Sorry, that was just a jpeg from the spreadsheet. With any luck the real McCoy is <a href="http://clim.stanford.edu/flatter.xls" rel="nofollow">here</a>.
Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt
<i>to support the biggest continuous con, since Darwin published his book.</i>
How about quasicrystals? Are they a con too?
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Comment on Open thread weekend by Doug Cotton
And I note that you’ve used SH of 1.126 at 700K ignoring the temperature gradient which is about 9K/Km so that the temperature gets down around 220K to 230K at 50Km altitude At 225K specific heat of CO2 is 0.763. So some more integration is also required over altitude as well as latitude.
Focus on the main points in the paper. Tell me whether you think gas in a closed cylinder in a gravitational field equilibrates
(a) the temperature, thus producing an entropy gradient, or
(b) entropy, thus producing a temperature gradient.
Supply empirical evidence for your answer, as I have in the paper.
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt
<i>you might also note that N2O increased dramatically during the 1950 to 1970 period as did methane output. These could provide some nontrivial positive forcing that your filtering is not accounting for.</i>
You may well be right. Pollutants of the 1960s is a subject well above my pay grade.
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Pekka Pirilä
MrB,
There are two different processes that are clearly visible over the last decades.
1) There’s natural variability where weather patterns affect vegetation leading to alternation of years with increasing biomass and decreasing biomass. ENSO has the strongest influence on this and the largest variability in biomass occurs in tropical land areas. The amount of biomass goes up and down without strong accumulation or release over longer periods. A much weaker variability occurs in carbon storage of the surface ocean. According to some scientific studies this variability is out of phase with what we see. This is possible because the variability of the land vegetation dominates.
2) There are more persistent processes. Some of them concern land use and there’s also some persistent accumulation of carbon in soil. By far the strongest persistent changes in carbon storages are those caused by use of fossil fuels and cement manufacture.
The variability of 1) can be seen in detrended data presented by Humlum and also Salby. The detrended data is by definition incapable of telling anything on linear trends and almost nothing on a slowly accelerating trend. For the variability of 1) ENSO comes first and affects vegetation and through that CO2 concentration.
The change 2) is the persistent smooth change we see immediately in the annual Mauna Loa data. The variability of 1) is barely visible in the data without detrending and switch to a much smaller unit on vertical axis.
What has occurred at much longer periods in glacial cycles is a third class of changes not significant for the present consideration. On that scale there’s obviously a strong positive feedback between temperature, CO2 content and other changes. In positive feedback warming causes CO2 increase and CO2 increase causes more warming. Details of the initialization of those phenomena are not well understood.
There’s a lot of research that has produced more detailed knowledge on the carbon cycle of oceans and land areas. All that confirms the general picture. The knowledge is not very accurate but by a safe margin accurate enough to confirm that the natural conclusions I present above are, indeed, right.
What is trivially wrong in both Salby’s and Humlum’s argumentation is that they perform an analysis that by construction cannot say anything about 2) but claim that they have reached very strong evidence related to that. That’s really disingenuous when continued long after the issue has been pointed out by numerous others.
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Peter Lang
Vaughan Pratt,
995 comments have been posted on this thread so far. Most are way over my head and not my area of expertise (I confess I haven’t read most of them). Could I urge you to make a succinct summary, and especially focus on what is important.
Could you please include an explanation of what is relevant for informing policy, if anything?
If what you’ve done proves to be correct, what does it mean for our understanding of climate sensitivity? Can you say if this work changes our understanding of the central estimate or uncertainty of climate sensitivity?
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt
Since the comments are all over the shop they’re hard to summarize, Peter. Currently Greg Goodman and Mike Jordan are disputing the soundness of my analysis, so we should wait a bit to see where that ends up — maybe they’re right, maybe I am, but let’s wait till things settle down a bit, hoping they do.
The relevance to policy is extremely unclear because I’ve only tried to describe what happened over the past 160 years. I’ve offered a little speculation as to why SAW and AGW happened, and would put more faith in the latter. But predicting the future is always hard, and made harder by the uncertainty of where future CO2 emissions are headed. Western Civ might reduce them, but 3rd world countries might fill that gap. And melting permafrost might release a lot of high-global-warming-potential methane, but we don’t have enough experience with that to say anything sensible about it.
Regarding the impact of my analysis, I would say it merely confirms existing analyses of what”s happened and of what the better models show. However I put far more faith in describing history than in those models because ultimately they’re adjusted to agree with history, making history our main predictor for the future. Which as I said is subject to considerable uncertainties about future CO2 and methane.
One interesting aspect is this question of whether SAW is one phenomenon or many, and if the former what is it. If it turns out to be something to do with rotation of the core relative to the crust as I was speculating, this would be an example of something no model could have predicted since there’s no basis for putting it in any existing model. (And by the same token there’s no basis for believing in that speculation to begin with, as Greg Goodman would surely agree.)
On the other hand those are the main uncertainties. I’m not aware of others that will make much of a difference, short of being hit by an asteroid or terrorists stealing and deploying some failing state’s WMD’s.
