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Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Robert I Ellison

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‘Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL037022/abstract

You could try going to the source of peer reviewed science. Or is this a little too radical?


Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Beth Cooper

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Errata (as usual.) ‘Mathbabe’ ‘know’ ‘paradigm’ (perhaps others)

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Jim D

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Last sentence in the same paper. Maybe you didn’t read it through.
“If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability [Kravtsov and Spannagle, 2008].”

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Robert I Ellison

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‘However, the nature of these past shifts in climate state suggests the possibility of near constant temperature lasting a decade or more into
the future must at least be entertained. The apparent lack of a proximate cause behind the halt in warming post 2001/02 challenges our understanding of the climate system, specifically the physical reasoning and causal links between longer time-scale modes of internal climate variability and the impact of such modes upon global temperature.
Fortunately, climate science is rapidly developing the tools to meet this challenge, as in the near future it will be possible to attribute cause and effect in decadal-scale climate variability within the context of a seamless climate forecast system [Palmer et al., 2008]. Doing so is vital, as the future evolution of the global mean temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum due entirely to internal variability that lie well outside the envelope of a steadily increasing global mean temperature.‘ My emphasis.

The penultimate paragraph. I don’t know what you make of this Jim – but it is the essence of dynamical sysyems in that they exhibit abrupt and non-linear change. I quote it because it is both right and challenges linear climate wisdom. Climate may well be warmer, it may not change or it cool. All bases covered? Can’t help it – it is the way of deterministic chaos grasshopper. If we had some proper probabilistic forecasting – we might be able to estimate the probability of various outcomes. As we don’t we can’t. So sad too bad.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by tempterrain

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Chief,

I see you are off on your hobby horse again. Yes we know that its not possible to predict the weather in NY City on any given day many decades from now. We knew that before. We also know that the prediction of future climate can’t be as exact as we would like. But not knowing everything isn’t the same as knowing nothing.

The comment below is a bit rich from one who doesn’t accept most peer reviewed work on the AGW question.

“Can’t beat expert, peer reviewed opinion. Although a lot of people seem capable of ignoring it.”

Yes they do. And others seem quite capable of distorting it to suit their own purpose too.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Herman Alexander Pope

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lolwot Snow fall in the Northern Hemisphere is at record highs. They just had snow in the Middle East Countries. It snows more when oceans are warm and the Arctic is open. That is now. Pay attention to the actual data. The snowfall started early and will last long during this snow season.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Peter Lang

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Max_OK,

they may seem nice to you, but you may not be a very good judge of character. the question is can they be trusted.

Read Lewandowski’s three articles in the list of 13 articles here:
https://theconversation.edu.au/pages/clearing-up-the-climate-debate. E=What do you think of this title: “The false, the confused and the mendacious …? Soes that look like a nice guy to you. Does it suggest he is an objective scientist? Of course you don’t have to go too far to find out how corrupt is his research and how he is up to his ears in conspiracy theories with John Cook and what’s his name from SkepticalScience. He’s also under investigation for breach of UWA academic integrity. That’s the sort of person you feel we can trust, eh?

Then there is Will Steffen (Head of the ‘Independent’ Climate Institute which was set up by the Labor Government and funded to give the government ‘independent’ scientific advice on catastrophic cimatre change) who briefed and misled the Join Parliamentary Committee on Climate Change – resulting in Australia getting a carbon tax and ETS.

Then there is Professor Garnaut, ex senior economic advisor in Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s Office. Garnaut is as partisan as they come. The Labor government appointed him to do ‘independent’ modelling for the Australian ETS. Guess what he advised? Yep, we need to implement the Labor Party’s policy of an ETS. And he exaggerated the impacts and said Australia must implement an ETS because if we don’t sea level will rise 1.1. m by 2100, the Murray Darling Basin will dry up, there will be wild fires that will destitute us, the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu National Park will be ruined and Australian Tourism will be severely damaged. So Max-OK, are these the sort of people you think are ‘nice guys’ and therefore should be trusted?

What about the Australian Treasury. Under the thumb of the Labor Treasurer they had to tell the government what it wanted to hear, otherwise senior bureaucrats would lose their jobs. So they did what was wanted. As justification for their modelling they said global CO2 concentrations would reach 1500 ppm by 2100 and temperatures would increase 7 C if we don’t act and legislate the Labor-Green alliances’ policy; i.e. a Carbon Tax and ETS. Do you still think these are the sort of guys we should trust, Max_OK?

