Yesterday I drove back to Bloomington to get the rest of my stuff. I got almost all of it, but along the way I saw a billboard. It was something like this:
Which, to me, sounds a lot like this:
More evidence is now coming out that makes the current propaganda thinking global warming sound suspiciously like all the warnings in the 70s that we were on the verge of an ice age. Take a look at some of the new wrinkles here, and see if your resident tree-hugging, pacifist, liberal climate expert has any good explanations for them.
I found these two most interesting:
- The average land temperature of the globe dropped precipitously last year, according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. The temperature drop — more than enough to “wipe out most of the global warming of the past 100 years,” according to the online technology publication Daily Tech — was also recorded by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
And
- Professor Oleg Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences is advising people “to stock up on fur coats” because he expects an extended period of global cooling, an assessment that is echoed by Kenneth Tapping of the U.S. National Academy of Science’s National Research Council. Both scientists contend solar activity explains most of the temperature variation in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Wait, wait, wait… you mean the sun might have something to do with the temperature of the earth? Say it ain’t so!
(Via: Kristin)
Tags: Global Warming
May 24th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Hey, Pete. Congrats on the degree.
I thought I’d update on the “100 years” quote. The website I’ve linked in my name shows the four graphs Michael Asher (the author of the Daily Tech article and that quote) references. The person that compiled the data had this to say:
“I wish to state for the record, that this statement is not mine: ‘–a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years’
There has been no ‘erasure.’ This is an anomaly with a large magnitude, and it coincides with other anecdotal weather evidence. It is curious, it is unusual, it is large, it is unexpected, but it does not ‘erase’ anything. I suggested a correction to DailyTech and they have graciously complied.”
John Christy, who provided the UAH Lower Troposphere data in the third graph, linked a response entitled “Twelve Months of Cooling Doesn’t Make a Climate Trend.” http://wattsupwiththat.wordpre.....ate-trend/
I couldn’t find the author’s sources on the “fur coats” quote, but the only other references to US NAS on the examiner refer to the sensitivity of tropical regions to climate change. I’m not sure about climate change; I just hate bad statistics.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:24 am
I’m not sure why Mr. Christy thinks he gets to decide what makes a trend and what doesn’t. 12 months is an awfully short amount of time when compared to the age of the earth, the length of other periods of warming and cooling, or really much of anything else… but it’s hard to fathom climate fearmongers complaining now about there not being enough data to dispute their points — there’s not really enough data for them to be making theirs.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:21 am
FYI, (Dr.) John Christy has won NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for developing a way to measure global temperature from satellites. He is also “still a strong critic of scientists who make catastrophic predictions of huge increases in global temperatures and tremendous rises in sea levels.” I really think anyone with his credentials, who is primarily interested in collecting and analyzing the most detailed data around, and with his opposition to extremist positions on both sides cannot be reasonably called a “fearmonger,” and is one of the better people around to decide what’s a trend and what’s not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christy
As someone who’s done more than a little with statistics, let me also point out that the big drop is cherry-picking at it’s finest. Temperatures are going to fluctuate a lot year to year, and it seems apparent from the graphs that year to year fluctuations are greater in magnitude than the longitudinal trend. Any conclusion based on one year (or even a few years) is going to be suspect; I’m afraid I can’t tell you more without the actual data. Do you really think the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index with 129 years of data isn’t compelling?
May 24th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Being a good scientist doesn’t mean he gets to redefine the English language, Ryne.
Earth has had an environment for, what, hundreds of millions of years? No, I don’t find 129 years of data compelling. But the issue is not whether or not earth’s temperature is rising… whether it is or not is just a fact (and a very uninteresting one). The argument is whether or not we’re a substantial cause of the warming.
May 24th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Dr. Christy was using “trend” as statistical jargon, where it refers to a statistically significant relationship with time, usually one which is surrounded by fluctuations from other sources, including measurement error, natural cycles related to additional variables, etc. He didn’t redefine the English language; he used the word correctly (although some researchers also use “trend” to describe effects that are just short of statistical significance, usually in the direction they hypothesize and not involving time. I’m not a fan, but that’s not really relevant).
Earth has had an environment for 4.5 billion years. The significance of a collection of data is not it’s proportion of the lifespan of what’s measured; it’s the ability to distinguish between hypotheses about process using the data. This type of data is really only relevant as a quasi-experimental design, showing a relationship between the increase in temperature and the increase in industrialization and all it’s offshoots. The real work is done in experimental settings (or, more accurately, iterated alternations between experimental and real-world or quasi-experimental settings). I don’t know how someone can look at the longitudinal and experimental data and disagree with Dr. Christy’s NPR quote, “[i]t is scientifically inconceivable that after changing forests into cities, turning millions of acres into irrigated farmland, putting massive quantities of soot and dust into the air, and putting extra greenhouse gases into the air, that the natural course of climate has not changed in some way.” It’s probably not as extreme as either the “fearmongers” or the “it doesn’t exist” people claim, but what ever is?
