IGX

Turdacious wrote: It seems like the Berkeley study is saying that this is a normal shift

dead man walking wrote:

Turdacious wrote: It seems like the Berkeley study is saying that this is a normal shift

no.

a skeptic who questioned whether the climate was changing at all now says the climate scientists have done a careful job and, yes, the climate is changing.

whether that change is "normal" or caused by humans was not addressed by the study.

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

We now know less about the history of climate, and its natural fluctuations over century-scale time frames, than we thought we knew.

If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. Suppose, for example, that future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously--that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small--then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be just a random fluctuation on top of a long-term warming trend, since according to the hockey stick, such fluctuations are negligible. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.

A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one--if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution.

dead man walking wrote:

Turdacious wrote: It seems like the Berkeley study is saying that this is a normal shift

no.

a skeptic who questioned whether the climate was changing at all now says the climate scientists have done a careful job and, yes, the climate is changing.

Turdacious wrote:Muller isn't exactly a new face in this debate, and as far as I know he's pretty well respected.

Richard Muller is a man climate scientists love to hate. Among other things, the Berkeley physicist has questioned the professional integrity of people like Penn State's Michael Mann, one of the creators of the so-called "Hockey Stick" graph showing that temperatures shot up dramatically and unprecedentedly in the 20th century. Mann has been cleared of such accusations many times over; so have the main actors in the so-called "Climategate" affair, another of Muller's targets.

Pinky wrote:

DrDonkeyLove wrote:I worry more about the economic meltdown than the glacial meltdown.


This suggests a difference in smoothing more than anything.

Severe seasonal melting has reduced ice floes, floating chunk of ice, in the Arctic Ocean to the thinnest on record, according to researchers.

Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany said the proportion of old, thick sea ice in the central arctic has declined significantly. The ice cover now "largely consists of thin, 1-year-old floes," they said. . . .

Researchers said that at sites where the sea ice was mainly composed of old, thicker ice floes in the past decades, there is now primarily one-year-old ice. . .

"The ice has not recovered. This summer it appears to have melted to exactly the same degree as in 2007. Yes, it is exactly as thin as in the record year," said sea ice physicist Stefan Hendricks.

dead man walking wrote:

Turdacious wrote:Muller isn't exactly a new face in this debate, and as far as I know he's pretty well respected.

both points seem true. also this view of him, from the lemonick piece, to which i provided a link.

Richard Muller is a man climate scientists love to hate. Among other things, the Berkeley physicist has questioned the professional integrity of people like Penn State's Michael Mann, one of the creators of the so-called "Hockey Stick" graph showing that temperatures shot up dramatically and unprecedentedly in the 20th century. Mann has been cleared of such accusations many times over; so have the main actors in the so-called "Climategate" affair, another of Muller's targets.

EDIT (now that I have a minute): No shit. The link I posted said that.
he's not a knee-jerk berkeley liberal, as you suggested earlier, anymore than john yoo is.

dead man walking wrote:so you are acknowledging that muller was a known skeptic, is not a knee-jerk liberal, and that his recent study does undermine the position of climate change doubters.

in other words, you have come full circle. excellent.

Ice Nigger wrote:Gene, I don't know nothing about all this shit, but wouldn't it logically make sense that burning the carbon that has accumulated in the earth during a shitload of years (too many zeros to comprehend) all up in just a few years, and thus releasing it back to the atmosphere would cause some kind of effect?

Ice Nigger wrote:Why does it so often seem to me that people make up their minds about all kind of things either on a political or religious basis? Very rarely do I get the impression that people actually would do some independent thinking and stuff.

DrDonkeyLove wrote:

Pinky wrote:

DrDonkeyLove wrote:I worry more about the economic meltdown than the glacial meltdown.


This suggests a difference in smoothing more than anything.

I infer from this graph that temperature has been quite consistent for the last 4500 years with a few peaks and valleys that could have nothing to do with man made climate change. Also, today's temperature is well within the average range over that time period. Am I misinterpreting?

Winter droughts have become increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, particularly over the past 20 years, and a new study finds that global warming has driven at least half of the change.

Drought conditions in this politically explosive region are expected to grow more severe over the course of the century unless countries begin to significantly reduce their emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, many researchers say.

