The BBC is under fire after altering a news story about global warming as a result of activist pressure. Tim Worstall writes that:
I must say, I think this is an absolutely marvellous advance. We pay for the BBC, after all, so we really shouldn’t have any of that elitist nonsense about a factual reality or anything. No, news should be presented to show the world as “you” believe it to be, not as some impartial reporter of the facts would have it.
That, at least, was the view of one Jo Abbess, a climate activist (and a remarkably confused one at that, a little googling reveals that she worries about both global warming and Peak Oil: mutually exclusive concerns one might think. Bless.) who… did indeed manage to have a BBC news report changed to reflect her views. We mustn’t actually talk of static temperatures, or even worse, of 1998 being the hottest so far (and thus since then we’ve had cooling) because that might make people think that the world has, umm, not been warming and might even have been cooling since 1998. Can’t let the proles know the truth now, can we?
Will the BBC’s Roger Harrabin please put the article back to how it was before the lobbying started? Email him your views at roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk.
Three baseball umpires are having a beer and talking about what criteria they use to determine a “no ball”
1st: I just call it how it is.
2nd: I call it how I see it.
3rd: It ain’t nuthin’ ’till I call it.
The BBC is the news. It ain’t nuthin’ ’til it’s been through the editorial sausage machine.
Well, that’s how they tacitly look at it. And I believe for the most part this isn’t deliberate distortion just the way they are. I think the BBC honestly believes it is fair and accurate and non-biased.
The BBC really isn’t biased from the viewpoint of the BBC of course!
Of course it isn’t as bad on the ol’ AGW as the laughably tabloid ITV news.
Anycase, climate change is now a fact isn’t it? The IPCC have declared it thus.
’tis all truth by fiat.
“1998 being the hottest so far (and thus since then we’ve had cooling”
What utter crap, logic of the “all birds live in trees, therefore squirrels can fly” variety!
Looking at one spike a mere 10 years ago and ignoring the general upward trend – and I suppose the recent snow in the South of England proves it all, does it?
Or does that mean another Ice Age is coming, because it didn’t snow last April.
BritSwedeGuy: where can I see this “general upward trend” for myself? What are the start and end years of the trend? Presumably you’re talking about surface data and not satellite data.
The activist Jo Abess writes:
[…]
Is she right?
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of stories about censorship. Indonesia and the BBC – very appropriate, and telling.
Sure, and if we stop driving SUVs, the solar cycle will change and Gaia will love us all again!
I don’t know if she’s right but she seems to not even agree with herself saying this …
as well as this …
Looks to me like she provided her own example of a temperature going in reverse.
We now have the noun: A Spitzer.
Can we add the verb: To Abbess
?
Rob Fisher,
Good as the 1998 story is, there is something to BritSwedeGuy’s claim. 1998 WAS a spike, and the temperatures then continued their trend until 2002. The temp. has been pretty flat since then, but 2002 is the important date, not 1998. We have had five years of AGW flat lining, not ten.
I normally sneer at people who quote their own website, but……
Try –
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=36
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=40
Warming did not stop in 1998, and it doesn’t help the cause of honesty in science for the sceptics, amongst whom I count myself, to claim it did.
I certainly think Global Warming is happening, I just don;t happen to think human activity has much to do with it. Hell it is happening on Mars(Link) too.
For both sides of that argument follow the link.
It seems like Perry’s sarcasm was warranted. At least one investigation failed to find ocean warming.
I guess I have a hard time believing that so many people can be so deluded.
Interesting stuff, Counting Cats. As a minor point, surely “known unknowns” was Donald Rumsfeld, not Dick Cheney?
The point here is that no matter how convinced climate scientists might be, they need to stop telling us that “the debate is over”. This is important stuff and we need to understand it, because from an educated layman’s perspective, it doesn’t look that way.
manuel II paleologos,
Error acknowledged, and corrected. Here(Link)
Yeah, it is all good stuff. What I feel we must do is stick rigidly to demonstrable facts, and not make extravagant generalisations; I prefer to leave that as the province of the hysterics.
I am about as lay as a man can get when it comes to climate science, but I don’t see how warming on Mars is evidence against AGW. The sun may be sending more radiation our way, but the sound theoretical science behind the radiation-absorbing/emitting potential of bigger molecules (CO2, amongst others) suggests that it is going to have a much greater affect upon our atmosphere than upon one with a lower concentration.
Surely debating the science of global warming requires engagement with the theory (particularly the theory of greenhouse gases), not just the nature of the sketchy evidence thus far obtained.
Ham: FWIW, this article argues that CO2 simply can’t absorb enough energy to have the effect that it is supposed to, mainly because at 380ppm there’s just not enough of it.
Rob, sure. I don’t mean to say that there’s no argument to be had there. Instead, I would like to see those that are sceptical take aim at the principle theory, rather than attempting to form a case based on the vicissitudes of the climate from year to year. It’s not an effective approach against the sort of people who have taken the environmental cause to its full religious conclusions. So long as the principle theory remains uncontested, any and all evidence will be believed to be proof of their argument.
