Feedback

I’ve put in a few days time now studying carbon sequesterization in limestone.  This morning I’ve run several calculations based on raw data dug up in Al Gore’s house – a.k.a. the internet.  Joking aside, I flatly disagree with the IPCC two hundred year shelf life of CO2.  It makes zero sense to me, and of course basic numbers don’t agree.  My hypothesis is that limestone production is a strong feedback mechanism to CO2 production.  It’s nearly a self proving result because of the very low concentration of plant food in the atmosphere for so many millions of years, but most don’t seem to consider that as evidence.

This paper is an estimate of limestone sedimentation rates across the ocean based on biological origin, other papers provide similar numbers.   An estimate of  10 grams per meter squared per year gives a result of 3.3 GT of sequestered carbon per year across the whole ocean.  This 10g rate of deposition is at the lowest end of the scale for what I’ve found.  Since our industry oututs about 7gt of CO2 per year that amounts to about half of the total human output.

Thank god for climate science

Oh, jeez.  Now the phytoplankton are dying off unprecedented…ly…. And it’s your damned SUV that did it again.  The scientists are claiming that we don’t really know what is going on, but maybe it’s global warming.  Never mind that our instruments can barely detect the temperature change, maybe the global warming killed 40 percent of the phytoplankton.

Bo Christiansen Variance loss

This is a repost from Eduardo Zorita’s blog, regarding a paper produced by Bo Christiansen which analyzed variance loss in climate reconstructions.  It’s a science post so keep all comments/questions on that topic or face the red heat laser of doom.

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Mann 07 made the claim that RegEM didn’t create variance loss and alleged proof using pseudoproxies.  This was of course ‘proven’ false here recently with a few simple posts and the ‘difference of opinion’ was identified in the artificially trendless noise added to the mannian pseudoproxies.

This is a very ‘hot’ field in climatology because the reasonable scientists have finally recognized the math issue that I found obvious literally within moments of reading my first hockey stick paper at CA.  I’m not that smart BTW, so why is it that Mann can find every excuse to miss the point?

Anyway, I read the pre-print of this paper but if someone can send a non-paywall copy of the final version, I would appreciate it.  There is a cool equation in the pre-print which would make a fun post by itself.

This paper again demonstrates what I consider the primary reason for unprecedentedness and repeatability of so many hockey stick proxy papers.   Remember, the primary defense of the hockey sticks is that so many have reproduced the result.  The reason is twofold.  At CA Steve has focused on unique proxies – they are unique,  here, we have focused on math.

BTW, I doubt any of these scientists are as skeptical of other AGW claims as some of us are so don’t attach some of the tAV fare to them.  That doesn’t mean that they don’t do good, honest and open science - don’t lump their fine work in with the opinions of those of us who are outsiders.

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Guest post by Bo Christiansen: On temperature reconstructions, past climate variability, hockey sticks and hockey teams

Posted by eduardo

Bo Christiansen from the Danish Meteorological Institute works actively on the development of statistical methods for climate reconstructions, a field of intense debate in the past few years. Hopefully we will enter a phase in which scientific debates remain .. well, in the scientific realm. Enjoy his post.

Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases – in particular CO2 and methane – change the radiative properties of the atmosphere and thereby impose a tendency of heating at the surface of the Earth.  In the past the Earths temperature has varied both due to external forcings such as the volcanic eruptions, changes in the sun, and due to internal variability in the climate system.  Much effort has in recent years been made to understand and project man-made climate change.  In this context the past climate is an important resource for climate science as it provides us with valuable information about how the climate responds to forcings. It also provides a validation target for climate models, although paleoclimate modelling is still in its infancy.  It should be obvious that we need to understand the past climate variability before we can confidently predict the future.

Fig 1. Pseudo-proxy experiments with seven different reconstruction methods. The black curve is the NH mean temperature, the target which we hope the reconstructions will catch. But this is not the case: All reconstructions underestimate the pre-industrial temperature level as well as the amplitude of the low-frequency variability. Note that the reconstructions are very good in the last 100 years which have been used for calibration. The three panels differ in the strength of the variability of the target. From Christiansen et al. 2009.

