About the Author

Richard Cochrane is trained in chemistry and metallurgy but is far more interested and practiced as a political and fund raising consultant, writer and amateur historian. He grew up in a Navy family and with his two younger brothers carried on its 500+ year tradition of naval service to Great Britain and the USA then enjoyed a career with one of the largest advertising and public relations agencies working with numerous Fortune 500 companies and many of America's premier educational institutions. He maintains friendships and acquaintanceships around the world. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

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Chilian Volcano Has Belched more Carbon Dioxide Than all Humans Have in Last two Decades.

June 16th, 2008 • Richard Cochrane

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There ought to be a law against volcanic pollution.

Did this frighteningly political documentary mention volcanoes?

A volcano in southern Chili is burping and belching millions of tons of ash, carbon dioxide and debris into the air. In two weeks it has spit out more CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) than the sum total of all human activity has in more than two decades, and it is far from finished.

There Are 79 Responses So Far. »

Comment by Richard Cochrane on 17 June 2008:

I was wrong about the twenty years. the Chilian volcano has emitted more Carbon Dioxide that all human activity since World War II, closer to 60 years.
Comment by Jim Sweet on 7 March 2009:

I will be having dinner with a group of liberals tonight. The fact that drilling for US oil is banned by a liberal congress and even LARGER left wing president in the name of global warming is a sin. “A volcano in southern Chili is burping and belching millions of tons of ash, carbon dioxide and debris into the air. In two weeks it has spit out more CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) than the sum total of all human activity has in more than six decades.”

“Producing more of our offshore energy will create jobs and fuel economic recovery,” said Odum. An executive from ExxonMobil Corp., estimated 76,000 jobs would be created from new drilling in areas that until recently have been under a congressional drilling ban.

Hey California, 76,000 jobs! Wonder if the president and Congress woman Pelosi feels enough of your pain to increase job opportunities by 76K. How many of you have lost your job since the election in Nov? You should be outraged.

All of this will be the subject of my conversation when the conversation rolls around to politics tonight.
Comment by Jason Blanchard on 8 March 2009:

Jim. how did the dinner go? I hope no one ordered a soda with all the CO2 they contain, haha… Environmental hypocrisy is the worst, especially when it’s paired with a healthy dose of “Not in My backyard”.
Comment by Jim Sweet on 9 March 2009:

Got my digs in. One of the Libs thought that Harvard was contemplating, with its large endowment, of paying the tuition of every student in attendance, and he thought that was wonderful. I thought that was little odd as I believe many of their students could well afford a Harvard education; and what have any us gotten free that we valued?

I told him, Harvard like the rest of us should spread the wealth. Give that money to students going to other institutions who can’t afford college. Somehow that was anathema to that liberal–just more hypocrisy.

Best
Comment by gbeauregard on 8 November 2009:

Richard, I’d be curious where you get your numbers. According to the US Geological Survey, human activities contribute 130 times as much CO2 to the atmosphere as volcanoes.

From http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php:
>>>>>>>>>>
Comparison of CO2 emissions from volcanoes vs. human activities.
Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1991). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 27 billion tonnes per year (30 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 2006) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2, through 2003.]. Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes–the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 3.3 million tonnes/year)! (Gerlach et. al., 2002)
<<<<<<<<<<

Do you have credible source that says otherwise? To say that a Chilean volcano has emitted more CO2 than all human activity since WWII, the USGS have to be off by several orders of magnitude.
Comment by Richard Cochrane on 9 November 2009:

gbeauregard The source is cited and its cover pictured in the in the original post. Google it.
By the way the 2002 USGS report has been widely questioned and I believe it has been amended. In fairness its calculation were 2002 and not 2009 so there is a 7 year gap.
Certainly this is an ongoing debate mostly between government agencies and private scientists. One with its hand in the taxpayer pocket and one without.
Comment by gbeauregard on 12 November 2009:

>> The source is cited and its cover pictured in the in the original post. Google it.

The source whose cover picture you included is National Geographic’s “Six Degrees Could Change the World”, which is based on Mark Lynas’ book “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet”. I’ve watched the video, and read the book. (The book’s quite good - very well researched and referenced. The video is disappointingly shallow).

Neither the book nor the video mentioned a volcano in southern Chile that’s spitting out in two weeks “more CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) than the sum total of all human activity has in more than two decades”. This is hardly surprising, since that would undermine their thrust that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are causing climate change.

So again: can you point to a credible source that that does back up your claim?

Incidentally, the country is “Chile”, not “Chili”. Google it
Comment by Richard Cochrane on 13 November 2009:

I should have specified greenhouse gases and not fallen victom to the Gore shorthand of Carbon Dioxide. Conclusions from researchers funded by the National Science Foundation, French Polar Institute (IPEV) and the Institut National des Sciences del’Univers (INSU) and a plethora of others
Comment by gbeauregard on 13 November 2009:

So I take it you’re now claiming that researchers funded by the NSF, IPEV, and INSU have concluded that that a Chilean volcano has emitted more greenhouse gases than all human activity in the last two decades? Credible references welcome. Good luck finding any

From what I’ve read, volcanic eruptions do have a significant short-term impact on climate, in that the aerosol particles they put into the atmosphere short-term global cooling. Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of. See for example:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Volcano/

It’s partly due to this known, measured *cooling* effect of volcanoes that one of the leading geo-engineering ideas to combat warming is to deliberately create stratospheric aerosols.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_(geoengineering)
Comment by Jim on 17 December 2009:

Mr Cochrane, I’m one of those “libs”, as you like to so insultingly describe.

Looks to me as if your “facts” are as contrived as our last conservative president’s “weapons of mass destruction”. You can’t even provide a good reference to rebut your claims. SHOW ME.

STOP WORRYING SO MUCH ABOUT THE COST OF PROTECTING THE CLIMATE, AND START WORRYING ABOUT DROWNED CITIES AND SUPER-HURRICANES AND WHAT THEY WILL COST.

Dems are a rather hapless bunch, can’t agree on a platform. But the GOP exists for a well-defined reason in a solid platform. This is to blast the Dems and increase their own power. Which is worse?
Comment by Richard on 18 December 2009:

Confusious says: Never argue with a fool; as he may be too.
Comment by Jim on 18 December 2009:

Ok, I won’t.
Comment by Jerry T. on 22 February 2010:

The following info from:

http://www.EnhancedOilRecovery.com

and

http://www.DrillBabyDrill.com

Enhanced Oil Recovery is a $20 Trillion market in the U.S., and a way for America to produce the oil it needs, saving ober $1 Billion/DAY for buying oil from foreign countries.

When an oil well or oil field reaches the end of its normal life, as much as 75% of the “original oil place” is still left underground in the oil wells. That’s because recovering the “stranded oil” is either too difficult or too expensive, or both.

According to the Department of Energy, there are nearly 400 Billion Barrels of “Stranded Oil” in the U.S. and that 60%, or 240 Billion barrels of oil are recoverable through Enhanced Oil Recovery.

At $80/bbl, Enhanced Oil Recovery represents a $20 Trillion market opportunity in the U.S., for producing America’s oil and creating jobs.

Enhanced Oil Recovery is the “green” way to produce America’s oil.

Enhanced Oil Recovery helps make the U.S. energy independent.

Enhanced Oil Recovery helps end our dependence on foreign energy suppliers and importing our oil from OPEC & the Middle East, Venezuela, Iran China & Russia.

Even the libs and global warmers should love Enhanced Oil Recovery because Carbon Dioxide Emissions are used, and then injected into the oil reservoirs through CO2 Injection which releases the stranded oil and then brought to the surface. When finished producing the oil from the stranded oil well, the CO2 is “sequestered” in the well, and the oil well plugged, leaving the CO2 in the ground.

At present (January 2010), over 48 million metric tons per year of CO2 are used for enhanced oil recovery. Of this total, about 25 percent (12 million tons) is anthropogenic in origin i.e., produced by human activities such as oil refining or fertilizer manufacturing (Trinity 2006). The rest is extracted from naturally occurring deposits.

The CO2 that is used to increase oil production via enhanced oil recovery is an expensive commodity, and for this reason oil companies are motivated to ensure that up to three quarters of the CO2 that is injected remains underground in the oil field. The amount of CO2 sequestered is highly dependent on whether the field is blown-down following any CO2 operations. Further research and development in this area is expected to improve the storage rate to close to 100 percent.

Estimates made by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) show that depleted oil and gas wells in the United States and Canada have the potential to sequester over 82 billion tons of carbon dioxide in total.
Comment by zote on 11 May 2011:

Hey Richard, I would also like to see your sources.

By sources I do not mean naming off a list of scientific organizations from memory. I want specific peer reviewed scientific studies including the name of authors, date, and title.

Heres what I have:

“Human activities, responsible for some 36,300 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2008 [Le Quéré et al., 2009], release at least a hundred times more CO2 annually than all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2010).”

Gerlach, T.M., 2010, Volcanic versus anthropogenic carbon dioxide: The missing science: EARTH, v. 55, n. 7, p. 87.

Le Quéré, C., et al., 2009, Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide: Nature Geoscience, v. 297, n. 12, p. 831-836, doi:10.1038/ngeo689.

I can post more sources if anybody wants more solid evidence.
Comment by Pat on 10 June 2011:

Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for some 36,300 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2008 [Le Quéré et al., 2009], release at least a hundred times more CO2 annually than all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2010).

The half dozen or so published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 132 million (minimum) to 378 million (maximum) metric tons per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998; Kerrick, 2001). If estimate medians and author-preferred estimates of these studies are used to lessen the influence of outlier estimates, the range is restricted to about 150-270 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The current anthropogenic CO2 emission rate of some 36,300-million metric tons of CO2 per year is about 100 to 300 times larger than these estimated ranges for global volcanic CO2 emissions.

In recent times, about 50-60 volcanoes are normally active on the Earth’s subaerial terrain. One of these is Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, which has an annual baseline CO2 output of about 3.1 million metric tons per year [Gerlach et al., 2002]. It would take a huge addition of volcanoes to the subaerial landscape—the equivalent of an extra 11,700 Kīlauea volcanoes—to scale up the global volcanic CO2 emission rate to the anthropogenic CO2 emission rate. Similarly, scaling up the volcanic rate to the current anthropogenic rate by adding more submarine volcanoes would require the addition of over 100 mid-oceanic ridge systems to the sea floor.

Global volcanic CO2 emission estimates are uncertain, but there is little doubt that the anthropogenic CO2 emission rate is more than a hundred times greater than the global volcanic CO2 emission rate

Read more here: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php
Comment by Owen Abrey on 21 June 2011:

I am a profoundly ignorant man. So I ask a nagging question: Have you seen the size of the Chilean volcano? I wonder how many orders of magnitude the ejectite would be in comparison to Hawaii–which puts out pretty lava flows, but hardly can other wise be compared…

An Hawaiian volcano is not all volcanoes. For intellectuals to presume such a thing… puzzles me.
Comment by Jim on 22 June 2011:

Well, for one, Kilauea and Pu’u O’o (the most active vent on Kilauea’s flank) have been erupting CONTINUOUSLY for years now. Less dramatic than Chile’s volcano, but it gets so much for endurance!
Comment by Roger on 10 July 2011:

4 feet of ash. Yep, that’s a lot of ‘whatever’ spewed out of an abscure Chile volano. Not to mention the pollution erupted by Pu’u O’o - yeah I’m beginning to understand why Australia is called ‘loserland’ by felloq business people - mostly braindead people living what is often called “backwards thinking in a backwards, developing world” - I partially agree. Backwards people, definetly a resounding Yes, and developing world, no question here, first world taxation, third world infrastructure.
Comment by Manfred on 10 July 2011:

Wow aussies must be truly the people I thought they were in the first place when we contemplated doing business in what I don’t regret as a big business mistake in a country I can’t call anything more than ‘loserland’ - how about the 23 million or so imbeciles that inhabit your poor excuse of a nation explain your support of politicians proposing a carbon tax which will make near-zero difference to the big picture??? Australia, about 23 million people. Sure its a lot of people, but hey, India, China and the US of A, who aren’t keen players on our scheme, well they’ll pick up what we’ll destroy in terms of local jobs. Yep, been over this time and time again, if I was faced with the prospect of having to live most of my remaining life in a backwards, retarded country like Australia, I would immediately broadcast the suicides of myself and my daughters on Youtube. Australia is as much a joke as Ju(LIAR) Gillars. That woman has put back the womens movement by at least 10′000 years. Anna Bligh and Margaret Thatchet proved beyond any reasonable doubt that woman aren’t fit to lead. This is a real shame.
Comment by Manfred on 10 July 2011:

In case you missed it, stupid people of Australia (those who vote for idiot politicians, being a democracy, majority rules therefore stupid people voting for stupid politicians equals stupid nation? Stupid people indeed. Did you know the snowy (river) has been flowing up-hill for the past 24 hours? Crikeys better pass a tax to stop this, sure, dumb-ass Skippies. I never liked this place, never liked its braindead population, they know everything better, but take everything as gospel from the same politicians they despite. Aussies=stupid people. Said it before, will say it again. Stupid people do stupid things, therefore stupid people are stupid. Doesn;t that make sense, or dont you have a heart for the children we are inheriting this pathetic excuse of a nation to??
Comment by Mike Jonas on 10 July 2011:

Manfred - The people of Australia aren’t quite that stupid. At the last federal election they voted in equal numbers for two parties that both promised not to introduce a “carbon tax”. That they now have one shows that Julia Gillard lied. Her now disastrous poll ratings tell you what Aussies think about it.
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 12 July 2011:

Big Man: I agree a carbon tax is a counterproductive punishment of what works and provides energy for billions of people today around the globe. But to say women aren’t fit to lead is a little backward if not a lot backward. Some might say stupid, as in stupid people do (and say) stupid things. Moma used to say “Stupid is as stupid does”. Seems wise to me and from a woman.
Comment by Martin on 25 July 2011:

It is curious that after numerous requests for credible references regarding volcanic emissions, Richard Cochrane could find none. Yet there is no shortage of information supporting fossil fuel burning as a large, and likely the major, contributing factor to global warming. Tailpipe emissions from vehicles in the United States alone contribute over 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year. Even that is more than the total volcanic output.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 25 July 2011:

Martin - As someone who is appalled at the gross distortions and exaggerations of the IPCC and its fellow travellers, I am very keen to see the scientific process prevail, otherwise I fear that science may lose so much credibility in the eyes of the public that scientists will not be trusted again for a very long time.

Having established “where I am coming from”, I would now like to support the main part of your last comment : I have checked such information as I can find on volcanoes, and I accept that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels greatly exceed those from volcanoes. While I’m agreeing with you, I can add that I have worked on CO2 emissions/atmosphere/ocean data, and I am satisfied that the increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last few decades is largely (of the order of 90%+-5%) due to man-made emissions.

Where I don’t quite agree with you is that “there is no shortage of information supporting fossil fuel burning as a large, and likely the major, contributing factor to global warming”. I say “don’t quite agree” because technically what you say is reasonable, after all there is indeed a large amount of information supplied by the IPCC and others, which purports to show that what you say is the case. However, I have spent a lot of time checking - just as I did for volcanoes and atmospheric CO2 only much more so - and that is only one side of the picture. There is IMHO an overwhelming body of evidence which leads me to the conclusion that the effect of atmospheric CO2 on global temperature is grossly overstated by the IPCC. The evidence includes temperature trends in the troposphere, global temperature trends over longer periods, the behaviour of Antarctic temperatures, various analyses by solar physicists and others, and I have probably missed a few more. I have also checked the IPCC report itself, because if it is wrong I should be able to identify where it is wrong. Its major errors are IMHO in the historical temperature (”Mann’s hockey stick” which everyone surely now agrees is discredited. If you don’t agree, I can explain why it is completely unreliable), in the models which then try to map that erroneous record to CO2 (including their “parametrization” [fiddle factors] of clouds, based on no known mechanism), and in the way it downplays natural factors and natural cycles. So, for example, it attributes virtually all of the temperature increase of the 20th century to CO2, when the temperature record clearly shows a natural cycle, aligned with the PDO, with two upward phases and only one downward phase within the century. The result is that the temperature increase claimed for CO2 is clearly overstated by about 50% just from this one factor alone.

