Another science that might benefit from the Arctic warming (assuming it’s true) might be that of archaeology, if there are in fact the remains of humans or other civilizations there to be uncovered.
Comment on Arctic warming opens region to new military activity by Howling Winds
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Comment on Gleick’s ‘integrity’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’d rather Gleick post real science under a false name than junk science under his real name.
Alas all we’re ever likely to get is junk science either way.
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Comment on Arctic warming opens region to new military activity by tempterrain
I was thinking of putting up , just as a joke, a comment disputing that the Arctic is actually warming. But I see genuine climate change deniers have already done that in all seriousness!
I really wonder why Judith bothers to run this blog which seems to have attracted the attention, and mostly the favour, of the worst of the anti-science crowd.
The only justification would be if she actually bothered to correct some of the more bizarre claims. Or is the melting ice just another one of those uncertainies with all points of view are equally valid?
That’s not the way hard headed corporations and governments see it. They know the sea ice they’ve been used to is going to disappear this century. They know its cause, and are all working steadily and aggressively to ensure they are are well positioned for that change.
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Comment on Assessing climate model software quality by Bart R
Sure, for this curve the r^2 isn’t as much of an issue, as you’re already talking about a derivative.
Which means you should not label your derivative curve “Observed”, as you are not directly observing it. “Derived” would be fine.
It’d be nice if you did include a reference line showing the actual observed data you’re basing your derivative on, but that’s not a big deal.
Of all of your graphs, this one depicts the most startling result, and appears to be the most worth investigating. However, derivative curves are tricky and ought not be approached without due care and attention, which I’m concerned about in your case given past issues with other graphs and what you’ve said about this one.
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Comment on Assessing climate model software quality by Bart R
Your conclusion is clearly backwards, Mr. Orssengo.
The fact that you’ve produced only four identical 60-year slopes on 120 years of data tells us the global warming rate has varied widely in the last 120 years.
Do you have no other sets of three or more slopes identical with each other for 60 years that appear in the dataset?
This isn’t unexpected, given your derivative curve tells us to expect the slope to change over time, generally accelerating from the corollary slope of 60 years ago at every point.
Well, provided we accept the logic of expecting the future to match a temporary-looking condition in a current highly tuned line, without doing further investigation.
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Comment on Arctic warming opens region to new military activity by Bernie Schreiver
Certainly there is a remarkable degree of resistance on this forum — and even animosity — with regard to the notion that the US Navy, having driven its nuclear submarines under the polar ice for more than fifty years, might actually know something about the cumulative effects of AGW in this region, and appreciate the strategic consequences.
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Comment on Week in review 4/13/12 by Bart R
timg56 | April 18, 2012 at 3:23 pm |
I suspect that the only thing it might predict is that extremes are possible, but nothing about the nature, extent or frequency.
More a connection that is difficult to interpret than specious. The principle predicts that ‘extremes’ are inevitable, but tells nothing about their nature, extent or frequency. Which, of course, is one of the points of Chaos.
A huge meteor the size of Rhode Island could crash into the Earth, dig out a crater half the size of the Moon, and so far as Chaos Theory can tell might have no more impact on the climate than the proverbial butterfly fluttering its wings. (Though the butterfly would need to be very, very well-positioned and well-timed.)
The CO2 perturbation question is still a question, in that Chaos Theory can’t directly answer it, and Physics, Biology and Chemistry can only in terms of how well they deal with complexity — which is limiting. And no, feedback arguments have little power to dislodge CO2 as an external forcing, per se. There may be remote teleconnections or their feedbacks we’re unaware of or underappreciate.
As for your tax dollars, are you really sincerely proposing that I vouch for your superior ability to make spending decisions for government, given that I’d prefer if government were involved in far fewer spending decisions overall?
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Comment on Week in review 4/13/12 by Chief Hydrologist
IR is emitted from surfaces which then warms the atmosphere. There is no physical mechanism for atmospheric warming without the emitted IR. If the problem is conceived as a high temperature atmosphere from which heat ‘diffuses’ by convection and turbulent mixing – then this is conceptually incorrect and any simple model based on the heat equation involving heat flow simply from the atmosphere to the ocean is physically implausible.
