@BrianK

Quote:

BrianK wrote: How to not present a graph ...

Brilliant!

Last edited by Dandy on 13-Aug-2009 at 12:29 PM.

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Dandy

What they mean:
Given that temperatures should increase during a maximum and the temperature has failed to normalize during the minimum, it's expected that we'll get even higher temperatures during the next maximum.

_________________
This weeks pet peeve:
Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@BrianK

Quote:

How to not present a graph ...

Classic Brian!

The NZ government earned a Fossil of the year award in Bonn a couple of days back when it announced emmissions cuts of 10-20% by 2020 after a big campaigne from the Greens with climate scientists and some economists in support, to go for a 40% cut by 2020.

The gov't had commissionsed a report on carbon trading scenarios which amazingly ignored forestry in its computations. The report said that if our carbon credit allowance was cut by 40% and the country did not cut emmissions the cost would be NZ$60/person/week by 2020. In spite of warnings in the report that it was not about NZ emmissions but about carbon trading scenarios , the government told the populace that the report said that cutting emmissions by 40% would cost $60/person/week, clearly not acceptable. The media and the populace did not catch this extraordinary misrepresentation which has not been corrected except here:
http://publicaddress.net/6075#post6075

Noel

Well - it is Off Topic - but I thought it's worth to share with you:

2 hours ago it was exactly 50 years since my parents took flight with me (being just an 2-year old boy) from East Germany.

They had booked rooms for our vacation in Waren (Mueritz) near the Baltic Sea.
We started at 04:00 from Magdeburg by train towards Potsdam. From there we had to take the urban railway to Berlin-Schoenefeld and from there annother train to Waren (Mueritz).

What shall I say - that urban railway went through West-Berlin, and my parents simply left the train with me there (at about 10:30). A few weeks later (after having passed procedure for the apply for admission) we went to West-Germany by plane and after having been through several refugee camps finally ended up in Cologne after some months.

Up to today I haven't seen Waren (Mueritz)...

Last edited by Dandy on 13-Aug-2009 at 12:55 PM.

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@olegil

Quote:

olegil wrote: @Dandy ...it's expected that we'll get even higher temperatures during the next maximum.

That's what I'm equally afraid of...

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Dandy & @NoelFuller

Thanks for the statements. I wish I had created the site. But, I didn't I found it and it seemed very apropos.

@Dandy

Quote:

Hmmmmmm - from your link: "The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun's activity increases" It is said that increasing sun activity is attended by an increasing number of sunspots. But just a few days ago I read that currently we have an absolute minimum of sunspots - so the solar activity should be on a minimum, too:Deep Solar Minimum

I think the statement is correct? The 'world faces record-breaking temperatures'. 2008 appears to have been the 10th warmest year recorded by instruments, since 1850. 2009 isn't done but through July it appears to be about the 5th warmest on record. We have been in a Deep Solar Minimum the last few years. 2/3 of 2008 and the first 1/3 of 2009 we saw 0 sunspots. . My understanding is in July of this year 'the sun's activity increases'. Missing Spots

Study finds last decade of North Atlantic storms outstrip the previous 1,000 years. LINK

Though an interesting side note on 'TMTisFree all weather is chaos and this means unpredictablity postulate'... In the last decade there has been 0 storms to hit land in the North Atlantic without adequate warning. A marked increase in our ability to predict this 'unpredictable weather chaos'.

Last edited by BrianK on 13-Aug-2009 at 07:28 PM.

@Dandy

Quote:

Well - it is Off Topic - but I thought it's worth to share with you:

Every plot has a few anomalous data points :)

Quote:

2 hours ago it was exactly 50 years since my parents took flight with me (being just an 2-year old boy) from East Germany.

Worth sharing indeed.

Noel

@BrianK

Quote:

Study finds last decade of North Atlantic storms outstrip the previous 1,000 years.

An extra point of interest for USA is that both coasts will see a greater portion of sea level rise in the future making these storms still more dangerous to populations clinging to their favoured portions of waterfront.

