OT: Hot, Flat and Crowded

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I think you are getting excited about a fairly trivial problem. There are climatologists out there who would like nothing better than to write a really impressive paper that would debunk global warming. The fact that they haven't got around to doing it does suggest that there's not enough uncorrected data in the system to blow up into a head-line grabbing paper in Nature or Science or the Proceedings of the American Academy of Science.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Not a lot of it. Check out the carbon-14 isotope ratio of today's atmospheric CO2.

Try to read all the way through the site below. You could learn a lot.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And thereby calling into question (or agreeing with me to call into question) the graph that you originally provided including a temperature record that I found questionable.

That covers a mere 6-7 years, with the most recent noted year in that short stretch including the 2007-2008 La Nina, greatest one in 20 years, notably a transient cooling event.

That graph there shows 3 curves:

1. Mauna Loa Observatory "seasonally adjusted" CO2
2. UAH temperature-lower-troposphere interpretation of satellite data

(There is another one "more-warmingist" than UAH but good enough for "The Register" in their "A Tale of Two Thermometers"article, by RSS/MSU.

That one is the RSS/MSU "lower troposphere",

first of the 4 "line graphs" in the middle of the 13 graphics in:

1. HadCRUT-3v-global

As for versions covering more time than starting with 2002:

HadCRUT-3v-global, link obtained from The Register's "A Tale of Two Thermometers" article:

UAH global-as-determinable lower troposphere temperature, in text file form, 1st column being year, 2nd column being month, and 3rd column being as-globally-as-determinable deviation from "whatever-was-norm":

Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 PPMV in Microsoft's "Excel" format:

monthly_mlf.csv

Meanwhile, you like to concentrate on a roughly 7 year record ending with the "Great La Nina of 2007-2008", along the lines of others concentrating on a 10-11 year record ending with the same greatest La Nina in 20 years and beginning with the greatest El Nino on record.

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

So your argument appears to be that as no one has published the research and published a report on the accuracy of the raw data then it must be a trivial problem. And you are happy to ignore the fact that someone is doing the research and showing the data is unreliable? And you are not worried that the "experts" haven't bothered to do the boring ground work before now? And you had the cheek to call me dumb.

And presumably the politically impartial IPCC will take on board such research like, for example, the Mann hockey stick curve.

Which comes to why I distrust the IPCC. They made such a fuss about the hockey stick graph which was obviously wrong. No little ice age? No medieval warm period? First time I saw it I knew it was suspect and no one on the IPCC knew enough to know that the curve was defective?

Back to my question how accurate is the temperature record?

A quick google shows no critcal comment on the article.

In summary the author gives an error band of 0.7K which is greater than the claimed temeprature increase and also shows that the change in the last 50 years is within the expected fluctuation range.

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I wish. But such political crimes are usually rewarded with a higher position. Follow Michael Mann, follow the money.

Household stoves and fireplaces burning anything will also be banned. I can cope with all but the last, then my utility bills would exceed my mortgage payment. How high will yours go?

The point being, we don't have to do anything *now*.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

And to think, enlightened society supposedly gave up on witch hunts "centuries ago". In reality NOT. Pseudopower to the sheeple.

Be glad you work in a normal industry where they cannot get tenure.

We don't "have" to do anything if we don't want to mitigate the chances of provoking a global extinction sometime in the next few hundred years. At the moment we haven't provoked enough global warming to be in a position to make a particularly accurate prediction of the way the current global climate will react to further increases in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we've got no idea of the way the climate will change when we've - say - melted all the artic ice and watched the Greenland ice cap slide off into the ocean.

It might be prudent to try and arrange things so that we never get to find out.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You stupidity does happen to be relevant. You think that the errors that you are fussing about are significant and important. Climatologists clearly think differently, and you feel happy about attributing their indiffence to a lack of willingness to do "boring ground work" which - as any graduate student will tell you - is what graduate students are for.

The problem with Mann's hockey stick curve wasn't the result - which has been confirmed repeatedly since Steve McIntyre found the error in Mann's technique - but Mann's data reduction scheme.

It's not easy to detect the existence of a fault in the data analysis when the analysis happens to produce the right answer.

Actually, you distrust the IPCC because Exxon-Mobil and a bunch of other interested parties spent a load of money on anti-IPCC propaganda, and you are too stupid to realise that you have been manipulated.

Both of which figure largely in Northern European history. Asian and Southern Hemisphere data tell rather different stories.

Actually, they knew enough to know that neither the little ice age or medieval warm period were global phenomena - your suspicions were merely parochial prejudice.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I think the fact that the Earth has in the past been a lot hotter with more CO2 means that we will be OK

In a few hundred years. Time to move North.

Not if it costs too much.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

You are a closed minded little man. You think you know it all don't you? I now understand why Jim said to kill file you - but I haven't given up all hope for you yet.

The reason I am skeptical is because " Climatologists clearly think differently". In my experience most academics aren't into boring work whatever their subject. They'd much rather they, and their grad students, do the stuff that gets them published - and that excludes 3 to 5 years of real detailed field work that will get someone else published.

