Thursday, July 02, 2009
Hello, Pot? This is the Kettle--You're Black.
Here is the original post at the Warmie website Real Climate which talked about the 2009 Synthesis Report which in turn 'updated' the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued in 2007. The Real Climate coverage of the 2009 Synthesis Report contained this sentence:
Roger Pielke, Sr. thought each of the three so called worsening aspects of climate change was false and he wrote on Anthony Watt's site detailing his reasons for thinking that:
1. Sea level has actually flattened since 2006;
2. There has been no statistically significant warming of the upper ocean since 2003; and,
3. [S]ee the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly from the University of Illinois Cyrosphere Today website. Since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased.
Commenters on Real Climate responded. It was tough to call a winner of that round. For each set of statistics Pielke could marshal, the Warmies had a different set. Part of the problem was with the imprecision of the offending sentence above. The 2009 report updated the latest IPCC report from 2007, but there are a series of IPPC reports going back to 1990. For every recent (i.e., 2 year old) prediction, the Real Climate writers were able to show older predictions which were indeed less than the data they cited. I though this was unfair, as the offending sentence said that the rising, warming, and melting were worse than "a few years ago". That sounded like things had indeed worsened since the 2007 report. Two years of change is too short a period from which to establish a trend.
Then there was a second round and what struck me about the writing on Real Climate was the following repeated criticism of Pielke:
Some aspects of climate change are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago - such as rising sea levels, the increase of heat stored in the ocean and the shrinking Arctic sea ice.
Roger Pielke, Sr. thought each of the three so called worsening aspects of climate change was false and he wrote on Anthony Watt's site detailing his reasons for thinking that:
1. Sea level has actually flattened since 2006;
2. There has been no statistically significant warming of the upper ocean since 2003; and,
3. [S]ee the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly from the University of Illinois Cyrosphere Today website. Since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased.
Commenters on Real Climate responded. It was tough to call a winner of that round. For each set of statistics Pielke could marshal, the Warmies had a different set. Part of the problem was with the imprecision of the offending sentence above. The 2009 report updated the latest IPCC report from 2007, but there are a series of IPPC reports going back to 1990. For every recent (i.e., 2 year old) prediction, the Real Climate writers were able to show older predictions which were indeed less than the data they cited. I though this was unfair, as the offending sentence said that the rising, warming, and melting were worse than "a few years ago". That sounded like things had indeed worsened since the 2007 report. Two years of change is too short a period from which to establish a trend.
Then there was a second round and what struck me about the writing on Real Climate was the following repeated criticism of Pielke:
First of all, trends over such a short sub-interval of a few years vary greatly due to short-term natural variations, and one could get any result one likes by cherry-picking a suitable interval...[...]
...Pielke is referring to a 5-year period which is too short to obtain statistically robust trends in the presence of short-term variability and data accuracy problems...[...]
And Pielke is again referring to a time span (“since 2008”!) that is far too short to have much to do with climatic trends.
But what was Real Climate saying in the offending sentence? -- that the Warmie scientists had discovered trends, necessarily over just a few years, which revealed some things were worse than just "a few years ago."
So apparently when Warmies discern trends over just a few years, they are significant; but when AGW skeptics discover trends over the same few years, they are bunk.
It's necessary to know the distinction to make sense of the controversy.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Disputed Metrics
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Where Has the Globally Warmed Ocean Heat Gone?
As late as 2005, Warmie alarmists James Hansen, Josh Willis and Gavin Schmidt, all of NASA, said that the excess heat from the increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was being stored in the oceans. See Science, 3 June 2005, p. 1431. Their paper affirmed the critical role of ocean heat as a robust metric for the theory of anthropogenic global warming. “Confirmation of the planetary energy imbalance,” they maintained, “can be obtained by measuring the heat content of the ocean, which must be the principal reservoir for excess energy” (Id. at p. 1432).
But about that time the ARGO buoy system was completed and we began to get numbers on the ocean heat from the 3000 buoys spread about the oceans. Josh Willis gave an interview on NPR and showed his inability to get out of the Warmie frame of mind by calling ocean cooling, which he was measuring with the ARGO buoys, a "period of less rapid warming." A lot of us made fun of him for that phrase.
But here is the latest. Willis might have been unconsciously fudging the numbers to reduce the rate and extent of the ocean cooling. It may be cooling quite a bit.
But the main thing to take away is that all the computer models and all the Warmie alarmists and the IPCC said that the ocean would warm up. All of them. It's not warming, it's cooling; and the actual rate of cooling is not really important given the Warmie consensus of ocean warming.
Here is a graph showing the predictions versus the measurements and here is the article from the maker of the graph. Well worth reading. He frames the essential nexus. To miss the mark by so much means either that the anthropogenic global warming theory is invalid or that it is seriously flawed. Either way there is no reason to risk harming our fragile economies with ill conceived taxing policies designed to ameliorate a problem that does not exist.
How many more times must the Deniers show that the Warmie computer models are crap before we, as a population, reject their theory and stop listening to their idiot spokespeople.
But about that time the ARGO buoy system was completed and we began to get numbers on the ocean heat from the 3000 buoys spread about the oceans. Josh Willis gave an interview on NPR and showed his inability to get out of the Warmie frame of mind by calling ocean cooling, which he was measuring with the ARGO buoys, a "period of less rapid warming." A lot of us made fun of him for that phrase.
But here is the latest. Willis might have been unconsciously fudging the numbers to reduce the rate and extent of the ocean cooling. It may be cooling quite a bit.
But the main thing to take away is that all the computer models and all the Warmie alarmists and the IPCC said that the ocean would warm up. All of them. It's not warming, it's cooling; and the actual rate of cooling is not really important given the Warmie consensus of ocean warming.
Here is a graph showing the predictions versus the measurements and here is the article from the maker of the graph. Well worth reading. He frames the essential nexus. To miss the mark by so much means either that the anthropogenic global warming theory is invalid or that it is seriously flawed. Either way there is no reason to risk harming our fragile economies with ill conceived taxing policies designed to ameliorate a problem that does not exist.How many more times must the Deniers show that the Warmie computer models are crap before we, as a population, reject their theory and stop listening to their idiot spokespeople.
Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Disputed Metrics