Forget 2002. That’s 6 years ago.
That is falling into the same kind of “the long hot summers of my youth that are better than the ones we have now” kind of thinking that prompts folk to ascribe all unusual weather conditions to GW.
If you look at this longer term then what turns up is that there have been dramatic variations in climate. The Romans had vineyards in Yorkshire and there were Frost Fairs on the Thames in the C17th. Such things would now have Porritt & Gore (sound like provincial solicitors) gleefully declaiming “We’re all going to die”. Our ancestors were much more sensible about it. Probably. I dunno, during the festivities there was probably a Gore ancestor handing out Jeremaic pamphelts in Southwark. Be cute to think so – “Yeah Truthe Inconviente”.
Ham,
It isn’t as simple as that. The greenhouse theory is a sort of tinker-toy, simplified conditions, model. It is a sort of pre-prediction. It says this happens in principle (i.e. under spectacularly unrealistic conditions) so it might be worth further study.
Now… to get real world results from theory you have to add in lots of stuff like atmospheric physics, oceanography, the interaction with the biosphere etc… It is hellishly complicated to do. There’s all sorts of non-linearities and feedback loops and God knows what else. It’s as they say in the trade a ‘mare.
Ham,
There are sceptics who have taken on the principal theory, although the arguments quickly get convoluted and technical enough that the general public soon switch off. But pointing out cold weather does have a positive effect from the point of view of scepticism, because it forces the AGW supporters to acknowledge that oddities of short term weather don’t prove anything. After they’ve spent years at the BBC citing every hot summer, Arctic melt, migrating bug, drought, flood, hurricane, and disaster of any kind as irrefutable proof of the progress of global warming, it does everyone good to watch them have to backtrack on all that.
Ham,
If you would like to see a truly Herculean and heroic effort to show that simultaneous apparent warming of Earth, Mars, Pluto, (Neptune’s moon) Triton and Jupiter is a coincidence while not mentioning a single case of suspected cooling anywhere in the solar system, read this.
Considering that all except for a very small geothermal contribution to our planet’s warmth comes from the sun, accepting as an untested assumption that the cause of apparent global warming is anthropogenic is suspect to say the least.
There are two questions to be asked. One, is global warming a continuing trend? And two, is it anthropogenic in nature? Our moral shamans would forbid us the heresy of even asking either of these questions.
CountingCats,
Be careful of the idea of “removing anomalies to see the trend” because it is something of an assumption to say that they’re known to be ‘anomalies’, or that there is a trend. It’s not that easy.
The following gets rather technical, so anyone should feel free to stop reading here.
Most early treatments of statistics usually make a certain set of assumptions: that errors are independently and identically distributed with a Normal distribution. It is so ubiquitous, and any other treatment so glaringly absent, that a lot of beginning scientists are not even aware that noise can be of any other kind, or that if it is, that it might matter.
Sadly, this is not so. A lot of noise processes are autocorrelated, meaning the independence assumption is violated, and weather is one of them. (The other assumptions are violated too, but I’ll skip that for the sake of brevity.)
If you have access to a spreadsheet program like Excel, try the following. In the first cell, generate a random number. (In Excel =NORMSINV(RAND()) will generate a normally distributed one.) Now in the next cell down, calculate 0.95 times the previous value plus another random number. Repeat that for a couple of hundred lines or so, and then plot the result out. You’ll get a graph with a special sort of wiggle, something like this.
This is just one (especially simple) example of a special sort of noise process that, if you look at any short segment of it, looks like it has systematic trends and variations. In fact, it doesn’t. The mean of the error distribution is zero at every point. There is absolutely no trend anywhere!
Now if you add noise like this to a real trend, how do you spot the difference? And if you add it to a signal like a slow sine-wave, or step function, or some other signal, how do you disentangle which features are “anomalies” (meaning noise) and which are the signal you’re looking for?
A lot of people can be convinced by looking at graphs of nicely smoothed data, but to a statistician it’s rather more complicated than that. It was something the climatologists didn’t understand either.
‘I am about as lay as a man can get when it comes to climate science, but I don’t see how warming on Mars is evidence against AGW’
It isn’t – rather it is proof that the warming is not just ‘here’ and that, given that both planets share
the sun, um, maybe, just maybe the sun is getting hotter ( it is – it goes through cycles ) and that is the reason temps are gradually climbing !!
Very few seem to be saying ‘it isn’t getting warmer’
rather, the question is why ( my vote goes to good
ol’ Sol and we can’t do a thing about it )
So, changing my light bulbs is going to help make the
oceans cooler – I don’t think so.
The idea that man can have a global climate impact
seems to me to be a little bit much.
Compared to nature, we’re not even a nit. Look up
Krakatoa some time.