When all the scientific evidence is put together - not just the IPCC’s cherry-picked subset - the case for dangerous man-made warming collapses.

Note that at no time have I said that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, nor that it does not cause any global warming. Only that its effect on global temperature has been grossly overestimated.
Comment by Pat on 25 July 2011:

Nothing beats people with no real scientific backgrounds arguing because they saw an article with no true citations online….
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 31 July 2011:

Pat - Free speech can be untidy. Besides criticizing those who comment because you believe their opinions are not scientifically supported or documented, can you add anything useful to the argument?
Comment by Pat on 31 July 2011:

Yes I can add something.

Turtles don’t like peanut butter.

Find an online blog that says that they do.
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 31 July 2011:

Pat, about your useful assertion that “turtles don’t like peanut butter”, do you have any “true citations online” per your earlier criticism? And by the way, do you still beat your girlfriend?
Comment by Pat on 31 July 2011:

For more information about volcanoes, you can refer to my prior post, but I will post it again. This comes from government research, but I am sure the government (along with newspapers, TVs, and radio) is lying so they can force us into thinking green. Perhaps this is why we should start listening to people’s blogs… They are the ones who can stand up against power and find the real truth.

Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for some 36,300 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2008 [Le Quéré et al., 2009], release at least a hundred times more CO2 annually than all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2010).

The half dozen or so published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 132 million (minimum) to 378 million (maximum) metric tons per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998; Kerrick, 2001). If estimate medians and author-preferred estimates of these studies are used to lessen the influence of outlier estimates, the range is restricted to about 150-270 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The current anthropogenic CO2 emission rate of some 36,300-million metric tons of CO2 per year is about 100 to 300 times larger than these estimated ranges for global volcanic CO2 emissions.

In recent times, about 50-60 volcanoes are normally active on the Earth’s subaerial terrain. One of these is Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, which has an annual baseline CO2 output of about 3.1 million metric tons per year [Gerlach et al., 2002]. It would take a huge addition of volcanoes to the subaerial landscape—the equivalent of an extra 11,700 Kīlauea volcanoes—to scale up the global volcanic CO2 emission rate to the anthropogenic CO2 emission rate. Similarly, scaling up the volcanic rate to the current anthropogenic rate by adding more submarine volcanoes would require the addition of over 100 mid-oceanic ridge systems to the sea floor.

Global volcanic CO2 emission estimates are uncertain, but there is little doubt that the anthropogenic CO2 emission rate is more than a hundred times greater than the global volcanic CO2 emission rate

Read more here: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 1 August 2011:

Thanks Pat. Seems you and Mike Jonas agree that CO2 emissions from man made sources exceed that of volcanic emissions.

Would you care to respond directly to Mike’s post after your initial one? Especially this part?

“There is IMHO an overwhelming body of evidence which leads me to the conclusion that the effect of atmospheric CO2 on global temperature is grossly overstated by the IPCC. The evidence includes temperature trends in the troposphere, global temperature trends over longer periods, the behaviour of Antarctic temperatures, various analyses by solar physicists and others, and I have probably missed a few more. I have also checked the IPCC report itself, because if it is wrong I should be able to identify where it is wrong. Its major errors are IMHO in the historical temperature (”Mann’s hockey stick” which everyone surely now agrees is discredited. If you don’t agree, I can explain why it is completely unreliable), in the models which then try to map that erroneous record to CO2 (including their “parametrization” [fiddle factors] of clouds, based on no known mechanism), and in the way it downplays natural factors and natural cycles. So, for example, it attributes virtually all of the temperature increase of the 20th century to CO2, when the temperature record clearly shows a natural cycle, aligned with the PDO, with two upward phases and only one downward phase within the century. The result is that the temperature increase claimed for CO2 is clearly overstated by about 50% just from this one factor alone.

When all the scientific evidence is put together - not just the IPCC’s cherry-picked subset - the case for dangerous man-made warming collapses.

Note that at no time have I said that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, nor that it does not cause any global warming. Only that its effect on global temperature has been grossly overestimated.”
Comment by Pat on 1 August 2011:

I am an accountant. Just like you, I have not made a career out of doing scientific studies on CO2 emissions.

I couldn’t believe that the hockey stick was a farse…. Surely I thought we could map out temperatures from hundreds of years ago.

I believe in climate change, and I feel that we do cause a lot of CO2 to be put in the air. However, I am not going to greatly change my ways, and that is why I just drove rather than walked to the library on my lunch break. Man did not cause the potato famine or the Boston summer snow in the early 1800s. It is due to a numerous amount of conditions.

Yet, if we have access to solar pannels, why not use them? Would you really rather burn coal? The only thing burning coal helps is keeping the railroads alive thanks to government taxation on the railroad industry nearly a century ago.

So continue to go online and search for the studies that support what you would like to hear. Everything else is rubbish.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 1 August 2011:

Pat - One of the great things about science is that everything has to be supported by evidence - Nullius in Verba and all that.

Should we be able to map out temperatures from hundreds of years ago? Yes indeed. But did Michael Mann and co produce a good map? No they didn’t. How do I know that? Because the evidence shows that they didn’t. The evidence comes in three forms.
1. The data that they used as a proxy for temperature is almost useless. It was based mainly on tree-rings, which are known to reflect factors other than temperature, eg. precipitation. It also used tree species, such as bristlecones, which are known to be particularly unreliable, and it used particular locations, such as Yamal, while other locations showing different patterns were ignored. The fact that the data is useless is visible from the “hockey-stick” graph, where proxy data prior to about 1550, proxy data after the mid-1900s, and instrument data prior to about 1900 are truncated. Had that data been left in, it would have been immediately obvious that the proxy data did not show temperature at all.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/23/13321/ is probably the easiest place to start getting the picture.
That really is all that one needs to know about the hockey-stick to dismiss it, but science is also about cross-checking, so here are two other bits of information that confirm this conclusion:
2. In the “climategate” emails, Phil Jones writes “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”. This confirms that Phil Jones knew that the proxy record declined when it should have gone up, and that the way he chose to make the graph look credible was to chop off the obviously bad proxy data and put in the instrument data instead. The really chilling thing, to me, is that the email showed that this technique had been used before somewhere. If you still doubt this explanation, please ask yourself this : when is it ever acceptable for a scientist to hide something?
3. There is anecdotal evidence that temperatures were warmer than now in the Medieval Warm Period - grapes in N England, Greenland being green, etc. By itself, this anecdotal evidence may not be of great scientific value, but in conjunction with 1 and 2 above, it provides corroboration that the hockey-stick is false.

And by the way, when you ask “if we have access to solar pannels, why not use them?”, I do. I reckon my “green” credentials are just fine. I live in a self-designed passive-solar mudbrick house, with solar panels for hot water and geothermal heating. Renewable energy is good stuff, but for the population as a whole it has to be cost-competitive or the economy suffers and along with it our ability to handle future climate changes (which may be hotter or, more likely in the next decades, colder).
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 1 August 2011:

Thanks Pat, for your straight forward honest comments. They do, IMHO (I just learned what that means by searching online) logically raise some questions. If you are not willing to bother to make minor changes which you admittedly can, how can you expect many others to make serious backward steps to accommodate your, “why not, it only hurts the railroads” assertions you must have read online somewhere.

There are a lot of employed folks (a check somewhere online might provide an estimate for us amateurs) who earn a living somewhere during the necessary development processes of coal which I would guess include discovery, extraction and utilization, which involve more than only transportation by one or more of the greedy railroads. Warren Buffet and Co owns a major railroad of their own.

An impossible and forced wholesale conversion to solar panels would throw them out of work and they would not be able to afford their previous lower cost carbon based heat let alone the higher cost green future forced on them too soon, ie before market forces help in the conversion.

My vision of the future, given energy sources I am aware of today, is locally generated and used solar and geothermal energy. Because few of us are willing to pay significantly more than than we have to for anything (preferring others via the government to do that for us), that result is not likely in my lifetime if ever.

Unfortunately perhaps, the world has carbon based resources galore. Sorry to repeat, but the more anyone looks, the more they find and most foreign countries, Brazil, China, Russia etc think of their oil companies as national security resources, not as evil.

Consequently, nothing is likely to beat the relatively low cost, mysterious ubiquity, BTU power and usefulness of what we pull out of the ground for some time. Yet I hope to be proven wrong tomorrow by a scientific break through that like a lottery win, no one should plan on.

We get nothing but a poor education from blatant, unlikely, untrue, ideological and self centered motivation and skewing evident in “An Inconvenient Truth”, the hockey stick promotion, even peak oil threats now 30 years old. Peak oil I think asserted that we would be using more than we produce now. A lot of the earth still has not been explored.

I too believe in climate change. Those of us who believe the earth is very old and that most land masses have appeared and disappeared, moved around and through the ages been iced over, under water, full of jungles, on top of mountains and so on, feel strongly that the temperature must have also been on a roller coaster ride.

It is the heights of human arrogance to think that what has happened in our short, relatively nonviolent stay on this earth, is not going to change for, as you said, a variety of factors which we can not control.

Given the real world economics we live with, purely idealistic forced changes, adding massive misallocation of capital onto our recent 25 year binge of temporary circumstances, could literally result in not being able to feed, clothe and shelter a growing, many billions problem that requires real solutions, not political ones.

Likely in the best of cases, that such ideological processes will not really put off inexorable climate change and the flooding of nice places. Unless they ice over first.

Knowing nothing about proxy temperature measurements, I have to limit myself to real temperatures gauges used in some studies, which causes me to think about micro climates near each other that create different grapes and wines. Or modern temperature gauges that differ by one or more degrees, say from one bank to the next, let alone from the one on your car or the kitchen window. Ever wonder about the quality control of temperature gauges, their handling and what difference it might have made if they put one on this hill or that hill or valley or?

The world is a big place, how many gauges have been used in non proxy studies? I have no idea, reading scientific studies is too complex and confusing for me, but I think it reasonable to be skeptical of measuring some hundredths of a degree changes, and draw conclusions for the entire earth.

And when the all important data gets lost like the Rose Law Firm records, what is a non scientist to think about the IPCC emails showing bias, a real no no in science, leading to the use of double blind studies, which still have flaws.
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 9 August 2011:

Poor Al Gore, seems his aging Tennessee male cow chip is souring. Maybe he should have kept this in his “lauk baux” with our social security money (his best idea).
Even York Times readers think he went overboard by a 2 to 1 margin today, a political rout measured by any melting iceberg in this or the last millennium.
Comment by Joel on 20 September 2011:

Chief,

Just a bit up, you had a post where you challenged Pat to respond to a comment. If you read that comment, you’ll see that not a single statement in that comment is backed up with fact. There are a bunch of things like `”Mann’s hockey stick” which everyone surely now agrees is discredited’
The fact that this is considered a compelling argument is because it relies on logical fallacies. If I imply everyone agrees with me, then I can mock people who don’t.

The simple fact is that we can measure temperatures. We can measure climate-related variables. Have you noticed a bunch of forest fires recently? A pretty significant drought in the US Southwest? A lot more flooding than normal? Not just in the US, but Australia, South Africa, South America, Russia? Satellites can measure global temperatures accurately. Glaciers in all parts of the world are retreating. Something weird is going on. Could it be random chance? Maybe.

Just maybe. But let’s be honest - it’s pretty strange that this is happening at exactly the same time that CO2 levels are skyrocketing. True, correlation does not imply causation, but when there are solid scientific reasons that CO2 prevents heat from escaping the atmosphere and radiating into space, and indeed scientific studies show that if we account for CO2 we can predict current temperature trends accurately, while if we don’t account for it, we can’t predict the trends. Let’s just say - if a murder was committed and someone who hated the victim is standing with a bloodstained knife right next to the victim would you use the correlation does not imply causation argument?

As for your argument about temperature gauges… Do you really think scientists aren’t smart enough to think about these things? Yes, they are careful. Yes they have multiple ways to check their measurements (lots of proxies out there - glaciers, satellite measurements, tree rings, etc). Just because you don’t necessarily understand everything doesn’t mean you have the right to discount it. I don’t know what your job is, but I’m pretty sure that there are aspects of it that I don’t understand. Does that give me the right to say you’re wrong about it? If an electrician tells me that wire ‘A’ better not get connected to wire ‘B’, just because I don’t understand his answer when I say “why” doesn’t mean I feel safe ignoring his advice.

Finally: “Given the real world economics we live with, purely idealistic forced changes, adding massive misallocation of capital onto our recent 25 year binge of temporary circumstances, could literally result in not being able to feed, clothe and shelter a growing, many billions problem that requires real solutions, not political ones.” Consider this: during the past few years, droughts, fires, and floods in various parts of the world mean that stockpiles around the world have gone down. Despite the fact that food prices have gone up as stockpiles drop, farmers have not increased net production. The conditions that would have been considered a major drought 50 years ago are now mild droughts in many places. If current conditions become typical conditions 50 years from now…? What happens when it’s not economic limitations that prevent us from feeding, clothing, and sheltering the population but rather the fact that there isn’t enough rainfall in some places and too much in others?
Comment by Joel on 20 September 2011:

Mike:

“2. In the “climategate” emails, Phil Jones writes “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”. This confirms that Phil Jones knew that the proxy record declined when it should have gone up, and that the way he chose to make the graph look credible was to chop off the obviously bad proxy data and put in the instrument data instead. The really chilling thing, to me, is that the email showed that this technique had been used before somewhere. If you still doubt this explanation, please ask yourself this : when is it ever acceptable for a scientist to hide something?”

No. You are using an out of context quote. I don’t know if you know it, because you’re probably just parroting what others have told you. But it is out of context. First, the word ‘trick’. Sounds terrible. But let’s be clear: have you ever used a mathematical trick? There are lots of tricks for, say multiplying by 9. Hold out 10 fingers. Drop the first one. Notice how you have 9 fingers on one side? 1×9 = 9. Now put that one up and drop the second. You’ve got 1 finger up on one side and 8 up on the other side. 2×9 = 18. when you get to, finger number 6, you’ll have 5 up on the left and 4 up on the right. 6×9=54. See the trick? When scientists talk about quick ways to do something mathematically they refer to ‘tricks’. It’s common, and in fact there are many published papers that actually use exactly that word. So be clear, it’s not a ‘trick’ as in “aha! fooled you” it’s a trick as in “that’s a lot easier than expected”.

As for the next damning bit: “hide the decline”… Are you sure you know what was declining? Was it measured temperatures? Um, no. It was a specific proxy measurement that was diverging from other measurements in specific parts of the world. Specifically tree ring measurements in high-latitude areas. There are reasons those specific measurements declined after 1960, though there is debate over whether we should trust those measurements before 1960. Nevertheless the decline was not a decline in measured temperatures. And the ‘trick’ was to incorporate real measured temperature into the calculation for dates where the real measurements existed.

So if you think the quote is “I’m going to trick people by hiding a decline in temperature”, then I understand why you’re upset. But if you realize the quote is “I’m going to use a neat method to make it easy to analyze the data without the influence of a decline in tree ring data in specific locations that was due to non-temperature effects”, well then you’re just looking for things to be upset about because you’ve already made up your mind.
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 21 September 2011:

Joel - I have some concurrence with “Just because you don’t necessarily understand everything doesn’t mean you have the right to discount it.” And I have always believed that anthropomorphic causes are contributing to climate change because reporting on the science I read and yet retain an incomplete understanding of, seems to overwhelmingly indicate that at a minimum greenhouse gases at our hands has increased dramatically during a period of arguable global warming (global change is more likely) and that the gas alone con tributes directly to global warming. What the combined consequences of natural cycles and our other activities, many additional variables, is something we do not understand so well.