May 24th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth, Ryne. Statistical trending has everything to do with the scale of the data you’re looking at. Temperature data for the past 25 minutes may or may not indicate a trend… it depends on whether your scale is “temperatures this hour”, “temperatures today”, or “temperatures ever.”
_”The significance of a collection of data is not it’s proportion of the lifespan of what’s measured”_
Of course it is. We don’t understand how the earth’s climate works, to suggest that all we need is statistical significance to figure it all out is ludicrous.
Assume the 130 years of data that exists is actually good. Can you look at that data and say “Yeah, the temperature is definitely rising!” Sure you can. You might even be able to figure out how much. But, as I said earlier, that’s not really particularly useful until you put it in context of the earth’s climate. If we had, say, 500 years of data, we might be able to compare this period of temperature increase with other periods.
What these folks are doing is akin to walking outside in the middle of a snowstorm in February and saying “Gosh, this is the hottest it’s been all day — it’s really burning up out here.”
As for Dr. Christy’s quote… it doesn’t really mean anything. Take a look:
For starters, many things that started off as “scientifically inconceivable” actually turned out to be true. Second, “changed in some way” is not a particularly impressive hypothesis. If I kill one of my houseplants, the “natural course of the climate” “changes in some way”.
Basically what we have is a whole bunch of scientists who gather some data, and then leap insane chasms of reason to arrive at scary predictions in order to fund their further research into “climate change”… something that’s been going on for billions of years. Add to that the under-handed, decidedly non-scientific dealings of these sorts of people — taking reports and adding names of people who disagree with premise, bullying those who disagree with the Climate Change Dogma, and so on — and you wind up with what looks an awful lot like politics/religion and not so much like science after all.
I’m perfectly fine with people having politics and religion, I just don’t want to have to pay for it.
May 25th, 2008 at 10:09 am
How did you move on to “scary predictions” and “Dogma?” I came here to dispute the article you posted, which I’ll get back to in a minute. If you could post a few references about scientists bullying other scientists, I’d love to read them.
_”The significance of a collection of data is not it’s proportion of the lifespan of what’s measured”_
This is still true, but the mistake you made is made by a lot of new researchers and statisticians. What matters is not the lifespan of an organism or system; it’s the periodicity. As an example, measures of heart rate taken over 30 seconds are about as reliable for a newborn infant as a 100 year old man, even though the 30 seconds is a substantially larger proportion of the infants life (the infant’s is probably marginally better, as s/he likely has a faster heart rate and thus more periods for HR lability to even out).
Moving back to climate change, researchers in that field are trying to simultaneously model oscillatory change (i.e. seasons of the year) while also modeling a number of different types of longitudinal changes. The one year difference is not really a trend, because you cannot differentiate between the oscillatory and longitudinal components over a single oscillatory period. Single observation changes are also known as difference scores, which are subject to a number of different types of reliability problems, most notably the invalidity/unreliability dilemma.
There’s nothing special about 130 years, or 500, or 1,000,000 (btw, I believe some data exists going back to the 1400s, as I think mean temperatures in London were one of the examples of early graphical data presentation. Could be wrong). Of course it’s possible that there are additional oscillatory periods that are longer in length than the data we have. The fact that this could always be true is no reason not to make conclusions based on the best data and analyses available.
I think part of your argument is “it could have been much hotter 500 years ago,” but that’s only relevant to the extent that one can infer that the current ecosystem can handle higher temperatures. I believe one of the Examiner.com articles summarized research that tropical ecosystems are particularly insensitive to changes in temperature, and there are of course the ice-cap issues. As a final note, the slow increase in global mean temperature is interesting in its own right; if higher temperatures lead to a whole host of problems (crop failures, raising tides, etc), isn’t that something we should be worried about regardless of the source?
I’ve got to go play plumber. I missing having an apartment, because they come with maintenance people.
May 25th, 2008 at 10:43 am
“Of course it’s possible that there are additional oscillatory periods that are longer in length than the data we have.”
Not only is it possible, it’s actually pretty likely isn’t it? Given what we know about the earth and it’s various ice ages and warm periods, it seems a little silly to assume that 130 years of data encapsulates a full iteration of the pattern.
The difference between your heart rate example and the earth’s climate is that the heart is a (mostly) known quantity. We know that 30 seconds is sufficient because we know far more about the human heart than we do about the Earth’s climate. That, and the heart is several orders of magnitude less complicated.
But, again, the temperatures rising are not (on their own) significant for a number of reasons.
First, “climate change” is not a new occurrence, it’s something that’s been going on (as far as we can tell) for as long as the earth has had a climate. We might as well be studying “earth rotation” and having a cow every day at noon that the sun is going away and might never come back.
