Culture of Certainty

I’ve spent several hours today looking at gridded temperature but didn’t finish again.  It was only at a quarter to eleven tonight that something struck me which seemed to need to be said.  All my favorite blogs are overrun by new readers ready to slaughter any climate scientists AGW conclusions at the blink of an eye.  As a result of the new traffic, many people have explained here about what tAV and other blogs should or should not do, should or should not say, how to approach the problem of having an incomplete science and foolish policy forced down our throats.  The problem is that I’ve known these bloggers for some time now and there isn’t a single one who is not used to being in control of their own decisions and direction.  I’m owner of my own company as is Anthony Watts.  Just try to get Steve McIntyre to write or do something he’s not directly interested in and guess what, Lucia, Pielke’s and the rest aren’t likely any different.

When people write, ‘hey Jeff this is what you should do’, I think — get a free blog and start writing.    Start working the math and data, give some hours. It’s not easy to build a blog readership.  Try doing a single post on sea ice and you’ll find out that it’s ten times harder to write a post than you think – people don’t get that.  There weren’t many classes on climate in engineering school.  In climatology, there are always data quality problems, calibration issues and instrument quirks over a 30 year period.  For laypeople, it’s amazing how bad humanity is at keeping a measurement consistent over even a ten year period. Instruments are not typically able to last that long. The problem is far more critical when your audience consists of a couple thousand people who have as much or more technical background than yourself.

Historic variations in CO2 measurements.

Guest post by Tony Brown

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Introduction

In March 2009 Leonard Weinstein, ScD provided an interesting thesis entitled ‘Limitations on Anthropogenic Global Warming’ which was carried on The Air Vent and subsequently updated here on this link;

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dnc49xz_0fb228shr&hl=en

The author provided much interesting information but in extending the CO2 record back to 1850 naturally used the accepted ice core figures rather than contemporary readings compiled by many leading scientists of the time. These historic CO2 records show a startlingly different view to our current understanding that levels of this trace gas were constant until the 20^th century, then escalated rapidly.

Figure 1; The IPCC view of CO2 variations http://climatex.org/articles/climate-change-info/climate-change-impacts-oxfordshire-words-and-pictu/

Gutting the credibiltiy of question?

This is big news, simply because it’s insane.   More emails were released regarding the fight back plan by climate science.  If you guessed they would open the data and methods for review and discuss reasonably the solutions they present — you were wrong.

Climate scientists plot to hit back at skeptics

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.

I’m curious how they will gut the credibility of people who question the science conclusions, while simultaneously hiding, modifying, and suppressing inconvenient data and exaggerating results.  This should be a really special trick.  My guess is that planning a fifty thousand dollar ad in a left wing paper won’t have that big an effect.  It would make a fun blog post though, which we can then use to mock it — for free.

Only in climate science can this be considered true genius.

H/T Cris M and WUWT and of course the Climate Science community which is continually willing to provide insane material to blog on.

Where Has All the Carbon Gone?

This post covers a very important topic which is a new interest of mine.  Understanding how climate works is a series of layers, in this case DeWitt discovered some interesting discrepancies between atmospheric carbon models and measured results.

Guest post by DeWitt Payne.

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Where Has All the Carbon Gone?

(Sung to the tune of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?)

Introduction

I want to thank Harry (comments #22 #39 in the Mike Hulme – Consensus Science thread) for getting me started on this. This was going to be a short post, but the more I thought about it, the more I needed to explain.

Carbon is going missing.  We know to a reasonable approximation how much carbon is being emitted to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel and land use changes.  But the concentration in the atmosphere isn’t going up as fast as expected.  Where is it going and what will be the long term effect?  I don’t have the answer, but I’ve learned some things by looking at the data that weren’t obvious in relation to what I’ve previously read about the carbon cycle. This is important, because any strategy for stabilization of atmospheric CO₂ is completely dependent on our understanding of the carbon cycle.

Natural Cycles

There is so much to write on, but my frustration with what is happening to this world is overwhelming.   It’s impossible to write anything, I spent my last few days in hiding. Buried in math, hoping that some sanity will return when I pop my head back up.  Instead though, we get the exposure of one corrupt government agency after another, and the government expanding voters never catch on.  The politics that people think they want and that are about to be forced on us are way outside of any reason.  Health care, environmentalism, expanded police presence, ever increasing taxes, expanding unionization, centralization of power, limitation of usage, limitation of speech, gun ownership, they are all sides of the same die and not a single one of them works as advertised.  We live on a planet of fools, tricked by endless near-monolithic media promoting the whole program.

Scare you, take your money, take your freedom, scare you again.

Get it yet?

Soon?

—-[/rant] – I won’t be commenting much on this thread.

Gridded GHCN Temps R2.5

In recent months, several bloggers have worked out their own gridded temperature series.  I’ve made several attempts, gradually improving each one.  This particular version isn’t yet perfect but it’s getting to a point where the quality isn’t far off from what the pro’s do, not that there aren’t errors lurking inside.  Again, this uses GHCN and Roman’s seasonal offsetting method.  I’ve commented the code more thoroughly and checked it for hours.  There were several small errors in the last version including weighting and gridding problems. This is likely what resulted in a too high trend and atypical graph shape.  It’s blogland tho and that’s what happens when you do your work online.

One important change in this version was the sorting of temperature series accoring to the inventory file.  If the file says the curves were from the same station, the algorithm collects them and takes the mean.   If the series are different instruments, the data is combined using Roman’s seasonal offset method.  This resulted in an improved match to pro curves over the old versions, which attacked the problem of data quality control from a variety of directions.

I’ll show the curves and results and then paste the complete R code so that anyone with the wish can run it.  After this version, it’s time to start messing around with different sorting methods, datasets, regions and those sorts of things.

A Half Hour of Wrongthink by Michael Mann

I couldn’t finish this, there is an MP3 at the bottom of the page linked below.  Michael Mann defends……well everything ….the team has done.  Listen to it at your  own risk, I linked it here with the warning that you must understand it will cost you IQ points and you will be dumber than when you started.

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/michael_mann_unprecedented_attacks_on_climate_research/

He characterizes criticism as attacks from a well organized and funded climate denial industry.  Talk about a role reversal. Mann fully believes that it’s perfectly ok to throw out data that doesn’t fit your conclusion, trees are thermometers, his reconstructions are good for the past 1000 years, there is only a reasonable trick and no ‘hide the decline’, the emails are out of context ….blah..blah…

I reject your reality and substitute my own – Michael Mann or Adam Savage Mythbusters.

He’s lost complete attachment with reality, besides making accusations that because some IP addresses from the thousands of comments at Real Climate come from oil companies, it must be about a funded anti-science movement.  It’s all anti-science and it’s all against the good guy scientists who use clever tricks to hide the decline.

I don’t know if the man is a liar or just so full of wrongthink that he’s convinced himself that his “science” is somehow reasonable but there is not one detail in this interview that is true in my opinion.  The show hurts my engineer ears because it’s two people making one incorrect point after another back and forth.  It was very painful to listen to and therefore I was unable to finish.

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I originally saw this link on CA and wasn’t going to run it.  It was also sent this morning by email from someone who used their full  name and I’m unsure of whether they want credit.