I doubt any forecaster can peg a storm to a specific date so they are unpredictable to that extent, but of course they have their seasons and once one begins to grow somewhere it can be tracked and its path forecast for a few days ahead maybe, but timing is I would think, still a little hard to pin down exactly.

Noel

Last edited by NoelFuller on 14-Aug-2009 at 12:23 AM.

Has anyone/everyone read this article?

Last edited by NovaCoder on 14-Aug-2009 at 12:38 AM.
Last edited by NovaCoder on 14-Aug-2009 at 12:37 AM.

@NoelFuller

Quote:

I doubt any forecaster can peg a storm to a specific date so they are unpredictable to that extent, but of course they have their seasons and once one begins to grow somewhere it can be tracked and its path forecast for a few days ahead maybe, but timing is I would think, still a little hard to pin down exactly.

I think the crux here is what sort of warning is being looked for. Oceans are now measured and conditions of high water and high temperatures which lead to tropical storms and hurricans frequently watched for the storm to form. Exactly what time is more difficult. However, at one time we didn't know enough to even watch for the event. When hurricanes will hit land are given with a window of time for the event. IMO there's little doubt in the last decade, and for sure 2 decades, hurricane events predictability has greatly improved.

Here are the Katrina warnings issued 24 hours in advance. LINK Of course during that time our 'leaders' told us that no one could have predicted this.

Looking at this even weather events have improved. In the 70s one was lucky if forecasters get tomorrow's prediction correct. In the 00s we have 10 day forecasts and they are fairly accurate at least 3 days out.

Predictions would be interesting to follow. Someone should study their area of interest and see how accurate NOAA LINK Looks to me that my area of the nation will be above average this winter -- Woohoo! I'm sure this thread will be going next year.

Last edited by BrianK on 14-Aug-2009 at 04:03 AM.

@NovaCoder

Quote:

Population growth is often overlooked, or at best considered a secondary issue, by many environmentalists, but it is as fundamental to our survival as reducing the emissions that are melting the polar ice caps.

I have never known a time in the 50 years so far, of my adult life, when I have not heard or read or thought about population growth and the pressure it places on all issues along much the same lines as this article although we are now better informed concerning biodiversity, ecology and of course climate change, than we were in my youth where these issues were never thought of. What is missing from most arguments is any contribution toward a solution.

It may be that there is no solution concerning population, in the sense that population growth is a product of desire, fear, insecurity. Consider the life expectancy of those (species & humans) who produce the most seed and offspring, and compare with the life expectancy of those who, while healthy, produce the least.

We look toward the settled unity of humanity. What do we contribute?

The nazis tried extermination, the Chinese use limitation by regulation, developed nations have relied on the pill.

"Kill out desire", said the sages of old. Nature is starting to regulate through infertility. Indeed I read a book written in the fourties, where the writer predicted that by the turn of the century we will be reacting to our excesses to such a degree as to generate widespread infertilty resulting in a world once again dominated by the animals.

In the last analysis, whatever you will that others do, you must apply to yourself.

Population growth is an effect of causes we can address and must, but there is good reason the issue cannot be addressed directly. Trying to control the effect is like putting your hand in front of a loud speaker to reduce the volume instead of seeking out the volume control.

Noel

@NoelFuller

Quote:

I have never known a time in the 50 years so far, of my adult life, when I have not heard or read or thought about population growth and the pressure it places on all issues along much the same lines as this article although we are now better informed concerning biodiversity, ecology and of course climate change, than we were in my youth where these issues were never thought of. What is missing from most arguments is any contribution toward a solution.

One famous book on this from decades ago is The Population Bomb One prediction was the death of hundreds of millions of people due to starvation. Soon after publication of Ehlrich's book the technology improved the situation. The fertlizer, pesticide, and herbicide industries took off about the same time. It didn't eliminate the problem as anywhere from at least 100 million and closer to 200 million people have died of starvation since publication of the book.

@BrianK

Quote:

Darwin was accepted because his model frequently produced more accurate results then Lamarack.

You mix again experiment and theory: a theory furnishes putative explanations by mean of a model while experiments test and verify the correctness of explanations (and thus the theory/model) by evaluating the accordance of the experiments' results with data from the real world. As Darwin's theory is able to provide wider and simpler explanation and that experiments' results clearly point to support it, it has superseded Lamarckian explanations' attempts.