Calling CO2 a pollutant is assinine at best and historically, CO2 increases FOLLOW increased temps not the other way around as Al the science guy would have you believe.
In addition, ALL of this is based on computer models.
I have some experience in that and can write programs to give you ANYTHING you want, whether or not it’s true is irrelevent.
Modeling global weather/climate accurately ( meaning you get some useful information ) is probably not possible at this time because there is still so much we DON’T know. When you build a model that way YOU’RE GUESSING !!!!!!!!!! The models don’t even give todays climate situation if past data is plugged into them – that should tell you something of their reliability/accuracy.
Global warming and carbon cedit is the biggest and
best scam of all time. Don’t see anyone muscling China
to come into line do you.
Nope, only the RICH industrialized western nations should be taxed/paying out/giving up luxuries to save mother earth !!
You buy carbon credits by sending MONEY to someone/some company and they then do what ??
Plant trees ?? How do you know ?? You don’t.
It’s a scam
And it’s based on GUILT. If you have 3 SUV’s, 2 houses over 500 SF and your own private G5 you should feel guilty because you have so much and others have so little and you are polluting/adding to global warming so much more than others. Soothe your GUILT by sending us MONEY.
Gimme a flippin’ break.
Mid:
Turns out the sun has a shape of an elephant.
El nino mainly caused the spike in temperature in 1997-1998.
Of course, even though the warming was caused by El Nino, it’s really all a part of the global warming trend and that dastardly CO2 emission. But when the world is cooling because of La Nina, it’s just an anomaly and we’ll warm up again soon.
Such is the logic of the warm-mongers.
This thread has gotten remarkably off-topic. I thought the original post was about the BBC changing the substance of its news stories after publication. Global Warming seems to be the Black Hole of all threads: sooner or later everything gets sucked down into its gravity well!
This thread has gotten remarkably off-topic.
You are right. I was about to post something, but it was about GW, not about the manner in which the BBC has pandered to the badgering of this ignorant and somewhat hysterical individual.
I will be on leave until April 10
I just received an autoresponse from Mr Harrabin. I guess he will come in tomorrow to find a lot of email in his box.
Those who are really worried about it can get some free carbon offsets here:
http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com(Link)
Scientists say that the last decade is the warmest on record.
Since the start of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74°C. But this rise has not been continuous. The linear warming trend over the last 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment (Synthesis) Report, 2007, “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.”
You can pooh-pooh the data if you want to, but you would be going against most climate scientists (with the possible exception of those on the payroll of EXXON and other oil companies. Name one scientist who is not on those payrolls who will claim that climate change is not happening.
If you want to learn about Global Warming, search for Bob Carter on Youtube.
And by the way, it has been cooling since 1934. AlGore only wants you to look at since 1980.
Here is a good one:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/2008_co2_monthly_maximum_at_mauna_loa_looks_like_will_be_lower_than_2007/
CO2 off the trend line. Thought to be caused by ocean cooling.
In response to atlantajan’s challenge:
Robert M. “Bob” Carter – research professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, Australia.
That’s just one. There are plenty more. Now go back to your cubicle and stop annoying us.
Atlantajan,
Are you aware the IPCC has corrected their estimates for temperature increase downward about 25-30% each time they release a report?
At that rate the AGW problem will be solved in 2 more reports. I suggest we wait for those corrections…
At the risk of continuing down the black hole, I’d like to let fellow Atlantan atlantajan know that the IPCC report she quotes is from the executive summary written by bureacrats who already had a pre-determined story line. Many of the IPCC scientists who submitted peer reviewed studies to the report disagree with the assessment(Link).
Also, Exxon must be paying off A LOT of scientists(Link).
The Wikipedia page(Link) has a pretty long lists and is noted to be incomplete. (yes, all Wikipedia caveats are noted)
And here I thought all those Exxon profits were only going to the oil company executives and, of course, the Bush Cabal. Academia apparently is gettting a nice little cut too.
In all seriousness, as others have noted, this kind of snark is necessary because we have been told that GW is “settle scientist” when any remotely objective observation that sneaks past the BBC censors would say its anything but. Yeah, GW theory is about as settled as my stomach after five Varsity chili dogs (a local shout out for atlantajan who I’m betting wouldn’t step foot in our local fast food joint).
It would be a much better debate if one side wasn’t trying to shut down debate.
There are a few commenters who appear to have missed the entire point of this story. It is not the “denialists” who are basing their arguments on the short-term trend of recent years, but the activists like Abbess and the BBC. Abbess put heavy pressure (including threats) on the BBC to change its story, on the grounds that it created the impression that the trend since 1998 contradicted the AGW dogma. The few scientists in this “debate” are keeping a low profile, because science demands objectivity, and the AGW side demands abandonment of objectivity. Apparently, we are supposed to consider real scientists like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick to be no better than industry shills, while Al Gore is to be considered an objective source of pure science.
My note to Roger Harrabin at the BBC:
Roger, do us a favour and put that AGW article back to the way your chaps wrote it originally, there’s a good man!
