Man Based Global Warming....

True the long term temperature trend is upward, but this was true before anthropogenic CO2 became significant (i.e., prior to 1940). So is the trend from the mid '80s onward CO2 driven, or simply a resumption / return of whatever caused earlier warming?

In any case, I agree that a temperature dip for a few years does not disprove AGW. However, one really has to reconsider the impact of CO2 when a 50 year span produces no net warming.

But the real climate "litmus test" is probably better assessed using ocean heat content. There is a nice discussion here, on Pielke's website:

"...Ocean heat touches on the very core of the AGW hypothesis: When all is said and done, if the climate system is not accumulating heat, the hypothesis is invalid.

Writing in 2005, Hansen, Willis, Schmidt et al. suggested that GISS model projections had been verified by a solid decade of increasing ocean heat (1993 to 2003). This was regarded as further confirmation the IPCC’s AGW hypothesis. Their expectation was that the earth’s climate system would continue accumulating heat more or less monotonically. Now that heat accumulation has stopped (and perhaps even reversed), the tables have turned. The same criteria used to support their hypothesis, is now being used to falsify it.

It is evident that the AGW hypothesis, as it now stands, is either false or fundamentally inadequate. One may argue that projections for global warming are measured in decades rather than months or years, so not enough time has elapsed to falsify this hypothesis. This would be true if it were not for the enormous deficit of heat we have observed. In other words, no matter how much time has elapsed, if a projection misses its target by such a large magnitude (6x to 8x), we can safely assume that it is either false or seriously flawed."

As Pielke notes here:

"Thus, according to the GISS model predictions, there should be approximately 5.88 * 10**22 Joules more heat in the upper 700 meters of the global ocean at the end of 2008 than were present at the beginning of 2003.

For the observations to come into agreement with the GISS model prediction by the end of 2012, for example, there would have to be an accumulation 9.8 * 10** 22 Joules of heat over just the next four years. This requires a heating rate over the next 4 years into the upper 700 meters of the ocean of 2.45 * 10**22 Joules per year, which corresponds to a radiative imbalance of ~1.50 Watts per square meter.
This rate of heating would have to be about 2 1/2 times higher than the 0.60 Watts per meter squared that Jim Hansen reported for the period 1993 to 2003."

 

Dude, self-selection just might bias towards people who like to express themselves which could be in either camp.

More importantly, there is no way you need to poll more than 50 percent of a population to get an accurate result. Give us a break.

 

Alright, you got me. I don't have a clue if you are technically right or wrong on this or that cherry picked measurement about climate. Unlike you, I never claimed to be a armchair climatologist.

My personal gauge is the real expert consensus, and for me that's the IPCC. But because the IPCC reports are somewhat dated and conservative, I have no problem supplementing them with news from major outlets like the CBC - which report on recently published studies from journals like Science and Nature.

So why do I say you are a liar?

Because, within every AGW thread that you have participated in, you've repeatedly demonstrated disdain for the big-picture conclusions of the climatologist community.

You discount clear evidence that GW is happening now and you try to spread doubt about the seriousness of the damage it will cause in the future.

That is total dishonesty at the core - completely shameful and irresponsible.

This is not a simple intellectual debate with no serious consequences for the future. This is not just an academic exercise for your entertainment.

100s of millions of real people are going to suffer needlessly unless we take bold steps and yet you think it's more important to win this little game of distract and deny.

Grow a conscience and stop trying to manipulate selective bits of data to suite your big picture agenda of dishonesty and irresponsibility.

 

Regarding your first point - of course self selection could work either way. The point is, the researcher does not know which way it is going to go or to what degree. That is why they use random sampling.

On your second point, I suppose I am lying about n=516, right? Of course, I just pulled the # out of my a$$, right? You need 516 to represent a sample of 1,000 at 95% confidence with a margin of error of +/- 3%. This does not mean you need to sample 516,000 to represent a population of 1 million. It doesn't work that way Fibber. See the sample size calculator here if you don't believe me.

 

Fibber - you are certainly right on point one above.

On point two, should science simply ignore the fact that the climate system - in contradiction to AGW models - is no longer accumulating heat? As the ocean heat content calculations demonstrate, "It is evident that the AGW hypothesis, as it now stands, is either false or fundamentally inadequate."

Don't you think it is important for science to understand this, even if it doesn't fit neatly into the AGW narrative?

 

http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohioshort.pdf

This is 45 pages long. (1 mb in this format) It is an explication of the history of what happened when someone completely outside climate science decided to look at the famous Mann et. al. 'hockey stick' used to jump start the whole global warming 'debate'.

The scientists (who claim to have superior knowledge in their area of expertise) come off looking rather petty, vindictive, uncooperative, well, generally unscientific.

It is no accident that the statistician with that initial curiosity authors one of the best science blogs on the internet ( climateaudit.org )and quite regularly embarrasses the so-called experts at realclimate.org.

If you are not frightened of a truthful look at what transpired(s), have a gander.

 

Here is the short version from MIT Technology Review.