My “discounting” (which I have an absolute legal right to, but not an unfounded intellectual right to) is in the context that global upheavals of land, water and air have gone way beyond (in both or all directions of measurement) anything we believe we know during our limited time here. The greatest of them occurred in the eons before industrialized man.

So given those scientific ideas and the also conspicuous amounts of money and power that accumulates with any successful combined scientifically “supported” /political POV, to me showcases the arrogance that accompanies “the science is settled” positioning and the obvious propagandizing of the collective minds of a public. A public generally less involved than I in trying to develop a personal way to decide if the electrician knows his different wires as well as he should or if he is in line to benefit otherwise from politically or economically biased assertions.

While believing second opinions and intellectually honest discounting should not be discouraged, I also believe we should continue to spend significant amounts of money increasing our understanding of our impacts on planet earth and beyond, I cannot understand how anyone can not see the convenient fear mongering of a rich over consuming celebrity like Al Gore.

And others, who know how everyone else should live (differently from them by the way) but have no qualms about flying all over the world to spread their gospel and image, perhaps to pickup an award while generally not taking the time to directly care or pay attention to the needy without a camera, living in exclusive compounds with armed guards and not paying windfall taxes.

I want government related support to fund unbiased scientific research, not a scientist in search of data to support a previous POV, a real problem in all aspects of life, not just among scientists.

Thank you for your very thoughtful remarks which indeed have increased my ability to evaluate the “electrician”. Sincere thanks.
Comment by Joel on 21 September 2011:

Hi Chief,

I have to admit I’m a little surprised by your response - in my interaction with people who express skepticism about climate change they generally aren’t willing to consider the underlying science.

You seem willing to consider the scientific basis, so let me lay out a bit more of the underlying science, and then I will address the question about what constitutes “settled science”. (please do read this - I’ve put more time - about 2 hrs - into it than I can really afford because I think there is a chance to honestly influence your thoughts) My PhD was in mathematical fluid dynamics, and although I have moved to a different research topic (infectious disease spread), I still know enough to comment on much of the relevant science.

First, the earth is surrounded by a vacuum. There is one, and only one, way for an object surrounded by vacuum to cool off. It has to radiate heat in photons - that is: ultraviolet, infrared, visible light, X-rays, etc have to go off into space carrying energy. You know from looking at fires and lava that things that are hot emit light. From cop shows you may have seen that even things that are warm emit light in wavelengths we can’t see. The same is true of the earth. It emits light, just generally not a wavelength we can see. To cool off, that light has to get through the atmosphere into space. The problem is that CO2 absorbs some of that light and converts it back into heat. It does so quite efficiently. There is no way to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere without trapping more heat. This in incontrovertible scientific fact (some say that there is enough CO2 already that the particular wavelength CO2 absorbs is already completely captured so changing CO2 levels does not affect how much of that wavelength is absorbed. Whoever originally made that claim lied, but once the claim is made many skeptics repeat it without question - I can provide proof that the CO2 isn’t that concentrated yet)

The only question is how big is the effect, and what does it mean for our climate? That’s a hard question to answer. The reason it is hard is that there are lots of feedback mechanisms. We know that heating air causes it to rise, which leads to wind. That wind means that heat in one place gets transferred somewhere else, in turn causing other weather variables to change. Other effects (e.g., white ice melting and no longer reflecting light) also muck around with things and mean that we cannot simply say that the temperature everywhere increases by the same amount. This is why ‘climate change’ is a better term than ‘global warming’. But CO2 levels are rising everywhere at the same rate because the atmosphere does mix pretty well over the course of a few years. So although lots of complicated things are happening, the one sure thing is that it is harder for heat energy to leave the earth, so somehow the climate must be changing. To understand how, we need to consider the feedbacks.

What are the potential feed-back mechanisms? I’ll tell you the one that scares me the most. One observation that we have made is that the arctic warms faster than the rest of the world. This is not particularly surprising, and simulations predict it: as snow melts, less sunlight is reflected back into space, leading to more heat, melting more snow… One of the big concerns here is that if the arctic warms too much there will be nothing we can do to reverse climate change. The amount of organic matter in permafrost is huge. As the arctic melts, that organic matter decays. What is the result? CO2 is released. The arctic warms, more matter decays… There may be a point that even if we completely stop emitting CO2, this feedback mechanism will run out of control. This has begun to be called a ‘tipping point’, though in science it’s more typically referred to as a ‘bifurcation’.

These are scientific facts and are relatively simple to understand. The challenge is that so far I’ve just waved my hands and said things may get warmer. 0.1 degree warmer is warmer. So is 10 degrees. The first isn’t very important. The second is disastrous. How much will it really be? This is where simulations come in. Are the simulations any good? In general we know what the equations underlying weather are: fundamentally it’s the same equations that go into fluid dynamics with temperature effects. If the simulations don’t include the observed increase in CO2, they predict roughly constant temperatures. If they do include the increase in CO2, they predict the observed trend quite well. Unfortunately, if anything, the models underpredict the temperature increase.

Now there is a question that frequently comes up: “weather is a chaotic system, how can we trust predictions about 10 years from now when we can’t predict 10 days from now?” It’s a compelling question, but ultimately it’s asking the wrong thing because it misunderstands where the chaos is. If you have a weighted coin that comes up heads 55% of the time, it is almost impossible for you to accurately predict the next 10 flips. But you can be fairly confident that over 1000 flips, something close to 550 results will be heads. We can’t predict what the weather will be 2 weeks from now. But we can predict things like how much rain will fall in a typical year or what the average high and low temperatures will be. Even for chaotic systems we can predict the average behavior.

Hopefully this was a relatively simple explanation of the underlying science. Now the question comes of whether the science is settled. Here’s my basic response: in my time of doing a PhD in fluid dynamics (Cambridge University), followed by a postdoc at a national laboratory (Los Alamos) and now a postdoc at a highly regarded university (Harvard) I have yet to meet a scientist who has significant doubts. That said, when I look at the media or online I do see them - prominent scientists even. Why?

The answer is fairly simple. You can have less than 1 tenth of 1 percent of scientists question something and still find some prominent scientists in the skeptical category. Just look at HIV: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/index.htm
http://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/

There are people who sincerely believe HIV does not cause AIDS. They have prominent scientists to back them up. They convinced the former president of South Africa that the cause of AIDS was the medications used to control HIV rather than HIV itself. Literally hundreds of thousands of people died significantly earlier than they would have otherwise due to this conspiracy theory. The arguments are that scientists get grants by taking the viewpoint that HIV causes AIDS, so dissident scientists don’t get funding, thus biasing the studies. Add to that the fact that pharmaceutical companies make profit off of HIV medications, you can quickly see how the conspiracy theory develops.

The arguments that HIV does not cause AIDS are every bit as compelling as the arguments that climate change isn’t happening. If anything, the evidence is stronger: There are people who have been HIV positive for decades without showing any AIDS symptoms. The way the theory sustains itself is that for every study on HIV, one can find a plausible effect that wasn’t considered by the scientists running the study. If someone points it out, then the answer is generally something along the lines of, well, the maximum size of that effect is 0.02, and the effect we have measured is 0.8, so it cannot change the conclusion. But to make that argument requires a lot of technical and generally highly mathematical arguments. It’s not understood by the layperson. So the layperson sees “Scientist ‘A’ did a study and neglected effect ‘q’. We can easily see that it will have some effect. So we can’t trust scientist A.”

This is akin to the argument that some temperature recorders are near areas that have had considerable urban growth. It is known that increasing roads and buildings increases local temperatures. Therefore we can ignore all conclusions from the temperature measurements. Well, no. Because the trend still exists even if you ignore the challenged locations, and also because the effect of that urbanization could not be as large as the observed change. But unfortunately this requires a detailed and complex explanation. It’s easy to say “I don’t understand, so I’m not convinced”. But if you (and I don’t mean ‘you’ as in you personally chief, but rather a generic person) won’t accept a scientist’s claims at face value, I believe that to be honest you have to be willing to look at the detailed explanation the scientist gives. If you can’t understand it because it relies on concepts your education didn’t include (please note, I’m not saying this is a deficiency in education - I’ve got a PhD in mathematics, but an electrical engineer could very easily leave me in the dust because the educational background is different), then you need to turn to others whose education is sufficient. And if they accept the conclusion, then you can’t honestly say “I don’t understand it so I simply will act as if it is not true”. That’s really “I don’t WANT to believe it, so I will pretend it’s not true”.

50 years ago, the science on tobacco was settled. It causes cancer and nicotine is addictive. But as recently as 1994 the tobacco company executives were able to point to studies they had funded and testify before congress that the science was unsettled.

The science is settled on climate change: it is real, it is happening and it is caused by CO2. But oil executives can point to scientists that they funded who say the science is unsettled. You also get people who have a political axe to grind so they post things like the statement that started this whole chain of comments - “some volcano is emitting huge amounts of CO2, so it’s obvious that the scientists are wrong!!” Well, actually it turns out that the basis of the story was entirely made up. Here’s my axe to grind: why is it that the ’skeptical’ people will accept these claims so readily? Because there are very few honest skeptics. Most of them are looking for the facts to back up their existing beliefs.

So rather than questioning how settled the science is that climate change IS happening, let’s look at the opposite side.

We can surely agree that the science that climate change is NOT happening is unsettled.

If politicians said we should treat a 2% chance of a terrorist attack as if it were certain, then how much more should we respond to climate change? The consequences of climate change are such that in my lifetime and certainly in my child’s lifetime it is conceivable that there will be famine in the US, never mind the rest of the world. You think global instability is bad now? You think terrorism is bad now? Imagine the entire world struck by famine. This is a plausible scenario. Would there be a cost? Yes. There was a cost to reducing SO2 emissions from coal plants worldwide (acid rain). There was a cost to reducing CFC emissions worldwide (ozone hole). But was the cost unbearable? We seemed to do okay (and in fact that cost may have been balanced by the fact that people lived longer with fewer medical visits). Was it successful? When did you last hear about acid rain and ozone holes? Climate change is a bigger threat and requires a bigger response, but the policy approach has already been developed for worldwide reduction in emissions of other chemicals. Should we as a society be so confident that the vast majority of scientists are wrong that we are willing to risk our future?
Comment by Joel on 21 September 2011:

Chief:

I wanted to point out a bit more of the parallel between the climate change deniers and the HIV-AIDS link deniers:

Look at their conference webpages:
http://ra2011.org/
http://climateconference.heartland.org/

Look at the similarities of their arguments. I’ve got two quotes, and substitute [X] where they say something that makes clear which cause they’ve adopted.

Which website says “The theme of the conference, “Restoring the Scientific Method,” acknowledges the fact that claims of scientific certainty and [X] are based on “post-normal science,” which substitutes claims of consensus for the scientific method. This choice has had terrible consequences for science and society. Abandoning the scientific method led to [Y] and the errors and abuses of peer review by [Z]”

Which one says to potential attendies “you will leave with a much deeper understanding of the scientific flaws of the [X] dogma, new insights into how this flawed theory become so firmly rooted and an understanding of how it is sustained today”

The only significant difference between the two is that the climate change group has a massive list of sponsors while the hiv group relies on individual contributions.

If you do happen to read the climate change conference website and see the quote: “Since 2007, more than 31,072 American scientists, including 9,021 with Ph.Ds, have signed the a petition which says, in part, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.””, then I request you learn a bit about the background of that petition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition Note the fraud in the initial distribution of the petition, the fact that most of these scientists are in unrelated fields, and the fact that there is no proof required for these people to claim to be scientists.

I realize that my arguments here may be construed as guilt by association. And that’s partially a fair criticism. But my point is, both sets of skeptics use the same arguments with the same amount of scientific support. If we give credence to one, we should give equal credence to the other. Or, if we reject one set of arguments as unscientific, we must reject the other.
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 23 September 2011:

Off to science class…back soon!
Comment by Mike Jonas on 29 September 2011:

I’ve been away for a few weeks, and I see that the debate has moved along a bit in the meantime. Joel is clearly having a determined attempt at swaying all and sundry to the AGW cause, and I don’t have time to reply to it all, but a couple of points may help:

On the “hockey-stick” graph. Joel defends the word “trick”, but the real problem is the word “hide”. As I asked then, when is it ever acceptable for a scientist to hide something. Yes, Phil Jones knew that the proxies declined when actual temperatures went up (that’s the “decline” referred to), but he substituted actual temperatures for the proxies in order to get the cherry-picked result that he wanted, when he should have acknowledged that the proxies were highly suspect. After all, if proxies and actuals diverge - and diverge severely - over a significant period, then the proxies are necessarily unreliable over all periods. And the period ~1960 onwards isn’t the only period chopped from the graph. They even chopped both proxies and actuals (over different periods) in order to - as Joel put it - back up their existing beliefs.

On the number of people that support either position and the arguments they use: in the end, numbers of people don’t matter, it’s the evidence that matters, and anyway similar-sounding arguments can be right in one situation and wrong in another. In an earlier post I mentioned some of the hard scientific evidence against CAGW (”C” for Catastrophic). The facts are that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and humans have added some to the atmosphere, but the IPCC have grossly exaggerated its warming effect using techniques which I outlined in an earlier post.

And then poor old CO2 has been demonised as well - just think how much more food the world could grow if Canada and Russia were a degree or two warmer. Unfortunately, if the solar physicists are right, that’s not going to happen for quite a while because we’re now back into the cooling part of the cycle, and we won’t warm back up again to above today’s temperature until - well, probably long after fossil fuel production has gone into decline.
Comment by John Theophilus on 5 October 2011:

I think that the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming is less than totally conclusive and that there is at least a possibility that the globe is warming up again to levels it reached before humans were around to notice due to mechanisms we don’t understand (we don’t understand everything)
To some extent this is an irrelevant matter. If global warming is occurring because of human actions and will result in our own self destruction (or more likely ALMOST self destruction) there is no possibility at all that we’ll do anything about it. As far as I can see even the most modest estimates of the degree of self deprivation which ALL humans will need to take on to avoid creating unsustainable stresses on the planet is way more than it is realistic to hope for. No politician is going to make the self control compulsory. No amount of hectoring or pleading will convert those unwilling to change or believing that the trifling things they are doing with such self satisfaction are adequate. If global warming is antrompogenic we are stuffed. If global warming isn’t antropogenic we are also stuffed.
It is rumoured that airline pilots finding themselves in a certainly fatal situation utter the last words “Oh, shit”. I figure it is time to utter these immortal words on behalf of humanity, maybe we could make a pop record based upon them sung by an ethereal choir and make some cash to enjoy our last days with?
Comment by Mike Jonas on 5 October 2011:

John T - all fair comment, except for “If global warming isn’t anthropogenic we are also stuffed”. If global warming isn’t anthropogenic, then we don’t know what happens next. The natural climate has done pretty well for us over the ages. The major cloud [pun intended] on the horizon is that the sun is showing signs of a slowdown which could deliver some rather nasty cold temperatures globally over the next decades. You may well end up uttering the immortal words, but for the opposite reason!

The lack of global warming over the last decade could of course just be a blip in the upward march, but it seems more likely to be the natural cycle turning on cue (it’s in line with the visible cycles of the last century+).

We shall see.

[In haste. I'm just leaving on a 10-day fishing trip. There are more important things than the world's survival!]
Comment by John Theophilus on 6 October 2011:

Mike

Hooray! Reason for hope. I’d more or less given up.

Trust you had a successful fishing trip.

I’ll try and get the pop song off the ground anyway as I could do with the cash. Do you think Bob Dylan would do a verse? Obviously we can rely on Bob Geldorf, Bono, Sting and all the usual crowd, but it would be nice to get ol’ Bobbie back in the groove again.

