[OT] NASA, NOAA Analyses Reveal Record-Shattering Global Warm Temperatures in 2015

The first nukes were designed with slide rules, and a lot of experiments. When you design something, one usually selects designs that are amenable to analysis and experiment. We can't design our planet - too late - and can't much experiment to define casusalities.

AGW alarmism depends on assumption of large positive feedbacks. But large positive feedbacks create chaos and make the models mostly useless. That doesn't seem to bother the modelers.

It's raining now, confounding the governor and everyone else who were counting on continued catastrophic drought. California rainfall is noisy year-to-year, but there is no visible long-term trend.

Wrong again! Worse. Bill Slowman's.

So, that's all come true. Ice shelves breaking off Antarctica, redoing the globes to show less polar ice, island nations that are panicking, Virginia real estate near the shore is uninsurable, crop failures in California due to odd rain/snow deficits. The rest of the 'within a century' prognostications are probably trustworthy, too.

Oh, not the thermodynamics of a globe in a vacuum, with heating from the sun. We know those causalities. It doesn't suffice for detailed weather prognostication, but the cliimate is warming for sure.

BS from a member of the ignorati... probably with a deformed left hand clutching his "smart" phone >:-} ...Jim Thompson

That's the reason I mentioned the detailed calculations, not the back-of-envelope estimates. You DO realize, of course, that 'ignite the atmosphere' wasn't believable, and the test wouldn't have taken place if it were. Neither of the individuals you quote were reporting the detailed model calculations.

Yeah, it's a global problem, and it's a big globe. That's why there's error bars and why multiple scenarios are used. There aren't any believable scenarios that look like climate-as-usual.

None of that has come true. Hurricane landfall the US has been declining for over 100 years. The feds have finally got rational about guaranteeing beachfront mansions. As long as it snows in Antartica (which is increasing) some of that snow will creep to the sea and break off. Icebergs are not modern inventions.

California ag is doing fine. The biggest problem is that we keep planting more water-gobbling crops, like cotton and rice and almonds, in a state that averages 20" of erratic annual rainfall.

Looks like snow in NYC soon. People are mobbing stores for bread and batteries. Not much like Daytona Beach.

Or cooling. We'll have to wait and see.

Hysteria is eternal and popular. Remember the new ice age and the population bomb? Nuclear winter? Hippies? Ebola?

Be afraid, be very afraid, if that's your personality type. It ain't mine.

While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New

will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across

There is no climate-as-usual. It's a chaotic system at all time scales.

On Fri, 22 Jan 2016 14:43:09 -0500, krw Gave us:

I know that I snipped his post quoted matl. I made my statement deliberately. Not surprising that you failed to see the intended humor. So, it wasn't wrong.

ucceeded because Steve Jobs was an engineer and a manager, but most of US i ndustry is run by people who think that discounted cash-flows are all that matters, and that the people predicting the cash flows know more about the future than the engineers who are in the business of changing it.

Not exactly. Wozniak may have been the better engineer in the original team , and Jobs the better manager, but Jobs did understand what Wozniak was doi ng and why he was doing it. The archetypical US manager is a lawyer, for wh om facts only exist as basis for constructing arguments, where the UK equiv alent is an accountant, for whom money is the only fact.

Jobs had enough exposure to engineering in the process of getting Pong and Apple to work to be aware of what it offered, and his subsequent reaction o n being exposed to the Xerox PARC Alto lead to the creation of the Lisa (wh ich didn't really make it) and the MacIntosh (which did) reflect a better e ngineering insight than anybody at Xerox could manage.

The Xerox Alto got quite a lot of publicity when it was first developed, so Jobs wasn't all that favoured by getting the tour of Xerox PARC.

The ratio of population to representatives in most representative democraci es is about 100,000 to one, so one has to wonder where your 99% comes from.

In the US the "Occupy" movement differentiated the 99% of the US population s whose incomes have not gone up since Reagan came to power, and the riches t 1% whose incomes have gone up a lot over the same period, but the most re cent study I've seen put the divide closer to 99.7% and 0.3%.