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The Revolving Door of a Broken Science

Back again.    During my absence, a story came out at Climate Audit and the Blackboard regarding Ryan O’s efforts to collect data from Ammann.  Now Ryan wrote several times politely to Caspar Ammann first, receiving ZERO response.  Having no options, he reasonably began a series of FOI’s which have been unsuccessful as of late.  It seems the climate of climate is more stable than the actual climate.

Just to demonstrate the apparently overwhelming nature of the request Ryan is making, which at the FOI level requires a Fee:

A reasonable fee should be quite low, as Dr. Ammann has freely provided the data I request to multiple researchers in the past, including Drs. Mann, Rutherford, and Wahl (at a minimum).

It seems that Climate Science is treating Climategate like a revolving door.  We’ll be here when it comes around again.  You can mark my words, if they learn nothing from the last time, it will come around again.

Check out the links above for the full story if you missed it.

Environmentalism as religion – Are Environmentalists the secular successors of the Judeo-Christian tradition?

This is a guest post from Roddy Campbell.  It’s a little risky, even for the Air Vent but I think it has a lot of truth in it.  It offers an explanation of the views of the enviro-scientists who pervade the climate science community.

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With the extraordinary rise of fears of global warming in the last few years, real fear of Armageddon for the human race and the planet as expressed in An Inconvenient Truth, the IPCC Assessment Reports, the media, it seems that the previous terrors of acid rain, pollution, food shortages, nuclear power station leaks, holes in the ozone layer causing cancer, intensive cannibalistic farming creating Mad Cows, and so on are trivial by comparison.  The list of scares in the last fifty years is very long, but none had the truly global nature of seas rising by tens of metres, icecaps melting, temperatures rising by ten degrees, widespread migration and starvation, even Holland under water let alone the Maldives.

Positive Climate Feedback

Positive feedback is used in every climate model to demonstrate aggressive warming from small changes in CO2.  Climate scientists agree that these models are accurate despite the disgustingly poorly quantified response of climate to warming.  The models also incorporate ridiculously long and nearly impossible CO2 absorption times. Let’s not get started on the aerosol assumptions, yet everyone is so sure – well climate science is.   You question them directly and  get obtuse answers and references to papers which are as full of assumption as can be imagined.  They really don’t know these important answers – so they couch it in uncertainty and have piled enough of it on top of the piles of others to declare consensus and further, that unbelievers (or the unconvinced) are deniers,   deceivers, on the payroll of whichever energy company powers their cushy lifestyles.

What causes this kind of self deception.   It is a deception in my opinion because there is a LOT more than uncertainty in climate science and it’s astoundingly easy to find.  You can see it in the way climategate was handled.  They can’t explain the fact that data is contradicting their conclusions, so they delete the data.  It’s the case with Kelly discussing the deletion  of endpoints for a presentation.  If you add Jones, Mann, and Briffa discussing hide the decline, it’s a done deal.  They spent literally over a decade pointing out the same flaws to each other that today’s skeptics discuss in paleo-papers and yet…………. still publish the unpublishable,  conclude the inconclusive, sophisticizing the unknown settling for the term …uncertainty.

Climate science is similar to the ‘science’ of philosophy in my mind.  Philosophy had no start point, no foundation which could be built on.   Some scientists imagined less and less knowledge about the universe until nothing could be knowable, others assumed god wasn’t a deceiver and built from there.  Neither of these cases was provable yet they spent their lives doing ‘science’.   If people listened to them,  then they must be doing the right thing.  Of course they could have heated discussions inside their group but was anyone’s conclusion wrong??

Ever??

CRU Apparently Received over 1.7 Million USD From the DOE

WUWT follow the money report.

See the rest at Watts Up With That.

What does staff buyout mean?