Quote:

What model can you provide that provides frequently more accurate results than the GW model?

There is no point providing model for the sake of it when the underlying processes are insufficiently known or not known at all. An assumed 'correct result' with known wrong model/theory (as are the IPCC ones) is Bad Science: tuning computer climate models to have desired results falls in the BS category. If and when:
1/ known natural events (AMO, ENSO, PDO, clouds, water, sun, etc) are be understood enough to be modelled (and not parameterized/tuned) ;
2/ still unknown/suspected/proposed climatic processes are found/proposed/confirmed, respectively ;
3/ known correct Physics (linear and non-linear) is used and respected and models are moved definitively out from ad hoc parameterizations ;
4/ available, correct and current real world data are agreed on, used and models validated against ;
5/ sufficient past data are researched to explain past climate events and to enlighten the currently not exceptional period ;
6/ codes of model are opened, published, reviewed and undergone engineering and quality checks with certification by independent public and private researchers and organizations ;
7/ and finally, above all, models are to be used to provide insights (and not results), with reasonable projection time (and with a scientific explanation of why the chosen time is reasonable) ;
then models will be useful tools.
Until then current IPCC models are just plasticine in the hands of a bunch of pseudo-scientist eco-activists.

Quote:

But, like the water brought to a boil example...

Try to predict the heat or the motion of a peculiar part of water with time: you simply can't. The heat or motion of any part of the water is completely unpredictable (even if mean value of both variables can be assessed statistically, it is meaningless given the uncertainty and with regard to the distinct part considered). The presence of per definition unpredictable stochastic fluctuations by force limits the predictability of the system. What current models do is to start from all particular parts of water (the cells of the grid as explained before) to compute any global mean variables. It is easy to understand that this method is just to pile on uncertainties and that parameterizations (like reducing the non-linearities to minimum) and tunings are required to 'drive' the system towards the desired values. Hardly a scientific approach.

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Weather would predict the clouds and temp at your home town on August 17 at 11AM in 2040. This isn't what climate is doing. Climate is an averaged effect over time.

Ceteris paribus, per your definition, prediction of climate can not be better that the prediction of the averaged weather itself, at best identical, but more probably worst. Modellers artificially 'enhance' the 'prediction skill' of models by assuming wrongly the lowering of the uncertainty related to the non-linearities part by changing (reducing) the spatial resolution and/or ignoring the variability below the scale of the grid.

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The non-linear is studied in climate but very few scientists agree with your view that climate is chaotic.

It is not my view. The quantitative measure of predictability of the climate system can be done (called the leading Lyapunov exponent and defined as an intrinsic property of the climate dynamical system).

Quote:

Even numbers of anti--GW scientists (Spencer for example) is using the assumption that climate is predictable and not a chaotic system.

You can also say Jesus just made an appearance to you and also said so: not an argument.

Quote:

Authors that are newer or have made much less or no errors deserve my time first.

Loehle is neither old author in the climate field nor has been shown to have made any error (for the moment). No problem with that approach though.

Here is the analysis from a 'chaos and complexity' scientist I share with: Quote:

In the beginning people thought of the climate as a deterministic system. The climate trajectory was supposed to be computable and predictable and inaccuracies were only due to the lack of computing power and crudeness of the parametrizations. After having multiplied the computing power by 100 - 150 in the last 10 years and the time spend on parametrizations by a similar factor, the models are still as inaccurate as they were and what increased is only the confidence that they indeed are inaccurate. This in itself is a powerful signal that there is a very fundamental error somewhere in the approach. If something like that had happened in a more serious scientific branch (like high energy physics f.e.), people would have dropped the wrong methodology already long ago. The approach begins to slightly change now. First as there can be no trust in any individual model, the "ensemble theory" has been invented according to which every model gets "something" right (but nobody knows what) and something wrong (everything else). By averaging the model results, the wrongness cancels out or at least reduces but the rightness stays. This theory seems to me silly and based on no serious physics. Second the modellers grudgingly abandoned determinismus and try to heal the problem by ergodicity. [Gavin] Schmidt even says that their models are "chaotic" showing hereby that he doesn't know what chaos is. What they try in fact is to handle the climate with statistics - while the evolution of every individual parameter that constitutes the climate can't be computed and predicted, the AVERAGES (time and/or space) of the said parameters are robust and significant while any difference between a realisation of the parameter and its average obeys some statistical law. That is the theory in which Realisation = Climate + Noise. It is analogous to Kolmogorov turbulence theory and that's why I guess Schmidt is calling that "chaos". Of course any analogy stops here because the assumptions taken by Kolmogorov (homogeneity and isotropy) that give sense to his theory are absent from the climate theory. And of course, not surprisingly, according to D. Koutsoyannis ["On the credibility of climate predictions", 2008] and other work that begin to appear now the "healing" of the models by salvaging at least the time averages, fails too. What is left [...] is the deterministic chaos. The best example and analogy is the solar system problem. It is clearly deterministic and even not very complex because there are only a few bodies and a few ODE. Now it happens that it behaves like the Lorenz system - the trajectories of the bodies are not predictable. While a trajectory is always computable by numerically solving the ODE for an arbitrary time period, this computed trajectory (that Dan Hughes would call "just a series of numbers") has little to do with the real trajectory. The system is not stochastic either - asking about probabilities of trajectory excentricity or time averages of distances (Body A - Body B) makes no sense. Making N runs (N large) with varying initial conditions and varying time periods will give some insights about what the system MIGHT do but no insight at all about what it WILL do or indeed with what probability it MIGHT do this or that. And the differences between trajectories are not just small numbers - it may be so dramatic as the difference between turning a circle 500 millions years and definitely leaving the solar system. Fortunately there is at least ONE question that can be asked of such a system and that is the one of stability. We may ask after having observed the system for a certain time, are the trajectories stable (e.g. will there not be a catastrophic divergence)? There are mathematical tools for that like f.e. the KAM theorem. Of course it is more than probable that the climate system is nowhere near to an integrable Hamiltonian system where KAM would apply but similar approaches could be attempted. As there will be more and more results like those of D. Koutsoyannis, I am convinced that people will do one day the last step to be made. Namely that the climate is neither deterministic nor ergodic. 1) The trajectories unpredictably evolve between different quasi steady states. The causality is not clear cut and for instance there is an infinity of different initial conditions that lead to the same final state. 2) There is no particular time scale at which the system is more stable or predictable (e.g. yearly averages don't behave "better" than hourly averages). 3) There is no statistical law describing the distances between 2 different trajectories and no probabilities of achievement of the different quasi steady states. 4) Observation of the last 3 billions of years shows that the envelope of the possible trajectories is bounded so the system is stable. 5) The results above are independent of the computing power and the size of integration steps. 6) The variation of a single parameter (f.e. CO² concentration) may lead to wide range of different final states and symmetrically those states can be reached without any variation of this parameter (CO² concentration). Then and only then people will stop bothering about CO² because they will understand that all kind of unexpected things happen and will happen regardless of CO² concentrations and the longer we observe, the more unexpected things will happen. With the usual irrational resistance of people towards any change, most of these unexpected things will be perceived as bad and dangerous :) However taking action with regard to a supposed qualitative impact of some climate variable on the final state after a certain time would make sense only if the specific costs/inconvenients of the action were near to 0 or if the time horizon was very short.

- Tom Vonk (links by me)

Bye,
TMTisFree

_________________
The engineering approach to our non-problems: "build a better washer".
The scientific approach to our non-problems: "find a new energy source".
The environmentalist approach to our non-problems: "stop washing your shirts".

@TMTisFree

Quote:

You mix again experiment and theory

Not at all. You wish I'd mix them up. Darwin's Theory makes frequently more accurate predictions because the experiments back this theory more often and more exactly than Lamarck's.

Quote:

There is no point providing model for the sake of it when the underlying processes are insufficiently known or not known at all.

