the Air Vent

Because the world needs another opinion

Archive for March, 2009

Gavin’s Response

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 10, 2009

I waited a bit to see if Gavin Schmidt would reply to Ryan O’s last comments on real climate.  Thanks to everyone for re-asking RC until we got some answers.  Ryan and Gavin went back and forth quite a bit so the replies were too long to discuss every detail, however the point is easy enough to see.

Here is a link to the thread with relevant comments starting at #353.  For background information, recall that Jeff C and I did a post demonstrating very clearly that the low number of eigenmodes used in RegEM erroneously causes data to be associated with unrelated temperature stations thousands of kilometers apart.  Link -Don’t Eat the Fish

Since RC and Tamino were both astoundingly quiet and my requests for explanation were blocked, I started a post asking readers to submit their own questions regarding our easy to understand post.  RC finally broke when Ryan O got through.  He cleverly did it by not referencing the Air Vent whatsoever yet addressed the issue as related to the reply to #353 in their comment thread.

Gavin decided that would make it acceptable to provide answers to we the unwashed.

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New York Times Wishful Thinking

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 9, 2009

The NYT is allegedly covering the Heartland conference with a variety of speakers pointing out the numerous problems with global warming hysteria.  Of course in one of the very few events of its kind, the NYT spends more than half the article refuting the claims by those presenting.  When you get sick of the NYT, Anthony Watts has a nice post on the first day of presentations HERE.

The always balanced NYT article Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other

Like always, I get wound up over this stuff.  I shouldn’t read the news.

More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

This is the first line in the article.  Proclamation of scientific consensus.  Well I’m not convinced yet and nearly everyone who reads the Air Vent knows a dozen reasons why there isn’t a scientific consensus as many of them are scientists and engineers themselves.  If you’re stopping by for the first time, my readers consist of a wide variety of professionals fully qualified to read an interpret climatology science  including engineers, climatologists, biologists, college professors, informed laymen and others.  How is it that so many people can’t seem to locate this alleged consensus?

Well at least the times got the part about a broad political consensus right.  As laid out by European Union and Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus and summarized by professor Bob Carter at WUWT.

The President commenced his talk by commenting that little change had occurred in the global warming debate since his talk, 12 months earlier, at the Heartland-1 conference. He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a naïve and uninformed person.

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McMurdo and Scott Base

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 9, 2009

I’ve spent a pile of hours looking at the most basic aspects of the data for the antarctic. I’ve discovered nothing earth shattering which is often the way of science, however I have discovered several interesting tidbits. One which caught me this morning is the subject of tonights post, the difference between Scott and McMurdo stations.

With over 1000 residents in the summer a harbor, 3 airfields and 100 bildings McMurdo is the largest science station in the Antarctic established around 1956. Scott base is almost only 3 miles from McMurdo established around 1958 Here is a picture from wikipedia of McMurdo.

mcmurdo118

This is an image of Scott Base only 3 miles away.

scott_base_antarctica_jan_2006

The reason I bring them up is their coordinates.

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Ten Reasons to be a Global Warming Skeptic

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 8, 2009

If you think global warming is a hot topic now, just wait.  The regulations coming along now have a cost and scope of massive proportion.  We’re looking at the undoing of the very industries which only a hundred years ago freed us from animal powered travel.  I’ve thought about it and here’s ten reasons why everyone should be a skeptic.

Some of these are less technical but even the serious scientist should be able to relate, #1 is a good example of the lack of complexity in the models.

#1 – Global warming is based on computer models of the atmosphere projecting temperatures out a hundred or more of years.  Computer models are used to predict the daily weather as well.  Can you tell us what your temperature at your home will be next month on the first Monday within 10 degrees……Celcius…  Would you bet even one paycheck on it?  How about the average for the week?  Maybe but maybe not.

