to mobilize people. But that shouldn't be neccessary.

Mike

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Post by djolds1 »

IntLibber wrote:One thing that climateaudit.org has successfully argued about is that the 'hockey stick' chart is flawed for several reasons. Firstly, the software Michael Mann uses to generate it for the IPCC report is inherently flawed, you can stick pink noise into his software and get a hockey stick pattern (proven fact) because it inherently biases stronger toward data at the end of the series.
The pitiful thing was that once the original Mann hockey stick was discredited, they kept trying to keep the hockey stick shape but with multiple new technical rationales. The hockey stick shape is simply dramatic in and of itself. It creates instant worry. Like Gore's "temperature sawtooth vs CO2 sawtooth" graphs, it has immediate visual effect, no matter what it purports to explain.
IntLibber wrote:AGW is not science, it is a political agenda of the Club of Rome, intent on using pseudoscience cargo-cultism to push the US to adopt eurosocialism in the form of energy taxes to fund a welfare state.
Not quite. It is a replacement for the discredited semi-religious ideal of socialism, and a justification to extend a transnational regulatory regime beyond the EU and to the entire world. The power to tax is the power to compel. Both "Right Wing" and "Left Wing" elites are similar in their thoughts, passions, and tacit support of this agenda. Its not a conspiracy, just a lot of highly influential people moving in roughly the same direction. There is a reason why Rupert Murdoch (owner of the "conservative" Fox News Channel) was one of the largest contributors to Hillary Clinton. Both wings of elites want transnational social justice, transnational economic regulation, and transnational legal institutions. The two "wings" merely weight the priorities slightly differently. The term is "Transnational Progressivism" or the more contemptuous "tranzi."

Duane
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Mike Holmes
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Post by Mike Holmes »

Glad to know that at my income level that I can be considered an "elite." Oh, wait, must be that ivory tower education... oh, yeah... I don't have a degree... hmmm.....

Let's call people some more names!

Mike

djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

Mike Holmes wrote:Frankly, I don't buy that AGW is proven by any means. But it's the arguments that point out that we don't understand the effects of the various possible inputs that are convincing to me.
Were that the case being made, AGW researchers would have my respect, and even my support. But they are not claiming simply that our knowledge is lacking. They are claiming certainty about their "findings" and demanding immediate, massive changes to human infrastructure, prosperity, and ways of life. If "the science is done," they'd d*mn well better have massively supported evidence for their conclusions. That evidence is lacking; lacking to such a degree that it and their credibility are laughable. Demanding massive changes based on such sloppy, incomplete, and biased work is not simply an insult; given the negative consequences of their demands on how we and our descendants will live, it is an attack. And when someone attacks you, you flatten them into chunky red salsa.

Duane
Last edited by djolds1 on Wed Dec 31, 2008 5:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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djolds1
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Post by djolds1 »

Mike Holmes wrote:Glad to know that at my income level that I can be considered an "elite." Oh, wait, must be that ivory tower education... oh, yeah... I don't have a degree... hmmm.....

Let's call people some more names!
I didn't call you an elite. Tho the educated and knowledgeable who flatter themselves as being among the "smart people" are fellow travelers and tools of those who actually set the agendas. And "educated" is not the same thing as being credentialed by a university. You d*mn well are educated and knowledgeable Mike, or you would not hold your own on this board.

Duane
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MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Even if Mann is shown thoroughly to be corrupt, for instance, that doesn't mean that everybody on his side of the debate is also corrupt.
If they are still using the hockey stick that is de facto evidence that they are corrupt.

If they have been shown to be using bad math and then don't invite mathematicians on their teams they are shown to be de facto corrupt.

If they are shown to have no solar scientists on their teams when solar variations may have a significant effect on their calculations (the 300 year solar cycle for instance) they are de facto corrupt.

If the PDO has been known for 10 years and it is not used to correct the historical record (the how of that can be argued) they are de facto corrupt.

One thing we know from the historical record of the last 120 or so years is that climate scares come in 30 year waves. Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold. Hot. You can follow the popular press on the matter. Is there any effort by the extreme warmists to trumpet this fact? Not in evidence.

Then you have the little matter of: neither the data nor the science is settled. Do the extreme warmists tout this fact? Not in evidence. In fact they project an air of certainty that is unwarranted.

Now you add all this up and you know the pile starts to have an odor.
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MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

djolds1 wrote:
Mike Holmes wrote:Glad to know that at my income level that I can be considered an "elite." Oh, wait, must be that ivory tower education... oh, yeah... I don't have a degree... hmmm.....

