Monday November 2, 2009, 10:58 am
In your own words:

"The authors don’t claim to have answered everything, and like all good scientists, they point out that they haven’t proven causation, only shown very high correlation. Attribution studies to determine whether CO2 was a cause, an effect, or both will require more research."

And what they left out was the period when CO2 was 4000ppm during an ice age

.http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif

"There has historically been much more CO2 in our atmosphere than exists today. For example, during the Jurassic Period (200 mya), average CO2 concentrations were about 1800 ppm or about 4.7 times higher than today. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Cambrian Period, nearly 7000 ppm -- about 18 times higher than today.

The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming."

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html

Monday November 2, 2009, 11:25 am
The study's authors didn't "leave it out" - they didn't have data that goes back that far. The Ordovician period was nearly a half a billion years ago - this study ends at 20 million years because that's where their oceanic microfossil record ended.

Something that's interesting, though, is that the entire Ordovician wasn't an ice age, only the late part of it. The early Ordovician was warm until, scientists think, the Appalachian Mountains rose due to plate tectonics. The exposed rock would have pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere as the mountains rapidly weathered. (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061025185539.htm)

The problem here is that scientists don't have high enough resolution data to determine what happened first - the drop in CO2 from ~7000 ppm to 4400 ppm, or the ice age. Remember, we have data on ice age vs. CO2 in ice cores that show a roughly 800 year difference between the two - 800 years out of 800,000 is 0.1%. 800 years out of half a billion years is about 0.0002%. The measurement accuracy would have to be 625x better, and the existing data just isn't good enough to say what really happened.

What that really means is that anyone who's trying to use the late Ordovician ice age as an example of why modern climate isn't correlated to CO2 is badly misunderstanding or intentionally misrepresenting the available data.

Finally, just to cut you off before you get started on the "CO2 follows the end of the ice age in the ice core data" thing, remember that it takes between five and six thousand years to end an ice age. It takes CO2 800 years to rise after a deglaciation starts - which means that the CO2 is in the air, heating up the global temperature, for between 4200 and 5200 years. So the time delay in the ice core record actually supports that CO2 has a role in ending ice ages. (see: http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/#m21)

Monday November 2, 2009, 11:34 am
I do find it interesting that you pounced on this within 10 minutes of my posting it. It's nice to know that you're so worried about my writing that you feel the need to try and destroy it so quickly.

Monday November 2, 2009, 11:54 am
I look at all the newly submitted "environment" stuff every morning, and comment if appropriate....nothing special about you Brian.

Aw, come on. When there has been no real correlation between CO2 and temperature over the eons, the fact that they found a period when there seems to be one…means nothing.

Get yourself a copy of:
August 2009 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Yang-Sang Choi
or read it at
New paper from Lindzen demonstrates low climate sensitivity with observational data
23 07 2009

“…ERBE data appear to demonstrate a climate sensitivity of about 0.5°C which is easily distinguished from sensitivities given by models.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/23/new-paper-from-lindzen/#more-9519
Extracted from the Abstract.
The observed behavior of radiation fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem in climate prediction.”

Monday November 2, 2009, 2:39 pm
Due to the sheer number of links in my latest response to Judy, I'm not going to reproduce it here at Care2. I recommend that everyone go to the original article linked above. You'll find that Lindzen and Choi have some potential mathematical errors in this paper, that there's questions about the data L&C used, and that one paper based on satellite data doesn't negate many, many (of which I list only 3) papers based on paleoclimate data that show that the climate sensitivity is at least 1.5 in order for the past to have happened as we understand it did.

Monday November 2, 2009, 3:32 pm
Oh, Brian...your hubris knows no bounds. have you submitted your critique to a science journal?They looked in the tropics because that is where the warming from CO2 is supposed to happen.

David Evans points out that the "greenhouse signature" that would indicate CO2 emissions are driving temperature increases - "a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics" - which would be evident if climate change was man-made, is simply non-existent.

"If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming,"
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-7583,00.html

Comparing Chyleks work with ice core proxies to Lindzen and Choi's workas you did at your site, is apples and oranges. Besides, it is still water vapor that has the has the biggest effect with estimates ranging from 70% up to 95%

The CO2 hypothesis is dead. Unless you are a zombie master, for heaven sake bury it.

Monday November 2, 2009, 5:18 pm
"And what they left out was the period when CO2 was 4000ppm during an ice age"

That's only 4% of the atmosphere, actually. It appears the CO2 amounts have been dropping throughout geological history. Both Venus and Mars have atmospheres of mostly CO2, and thus we may infer that the early Earth also had such an atmosphere. So what happened to lower the CO2 levels?

