“climate change delivered by the postmanâ€

No.

As far as I'm concerned the boat is sinking and you all are arguing about what hymn the band should play.

 

You are actually reenforcing my point. If I start a conversation about Global Warming, usually nothing much comes out of it other than a bunch of people polarized around the two extreme opinions of a) we are doomed, or b) it's all a scam. If I start a conversation about how I have cut my gas bill in half and I am reducing my electric bill, then by the end of the conversation, most of the listeners are going to start practicing some of the things they have learned....such as getting a power meter to find phantom loads. The later conversation has actually created action.

The herds will follow the lead cow. It's true with cattle, it's true with humans. Right now the lead cows are driving Prius's. Most of the herd is ditching their SUVs. Five years ago, a claim that a Toyota Truck plant would be converted to making Prius's would have been laughed at. Now it's happening.

Let me use the CFC Freon ban as an another example. Only a very small number of individuals were actively involved in forming and executing the Montreal Protocols. Yet everyone in the world benefits. The point here is that having enough of the right people educated can make a difference.

 

Don't worry - you can always hitch a ride with Algore on his 100 ft. houseboat.

 

You exaggerate. The NAS did not conclude what you state.

From Nature (subscription required, concluding 4 paragraphs quoted in full)
Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

In an effort to quell the controversy, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Representative Sherwood Boehlert (Republican, New York), commissioned the academy to examine the earlier work.
​

The academy essentially upholds Mann’s findings, although the panel concluded that

systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated
as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the
statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding, says Peter Bloomfield, a statistician at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who was involved in the latest report. “This study was the first of its kind, and they had to make choices at various stages about how the data were processed,” he says, adding that he “would not be embarrassed” to have been involved in the work.​

Panel members were less sanguine, however, about whether the original work
should have loomed so large in the executive summary of the IPCC’s 2001 report. “The
IPCC used it as a visual prominently in the report,” says Kurt Cuffey, a panel member
and geographer at the University of California, Berkeley. “I think that sent a very
misleading message about how resolved this part of the scientific research was.”
“No individual paper tells the whole story,” agrees North. “It’s very dangerous to
pull one fresh paper out from the literature.”​

Mann says that he is “very happy” with the committee’s findings, and agrees with
the core assertion that more must be done to reduce uncertainties in earlier periods. “We have very little long-term information on the Southern Hemisphere and large parts of the ocean,” he says. As for the report’s effect on the policy debate, Mann says: “Hopefully this is the beginning of us, as a community, putting that silliness behind us.”​

And the authors of the original paper had a letter published in Nature regarding the above as well (excerpted in full as it's short). Nature 442, 627 (10 August 2006). They have always been explicit about any uncertainties in the Hockey Stick.

Authors were clear about hockey-stick uncertainties

Sir
Your News story "Academy affirms hockey-stick graph" (Nature 441, 1032; 2006) states that the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel "concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been". This conclusion is not stated in the NAS report itself, but formed part of the remarks made by Gerald North, the NAS committee chair, at the press conference announcing the report.

The name of our paper is "Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations" (Geophys. Res. Lett. 26, 759–762; 1999). In the abstract, we state: "We focus not just on the reconstructions, but on the uncertainties therein, and important caveats" and note that "expanded uncertainties prevent decisive conclusions for the period prior to AD 1400". We conclude by stating: "more widespread high-resolution data are needed before more confident conclusions can be reached." It is hard to imagine how much more explicit we could have been about the uncertainties in the reconstruction; indeed, that was the point of the article!

The subsequent confusion about uncertainties was the result of poor communication by others, who used our temperature reconstruction without the reservations that we had stated clearly.
​

And one can, of course, read the National Academy's report directly.
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
From the summary, page 4:

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years. Not all individual proxy records indicate that the recent warmth is unprecedented, although a larger fraction of geographically diverse sites experienced exceptional warmth during the late 20th century than during any other extended period from A.D. 900 onward.

Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.
​

 

Megansprius, thank you, as usual, for the straight information on this.

 

But more importantly. What is the source of misinformation that TimBikes and other contrarians use?

I googled: "Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis." And all I got was conservative denialist blogs.

The other misconception is that the hockey stick refers only to Mann's work. Since then many other proxies have been used to verify there is indeed an unprecedented rise in temperature. To pick two:

Glaciers:



Or Borehole temperature



I see hockey sticks....