No?! What do you mean, “no”? Oh blast it, you’re absolutely right, I don’t have any way to credibly threaten you, do I?
sherlock
While I’m at it, I might note that if you start out claiming that the problem is “global warming”, then at some convenient moment switch to saying that the problem is “climate change”, then you are no more than a phony.
Boy I wish I’d have wrote that. Best comment by far.
I can’t remember where I read (probably from Ron Bailey at Reason) but I’m pretty sure much of the IPCC/Gore unified GW theory is presented with the idea that the earth is supposedly getting hotter and CO2 levels are rising and so one MUST cause the other because there is no OTHER good reason to cause it. It’s basically the socialist version of intellegent design. The absence of proof for one theory automatically proves the other theory.
The way these “Scientists” avoid bringing that flaming ball of plasma in the sky into the discussion is simply Orwellian.
Changing gears:
Ham, fair point. I’ll agree to your idea as soon as all journalists, “academics”, and politicians stop treating a warm day in December or a bad hurricane as “proof” of global warming.
I’ll also take it more seriously when something resembling a bit of humility occurs. We’ve been able to somewhat accurately measure temperatures for about 100 years and judge weather patterns with some level of understanding for roughly 50 years. Yet our species has been around for what, 50,000 years? Our planet has been around for billions of years? And we assume this small spec of data HOLDS ALL THE ANSWERS. Such a small sample size would get one laughed out of a freshman statistics class (or get oneself published in a Lancet study I guess).
More Unscientific Snark:
I really wish someone had sent out a memo stating that in 1965 earth achieved the optimum climate and that we needed to make it permanent. You’d think that would have made the news or something. I guess hind site really is 20/20. Or something.
We don’t trust weathermen to predict the weather five days out and this has been conventional wisdom as long as we’ve had the “concept” of weathermen themselves. However, we are supposed to “trust” what amounts to 100 year predictions from weathermen and change our entire economy and culture (not to mention condemning Africa, among others to permanent poverty) based on this?
During the day its warm. At night it’s typically cooler. Why is that? Must be because less people are driving their cars. Or Exxon stops working to count their money.
During the summer, its hotter (when your hemisphere is closer to the sun) and during the winter, it’s colder (when you are farther way). Please ignore the yellow circle in the sky.
The Ice Age was a myth! How do I know? Because how could a glacier that stretched down to Cincinnati have melted without capitalism or Hummer’s?
Ah! Even better: What exactly was the Ice Age? All together now….”A temporary break in global warming”.
And I’ll see you at Super Al’s Global Warming Denier Nuremberg trials.
Step away from the black hole….
“The linear warming trend over the last 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.”
_______________
That can’t be right. The earth was cooling from about 1940 until at least 1972. TIME magazine was going on and on about the coming ice age, as I recall.
So, at most you can show 35 years of warming. Err… except perhaps the last ten.
It will take a few moments to track down the URL but I read a report quite recently that a unit of NOA has been running oceanic temperature probes for the last five years and has found not only no evidence of oceanic warming, but has in fact found evidence of cooling. Will advise.
When you hear the word “doubt” used as a curse, you can predict with some reliability that the person speaking is wrong.
Here are three links to scientists who question the AGW orthodoxy. All three are stolen shamelessly from Mr. Russ Goble’s post, just above; a necessary evil. Unfortunately, if there’s one characteristic of this debate, it’s that people who deeply want to believe in the inherent evil of civilization will not read opposing evidence even after it is shoved down their throats, not until it has reached a critical mass (i.e. too many weak-willed fools failed in their duty to ignore opposing evidence). They will not even allow it to be expressed, e.g. the original post.
These practices, of course, completely discredit the “discussion” by the scientific standards espoused by Popper. You would think that the hockey stick graph alone would have caused any decent physical scientist to die of shame. No phenomenon since – perhaps – the meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs has produced such a pronounced swing in the metrics as climate “scientists” (now wholly overseen and essentially employed by AGW interest groups) claimed to find in the temperature changes of the last X decades, where X is their research grant in millions (capped at the dawn of the industrial revolution, of course).
Follow the money, atlantajan. No, not the Exxon money, the OTHER money. Heck, if I were a climate scientist, I would work for Exxon; it’s not like you can get a job with government funding if you aren’t providing support for whatever this year’s horrible anti-warming idea is.
Meanwhile, the icecaps continue to…grow.
*
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
“Missing” ocean heat.
Celaeno,
In Perrys words, I am being a real blog whore on this one. I think you will find the links and references you are looking for here –
http://www.countingcats.com/?p=33
Jennifer Marohasy(Link), Greenie Watch(Link) and Junkscience(Link) are all good sites for keeping up with this sort of thing.
For me, they are daily reads.