Second, I have yet to hear anyone suggest that we start making plans for a warmer earth… everyone is hell-bent on trying to stop the earth’s climate from changing (yeah, sure) which still seems to me like a fool’s errand.
Third, the mere fact that change is happening is frequently conflated with what impact we may or may not be having. Consider all of the talk about CO2: it’s not even close to the most influential greenhouse gas, and there’s reasonable debate about proportion of THAT humans produce. Is it really worth billions and trillions of dollars, as well as forcing the 3rd world to stagnated in poverty because we might be able to influence one fraction of one percent of the greenhouse effect?
People can speculate all they want, that’s what scientists do (they call it something different, of course), but when they start spending billions of tax dollars and putting the brakes on industrial progress in developing nations, I think we need a higher bar than “Some scientists think that…”
As for the articles on the bullying, take a look at this one:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220
Here, the same guy talks about the puffery involved with the IPCC report:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=1069
This isn’t science anymore. It’s propaganda.
May 25th, 2008 at 11:17 am
The Lindzen stuff is interesting; I’m a little curious about his experience with Science or Nature, given that they have something like a 93% rejection rate and that responses from dissenting authors are commonly solicited to run alongside or shortly after controversial findings. I’m not sure about his “waiting months” deal, because many journals & fields (mine especially) have pronounced publication lags.
Of course it’s likely that additional periods are going on, but that’s no reason to stop making conclusions. If the world were to get too cold for wheat and rice to grow, the fact that it would warm up again in 1000 years would be of little importance. I’d be very interested in plans to adapt for a dynamic world climate, but I’d imagine it would be easier to adapt temperature to our needs than to re-engineer every resource-generating ecosystem to a warming or cooling planet.
I think one of the major problems with this (and many other scientific endeavors thrust into the public eye) is that data is always incomplete. The common adage is that all models are wrong, but some are useful. All theories are just best guesses, and there are always dissenting scientists. Translating scientific journals into newspaper articles tends to misrepresent views (try it with any topic). At this point, I’m starting to feel that I have a couple hundred pages of journal articles to read before I can make an opinion.
If anyone wants tips to unclog a tub drain, I have new knowledge (remove the trip lever: it’s probably the problem, and you’ll never get a good enough seal to plunge properly with the plate on).
May 25th, 2008 at 11:24 am
“but I’d imagine it would be easier to adapt temperature to our needs than to re-engineer every resource-generating ecosystem to a warming or cooling planet.”
I’d love to know how you propose we do that. What I think the most likely thing is right now is that we’re adding to (and probably in a fairly minor way) a swing that was already taking place, already going to take place, and man’s heightened sense of self-importance is leading people to overstate our impact… that to say that the climate is going to change when it decides it’s time to change, and there’s little we can do about it, even if we could coordinate everyone on the globe. Attempting to manipulate the global climate on any significant scale is a fool’s errand, in my opinion.
The benefit of adapting ourselves to a dynamic climate is that we already know how to do it… we’ve been doing it forever.
May 25th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I’ll probably leave off here, because it seems we’re done with the statistical issues.
As much as I’d like to believe that this increase is a natural swing that will reverse itself shortly with no effect our survival, that requires some pretty big assumptions that aren’t supported by the available data. It’s possible that this is just a natural upswing that has nothing to do with increases in deforestation and CO2 emissions that coincided with it; it’s just supported by the data, nor is that theory supported by the majority of scientists who have studied the issue. This isn’t something that will be disproved with a single study or a set of studies; until someone demonstrates that CO2 emissions don’t actually effect the environment, or enough years of data on global temperature demonstrate a reversal of the last century’s increase, this is and will remain an issue.
May 25th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
“that requires some pretty big assumptions that aren’t supported by the available data”
So does believing the opposite, really.
“It’s possible that this is just a natural upswing that has nothing to do with increases in deforestation and CO2 emissions that coincided with it; it’s just [not?] supported by the data, nor is that theory supported by the majority of scientists who have studied the issue.”
The data doesn’t really support a causal link, either. In fact, there’s a pretty strong correlative link between sun activity and global temperatures as well, and given the choice between the two, Occam’s Razor would suggest we side with the more simple: that the sun is heating us up.
Really, the bottom line is that this has become a political issue, not a scientific one. Activists take the data, make the assumptions necessary to get to the result they want, and then try to bully everyone else into going along with them.
One of the most telling situations to me is that most of these activist sorts, when evidence comes out that the current science on global warming might be incorrect or overstated, instead of seeing that as _hopeful_ news, they get angry and defensive. Is that really the behavior of someone who believes the science and wants what’s best for the planet, or is it the behavior of someone who likes having a reason to try to dictate the lifestyle of others?