Your comment is #663 at the <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/the-bore-hole/comment-page-14/#comments" rel="nofollow">Bore Hole</a>. I suspect the reason it's there is not simply because it states a skeptical viewpoint but because it's very general and can't be answered briefly. I think if you had made a very specific criticism regarding an element in the current thread, it would have been posted in the thread, but that's just my guess.
Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Fred Moolten
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by timg56
I have a question.
If the range of the error bar is 0.8 and the prediction is for 0.2, what good is the predictive quality of the model?
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by manacker
Chris,
It is difficult for me to tell whether you are simply misinformed or are purposely fabricating a story in defense of Hansen’s failed forecast.
The Hansen 1988 forecast to which I am referring is:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf
Check Figure 3 (this is the graph, which I posted earlier – but will post again):
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2537/5738998081_b3b3e55049_b.jpg
Hansen’s 1988 study stipulated:
Scenario A assumes that growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the 1970s and 1980s will continue indefinitely; the assumed annual growth rate averages about 1.5% of current emissions, so that the net greenhouse forcing increases exponentially.
Scenario B has decreasing trace gas growth rates, such that the annual increase of the greenhouse climate forcing remains approximately constant at the present level.
Scenario C drastically reduces trace gas growth between 1990 and 2000 such that the greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000.
Based on CDIAC data, the actual CO2 emission growth rate increased from 1.5% in the 1970s and 1980s to 1.7% from 1988 to today, so the actual rate of increase was actually around 13% greater than that assumed by Hansen for Scenario A.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2008.ems
Obviously, Scenarios B and C are way off the mark.
The problem is that Hansen’s Scenario A grossly overestimated the GH warming that would result, very likely because he used a climate sensitivity estimate that was high by a factor of 2 or more..
Actual warming turned out to be the same as Hansen’s Scenario C, based on the complete shut down of GHG emissions in 2000 ” such that the greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000”. But this did not happen, did it?
You can wiggle and squirm all you want to Chris, but all-in-all it was a forecast that turned out to be grossly exaggerated (like all of Hansen’s “predictions”).
Max
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Rob Starkey
Fred- I suppose it would take a long nonsense explanation of why it makes sense to average the results of models of unknown quality of have faith in believing models that have not on not been shown to be accurate, but appear to be inaccurate.
Far more general questions supporting gavin’s view are posted. I challenge you to find anyone who understands modeling and is not an AGW advocate to support believing the implementation of policies based on the current GCM’s
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Comment on Solar discussion thread II by Markus Fitzhenry.
Anteros,
Does Richard mean, if the information is not in the peer reviewed material submitted, the scientific method of the IPCC is rigorous enough to deal with partial arguments?
Henrik Svensmark would probably be the bloke who has the answer for Richard Betts. But why should he put his science into an international politic seeking to influence policy? Wouldn’t be an influence for me.
Should sceptical scientists even consider Richards request?
Richard asks “is the effect of galactic cosmic rays large enough to influence”, is that really a question for IPCC to be asking now, rather than a decade ago?
Or, is the phenomenon of energy flow through our galaxy, and other major effects on our climate, only now receiving due consideration because the consensus of co2 radiative forcing as the main cause of climate change, is now recognised as unsustainable in the consequential science community?
Go figure.
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Comment on Slaying a greenhouse dragon by Joel Shore
Doug Cotton says:
The guts of what Johnson actually proves computationally (though I doubt she would follow the mathematics) is that spontaneous radiation coming from the atmosphere is not converted to thermal energy when it meets a significantly warmer surface.
That is simply a falsehood…Johnson does not prove anything. You can’t prove anything by computation about the physical universe. You can only prove that the results follow from your assumptions. If your assumptions are nonsense, that means the results will likely be too.
I have done experiments which confirm for me the truth of this. So too has Prof Nasif Nahle in September last year when he showed the atmosphere cools faster than the surface at night.
Frankly, neither of you has an ounce of credibility, showing an inability to even get simple things right. And, you expect us to believe either of you knows how to conduct a rigorous experiment and that your experimental results should overthrow a century of physics?
My 50 years of physics tells me it is right.
According to what I have seen you advertise elsewnere, you have just a B.Sc. in physics….and it is unclear what sort of career you have had in physics. (You went on to get a higher degree in business administration. You know how the saying goes: “Those who can do, those who can’t teach, and those who can’t teach administrate.” Even for some whom this doesn’t apply to it has been my experience that for many of them, a degree in business administration can be equivalent to getting a lobotomy in terms of hampering their abilities to think rationally.)
Never before the days of the IPCC et al was there anything in physics textbooks claiming that thermal energy can in this way be transferred from a cool body to a significantly warmer body.
That is just prove-able nonsense. For example, my copy of Serway from 1983 says
A body radiates and also absorbs electromagnetic radiation at rates given by Eq. 17.11 [the Stefan-Boltzmann Eq.]. If this were not the case, a body would eventually radiate all of its internal energy and its temperature would reach absolute zero. The energy that the body absorbs comes from the surroundings, which also emit radiant energy. If the body is at a temperature T and its surroundings are at a temperature T_0, the net power gained (or lost) as a result of radiation is given by
P_net = sigma*A*(T^4 – T_0^4) (17.12)
When a body is in equilibrium with its surroundings, it radiates and absorbs energy at the same rate, and so its temperature remains constant. When a body is hotter than its surroundings, it radiates more energy than it absorbs, and so cools.