So if we don't know the underlying process, as you claim, how can you possibly support 'it's all natural'? You can't you said we don't know the underlying processes so therefore science doesn't know the underlying processes. Any conclusion is therefore invalid. Even the 'it's natural' answer.

Nice of you to list out some of the unknowns. Other theories - Einstein's Gravity, Evolution for example - have their own unknowns too. Do you therefore reject them?

Quote:

Try to predict the heat or the motion of a peculiar part of water with time: you simply can't. The heat or motion of any part of the water is completely unpredictable

I agree. However, this doesn't mean the net change of the whole isn't predictable. We add heat to a pan of water nobody, well you perhaps, thinks the chaotic state is so unpredictable we might even get a pan of ice instead of steam. Changing a chaotic system has an impact to that system. These are predictable. A chaotic cold system will be warmed when placed next to a chaotic warm system. Or does your chaos hypothesis now break the predictability of 2nd law and the cold system gets colder?

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prediction of climate can not be better that the prediction of the averaged weather itself,

There are 2 different but related things here. Prediction of weather is an exact measure of an exact condition at an exact point on the planet. Climate is an average condition of the planet over time. The first is your unpredictable spot of water within the pot. The 2nd is the prediction that water will boil with enough time and energy is added to the system.

Quote:

You can also say Jesus just made an appearance to you and also said so: not an argument.

It's a statement that your hypothesis is one accepted by few climatologists and frequently not even by the scientists whose work you've cited as your backing.

@Dandy

Quote:

Although the last section in your diagram undoubtly represents a stable period if you just look at that period, it should be rather obvious by looking at the other two "stable periods" - each on a higher level than its precursor - that the overall trend of this diagram is ascending - despite the stable period at the end of the curve.

I fully agree. But note that nonetheless:
1/ the graph itself is just a very tiny part in geologic/climatic time of the OHC which can obviously be traced back to the formation of oceans: looking at a part of the graph (2003 till now) is no more uninteresting (or misleading) than looking at the available OHC data plotted in this graph when it missed billions of years of data ;
2/ the last part of the graph was selected because model (the GISS one) predicted a continuous rise in OHC (mimicking the rise of CO²) while OHC is stable since 2003 (but the CO² is still rising), thus evidencing the lack of connexion between the two variables ;
3/ while there is no doubt the trend of the considered/available plotted data in the graph is positive and OHC is a good metric for climate study, the trend and OHC themselves give no explanation a priori of why and from where the heat comes from, though OHC can explain why the ground surface has slightly warmed between mid-70s to mid-90s (see for example Compo and Sardeshmukh, 2008 Oceanic influences on recent continental warming).

Quote:

From looking at the entire graph my bet would be that the stable phase we're obviously in now will come to an end and the the trend will continue to upswing after that. This graph does not provide any indication for me that the rising trend will turn over and start to decline.

Perhaps but this graph does not provide either any indication that the rising trend will continue: in short future OHC will be known only when measured.

Bye,
TMTisFree

_________________
The engineering approach to our non-problems: "build a better washer".
The scientific approach to our non-problems: "find a new energy source".
The environmentalist approach to our non-problems: "stop washing your shirts".

@Dandy

Quote:

Even my 9 year old grandson today knows that CO² is the only component of the atmosphere mankind can easily influence.

So young and already corrupted by MSM: what about methane, water, land usage changes or ground, atmosphere and water *real* pollutions, etc? My 12 year old son already knows that natural variability is so high but repetitive (what he calls weather) that he intuitively also says that the long term weather (what is called climate) will not be that different of the one of today or yesterday. And he is right because essentially one will not care much about the climate in 50 or 100 years: one will care about the weather in 50 or 100 years. He also keeps repeating technology is powerful and uses it accordingly...

Quote:

We can stop burning fossile fuels to reduce the emission of CO², while its rather unlikely that living beings will stop farting to reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas methane.

Indian lead head of IPCC and some other green organizations have suggested to stop to eating meat to reduce methane spitting from cows...a good way to also kill future children (no more milk).

Quote:

Repeatedly imputing other reasons than this for mainly talking about CO² simply is not appropriate and only demeonstrates political intentions

Repeatedly implicating CO² while the only 'proof' is some tuned models' output only demonstrates a deliberate deviation from Science.