 

Nice calculator. Makes sense that you would need a bigger % to be accurate at smaller pop levels.

It also shows that to accurately sample a population of 10,200 you need only 966 respondents. Well since the authors got 3146 respondents, they did pretty well then. A good poll.

 

Well it's just a matter of a few days before we see the IPCC climatologists on mass say that they were wrong. Thank goodness. I hope you get a nobel prize for your work on pointing out where they missed all this data.

 

Well, again it depends. If you want a random sample, an opt in poll is really not going to give it to you. Also, even if it was a random sample, you just have to be clear about what that sample represents. In this instance, I believe it was submitted to members of a scientific society. So the poll is not really representative of climatologists at large, but rather members of the scientific society.

In any case, as I mentioned previously and as you well know, the veracity of AGW will not be determined by a poll. But I don't doubt that a majority of climate scientists believe CO2 will have an effect on climate (as do I). The heart of the matter to me is will that effect be minimal or catastrophic. Based on the evidence, I judge it will be the former. But am open to evidence, beyond inadequate models, that would demonstrate it is the latter.

 

It will be interesting to see what the Nobel committee does when they come to the realization that catastrophic AGW is not happening.

In any case, what is happening "in a matter of a few days"? Wasn't sure what you were referring to.

 

Well, the MIT article is from 2004 and the longer version continues to present problems with the effort to suggest the present day warming as something unusual, never before encountered. It shows how temperature proxies seem to have been cherry-picked by Mann and his associates to make it appear that present day temperatures exceed the Medieval Warm Period.

Having proved the mathematical mistakes was really just the beginning.

Don't sell the longer document short.

If recent temperatures don't rise to the level of the MWP, then AGW claims are greatly diminished.

All this, of course, means nothing (and everything) to scientists who have invested their credibility into the theory. They can't easily admit they are wrong. No one likes to do that. It would be F8L.

 

True, true.

I actually like this, from Climate Audit. It a flash version of all the proxies Mann used to show the current century is the warmest in recent history. Note any problems??? LOL.



PS - I should note, the most compelling proxies here - the Finnish lakes - were noted as contaminated by the scientist that derived them.

 

TomBikes --
Playing smartass with Fibb222 isn't going to gain you any brownie points, since he has simply defaulted to IPCC (not a bad position to be in).

Why don't you head over to realclimate.org and see if your arguments sway real climate scientists ? I've lurked there for a couple of years, and know that they are inclined to give informative answers to sincere and informed public.

 

Bolding mine...

I think you answered your own question based on what I've seen of the "discussion" from the denialists.

 

If it's so obvious that AGW is not happening, and this has been evident for a while, then a recant should be imminent. No?

 

SageBrush - Fibber called me a "liar" and a "bi-otch". So who is the "smart nice person"? He couldn't refute a single point I made, even though I included references from NOAA, Cryosphere Today, and other sources that are much less biased than the AGW alarmists who run realclimate.

Why don't you - sagebrush - use some of your realclimate expertise to enlighten us as to why GISS ocean heat content calculations are so far off from the actual data?



Or why NASA data shows no "global warming" for 50 years from the early 1930s to the mid 1980s despite copious increases in CO2?



Or why antarctic ice extent is near an all time high and arctic ice extent is near normal despite what the media constantly tells us is "an accelerating pace of global warming"?





Or why lower troposphere temperatures have been flat to declining for most of this decade? And while you're at it, why were they also nearly flat from 1980 to the mid '90s and why was there a sudden step change in tropo-temperatures following the 1998 El Nino event, with no trending increase since?




None of this seems very consistent with anthropogenic global warming to me, smartass.

 

Well, we all know the answer to that. There will be no recant. That is why the terms are changing from "global warming" to "climate change" and "climate disruption". Those terms leave lots of wiggle room - now don't they?

 

Shawn - instead of resorting to name calling, why don't you post a sincere response to my questions for sagebrush, above? You are ostensibly a man of engineering and science. Certainly you can come up with a sincere response that will further the discussion.

The responses from the likes of you, Fibber and now sagebrush are so predictable. "Denialist", "liar", "bi-otch", "smartass", all the while not advancing a single point to refute the data or answer the questions I have asked. Boy, that is sincere.

 

TimBikes -- I don't answer your questions because I am not an expert in climate change. Instead, I refer to people who *actually are* PhD scientists actively publishing in this field, and you run away from the idea because they may not share your opinions.

You see, therein lies the rub: you want to argue pseudo-science with laymen, or scientists who a priori agree with you. Unfortunately for you, the latter are a rapidly vanishing group, now pretty easily counted on one hand.

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I am not qualified to argue climate change, but I will point out one general observation I think is reasonable, a product of my limited training in chemistry and biology: temperature in the earth system is an amalgam of processes that act as a complex buffer system. By analogy I think of acid/base in the human. While it is useful to measure mean ocean temperatures and mean air temperatures, it is best not to forget that the real measure of change is the total buffering capacity. In the case of recent earth climate change, ice melt is an obvious buffer input that will modulate ocean warming, and can hardly be used as an argument that AGW is disproven.