How many different lines of evidence do you need?

 

Scott - my mis-statement. It was from Wegman, who chaired the panel evaluating the "hockey stick's" validity, not the NAS panel report. It seems the two reports are somewhat at odds. The Wegman report is from a team of statisticians who are obviously, quite adept at the use of statistical methods and tools. They essentially concluded that Mann's use of statistical methods was flawed, his result not reproducible, and that the Mann "hockey stick" findings are unsupportable statistically.

See p. 29:

"The ‘hockey stick’
reconstruction of temperature graphic dramatically illustrated the global warming issue
and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster graphic. The graphics’
prominence together with the fact that it is based on incorrect use of PCA puts Dr. Mann
and his co-authors in a difficult face-saving position. We have been to Michael Mann’s
University of Virginia website and downloaded the materials there. Unfortunately, we did
not find adequate material to reproduce the MBH98 materials."

and...

"Conclusion 1. The politicization of academic scholarly work leads to confusing public
debates. Scholarly papers published in peer reviewed journals are considered the archival
record of research. There is usually no requirement to archive supplemental material such
as code and data. Consequently, the supplementary material for academic work is often
poorly documented and archived and is not sufficiently robust to withstand intense public
debate. In the present example there was too much reliance on peer review, which
seemed not to be sufficiently independent."

Conclusion 2. Sharing of research materials, data, and results is haphazard and often
grudgingly done. We were especially struck by Dr. Mann’s insistence that the code he
developed was his intellectual property and that he could legally hold it personally
without disclosing it to peers. When code and data are not shared and methodology is not
fully disclosed, peers do not have the ability to replicate the work and thus independent
verification is impossible.

Conclusion 3. As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as
the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to
be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications
of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical
expertise was sought or used.

Conclusion 4. While the paleoclimate reconstruction has gathered much publicity
because it reinforces a policy agenda, it does not provide insight and understanding of the
physical mechanisms of climate change except to the extent that tree ring, ice cores and
such give physical evidence such as the prevalence of green-house gases. What is needed
is deeper understanding of the physical mechanisms of climate change."

Hardly a ringing endorsement of the hockey stick.

 

The NAS report is a peer reviewed article published in Nature magazine. What you cite is a bunch of mercenary statisticians (not climatologists) hired by republicans, including Inhofe. What did you expect to get.

Statisticians are also trying to disprove evolution (See Bill Dembski) probably because statistics is always the weakest argument. I think for climate problems you listen to climatologists. Just like for evolution you listen to biologists.

Just look at this dishonest statement that should color how you view the rest of the article.

"The politicization of academic scholarly work leads to confusing public
debates. Scholarly papers published in peer reviewed journals are considered the archival
record of research. There is usually no requirement to archive supplemental material such
as code and data. Consequently, the supplementary material for academic work is often
poorly documented and archived and is not sufficiently robust to withstand intense public
debate. In the present example there was too much reliance on peer review, which
seemed not to be sufficiently independent."

 

Now there is an intelligent and well thought out rebuttal worthy of contemplation. I am so going to reconsider my position given the thoughtful and organized presentation of these new facts.

Not.

 

Wegman's report had a narrow focus, as opposed to the National Science Academy.

The missing piece at the Wegman hearing
Wegman had been tasked solely to evaluate whether the McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) (MM05) criticism of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) (MBH) had statistical merit. That is, was their narrow point on the impacts of centering on the first principal component (PC) correct? He was pointedly not asked whether it made any difference to the final MBH reconstruction and so he did not attempt to evaluate that. Since no one has ever disputed MM05's arithmetic (only their inferences), he along with the everyone else found that, yes, centering conventions make a difference to the first PC. This was acknowledged way back when and so should not come as a surprise.
...
But, and this is where the missing piece comes in, no-one (with sole and impressive exception of Hans von Storch during the Q&A) went on to mention what the effect of the PC centering changes would have had on the final reconstruction - that is, after all the N. American PCs had been put in with the other data and used to make the hemispheric mean temperature estimate. Beacuse, let's face it, it was the final reconstruction that got everyone's attention.Von Storch got it absolutely right - it would make no practical difference at all.
This is what MBH would have looked like using centered PC analysis:



Again, a hockey stick.

 

Scott - for sure there is a modest recent temperature rise. Nobody is disputing that. But what is in dispute is that Mann's analysis can conclude with any statistical certainty that the rise is unique in recent history.

