Re: OT: Global warming strikes again.

I don't think there is anyone in climatology who doesn't think that oceanic currents can shift huge amounts of heat around and potentially alter climate. The UK is a net beneficiary of the Atlantic Conveyor (aka Gulf Stream) and would be a lot colder at 50-55N without it.

You can't have looked very hard then. The canonical paper attempting to relate periodic components of the CRU record was by Keeling & Whorf, PNAS, 1997

Fig 4 is an MEM spectrum of the detrended data (a method more powerful than simple Fourier analysis) which as a technical aside looks to me like an overfit with some spurious peak splitting due to overfitting.

Their second paper goes on to look at longer term tidal influences.

They argue that these tidal influences could provide a driving force for some of the periodic components that are observed.

Quite a few people thought that at least some of the late 20th century warming could be from periodic components. It would have been thoroughly alarming if temperature was taking off at that rate of climb and continued ever steeper (which would be a potential runaway).

I think 64 years is a bit on the long side possibly skewed by your choice of algorithm and baseline subtraction.

Explanations that say that global temperature changes because of various PDO, AMO, ENSO oceanic factors still leaves open the question of what drives these periodic oscillations in the oceans.

You can see by inspection on the PDO that PDO(t-29) ~= -PDO(t) has a better than expected predictive power at least over the last 100 years.

Unfortunately both the authors of the Keeling tides papers are deceased. I am in the process of trying to get a paper published on the possible physical interpretations of the periodic components of the CRU temperature record. The available data is too short and too noisy to have much confidence in measured frequencies which makes life difficult.

Regards, Martin Brown

That is an original observation on my part. I've thought that for a long time, well before I heard anybody else express the idea.

The public is getting what they want, and they get it by electing and re-electing their representatives. The US's real problem is that there is too much government, which forces everyone (business, unions, immigrants, gays, Christians, minorities, everyone) to look to Washington for support. The newspapers are, nowadays, mostly about politics.

The observation was that *my* politics influence my perception of "climate science", which is silly because I don't have politics.

I can't control my blood pH either. I can control my weight and my blood pressure and my cholesterol, so I do. The things I can't control, like my moods and my tax rates and the miserable Xilinx software, I deal with the best I can. The key to dealing with things is seeing them clearly, without emotional bias.

Sure, but those are hardly seismic shifts in science. Neither has been shown to be very useful so far. Things like this are minor tweaks, nothing on the scale of f=ma or e=mc^2.

Besides, graphene had a long history, spread all over the world, and the scotch-tape thing was not discovered by a lone amateur researcher, but by a collaboration at a major university, people funded to do the research. You'd need some serious lab equipment and skills to even verify that the thing stuck to the tape was a single atomic layer of carbon.

Logic is analysis. Design is something else.

No, it's a check to see if the OT theorists ever do anything useful. Since this is s.e.d., I hugely discount the opinions of people who can't or don't design good electronics. Usenet attracts a lot of argumentative armchair theorists, and they naturally prefer topics where their theories are uncheckable.

It's interesting how many people can't design even modestly-decent electronics. I can tell a lot about a person by looking at their schematics... but only if they make schematics.

Post a schematic and I'll demonstrate.

It's also interesting how many people here answer my "tag line" in the negative, or don't answer at all.

John

SNIP

Thanks for the link. I've been looking for information on tidal influences but hadn't come across this paper.

SNIP

Which is to say you don't remember when you ran into it in some denialist story in the kind of right-wing media you read and occasionally link us to. It has been around for a while.

John R. Christy - who is colleague of Roy Spencer and like him, one of the few denialist climatologists and a Christian fundamentalist - produced this argument in his testimony to the Senate in 2001.

What they think they want. Public perceptions are influenced by advertising, and elections are won by the side who can afford to spend more on advertising their candidate. Obama's victory was widely seen as a consequence of his use of the internet to collect a lot more money than than McCain. Obama got lots of small contributions from many more contributors than McCain could raise from his richer - but less numerous backers.

A group which contains a disproportionate number of miilionaires.

A standard Republican mantra. In fact the US's real problem is not too much governement, but too much bad government by special interest groups for special interest groups working through the lobby system. The interests of society as a whole are severly under-represented.

Everybody else has a political stance, but your opinions are all your own? And have never been influenced by anything you read - like the series of books you recommend here that all seem to have come from the "make rich republicans feel good about themselves" branch of the publishing industry. You recently recommended "Who Really Cares" - not for the first time, with the usual comment that it proves that conservative give more than liberals, while most reviewers comment that what it actually proves is that the religious (who are often conservative) give more than the non-religious (who are more often liberals).

You've got a copy of my Peltier milli-degree thermostat paper. It includes some schematics which do happen to be mine. You normally deny that I do any electronic design - why not dig out your copy of my paper and demonstrate your skills on it?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You refuse to consider that some people actually have original ideas. With your background, that makes sense.

John

This is a public discussion group. Put it up where everybody can see it.

I don't post much on climate. When I posted about snow, that was weather.

John

" .

"?

If you wanted to claim that the proposition that "CO2 is good for the Earth and more is better" is an original idea of yours, you'd ideally establish that you had had the idea before 2000

You've snipped my reference to John Christy presenting it to the Senate back then

and failed to mark the snip in your usual - ethically impeccable - way.

Can you come up with a quote that has you propagating this particular bit of denialist nonsense earlier than that?

We might - of course - trust you if you claimed that you had the idea later than that, but had not seen seen John Christy's testimony, but then again somebody who removes relevant evidence from a response with an unmarked snip isn't all that easy to trust.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Who cares?

All your posts are bloated and most are off-topic. I snip most of them.

John

Why should it matter to me?