Further to my previous: Curiously, the story was on NPR, and appeared on 19 March. It got some Web circulation, then sank out of sight, but it’s worth reading if only for the desperate efforts of the writer and his source to explain away the fact that 5 years of searching generated evidence not of warming but of cooling in the oceans. My favorite of their explanations was that the warmer waters have perhaps just gone deeper down for a bit. (Link)
Pa Annoyed’s comments about the nature of the statistics involved and the possibility of autocorrelated noise is the best one posted so far regarding the nature of the statistical difficulties involved; further, his choice of generating function is significant: it produces curves qualitatively similar to those seen in the temperature records.
Ask the risk of getting more technical, there are two other (related) difficulties within the science that confound matters further.
The weather is, as I’m sure you’ll all agree, a somewhat complicated system. As such, there are many (at a guess, roughly order 10^40) elements which go into it; functions with many elements tend to have many wiggles – as a simple example, consider the behavior of an arbitrary polynomial of >10th degree.
This is important from a modeling standpoint – the more wiggles a function has, the more likely it is to sharply deviate on a short term, and thus the more data points are needed to establish the overall behavior of a function. As a for instance, a 25th degree polynomial requires at least 25 data points (and the knowledge that the function /is/ a 25th degree polynomial) in order to determine it uniquely.
Smoothing out the bumps can give us a rough approximation with fewer data points (look up a spline curve to see what I mean), but it also runs the risk of mischaracterizing the system: especially when you try to extrapolate into regions where no data exists (such as the future).
So, the point of this mathematical digression is that, with a system as complicated as the weather, even if we knew the overall behavior of the governing function (which we don’t, other than a basic first-principles approach from fluid dynamics that is quite impractical to implement realistically), we’d still need order 10^40th data points to actually characterize it – far more than is realistically achievable. A simplified model might reduce the number of observations necessary to characterize the system over a given region, but at the cost of lost accuracy outside that region – which is exactly what we see in the computer models we have: good data fitting for the regions where we have data, and poor fitting much beyond that.
(There is a way around this: if enough is known about the nature of the system, there are generally many redundant data points which can be lost without losing any degrees of freedom from the overall model. However, ab initio, it is extremely hard to know which pieces of data are redundant; further, this is /not/ the approach taken by the current climate modelers – they do something far more akin to fitting spline curves to existing data.)
Which brings us to the other related issue: we have an extremely complex system to model, and not terribly much data to do it with. Even simplified to the greatest extent possible, climate models are quite complex, and rely upon the fitting of parameters in order to match the data set given. But herein lies the flaw: with a sufficient number of parameters (or an insufficient data set – in our case, we have both), in general a complex system such as this can be tweaked to reproduce /any/ data – even truly random data. Certainly I have seen no evidence suggesting that the climate models as written are not subject to this flaw (and some evidence that they are subject to said flaw).
Further, because of the statistical problems noted above, random data may be exactly what we have, and we have no way of knowing – at least, not without more data than we currently have available to us.
Ergo, it’s extremely hard to decouple the noise from the signal, and, even if we could do that, extrapolating the signal out to the regions beyond those for which we have data is nearly impossible. The science simply is not there yet: there is far too much about the behavior of the atmosphere that we do not know, and until this is fixed it’s impossible to create a working model straight from first principles; further, because of the enormous complexity of the system, any modeling based on simply fitting parameters to past data is fundamentally flawed.
Which is a roundabout way of saying don’t trust any predictions made by climate modelers – which includes every prediction made by the IPCC.
I wonder how anyone can say if the earth is getting hotter or not. First how many sensors with the necessary precision we have to measure temperature in 70% of Earth that is water, plus many isolated places. Then what we measure? In upper atmosphere or a Ground and Sea level?
Perry and Midwesterner,
just out of curiosity, have you ever considered which implications the inverse square law might have, concerning some warming on bodies sich as Triton and Jupiter?
If you are searching for Carbon Credit discounts, try http://imgsrv.wrko.com/image/wrko/UserFiles/carbon.jpg
Honest Howie won’t steer you wrong.
atlantajan is possibly a troll, but…
Note to AGW alarmists:
Stop using the EXXON line, because it gives away the game. The moment it appears we know you are an dumb-ideologue-nut, who parrots idiotic mantras and hasn’t a clue about anything in this univers.
Here is a famous remark by Dr. James E. Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science, the main publisher of temperature records, and the main AGW alarmist, or the father of them all:
This is ideology, not science, spewed by the main “scientist” in this movement. Vile ideology.
Well, we’ve measured. How accurately ?
There have been many problems with the instruments, with site locations, with site movements, with the recording of data. Aknowledged problems.
By the standards set by the meteorologists themselves, the accuracy of most measurements is no better than +- 5 Deg.
How one can deduce a tred of +0.6 deg over 100 years from +- 5 deg measurements is beyond my comprehension, but then, I’m no climate scientist. They can deduce anything they want to.
The numbers and graphs published by GISS that are supposed to be the measured temperature record aren’t the measurements themselves, but numbers obtained after a series of adjustments, which surely don’t add much to the basic (lack of) accuracy.