Certainly the medieval warm period throws that into doubt, particularly with regard to the temperature record of Greenland, as this chart from NOAA clearly demonstrates:



Furthermore, the Mannian hockey stick relies on surface temperature records glued onto the proxy records. A scientific no-no.

In addition, the surface temperature record is greatly overstated, as evidenced by this:



...where 56% of 534 audited stations have a temperature error of >=2 degrees C, and 13% of stations have an error of >=5C.

And in fact, when you look at the satellite temperature record (below) the error in the terrestrial temperature record becomes obvious. Strangely, and in conflict with CO2 model projections, the temperature does not rise at all from the start of the record in 1979 thru 1997, then rises in 1998, then remains flat at approximately 0.17 degree higher level (worst case, from data below), from 1998 forward.

Please tell me Scott - since you ignored this in my previous posting on the subject...

How can it be that CO2 had no effect at all on temps from '79-97 and then increased the temperature in 1998 (coincidentally an El Nino year), somehow magically bumping temperature up to a higher plateau. Then how can it be that the CO2 effect went away again after that since post 1998 temperature has again remained flat (to declining)? Please explain how this 30 years of data aligns with the predictions of anthropogenic warming from CO2?

 

Tim,

You forgot to copy the figure description. The troposphere (where we live) is warming. The stratosphere (high up on the atmosphere) is cooling. That is because greenhouse gases trap heat on the troposphere.

 

"Nearer My God to Thee" or "Onward Christian Soldiers"?

 

I agree - the surface and lower troposphere are warming, and have stated that. But the warming of the surface is demonstrably overstated and the much more reliable satellite data for the lower troposphere - which as you say - is next to where we live - shows a rate of warming of just 1.7 degrees C per century. This is well below the usual scare scenarios and below every one of the IPCC's "best estimate" warming scenarios in their latest report:

B1 scenario 1.8
A1T scenario 2.4
B2 scenario 2.4
A1B scenario 2.8
A2 scenario 3.4
A1FI scenario 4.0

So again...

How can it be that CO2 had no effect at all on temps from '79-97 and then increased the temperature in 1998 (coincidentally an El Nino year), somehow magically bumping temperature up to a higher plateau. Then how can it be that the CO2 effect went away again after that since post 1998 temperature has again remained flat (to declining)? Please explain how this 30 years of data aligns with the predictions of anthropogenic warming from CO2?

Could you please explain this, Alric? Scott?

 

If it makes it any easier to see, here is the LT Temp broken into pre-1998 and post-1998.

As you can see, the post-1998 trendline is at a slightly higher level vs. the pre-1998 trendline, but only because of the temperature "step" that occurred in the 1998 El Nino year. Other than that, thereis no significant temperature trend in either of the pre/post 1998 datasets.

How does this "step", and lack of warming otherwise, fit with CO2 induced warming?

 

The predictions of the IPCC include rising levels of CO2 which have not occurred yet. We are only 8 years into the century. And 1.7 is pretty close to 1.8 anyway....

Variations in a complex system. Just consider that your initial anomaly is -0.3 while the final is +0.3.

But what purpose could possibly serve to break up segments like that. To appreciate a trend over time continuous data would be much better.

Like this:



Or this:

 

And the band played on...do you think the deck chairs look better over here?

 

probably not...Greenland being that warm, means most of what is currently green now will probably dry up and wither away.

the American SOUTHEAST, is expected to look much like the american southwest looks now.

 

So are you arguing that the continuous rise in CO2 from 1979 - 2007 has not had an effect on temperatures? If this in not what you are arguing, again, explain:

How can it be that CO2 had no effect at all on temps from '79-97 and then increased the temperature in 1998 (coincidentally an El Nino year), somehow magically bumping temperature up to a higher plateau. Then how can it be that the CO2 effect went away again after that since post 1998 temperature has again remained flat (to declining)? Please explain how this 30 years of data aligns with the predictions of anthropogenic warming from CO2?

 

Godiva - when I present data that supports what I am stating, you never respond back in any sort of intelligent manner - you just reply in knee jerk, drink the koolaid generalities or insults.

Although we may disagree, at least Alric and Scott present some data back to me in response to my posts, that they believe supports their case.

So tell me - why should I bother wasting any more time trying to respond seriously to you?