Nothing in there about thermal radiation from a colder body not being absorbed by a warmer body.
No one has produced an experiment showing any backradiation actually warming anything. They can’t, because it doesn’t, if it even exists to anywhere near the extent claimed.
A hundred years of use of the accepted equations by scientists and engineers shows this claim to be nonsense.
Johnson has brilliantly derived a computational explanation of the UV catastrophe without resorting to a “particle” nature of radiation (just using a wave nature) and, in my view, yes he does deserve a Nobel Prize for advancing physics in this way and solving a problem that baffled even Einstein.
Some statements are so silly that it is just breathtaking to see them made. Next, perhaps we ought to start putting Nobel Prizes in Crackerjacks boxes. Johnson hasn’t solved anything. His notion can’t explain the photoelectric effect. His overturning of statistical physics with a new notion can’t explain the huge amount of stuff that has been explained by statistical physics.
It is absolute garbage to imply that Johnson has overturned 100 years of physics theory.
Yes, he has. And, he proposes to replace it with nonsense that hardly explains anything of what the 100 years of physics has explained. The fact that people like you are embracing such crackpot notions just shows how desperate and anti-scientific some of the “AGW skeptic” movement has become.
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by manacker
Rob and Fred
I suspect (unlike Fred) that the real reason your question was censored out by Gavin is that it raised embarrassing questions, which he was unable to either answer or brush aside (my experience on this site).
The problem is that Gavin has been playing around with models so long that he has forgotten that they are simply multi-million dollar extensions of the old slide rule and has started to actually believe them.
The old “GIGO” rule still applies.
Max
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Girma
Chris Ho-Stuart
FAR too short a time to look for a long period oscillation like that — ESPECIALLY in the absence of any physical theory that would explain such a thing or give a prior expectation of periods
I thought that was explained in Knight et al (http://bit.ly/nfQr92 ):
The AMO is a genuine quasi-periodic cycle of internal climate variability persisting for many centuries, and is related to variability in the oceanic thermohaline circulation (THC).
Chris:
The idea of a very long term fixed 0.06 C/decade rise is really bizarre. It can’t be long term on the scale of millennia
I agree. It cannot be fixed. But for the period since 1850s this is a fixed straight line, because that is what the data shows. Although the trend line for the period since 1850s is a straight line, in a longer time scale, it is part of a very long curve that contains the Little Ice Age, Medieval Climatic Optimum, Holocene Maximum, etc.
Why do “climate scientists” at Realclimate choose the starting year for trend calculation from the 1970s or 1980s?
If I start trend calculation starting from year 1910, here is how my projection would be wrong => http://bit.ly/w5P3c9
That is what might happen to the current projection of “climate scientists” at Realclimate.
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Comment on Solar discussion thread II by David Wojick
When the solar page count equals the CO2 page count we will be halfway home. Objective discussion will begin.
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by manacker
Chris
<em>"Statistical test for significance?"</em>
Huh?
What kind of double-talk is that?
Girma is showing you <em>actual physical observations</em> (warts and all) of the <em>globally and annually average land and sea surface temperature anomaly</em> over time.
Is this <em>"statistically significant"</em>?
You bet it is.
And it shows multi-decadal cycles of warming and slight cooling of about 30 years each with an amplitude of around +/- 0.25C, like a sine curve on a tilted axis with an overall warming trend of around 0.6C per century.
Max
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Jim Cripwell
Max you write “The old “GIGO” rule still applies.”
Sarc on. Hasn’t anyone told you that the proponents of CAGW have redefined GIGO. It now means Garbage in, Gospel out. Sarc off.
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Comment on Solar discussion thread II by Peter Davies
This topic and the comments are most interesting and indicative of way too much focus being placed on anthropic CO2 and way too much neglect of solar and other influences in climate research over the past 20 years.
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Comment on Solar discussion thread II by J. Seifert
This is really true…..
especially studying the Earth’s orbit, which the IPCC is seeking to
suppress ……. by collution of AGW-activists……by declaring
there were no orbital forcing on a centennial scale….. pointing to only 2-D Keplerian parameters and keeping silent of other orbital processes, suppressing Libration, osculation, perturbation and “J_2-motions” of
the orbit trajectory…..
JS
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Chris Ho-Stuart
Girma, Knight et al do it right.
They DO look over a much longer time; look at figure 2 of the paper. That’s what needs to be done if you are testing ideas about effects with a long period. Just eyeballing 150 years of instrument record can only give weak support to the hypothesis; the look at longer periods of time is essential.
Note also that their model is “quasi-periodic”. It is not a simple sine wave with a definite period. It is rather shows a characteristic time scale for changes, but shifts up and down somewhat chaotically at that scale. That’s pretty standard for these kinds of effect.