Therefore, Max_ I think you trust people who stroke your ego and tell you what you want to hear. You are certainly not objective. And, therefore, you cannot be trusted either, and your opinion is worthless.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Herman Alexander Pope

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A proper robust solution is to recognize that climate data is well inside the bounds of the last ten thousand years and look for an energy plan that includes all the options that are cost effective and throw away the options that are not cost effective. This includes that we burn fossil fuels of all kinds until they run out and we build nuclear power to help the fossil fuels last longer and to cover for when they do run out. We must get ready for the cooling that always follows a warming. That will come next and a little ice age is not as nice and the nice warm time we are in now.


Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Robert I Ellison

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Peter,

We are back to the nonsense of climate averages. What is clear from the above references from leaders in the field of climate modelling is that numerical methods of climate ‘prediction’ are chaotic. There are no unique solutions. There are multiple and widely divergent solutions for the temperature in NYC decades hence – and there is no particular reason (other than liking a particular solution) for choosing one over another. Thus even if climate evolved smoothly over the decades – it won’t – models most assuredly do not. This I believe is the consensus in the field of climate modelling – the threshold concept you are incapable of comprehending. Don’t feel too bad but it would be better if you stopped peddling this particular distortion arising from your lack of comprehension around the interweb.

‘Sensitive dependence and structural instability are humbling twin properties for chaotic dynamical systems, indicating limits about which kinds of questions are theoretically answerable. They echo other famous limitations on scientist’s expectations, namely the undecidability of some propositions within axiomatic mathematical systems (Gödel’s theorem) and the uncomputability of some algorithms due to excessive size of the calculation.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full#content-block

Probabilistic estimates may be possible but until those arrive we effectively can know nothing about climate decades hence. Some people know less than that as they still think that we can know something from solutions chosen on the basis of ‘a posteriori solution behaviour’.

The world is still not warming for a decade or three more. So sad too bad.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by stefanthedenier

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Joshua | January 10, 2013 at 10:20 pm said: ''Anyone who uses “denier” is clearly calling people Nazis'' that's scraping on the bottom of the beryl.... same as: everybody with mustaches is Hitler or Stalin ==== if you deny that you are a bank robber, or a pedophile => does that make you a Nazi...? ''denying'' any phony GLOBAL warming is honesty. Denying localized warmings as GLOBAL = honesty. Denying that climatic changes have anything to do with the concocted past phony GLOBAL warmings / global coolings is honest science. Believing in LIES, just to be trendy and to fit with the nutters from both camps; is irresponsibility, low moral value / bigotry, and total ignorance ; or just ''frozen brains syndrome''

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by stevepostrel

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Enough with the transparent troll tactics. I quote: “Now the % of the full gamut of “skeptics” who might profit directly from climate “skepticism” might be small, but the influence of those “skeptics” who would profit directly is quite large.” Not a strawman but your direct and unfounded assertion.

Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt

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@DS: 8 variables for Rossander (4 SAW filters) + 0 vars for AGW.

Haven’t you forgotten ToothW (D26), David? How else can Solver pick frequencies for the harmonics?

In his original post at WUWT Rossander wrote, ” I played with a few initial parameters to see what they might do, then fired off Solver with the instruction to modify the parameters below with a goal of maximizing cell U35 (MUL R2).”

Rossander then lists the 12 parameters he authorized Solver to modify. As far as he’s concerned he used 12 parameters.

In hindsight we can use the fact that Solver achieved R2 = 99.992% by setting SAW4 to zero to justify taking control of SAW4 away from Solver and zeroing it manually ourselves. This would bring Rossander’s parameters down to 10. By the rules I’ve been playing by this is fair play.

But since Solver is allowed to set all five amplitudes of the individual harmonics independently, Amp (M26) becomes redundant, that is, these six parameters are not linearly independent. This further brings Rossander’s parameters down to 9, the same number as I’m using.

I don’t see any room for further reducing the count for Rossander’s fit.

But since it’s the same number of parameters as mine, it would now be a tie were it not for the fact that we can break the tie with R2.

Never expecting this sort of competition, I had rounded my parameters to plausibly round numbers without worrying about the fifth digit of R2. Using one extra digit of precision in a couple of the parameters, very small changes to my poster’s parameters brought the 99.990% in my spreadsheet (conservatively reported as 99.98% in the poster) up to 99.997%.

So with the same number of parameters, we have 99.992% against 99.997%.

This sounds better in terms of variance of MRES as a fraction of that of MUL expressed in parts per million instead of percentages. Using AGW we get 3, replacing AGW by additional SAW parameters gives 8. Smaller is better in this case.