PS I don’t doubt the survival of the world and its boi-sphere at all, simply the continued existance of the curious monkeys who have populated it so extensively, just for the moment.
Comment by Joel on 22 October 2011:

So I’m going to respond to a few of the points made above.

Mike: I’m glad you acknowledge that the word ‘trick’ was not used to refer to actually tricking people. To be honest, of the many “skeptics” I’ve seen refer to this quote, you’re the first to do so. This quote was used by Hannity who then said “Well, that would be the decline in global temperatures.” I’m glad you acknowledge that in fact it was a decline in a specific set of proxy measurements, while measurements of real temperature went up. I trust you’re holding the skeptics to the same standard of truth? I trust you’re offended at the person who made the initial claims way up at the top of this thread that volcanos produce as much CO2 as humans? You’re vocally opposing the “Oregon Petition” for the fraud they committed, right? Or do scientists have to not only be honest, but avoid any use of words that could be taken out of context, while “skeptics” are allowed to lie outright? Don’t go down the path of accusing scientists of being dishonest if you don’t also hold the skeptics to the same standard. Yes, there is fraud occassionally in science, but being caught completely and irrevocably ends a scientist’s career - it seems to have no effect on the willingness of the “honest skeptic” crowd to continue to associate with skeptics who parrot a lie. So let’s look a little bit closer at the ‘fraud’ you think was uncovered when someone’s private emails were stolen and taken out of context.

You’re now switching the focus from the word ‘trick’ to the word ‘hide’, saying “when is it ever acceptable for a scientist to hide something”. Well, let’s look at the word “hide” as it was used. It wasn’t hiding anything from the public or from other scientists (or even the “skeptics”) because the method was explicitly explained in the publication. It was about using the correct statistical technique to prevent data that was known to be inaccurate from polluting the outcome - thereby “hiding” the inaccurate data. The fact of the matter is that there were multiple proxies used. These proxies were consistent over long periods of time. One of these proxies deviated in from the other proxies over a specific time period, for reasons that were at least partially understood. The authors used a method to prevent the data that was known to be inaccurate from affecting their result. The only reason people are focusing on this quote is that it sounds bad when taken out of context. You know it.

I cannot emphasize this enough. When published, they explained the method publicly. There was no hiding.

On to the next point. I pointed out that the arguments used by the people claiming HIV doesn’t cause AIDS are identical to the arguments used by the climate change skeptics. You respond: “anyway similar-sounding arguments can be right in one situation and wrong in another.” Maybe. But my point is that the arguments and strength of evidence underlying both of these arguments are not similar, they are identical. If one set of arguments are scientifically valid, so is the other. I’ll ask again, what is different about the people claiming HIV doesn’t cause AIDS? I honestly believe these people have stronger science to back them up than the climate change skeptics (just as an aside, what do you think you would find if you stole 20 years of private emails between HIV researchers dealing with the fact that the HIV causes AIDS skeptics managed to convince Mbeki that AIDS treatments should be stopped? You think you might find a quote or two that could be taken out of context there?)

Moving on: “The facts are that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and humans have added some to the atmosphere”. Yhe word “some” was carefully chosen. We’re at levels of around 400ppm. Not that many decades ago it was at 300ppm. Since CO2 is the predominant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, a 33% increase should raise an eyebrow or two (and in my lifetime it’s likely to hit 450, meaning a 50% increase). Can you offer any scientific basis to believe that such an increase has no effect? Clearly not, since you acknowledge the effect. But you go on to say: “And then poor old CO2 has been demonised as well - just think how much more food the world could grow if Canada and Russia were a degree or two warmer.” Yes, wouldn’t that be nice. Now remind me, why was it that Russia is normally a massive exporter of wheat and the year before last it made it illegal to export wheat? Had something to do with the weather as I recall. Simply warming Russia does not necessarilly mean increased food production.

The current research is not focused on keeping Canada and Russia from getting a degree or two warmer. It’s already fairly widely assumed that the best we can do is keep global average temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees (and to be clear, we’re talking C, not F). A 2 degree increase is already taken as inevitable.

To put the burden of proof on you a bit, do you have any scientific basis to show that a 50% increase in the main greenhouse gas will only have a degree or two warming effect?
Comment by Joel on 22 October 2011:

By the way: when an oil company funds a skeptic researcher to investigate global warming, they don’t expect this answer, do they?

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2011/1021/Koch-brothers-accidentally-fund-study-that-proves-global-warming
Comment by Mike Jonas on 22 October 2011:

Joel -

>>>”I trust you’re offended at the person who made the initial claims way up at the top of this thread that volcanos produce as much CO2 as humans?”

See my comment 25 July 2011 http://hypocrisy.com/2008/06/16/chilian-volcano-has-belched-more-carbon-dioxide-than-all-humans-have-in-last-two-decades/#comment-21988 2nd para: “I accept that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels greatly exceed those from volcanoes”. I’m not offended, because there is so much crap flying around that it is very hard for anyone to be sure what is real and what isn’t. But if I think a mistake has been made I do tend to weigh in (politely) no matter which “side” the person is on (unless someone else gets there first, of course, and time permitting).

>>>”You’re now switching the focus from the word ‘trick’ to the word ‘hide’”

I have focused on the word ‘hide’ right from the start.

>>>”The only reason people are focusing on this quote is that it sounds bad when taken out of context. You know it.”

Absolutely not. Read on.

>>>”These proxies were consistent over long periods of time. One of these proxies deviated in from the other proxies over a specific time period, for reasons that were at least partially understood. The authors used a method to prevent the data that was known to be inaccurate from affecting their result.”.

If they really were doing just that, then they would not have used the words “to hide the decline”. The simple unavoidable fact, demonstrated very clearly by direct evidence, is that they intended to hide something. Scientists following proper scientific method simply do not ever hide anything.

In more detail: the proxies chopped were: Briffa’s from ~1960 and before ~1550, and Mann’s from ~1980. I stated in an earlier comment that some instrumental data was chopped too, but can’t find that part now (maybe my memory was faulty). A huge amount of sleuthing was done by Steve McIntyre on “hide the decline”, and it makes a very interesting read. After reading it, it would be extraordinarily difficult to stick to the explanation you give.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/15/new-light-on-hide-the-decline/
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/17/hide-the-decline-sciencemag/#more-13285
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/21/hide-the-decline-the-other-deletion/
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/23/13321/
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-trick-and-phils-combo/
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/provenance-of-the-briffa-file-in-the-jones-1998-archive/
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/30/muir-russell-and-the-briffa-bodge/

>>>arguments used by the people claiming HIV doesn’t cause AIDS

I’m quite simply not interested in entering a diversion. Analogies are no substitute for the actual. Let’s stick to climate.

>>>”Can you offer any scientific basis to believe that such an increase [in atmospheric CO2] has no effect?”

As you go on to note, I do not claim that it has no effect.

>>>”Now remind me, why was it that Russia is normally a massive exporter of wheat and the year before last it made it illegal to export wheat? Had something to do with the weather as I recall.”

The reason Russia banned wheat exports in 2010 was that they were hit by drought and wildfires caused by an intense atmospheric blocking pattern.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/09/us-climate-russia-heat-idUSTRE7287DS20110309
This Reuters report says that it was a “long-lasting, high-intensity weather pattern unlike any seen before around Moscow” and that it “was primarily due to natural variability, not human-spurred climate change”.
You may prefer NOAA as a source:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/moscow2010/
After discussing man-made global warming, it goes on to say:
“Despite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave. It is not known whether, or to what exent, greenhouse gas emissions may affect the frequency or intensity of blocking during summer. It is important to note that observations reveal no trend in a daily frequency of July blocking over the period since 1948, nor is there an appreciable trend in the absolute values of upper tropospheric summertime heights over western Russia for the period since 1900.
The indications are that the current blocking event is intrinsic to the natural variability of summer climate in this region (Figure 11), a region which has a climatological vulnerability to blocking and associated heat waves (e.g., 1960, 1972, 1988).”

>>>”Simply warming Russia does not necessarilly mean increased food production.”

True. But I think that increased food production capability is much more likely than decreased capability. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of information for Russia, but I also mentioned Canada, and the IPCC report has this to say (para 11.5):
“Assessment of projected climate change for North America:
All of North America is very likely to warm during this century, and the annual mean warming is likely to exceed the global mean warming in most areas. In northern regions, warming is likely to be largest in winter, and in the southwest USA largest in summer. The lowest winter temperatures are likely to increase more than the average winter temperature in northern North America, and the highest summer temperatures are likely to increase more than the average summer temperature in the southwest USA.
Annual mean precipitation is very likely to increase in Canada and the northeast USA, and likely to decrease in the southwest USA. In southern Canada, precipitation is likely to increase in winter and spring, but decrease in summer.”.

That looks to me like a longer growing season with more precipitation in most areas as well as the increased warmth. That is surely a formula for increased food production. Maybe less precipitation in summer could be a problem in southern Canada, but if the place warms enough they might be able to produce 2 crops per year instead of the current one only (http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0002038 “Unlike many producers in tropical and subtropical areas where 2 or more crops per year are possible, Canadians can rely on only one crop.”).

>>>”To put the burden of proof on you a bit, do you have any scientific basis to show that a 50% increase in the main greenhouse gas will only have a degree or two warming effect?”

By “main greenhouse gas” I assume you mean CO2, not the actual main greenhouse gas which is water vapour.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/03/climate-sensitivity-plus-a-change/
“a new paper in GRL this week by Annan and Hargreaves combines a number of these independent estimates to come up with the strong statement that the most likely value [for a doubling of CO2] is about 2.9ºC”.
That puts the figure for a 50% increase at about 1.7 deg C (the relationship is logarithmic not linear).

To be fair, you didn’t ask the right question. “A degree or two” for 50% increase in CO2 is all that’s being claimed by most climate scientists. Do I have any scientific basis for a 50% increase in CO2 warming by less than say 1 deg C? Well, yes I do. What we are talking about is “climate sensitivity”, which is the temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 (from which +50% CO2 can be calculated) There are basically 2 ways in which climate sensitivity has been estimated. One (I’ll call it method A) is to calculate the effect on global temperature of CO2’s IR-absorption, the other (method B) is to map observed temperatures against measured atmospheric CO2. Method B is highly unreliable, to the extent that it assumes that CO2 is the cause of the warming. Nevertheless, using method B, there have been a range of estimates many of which have been around 1 deg C or lower (hence making the +50% CO2 figure well under 1 deg). Most studies using method A come up with a figure around 1.2. From memory, a paper by Michael Mann put it at 1.3, a paper by Stephen Schultz(?) cited by the IPCC put it at 1.2, and various other papers have been similar.

However, this figure is not the final climate sensitivity figure used by the IPCC. It couldn’t be, because their quoted calculations using method B put it much higher; if the real figure was only 1.2, then the clear implication would be that CO2 could not be the principal cause of the warming. What they did was to introduce climate “feedbacks” which bring the figure up above 3 (IPCC report AR4 8.6.2.3: “it can be estimated that in the presence of water vapour, lapse rate and surface albedo feedbacks, but in the absence of cloud feedbacks, current GCMs would predict a climate sensitivity [] of roughly 1.9°C ± 0.15°C []. The mean and standard deviation of climate sensitivity estimates derived from current GCMs are larger (3.2°C ± 0.7°C) essentially because the GCMs all predict a positive cloud feedback (Figure 8.14) but strongly disagree on its magnitude.”).

There is absolutely no evidence that this positive cloud feedback exists. It is purely a figment of the computer models. The fact that they disagree with each other so much suggests that they are on the wrong track. There is no mechanism for it. I suspect, but I don’t know, that the models’ parameters were played with until they came up with a good match for observed temperature increases - in other words they effectively used method B. The IPCC report does state clearly that clouds are “parametrized”, which means that there is no mechanism just guesswork (yes, it really does mean that!). IPCC report AR4 Box TS.8: “Although the large-scale dynamics of these models are comprehensive, parametrizations are still used to represent unresolved physical processes such as the formation of clouds and precipitation, ocean mixing due to wave processes and the formation of water masses, etc. Uncertainty in parametrizations is the primary reason why climate projections differ between different AOGCMs.”.

The end result of all this is that there is good scientific evidence that climate sensitivity is around 1.2 (giving ~0.7 deg C for +50% CO2), and effectively none that it is higher. There is also a body of evidence that cloud feedback is in fact negative, which would make climate sensitivity even lower. Needless to say, this evidence comes from “sceptical” scientists, and I have tended to avoid quoting them here even though I shouldn’t because they are perfectly qualified and respectable scientists. So for now I will leave it at 1.2, ie. about 0.7 deg C for 50% increase in CO2.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 23 October 2011:

Joel - Your last comment has only just appeared in my inbox, yet shows before mine in the blog. Not sure what happened there.

Some people seem to have jumped the gun a bit.

The Berkeley Project starting their press release with the words “Global warming is real” certainly puts a bias on it from the start, because people tend to read “global warming” as “man-made global warming”, and the media have been reporting it as such. But the study says nothing about whether the “global warming” is human-caused or natural.

I would have to do a major rethink if they credibly found no warming over the last 30 years of the 20thC. With an active sun and a warming-phase PDO over that period, it would be very hard to explain.

Now that the sun appears to have become less active, and the PDO has entered a cooling phase, the expectation is that the warming will slow down and turn to cooling. The last few northern winters are probably the first signs of that, but it is complicated by the fact that the oceans are still warm (they don’t cool instantly) and the current sunspot cycle is now nearing its peak (thus likely putting the cooling on hold for a few years). And of course, no-one knows for sure what the sun or the ocean oscillations will do next.

The bulk of the data that the Berkeley Project used is also used by the other global temperature projects (CRU, etc), so it is unsurprising that their results are similar. However, they also did a random sampling of some 30,000 stations that are not used by the others, and these stations’ data show a significantly different picture over the last decade. They show a temperature decline while the others go up. Definitely more analysis is needed. Having the Berkeley Project in the mix should help (there are some questions about their methods but those should get resolved).

This whole AGW debate has, IMHO, been run with the wrong emphasis. All the time, there is the assumption that the observed warming is man-made, and hence confirmation bias sets in. It is too early in the development of climate science to make assumptions like that. The pattern of warming has a much better fit to natural factors than it does to CO2, and there is the inconvenient fact that the tropical troposphere (the place where CO2 warming starts) does not warm as it should for CO2 warming but behaves as expected for natural warming. The real-world evidence, of which the Berkeley Project is now a part, indicates that the man-made component of global warming has been greatly overestimated.
Comment by Joel on 24 October 2011:

Hi Mike,

I’m sorry, but I find the accusations you’re making to be just not credible. You are accusing a scientist of dishonestly trying to manipulate results. The scientist published his results and his method. He publicly disclosed the method that you claim was dishonest. This does not strike me as a typical action of someone who is “hiding” something. But you’re right, in a private email he did use the word “hide”. I say that he was not talking about dishonestly hiding something from the public. You say he was.

Let’s apply Occam’s razor. If you are correct, then that means that his result is almost certainly incorrect and overstates the effect of global warming.

There has recently been a new study. This study was performed by someone who was a skeptic. The analysis carefully considered many of the “errors” that had supposedly been made. The research was funded in large part by someone (Koch) who has a massive financial interest in countering the standard scientific consensus. This study confirmed the previous result that you claim was unethically manipulated, and found that the supposed “errors” were - exactly as the scientists had claimed - insignificantly small effects to have any fundamental impact on the conclusion.

So let’s consider our options. I claim that the first scientist was attempting to remove data that was known to be wrong from the analysis, and did so with careful attention to avoid invalidating his results. The second scientist was using a different set of data and trying to see if there might have been any mistake in the existing science - in fact much of his funding came from someone who certainly expected that to be the conclusion. Both studies found consistent results. To me this means that the results of both studies are valid. I can’t quite tell what it means to you.