Answer: the evolution of photosynthetic organisms, including cyanobacteria, algae, and finally land plants. The vast coal deposits we currently dig up and burn were made out of dead plants that were buried, keeping CO2 from returning to the atmosphere due to the plants being eaten by animals or decaying. A lot of CO2 was absorbed by the early oceans as well, by the way.

"According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming."

In most cases, the temperatures WERE warmer than today, according to the fossil record. And the other factor influencing global climate was......the SUN.

When the Sun was first formed about 4.6 billion years ago, its core was mostly hydrogen, the lightest element. As the Sun aged, the hydrogen fused into helium, an element at least four times denser. So the Sun's core has been getting denser and therefore hotter. Indeed, astronomers now estimate that in only two or three billion years, the Sun will grow so hot that life on Earth will become impossible to sustain itself, even though the Sun will not actually die until about five billion years from now.

"David Evans points out that the "greenhouse signature" that would indicate CO2 emissions are driving temperature increases - "a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics" - which would be evident if climate change was man-made, is simply non-existent."

What mindless crap! CO2 molecules are actually heavier than the nitrogen and oxygen molecules that make up most of Earth's atmosphere, so they should be lower in the atmosphere, not higher. Therefore, we should expect the upper atmosphere all over Earth to be cooler due to the trapping of heat closer to Earth's surface by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Also, heat flows naturally from warmer to cooler regions, so the most warming should be near the poles, not the tropics! David Evans is a liar!

"The CO2 hypothesis is dead. Unless you are a zombie master, for heaven sake bury it."

Ever watch that Michael Jackson Thriller video, Judy?

Monday November 2, 2009, 6:34 pm
Good response, Dale. You made valid arguments right up until your next to the last response. There you failed to consider the mixers in the atmosphere; the jet streams, wind caused by pressure gradient differences and storm generated winds that continuously keep the various gases mixed. We can be thankful that the wind does keep things stirred up otherwise there wouldn't be any oxygen for us to breath at the surface.

Monday November 2, 2009, 7:37 pm
“They looked in the tropics because that is where the warming from CO2 is supposed to happen.”

Lindzen and Choi looked at the tropics because that’s what the ERBE nonscanner data that they used actually measures. It didn’t measure as effectively outside of the tropics. You’d know that it if you actually looked up the ERBE data or read the paper you quoted out of context.

As for your apple and oranges comment, I’d love to understand your reasoning, since from where I sit, you have none. Climate sensitivity is estimated from multiple different sources, using multiple different methods, to be over 1.5 C, and most likely about 4 C. One single outlier study by Lindzen, especially when there’s a great deal of question about whether Lindzen’s methods are mathematically predetermined to produce an artificially low sensitivity, doesn’t negate all those other studies.

By the way, nice try to segue from a topic you were about to lose badly on to one you think you can win. Too bad Evans’ arguments are a loser too.

I’ve debunked Evans already (http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/08/13/the-weekly-carboholic-david-evans-climate-facts-hardly-factual/) and don’t feel inclined to do it again here, but I have a couple of new points that I came across a while back. While there’s no physical mechanism to boost the sun’s output by 1%, climate models show that the troposphere “hot spot” of a major jump in solar output would be nearly identical to a “hot spot” from greenhouse gases. The difference is what would happen to the stratosphere. From an increase in solar output, the stratosphere would heat up too, whereas the stratosphere cools due to greenhouse gases trapping heat in the troposphere. Note that these simulations are based on one of the simplest physical laws – hot air is less dense, so it rises until it can’t rise any more or it reaches equilibrium with the rest of the air.

And what’s happening to the stratosphere? It’s cooling at the same time that the troposphere is heating. In many respects, it’s that cooling that is the “tropical fingerprint,” not the heating.

Furthermore, there are what’s called “attribution studies” that have, based on a number of factors well beyond the troposphere “hot spot,” strongly suggested that CO2 is the bulk of the problem. The IPCC AR4 WG1 paper attributed climate to human factors to a likelihood of 95% using paleoclimate data, satellite data, volcanic eruptions, surface measurements, and more. In fact, the IPCC used 14 different papers that used five different methods. When there’s that much data, and that many different techniques that all agree with each other, the burden of proof is on the people like Lindzen who claim that all that data and every one of those techniques is fatally flawed.