A 19th Century comment as a caution to climate modelers and statisticians:
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peascods, so pages of formulæ will not get a definite result out of loose data.”
~Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 25: 38, 1869.
Jacob,
A specific problem is that a lot of the recording sites have had land-use changes around them. In particular many have gone from being rural(ish) to surbanized.
I can’t for the life of me remember where I found this out. Sorry.
Nick M
Here. surfacestations.org, run by Anthony Watts, meteorologist.
Nick M.:
This is what you are looking for:
http://www.surfacestations.org/
Lots of examples of official temperature sensors placed next to parking lots and AC units. Provided with temp graphs from the stations pictured. Seems to be an unusual correlation between increased temperature readings and encroachment on the sensors. Nothing to see here.
Official spec is 100 ft away from any paving or building. Site documents sensors on roofs, next to parking lots, next to ac units. One, on the roof of a Newspaper, was placed there when the building was built. Guess when the temps trended upward?. One is even placed within 50 feet of hot jet exhaust.
Remember that when AGW folks want to take “surface temps” over satellite temps.
The surface temp stuff is really nauseating. Gee, the globe is warming around my dryer vent… The satellite and proxy records tell a coarser tale but it is less amenable to fabrication. And fabrication is what we are seeing from the Warmies, no doubt. The revisions we have seen from NASA, the modelers and others are given only grudgingly, under pressure of overwhelming evidence and never given a fraction of the publicity of the original alarmist screeching that the erroneous “data” produced. Global warming is a hoax. You can tell because they now bark about “Climate Change”…. Hilarious! Newsflash: the climate changes day to day; moment to moment. What there never is, is stasis.
Thanks guys! It was beginning to itch me!
Even though the temperature has dropped since 1998, the carbon emissions have increased significantly since then. If they were connected, then with increased carbon should come increased temperature.
If carbon has nothing to do with temperature, think of all the billions of dollars that will be lost. GlobalWarming(tm) is a big business enterprise.
Also, the hottest year last century was not in 1998 but in 1934(Link).
Must say I have not. Has warming been observed on Triton and Jupiter?
Perry, Mid linked to this.
There is an animation of the BBC story available at this BLOG.
BBC Before and After
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/bbc-before-and-after/
i notice that this story cannot be found in any deadwood media news site. Google news only lists it in the crackpot sites -prisonplanet etc.. is there any chance everyone could make an effort to tell this story to at least one non internet using, blog reading voter in the uk? its all very well that we all know the bbc is corrupt, but most people won’t belive it until they read it in the paper!
First of all, yes, sorry, you only have mentioned Mars and the question had originally been aimed at both Midwesterner and yourself, but since I didn’t know how to contact Midwesterner, I had posted in your thread to get your attention.
Now, the basic point about any body other than the earth allegedly getting warmer is that you have to consider the inverse square law. In the case of Mars, the alleged warming is a local phenomenon, mostly in connection with dust storms. Those storms mostly have an impact on the albedo of the planet. If they shiled darker areas from the sunlight, less energy from the sun is absorbed, so that the planet cools regionally. On the other hand, if it whirls up dust so that formerly covered darker areas are now opebnt to the sunlight, the surface will absorb more enegery than before, resulting in regional warming. Since the albedo of the south pole of Mars is irregular due to the irregelur topology of the surface ,a partial melting of the polar cap therefore does not indicate global warming on Mars.
Now to the inverse square law and alleged warming all the way out there at Pluto and Neptune:
Neptune’s distance from the Sun is thirty times as great as that of Earth from the Sun, therefore it only receives 1/900 as much sunlight for any given surface area, if you apply the inverse square law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune#_ref-11
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/forces/isq.html
To make a noticeable impact all the the way out there, solar output would have to increase significantly, to the point where it would get really uncomfortable arould Earth orbit. And of course, there has been no such increase in output.
If you follow the link to the Wikipedia entry, you’ll also find that Neptune emitts more energy than it receives from the Sun, so that also is a more significant impact on Triton’s luminosity than the Sun could ever have. Variations in Pluto’s orbit also are much more significant than any effect the Sun could have. Jupiter for it’s own part is not quite as far out there, but it has it’s own climate and considering it’s enormous mass and how much heat it can generate itself, the Sun is yet again not a real factor.
Also consider this: If you count all the planets and their moons as well as large asteroids, you have over a hundred different bodies that can, at any given time, display variations in temperature and/or luminosity. If a handful of them display variotions in those, it still isn’t a statistically significant change.
This is from the LiveScience article linked above.
But a change of one-hundreth of 1 percent in CO2 concentration in the athmosphere – that is substantial enough to cause a “tipping point” and ruin our planet.
Pretty much everything I was going to say/link to when I started reading the comments has been covered by someone else, but a couple of points:
Pete: 1934 was only the hottest year for US surface temperatures, not globally. I’m on your side here, but I’d caution you against rolling out that stat, as the alarmists will jump on you. That said, the revising of the figures was another nail in the coffin of the ‘settled science’ brigade.