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt
Currently Greg Goodman and Mike Jordan
–> Mike Jonas (but both the statistician Mike Jordan and the basketball player Mike Jordan might dispute it too).
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Comment on Stratospheric uncertainty by Edim
Webby, you’re wrong again. I believe in science and I believe in the ignorance of experts. It is the love of science (and its method) that motivates me.
The radiative properties of CO2 are not controversial. The solution of the Earth’s surface (and TOA) heat transfer problem is, IMO. The ‘climate science’ is a textbook example of Cargo Cult Science (practices that have the semblance of being scientific, but do not in fact follow the scientific method).
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Peter Lang
Vaughan Pratt,
Thank you for your response. I understand that there will be ongoing discussion about whether the method is correct, meaningful, reliable, etc. I was hoping for a simple summary like you might give to a policy adviser if he could give you just 5 minutes. I’ll ask my question a different way?
Assuming your method turns out to be valid:
1. does it suggest any changes to the central value of climate sensitivity?
2. does it now or is it likely to reduce the uncertainty on climate sensitivity.
The other points you made about how population might grow, future emissions rates, etc are a different issue. What I mean by this is that, IMO, there are four key input parameters for doing cost benefit analyses and probably also for robust analysis. They are:
1. climate sensitivity [1]
2. damage function [1]
3. decarbonisation rate [1, 2]
4. probability (and uncertainty) that the proposed solution (e.g. carbon pricing) will achieve the objective (e.g. of controlling the climate in the way expected).
I suspect your method might be able to help to improve the central estimate and uncertainty for #1, but would not not throw any light on #2, #3 or #4.
[1] William Nordhaus, 2008 A Questrion of Balance, Table 7-2, p 130
http://judithcurry.com/2012/12/04/multidecadal-climate-to-within-a-millikelvin/#comment-276226
[2] Roger Pielke Jr. Decelerating decarbonisation of the global economy http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com.au/2010/07/decelerating-decarbonization-of-global.html
Or the article in Nature: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2593-2008.08.pdf
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by greg goodman
Vaughan Pratt: “F3 was designed to take out SOL+DEC essentially completely (below 0.4%) while bending up sharply enough to be 5x as sensitive to 23-year periods (2%) and way more sensitive to yet lower frequencies (40% at 42 year periods). This sharpens the minimum (or local minima) enormously!
With that as motivation for F3, let’s consider the impact of the errors it introduces at the ends. These errors can be clearly seen in the plot of MRES.
If we follow Greg’s recommendation to chop say 20 years off each end of MRES as being unreliable, then we should aim to minimize the variance (or standard deviation, same effect) of MRES over the period 1870 to 1990 rather than the whole period 1850-2010.
”
You will recall that my first post on this was very positive.When I saw Vaughan’s filter I though , OMG, at last someone who understand signal processing and how to design a filter.
The problems arise in the implementation, as we have now agreed the first and last 25y of the data are not being passed through this superbly designed filter but some increasingly sloppy approximation of it.
Admittedly at first this will be a small error but if we are looking to evaluate mK accuracy even this can not be assumed to be correct. Neither is this just ‘end effects’. 25+25y is quite large proportion of 160y. Almost a third of the data is being incorrectly filtered.
“These errors can be clearly seen in the plot of MRES.”
No, the error, as I have stated several times is seen in figure 3 . It is approximately 140 mK not the several mK seen in MRES. I have already pointed this out. You are still trying to sweep this under the carpet and divert attention elsewhere.
140 mk in a total swing of about 800 is about 17.5% a far cry from the 0.4% pass band ripple you are touting.
I am saying that your implementation of the filter is invalid, I’m NOT saying that you should use this as an excuse to avoid including the last 20 years of data when your supposed climate “law” goes totally loses all contact with reality.
What I DID suggest is that you extend the analytical function so that filter would work correctly and so avoid the distortion.
This leaves the problem of the distortion of hadCrut3, which we cannot extend. but, as I already noted, we can see the distortion here is a lot less problematic. As I already detailed, the end values may be low by about 10 to 20mK but the form is not visibly distorted. That error is about an order magnitude smaller than the error in F3(AGW) so does not change the fundamental point I am making.
What I did request is that if you did not agree you do the numbers and post the result. You chose not to do so.
You know doing this will blow your mK residual claims out of the water which is why you are doing you damnedest to avoid addressing this issue and trying to divert the discussion elsewhere.
SSN, CET HMF fine. Save that for you next presentation.
Would you now kindly comment on the “within a mK” headline claim in the “paper” and poster, that you presented to AGU and the rest of the world here? Do you still consider this claim to be valid or is it, as I have clearly demonstrated, simply a result of F3 distorting AGW into something far more like climate than the 3K/doubling exponential you proposed?
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Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Peter Lang
Vaughan Pratt, By the way, I have it on good authority [1] that the Earths core is not made of iron and nickel. It’s hydrogen.