Simple models are sometimes useful even if physically incorrect. In this case you would call them a black box model and not infer too much physically about the system from the black box model. This is Webby’s problem – he has mistaken convenience for varacity.
I tend to think of the ocean and atmosphere as being radiatively coupled. That is that SW warms the ocean and land surfaces, the ocean and land warms and emits IR, the atmosphere absorbs IR and re-emits in all directions. So the only rational approach to assessing warming or cooling is with an energy conservation approach – which works best at TOA. That is – both warming and cooling if the atmosphere and oceans is involved.
d(S)/dt = Energy in – Energy in
Where d(s)/dt is the total global energy storage. It includes minor terms for enthalpy and kinetic and potential energy as well a heat – so the deceptively simple global budget is a complete description of Earth’s energy dynamic. We can tell many things from this. Principally that the warming in the CERES era was in the SW in as a result of cloud changes – although this has changed to cooling with the current 2 year La Nina. The ocean warms, convection brings the warm water to the surface where net IR is emitted to the atmosphere and ultimately to space.
This simple and obvious description of global power flux is correct without a doubt. The problem with Webby is that he is so aggressively beligerant that he leaves no rooom either to ignore me or to back down gracefully.
I leave open the possibility that he is sincerely deluded – that makes a great of sense. There are many examples of sincere – but nonetheless misguided – beliefs on the web.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
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Comment on Lindzen et al.: response and parry by John S.
I’m amused by your rapid move from one groundless presumption to another in
your uninsightful reply. Such boorish personal attacks should find no place in scientific debate.
Nothing has seriously challenged the basic first-order physics of UHI
development that I sketched. Your allusion to research du jour on
second-order effects, such as cooling by haphazard plumes of aerosols and
particulates is largely irrelevant to climate-scale urban discrepancies
with validated nonurban records, located not necessarily downwind and on
the order of ~100km away. Such plumes would cool the cities of origin even
more, due to higher concentrations. Yet, in neo-capitalistic China and
Russia, urban temperatures are rising particularly fast.
V. Ramanathan has conjectured “global dimming” due to increased atmospheric
pollution as an explanation for the deep dip in surface temperatures that
culminated in 1976. The inconvenient fact is that this dip, which had some
alarmists talking about a coming ice age, was experienced primarily at
nonurban stations. Contrarily, most urban records show little, if any,
dip. All of the published “global” surface temperature indices more
closely resemble the urban signature during that period, indicating
corruption by UHI intensification in the post-war era.
Despite the fact that I distinguished amply between Mosher’s views and
yours, you take pains to distance yourself from him in your reply.
Nevertheless, your views on BEST’s project clearly converge on its putative
value. You both tout the sheer bulk of the data base and the “mathematical
truth” of the processing algorithm. I recall hearing John Tukey at a
research symposium decades ago presciently warning about the perils of
growing mountains of unvalidated data in trying to understand physical
reality. IIRC, he said: “We don’t need more data; we need better,
concentrated information measures.” Sadly, BEST provides little of the
latter, while trumpeting the former. At best, they obtain a statistical
description of a geographically incomplete, patently biased and otherwise
mangled data base. Even the most rigorous mathematics has no compelling
power over physical reality. Trusting the results of a huge computational
effort as if they were immune to the GIGO principle is a sure sign of
scientific gullibility.
Finally, I find it richly ironic that you should bring up Socrates in a
gratuitous display of historical one-upmanship. It was he who declared that
knowing the limits of his knowledge is his greatest strength. May his
wisdom guide your career in the blogosphere.
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Comment on Arctic warming opens region to new military activity by David Wojick
The Navy cannot know about the cumulative effects of AGW because it cannot know about things that are not known to exist, and probably do not exist.