Finally, although you’ve agreed that the long term underlying linear line is unrealistic, you use it crucially for “predicting” or “falsifying” your supposed model into the future. You need to look at tools for identifying a periodic (or quasiperiodic) signal on top of a base trend that is NOT linear; because there’s a heck of a lot more going on with climate that you can capture on such scales with one line a sine wave. There ARE such tools, but as I’ve said, you really need a professional statistician to deal with that. It’s not trivial. I just work at the level of basic significance tests for regression lines and so on, which are okay as a ball park starting point but not really up to a proper hypothesis test.
I doubt any professional statistician would be much interested in how you’ve made your proposal, especially as there is no physical basis whatsoever being proposed which could be the basis of a test of prediction against data.
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Jim Cripwell
Chris, you write “You test that physical theory against the data. That’s how science works.”
Yes and no. We have not got that far yet. All we have, and all Girma shows, is ALL the data plotted on one graph. If there was more data, it would be plotted. What the data shows is that temperatures have been rising linearly since the data started. On top of this linear trend is some sort of sine wave. So far as I am aware no-one has any idea why this is happening. So there is no theory to explain the data. All we know is that there are factors which affect temperature, and which have produced the observed results. What these factors are is unknown. Yes, people have ideas what they might be, but there is no coherent theory to explain the data.
However, what the data clearly shows is that there is no CO2 signature, as hypothesised by the proponenst fo CAGW. If there was a CO2 signal, then by now the observed temperatures would be outside the +/- 0.25 limits; on the high side. This has not happened; this is Trenbeth’s “missing heat”. this is what the CAGW hypothesis completely fails to explain.
Of course this trend has not been going on for millenia. Nor will it last for millinia into the future. There are clearly long term factors which affect temperature, and which for the moment are not having any effect.
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Comment on Solar discussion thread II by DocMartyn
There appear to be a number of processes that have 11, 22 or 33 episodity; all solar or harmonics of solar cycles.
One would think the cause and effect would be easy to spot; but so far not really the case.
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Comment on Consensus or not (?) by stefanthedenier
@ Vaughan Pratt, comparing ”climatologists” with the honest section of the scientific community is same as comparing the cleanliness of eyes with the cleanliness of as-holes… It is a gross insult, to compare the scientific community with climatologists. Stop doing that!!!
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Comment on Solar discussion thread II by capt. dallas
poker guy, I think he will be rethinking, but if it is greater than 0.25 C, 1 C would take a looong time. There is only 1 Wm-2 change at the TOA with only about 0.7Wm-2 making it through, which would only average 0.175Wm-2 impact or 0.1% change at the surface. Only a tenth of a percent, but that tenth would produce 0.4% change in the tropics at noon. Not much, but enough to mess with circulation patterns. I think it can produce .25C change if it the minimum is long enough, just by moving the intertropical convection zones a degree closer the the equator.
Small average changes don’t do much, small unbalanced changes can do a lot. I am looking at the long term impact of milliwatt changes, which given enough time, add up. Non-linear dynamics is pretty interesting.
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Girma
For example. Girma shows HadCrut3 from 1850 to 2011 inclusive.
I calculate the trend to be 0.45 C/century. I don’t think Girma is doing any calculations at all. His 0.6 per century is way off what his graph shows.
You cannot arbitrarily pick the beginning and end years in a trend calculation of data that shows oscillation. The start and end years must be at the same stage of the oscillation cycle. We know that the 1880s where global mean temperature peaks. We also know that the 2000s were global mean temperature peaks. As a result, these two years may be used as start and end points in calculating the global warming trend :
Graph => http://bit.ly/xxMj6K
Data (0.06 deg C per decade warming) => http://bit.ly/wav7fq
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Comment on Trends, change points & hypotheses by Chris Ho-Stuart
Manaker says:
It is difficult for me to tell whether you are simply misinformed or are purposely fabricating a story in defense of Hansen’s failed forecast.
I’m taking available data, and doing my own calculations, and show the results for anyone to check or repeat. I get the same result as is used in various published work looking back at the old 1988 model.
The actual forcings which turn out are a bit less than scenario B and a lot less than scenario A.
Why do you think otherwise? I think it is because you are not even looking at what Hansen et al actually calculate.
They are climate modelers. Their input to the climate model is an atmospheric composition. They don’t try to calculate from emissions; but they propose rates of increase of atmospheric composition based on models of rates of emission increase.
I compared the model input (which is an atmospheric composition in ppm for each year) with the actual composition. That’s the correct way to check which scenario is closed to actual; reality is a bit less than scenario B and a lot less than scenario A.
Your objection appears to be based on criticizing predictions of atmospheric composition based on emissions. That’s a level of indirection you would do well to avoid if you are wanting to check the skill of the climate modeling back then.
But hey. Even if you do use emissions as a guide rather than the actual model input, your description of that data is still just wrong. There was a major reduction in the rate at which emissions increased around the 1990s before emissions took off again this century.
That is also reflected with a dip in the rate of atmospheric increase in the 1990s, as I mention before.
I’m not making anything up here or trying to fabricate a story. You’ve cited some emissions data, but have you actually done any calculations with it? Where are you getting your descriptions of trends? It certainly doesn’t match the actual data you are linking.
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