OT: Hot, Flat and Crowded

I'm dumb because of faulty data? Or because you claim I don't understand the data?

So how accurate is the temperature record?

And how meaningful is a single global temperature figure?

"Jim Thompson" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

By which he means that I don't share his ill-informed view of the world and have the gall to correct his more obvious errors; he might more constrictively mitigate his indigestion by learning a bit more about the world outside electronics, but that would be painful - finding out that you've been making idiotic observations for years because you don't know any better doesn't do anything good for your self-respect.

"John Larkin" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

It would be, if that were what I was doing. John's perceptions are somewhat warped by his own-self-image as somebody who knows what he is talking about, which he has from time to time sabotaged by posting egregious nonsense. He resented my corrections at the time, and still resents them, and comforts himself with the delusion that I'm doing it because I have some relentless need to prove myself smarter than everybody else.

Happily, I don't feel any such necessity - which is just as well because Don Klipstein does a much better job of correcting the global warming denialists than I could ever do.

You are dumb becuse you latched onto an isolated piece of information which you picked up on a denialist web-site and presented it as if it meant something. If you'd spent a little time with Google, you could have picked up the information that I did - that showed that the graph you presented was invalid and had been corrected.

If you'd spent a little more time, you might have worked out that the sunspot story was one of a number of wacky hypotheses that have surfaced in the scientific literature, been subjected to the usual give and take of scientific debate and eventually discarded.

It's survival on denialist web-sites reflects one of the standard techniques used by people interested in discrediting a scientific case when they can't actually discredit the science - they dig out old controversies and revive the the original proposition while ignoring the consequent debate (and in this case the correction) in an all-too- successful tactic of making the real scientific case look weaker than it is to people who lack the background information to see what is going on.

Creationists use the same trick when trying to discredit evolution. It has been around long enough that anybody who still falls for it has to be seen as somewhat stupid.

Accurate enough. And these days NASA has got a bunch of satellites backing up the surface stations, which do survery the entire planet.

Not all that meaningful - as your web-site points out, it's always changes in temperature at specific places that we end up worrying about.

On the other hand, the source of the problem is the accumulation of green-house gases in the atmosphere, which is remarkably homogenous around the world, and the problems that this is creating - and will continue to creat for the next few hundred years - affect temperatures all over the world, so the rise in the global average temperature is a useful proxy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I wonder if he's ever noticed that few respond to his garbage anymore.

We still seem to have a few remanent feed-the-troll types :-(

...Jim Thompson

If it exists, then the cheapest, quickest and best method of fixing it is geo-engineering. Any one of a number of schemes, or combination thereof eg iron seeding, cloud generation etc. Costs likely to be

Where in that page is support for the temperature shown in the graph you provided a link to?

We have HadCRUT-3 and HadCRUT-3v, appropriately weighting oceans, which are greatly lacking urban heat islands. HadCRUT-3v is good enough for The Register in one of their criticisms of NASA's GISS (The "A Tale of Two Thermometers article).

Then there are the UAH and the MSU/RSS interpretations of "brightness temperature" as a function of frequency throughout a major atmospheric shorter-microwave band, to determine temperature of various layers of the atmosphere, including the lower troposphere - but only since good satellite coverage of this started in 1979. During their existence, they correlated fairly well with HadCRUT-3 and HadCRUT-3v. Determining the temperature of the lower troposphere as a whole avoids problems specific to weather station locations, such as urban effects. Those are also good enough for The Register, which tends to argue against existence of AGW.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Trolls are fun to play with. Slowman is an old dried up hag, though.

Does CO2 lead or lag temperature rise?

No direct link. I am questioning the temperature record.

Thanks. I will google. I appreciate the constructive response.

For Bill: Health warning. This link is from a "denialist" website.

Bill seems to think I'm a denialist. I'm an engineer and expect any theory to be backed by proper measurements. I also expect any theory to make predictions that can be validated. The onus is on the supporters of a theory to make their case.

Unfortunately climate has become political and religious for too many people.

/quote

One Australian columnist has proposed outlawing ?climate change denial?. ?David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial?, she wrote. ?Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all.? (1) Others have suggested that climate change deniers should be put on trial in the future, Nuremberg-style, and made to account for their attempts to cover up the ?global warming?Holocaust? (2).