Tuesday November 3, 2009, 12:30 am
"Claims of the existence of a scientific consensus as reflected in IPCC reports fail to recognise that the IPCC itself undertakes no scientific research. Its key public document ('Summary for Policy Makers') has been drafted by government appointed officials often drawn from environmental departments or agencies. While these officials draw on submissions by scientists, they are able to select analyses with which they are sympathetic. There is thus a sense in which the claimed consensus simply reflects the views of those sympathetic to the belief in dangerous threats of rising temperatures. Moreover, consensus claims are much more difficult to sustain than they were a couple of years ago as more and more qualified scientists publicly reject or question the thesis in IPCC reports. " Former Deputy-Secretary of the Australian Treasury, Des Moore, writing in Quadrant . "
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=513&Itemid=32

Dr Vincent Gray, expert reviewer of IPCC Assessment Reports since their inception, has up-dated his extensive paper "The Global Warming Scam", (to August 2009), in which he shows that none of the evidence presented by IPCC confirms a relationship between emissions of greenhouse gases and any harmful effect on the climate.

http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=369&Itemid=32

No, the burden of proof is on those who proposed the CO2 hypothesis. that is the way science works....and they are unable to prove that CO2 changrs climate, because others have shown why that is impossible.

The only thing it has was the Hockey Stick graph which scared the bejaysus out us us all...until it was found to be a fraud based on cherry picked data (Yamal/Briffa) and a technique which made hockey sticks no matter what data was fed into it.

It's dead and still you feed zombie science.

Tuesday November 3, 2009, 10:17 am
"There is thus a sense in which the claimed consensus simply reflects the views of those sympathetic to the belief in dangerous threats of rising temperatures."

Nope, politics doesn't work that way. The SPM is a 100% consensus document - every word had to be agreed to by every participant nation in the IPCC. That means that countries with a vested interest in making the SPM as weak as possible because it might lead to interference with their fossil fuel economies (China, India, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Russia) watered it down as much as they could. The same thing happens in the U.S. Senate as a result of the fillibuster - every piece of legislation is watered down to meet the objections of a small cadre of so-called moderates, and as a result the legislation is always more conservative than it could have been.

At one time, the burden of proof was on the scientists who held that increasing CO2 would change the climate. That was back in the 1970s or 1980s. There have been literally hundreds of papers since then that all affirmed that CO2 is a greenhouse gas (denying that would require you to deny some serious physics, specifically optical absorption properties of materials) and that CO2 is the dominant factor driving the Earth's climate.

Somehow I don't think that I'm the zombie here, Judy. Not when you repeat the same disproved arguments using the same debunked data from the same discredited sources over and over and over. Try reading the actual papers and doing some of your own math sometime.

Or better yet, read the new book "Climate Cover-Up." I'd say that it'll all be new to you, but I'm convinced that the denial industry that the book exposes pays at least some of your bills. After all, when I searched on the title of the Lindzen/Choi paper, I found that you'd pimped it widely at many different sites earlier in October.

Tuesday November 3, 2009, 10:55 am
Brian, you are desperately pretending that the temperatures going down while CO2 continues to go up means nothing.

"Temperatures were predicted to increase but are declining (Figure 1). Even their lowest scenario says the world should be at least 0.3¬∞C warmer. Doesn’t sound like much but it equals half the warming they claim occurred in the preceding 130 years.

image
Figure 1: Global average temperature 2002 to 2009 and IPCC scenarios.

As physicist David Douglass said, “If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing.”
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/16460

When reality and climate models are so different, it must be hard to deal with. I can imagine your anguish as the scam you support falls apart.

Luckily for humanity, Mother Nature seems to be a skeptic.

Tuesday November 3, 2009, 12:08 pm
First, I generated these images today in response to your claim that temperatures are going down: http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/surftrend98-09.jpg, http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/LTtrend98-09.jpg

Note that I cherry-picked my starting point _in your favor_, and still the temp is going up.

Second, you’re assuming that anything Tim Ball writes is credible, when in fact he has a well documented history of lying. First, before leaving academia, he wrote precisely 4 peer-reviewed papers, none of which had anything to do with climate. He’s written no peer-reviewed papers on climate since. Second, he has alternately claimed to have 28 years and 32 years teaching climatology – he taught for 8. Ball also claimed at one time to be the first Canadian PhD in climatology, when he was actually something like 10th or 20th. Finally, Ball used his contacts at the University of Winnipeg to launder fossil fuel money that he then used to promote climate FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt. In other words, Dr. Ball has a history of lying about himself in order to make himself sound more impressive than he actually is and using his political and university connections to hide his fossil fuel backers (source: “Climate Cover-Up”)

Now, on to the SPPI/Douglass image from the Canada Free Press link (http://www.canadafreepress.com/images/uploads/ball110209-1.jpg). There are so many problems with this image it’s hard to know where to begin. How about with my prior debunking of a nearly identical image (http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/07/01/the-weekly-carboholic-cassava-yield-toxicity/comment-page-1/#comment-67242) that you tried and failed to use effectively? Here’s what I wrote there:

