Global Warmest defector says, "No smoking hot spot"

No Tim, ranting is what Berman does: to speak or declaim extravagantly or violently; talk in a wild or vehement way. I would hardly call my prior post ranting. Most of the verbs I use above (shown, is, has, think, laid, check, etc.) don't create a tone of ranting.

Since most of the climate "debate" is essentially marketing coming from the fossil fuel industry with the purpose of making the issue unclear, I feel it is worthwhile to draw attention to such links when they occur.

You might think of it as ranting. I prefer to think it's more like a PSA.

 

Honestly Scott, when you post something about the science of AGW I typically read it and usually find it quite interesting. But as soon as I see the words "Exxon" or "SourceWatch" or some other ad hominem attack, I tune out.

With Evans for instance you should attack his premise and demonstrate why it is false or questionable. For instance, he writes:

"The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever."

I'm not looking to get into a debate right now on this particular point of Evans'. I just put it out as an example that if you wanted to sway more discerning and open minded readers, you might attack this statement of Evans'. Which in turn, assuming your argument was strong enough, would in and of itself discredit Evans. No ad hominem attack required.

 

TimBikes

Good point, I was just getting ready to raise it myself

He has raised a lot of good points here none of which has been refuted, I'll read it again to be sure, but the facts are the facts. If the temps have dropped 0.6 C recently does that not wipe out the entire temp raise for the last 100 years!?!?

If all the scientist agree that there should be a hot spot then where is the hot spot? If the AGW advocates say that carbon is the culprit behind AGW then where are the facts that support it? I'm beginning to trust scientist about as much as I trust politicians, used car salesmen and the MSM.

Wildkow

p.s. the fact that the AGWers attack the report writer and not the points he brings up speaks volumes about the advocates of AGW.

 

The problems with Evan's science were well addressed by Chogan on page 1 of this thread, and his objections roundly ignored, with the exception of an old temperature argument that has been well discussed elsewhere.

See chogan on page one.

And see the (again, listed earlier, and not rebutted) thorough analysis of the flaws in Evans' science at Deltoid: The Australian's War on Science XV

Hence, I felt no need to rehash the subject.

 

Better, Scott. So if you link through to the repository for the satellite data shown on "Deltoid", you see the following:


Start Time
Stop Time
# Years
Global Trend

Channel TLT
1979 to 2008-06
29
0.171 K/decade

Channel TMT
1979 to 2008-06
29
0.098 K/decade

Channel TTS
1987 to 2008-06
21
-0.014 K/decade

Channel TLS
1979 to 2008-06
29
-0.336 K/decade

So the only upward temp trend shown is for Lower Trop. (TLT) and Middle (TMT). And that is between .98 to 1.7 degrees C per century. Pretty minimal.

And if you look further at the LT and MT graphs (top 2 graphs) you see a clear step function at the time of the 1998 El Nino event - prior to 1998 there is no discernible trend.



Can someone please explain how the troposphere did not respond to consistent, large increases in CO2 from 1979 - 1998. Then suddenly, with the onset of a strong El Nino 1998, CO2 apparently became "activated"?

It's odd too that the scientists that created this page don't specifically attribute CO2. What they do say is:

"For Channel TLT (Lower Troposphere) and Channel TMT (Middle Troposphere), the anomaly time series is dominated by ENSO events and slow tropospheric warming. The three primary El Niños during the past 20 years are clearly evident as peaks in the time series occurring during 1982-83, 1987-88, and 1997-98, with the most recent one being the largest."

 

Tim, I had the pleasure of having dinner last week with a prominent non-fossil-fuel-funded climate scientist who thinks that AGW is much over-hyped. He laid out some very reasonable explanations for every question I had, and I will need some time to digest and research what he said (which is different from but not necessarily conflicting with the arguments you have been making).

As to your question above, who claimed that CO2 became "activated" during the 1998 event? I guess I missed that. The claim that I think is being made by is that the underlying long-term increase is due to CO2, not the short term spikes like in 1998.

 

True. But only certain kind, and definitely not this kind.

 

Interesting. That is my position - AGW is much over-hyped. I would be interested to read a few key points of what he said, if you are willing to share.

In any case, let me frame my statement another way...

From the graphs, you can see that only in the LT and MT cases do you see any warming. And in those cases, the warming is minimal. And what you would expect to see, as you say - "an underlying long-term increase" really is not there. Sure, there is an increase - but again - it is a "step" that occurs around 1998. But prior to 1998, you do not see the positive trend you would expect were CO2 the culprit. So instead, it appears that the 1998 El Nino event shifted climate to a higher plateau - not that CO2 drove a continuing trend of long term temperature increases over the 30 year period.

 

Actually, I'll clarify that by saying that he does not believe CO2 is responsible in any significant way for the temperature increase in the past century. There are a lot of parts to the argument, but one of them is that he thinks that weather behaves stochastically, like flipping a coin. Over long periods of time you can start to see cyclical patterns. I found a graph here that illustrates this.

I just don't see that the 1998 EN event caused an uptick. It looks to me as if it ended up right about where it started.

 

I'll check the link, thanks.

In regard to the EN uptick, think of it this way. In the top two charts, if you ran a trend line for 1979-1997, you would see it is nearly flat and at zero on the vertical axis. If you then ran a trend line from 1998 to 2007, you would also get (and I'm eyeballing this) a pretty flat line, but one that is centered around say 0.2 on the vertical axis. So to my eye - without running the actual regression here mathematically - it looks like the latter period is roughly 0.2 C higher in temp than the earlier period. A "step", if you will. Sorry if I'm not explaining myself well.

 

I see what you're saying. It seems like a matter of interpretation. I don't think we have enough data to conclude definitively one way or the other so I'm not going to say you're wrong. Ok? My bigger problem with these graphs is that they are not global. The long term temperature increase is more evident in the global plots.

 

Fair enough - a longer record would be better, but we have what we have, and 30 years is not bad.

As for it not being global, the graphs exclude primarily the Antarctic (stop at 70 degrees south latitude). As may know, on the surface at least the Antarctic has actually cooled over this timespan. So if anything, inclusion of that region might further reduce any temperature anomalies, rather than increase them. But I'd have to research it to say for sure.