All the cherry-picked data that the climate change deniers put forward, all the times deniers say “well they might be wrong about this tiny detail, so we must disregard everything they say”… It just doesn’t hold water: As the leader of the Berkeley Earth project said “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK… This confirms that these studies were done carefully and the potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”

And that is the word of a former skeptic.
Comment by Joel on 24 October 2011:

Mike:

I want to separately handle your repeated argument about solar activity. You claim that the fact that solar energy levels are high is consistent with a continued warming trend. I claim that’s wrong.

During the day, it gets warm. However, even while the sun is fairly strong in the late afternoon, temperatures start to cool. Why? Because the sunlight isn’t quite as strong as in the early afternoon: temperatures respond very quickly to the amount of sunlight. If the amount of sunlight hitting the earth were to suddenly increase by 1%, the temperatures would reach a new “equilibrium” within a day or two. You’re trying to explain a multi-decade warming trend by a tiny step change in solar energy (which itself is small compared to the 11 year cycle of the sun).

The only way to explain a multi-decade warming trend on solar energy variation is if the solar energy has also had a multi-decade increasing trend. I need to emphasize, the trends should be the same. In math-speak, for your theory to explain things, the derivatives should have the same sign. They don’t.

Sure, solar activity has been high since the late 50s compared to the previous, say 50 years. But since then the overall trend has been a decrease in solar energy hitting the earth, particularly since the 80s. The temperature trend has been in the opposite direction.
Comment by Joel on 24 October 2011:

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. The Koch brothers have a strong financial interest in arguing that people are not causing any global warming. They’ve spent a lot of money on this.

They recently paid the Berkeley Earth project to investigate whether global warming is happening by reanalyzing old data, studying new data and investigating many supposed flaws in previous studies. The answer was unequivocally “yes, it’s happening”. This was not the answer they wanted.

So, speaking of hypocrisy - any guesses as to whether they will now ask the Berkeley Earth project to investigate whether most scientists are right that CO2 is the cause?
Comment by Ellen O'Day on 25 October 2011:

Here is a conundrum for all the tub thumpers that believe in AGW as opposed to GW.

1. Around the world glaciers and ice fields have been receding since the mid 1800s. For example several Canadian glaciers have small museums showing maps of how glaciers have receded since 1853.

2.The IPCC main report estimates that AGW started around 1976. Industrial society, before that decade, they believe was not extensive enough to generate enough CO2 and green house gases to support the green house effect.

What caused glaciers to recede from the mid 1800s until the mid 1970s?
Comment by Joel on 25 October 2011:

Hi Ellen,

Can you tell us when the second photo in any of these sequences was taken? If the first photo was 1853 and the second in 1980, then you haven’t established any evidence the glaciers were retreating. I’m not saying they haven’t retreated, because glaciers all over the world used to advance and retreat at different rates. The big thing is that now, all over the world, glaciers are consistently retreating.

But, we need to know when the first evidence of retreat was before we can evaluate your statement.

And realize of course, that the arguments that climate change is happening goes far beyond just the fact that glaciers everywhere are retreating.
Comment by john grove on 3 November 2011:

Not a scientist just a 68 year old with some questions: 11 thousand years ago glacier national park was covered with ice, what caused it to melt? No fossel fuels burnt then. 7 billion people in the world, are there just too many people. The bible is 3/4 prophecy read it.
Comment by Max17 on 22 November 2011:

I love all the scientific garbledeegook. You’re so much smarter than everyone else. I use to be a rocket scientist and worked with computer models for NASA. Just like you do now, but gorebull warmerism has all the money. Couple of questions, Einsteins:

Giant ice covered island. Name - Greenland. Why is that?

I know. I know. Just a marketing ploy. How lame is that? ROFL!

Oh, and what’s the correct temperature for Earth and what percent of the last million years was Earth at that temperature?

I know. I know. You don’t know. That’s not part of your ‘computer model’. ROFL!

Go after those government dollars - that’s what your government funded hot air is really all about anyway. Remember, I relied on those dollars for 10 years and knew what the computer models had to spit out back then to keep the funding flowing. If you’re any good, you can move to private industry and do better. If you’re not any good, keep writing those government funded computer models. ROFL!
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 24 November 2011:

Some good questions: “What is the ideal temperature for earth and when have we had it?” As humans we notice our relative dominance where ever we tread here on earth and one thing we know for sure, that we have steadily increased greenhouse gases (at least I believe that).

Also as humans, we are arrogant and expect that what we like will never change (even though there will be winners as well as losers if the seas rise significantly). There are too many other variables and no model today can accurately collect all the variables even if the algorithm is correct which is unlikely.

In my own neighborhood as well as in the wine regions of Napa Valley and elsewhere, everyone knows there are micro climates with great variability not far away. So the imperfect by definition proxy models must have been collected in maybe billions of locations to smooth out the data.

And “Why is Greenland names Greenland?” Not sure we really know better than the legend of when a murderer landed on the very green south end of the island some time ago, he named it the way he saw it. Scientists in general, I believe, think it may have been even greener during an earlier warming period before man had sucked oil from the ground at least in any quantity.

The science is not settled except for those who make millions and lesser amounts by scaring people. Maybe they are right, no one really knows.

But to change our energy sources dramatically enough as reported recently to prevent disaster in the next five years, something forecasted by the science is settled crowd and at the same time remain any vestige of choice by the people, well, it is not going to happen. Science is settled crowd is no more willing to make serious expensive, inconveniently true lifestyle changes than what they call deniers. Even “don’t knowers” like me are smeared with that presumptive unnecissarily, unless they think they will get rewarded in some way immediately. Make the masses pay instead.

Last question today is “in what month, day and hour in 2016 will it be too late to avoid disaster? Five years means something to us when it relates to monthly paychecks or monthly electric bills, not to nature. Any such “scientific” forecast is arrogant with it’s biased political slip showing when they forecast doom during the administration of the presidential contest of 2012. Only a non denier president can save the world.

Arrogance and self serving hypocrisy at best, even if their forced scientific conclusions turn out to be the current lottery winner. I think it will not be too late until 1:23PM MST, on Monday, March 16, 2026 without even checking to see if that date exists on our calendar. Not to worry the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 anyway.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 24 November 2011:

Joel - apologies, somehow I missed your comments on 24 October. Briefly:

The sun’s effect on global temperature over timescales longer than days is via the oceans. The oceans take time to warm up and time to cool down, so there is a lag from solar change to global temperature. The sun’s influence is almost certainly not restricted to direct irradiation - the only solar factor considered by the IPCC - but is also indirect, eg. via clouds.
The sun is not the only factor affecting global temperature on a decadal timescale. Ocean oscillations, for example.

Richard Muller is not and never has been a climate sceptic:
http://www.muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/23-MedievalGlobalWarming.html
Note that it is by Richard Muller, dated 2003, and says “Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate. I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium. “.

As for the Koch brothers, in the end it’s the science that counts, not the money. But I am quite sure that it is very unwise of you to make assumptions about the Koch brothers based on any philosophy other than self-interest. “the Kochs have vociferously opposed a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions in the US. Yet, in Europe, the Kochs make millions from trading in emissions credits.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/08/koch-brothers-lobbying
Comment by Joel on 7 December 2011:

Mike,

The explanation for why the ocean warming cannot explain the time-scale of the observed trend is somewhat more detailed than I feel comfortable writing up right now (it’s late here, I’m tired but can’t sleep, I might mis-cite something). I hope to give it in the next few days. But here’s a more significant issue which really cuts to the heart of the question of whether your bias overwhelms your ability to think critically.

You claim “Richard Muller is not and never has been a climate sceptic”. In fact, on Oct 23 you accused his group of being biased about the cause of global warming even though they quite clearly state that they are not addressing the cause. This claim that he was never a skeptic would surely come as a surprise to the climate change deniers in the US Congress who called him to testify. It also seems to contradict his statement “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find.”

But to prove your claim, you give a quote from Muller. I think you are either being knowingly dishonest or succumbing to your bias. The effort it took to find that quote must have involved reading over many other critical comments he made. In fact, the quote you cherry-picked was bracketed by “It was unfortunate that many scientists endorsed the hockey stick before it could be subjected to the tedious review of time. Ironically, it appears that these scientists skipped the vetting precisely because the results were so important. [your quote about the hockey stick fits here] Love to believe? My own words make me shudder. They trigger my scientist’s instinct for caution.” Huh, doesn’t sound like he’s accepting it uncritically, does it? Just a few months later he calls the hockey stick graph an “incredible error”. http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/32-Global_Warming_Bombshell.htm

Reading your cherry-picked quote in its full context suggests that he was a skeptic, or at the very least it suggests that the simplistic conclusion you want us to draw is not supported by the evidence. You are either intentionally being dishonest, or you misunderstand what it means to be a skeptic versus a denier. A skeptic questions the accuracy of the data and its interpretation regardless of whether the data/interpretation agree with his predispositions. A skeptic will accept an idea that agrees or disagrees with his predispositions if the data is sufficient, and will not accept it as proven if the data is insufficient - in essence a skeptic recognizes his bias and works to ensure that it doesn’t overwhelm his ability to think critically. In contrast a denier wants to confirm his bias and will look through the available data with the only goal being to find any flaw no matter how insignificant.

As an analogy: a creationist denies evolution by saying “there’s a missing link between species A and species B”. A skeptic might have the same concern. What is telling is what happens when a fossil of species C is found linking the two. A skeptic recognizes the new evidence eliminates the original concern. A creationist now sees two missing links: one between A and C, and another between C and B. The denier will always have new opportunities to claim “skepticism” because as the detailed understanding of a phenomenon increase, there are more places to poke holes. The fact that the size of those holes is shrinking is lost on the denier, but not the skeptic.

The fact you could lift that quote and strip away its original context to suggest it conclusively proves Muller was never a skeptic suggests a clear conclusion. You are looking at the available data with one goal in mind: to find flaws in the argument of those who believe humans are a major contributor to climate change. This is the behavior of a denier, not a skeptic.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 7 December 2011:

Joel - it’s mainly a matter of language.

“Global warming” doesn’t mean “global warming” any more. It means “man-made [CO2] global warming”.

Richard Muller’s press release for the BEST results began with the words “Global warming is real”. He would have known perfectly well (and I would argue that he must have intended) that the media and everyone else would read that as “man-made global warming is real”.

“Scepticism” in the context of climate science no longer has the meaning of not taking anything for granted, it means disbelieving. As in Richard Muller’s “But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.”.

Richard Muller played a rather nasty game, portraying himself as a “skeptic” when he wasn’t, in order to shaft the real “skeptics” and promote himself.

In the end, it won’t make any difference what Richard Muller thought or said, and his BEST project won’t make any difference either because Sceptics do not generally have any problem with temperatures having risen towards the end of the 20thC. The real issue is whether the rise was caused by CO2.

The hope of BEST was that it might settle some of the outstanding issues - things like UHE. It didn’t.
Comment by elleno on 7 December 2011:

@Joel

Sorry I was away and could not respond to your posting.

If I recall the glacier photographs (daguerreotypes) were taken in the late 1850s or 1860s.

Seems to me though your questions are used to really try and obfuscate a simple and powerful argument - that GW that is causing glaciers to retreat is NOT caused by man because the IPCC claims AGW only started in 1976.

Glaciers almost everywhere have been retreating(at least) since the mid 1800s (they could have been retreating before that too). The retreat has been regardless of geographical location. Africa, Europe, the Himalayas, the Americas all have glaciers that have been in documented retreat for at least 100 years.

A more sophisticated posting would have questioned the rate of glacier loss ( the rate appears to be constant), but you deflect issues by demanding to know the date of the photograph.

Michael Mann would be proud of you.
Comment by Joel on 8 December 2011:

Mike,

I find your argument tempting on the face of it, but it just doesn’t stand up to inspection.

First, given that Muller has repeatedly explained what he means by the word skeptic, and what he means by the term ‘global warming’ (and neither match your definitions), I think it’s disingenuous to use a quote from him to show that the word ’skeptic’ matches your definitions. You are misleading people. And I give you credit for having enough intelligence to know it.

Nevertheless to help make sure we’re speaking a common language, I will use the word ‘Skeptic’ (capitalized, just like you do to refer to people who are absolutely convinced that the scientists studying climate change are wrong.

You suggest that Skeptics already knew the results that Muller and his team came out with: “In the end, it won’t make any difference what Richard Muller thought or said, and his BEST project won’t make any difference [because the results aren't new to Skeptics].”

This claim is revisionist history. Bluntly, it is a lie. Remember, Muller’s results are effectively indistinguishable from those that the climate scientists had already published. So you are suggesting that the Skeptics accepted the earlier studies and expected this to simply confirm them. This is contradicted by their behavior. 1) Why were they questioning the earlier existing measurements and methodology? 2) Since it was known that the study was simply going to look at the temperature trend why were they initially so excited about this study?

With regards to 1) Why such an effort to find flaws in the initial studies? Why would a Skeptic who accepts that global temperatures are increasing and that the lying, cheating, hiding scientists have correctly measured them go to the effort of trying to demonstrate that there is a measurement bias in the temperature trend in urban versus rural weather stations in Australia? I’d really like to know why you personally took on that task and published it on a blog (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/21/an-analysis-of-australian-rural-vs-non-rural-stations-temperature-trends/). It suggests that you are trying to identify a bias in the overall trend. Amazingly, this specific bias you devoted such effort to was one of the things that Muller’s team investigated, and they found that the impact on the overall trend is effectively zero. If you already knew this, why did you personally yourself devote such effort to it? And if you didn’t already know the bias was insignificant, does the project really not “make any difference” to you?

As for 2) Why were the Skeptics so excited by this project before it produced results? Remember the ONLY question it was evaluating was whether the reported temperature trends were accurate and whether the biases the Skeptics kept promoting could affect results. You say that Skeptics already knew those trends were true. And yet, the owner of the blog you published your Australian weather station analysis on said this about BEST before he knew what the results would be “In the meantime, never mind the yipping from climate chihuahuas like Joe Romm over at Climate Progress who are trying to destroy the credibility of the project before it even produces a result (hmmm, where have we seen that before?) , it is simply the modus operandi of the fearful, who don’t want anything to compete with the ‘certainty’ of climate change they have been pushing courtesy NOAA and GISS results.” [parenthetical comments in original - http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/briggs-on-berkeleys-best-plus-my-thoughts-from-my-visit-there/.

More specifically, if you are correct, why did the author of that blog go on to say “But here’s the thing: I have no certainty nor expectations in the results. Like them, I have no idea whether it will show more warming, about the same, no change, or cooling in the land surface temperature record they are analyzing. Neither do they… I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results.” What? No idea whether it will show warming, no change, or cooling? You said they already accepted the warming. This isn’t just one random guy, this is THE blog for climate change deniers. Ooops, sorry, THE blog for Skeptics.

Now that the results are out, you say Muller “played a nasty game”. You accuse him of bias. You accuse him of lying. You claim he is just self-serving. You accuse him of conspiracy to pretend he was a skeptic (lower case ’s’) so that he could harm the Skeptics. Oh, and by the way the Skeptics already accepted the trend existed. Nothing new here. Move along. Nothing to see.

To paraphrase the quote above, you’re trying to destroy the credibility of the project because it didn’t produce the result you want (hmm, where have we seen that before?). It is simply the modus operandi of the faithful who are already certain the science is wrong and refuse to accept any evidence that the scientists were right.