Edit: modified 2 sentences to give more perspective

Bye,
TMTisFree

Last edited by TMTisFree on 16-Aug-2009 at 12:25 PM.

_________________
The engineering approach to our non-problems: "build a better washer".
The scientific approach to our non-problems: "find a new energy source".
The environmentalist approach to our non-problems: "stop washing your shirts".

@BrianK

Quote:

Study finds last decade of North Atlantic storms outstrip the previous 1,000 years.

Remind of the last Steig's paper, inventing data when/where there are none. Some words will trigger the red alert for some: Mann, model simulations, 1500 years when only 150 data years available, etc. The paper will probably be inspected deeply given its overall similar methodology to the defunct HS papers. Nevertheless, the interesting part is at the end, by one of the authors: Quote:

"the lack of a real tight physical theory between ocean warmth and frequency indicates this is not the smoking gun that would allow us to confidently project what might happen as oceans warm in the future."

So much for the causation and the predictability.
Anyway the paper by Mann is probably a response to the truckload of recent papers showing no trend in storm/hurricane activity or number:
1/ current lower storm activity in past 30 years in US ;
2/ no trend in storm number since 1690 in Antilles ;
3/ no trends since 1945 in landfalling tropical cyclones in East Asia ;
4/ no trends in hurricane landfalls in the US ;
5/ or in Australia ;
6/ or in Jauregui, 2003 Climatology of landfalling tropical storms and hurricanes in Mexico, Atmosphera, together with data from Chris Landsea at the National Hurricane Center showing no trends in hurricane landfalls in Mexico between 1951 and 2008.
7/ no significant long-term trend in the total number of storms available here.
Of course all based on real world data.

Quote:

Though an interesting side note on 'TMTisFree all weather is chaos and this means unpredictablity postulate'... In the last decade there has been 0 storms to hit land in the North Atlantic without adequate warning. A marked increase in our ability to predict this 'unpredictable weather chaos'.

A definitively out of context misquoting of me as storms are actually tracked in (near-)RT by satellites: no surprise that not one has gone unnoticed . More interestingly though, one can note on the web site only short term forecasts...

Edit: added recent ref. 7/

Bye,
TMTisFree

Last edited by TMTisFree on 16-Aug-2009 at 05:10 PM.

_________________
The engineering approach to our non-problems: "build a better washer".
The scientific approach to our non-problems: "find a new energy source".
The environmentalist approach to our non-problems: "stop washing your shirts".

@NoelFuller

Quote:

The nazis tried extermination, the Chinese use limitation by regulation, developed nations have relied on the pill.

And to achieve the same goal, ecologists attempt to take the best of these 2 ideologies, the utopia of communism with the practice of fascism, all 3 linked by the will of power by the leading heads under the name and with the use of Science. The world massacre begun publicly half a century ago and continue nowadays covered by the masqueraded UN cowards.

Quote:

Population growth is an effect of causes we can address and must, but there is good reason the issue cannot be addressed directly.

This is the usual falsehood, nonsensical speech and outright delusion by ecologists to keep their 'scary businesses' alive the longer they could to justify their existence and their ideology, depicted above. Of course they know it can be addressed directly. Better they know it can be addressed easily because there are existing examples of how to proceed: give or help to get the poorer of this world the technology to reach our level of life and your population scare will disappear itself. To reach this goal, what the poorer vitally need is using very cheap energy like coal: it is easy to understand (through the CO² scare) why that need is in direct conflict with the green ideology of the world elites and the horde of following zealots, finally supporting the first sentence of this §, and to the worst interest of the world's poorer, the first § of this post.

At the end, greens, like any dogmatic ideologists, have it completely backward.
If you want to save the planet, save human first.

Edit: added the link

Bye,
TMTisFree

Last edited by TMTisFree on 16-Aug-2009 at 06:14 PM.

_________________
The engineering approach to our non-problems: "build a better washer".
The scientific approach to our non-problems: "find a new energy source".
The environmentalist approach to our non-problems: "stop washing your shirts".