Also, to the idiot who brought up the ‘oil money’ argument (I’m not even going to bother going back to find out his name): any money donated to researchers by oil or other energy companies is a drop in the ocean compared with the millions given out by the US and other governments, the UN and the EU to researchers who subscribe to the AGM theory. So does all that money invalidate their research?
Forgot to add, I’ve emailed the Times and the Daily Mail with a brief run-down of the BBC story and a pile of links. I suggest others do likewise.
Ralf,
Firstly, you’re quite correct that there are other potential factors at work that might explain planetary climate change. Of course, that these are swiftly brought up in connection with any other planet, while being swiftly dismissed in the case of the Earth, is just one of our many complaints. The local melting of the Earth’s North pole is trumpeted in the press as evidence of AGW, while the melting of the Martian South pole is a purely local affair, of no global significance. Winds push dust around on Mars affecting the albedo, but they forgot to mention wind pushing ice out of the Arctic into warmer waters, lowering the albedo. (And what other Earthly albedo changes might there have been?)
The inverse square law reduces the heat input to the outer planets, but a proportional variation is still a proportional variation. A 0.1% change is 0.1% for all the planets. And since the Stefan-Boltzman law gives an equillibrium temperature proportional to the fourth root of the heat input, the temperature change is proportionately far more for lower temperatures. There are also additional mechanisms possible besides simple solar heating, as the sun outputs more than just light, and planetary atmospheres are not simple black bodies but have complicated feedbacks. The Svensmark cloud hypothesis on Earth is one example – there may be interesting new physics affecting the others too. I’m inclined to doubt the correlation is significant since the physics on each planet is so different, as are their orbits, but I don’t dismiss the possibility either. The coincidence is intriguing.
The population size from which the sample is taken has no effect on statistical significance. The only thing that matters is whether the sampling method is independent of the variable being measured. If you’re more likely to be able to see increases in temperature rather than decreases, then it would be an issue. So far as I’m aware, it isn’t. Also, if warming planets were more likely to be reported, it would bias the result. That’s possible, but easily answered by pointing to cooling planets.
The warming of a number of other planets is by no means the best evidence for a solar-climate relationship, or for AGW scepticism. But it does provide a classic example of the tactics used in the debate – selective scepticism combined with oversimplification of complicated and poorly understood physics. The BBC’s website on “everything you need to know about global warming” is another.
Each side needs the other, to point out what they’re missing because of their own preconceptions. Science progresses only through debate between competing theories. And anyone who tells you the debate is over is, ipso facto, not a scientist, whatever their academic qualifications might be.
PA:
As it happens, no increase in solar activity has been recorded in the lst years, the alleged warming – more like an increased luminosity in most cases – was due to minor variotions in orbit.
The bodies displayed increases in termperature or luminosity did so inside different time-frames than the Earth. That especially goes for Jupiter, with, IIRC, a cyclical weather-pattern of 70 Earth-years or so.
Ralf,
In the last how many years?
And as I just pointed out, luminosity is not necessarily the relevant variable.
The Earth also has cyclical weather patterns. Dansgard-Oeschger interstadial events roughly every 1400 years, for example, or the PDO/AMO/AO/ENSO/etc. oscillations on the shorter, 1-60 yr timescales. What’s your point?
In more years than ‘warming’ in other places in the solar system aleggedly has been observed.
And the cyclical weather patterns also refute claims of a systemic warming across the solar system in the span of just a coupleof years.
Ralf,
I don’t follow. You say the climate cycle on Jupiter is 70 Earth-years. Presumably that claim is based on observation. You say no increase in solar activity has been recorded in longer than the warming of other planets has been observed. And yet, over any period longer than 70 years there have been increases in solar activity recorded.
Something doesn’t fit. I suspect that when you say there’s a 70 year climate cycle on Jupiter, that this is an unproven conjecture based on computer modelling, and that in fact you don’t know that this is the reason for it warming, or even if there really is a 70 year cycle. To claim that this refutes anything is as much a declaration of blind faith as for those offering the sun as ‘the cause’.
And you still haven’t commented on whether luminosity is necessarily the only relevant variable, whether feedbacks can amplify effects on other planets too, or on the question of whether a statistically valid small sample can be taken from a much larger population.
When people engage in the tactic of never conceding any point but simply changing the subject when challenged, it renders the debate uninteresting. A dishonest debater is disbelieved by default. Other people don’t generally have the time to fact-check everything they say, and eventually stop bothering and dismiss it all as a scam. It’s sad, but other AGW supporters have done this so often and for so long, that they have ended up discrediting the entire ‘message’. They try to show more confidence and certainty in order to be more persuasive, and end up sabotaging their own efforts by doing so.