[1] Omanuel http://judithcurry.com/2012/12/01/open-thread-weekend-4/#comment-273003
(Clearly, if the sun is made of Iron, the Earth’s core must be made of hydrogen to get the correct proportions of elements in the universe)
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Comment on Open thread weekend by gbaikie
“Now divide your atmospheric mass by 2, because I’m only talking about the half that gets heated in the day. ”
A Venus day, would include a day and a night.
“The measurements of 5 degrees were at the equator, so don’t take it too literally as applying equally over the whole hemisphere. ”
If was accurate measurement of any Venus surface change in temperature then I would take it as useful metric.
Half the mass of atmosphere is below 15 km. And below 15 km there would fairly uniform temperature. Similar temperature uniformity of the Earth’s oceans below 1000 feet.
Btw, if we considered our oceans as part of the average global temperatures- then Earth would have an average temperature of about 3-4 C, with little change global temperature in centuries to thousands of years.
With this choice, Earth is being about 1 C cooler then the blackbody would indicate it should be without clouds- by what chance does that happen?.
But strangely this would about right, since for last 10 million years we have living in cooler period.
But Venus, as indicated by it’s heat capacity, -and if being mostly warmed by the sun- then Venus in it’s daily period should have change in it’s temperature within the range of 2 to 8 C.
Or different way to say this, if average temperature changed was less than 2 C, then Venus would probably be heated from it’s internal heat. I don’t know what it would mean if average temperature change was greater than 8 C. Except heat capacity is wrong, or there more energy coming from sun- more than 2600 watts per square meter.
Or perhaps it could indicate massively catastrophic global cooling or warming
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Comment on Stratospheric uncertainty by Pekka Pirilä
Edim,
There’s no significant change in the understanding of climate change or global warming which continue to be valid expressions (while CAGW is just a concept invented by skeptics to use as they like and in a way that does not reflect main stream views).
The concept of “ignorance of experts” is far too simplistic to be useful as such. I’m sure that you have trust in many experts and use their services even when you have some doubts. You choose to really apply the concept only when that fits your prejudices or hopes. You turn suddenly to the mode that you consider yourself the real expert who has the knowledge to dismiss a large scientific community. That’s hypocritical.
Feynman was a physicist in search of new fundamental theories. That’s a very special quest and that’s a very different quest from using the existing science to get the estimate that best describes scientific understanding. I have worked as theoretical scientist myself and I have read papers written by Feynman. Having some understanding of that world I understand why Feynman expressed himself like that, but I see also how terribly his words have been misused by those who oppose science and promote anti-science attitudes while they claim to speak for more correct science.
There are always false experts and even the best experts may err or be overconfident. Therefore it’s right to not have blind trust in people stated to be experts. That far you are likely to go also in more practical cases. Ignoring the experts is another thing and most certainly just stupid as a general guideline in the present day complex world.
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Comment on Week in review 12/15/12 by manacker
Judith Curry
I like Bill Clinton’s ‘climate hero’ a lot more than I like Al Gore’s climate heroes.
(Except when it came to sexual flings) Bill Clinton’s judgment was always much better than that of Al Gore – that’s why Bill Clinton became President for two terms (and Al Gore never did).
Max
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Comment on Week in review 12/8/12 by Doug Cotton
Lolwot – give them a chance! They only say half of it isn’t true. In the next one after that they will say only a quarter of it is true, etc until, in the limit, they will come to the real truth of the matter.. You’re jumping the gun. It’s called “face saving.”
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Comment on Week in review 12/15/12 by Joe's World {Progressive Evolution}
Judith,
Scientists through bad teaching practices have lost one hugely important ability…The ability to focus on the why and how each process in planetary science actually works.
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Comment on Week in review 12/15/12 by phatboy
…the ivory tower principle
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Comment on Week in review 12/15/12 by manacker
Judith Curry
To the resignation of NOAA head, Jane Lubchenco:
It’s nice when you can write your own performance summary as you leave a job – it will always sound much better than one written by someone else.
Max
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Comment on Week in review 12/15/12 by Paul Matthews
“The extreme overconfidence of many of their conclusions is bewildering.”
Indeed. I registered as an IPCC reviewer and sent in the following few comments on the SPM in time for the Nov 30 deadline. It will be interesting to see whether they are acted on when the final version comes out.
p2 line 36-39 This statement about stronger confidence of ‘unprecedented’ changes is not supported by the evidence. In fact there is less confidence in the paleo data, see for example the paper by statisticians McShane and Wyner (“proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series”). See sec 5.3.5.2 on limitations and uncertainties.
p3 Some acknowledgement needs to be made here of the slowing of warming over the last 15 years or so.
p5 line 32 Misleading claim. Rutgers GSL data shows winter snow cover has not decreased.
p6 line 46 The statement of ‘high confidence’ in ‘inconsistent’ changes is scientifically meaningless and should be removed.
p7 line 22 Sec 3 and 4 are misleading because they make no mention of natural climate variation.
p20 Fig SPM1c is cherrypicked data (March April only), is misleadingly presented as an ‘anomaly’ and despite this does not even support the claim on page 5 of a significant reduction.
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