Vintage December 9, 2012 at 3:52 pm:

> [M]y main goal is not to predict climate, or even explain it, but only to describe the multidecadal part of HadCRUT3. Explanations enter only as a motivation for descriptions that are at least consistent with the known physics and that are analytic by virtue of belonging to the class of functions containing the constant functions and closed under linear combination, exponentials, logs, and sines. The multidecadal part seems to lend itself it to simple such descriptions.

http://judithcurry.com/2012/12/04/multidecadal-climate-to-within-a-millikelvin/#comment-275240

Our emphasis.

oneuniverse, I’ll note you didn’t address a major point I made in my comment. You specifically told me to do something that was illogical. I pointed this out; you responded by saying nothing. You told me I should hold consistent standards yet you are failing to meet your own. Instead, you say:

In any case, I doubt that Professor Pratt would want you to misrepresent him as you did, however generous your intentions.

There is no functional difference between my description of Pratt’s argument and his actual argument. The differences were minor. Instead of saying “Prove me wrong,” he said, “Prove you have a better answer.” Instead of saying, “I’m right” he said, “My answer is best.” It’s the exact same fallacious logical structure.

It’s not as though anyone reading the exchange would have been mislead by my remarks. The parallels were obvious, and I quoted Pratt’s words so they were easy to examine. Unless you can show some way in which my description’s inaccuracy would create a problem, I can’t say I’m concerned about it. So please, explain:

In fact, he didn’t say it at all, either explicitly or implicitly.

What functional difference is there between my description of Pratt’s words and his actual words? How is the logical structure of his argument any different than I portrayed? You say it is, but you’ve given no explanation or reason.

Thanks Brandon – as you point out, your answer to my question was in your following comment, in which you back-track from the certainty of “You see, I am not capable of self-deception.” by adding “I accept the possibility I am just so good at fooling myself I haven’t noticed.”

Why in the world would you portray this as backtracking? That is like saying it’s backtracking if a scientist says, “Our data shows X. Issues Y and Z may change that.” Immediately offering additional statements to clarify things isn’t backtracking. It’s clarifying things.

You’re misrepresenting a simple clarification as a change in position. You didn’t admit the standard you demanded I follow was illogical. You didn’t admit any fault in failing to see the answer to your question or in using a nonsensical premise for said question. And yet you’re the one who said:

Be consistent in applying your judgements, or, preferrably, admit your error(s)

if they employ meteorologist for the developing countries, would be a noble move. BUT, if they send there ”climatologist” as a mouthpiece for IPCC; it can only do harm to the world as a whole. Meteorologist are good in predicting the weather in advance for few days, give them credit; even for 4-5 months regarding the effect from El Nino / La Nina.

BUT, getting ”climatologist” to brainwash the ignorant in those countries b] to send fabricated informations from the developing countries to the western countries… is same as they are already sending bad news constantly from the polar caps – they are good at falsifying / lying./ cherry-picking for the media / public

For the public is cheaper to believe them, than to go regularly and check for themselves… bad climate news from the developing countries will increase the con / for brainwashing the fakes and more weapons fore the Warmist

Now remember it was you al-a-Putin up a golden calf, today it has grown up to become the bronze bull you got down on wall street. Or was it, Pig Street? Still hard to say today.

Have we passed peak climate-BS yet? :)

Pratt had no problem with his forecast of +4 C by 2100 being called a forecast, early on in this thread. I guess the beating his credibility has taken since has chastened his boldness.

Mark B (number 2) | December 5, 2012 at 8:24 am | Reply

Dr Pratt,
This is a quote from your paper:
“With either dataset, the model forecasts a 4 C rise for 2100?

Does this mean a rise from the current temperature (2012) or from the vague “pre industrial” value. (If it is the latter, can you please say what the temperature is assumed to be at the moment, on the same scale?)
Furthermore, I don’t see any decimal point with zeroes after it, just “4C”, Does this mean that you cannot actually predict the future temperature to an accuracy of 0.001 degrees C (1 millikelvin)?

Also do you have a temperature change prediction for the next 10 years?

manacker | December 5, 2012 at 11:15 am | Reply

Mark B

Assume that Vaughan Pratt will answer your specific question regarding the 4C warming forecast to 2100.

But let’s assume for now this refers to the warming from today and do a quick “sanity check”.

We have 88 years to go, so that means an average decadal warming rate for the rest of this century of 0.45C per decade. This sounds pretty high to me (three times what it was during the late or early-20th century warming cycle). But maybe that’s what you get from an exponential curve.

But how realistic is this projected warming?

Let’s assume that other anthropogenic forcing beside CO2 (aerosols, other GHGs) will cancel each other out, as IPCC estimates was the case in the past.

Using the IPCC mean 2xCO2 climate sensitivity of 3.2C (and assuming there will be as much warming “in the pipeline” in 2100 as there is today, this means we would have to reach a CO2 level of 932 ppmv CO2 by 2100 to reach a warming of 4C (all other things being equal, of course).