I don't post much on climate.

Jon

Your 1st link mentions heavily periods much shorter than 60 years.

Your most recent one is *titled* on basis of a proposed 1800 year cycle.

That appears to me considered excessively into the alarming "IPCC median" of 3 degrees C of AGW this century.

I did show a bit of work where about 43% of the warming from the

1970-1979 stretch to the 2000-2009 stretch is accountable by a 64- year-period "oscillation" that persisted during 1877-2004. The 2005-2036 stretch is accordingly in for, to some extent or another, less of the warming that the world experienced from 1973 to 2005.

I have yet to do so - bad time of year to initiate a project for anyone not in my family or paying bills.

My e-mail addy is somewhere above and well-enough known. Please feel free to nag me there!

Likewise,

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

Just to follow this up, I note the UK Information Commissioner has required the Vice Chancellor of the UEA to sign a written undertaking to obey the Freedom of Information laws in the future...

An odd request if the Information Comissioner thought thought they were obeying them in the first place (which they are obliged to do).

As they say if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck.....

Nial.

Even if they had tried to prosecute it would have been a sufficient defence that the effort needed to obtain permission to give away all that bulk data was beyond the scope of a reasonable FOI request.

The FOI laws and the utility of the "Information Commissioner" and his officials is a mute point. They were until very recently the most impotent, slow and ineffective toothless IT watchdog ever. It remains to be seen whether the new guy can actually make it work properly.

But to be honest I would prefer them going after banks and financial institutions that put huge printouts of personal information unshredded into the commercial paper waste bins, design daft websites that show you other peoples account details or lose unencrypted memory sticks.

The ICO's sanctions are pretty limited. They mainly and unintentionally facilitate a scam preying on small businesses registering for the Data Protection Act that trading standards have found impossible to close down.

duck.....

Even though I think UEA should have shared their data, they could not give away any data they obtained from third parties without obtaining permission from each and every donor country.

Regards, Martin Brown

Oh yes, you do remind me how Christy and Spencer had to make a new version of their "UAH" lower troposphere trend index in response to findings by those responsible for the "RSS" one.

And although Spencer likes to find the "cloud albedo feedback" to be a negative one, while I like to see that one as a positive feedback merely a fraction as positive as IPCC-favored findings...

Even though Spencer sometimes spends time in his blog sounding close to Anthony Watts...

I see that Spencer was humbled by the snafu that you mentioned, and afterwards he has shown times when "he lets facts get in the way".

That is a level of honesty that I see few engaging in AGW debate rising to, even if that level is low.

In contrast, Hansen has in recent years gone along no known complaint (by himor anyone he works with) with "paring down the world thermometer count" in ways noted to give slight bias to more-warming areas of the globe. More notably, he has recent years having significant amount of ocean area represented by land thermometers.

So, Hansen and CRU could be closer to the truth than Spencer is, due to heavily dealing with data that their primary jobs make them do their work with and from.

Meanwhile, what are the current degree/decade figures for UAH, RSS, and GISS and HadCRUT3 for the time period from beginning of UAH and RSS lower troposphere indices to now?

Close to .13 degree/decade for UAH, close to .155 degree/decade for RSS, close to .16 degree/decade for HadCRUT3, close to .165 degree/decade for GISS?

I seem to think that the agreement is now close enough that differences between the individual indices matter less than multidecadal ocean-involved oscillations and the likely-starting-to-hit-now Dalton-class solar activity dip do.

One thing I see is that global temperature "climate sensitivity" is less to change in greenhouse gases (GHGs) than to other causes, because GHG change more directly causes a nagative feedback than other causes do - the "lapse rate" negative feedback.

Solar variation has 2 postulated specific-to-that positive feedbacks: One (known, but unknown how much positive) is that the cross section area of Earth (including its atmosphere) to the more-varying part of solar radiation varies directly with solar activity. There is also matter of "slightly noted" cloud pattern variation with solar activity, making winter worse in eastern/NE North America and NW Europe in solar minimum years, especially "Hale Winter" years (usually once every 22 years, butv UK is having 2-3 in a row now).

Best Regards,

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

I suppose I don't know what you mean by what you write above. Are you talking about long term, or more on the order of short term where the non-linear effects can be treated locally as linear ones and summed?

And what specifically makes you think feedbacks on the lapse rate (and there is a different lapse rates for stratosphere and troposphere and probably different feedbacks involved) which is __small_ and negative are so important? The water vapor feedback is extremely well understood (to a 1st order controlled by the saturation vapor dependence on T, with RH playing a far more secondary role which is good because it depends upon turbulence and that is a 'hard problem'), certainly positive and very strong, and the cloud feedback is likely positive (but may possibly be slightly negative, still uncertain and may be for some time yet) and likely more pronounced in importance, I think.

I guess I don't follow your logic, right now.

Jon

Both Spencer _and_ Christy had to be dragged, kicking and screaming all the way. They took FIVE MONTHS _after_ discovery and exposure of their error in the public and that itself was YEARS after they were being asked over and over again to PLEASE look to see why their dataset was the ONLY dataset not in congruence. They were nearly giddy with excitement and imagining they were the only ones getting it right and said as much, on a few occasions. And even then, after 5 months, that was with incredible pressure being applied. [Not to mention their timing of updates. Which I've talked about how it connected neatly (down to the very day) with politics going on in the US Congress.]

I concluded they let their extremist religious worldview hamstring their ability to self-criticize; and a few looks into Spencer's website over the last few years has done very little to make me feel otherwise.

Perhaps you could point up specific examples that lead you to arrive at the idea that they are NOW being more honest that most others in the field? I'd love to see what you see. Right now, I simply don't see it.

Jon