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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Tyler Snow

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Why say anything at all? Kill them all, now.


Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Rob Starkey (@Robbuffy)

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Rud

I grew up in the Kingdom

Comment on Hiatus controversy: show me the data by Jim D

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Surface datasets have a level of redundancy that makes it possible to use different subsets of surface stations to independently check each other. This also allows them to accurately gauge their uncertainty error bars. The agreement between independent sets of surface records is an important point about the robustness of their signals. Satellites are basically a daisy chain of individual sensors with little to no redundancy, and the error bars are not easy to determine due to a lack of independent measures to check them.

Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Faustino aka Genghis Cunn

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rud, if you believe Iran will cooperate with nuclear inspections, you’ll believe anything.

Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by kim

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Dung cakes, on the wall.
My fingers ache, and that’s not all.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by kim

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It’s OK, Michael; the Persians will do their own inspecting. Obama and Kerry really pulled a fast one on them there, gittin’ ’em so co-operative.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by omanuel

Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by timg56

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Gina McCarthy’s comments – also known as whistling past the graveyard.


Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by ristvan

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Faustino, I do not. Think Obama was snookered yet again. Iran has apparently already halted centrifuge dissembly on some pretext.

Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by timg56

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Tony,

I personally think you are over reacting.

The conference itself should be fine. They’ll jack up security measures and it may be a bit more inconvenient for the delegates. One aspect that may get cancelled is the NGO planned demonstrations. Those are a bit more difficult to ensure security.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by aaron

Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by timg56

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AK,

While our President’s most likely legacy will be his historic attack on the Constitution, Rud is correct. As long as there are SC judges willing to stand up and support the Constitution, anything Obama commits to can end with his term.

Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Don Monfort

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Let’s say the muslim fellas never become a majority, or even a sizable minority. It would not be unprecendented for a relatively small number of angry young gentlemen to commit the majority of murders and other acts of mayhem in a society.

Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by ristvan

Comment on Call for an ethical framework for climate services by omanuel

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The greatest threat to humanity today seems to be the insanity of those who try to retain power by inciting hatred of AGW believers for AGW doubters, of Muslims for Jews, for Christians, for Hindus, etc., etc.

The inhabitants of planet Earth will hang together or die separately.

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/paris_solidarity/?blZnHcb&v=68045


Comment on Week in review – science edition by JCH

Comment on Call for an ethical framework for climate services by Knute

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O

I’m totally open to listening to teamwork. But if you want a thinking person to follow the group, it can’t be based on a false premise such as CAGW/CO2.

Simple enough eh ?

Comment on Call for an ethical framework for climate services by Vaughan Pratt

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@AK: There’s no proof CO2 will cause “global warming”. There’s no proof it won’t.

While it’s certainly not the same thing, a strong argument can be made that the warming during the 83 years 1900-1982 was caused by phenomena whose combined contribution increased in direct proportion to CO2 forcing.

One can argue this by removing all fluctuations in HadCRUT4 with a period of 65 years or less simply by filtering them out (65-year HadCRUT4), then removing solar forcing simply by subtracting it, and lastly plotting what remains against CO2 forcing (the x-axis used by Shaun Lovejoy in his recent EOS article) defined as log(CO2). (Neither the units of CO2 nor the base of the log changes the outcome other than linearly, and R2 not at all.) With units of 280 ppmv and base 2 logs, the result is the red curve in this figure.

This curve fits a straight line (the green trend line) with an R2 of 0,9989, meaning that the residual (the difference from the trend line) has a variance relative to that of the red curve of 0.0011 (0.11%).

TSI needs to be subtracted explicitly from 65-year HadCRUT4 (the blue curve) because the rise in TSI during 1900-1950 is too slow to be removed by a 65-year filter, which can only remove rises shorter than 33 years. If that step is skipped the variance of the residual is ten times as large!