Our conversation has come pretty much full circle. At the beginning of our conversation the two of us were discussing whether the scientist who “hid the decline” as he was quoted out of context was being honest or not. At the time you suggested he was dishonest, unethical, and presumably I would be correct in concluding you thought his results were completely unreliable and effectively falsified. Now someone who the Skeptics promoted gets the same results as the unethical, inaccurate scientist, but that doesn’t affect your opinion about anything because, hey, you already knew the unethical, lying, cheating, inaccurate scientist was correct. You’re probably still sure that he was lying, cheating, falsifying his results, etc., but we are supposed to believe that you also knew he was right all along.

You’re being dishonest, and you’re intelligent enough that you should know it.
Comment by Joel on 8 December 2011:

Ellen,

wow, that was harsh. You posed a question, but provided only a partial recollection of the data, which in all honesty was fuzzy. I asked for a tiny bit more information, and you accused me of obfuscating and then told me a bunch of questions I should have asked, and partial answers. Well, if you knew what other data I needed to even begin to answer your question, why didn’t you share it in the first place?

I initially assumed you were acting in good faith and responded under that impression. After dealing with the fact that you clearly tried to set a trap, and you think you’ve sprung it on me, I’m not inclined to play nice with you now. My experience with Mike also doesn’t incline me towards assuming good faith on your part. So my apologies if I’ve misinterpreted your motive, but please understand that my response here is because I’m assuming you aren’t really interested in understanding the science - you want to catch me in a trap.

In order to actually give any sort of “a more sophisticated posting” as you put it, I have to know what the real data is, not just your vague recollection (there’s a reason hearsay isn’t considered real evidence), and even assuming your claims are honest you still haven’t given me enough to make an informed response.

As a first pass, I’ll settle for knowing the names of the glaciers and then I’ll try to find real quantitative information about it. Can you at least give me that much? I would like an honest answer to this: Have you seen this at every single glacier you visited in Canada, or just some of them? How many glaciers have you visited in Canada?

Just to make sure you don’t think I’m giving an “unsophisticated posting”, here is some of what I will be trying to find out: 1) How big are the snow fields that feed the glaciers? 2) Which direction do the glaciers and snow fields face - i.e., how much sunlight and snowfall would they get? 3) How much volume of ice was in each glacier over the time period in question? 4) How much ice was lost each year? 5) What was the frequency of observations (this was effectively my initial question)? 6) What time of year was each observation made? 7) What observations are there of glacier thickness over that time period? What are the closest temperature measurement stations to the glaciers? 9) What snowfall measurements exist? 10) What were historical logging trends close to the glaciers (at least BC has had a huge amount of logging over that time period, but of course I don’t know if they were in BC because you haven’t shared that data)?

Your comment: “Africa, Europe, the Himalayas, the Americas all have glaciers that have been in documented retreat for at least 100 years” borders on dishonesty. Over (at least the earlier part of) that time period there are many glaciers in documented advance. What matters is the overall trend, and you know it. You said something that would imply an overall trend, but were careful not to actually claim that trend. So you didn’t lie. But you did try to mislead. What changes occurred to the overall trend from 1850-1900, 1900-1950, 1950-1970, 1970-2010?

And finally, your question seems to be implying that global temperature increases have been occurring over the entire time period. So I need to know what kind of Skeptic you are. Do you agree with the temperature anomaly reported here: http://berkeleyearth.org/FAQ.php ? Mike Jonas says that it’s nothing new to the Skeptics. Do you accept it?

So just to recap here is the minimum I need to answer your accusations: What specific glaciers are you talking about? Were these glaciers unusual for their time periods? Do you acknowledge that temperatures have increased by 1 degree C since 1950 (and were effectively stable for at least a few decades before then)?

Thanks!
Comment by Joel on 9 December 2011:

Hi Chief,

You pointed out that even the “science is settled crowd” is unwilling to make significant personal sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions. There is certainly truth to that, but since I’m a member of that crowd, I think it’s worth telling you some of the things I’ve done. I want to take mild exception to your statement that the science is only settled for those who stand to profit - I’m sure you probably didn’t mean it as strong as that. Although I did a fluid dynamics PhD, my research is on infectious disease control (think HIV, Malaria, Influenza). I want to emphasize that my belief that the science is settled about climate change does not affect my pay in any way - if anything the climate change people are actually competing with me for grants.

Many of these things are not sacrifices, most are very minor sacrifices. Quite a few of these things are things that would probably be a good idea even for someone who is part of the “scientific consensus is completely wrong” crowd. I’m sure some people will think I’m just bragging, but I’m trying to do this to point out that at least some of the people who think CO2 is a problem are adjusting their lifestyles in response.

I haven’t had to change a light bulb in years because when we moved into our apartment I replaced all the light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs. They last for years, and use much less energy.

We pay a bit extra on electricity to have it provided from renewable sources (less than $10/month extra).

We don’t buy fruit and vegetables that were grown on a different continent than we live on.

I eat less meat - and tend to choose poultry over beef. Raising corn-fed beef uses a lot more energy than chicken, which in turn takes more than just feeding me fruits/vegetables.

We recycle (the CO2 used getting iron etc out of a rock is huge). We buy recycled products. Our wedding rings are platinum that used to be in electronics. Yes it cost a bit more for the rings, but generally it’s not an issue for other products.

I take a six hour train journey if it will avoid a 2 hour plane flight. Train stations are generally downtown, so I save travel time to/from airports and I save time on security, so this is only a couple hours lost.

We’ve turned the heat down in our apartment (even though the landlord pays for it).

In a house we own elsewhere and rent out, we’ve installed a programmable thermostat and are looking into installing solar water heating.

We haven’t owned a car in over 4 years. The car we owned before that was a hybrid. This hasn’t been a huge sacrifice given where we’ve lived. I acknowledge it’s not feasible for everyone. This saves us many thousands of dollars. (as an aside, if the US had forced its companies to build more efficient cars as happened in much of the rest of the world, the US cars would have been more able to compete when gas prices went up).

We’ve donated thousands of dollars to projects intended to reduce carbon emissions. Things like providing compact florescent lights in poor communities.

There are other things, but that’s what comes to mind. All of these things reduce pollution in general, and most come at minimal cost (some even reduce cost). If you are ambivalent or even if you deny that CO2 is a problem, you can still look at these as reasonable steps to reduce pollution. For example, anything that reduces the amount of coal burned will reduce the amount of mercury and many other nasties getting into the environment.

Something deeper to think about: would major sacrifices really be needed? When did you last hear about acid rain or ozone holes? There were international treaties put into place to deal with these sorts of problems. For acid rain, there was a cap and trade program installed (this was while George H W Bush was president). Many people argued that it would destroy our economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the costs ended up being much less than those people claimed. We have the technology right now to fairly cheaply reduce our CO2 emissions by a (perhaps very) modest amount. The economic impact of a 2% reduction in our emissions would be unnoticed by a typical person. If a larger scale reduction were to be implemented slowly, the research investments would be made. We saw this when power plants were forced to reduce the SO2 from their emissions. You probably didn’t even notice the acid rain regulations as they came into full effect. Certainly the cost is larger for CO2. But I don’t think it would require major sacrifices on your part.
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 9 December 2011:

Joel, I thank you for all things that you voluntarily do and for the sincerity with which I trust you do them. My list also contains some of the standards of the green marketing movement.

My list however, is minus the mercury tainted bulbs that do not produce the light output as claimed on the package and does include our indoor and outdoor worm bin to recycle the appropriate scraps that we turn into worm pee and poop for our indoor and outdoor plants.

You and too many think there are only two crowds in the environmental area or others for that matter. You happily toil in the “Science is settled crowd” and debate your nemesis you famously call “Deniers”.

I belong to neither of those crowds, rather I sincerely believe I am in a large unorganized crowd best called the “I don’t know, and I’m not sure either of the other two crowds know either” crowd.

Have you ever considered that you are the pawn, the proletarian providing the necessary work and political support for the celebrity and aristocracy driven financial windfall receiving wing of your crowd who are also the fear mongering controlling wing of your crowd? They just need your degree and organizations to give them street cred to stretch their popularity.

Questioned by reporters about the pollution emitted by flying across the Atlantic to pick up his awards, Leonardo DiCaprio indignantly asks how else can he get there?

Al Gore aptly gored the public with his hypocritical and emotional Settlement Statement in “An Inconvenient Truth” while not really dealing in truth, rather in his ideological beliefs he learned to profit from. I won’t comment about his science grades but think his personal consumption deserves mention.

Michael Moore and so many more undeserving types abuse this issue and others, grow rich and famous and get a pass from your crowd.

Show me the science that is not so easily debatable, rather than debate the very debatable with esoteric arguments. Reminds me of the fiction based on some fact show “Numbers” which I loved and understand is a significant fantasy.

Please reconsider your personal actions in cleaving deeper your side of an ideological movement which only serves to give the other side a fundraising opportunity. No one but those elected win regardless of the specific duopoly party.

Make the science unassailable with out needing to have majority political support. Scientists are sounding too much like dirty politicos in both our political parties.

You seem smarter to me. But I do understand that you need to make a living like most of us and competition forces us to be one thing or another. Not being on one of the two “official” teams, seems to result in our being assigned to one by others.
Comment by Joel on 9 December 2011:

“Make the science unassailable with out needing to have majority political support.”

Herein is the challenge. People make a very compelling argument that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. There’s even a Nobel Prize winner who takes that stand. Sure, HIV is found in lots of people with AIDS. But, the argument goes, HIV is a very weak virus. It can only survive in people who have weakened immune systems. So it’s a marker for people whose immune systems are weakened by something else. Besides, HIV attacks cells that aren’t that critical to our immune response. It’s really the medications for HIV (which are known to have toxicity) that are now the reason everyone with HIV gets AIDS. For a long time South Africa prevented HIV treatments because Mbeki believed this. Many people died, newborn children were infected with HIV even though treatments exist to prevent mother-child transmission, and many other transmissions happened that would have been prevented if a science-based policy had been in place.

These arguments about HIV fall apart and even start to contradict one another. But, give these people a large quantity of money for their conferences, and start spending millions of dollars telling the public that treating HIV positive people will harm the economy and cost jobs and I guarantee you the debate would be just as fierce all over the world.

So that my language with you is clear, I believe there are people who believe the science is settled. I also believe there are genuine skeptics. I also believe there are people who believe the scientific consensus is wrong. I thought I had put in a comment to that effect in my last post, but it looks like I edited it out to shorten it. This is the reason I was using the word ’skeptic’ to refer to people who are unsure. It is the proper term, but it’s been co-opted by the people who are denying the science.

Here’s the problem, I almost need to pose a challenge to you saying, “what would it take to convince you?” Obviously you can’t answer that question, because you probably don’t know.

But here’s what I can tell you for sure.

1- Every serious attempt to measure global average temperatures have shown considerable increases in temperature over the last 50-60 years.

2- There is no question that the laws of Physics say that CO2 traps energy and prevent it from radiating into space.

3- CO2 levels have increased significantly over the last few decades.

We have a clear potential cause and effect. That much is indisputable. However, you’ll find people who dispute all of these points. Their scientific basis is weaker than the people who dispute the HIV-AIDS link.

So the question is, how much of the warming is caused by the CO2 and how much might have other causes. In the HIV analogy, it’s not too hard to address this issue: simply watch a lot of patients die, and maybe look at how treating some of them extends their life. The corresponding problem in the climate case is to look at a lot of different worlds just like Earth and see what happens if we make CO2 rise or fall. That’s not an experiment we can do - we are doing this experiment with one planet.

So what do we have left? Luckily we have computer models, and we know the relevant equations. So we run these computer simulations. A lot of them. This is our best attempt to have many planets to do our experiment on. Yes, it’s not perfect. The models aren’t exact. The argument the ‘deniers’ have is that we should abandon their output. But remember, the laws of Physics say that the CO2 will have some effect on our climate. We really should use whatever is available to tell us how big it might be and what that impact will be.

So we turn to our computer models. We run them. This is what we see:
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/spm4.jpg In this figure we see that simulations that account for the effect of CO2 do a much better job of reproducing the observed trends all over each individual continent (and the oceans) than simulations that don’t. Each simulation is like a different world, and so there is variation from simulation to simulation, but it’s pretty clear that the simulated worlds behave like the real world as long as the simulated worlds have CO2 levels similar to ours.

To me, this is pretty unassailable evidence that CO2 is having an effect and that our computer models can accurately capture that effect. But, to some, there are lots of holes. I’d like to know what your concerns are when you see this.

Here are the things that are often said: The measurements are wrong. The calculations are parametrized to fit the observed trend.

Here’s the response: the measurements have been done by multiple groups independently. They get the same answer. I’m not saying they all say the temperature is rising. It’s much more specific than that. They get the same answer about when the temperature was rising, when it was steady, by how much it was rising, etc. The Berkeley group of Muller is the most recent one to do this. I’ll be honest, if I were refereeing a paper in my own field and someone was saying “we got the same result that the last 4 groups to look at the problem got”, I’d say that they weren’t doing science anymore.

I hope you can agree that the temperature studies were done correctly. But here’s the thing: the so-called ’skeptics’ who genuinely believe the science is wrong said in advance of this study that they would accept its results because it was going to deal with all the biases in earlier measurements they claimed were important. But when the results came out, 2 things happened. 1- the person who they spoke so highly of is now being accused of lying and duplicity. 2- they claim they aren’t arguing this point anyways.

So if we can accept that the measurements are correct here’s what we’re looking at: Over a 50 year period temperatures increased by 1 degree C. If that was caused by CO2, we should have a concern: CO2 levels are rising faster now than they were over that period. And the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere now isn’t going away for a very long time.

This again is the hard part. We have only a single world. With an HIV patient we could sit and watch until the patient develops AIDS and dies while trying to figure out if the virus that attacks part of his immune system is the reason his immune system is shutting down. We have that option, and that is the option we are using right now with the climate. The only alternative I am aware of is computer models. I’m open to suggestions though, so if you think something else would be more convincing to you, it’s probably been done and I can probably find the results for you.

So we have a number of different groups who are using very different techniques to model the climate. Lots of inputs go into the model - including the amount of sunlight hitting the earth and how that varies. It’s an easy thing to measure and it’s actually a fairly easy mechanism to include. The alternative hypotheses have been tested out in these models. Yes, it’s true that there are always aspects that aren’t quite right in any given model. In any fossil record, there are missing links. As you increase the number of fossils, you get more missing missing links. If the model doesn’t include enough effects, it can be accused of leaving out important effects. If it includes more effects it can be accused of having too much uncertainty about the parameters.
For the most part the parameters are known from independent data. Someone else tells the modeler what the values are. Some of them, the modeler has to work out. This is why there is value in the fact that multiple research groups are working on this question. It’s also standard scientific procedure to investigate how much the results change over the reasonable range of parameter values.

Sure, it’s not perfect. But the models are fairly consistent with one another in terms of their output and the models are fairly consistent with the observations. But the models account for all the effects that are suggested as alternative explanations for the observed warming - including the solar output increases suggested by Mike.

And yes, as the scientists put more and more data out there, there will be bits and pieces that don’t seem to fit the picture. A colleague of mine recently worked with a patient who has been HIV positive for over 2 decades without symptom or treatment. Does that mean HIV doesn’t cause AIDS? No. If there’s a large snowfall in the Northeast of the US does that mean the globe isn’t warming? Fox News had a great time with that recently. Of course, warmer air holds more water, and the snow that falls on the Northeast usually comes from air that had been over the Atlantic, so global warming would tend to predict that the snowstorms in the Northeast will tend to be larger, not smaller. On the face of it though, sure, it looks suspicious. On the other hand, as I write this in Boston this year, I still have a living tomato plant on my fire escape a week into December. Is that clear evidence of global warming? Again, no.