Rossander also said No other constraints were applied. That’s evidently incorrect as he appears to have overlooked Solver’s checked-by-default box constraining all otherwise unconstrained variables to be nonnegative. Solver found that the solution could be improved by decreasing SAW4 but when it reached zero Solver had to stop because of the checked box.

Further on Rossander wrote My analysis was trivial, limited and deeply flawed. It had to be so because it was based on no underlying hypothesis about the factors being modeled (other than the ClimSens control value). It was an exercise that took about 15 min and was intended only to illustrate the dangers of over-fitting one’s data.

With more time Rossander would presumably have noticed the oddity about SAW4, diagnosed it, and unchecked the box.

I discussed all this at WUWT three weeks ago. However with over 2000 comments here plus those on WUWT including two each by Rossander and me on this topic I can’t say I blame people for losing track of what everyone’s said in the past five weeks.

One thing that’s been nagging at the back of mind since then is that 2 more parameters (those for SAW4) should have totally nailed it. What would have happened had Rossander unchecked that box?

I tried this just now (I included Amp for old time’s sake) and Solver gave me the following fit.

D26 ToothW 1783.15…
G23 Shift 1 2219.30…
G26 Scale 1 761.44…
H23 Shift 2 4268.41…
H26 Scale 2 598.68…
I23 Shift 3 4550.48…
I26 Scale 3 1271.08…
J23 Shift 4 2741.42…
J26 Scale 4 521.23…
K23 Shift 5 3283.39…
K26 Scale 5 577.08…
M26 Amp 3748.51…

(Paradoxically Solver seems to have sent SAW4 into negative territory only to bring it back out later on. This could well have happened via continuous changes to Shift 4, J23, while J26 was negative. As John S would point out this is more easily understood in terms of the 2D geometry of the complex plane.)

The envelope, please…

R2 = 100.000%

Fourier would have smiled and said “That’s what it should have been.”

In those days mathematicians were mathematicians and didn’t need no stinking computers to see the obvious.

But this also shows how dangerously close 9 parameters are to overfitting. The “3 vs. 8″ outcome would seem to show that although 9 parameters is not completely overfitted it’s in a very tight corner.

For my poster to have even a prayer of being publishable this corner needs to be considerably enlarged. I certainly wouldn’t attempt to publish it as is. Pekka made much the same point in his first reaction to the poster, and I’ve since been mulling over the various ways of addressing this serious concern.

Climate Etc. to the rescue. Thanks to Judith for founding and hosting it.

Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt

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@DS: <i> Wool gathering is usually not associated with any particular goal.</i> Wasn't that Senator Proxmire's rationale for his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award" rel="nofollow">Golden Fleece award</a>, awarded 168 times? Scientists aimlessly gathering wool by fleecing the taxpaying public.

Comment on Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin by Vaughan Pratt

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If future temperatures were to match your modeled values, you would call that a meaningless coincidence, right?

No, I would call that “business as usual.”

When I say that the future is hard to predict I mean that the unusual is hard to predict. Predicting the usual is a no-brainer.

Betting on the odds-on favourite is a no-brainer, but one with little to no money in it. Predicting which of the twenty-to-one starters is going to win has a lot more money in it, but it’s a crap-shoot that in the long run you won’t win unless you’re considerably smarter than your bookie.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Memphis

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Michael
climate-’skeptics’, who believe a range of mutally contradictory (or impossible) things, seem to spend most of their timeback-slapping and high-fiving each other.

So because skeptic A has beliefs which contradict those of skeptic B, that means skepticism is wrong? This moronic meme is seems to be a mainstay of the dumber alarmist faithful.


Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Michael

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Well that mght be the case, but the point was according to Waggy’s take, the ‘sceptics’ should be calling each other on their BS – instead we have a self-congratulatory echo chamber.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Michael

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Memphis,

That would imply that you want newspapers to do a much better job in reporting science.

I agree.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Memphis

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Sceptics do in fact call each other on their BS here. Not as often as calling the mainstream, since the latter is a much bigger and well-funded target.

If you want to see a real self-congratulatory echo-chamber, try RealClimate or Skeptical Science.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Montalbano

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I popped over to Skeptical Science the other day. One of their big themes seems to be denial of the 16-year warming pause.

Comment on Trusting (?) the experts by Montalbano

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Max_OK | January 10, 2013 at 1:45 pm | Reply
I agree that trust[ing] scientists is better than trusting ideologues.

This deftly misses the central dilemma of climate science – that scientists are at the same time also (statist) ideologues to some degree, since they are selected by and work for the state, and labor to reward it.

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