The source for the wikipedia graph you keep posting seems to be here:

Note a lot of the source data comes from the measurement sites investigated in my link:

So how accurate is the temperature record you like to quote?

It's pretty dumb to quote data based on appalling measurements. If an engineer of mine did measurements like that he would be out of a job.

In the ice core data, which records the climate's response to the (small) thermal forcing from the Milankovitch orbital changes, the CO2 lags (and amplifies) the intial forcing.

Our current situation is that we are injecting CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, which immediately raises the global temperature by increasing the greenhouse effect.

At the moment something like half the CO2 we are injecting into the atmosphere is being absorbed by the oceans; as the oceans warm up - and they seem to have time constant of 800 years - this absorbtion will stop and reverse, so we aren't getting the ful benefit of the CO2 that we are currently injecting into the atmosphere.

Note that fossil carbon contains less of the short-lived (5568 years) isotope C-14 than atmospheric CO2 (and the CO2 dissolved in the oceans) used to so our activities are registered in the declining C-14 content of atmopsheric CO2 (the Suess effect).

Sadly, you are probably wrong. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM machines".

I'd expect that the data from the suspect measurement sites would be processed before it went into the record. The concept of cities as "urban heat islands" has been around for a while now - since 1820 in fact.

So CO2 lags temperature rise.

The little ice age hit minimum around 1650 (wikipedia). CO2 started rising soon after. Global temperature has been rising since then as has CO2.

So of the 100ppm CO2 rise at least some is natural.

"Raveninghorde" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

It presents six years worth of data. The CO2 concentration record shows a steady progression over this period, but the temperature measurments are hopelessly noisy. By snipping the right six years out of the climate record you can produce any trend that you like, and all it proves is that you don't know how to extract useful information from noisy data.

No, I think you've shown yourself to be a sucker for denialist web-sites.

When you don't know enough about the subject to reject improper conclusions based on short exerpts from noisy data?

It is rather difficult to validate long term predictions about long term trends for a noisy system. Try to think through your demands before spelling them out in public.

Which they have done. The IPCC reports the concensus of the research published in peer-reviewed journals.

British science journalists don't know much about science, and do seem to be suckers for the kind of obfustication that Exxon-Mobil used to fund.

Some of the anti-global-warming propaganda presents outright lies, and a lot more of it lies by omission, which is to say it is fraudulent.

Fraud is a crime, but fraudsters have to take money directly from their victims in order to run any real risk of prosecution. The millions that Exxon-Mobil and the coal companies will make because they've managed to slow effective measures for reducing CO2 emissions for a few years comes directly out of our pockets, but we can't easily sue them for their criminal activity.

I'm less enthusiastic about geo-engineering. The general rule is that if you have got yourself into a hole it is a good idea to stop digging.

Getting the bulk of our enenrgy by burning fossil carbon isn't a sustainable strategy - there's only a finite amount of fossil carbon in the ground, and the cost of extracting it is going to keep on rising as we work our way through the more accessible deposits.

In the long term we've got to go over to sustainable energy sources - basically solar power from hydro-elecric plants, windmills and and more directly solar-powered electricity generation schemes - and it makes sense to put our energy into getting with that rather starting up another large scale experiment on the planet's climate.

From:

/quote

adjustments have been made to account for measurable and predictable data biases, such as Time of Observation and station moves, but the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Flight (GISS) who are the main collectors, analyzers, and modelers of climatic data have not done a site by site hands on photographic survey to account for microsite influences near the thermometer. To date all such studies conducted have been data analysis and data manipulations used to spot and/or minimize data inconsistencies.

/end quote

The raw data errors will all be high and probably increasing. So the temperature curves depend on GISS fudge factors. The phrase garbage in garbage out springs to mind.

The errors are not a random distribution and looking at the site survey results will probably exceed the value of the temperature annomaly.

By the time we ramp down fossil use, in 20-30 years time, it will probably be too late to avert major climate change unless we go the geo-engineering route. Stopping carbon emissions *now* just won't happen.