All we have is some simple facts: CO2 traps energy and CO2 levels have increased. We then turn to computer models and observation. If there is something else that you would consider unassailable proof, I’d love to know. It probably exists. But for now, all I can say is that many people have done the observations very carefully and they all agree. Many different groups have done the computer models very carefully, and they all agree. Do models and observations agree? yes: http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/spm4.jpg Yes, there are details that they will disagree on. As the model predicts more details, the opportunity for that increases. We expect people with HIV to be dead after 10 years without treatment. But if you get enough infected people, some will live longer. That doesn’t mean HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

So, I need to apologize for this being a bit long - you said you wanted to see unassailable evidence. In my opinion it exists, but it’s not easy to just give a short explanation. I also need to apologize if you ask another question (or answer any of mine) and don’t get a response. I’ve spent too much time this week on these. I need to work on other stuff. For the most part, I’m not someone who spends much time on these sorts of things. I only arrived at this website because a family member had told me that she was told that volcanoes release more CO2 than people. So I was looking up facts for her and found what quite honestly were lies way up at the top of this page. That’s why I initially responded. But for now, I need to get back to my own things for at least a few weeks. Nevertheless, if you think there is one fact or detail that would satisfy your concerns, let me know and I’ll see if I know where it can be found.

One thing I want to leave you with is this: the people who question the science don’t have a computer model to back them up. They sit and snipe at the research others do, but they don’t do the research themselves. Perhaps they should commission someone to develop a computer model. It was only in the last couple of years that they finally got around to looking at the measurements. The person found that actually the scientists were right. I think they probably learned their lesson from that and won’t do it. But I hope they do. Because right now, if any independent group goes and does the computer model, as soon as the results come out, they’ll be pigeonholed as a “the science is settled’ pawn.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 10 December 2011:

Joel - that was a long and passionate comment, but you aren’t seeing the whole story.

Anthony Watts was very optimistic about the BEST project, on the basis that it would be genuine, hence the statements that you quote. But he was then shafted by Richard Muller, who sent him a copy of the unreviewed paper, asking him to keep it confidential, then hit the airwaves in a blaze of publicity still before the paper had been reviewed and while AW was prevented from commenting by the confidentiality request.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/30/the-best-whopper-ever/

BEST was supposed to resolve UHE and a few other things that sceptics were concerned about, but didn’t. It also made no attempt to identify the possible causes of the temperature changes. For Richard Muller then to claim that he had “proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer” was provocative nonsense. Hence much of the fuss.

This article by David Rose spells it out quite well
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html
“… Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.
Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.
… In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.
‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.”

It may be worth noting that Judith Curry says
“In David Rose’s article, the direct quotes attributed to me are correct.
To set the record straight, some of the other sentiments attributed to me are not quite right, I will discuss these here.
… “Hiding the truth” in the title is definitely misleading
… I told Rose that I was puzzled [by] Muller’s statements, particularly about “end of skepticism” and also “We see no evidence of global warming slowing down.”.
… When asked specifically about the graph that apparently uses a 10 year running mean and ends in 2006, we discussed “hide the decline,” but I honestly can’t recall if Rose or I said it first. I agreed that the way the data is presented in the graph “hides the decline”. There is NO comparison of this situation to Climategate.”

That last “Climategate” reference by Judith Curry is correct. Richard Muller keeping quiet about the recent decline in temperatures was naive and stupid, because people are going to find it anyway, but was not at all in the same league as the severe scientific malpractice of the Climategate “hide the decline”.
Comment by Joel on 10 December 2011:

Mike,

In my experience with the HIV-AIDS “skeptics” (yes they like being called skeptics too), their arguments typically diverge quickly from science and branch to ad hominem attacks on scientists.

I think we both agree that this is a discussion about a scientific fact: if CO2 levels continue to rise, will their impact on temperatures be significant? The answer would remain the same whether the scientists volunteer at orphanages or run sweatshops with child labor.

So I’m going to ignore the numerous ad hominem attacks on Muller et al (except to say that the HIV-AIDS people can do better) in your post. That leaves nothing to respond to. So I’m going to focus instead on one question for you: is their science right?

You now vilify Muller et al for all sorts of things, but none of them have anything to do with the science. The only thing of relevance involving Muller that gets us any closer to answering the scientific question under discussion is the results his group has produced. So let me ask you simply:

Is the science they did right?

Let me remind you that earlier you said “in the end, it won’t make any difference what Richard Muller thought or said, and his BEST project won’t make any difference either because Sceptics do not generally have any problem with temperatures having risen towards the end of the 20thC.” Let me also remind you that when the “skeptics” guru Watts saw the method they were using (before they were done), he said “the entire team seems dedicated to providing an open source, fully transparent, and replicable method no matter whether their new metric shows a trend of warming, cooling, or no trend at all, which is how it should be. I’ve seen some of the methodology, and I’m pleased to say that their design handles many of the issues skeptics have raised.” As for when they shared their draft with him in advance, he “sent along a couple of small corrections and thanked the author.” All this seems to suggest there is no important error in their work in the “skeptic’s” eyes.

Rather than engaging in ad hominem attacks because you don’t like the conclusions people make based on his results, you need to take a clear stand on the science - because again, the ultimate question is a scientific question.

Is the science they did right?
Comment by Mike Jonas on 10 December 2011:

Joel - You ask “Is the science they did right?”. They didn’t do much science. The figures they ended up with matched the figures we had already, because they used the same data. That bit was probably right as far as it went, but it didn’t go very far and it didn’t tell us much. They didn’t address certain issues that they were expected to address, and they left out tens of thousands of stations’ data. Those bits were questionable or maybe just disappointing. They then overstated their findings. That bit was wrong.

But let’s start with the proposition that all their results are correct. What do they tell us about global warming or cooling?
Answer : Basically nothing. They are land-only, not global.

OK, go back a step. What do the global temperatures that we do have tell us?
Answer : Nothing that confirms CO2 as the cause of any warming. See this interview with Phil Jones.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
There is no statistically significant difference between the global warmings of 1860-1880, 1910-1940, 1975-1998 and 1975-2009, “but only just”.
Phil Jones later said that one more year, 2010, made the difference statistically significant and showed how important it was to use a longer period, but conveniently omitted to mention that it was from an El Nino.

The basic problem is that the IPCC and the computer models concentrate on CO2 and exclude other possible influences on global temperatures, resulting in the global warming of the late 20thC being interpreted as caused by CO2 and thus extrapolated into the future as a monotonously increasing trend. But simple eyeballing of the temperature record shows cyclical types of influence which clearly were in an ascending phase overall in the late 20thC.

If the IPCC and the models are correct, then temperatures should have increased over the last decade. They didn’t. It can be argued that temperatures do go up and down independently of CO2 for a few years at a time, so the last decade is not enough to prove anything. However, every year that goes by without warming makes that argument harder to justify.

Many sceptics, including myself, are interpreting the lack of warming over the last decade as the expected turning of the natural cycles. However, just as it hasn’t been long enough to fully disprove the models, it hasn’t been long enough to fully prove that we are starting a downturn.

There is the added complication that we don’t have mechanisms for the natural cycles, so we can’t predict them. The best we can do (apart from more research, eg. CERN) is to wait and see what natural phenomena like the sun and the oceans actually do, and then see whether the actual temperatures matched them or CO2. In the late 20thC, both led us to expect increasing temperatures, so the fact that temperatures rose did nothing to distinguish between the two possible causes. But now, there is every prospect that CO2 theory will require rising temperatures over the next few years while natural factors will not. That should, with any luck, settle the issue. The last decade has very nearly settled it in natural factors’ favour, but maybe a few more years are needed to be certain. Solar cycle #24 reaching its peak in the next year or two may complicate things, ie. defer the ’settlement’ date.

In the meantime, it is obvious that some very dodgy science has been going on, so no credence should be awarded the computer models while we are waiting.
Comment by Joel on 11 December 2011:

Mike,

You are misrepresenting the study again, and you’re intelligent enough to know it.

From an article quoted on Watts’s climate “skeptic” blog before the result was out: “In the group’s new study, which will be released in about a month, the scientists hope to address the doubts that skeptics have raised. They are using data from all 39,390 available temperature stations around the world – more than five times the number of stations that the next most thorough group, the Global Historical Climatology Network, used in its data set.”

You: “The figures they ended up with matched the figures we had already, because they used the same data.”

They used much more complete data and a fundamentally different statistical method to analyze it. This is significant since this method addresses many of the biases ’skeptics’ promoted.

From that same article “The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study was conducted with the intention of becoming the new, irrefutable consensus, simply by providing the most complete set of historical and modern temperature data yet made publicly available, so deniers and exaggerators alike can see the numbers.”

you: “They didn’t address certain issues that they were expected to address”.

I’m sorry, but they said they would gather all temperature data they could and use it to reconstruct temperatures (while developing statistical methods to deal with your favorite claimed biases). This is what they did. You are implying they were supposed to do more in an attempt to dismiss it.

Another quote from you: “They are land-only, not global.” You knew as far back as Mar 6, before it was released when you posted a comment on Watts’s blog, that the first part of their study was land temp and the second part (which they are doing now) does ocean temp. You know the result is coming, and you knew that they were starting with land. This is an unfair criticism.

I could go on and on responding to the attacks you’ve made. But again, I want to stick to science. So let me make clear - my question isn’t what happens “if we accept the proposition that all their results are correct.” Nor is it “how much science did they do?” My question is “do you accept that what they did was scientifically correct?”

If we are to have a discussion about the impact of CO2 on temperature, then as a starting point it is important to know what is happening to temperature. Dismissing any attempt to measure it seems like burying your head in sand. Given the effort you have personally put in to discredit previous attempts to measure temperatures (and the fact that this study accounts for the bias you were trying to promote and finds it is insignificant), having you say “of course it gets the same result as the previous ones” is disingenuous.

So please answer the question. Do you believe they did the science right? I’m going to stick to this point about the measurement data until you are willing to say what results you are willing to accept about temperature history. Then I’ll be willing to address what you’re saying about the IPCC etc (again, you are continuing a pattern of misrepresenting what was done). Having a conversation with what appears to be someone who accepts or denies the measurements depending on what suits his argument at that time is difficult. I need to know what you believe to have any meaningful conversation with you, so I repeat:

Is the science correct? As you think about what your answer is, let me remind you once more that before they released their result, the Berkeley team was praised by the skeptics for the fact that their method dealt with various biases and used so much more data than any other study. If ’skeptics’ question the method only after seeing that the results confirm previous results, then they are not engaging in science.

Is the science correct? A one word ‘yes’ would suffice. Even a ‘no’ with an explanation would give us a place to start having a constructive discussion again. If you go ad hominem again, I’ll decide you’re just a troll and be done.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 11 December 2011:

Joel - You have very conveniently ignored all the pertinent points from my last comment(s). A lot of what was wrong with Richard Muller and BEST was spelled out in the WattsUpWithThat and Judith Curry comments.

No matter, you ask : “Is the science correct?”

I answered this in my last comment. Part of what they did and said was right, part was questionable or disappointing, and part was wrong.

If by “the science” you mean just the numbers and not anything they said then FWIW, I expect that their numbers are correctly derived from their data using their stated methodology. In your terms, that is a “Yes”. They are putting up their methodology and data for independent review, which is something that others like Michael Mann for example should have done and disgracefully still have not done.

There are some curious things about the BEST project though, for example they said they drew no conclusions as to the cause of the observed warming and then said they thought the human component may be overstated. They appear to have had no grounds for saying this. In fact they appear to have made a number of rash and unjustifiable statements. [You might think I would be pleased that they thought the human component may be overstated, but I'm not. As far as I can tell it was completely baseless and therefore stupid.]

It may help if I clarify a few things: I do think that global temperatures rose during the late 20thC, as they did earlier in the 20thC and in the late 19thC and no doubt in various other centuries before that too. I have no difficulty in accepting that atmospheric CO2 levels increased over the late 20thC, and that most of the increase was due to human emissions. What has not been established by anyone is how much of the warming the CO2 was responsible for. The BEST project threw no new light on that.
Comment by Joel on 12 December 2011:

Mike,

We’re making some progress. You now say, “their numbers are correctly derived from their data using their stated methodology”. That’s a big step in helping me know where you stand.

But, my question was a bit more than “did they add 1 and 1 and get 2?” - I want to know whether it was correct to be adding 1 and 1. In other words, were the data and methodology appropriate to determine the temperatures and whether the supposed biases were important?

Remember, Watts said, “I’ve seen some of the methodology, and I’m pleased to say that their design handles many of the issues skeptics have raised and has done so in ways that are unique to the problem.” So until he saw the results it seems he was pretty happy with their approach.

So, were they using appropriate data/methodology?

As for your other comments: “You have very conveniently ignored all the pertinent points from my last comment”: I responded to the first 3 false claims. I cut it off at that point because it seemed you were trying to distract from the scientific question - did they do the science right? Let’s stick to small steps until we reach a step where we disagree. That will allow for a constructive discussion. Throwing accusations back and forth does not help.

I’m not going to respond the off-topic ad hominem attack on Mann except to say it is misleading. My experience with HIV-AIDS deniers is that they use off-topic attacks because it puts the other side of the discussion in the position of either ignoring the slander and thus letting it appear to be true or respond to the slander and thus distract from the science. I would like to give you credit for more than that.

Moving on: “What has not been established by anyone is how much of the warming the CO2 was responsible for. The BEST project threw no new light on that.” I will respond because this is somewhat on topic. All that BEST ever promised at this stage was to report land-based temperatures and to address whether supposed biases skeptics were trumpeting were significant or not. They were praised by the ’skeptics’ for undertaking this project. They were praised by the ’skeptics’ for choosing the data set they used. They were praised by the ’skeptics’ for their methodology. Now that their results agree with the earlier results, they are being vilified by the skeptics. I think it’s because the skeptics don’t want people to pay attention to the science. I’m getting confirmation of that by how difficult it has to get you to answer the question - was the science correct? But I think we’re almost there now.

Were the data and methodology appropriate?
Comment by Joel on 12 December 2011:

Chief:

You requested: “Show me the science that is not so easily debatable, rather than debate the very debatable with esoteric arguments.”

I hope you’ll see that I’m making an attempt at seeing what Mike and I can agree is not up to debate. Right now I’m trying to establish if we can agree on the historical temperature trends. The background is this: A number of scientists have looked at historical temperature measurements and published the historical averages. These results have all been consistent. But the skeptics took exception to these studies. Their main concern has been that urban locations tend to be warmer and also may have warmed up more than others, though they also complained that some data sets used in the original studies weren’t released. Could this be biasing the results? The debate raged…

But along came a study to address this. It took a different, and much larger data set than others had used. This data set was based on publicly available data, so the authors didn’t have to promise the owners of the data that they wouldn’t share it, so it’s more transparent. The methodology was specifically designed to look at the biases the skeptics had considered, including the urban heating. The method and data were roundly praised by the skeptics. Then they released their results. Their results were effectively identical to those that had already been released. Their method and data are no longer praised.

There should no longer be a debate over what the historical average temperatures have been. As you can see though, it’s been tough getting the skeptics to agree. On the one hand, when confronted with the data, they argue it doesn’t say anything new, so it’s not important. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to agree that it’s right. The most I’ve been able to get out of Mike has been “I expect that their numbers are correctly derived from their data using their stated methodology” - note that this is the same data and methodology that the skeptics used to praise.

The research arms of tobacco companies once said “doubt is our product”. They only had to introduce enough doubt so that someone who was addicted to cigarettes could justify smoking another. Similarly here the skeptics don’t have to introduce strong evidence of anything. They just have to introduce enough doubt that people who don’t want to believe it can justify to themselves that the science is not settled. If they can introduce something that requires a detailed response to explain why it’s BS, hey, all of a sudden it’s an ‘esoteric discussion’. So even if they were lying, they’ve won from the point of view of introducing doubt.

So I guess I’d like to ask you where the first place is that you feel the science might be debatable. Once I know that, I can try to tailor my response to your concerns. I’m going to start with the first part, which is simply determining whether there is the possibility that CO2 presents a concern. If we’re happy with all this, then I’ll move on to the work done to establish what role CO2 has played and what role it may play in the future. Is there a step here you aren’t comfortable with?