In part this reflects the fact that the US has a rather primitive constitut ion, put together by supporters of the moderate enlightenment, with the ide a that the people who owned the country should run the the country. Subsequ ent constitutions, in other countries, have been designed around the radica l enlightenment proposition that the country should be run to make life as comfortable as possible for everybody, bearing in mind that it makes sense to let able people accumulate more resources than the less able, so that th ey can invest in good ideas.

Fourier's 1824 insight wasn't BS, and Jim's failure to catch the reference places in him firmly in the ignorati ...

I need a rant today.

I beg to differ as usual. Go thee unto Weather Underground. and find some random city with a large number of weather stations concentrated fairly close together. Compare the temperature readings on the maps or tables. You'll find them all over the chart with large differences and variations that change with the time of day. For example, try to select temperature from this: Identical weather stations will report large changes in temperature by simply locating them differently. For example, this contributor to global warming is located above the HVAC unit on the roof of the radio station offices: I'm not immune to bad sensor placement either. This is just one of my early mistakes, err... compromises, in building a radiation shield. The measuring cup pagoda worked well. Unfortunately, the building housed a number of transmitters that did a fair job of trashing the temperature reading by leaking hot air through the gap between the wall and the roof joists barely visible in the photo. Oops.

Then, there are the mountain top sites, which should be ideal for measuring air temperature instead of reflected IR or hot air from the buildings. I have access to a few such mountain top weather stations. Typical is a 3 to 10 degree Celsius spread.

There has been some effort by the CWOP put into identifying inaccurate temperature readings caused by poorly located weather stations and those lacking a radiation shield: This is a typical report from one of the local weather stations: The stuff in red means it's seriously out of spec. How is this deviation from acceptable calculated? Easy... just average the readings from about 5-10 nearby weather stations and compare the reading with the average. The problem is that if some or most of these stations are also badly sited and have a screwed up radiation shield, even the most accurate temp reading will be declared erroneous. That has happened to me at 3 former wx stations. I'll spare you my rant on averaging a pill of erroneous number and magically producing a right number on the assumption that the error will cancel.

Of course, those are consumer weather stations, with little or no calibration and dubious accuracy. The pros must obviously be better. Right. This is a RAWS weather station at the Cal Fire camp on Ben Lomond Mountain: If you want to do the weather correctly, something like that is what is needed. However, it is still possible to do it wrong. In the second photo, note the electrical substation in the background. When the wind is blowing from behind the substation, the temperature at the weather stations can be up to about 4 Celsius higher. Oh well.

The photos above are from stations standardized in the late 1980's. At least they're an improvment over the previous generations of wx stations:

Anyway, I don't believe you can even obtain multiple outdoor *AIR* temperature readings, in nearby locations, that produce much in the way of absolute accuracy.

End of rant.

The archetypical US manager is a lawyer, for whom facts only exist as basis for constructing arguments,

Wrong.

Dan

That wasn't one of the predictions listed, and if John Larkin had been paying attention he'd be aware that global warming is not predicted to make hurricanes more frequent - the area where the top fifty metres of sea water is warm enough (above about 26C) to sustain them will grow but the main effect will be to make the hurricanes that do appear bigger and more powerful (so they will stir up a larger area of the sea surface, which might make hurricanes less frequent).

Fewer - but more destructive - hurricanes making landfall, some of them further from the equator than they used to - isn't a desirable outcome.

The GRACE satellites showed that while snowfall on Antarctic may be increase, the Antarctic ice shelf is losing mass. More of that snow is creeping to the sea and breaking off.

Ice sheets do seem to have a built-in instabilty. Even during ice ages, they can get thick enough that layer directly in contact with the rock underneath gets warm enough to melt, and the whole ice sheet can slide off into the ocean quite fast.

During the last ice age this happened every 8,000 years or so and nobody knows enough about the mechanism to be sure exactly what was going on. Warming up the planet and dumping more snow on top of the ice sheets does seem likely to make it happen sooner rather than later.