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Comment on Arctic warming opens region to new military activity by David Wojick
Temp, you are the one who is anti-science, as I have noted many times before. You have no scientific case so you resort to repeated name calling.
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Comment on Assessing climate model software quality by Girma
How about calling it “trend for the observed data”?
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Comment on Assessing climate model software quality by capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2
Bart, really complex problems are great at making very intelligent people look like idiots. CO2 is going to make a whole bunch of intelligent idiots 
The GCMs are impressive and surprisingly informative. Since they are not truly independent though, there is the likely problem of common failures. Those are the really fun ones to find. Orders of magnitude idiot production.
When I compared GISS modelE projections (or is it really predictions?) The Antarctic and the tropics are the biggest blunders. The paper by Stevens and Schwartz compares five models in figure 10. All five missed the Antarctic or the tropics. Believe it or not, UKMO was the cream of the crop with MPI, whoever they are, close.
Most of the model biases are greater than 10Wm-2. That is a lot. The topic of this thread is assessing the model software quality, that seems to be adequate Being off over 10Wm-2 isn’t a software bug, it is a lack of understanding of some part of the physics. Something is out an order of magnitude. Trenberth missed 20Wm-2 then claimed the model data was accurate to +/- 0.18Wm-2. Kimoto used Trenberth’s data and his estimate was at least half of what it should be and Kimoto’s paper was on a common error The error is likely in the surface temperature data and most likely at the poles with the least coverage and greatest extremes. If everything is based on a common flaw, everything is going to be off but agree with each other remarkably well.
So, I would get ready for that lightning strike.
Here is that paper again,
http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/Documents/StevensSchwartz2012.pdf
and here is GISS south pole versus RSS.
That is a pretty serious discrepancy. So I recommend shorting CAGW
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Comment on UQ by Arcs_n_Sparks
>We cannot predict earthquakes, yet we have earthquake building codes.
This engineer would explain that we have a good understanding of the bounding parameters regarding earthquakes (which of course, can and are revised with new data over time), and the country is divided into various zones for that building code feature. Moreover, we do not mandate building codes for a 11.9 quake because some model predicts it might happen in the next 1000 years; it would be far too costly.
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Comment on Week in review 4/13/12 by Chief Hydrologist
So here we have the ocean warming to 10m and more with SW and cooling with IR from the surface and with convection and latent heat. Because the warming is all radiative – it is all very nearly instantaneous. The heat is right there in the ocean. There is turbulent mixing – both at the surface and from the bottom and convection in the ocean. These are pretty quick processes as well. The atmosphere is warmed by the ocean – the physical mechanism is by IR emission from the surface.
This is the reverse of what you said – and insisted on so graciously. I just like to see you get trapped into one reinvention after another. Most amusing.
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Comment on The Righteous Mind by DocMartyn
The 60′s Liberals had been through WWII, the present day leadership cut their teeth in Vietnam.
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Comment on Questions on research integrity and scientific responsibility by http://servicepro-plumbing.com/
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Comment on Week in review 1/27/12 by http://servicepro-plumbing.com/
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Comment on The Righteous Mind by philjourdan
We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”
It is called being in a familiar place. Ever tried to give directions to someone. You know the turns, but what about the street names? When I am very familiar with an area, such as my neighborhood, I can easily tell people “first right, second left”, but am very hard pressed to name the streets. I do not need to know them. I just need to know the turns.
Thus it is with our own beliefs. We already know them, so we do not have to name them. But when telling someone how to get from an unknown place to our place, we make sure they know the names as well. We know the arguments against what we do not believe, but having gone over the same road so many times, we may forget the arguments that got us there in the first place.
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Comment on Arctic warming opens region to new military activity by Scott
Thanks Tonyb. For fun I checked out The Cooling a 1976 non fiction by Lowell Ponte about the coming ice age. Starts with “Our planet’s climate has been cooling for the past three decades.” NAS published a 1975 report warning about the cooling trend and recommended quadruplihg of funds for climatged research, from the NAS Committee on Climate Variation.
Who said follow the money? Scott
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