1) The earth cools through radiating photons into space. There is no other way for a body surrounded by vacuum to cool.

2) CO2 absorbs some of these photons and prevents them from radiating away.

3) CO2 levels have increased dramatically and continue to do so.

4) More photons are now captured by CO2, so less energy escapes.

5) If less energy escapes the earth, the earth must warm.

6) Temperatures have been studied by many researchers using different data sets and different methods. Their conclusions are in agreement - not just about whether temperatures have risen, but by how much and when.

7) The true historical temperatures do not deviate significantly from the multiple consistent results of the different groups.

I’m not yet getting into whether other things might also be contributing. I’m asking whether you’re happy with the evidence that the earth has warmed and that there is at least reason to investigate the role CO2 has played.

thanks
Comment by Mike Jonas on 12 December 2011:

Joel - Everything that I have said concerning Michael Mann directly or indirectly has been about the science and the scientific process. To portray it as off-topic and ad hominem is absurd and pathetic. Take a look at those graphs, see where they have been chopped, understand what the decline was and why they had to hide it. It is at the core of AGW and the credibility of the climate models. (It is not the only major problem with the models, bear in mind that the models also use fiddle factors for clouds in order to derive a massive increase in the supposed future warming (they take ECS from 1.9 to 3.2).)

Regarding your last question - were they using appropriate data/methodology?

The answer is yes and no. Mostly yes but a bit of no. Unfortunately in science a little bit of no can have disproportionately large effect.

The no concerns dealing with the uncertainties in the data, dealing with UHE, and probably a few more things that others have commented on elsewhere. But it is also important that Richard Muller went very public with unjustifiable and misleading statements, thus making it very difficult to discuss the real science properly because people like you immediately picked up the wrong idea from it.

There is no problem at all with temperatures having risen in the late 20thC. I would have significant difficulty with a finding that temperatures had not risen then, because my understanding of the natural factors such as the sun and PDO is that temperatures should have risen then. The issue is what caused the temperature changes, in particular how much of it was caused by CO2, and where temperatures are headed now. The BEST project has so far added nothing of value, which is disappointing, and has publicly misrepresented its work, which is doubly so.

Regarding the points in your next post:
1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes.
4. Yes.
5. Yes.
6. Yes, but with some uncertainties.
7. See 6.

Add in:
8. Global temperatures have risen similarly in the past, when CO2 could not have been the cause.
9. The proportion of the recent warming due to CO2 as opposed to natural causes is not known.
10. If global temperatures now continue to remain steady or decline, then the proportion due to CO2 must be small.

I’m away for the next fortnight. Have a great Christmas, everyone.
Comment by Joel on 12 December 2011:

Thank you Mike,

On the third try you finally answered the question, sort of. “yes and no”.

Just to be clear: the method and data were the same before and after Watts praised them. Specifically he praised the way they handled the uncertainties in the data. The only thing that has changed is the result is now known. Watts himself got a draft before it went public, and he claims he only recommended small changes.

You say, “the ‘no’ concerns dealing with the uncertainties in the data, dealing with UHE, and probably a few more things that others have commented on elsewhere.” Now, I’m assuming UHE refers to urban heating - I’m not up on the ’skeptic’ argot. Assuming that, I would like to ask you what specifically was wrong with the analysis BEST did? Watts was happy with the methodology for this point before BEST told him the result. What’s the problem now? Simply saying you aren’t happy with the way they addressed it is not good enough. Bear in mind they have some people who know more about statistics than both of us combined working on the problem - and they’ve devoted a lot of time specifically to this problem. If you think you’ve found a flaw in the analysis, please explain it. I have a PhD in mathematics - don’t be shy. You should be able to tell me what your criticism is and how big of an effect it could have.

As for the “things that others have commented on elsewhere”, this looks a lot like you’re saying “if my first argument falls apart, then I’ll go read a bunch of blogs elsewhere and I’m sure I can throw some mud somewhere that sticks.” If you’ve got specific criticisms, you should be able to tell me what they are, and how big of an effect it could have. If you don’t, then stop trying to give yourself weasel room. More to the point, don’t believe something simply because it attacks the project. Remember, Watts was so convinced by the method that he said “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise.”

As for “everything that I have said concerning Michael Mann directly or indirectly has been about the science and the scientific process. To portray it as off-topic and ad hominem is absurd and pathetic.” When the topic is whether or not BEST has done correct science, I fail to see how “which is something that others like Michael Mann for example should have done and disgracefully still have not done” is relevant - you’re shoehorning the insult in. It is most certainly off topic. It is without question an attempt to lower the level of discourse. It is also a sign that you are unable to separate your supposedly scientific dislike of a person’s research from a visceral dislike of the person. I dislike some very good researchers in my field. If I can’t separate my dislike of their personalities from my respect for their research, my own research will suffer. As for what you hoped to accomplish by this comment? It seems you’re trying to introduce a dislike of the person rather than the person’s research. That is practically the definition of ad hominem. To complain that a person who used a dataset belonging to someone else hasn’t released it - well it’s not his to release. Sure, you have the right to say you won’t accept the result without seeing the data. There’s almost a scientific basis for that argument. But to say it was disgraceful of him? No. That is ad hominem. Address the science. Leave your emotions out of it.

I assure you, I have little doubt - based on what I’ve read of his own blog - that Watts’s ethical standards are as low or lower and his desire to inflate his ego much larger than what you believe about real climate scientists. But I have not treated him in the same way you’ve attacked Muller and Mann and others. Because it doesn’t help the scientific discussion. So can we please stick to the science and leave the ad hominem out?

So now that we finally have what appears to be a clear statement from you that you are happy with the data set and happy with the application of the methodology we can focus on the methodology itself. You aren’t happy with the methodology. In order to advance the scientific aspects of our discussion, I need to know specifically what you’re not happy about. I’m going to ask several questions of you now. Hopefully we don’t have to break them down further into small pieces.

What specifically is your concern? What error did they commit? How large of an effect do you think it could have? What is the mathematical basis for that estimate of how large it could be? And finally, does it not make you wonder even a bit that every careful study that’s been done by different groups with different methodologies and different data sets seems to arrive at the same historical temperature curve?
Comment by Mike Jonas on 3 January 2012:

Happy New Year to all. 2011 was a pretty miserable year in many ways, so here’s hoping that 2012 will be better around the world.

Joel - I have been away over Christmas and New Year, and haven’t put in any time yet. Briefly:

The method used by BEST to identify rural vs urban stations is highly suspect. Let me re-phrase that correctly - it’s crap. They use MODIS to identify urban areas http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5700/b1104.pdf, so yes the big urbs are so identified, but small and probably some not-so-small towns fall into the “very rural” classification. UHE (which is indeed Urban Heat Effect) is not restricted to large urbs, in fact on a per annum basis it can be greater in a small growing town than in a large city, even if the city is itself growing. In Australia, BEST has classified about 870 stations as “very rural”. Just looking at the names of the “very rural” stations[*], over 100 are at airports and over 100 are at post offices. I suspect that the majority of the “very rural” stations are in fact in urbs of varying sizes or places with human development, and are therefore not at all “very rural”. Checking at the individual station level will be very time consuming so I haven’t tried to do it, and if I can’t at least semi-automate it in some way then I doubt that I will.

Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph was absurd and a disgrace, as is ongoing support of it from people who should know better. Nothing about that statement or any other like it that I have made is an ad hominem and nor should it be construable as such.

Regarding your questions, the first two are answered above.

How large of an effect do you think it [UHE] could have? What is the mathematical basis for that estimate of how large it could be? Hard to quantify without doing one hell of a lot of work. My WUWT post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/21/an-analysis-of-australian-rural-vs-non-rural-stations-temperature-trends/ which I think you have seen suggests that Australian rural stations may have warmed at only 60-70% of the rate at which urban stations have warmed, but the sample is small and the data is not particularly reliable. On a global scale I suspect that the UHE is rather smaller, but I have no evidence-based reason for saying so, other than that rather obviously UHE is unlikely over the oceans. The argument that ‘only a very small proportion of Earth’s surface is urbanised and therefore UHE is small’ is invalid, since the temperatures are projected way beyond their immediate location in order to provide a global picture. The point here [this blog] is though that since UHE is not dealt with correctly, the temperatures from BEST and others are unreliable, and certainly can’t be used to identify how much is due to CO2 - and BEST say explicitly that they haven’t tried to.

Does it not make you wonder even a bit that every careful study that’s been done by different groups with different methodologies and different data sets seems to arrive at the same historical temperature curve? As I explained, it’s not exactly surprising, since the input data is the same for all of them, and, as I said before “There is no problem at all with temperatures having risen in the late 20thC. I would have significant difficulty with a finding that temperatures had not risen then, because my understanding of the natural factors such as the sun and PDO is that temperatures should have risen then. The issue is what caused the temperature changes, in particular how much of it was caused by CO2, and where temperatures are headed now.”
and
“8. Global temperatures have risen similarly in the past, when CO2 could not have been the cause.
9. The proportion of the recent warming due to CO2 as opposed to natural causes is not known.
10. If global temperatures now continue to remain steady or decline, then the proportion due to CO2 must be small.”

[*]-The station classifications were not available online from Berkeley so I used information obtained from Berkeley by a third party. However, I requested the information from Berkeley and have now received it so I need to check, although I don’t doubt that the first set of information was correct.
Comment by Joel on 4 January 2012:

Mike:

You claim BEST used the same data as previous studies. This is disingenuous and borders on a lie. The data for the BEST study was not the same as previous studies. You know that - I’ve already pointed it out to you, and your claim contradicts the fact that Watts promoted this study as the one that was going to finally do it the “right” way. Even if it were the same data, the fact is you accused one scientist of manipulating his results. If your libelous accusations were true, then the results of the new study would be different. How you can on the one hand say “one person manipulated his results”, and on the other hand say “of course someone else got the same results because it was the same data” is beyond me.

You say “The argument that ‘only a very small proportion of Earth’s surface is urbanised and therefore UHE is small’ is invalid, since the temperatures are projected way beyond their immediate location in order to provide a global picture.” You might want to read up on the methodology of BEST before you inaccurately portray it again. This is not the method BEST used - part of the reason Watts praised their method is that it was designed to eliminate this imaginary effect. You don’t know what you’re talking about, so you’re recycling old complaints.

Now let’s talk about “confirmation bias”. Confirmation bias is summarized by this: “still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest,” and it’s closely related to the placebo effect. A scientist must build walls around his analysis to protect it from his/her own confirmation bias. In the medical fields we have developed the method of double blind trials with placebo. Not only does the patient not know if he or she received the treatment, neither does the person running the study (look up ‘facilitation’ for an example of how badly things can go wrong if we don’t use safeguards to protect against even inadvertent bias).

Since you seem to think attacking individuals is fair game, let’s discuss Watts’s scientific capability and hypocrisy. He said he was happy with the BEST method. Then after he saw their results, he changed his mind. A real scientist does not have that right - once you’ve seen the results, your own bias affects your ability to rationally judge the method. Would he have made the same criticisms if BEST had agreed with what he wanted?

Let’s now talk about the recent project Watts led that they published. In this study they recruited volunteers from his (climate change denying) followers to check the accuracy of stations recording temperatures. I could spend a while talking about why using biased people to collect your data effectively guarantees a biased result (even if the collectors aren’t consciously biasing their measurements), but I want to save space, so here are two other issues.

First: You and Watts both attack BEST for releasing results before they were completely peer reviewed. Let’s be clear, BEST had completed their analysis before they released their results. That didn’t stop Watts from publishing a blog article titled “The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review”. Watts is a hypocrite on this point. He published a “mid term” report on their analysis at least a year before submitting it to peer review, and before the analysis was done (oh, and he solicited donations for the project from his followers). He did everything he could to get media attention for that. If he and you are right that this sort of behavior is unethical and makes results suspect, then why is he engaging in it?

Second, and perhaps more significantly, Watts admits that they used (at least) two different statistical techniques to analyze their data which gave different answers. AFTER seeing the answers, they decided which method to use. This opens the door for him to unconsciously (or consciously) select the method that gave the answer he wanted. I absolutely guarantee that you and Watts would excoriate any real scientist who did that, and in this case he would be right to do so. It is poor scientific principle.

Remember, after seeing the method (but before seeing the results) of BEST Watts said, “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”

Is Watts a man of his word? Is he a competent scientist?

I don’t care what your answer is. In fact, I already know you’ll just repeat ad hominem attacks. I’m bringing this up to show you that your idol is not the scientist you think he is. I’m fed up with this and have better things to do with my time.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 4 January 2012:

Joel - your habit of portraying criticisms of scientists’ work as ad hominems is getting ridiculous.

All of the data used by all of the other temperature studies was input for BEST. Directly or indirectly, there is no other data available. Some of the other studies may have chosen to filter out some of the data, and BEST’s methods may have filtered out different data and treated some things differently, but the full set of original data is the same for everyone.

Temperatures in BEST are indeed projected - implicitly or explicitly - beyond their immediate environment. There is no other way of getting a “global” temperature.

You say that I attacked BEST for releasing results before they were completely peer reviewed. Not true. It wasn’t the fact of releasing unreviewed results that I addressed, it was the effect (intended or not) of muzzling Anthony Watts. I said “Anthony Watts was very optimistic about the BEST project, on the basis that it would be genuine, hence the statements that you quote. But he was then shafted by Richard Muller, who sent him a copy of the unreviewed paper, asking him to keep it confidential, then hit the airwaves in a blaze of publicity still before the paper had been reviewed and while AW was prevented from commenting by the confidentiality request.”.

It is still the case, as I said before and have supported in some detail, that “The hope of BEST was that it might settle some of the outstanding issues - things like UHE. It didn’t.”.

I have no idea why you suddenly introduced confirmation bias into the conversation, but obviously confirmation bias is a potential risk in all science and all scientists. That’s why we have peer review and sceptics.

I have no need to defend Anthony Watts, and indeed I feel free to criticise him if required. I have criticised various climate sceptics at times, even describing as BS a peer-reviewed paper purporting to show that AGW was exaggerated. (AGW is indeed exaggerated, but the paper’s logic was wrong.)

You, on the other hand, have a very serious problem if you consider my criticisms of Michael Mann’s atrocious hockey-stick graph to be ad hominems. I suggest you take a clear and considered look at the graph, and all that has been written about it and the attempts to hide the divergence problem, and recognise that it is quite simply fraudulent. It is also still a disgrace that Michael Mann has refused to make data available which would allow others to check his work as per normal scientific process. I fail to see how you can try to claim that somehow this has not been a topic integral to this thread, as it has been a significant part since last July.
Comment by Dave on 21 January 2012:

Joel and Mike: Gentlemen, you’re getting hung up on the wrong issue. The issue is NOT the validity or non-validity of the temperature data. The issue is much simpler.

According to the computer models from the AGW crowd, global temperatures should have risen throughout the 90’s and the 00’s - not only did temperatures not increase, they actually declined. As predictors of global temperatures, the AGW models appear to be next to useless.

Even if the data are as perfectly accurate as we can make them, the results from the models suck when used as a predictor of future events. And suck badly. (Joel, if ever there was a need for an example of confirmation bias in science, this appears to be it.)

You see, science isn’t just supposed to be telling you what is happening now, it’s supposed to be able to accurately predict future events according to an analysis of both the past and present conditions. AGW fails miserably at this task.
Comment by Mike Jonas on 21 January 2012:

Dave - you are quite right. I have tried a few times to explain to Joel that the issue is not the rising temperatures themselves but what caused them, and that BEST in spite of their high-profile claims have thrown no light on it. BEST is still worth discussing, but with the recognition that it is not a core issue.

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