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Flow Chart of RegEM Satellite Reconstruction

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 6, 2009

Jeff C provided a great flowchart detailing the (not so clear) process used in creating the RegEM satellite reconstructions. Jeff really does excellent work.

sat-regem-flowchart

RegEM Satellite Reconstruction by Jeff C

I’ve checked this flowchart and it matches my views on how the process was done. There are several questions about the detail/code of the cloud masking and the method for infilling the removed clouds but otherwise it represents the best detail description of the process as replicated so far.

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments »

Obama’s Policy for Global Warming

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 5, 2009

china-usa-flag-1IMO, this is the biggest news coming out of global warming in some time.

The keynote speaker for climate change Todd Stern. Apparently he’s the envoy of climate change. We’ve found the nexus.

This is an extremely important address. It states quite clearly the true intent of the Obama administration. I have pointed out repeatedly here, Obama has set up a network of cabinet politicians with a single item in common – global warming. This is a key focus of the fear center the administration intends to use for Americas voluntary transition to socialism. Consistent with governments around the world, there are numerous bits of flatly false information which I’ll highlight in red.

Todd Stern is a Clinton politician with no science background yet he pretends to know what he’s talking about. Here’s a link to some of his history.

What we’re looking at folks is nothing less than the end of the American way of life, everything we ever fought for or wanted. Everything America had to show the world about a better way of life being sold out in the false name of a poorly understood physical process. Read on, I copied the whole article without reference, screw em.

My bold, red is false information, since this is the US envoy who is backed by a great deal of science it is deliberately false. People who claim lie here will have trouble with moderation unless it’s used correctly. Green is my Id letting go, I’ll keep it to a minimum because I’m not important in this article but some comments can’t be held back

This man does not know climate, this is simply a politician who sees climate as a mechanism to a goal. What is very very important is this man’s words are those of the man voted to president.

The rest of the world feels a sense of victory at catching up to the US. After all, wouldn’t we if we had a similar situation with Russia or Japan. Don’t be fooled my foreign friends, it’s a false competition. The death of the dream here is the death of the dream for the people of the world. America’s consumption supported many bad governments around the world. Those who have embraced socialism will realize soon that without an outlet for their product, their own strained existences will shrink dramatically.

I’m sorry for the bad news, there are plenty of liberal readers who come by but this is the world we live in.

———————

Keynote Remarks at U.S. Climate Action Symposium

Todd Stern

Special Envoy for Climate Change

Senate Hart Office Building

Washington, DC

March 3, 2009

Thank you, Lord Stern. Thank you Jonathan Lash and WRI; Fred Bergsten and the Peterson Institute; and Nancy Birdsall and the Center for Global Development. You and your colleagues have done so much to ensure the right response to the climate crisis, and we all deeply appreciate that. And today, you’ve brought us together for a very important discussion.

Lord Stern, it is an honor to share the podium with you. You have made an enormous contribution to our understanding of this issue, including the complex questions of economic cost – both the cost of action and the costs of inaction — which have too often been ignored. What is clear from Lord Stern’s work is that the costs of action, though real, are affordable, while the costs of inaction – economic, environmental and national security – are so profound that if we fail at this moment of truth, it will amount to a breach of our generational contract to leave our children a better world. Thank you all for coming. This is a distinguished group: leaders from other countries, from NGOs, from corporations, and from here on the Hill. I am honored to be part of the day’s events. And delighted that the U.S. Government now can be and wants to be a genuine part of such a gathering.

Posted in Uncategorized | 23 Comments »

High Order PC’s

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 4, 2009

I was going to spend my night answering Gavin Schmidt’s replies to JeffC and my post, however I’ve changed my mind. This is one of the best things about having a blog since Gavin’s answers were far from revealing and it isn’t my intent to pound on him. On the Air Vent we can talk about whatever. He’s been attacked enough for other reasons and this isn’t his paper, his friends wrote it. He would get a lot less flack from me if I could post there without the 95% moderation factor.

Anyway, he left us something else to talk about. His last reply to Ryan O was intended to show no differece in trend for RegEM when applied to the Antarctic. Thus implying robustness. It’s a bad situation for him because he’s trying to defend from a position of friend rather than coauthor. Why Mann doesn’t answer is another question but here’s what Dr. Schmidt said. – Thanks to Ryan O who’s done a fantastic job with the subject on RC. Gavin is very smooth and IMO seems to be thinking about this point a bit.