Big Government

The skeptic movement has produced quite a stir lately.  Climatologists repeatedly accused us of being funded by big oil, big energy, big whatever — except big government.

Exhibit A – 300 ish government funded papers straight from ‘big climate industry’..

h/t to Steve Mosher left the link here, if he wants it.  Read some of the abstracts and titles,  all I see is waste. Endless waste from those on the gravy train.   Sure some of the papers are probably worthwhile, but my guess is under 10%. The rest is pseudoscientific rubbish.

Mann07 Part 3 — Unprecedented

Well lessee, what kind of trouble can I get in today. . Hmm, well Bishop Hill has a post that proves Phil Climategate Jones had veto authority over which papers were reviewed by Muir Russel’s crack team…. Now that is hard to resist for bloggers, but I’m sick of climate scientists cheating  and misrepresenting the truth, they have learned nothing, absolutely not one damned thing from cliamategate.  Think about it, Mann08 deletes inconvenient data for a preferred result, climate science sees no problem.  Muir Russel deletes the critics arguments for climategate, again they find no problem.

I’m sick to death of politicians – you sort out who is who.  Keep it to yourself though, because that’s not what this thread is about.   This is a math thread….. Yeah, I know, I’ve got a bunch of different readers these days who have arrived here and suffered with us through climategate and don’t generally come here for the math.  I’m sorry though, I like it.  Math is the key to science.

Long time readers have seen many demonstrations here of historic signal reduction or ‘variance loss’ from Mannian methods.  This post attempts to match some basic statistical qualities of pseudo temperature proxies to the same proxies of Mann08.

You recall from my last Mann07 post, this histogram of the autocorrelation coefficient from Mann08.

I took this histogram of about 1100 of 1209 proxies – a few didn’t converge, and copied these parameters to 10,000 series of random data such that the distribution of the rho’s was identical.   That means that I now have 10,000 proxies with a known signal and characteristics which are matched to Mann08′s (and 09′s) more recent and less famous hockey stick papers.  In Mann07 he assumes 0.32 is the ‘right’ value for rho in ALL of the proxies- red line above.  Why use only one value??? – I say use them all.

Fraternal or Paternal

Roman took a closer look at duplicate GHCN stations. He had a few sharp words for those who taught the recent replications of temperature metrics as ‘confirmation of accuracy’ — they are absolutely NOT.  They confirm that the softwares used aren’t causing big problems with trend, nothing more.  The similarity is due to the use of the same original datasets.  Anyway Roman’s post begins here with a link to the whole thing at the bottom.

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There has been a flurry of activity during the last several months in the area of constructing global temperature series. Although a variety of methods were used there seemed to be a fair amount of similarity in the results.

IPCC says that there are important differences between weather and climate.

Is the claim serious science?

By Arnd Bernaerts

The last IPCC-Report 2007 claims that there are important differences between weather and climate[1], by saying that:

A common confusion between weather and climate arises when scientists are asked how they can predict climate 50 years from now when they cannot predict the weather a few weeks from now. The chaotic nature of weather makes it unpredictable beyond a few days.

• Projecting changes in climate (i.e., long-term average weather) due to changes in atmospheric composition or other factors is a very different and much more manageable issue.
• As an analogy, while it is impossible to predict the age at which any particular man will die, we can say with high confidence that the average age of death for men in industrialised countries is about 75.

The text is from the section FAQ 1.2[2]: “What is the Relationship between Climate Change and Weather?”, and obviously intended to create the impression that ‘climate science’ is more reliable than weather forecasting. That is utterly nonsense, and can only pass undetected as long as it is presented in a terminology which is meaningless. The terms and explanation given do not meet the lowest academic standards, which shall be discussed to show the superficiality of the text (cited above).

Mann 07 Pseudoproxies Part 2

The Mann 07 paper uses synthetic temperature proxies to demonstrate that the methods don’t create artificial hockey sticks. I’ve maintained here, that they most certainly do create artificial hockey sticks and that calling the papers science is more than a slight stretch. What I’ve learned over the last few days is that Mann07 is a situation where CPS and RegEM don’t show signal variance loss in the historic portion of the hockey stick. The math of M07 is correct!!