(quote on) 1. That’s weather, not climate. Come back to me when you’ve got a 15 year cooling trend. Oh, that’s right, there isn’t one.
2. Temperature is expected to rise exponentially, not linearly, and slow points are to be expected. Entire papers have been devoted to explaining this. You should read a few (here’s a good starting point: http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/05/19/the-weekly-carboholic-climate-disruption-lowering-juneau-sea-level/#cool)
3. Lest you think 1 and 2 were too dismissive, there’s something called endpoint sensitivity. January 2002 was the third hottest monthly measurement in that period, following January 2007 and March 2002. All of 1999, 2000, and 2001 were colder than that. So the starting point, being the start of an El Nino, was unusually hot while 2008 and up through April 2009 was unusually cold due to La Nina effects. So the careful choice of the endpoints produced a short-term cooling trend in long-term data that shows nothing of the sort. Weather vs. climate again.
4. The error of that trend is nearly double the trend itself because there are so many trend outliers and the number of independent samples is so low (again, because this is essentially weather instead of climate).

In other words, the supposedly massive cooling trend you, Monckton (since one of his presentations is where I first saw this terrible graph), and D’Aleo are trumpeting here is statistical bullshit. (quote off)

Add to that list the following:

1. There’s no way to verify the data since the graph doesn’t say if it’s surface station data from CRUT, GISS, or NCDC, or if it’s satellite data from RSS, UAH, or UMd (or if it’s the lower troposphere or middle troposphere channels from the satellite data). It looks like the CRUT data, which is convenient since that data shows the greatest drop from January 2002 to the present, but if you look closely at the data in the graph above and the CRUT data in the image below.
2. For those of you who care about the math behind the image below, the trends and autocorrelation adjusted standard error are as follows:
* GISS Trend: -0.002 C/decade. Samples (N): 90. AR-1 equivalent samples (Neq): 42.5. Std Error: 0.14 C. AR-1 adjusted 1 sigma error: 0.94 C. Adjusted 2 sigma error (95% confidence interval): 1.87 C. Rsq: 0.001.
* CRUT Trend: -0.15 C/decade. Samples (N): 90. AR-1 equivalent samples (Neq): 24.8. Std Error: 0.08 C. AR-1 adjusted 1 sigma error: 0.42 C. Adjusted 2 sigma error (95% confidence interval): 0.84 C. Rsq: 0.132.
* NCDC Trend: -0.09 C/decade. Samples (N): 90. AR-1 equivalent samples (Neq): 41.5. Std Error: 0.09 C. AR-1 adjusted 1 sigma error: 0.61 C. Adjusted 2 sigma error (95% confidence interval): 1.22 C. Rsq: 0.041.

In other words, the error is WAY greater than the trend. To a simple first pass, the data is so noisy that the CRUT trend would take 57 years of similar data to reach the 95% confidence level, 129 years for the NCDC data to reach the 95% confidence level, and over 10,000 years for the
3. Notice that you can see the endpoint problem from the CFP image to the data I ran for the image below. The SPPI image that Tim Ball used claims a negative trend of -1.9 C/decade from January 2002 to the end of March, 2009. But now it’s October, the same starting point and an endpoint 6 months later produce a trend of -0.15 C/decade, over 10x smaller. Thus the problem with (and ease of manipulation of) short, noisy datasets.

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/surftrend02-09.jpg

And finally, it's not the scientists but rather the paid deniers who are manipulating data. Ball did it in the CFP link you shared. Too bad that independent statistical experts disagree with you, Ball, Douglass, D'Aleo, etc.

(start quote) In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina....

The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA's year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of "people coming at the data with preconceived notions," said Peterson, author of the book "Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision Analysis." (quote off)

One key sentence here I'll pull out to make sure you didn't miss it: "The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880."

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/ap-impact-statisticians-reject-174088.html

Wednesday November 4, 2009, 10:39 pm
We thought the debate is over global warming.

Apparently, not.

Last week, a poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press showed that there has been an erosion of the percentage of American’s who think that the earth is heating up.

And now, the AP’s Seth Borenstein is out there trying to find out whether or not the earth is cooling!

How things have changed during the past 10 years.

Borenestein had been hearing so much recently about the possibility that the earth has been cooling that he decided to go out and find some statisticians that could analyze the earth’s temperature history and give him some insight as to what has been going on:

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

Hmm. Why go to all the bother? This analysis has already been done numerous times. A recent example that clearly lays out the ups and downs of current temperature trends was posted about two weeks ago at the blog MasterResources.org. The figure below is taken from that post. It shows the current temperature trends from 5 to 15 years in length from all available global temperature datasets.Figure 1. Each point on the chart represents the trend beginning in September of the year indicated along the x-axis and ending in August 2009. The different colored lines represent different temperature datasets as indicated. The trends which are statistically significant (

Thursday November 5, 2009, 7:57 am
The cut/paste isn't any good if you don't provide a link, Judy, and I'll admit that you have me curious this time.