[Response: Fair enough, but that just gives a finding that there is “a significant difference in the means” over some time period. Your interpretation assumes that there is some expected distribution of what this should be in any particular reconstruction and that must depend on the temporal auto-correlation of the time-series among other things. Wilcoxon also does not tell you how big the deviations are. The fact is that the number of retained PCs above two doesn’t impact the long term trends (for instance, for the AWS reconstruction the trends in the mean are -0.08, 0.15, 0.14, 0.16, 0.13 deg C/dec for k=1,2,3,4,5). - gavin]

I have to say, it’s much better when people are willing to discuss, rather than moderate.

My new friend Jeff C provided an interesting revelation which was pointed out quite clearly by SteveM in a newly invented and likely equivalent or possibly even superior quality truncated PC process which provided the following graph. (I don’t say this without reason, I’ve single stepped through RegEM for some time)

aws-trend-by-regpar

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Out for a Day

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 3, 2009

I’m gone until this evening, so I won’t be able to point out the obvious problems in the response from RC until later, it may be done before I get back. Thanks to everyone who asked for replies from RC. In the meantime CA has done a post regarding the answer received from Gavin Schmidt.


Gavin and the PC Stories

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The Stunning Sound of Silence — requests for reply

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 2, 2009

The Air Vent is rarely quiet. There’s always some news here. Fabius Maximus did an interesting post where he gathers a pile of information together on the antarctic paper. He discusses several aspects of what’s going on.

An opportunity for you to judge for yourself the adequacy of today’s climate science

Comments keep coming in on WUWT regarding JJ’s latest article yet if you look at the AGW guys, I mean the real believers, there’s nothing but silence. Not one person saw fit to comment on RC, or did they. Nobody even brought it up on Tamino, not a single person. Ray Ladbury continues to spout his rubbish unabated apparently unaware that serious discourse is not allowed by his helpless victims. Yet not one person even makes a comment. Go ahead, search the sites and see for yourself. Not a single Jeff or WUWT, I wonder what happened?

Being the curious (and grumpy) sort, I took the time to send a comment over to RC. I saved it as I always do, I knew it would likely get cut because 95% of the time I do.

We’ve been working hard on replication. There is a serious problem with area weighting of the stations in the AWS and satellite reconstructions.

Numerous times and methods have now clearly demonstrated that station and gridcell data is heavily ‘smeared’ across the continent due to too few PC’s being used.

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/2547/

When the covariance of the PC’s is used for area weighting, someone should have checked closer. What am I missing?

Now since I’m not the expert climatologist, I would expect this to be a simple answer for the big dogs. Hell I couldn’t even defend myself if they commented back, yet they don’t seem to have an answer.

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Don’t Eat the Fish

Posted by Jeff Condon on March 1, 2009

Steig’s Antarctic Heartburn – WUWT Link

Posted Feb. 28th, 2009 on www.wattsupwiththat.com

hotbirdy

Art courtesy Dave Stephens
Foreword by Anthony Watts: This article, written by the two Jeffs (Jeff C and Jeff Id) is one of the more technically complex essays ever presented on WUWT. It has been several days in the making. One of the goals I have with WUWT is to make sometimes difficult to understand science understandable to a wider audience. In this case the statistical analysis is rather difficult for the layman to comprehend, but I asked for (and got) an essay that was explained in terms I think many can grasp and understand. That being said, it is a long article, and you may have to read it more than once to fully grasp what has been presented here. Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit laid much of the ground work for this essay, and from his work as well as this essay, it is becoming clearer that Steig et al (see “Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year”, Nature, Jan 22, 2009) isn’t holding up well to rigorous tests as demonstrated by McItyre as well as in the essay below. Unfortunately, Steig’s office has so far deferred (several requests) to provide the complete data sets needed to replicate and test his paper, and has left on a trip to Antarctica and the remaining data is not “expected” to be available until his return.

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