Winter storms historically have delivered most of the annual rain and snowfall to the already arid Mediterranean region. Yet precipitation measurements from the region and modeling studies point to a relatively rapid shift in the winter rain and snowfall trends that began in the 1970s, according to the study.

That change could signal that the region "has moved into a new climate regime," says Martin Hoerling, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., and the study's lead author.

The shift is not the result of temperature trends in the region itself, Dr. Hoerling notes. Instead, he and his colleagues trace drier Mediterranean winters to changes in long-range atmospheric circulation patterns. These changes, the study suggests, are triggered by rising ocean temperatures in the tropical Indian Ocean, a trend scientists have previously attributed to climate change.

Turdacious wrote:

dead man walking wrote:

Turdacious wrote: EDIT (now that I have a minute): No shit. The link I posted said that.

No shit. I just posted a link that said that.

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.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.

As well as trends in world temperatures, they looked at the extent to which temperature readings can be distorted by urban ‘heat islands’ and the influence of long-term temperature cycles in the oceans. The papers were submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research.

But although Prof Curry is the second named author of all four papers, Prof Muller failed to consult her before deciding to put them on the internet earlier this month, when the peer review process had barely started, and to issue a detailed press release at the same time.

He also briefed selected journalists individually. ‘It is not how I would have played it,’ Prof Curry said. ‘I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did.

‘It would have been smart to consult me.’ She said it was unfortunate that although the Journal of Geophysical Research had allowed Prof Muller to issue the papers, the reviewers were, under the journal’s policy, forbidden from public comment.

Prof McKittrick added: ‘The fact is that many of the people who are in a position to provide informed criticism of this work are currently bound by confidentiality agreements.

‘For the Berkeley team to have chosen this particular moment to launch a major international publicity blitz is a highly unethical sabotage of the peer review process.’

In Prof Curry’s view, two of the papers were not ready to be published, in part because they did not properly address the arguments of climate sceptics.

As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’

Prof Muller said she was ‘out of the loop’. He added: ‘I wasn’t even sent the press release before it was issued.’

Prof Muller defended his behaviour yesterday, saying that all he was doing was ‘returning to traditional peer review’, issuing draft papers to give the whole ‘climate community’ a chance to comment.

As for the press release, he claimed he was ‘not seeking publicity’, adding: ‘This is simply a way of getting the media to report this more accurately.’

He said his decision to publish was completely unrelated to the forthcoming United Nations climate conference.

This, he said, was ‘irrelevant’, insisting that nothing could have been further from his mind than trying to influence it.

I told Rose that I was puzzled my Muller’s statements, particularly about “end of skepticism” and also “We see no evidence of global warming slowing down.”

did not say that “the affair had to be compared to the notorious Climategate scandal two years ago,” this is indirectly attributed to me. 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 agree that the way the data is presented in the graph “hides the decline.” There is NO comparison of this situation to Climategate. Muller et al. have been very transparent in their methods and in making their data publicly available, which is highly commendable.

My most important statement IMO is this: ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’ My main point was that this is a very good data set, the best we currently have available for land surface temperatures. To me, this should have been the big story: a new comprehensive data set, put together by a team of physicists and statisticians with private funds. Showing preliminary results is of course fine, but overselling them at this point was a mistake IMO.

The issue for which Muller has taken the most heat is his public statements regarding his analysis as being the end to climate change skepticism. To Muller’s credit, he has taken the initiative to engage with and listen to skeptics, albeit on the narrow topic of the surface land temperature data record. Relative to the broader issue of attribution, which are at the heart of skeptical concern, details of the surface temperature record don’t play a terribly large role in most people’s skepticism about climate change.

My bottom line assessment is:

a press release on this was warranted
I applaud making the submitted papers publicly accessible at this time
the spin on the press release and Muller’s subsequent statements have introduced unnecessary controversy into the BEST data and papers

I will meet with Muller and Rohde next week in Santa Fe (more on this meeting in a few days). I will see if they will agree to an interview for Climate Etc. This thread is an opportunity for you to craft questions for them to respond to.

Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels.
“Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world,” he said. Still, he contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

limey twink wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

dead man walking wrote:

Turdacious wrote: EDIT (now that I have a minute): No shit. The link I posted said that.

No shit. I just posted a link that said that.

*twinklefingers!*