Again, I don’t personally think the warming of the other planets is good evidence of anything. We don’t know enough to draw conclusions either way, and the arguments put up against are as bad as those put up for. But I do find that it shows very well that the efforts and methods routinely devoted to ‘refuting’ anything that might support AGW scepticism to be significantly out of proportion, unless motivated more by politics rather than the desire to educate.
Well excuse me, but I neither felt a need to change the subject nor to concede a point. I simply answered your question as I understood it.
More on this later, but just this for context: It was the AGW sceptics who conflated increased luminosity of Triton, for example, with warming, i.e, in their opinion increased luminosity indicated warming in the Solar system outside the Earth, which in turn disproved, as far as they were concerned, AGW on Earth.
Please, consider yourself excused. 🙂
I was, to some degree, making a general point about the arguments of the AGW faithful, that was not entirely directed at you. Having had many past encounters where the same pattern was followed, it is hard not to see it in more minor examples. You have certainly been more courteous about it than many, and I failed to give sufficient credit for that.
As I understand it, the warming of Triton by 5% over the 90s (37 K to 39 K) has been widely acknowledged and isn’t controversial. The reasons for it, so far as I am aware, are not known. Certainly sceptics have suggested a solar explanation, and I agree that such a leap is unjustified, but the same goes for the alternative hypotheses. That there are alternatives doesn’t prove that it isn’t the sun, but they do mean that we don’t know that it’s the sun. It’s fair enough to point that out, but if you simply assert the alternatives as the truth with apparent total confidence, you’ll get an argument.
Sceptics have a psychology inclined towards rebellion against authority, and the idea that there’s nothing new to learn, that anything is final. When discussing science, sceptics hate appeals to authority and assertions of total certainty. A genuine sceptic will respect an argument far more if it is associated with expressions of uncertainty and acknowledgement of where things are unknown. Even if it’s nonsense, the fact that you’re questioning things signals a sceptical mindset too, which makes it far more acceptable.
Unfortunately, this debate has become so politicised and polarised that even many hard core sceptics have stopped considering the arguments and resort immediately to rhetoric when it comes to AGW. It’s unfortunate, because it has damaged the reputation of science and concern for the environment, and means that any genuine emergency would be dismissed as simply the next eco-scare.
We have diverted a long way off topic, which is the question of the BBC changing its news reports on the basis of pressure from environmental activists. The argument in the last email that finally persuaded the BBC’s reporter centred on how public opinion could be affected by headlines, and whether sceptics should be given any voice at all in the media. The BBC shouldn’t worry about whether they gave some the impression of there being a conspiracy or withholding the truth, so long as her “emerging truth” became the only truth.
Even if AGW was true, that’s dangerous. Wouldn’t you agree?
I am relieved that it wasn`t that personal)
Now, Neptune is emitting more energy than it receives from the Sun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune#_ref-11
so a contribution from that is likelier than one from the Sun to explain the warming of Triton.
I sometimes forget to recalibrate and reset to zero after past arguments. 🙂 Nothing personal.
Neptune emits 40% from solar heat radiating back out and 60% from internal sources, so any variation in solar input will have an effect about 40% of the size. The question, though, is how large are the variations? If the variations in the internal heat source are much larger than 2/3 of the external variation, then you can argue that they are a more likely source of changes.
And of course you have to understand what sort of external variations are relevant. Light? Solar wind? Magnetic field? Spectral variations? Something nobody has thought of? Is it direct heating, something changing the albedo, something changing the circulation? In something as complicated and turbulent as an atmosphere, there are no simple explanations.
If we can’t even figure out the Earth’s atmosphere when we’re living in it, I don’t see how we can make any authoritative statements about Neptune. “Something to do with the sun” is as good a hypothesis as any. But I agree it is by no means any sort of disproof of AGW, and is interesting more for the reaction it usually gets.
What bothers me is not whether any particular argument is “disproof of AGW”, but that whether a fact or argument is reported on depends on whether it could be seen as such. When the conclusion we might draw is used to filter the evidence we’re allowed to see. When unscientific arguments routinely pass unchallenged, unless they conflict with the Green/Nanny orthodoxy where they’re attacked vigorously. When Appeals to Authority, the very antithesis of the scientific method, are increasingly seen (and taught) as the right way to understand science. It’s a very authoritarian way of thinking.
It would be worth fighting for that reason alone.
Oh, by the way – on rereading more carefully, I just noticed you were talking about explaining the warming on Triton, rather than Neptune. For that, you would have to reduce the heat from Neptune by the inverse square law. Triton’s about 14 Neptune-radii out, so divide by 200.
But all the same arguments I just gave apply the other way too. Triton is deep in Neptune’s influence; gravitationally, magnetically, electrically. Unless we know the full range of possible influences, we can’t eliminate changes on Neptune from our enquiries either.
References showing that solar output can not explain global warming
Absence of correlation of global temperature with solar cycle
Weakness of evidence for warming on mars
Neptune’s warming may be seasonal
Triton’s warming may also be seasonal