Which is likely to become more erratic as we warm the planet.

The ice cover on the Barrents and Kara Seas north of Finland does seem to have an odd effect on the winter jet stream. No ice cover (which is happening more frequently these days as the Arctic warms up faster than everywhere else) dumps loads of snow on the UK and northern France.

What is does in the US wasn't spelled out in the German climate science paper published in November 2010, just before precisely such an unusually severe winter.

Weather is a wildly chaotic system. The causalities are known, but precise prediction is impossible. Climate is a lot more predictable - the chaotic weather falls into strange attractors, which average out to something a lot more predictable.

Fourier's 1824 insight precludes cooling. More CO2 in the atmosphere raises the altitude at which the planet radiates as if it were at -18C, which means that the surface that we live on gets warmer.

John Larkin doesn't know much, and confuses real and imagined problems.

We aren't talking personality types here, but informed versus un-informed opinion. You are a pig-ignorant optimist who enthusiastically ignores any fact that might dent your optimism.

Jim Hansen now has a clearer idea of how sea level rise will happen.

Essentially it's going to take a Heinrich event in one of the ice sheets to flood the West Side Highway. Heinrich's seminal paper got published in 1988, so Jim Hansen can be excused for not having digested the implications then.

In fact he seems to have taken some 27 years to fully digest the notion

We don't have time machines, so the historical land and sea temps can't be improved by new satellites and buoys and RTDs.

I have a temp sensor at our cabin in Truckee. Carefully calibrated RTD, located under a wooden stairway on the north side of the cabin. It correlates poorly with the official station at the airport. There are about 20 nearby weather stations of dubious quality, but they agree a lot better than the airport numbers. The official temp is always the outlier, usually higher or especially lower than all the rest.

Satellite measurments of low tropo temps are likely to be better longterm than anything else, but only go back 25 years or something. The satellite record correlates well with balloon measurements and shows no warming for about the last 18 years.

Not the way the data looks: it DOES show warming, but remote-sensing from hundreds of miles up isn't a noise-free solution, either. There's also the small matter of differing satellite sensors, we haven't had decades of output from a single thermometer design. There are corrections, interpretations, and prospects for confusion. Look at several-miles-thick atmosphere, and identify 'the' temperature, and what do you expect?

Oh, you expect confusion (and will create it if you don't see enough).

"it is commonplace in the US for many people to attend law school before pursuing a mainstream business career without any intention of formally practising law "

Dan is as reliably wrong as ever.

They use the education, it helps keep them out of jail!

Jamie

Yep. Satellites don't measure planetary temperature. They measure oxygen microwave emissions from various MSU's (Microwave Sounding Units) from which a temperature estimate is derived. However, the air temperature versus ground, ocean, and possibly ice temperature is mostly a waste of time. About 90% of the heating from greenhouse effects goes into heating the ground and oceans, not the air. Might was well use only the surface temperature data. In other words, throw out most of the weather data that only measures air temperature.

I've come to the independent conclusion that still air temperature measurements are inherently inaccurate, convective air flow instruments are better, and forced air (fan aspirated) air flow instruments are best. This old article on radiation shields covers some of that: The problem with your arrangement is that if close to the ground or building, you're measuring the radiated IR from the ground or building, not the air temperature. The stagnant air under the stairs will produce a time lag between changes in outside air temperature and the air under the stairs, as moderated by the nearby ground and building. There's also a thermal time lag involved.

What you really want is a way to measure air temperature away from the ground and buildings, while unaffected by direct or reflected solar radiation. That's what the radiation shield does and what I would recommend if you want better accuracy. I prefer a fan aspirated radiation shield, but those have problems in freezing weather. The fans also produce a little heat, which has to be dealt with. It's better to put the fan on top, and suck air in at the bottom.

There are claims that balloon and satellite data correlated nicely, until about 2012, when they began to diverge: If true, I don't really understand the implications (yet).