I don’t subtract TSI directly but first convert it to an anomaly, taking its mean value during 1961-1990 as the reference. Since Earth’s surface is 4x that of the disk intercepting the insolation I divide the TSI anomalies by 4. I then multiply by 1-A where A is Earth’s albedo. And I further multiply by 1.1 as an estimate of solar climate sensitivity taking feedbacks etc. into account (the no-feedback value λ is usually taken to be around 0.8) in order to convert shortwave radiative heating in W/m2 to temperature rise in degrees C.

What is particularly striking about this graph is that after stripping out enough “high-frequency” noise, the warming in 1900 is no different from that in 1982. This is contrary to the common understanding that the strong warming since 1970, however caused, was qualitatively different from that prior to 1950.

To implicate CO2 itself one would need additional information, such as

1. Rising greenhouse gases and vapors can warm the Earth’s surface.

2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

3. CO2 is not dominated by some other warming agent whose forcing effect is directly proportional to CO2 forcing, known to grow as the log of CO2 concentration.

4. …and perhaps other information, though finding fault with 1-3 is all I can think of for now by way of undermining the claim that rising CO2 is responsible for much of that warming.

1 was observed by Tyndall in his Fragments of Science Vol. I, namely that the ground at night is cooler when the air is drier. He used this observation to explain why Earth’s surface was far warmer than could be explained by its distance from the Sun.

The only property of water vapor that Tyndall made use of in this explanation was that it absorbed infrared. One would therefore expect that any gas or vapor with that property would have the same effect, otherwise his explanation would be wrong, or at least incomplete.

2 was observed by Tyndall in his laboratory, for water vapor, CO2, and a score of other gases and volatile vapors. The logarithmic dependency on absorption by CO2 was observed by Arrhenius several decades later, using Langley’s bolometer to measure absorption of the Moon’s IR radiation at different altitudes of the Moon above the horizon and subtracting an estimate of the proportion of IR Rabsorption attributable to water vapor.

For 3, there might well be something stronger than CO2 that is warming Earth’s surface in direct proportion to CO2 forcing, but if so it has yet to be identified. A number of greenhouse gases are known to do this, but their combined contribution is estimated to be about a quarter of that of CO2; that is, to the best of our knowledge CO2 alone accounts for about 80% of all known greenhouse gas warming. (Rising water vapor contributes relatively little, not because it is not a strong absorber but because it is not rising much.)

This is the extent of my understanding of the possible causes of all warming during 1900-1982 slower than the slow TSI rise of 1900-1950.

What might happen to 65-year climate during this century is a whole nother story. The cause of the 1900-1982 warming, whatever it might be, might change drastically up or down, or merely cease to be an influence, or become a stronger influence. A large meteor might knock 10 °C off the temperature. Somewhat more likely given the statistics on meteor strikes, IS might master hydrogen bomb technology. Etc. etc.

Comment on Call for an ethical framework for climate services by Vaughan Pratt

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Incidentally all MATLAB code and data for reproducing the above graph can be seen and downloaded at http://clim.stanford.edu/SeeForcing/ . The code is considerably simpler and cleaner than its predecessor at http://clim.stanford.edu/Clim60 (the nonlinear x-asis was a bit of a learning curve for me), and should therefore be easier both to understand and to translate into R, Excel, etc. It runs almost perfectly under octave except for the line colors: for some reason octave doesn’t handle ColorOrder the same way as MATLAB (probably isn’t recognizing NextPlot ReplaceChildren) so if you want colors you’ll have to put them in each of the four plot commands yourself (lazy me).

h/t to Shaun Lovejoy for his forcing x-axis. It was the first time I’d seen that neat trick, though I’ve since run across it elsewhere.

Comment on Call for an ethical framework for climate services by Knute

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“@AK: There’s no proof CO2 will cause “global warming”. There’s no proof it won’t.”

Allow me to jump in. Obviously, you know that’s not how science works.
You propose the theory. You prove a causal relationship. you dont get to claim it as true and then we nod our heads and disprove what you havent proved.

So if man made CO2 is responsible for this ever so slight warming, what caused the much higher previous ones of the past 5000 years … blacksmiths ?

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