This is unrealistic, since WEC 2010 estimates tell us there are just enough total optimistically inferred fossil fuels to reach around 1030 ppmv when they are all gone.

Let’s assume, on the other hand, that Dr. Pratt is referring to 4C warming since industrialization started (a pretty arbitrary figure, as you point out, but a concept that is often cited). On this basis, there has been ~0,8C warming to date, leaving 3.2C from today to year 2100.

Using the IPCC climate sensitivity of 3.2C, the CO2 level by 2100 would need to double by 2100, from today’s 392 to 784 ppmv, to reach this warming (the high side IPCC “scenario and storyline”A2 is at this level, with estimated warming of 3.4C above the 1980-1999 average, or ~3.2C above today’s temperature).

So, on this basis, Dr. Pratt’s estimate would agree with the high side estimate of IPCC.

I’d question the realism of this “high side” estimate by IPCC, since it assumes that the exponential rate of increase in CO2 concentration will jump from the current rate of 0.5% per year to 0.74%per year, despite a projected major slowdown in human population growth rate.

But I guess that only shows that you can demonstrate anything with statistics.

Max

Vaughan Pratt | December 5, 2012 at 3:29 pm | Reply

Furthermore, I don’t see any decimal point with zeroes after it, just “4C”, Does this mean that you cannot actually predict the future temperature to an accuracy of 0.001 degrees C (1 millikelvin)?

It depends on whether you’re predicting average temperature for one year such as 2097 or one decade such as the 2090?s or twenty years. SAW + AGW can be evaluated to ten decimal places at any given femtosecond in time. But that’s no good for a forecast because you have to add SOL and DEC from Figure 11. Double their joint standard deviation and you get a reasonable figure for the uncertainty of a prediction in any given year. For any given decade the uncertainty decreases, but I wouldn’t want to forecast to two decimal digits so far ahead.

But even one digit isn’t that reliable because of unknowns like those Max refers to.

And I see that Dr Pratt has not found the wherewithal to reply to this:

John S. | January 2, 2013 at 7:13 pm |

Time and again, your response seizes upon the incidental, while ignoring the substantive.

Any competent signal analyst, not just Parzen, is keenly aware that an exact Fourier decomposition of ANY bounded series of N real-valued data points consists of N complex-valued coefficients specifying the amplitude and phase of a HARMONIC series of sinusoids. The analysis tacitly ASSUMES an N-periodicity to the data, which assumption is never satisfied by real-world geophysical signals with a continuous power density spectrum. If such a signal is properly recorded over DIFFERENT record lengths, the series of harmonics changes accordingly. Thus the F. decomposition is not unique, nor is it a CONSISTENT estimator of the inherent signal characteristics. As the record length is varied, it is particularly the periodicity of the lowest-order coefficients that changes most dramatically. This analytic fact has nothing to do with signal-to-noise ratios, which your naive analysis of 161 (not 3000) yearly averages of HADCRUT3 is incapable in principle of revealing. Your fanciful SAW component is as much an artifact of nakedly assumed exponential trend as it is of record length.
.
As a final thought here, I can only suggest that terpsichorean skill is never a substitute for analytic competence.

Chewbacca returns to his old ways:

> You specifically told me to do something that was illogical.

That indefinite description assumes what is being contested. As such, this is a fallacy. It begs the question.

***

Let’s repeat what was being contested in oneuniverse’s admonition, instead of hiding under indefinite description like Chewbacca’s doing (yet again):

> Be consistent in applying your judgements, or, preferrably, admit your error(s), instead of excusing them by saying that what Professor Pratt said was actually worse [...]

In that sentence, the verb “excusing” does not mean “to apologize”, which is the meaning that Chewbacca’s injecting for him to say:

> How do you think admitting and excusing something is mutually exclusive? Excusing something (almost?) always requires admitting it first.

***

We can surmise that such parsomatic trick have a better success rate when they are coupled with indefinite descriptions.

We can confirm that quotes kills gaslighting.

***

Common sense should be enough to realize that one either apologizes or tries to justify one’s action. Not that it’s impossible to do both. The justification simply diminishes the apology.

But if common sense ain’t enough, here’s one of my favorite philosopher about excuses:

In general, the situation is one where someone is accused of having done something, or (if that will keep it any cleaner) where someone is said to have done something which is bad, wrong, inept, unwelcome, or in some other of the numerous possible ways untoward. Thereupon he, or someone on his behalf, will try to defend his conduct or to get him out of it.

One way of going about this is to admit flatly that he, X, did do that very thing, A, but to argue that it was a good thing, or the right or sensible thing, or a permissible thing to do, either in general or at least in the special circumstances of the occasion. To take this line is to justify the action, to give reason for doing it: not to say, to brazen it out, to glory in it, or the like.

A different way of going about it is to admit that it wasn’t a good thing to have done, but to argue that it is not quite fair or correct to say baldly ‘X did A’. We may say it isn’t fair just to say X did it; perhaps he was under somebody’s influence, or was nudged. Or, it isn’t fair to say baldly he did A; it may have been partly accidental, or an unintentional slip. Or, it isn’t fair to say he did simply A — he was really doing something quite different and A was only incidental, or he was looking at the whole thing quite differently. Naturally these arguments can be combined or overlap or run into each other.

