Climate Change

[Batalov]

Well, we are supposed read your quote of item 60 out of context and be happy with it? Why didn't you discuss items 39 and 44?

My message was mostly that it is press and uneducated people who care about the words "trick" and "hide". I don't. I subscribe to the aforementioned Tytchev quote.

I personally care about:
- raw data,
- transparency,
- bugs.
The programmers are concerned about bugs, and the programs are hidden from them; when they get access to them - they find bugs:

44. CRU’s alleged refusal to disclose its assumptions and methodologies gave credence to the view that exposure to “independent scrutiny would have undermined the AGW [anthropogenic global warming] hypothesis”./64/ However, the failure to publish the computer code for CRUTEM3 left CRU vulnerable when concerns emerged that other codes it used had faults. John Graham-Cumming, a professional computer programmer, told us that:

"the organization writing the [other] code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering. The code had easily identified bugs, no visible test mechanism, was not apparently under version control and was poorly documented. It would not be surprising to find that other code written at the same organization was of similar quality. And given that I subsequently found a bug in the actual CRUTEM3 code only reinforces my opinion."/65/

Have they heard of opensource? Take Prime95, for example. :-) You want to find bugs? Go for it. Right? That's why Prime95 doesn't have bugs!

Transparency:

39. We are not in a position to set out any further the extent, if any, to which CRU should have made the data available in the interests of transparency, and we hope that the Independent Climate Change Email Review will reach specific conclusions on this point. However, transparency and accountability are of are increasing importance to the public, so we recommend that the Government reviews the rules for the accessibility of data sets collected and analysed with UK public money.

Didn't care much reading the "Dishonesty" chapter. That's for people who follow facial expression, tone of voice because they cannot process the facts. Including those quote with items 60 and 66. That's for the press and damage control. That's understandable.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Batalov

"That he has published papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the science clearly refutes this allegation." Of course! Nature is the Bible. I had never seen anything wrong published in Nature, ooh, never.

But that's not the point -- it was pointed out that he had published in Nature as evidence that he'd never tried to deceive anyone with "hide the decline". He had gone public with the issue about tree-ring data after 1960, explaining why it was anomalous.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Batalov

Well, we are supposed read your quote of item 60 out of context and be happy with it?

What a low-road comeback that is!

I gave the link to the entire document so that anyone could read the whole thing!

Paragraphs 60 (and 55-59 preceding it) and 66 (and 61-65 preceding it) were the only ones I saw that were directly related to aspects of "Climategate" that I had personally commented on earlier in this thread! That's why I quoted them.

At no time did I say, hint, believe, or imply that anyone was supposed to "be happy with it".

Once again, you show that you're more interested in scoring rhetorical points than in determining the scientific truth.

Why didn't you discuss items 39 and 44?

Because they did not concern anything I had personally commented about earlier in this thread.

My message was mostly that it is press and uneducated people who care about the words "trick" and "hide". I don't.

Oh? Then why are you posting messages about them? If you didn't care about them, you wouldn't have mentioned them in post #703. You contradict yourself.

I subscribe to the aforementioned Tytchev quote.

Which quote is that? I can't find any previous mention of Tytchev on this page, and I certainly don't know any Tytchev quotes by heart.

I personally care about:
- raw data,
- transparency,
- bugs.

Fine. Those are all discussed in the report.

The programmers are concerned about bugs, and the programs are hidden from them; when they get access to them - they find bugs:

Why don't you mention that none of the bugs (nor any other claimed defect yet pointed out by critics) makes any difference in the determination of whether anthropogenic global warming is occurring? Or would that disperse the rhetorical impact of what you want to imply?

[xilman]

Nice article on the apparent link between sunspot activity and the European climate at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8615789.stm

Professor Lockwood was keen to stress that "blocking" only affected a limited geographical region, and would not have a widespread impact on the global climate system.
To illustrate the point, he said that while the CET record showed that this winter was the UK's 14th coldest in 160 years, global figures listed it as the fifth warmest

Paul

[cheesehead]

"Oceans' Saltiness Reaching Extremes"

http://news.discovery.com/earth/ocea...y-warming.html

(Note: the article is about areas of not only high, but also low, salinity.)

The supercharging of Earth's water cycle by global warming is already making some parts of Earth's oceans much saltier while others parts are getting fresher.

A new study by Australian scientists shows a clear link between salinity changes at the surface and changes in the deeper waters over the last six decades caused by the warming seen over the same period.

The reasoning goes like this: The saltiness, or salinity, of the oceans is controlled by evaporation and rainfall at Earth's surface, explains Paul Durack of CSIRO, the Australian government's research agency.

The more evaporation there is at a given patch of ocean, the more concentrated the salts get in the seawater, and the higher the salinity. In places where lots of rain is falling, the water gets more diluted, becoming fresher.

Tracking salinity changes over the oceans is, then, a great way to monitor the water cycle over the oceans.

. . .

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

"Oceans' Saltiness Reaching Extremes"

http://news.discovery.com/earth/ocea...y-warming.html

(Note: the article is about areas of not only high, but also low, salinity.)

Interesting ... but the related question of greatest interest to me is, would such enhanced salinity gradients tend to enhance or suppress (or neither) the large-scale thermohaline cycles such as the Gulf stream (more precisely, the north Atlantic deep-water overturning)?

One might intuitively think "larger gradients means larger forcing of the circulation", but it can also mean larger stratification, e.g. more fresh water sitting atop salty water and thus suppressing the thermohaline cycling.