Let's call people some more names!
I didn't call you an elite. Tho the educated and knowledgeable who flatter themselves as being among the "smart people" are fellow travelers and tools of those who actually set the agendas. And "educated" is not the same thing as being credentialed by a university. You d*mn well are educated and knowledgeable Mike, or you would not hold your own on this board.

Duane
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Mike Holmes
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Post by Mike Holmes »

The point, Duane, is that "elite" is slung around to mean... well pretty much whatever the slinger needs it to mean. Basically somebody who thinks that they're better than others, and, therefore, will presumably try to enforce their will upon those others.

As opposed to, you know, somebody who might hold a particular position, and try to get people to see it.

Or is your contention that everybody who holds an opinion other than yours must automatically be somehow bereft of the moral fibre required to argue honestly? That'd be pretty... I dunno... elitist?

Murdoch is, in fact, a perfect example of the fact that there's no "they" in this at all (his motives are pretty clearly profit-oriented: if he gets one world government, then he can own American media outlets directly). Just individuals who have their own opinons. Anything else is, yes, a conspiracy theory. We then have to go and label these groups so we have a poster-child enemy to target. Instead of making arguments.


Anyhow, back to facts (if I can at all swerve things that way), MSimon... do they in fact use Mann's hockey stick? Or is it just easy to label any graph with an upturn in it a "hockey stick" (this is, after all, what's being proven), and so discredit it by association with Mann's Folly?

Mann published in, what... 1998? And was "exposed" in 2001? Yes, he came back and "revised" his work, as recently as last year. But lots of work has happened over the past decade outside of Mann, and, yeah, some of them show the same trends his work did using math and data that, as yet, I've not seen directly indicted.

I'm pretty convinced that we've seen some slight warming. Again, my point is... so what? Doesn't prove we've done it, nor that it's having any particular detrimental effects. The temperature, that is. There are other problems that are much more directly attributable to the CO2 levels, as I've mentioned.

Mike

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Mike,

If the extreme warmists were to say: this is what we think but the uncertainty may be as large or larger than the prediction as you do - I'd give credit where due.
Anyhow, back to facts (if I can at all swerve things that way), MSimon... do they in fact use Mann's hockey stick? Or is it just easy to label any graph with an upturn in it a "hockey stick" (this is, after all, what's being proven), and so discredit it by association with Mann's Folly?
Yep. The IPCC used it in their 2007 report.

Any climate history that flattens the past and exaggerates the present is suspect.

BTW the hockey stick has turned down. Surprisingly the last 8 or 10 years of data is left off of a lot of the propaganda "We haven't got around to updating our material. We are on to new studies. And BTW we have misplaced the data our old studies depended on. We forgot to file them and now they are lost. So sorry old chap. You will just have to trust us."
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Mike Holmes
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Post by Mike Holmes »

I'm sorry. A flip "yep" is not convincing. In several ways. Again, are we talking the original Mann work, or his revised... I'm pretty sure it's the latter from what I've read.

Have those revised Mann figures actually been looked at by a statistician the way the originals were? Or are we just going to automatically darn anything he says henceforth?

If, in fact, "flattening" and such are going on, are they actually bad statistical models? Being a statistician by trade, I can tell you that this might, in fact, be important in reaching a reasonable conclusion from the data.

Was there no other data being used besides Mann? Obviously they have used other studies. But, I know, I know... they're all corrupt. Every last one of em. It's a cult!!!

I'm not saying that many of these studies don't, in fact, come from biased people. But the question is whether or not they've let their biases affect their outcome. Maybe, just maybe, some of them are also concerned with their reputations. It's been known for this to happen with scientists.

Lastly, is the IPCC the sole source of wisdom on the subject from the warming side? Or do other scientists agree with them? I mean, "consensus" aside, is it only the IPCC that's saying that warming is happening? Or are there not, in fact, many universities and other organizations, and scientists all over producing studies that corroborate their evidence?

There are. If there's some "conspiracy" to create this global warming furor, it's quite insidiously pervasive. Far more pervasive, I'm afraid, than my tiny brain can find credible. So many scientists willing to chuck their credibility in the name of following Al Gore. Most impressive.

Again, I'm not 100% convinced, because it's complex as that link about the Swedish Ice Age indicates. But, as a layman, I'm not about to distrust a huge number of scientists based on the fact that one of them screwed up ten years ago. Sorry.

Mike

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