In the one defence, briefly, we accept responsibility but deny that it was bad: in the other, we admit that it was bad but don’t accept full, or even any, responsibility.

http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/1309/1/plea.html

***

We hope that Chewbacca will say that J. L. Austin does not make sense.

Thanks Tom. Most try to by spreading the truth, or a close approximation.

According to Latimer Alder even the IPCC does that. But they won’t touch Quantum mechanics despite that it might give a closer approximation.

Another oldie but goodie:

MattStat/MatthewRMarler | December 4, 2012 at 2:27 pm | Reply

This is the most recent of 2 decades worth of work trying to identify periodic filters and decay rates that can smooth the observed trend and get a relatively straightforward function of CO2 as a result. This is either the Holy Grail or else a carefully constructed flimsy imitation. That is: if this is the signal of CO2, you have constructed the best filters to reveal it; if this is not the signal of CO2, you have constructed the best filters to reveal something conforming to someone’s expectations.

Whether you have found the signal of CO2 is as uncertain as with all the other phnomenological model fitting efforts.

The best test of models is how well they are matched by future data. What is your model for the data collected after the last of the data used in estimating model parameters? What is your model for the next 30 years, say possibly 3 models as Hansen did for 3 realistic CO2 scenarios?

What is your estimate of the transient climate effect, say a doubling of CO2 over a span of 70 years?

There is an apparent period of 1000 years or so, that produced the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm period, etc. That is, it is “apparent” to some. If you subtract out the best estimate of that periodic function, how much remains to be accounted for by CO2?

Remember to smile, wink and chuckle when you say “millikelvin accuracy” and “99.98%” aloud.

Yes, it is always the power of One, over zeros

Don Montford,

Time and again, your response seizes upon the incidental, while ignoring the substantive.

Yes. That sums up what he does when asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, or when something is explained to him that he doesn’t want to admit he didn’t know.

What you so accurately describe is one of Pratt’s commonly used methods of deception, misrepresentation, avoidance, obfuscation.

I couldn’t believe at first that an ‘Emeritus Professor at prestigious university Stanford’ would do such a thing. Not just once, but frequently. But he has demonstrated many many times in response to my comments on previous threads.

He is basically dishonest and should not be trusted on anything he says.

Time and again, Stanford Emeritus Professor Vaughan Pratt’s response seizes upon the incidental, while ignoring the substantive.

It’s pretty warm down under right now. The Australian weather bureau has had to add a new colour contour to their maps recently: ” deep purple and pink — to mark out areas experiencing peaks above 122 deg F (50 degC)”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9787084/Australian-weather-bureau-introduces-new-colours-for-heatwave.html

‘Australia had its hottest day on record Monday with a nationwide average of 40.33degC, narrowly breaking a 1972 record of 40.17degC. Tuesday was the third hottest day at 40.11degC. Four of Australia’s hottest 10 days on record have been in 2013.

“There’s little doubt that this is a very, very extreme heat wave event,” said David Jones, manager of climate monitoring and prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology.

“If you look at its extent, its duration, its intensity, it is arguably the most significant in Australia’s history,” he added.

Arguably it is not much different to the 1970′s heat wave. These are fairly rare events and it doesn’t seem surprising to me that the hottest days occur in extreme conditions that result from an unusual combination of meterological conditions. It might be noted that Australia’s ‘history’ in this regard extends only to the 1950′s – earlier records not being reliable enough.

Yet the world is not warming again last year and we are instead supposed to make something of unusual regional conditions that owe much to what is simply weather. So we had the tail end of a large La Nina last year. We are likely to get another this year. It is part of the system in decadal (and longer) changes in the frequency and intensity of ENSO. The world is not warming for a decade or three more at least.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703

‘Clicking on the prediction for 5pm AEDT next Monday, a Tasmania-sized deep purple opens up over South Australia – implying 50 degrees or above.

Aaron Coutts-Smith, the bureau’s NSW head of climate monitoring, though, cautioned that the 50-degree reading is the result of just one of the bureau’s models. “The indications are, from the South Australian office, that we are not looking at getting any where near that (50 degree level).”‘

At least try to understand the difference bewteeen models and reality.

Quaaludes are drugs. P-i-l-l-s (the spam filter strikes again) that make you feel warm, relaxed, and sleepy.

Quatloos are the monetary unit used on the planet Triskelon in the fictional Star Trek universe.

Write that down.

“the fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;”

The widely held opinion here is that climate science is a fraud.

Timely advice from Mr Russell.

Beth Cooper

“… it tolls for thee.” but I did not want to be hurtful nor predictive, so its “me”.

I hear climatological alarms in the far distance and ask: why?

Maybe the owl is asking a climatologist: “Who do you think you are?” one wing pointing to hubris and the other wing to charlatanism.

in any case, we need to make do with what we have. To me that means: adapt.