Any discussion or related links along these lines welcome...

[garo]

Letter from 255 top scientists:

Open letter: Climate change and the integrity of science

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by garo

Letter from 255 top scientists:

Open letter: Climate change and the integrity of science

I, too, have seen a change in the comments of ... (what's a neutral term for those who contend that AGW is wrong and claim to present, without actually doing so, a scientific disproof of AGW^*? "anti-AGWists" That's it.) ... anti-AGWists to online articles recently: the adoption of a certain attitude of total moral certainty that they are following the real science, and that climate scientists, or at least the majority who support the AGW theory, have joined together in a vast conspiracy to mislead the world for the purpose of pushing a political agenda. They're likening AGW to eugenics, for instance.

It's pretty impressive rhetoric, even when one disregards the ad hominem parts ... until one notices that it's never accompanied by citation of evidence that actually disproves AGW, only by citation of evidence that doesn't actually disprove AGW but can seem superficially to do so to folks who don't have a thorough grounding in climate science.

- - -

^* -- Ernst, for instance, is not in that group because his anti-AGW contentions are not based on misunderstandings of science or on "evidence" that doesn't actually disprove AGW. I'd say that Ernst has not yet shown me any disproof of AGW, but neither has he claimed that any non-disproof of AGW really is a disproof of AGW. He's expressed reasonable doubts, and plausible lines of reasoning, and is still working on developing a disproof to substantiate his doubts.

Is that fair, Ernst?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

^* -- Ernst, for instance, is not in that group because his anti-AGW contentions are not based on misunderstandings of science or on "evidence" that doesn't actually disprove AGW. I'd say that Ernst has not yet shown me any disproof of AGW, but neither has he claimed that any non-disproof of AGW really is a disproof of AGW. He's expressed reasonable doubts, and plausible lines of reasoning, and is still working on developing a disproof to substantiate his doubts.

Is that fair, Ernst?

The first part, yes - but I am in no way "working on a disproof", or otherwise engaging in such Hegelian making-the-facts-fit-ones-preconceived-notions exercises. I am following the science and applying what I consider reasonable standards of scientific proof to it. Unlike those seeking government funding for climate research or (on the opposite side of the for-pay debate) those seeking fossil-fuel-industry support, I have no need to exaggerate either the alleged "certainty" of the evidence for AGW or of the alleged evidence against it. Oversimplifying the science and downplaying the uncertainties and the unexplained or downright contrary data may be something one needs to get support from funding agencies or in the political sphere, but it's not science.

On the political and public-policy side I firmly believe that there are so many other good reasons to reduce our carbon (and in fact our total, including numerical-population) footprint that it shouldn't require a doomsday AGW scare to accomplish that. It seems that even with the dire predictions it's not enough to get any kind of global political unanimity on addressing what is at root the classic Ehrlichian overpopulation crisis (magnified by an energy-intensivity crisis), but that has me wondering whether that justifies the doomsayers in continuing to ratchet up the rhetoric, or whether such "the world is ending!" approaches are wrong-headed for the simple reason that there is a piece of human nature (or at least of many humans' natures) which reacts viscerally against the makers of such predictions.

On the science side I freely admit that I believe the onus of proof falls more heavily on the AGW crowd ... partly from a "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" stance, and also from my belief that we humans are prone to exaggerating our own importance in the grand scheme of things. And having some particular experience both in the mathematics of complex nonlinear dynamical systems and in numerical modeling (computational fluid dynamics), I view the claims about the alleged "close agreement" between the various GCMs with extreme skepticism. Modeling inherently chaotic phenomena on long timescales is an extraordinary challenge even for simple mathematical models ... add in the number of crude approximations and quite-low spatiotemporal resolution needed to model global climate over any kind of multiyear timescale even on our currently most powerful computers, and there is no way in hell you can expect anything but a massive scatter in the resulting predictions (just look at the divergence in the 5-7-day forecasts of your local weather for an example of that sort of thing), unless one or more of the following is going on:

[a] The various models have had their built-in 'fudge factors" adjusted in a posteriori fashion to fit known data, i.e. they "agree by design";

[b] People are selectively presenting the data that best fit the hypothesis and suppressing the "inconvenient outliers";

[c] There really is a huge pro-AGW conspiracy which involves wholesale fabrication of model data.

Now I don't give [c] any credence (although I do begin to worry when powerful political and financial interests get involved, e.g. Wall Street's keen interest in emissions-trading exchanges), but [a] and [b] are well-known and near-ubiquitous phenomena in many fields of science, not just climate research. They don't require any malicious intent to occur, either - just natural human "go with the herd" tendencies amplified by funding agencies which have a strong bias toward funding "safe" research - the kind of things that have led to many a false scientific consensus in scientific history.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

The first part, yes - but I am in no way "working on a disproof", or otherwise engaging in such Hegelian making-the-facts-fit-ones-preconceived-notions exercises.

Thank you for this correction, and for the rest of your explanation!

[science_man_88]

not saying it doesn't exist, but unless people see a marked increase in high pressure systems or marked increase in pressure within the same amount of high pressure systems I don't know if they know enough to go on either side.

people say well wouldn't global warming make more low pressure systems but unless it's changed the average number of high pressure systems i doubt it however:


pressure = energy per volume

lower pressure = lower energy in the system, so unless they both change neither will.

I could go into my thoughts on hurricane energy transfer but I know I'm probably boring most.