Not the right answer, the required answer.

I don't trust big business any more than I trust academics. I'm all for genuine fossil fuel replacements - fossil fuel won't last for ever. Exxon can go they way of GM for all I care.

They note similarities to the medieval warm period and little ice age but say more work required.

Seems to make it global for me.

Or are you going to say again that " Climatologists clearly think differently".

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My mind is closed to your kind of idiocy.

More than you do at any rate.

Very kind of you.

My Ph.D. project took five years of solid work - including a fortnight grinding and polishing two disk of cast silica to make UV-transparent windows for my reaction vessel. I'm not sure why my supervisor didn't let me just buy them, but it wouldn't have done me any good to argue about the matter.

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Or so you'd like to think.

?

In fact what they say is that other authors (Cook, E.R., Palmer, J.G. and D =19Arrigo, R.D. 2002. Evidence for a =18Medieval Warm Period =19 in a

1,100 Year Tree-Ring Reconstruction of Past Austral Summer Temperatures in New Zealand. Geophysical Research Letters 29(14): 10.1029/2001GL014580.) have claimed a similarity but they can't really see it in their data.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/tasmania/ta= smania_recon.txt

The Tasmanian tree ring record doesn't include anything looks much like either event.

Wishful thinking

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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This isn't surprising. The conclusion contains one obviously nonsensical claim, and nobody is going to take it seriously.

The nonsensical claim is

"3. The observed increase of the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere is not a cause, but a consequence of stochastic temperature fluctuations."

and the reason that it is nonsense is that the authors have ignored the progressive decrease in the carbon-14 content of atmospheric carbon dioxide - the Suess effect - which demonstates that the increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is a direct consequence of our burning fossil carbon, which doesn't contain any of the short lived (half-life of 5568 years) carbon-14 isotope.

The paper's introduction does suggest that it was politically inspired, and the politician who inspired it doesn't seem to have been able to influence any of the competent researchers in the field.

Once again you seem to have but your faith in a less than reliable source.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That may depend on how quickly the earth warms up. A couple of the global extinction events show an interesting dip in the carbon isotope ratios for fossil carbon deposited at the time, which seems to correspond to a large injection of methane, such as we might provoke by thawing the Arctic.

Once the methane - a very potent greenhouse gas - starts getting ito the atmosphere, the process is likely to run away. Nobody is in any position to promise a global extinction, but it has happened before.

Your descendants may have a slightly different take on the cost- benefits analysis. Global extinction events tend to kill off any land animal that is bigger than a rabbit and doesn't breed as as fast, which does happen to include us.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Probably another cut at the answer would be to have Dirk read a few science papers on what is developing about those times when it was "a lot hotter." Only one example of very many here:

Jon

During the few hundred thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, when environmental carbon content was constant, atmospheric CO2 content on average lagged temperature by 800 years - according to "best determinations so far". Atmosphere/ocean ratio of CO2 varying directly with temperature was one of the feedback mechanisms that allowed periodic minor changes of insolation at a key range of latitudes to cause the Ice Ages to come and go. Two other positive feedback mechanisms have been water vapor (notably a greenhouse gas whose degree of presence varies greatly directly with surface temperature) and surface albedo.

The surface albedo one appears to be both very strong even globally and concentrated to Arctic and near-Arctic latitudes - the "Milankovitch Cycles" are mainly noted to periodic variations in insolation at 65 degrees north latitude, though one that apears to me not latitude-specific does appear to have more effect than ones that appear to me latitude-specific. The latitude-specific ones have some effect despite lacking variation in global insolation and lacking variation in insolation of specifically the northern or southern hemispheres.

Since the Industrial Revolution, temperature has lagged atmospheric CO2 concentration by a few years on the whole if anything.

The most recent center year of a 5 year period for which I saw smoothed HadCRUT global surface temperature was 2005. Atmospheric CO2 content went halfway from the 280 ppmv best-determination-of-pre-industrial-revolution to the 379.6 ppmv of 2005 in 1973.

Smoothed HadCRUT-3 and smoothed HadCRUT-3v have global surface temperature around .32-.33 degree C cooler than the 1961-1990 average from

1850 to 1900. The post-2000 stretch has smoothed global surface temperature around .42 degree C warmer than the 1961-1990 average. Halfway up is .045-.05 degree C warmer than the 1961-1990 average. Smoothed global surface temperature rose through that in 1980. If since-1850-periodic-so-far effects that I would blame on the Multidecadal Oscillation (period 60-65 years) are accounted for, the year that would have happened would not be 1980 but 1978 or 1977 - still lagging by 4-5 years.

And if freezing atmospheric CO2 at 2005 level fails to halt warming past the temperature level of the 2001-2008 stretch, then the lag turns out to be much greater.

I am reluctant to buy any notion that current atmospheric CO2 rise is from 800 year lag from MWP, because nature has been removing CO2 from the atmosphere rather than adding during the times when there have been good figures for global fossil fuel burning and good measurements of atmospheric CO2 content at Mauna Loa Observatory.

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