Yup, you heard it here first, M07 is right and CPS and RegEM will not create signal distortions of any magnitude from these pseudoproxies.

An important table from the SI SupplementaryInfo shows the noise levels and type of noise used in each of Mann’s experiments.

There are a couple of important columns for this discussion, SNR or signal to noise ratio, percentage of noise, and the rho column which is the autoregressive component.   This basically can be thought of as how fast the noise component can change.  A rho value of zero means that the noise can change instantly from one point to the next without having any dependence on the last value.  Rho can vary from zero to one, a higher value means that the more recent point has some dependence on the previous value.  If you imagine a pan of water, you could measure its temp and then heat it with a stove burner but if you measure every second, the measurement you take at second #2 is going to be similar to second #1.  However if you measure every several hours hours, randomly turning the burner on and off,  the temps will vary wildly and independently of the previous measurement temp.  The dependence on the previous temp is autocorrelation.

The significance of white noise is that statistically nearly impossible to generate a trend from it. Whereas if we have autocorrelation (redness) in the noise the signal can walk creating the potential for locally induced trends after these standard paleo sorting methods are used.

You can see in the table above M07′s model r (first column – r) he used dataset A with a signal to noise of 0.4 which he refers to as 86% (does anyone know how this 86% number is computed?).  Anyway, I found the column averages of dataset A from experiment a and r above and calculated an r amplitude ratio of 0.4 matching well with the table. I then fit an arima (1,0,0) model to the data and found that the noise had an average autocorrelation of 0.31 confirming the 0.32 rho from the table above.  Mann wrote out the AR math himself rather than using stock functions so I wanted to check it .

Skeptic’s Creed

People have made several suggestions for the creed of the scientific skeptic.  In an inspired moment created by several commenters, I wrote this.

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Climate Skeptic’s Creed

I understand the radiative capture of CO2

I accept that radiative capture causes warming.

I acknowledge that there is climate feedback to warming.

I assert that the rest is unknown.

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It’s nice and short, goes against the duma view, and leaves plenty for consideration without taking a soft approach.

The only suggestions I didn’t like were the ones which added specificity to the language even though the original didn’t contradict the specific.  Of course there were some who’s specificity did contradict these basic truths which I cannot help.

I hope not…

Pat Michaels has a disturbing article in the Wall Street Journal on what is happening in peer review since climategate.  He can no longer publish any papers and has had four blocked since November.   The article was from the 12th but I didn’t see it until now.

Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I’m hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it’s becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that’s nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.

Blocking of papers that came to different conclusions from climate journals was one of the central issues of climategate.   The conspiracy to block certain views was openly discussed in the emails, of course the ‘review’ panels couldn’t seem to read them, but whatever.

Currently we are awaiting a re-review of Ryan’s Antarctic paper, the first reviews read favorably except for one which came from what appeared to be the original authors being critiqued.   It was decided by the editor that we needed to make major changes, which we did where appropriate.  At this point we have been waiting for quite a while to see if they will accept it.   Everyone put a lot of work into the paper to insure its accuracy and it’s not anti-agw by anything I can see so we’re just quietly hoping it will be accepted.

Reading Pat Michaels and Roy Spencers experiences of late, it doesn’t give a warm fuzzy feeling.  It sounds though, like climate science has learned nothing.

Snip This Real Climate

No snips at tAV this year.

To my recollection, I’ve had to snip nobody this year.  No comments deleted, no thoughts removed. I think I edited a cussword, but it was from Ryan O’s guest post haha.  Perhaps I’ve just forgotten one, but considering that the Air Vent has close to 10,000 comments this year and over two million views in its under two year life, that’s pretty good stuff.   Especially so when considering the contentious nature of the discussion here.

Going forward, I hope to refocus more on science and less on scientists, of course they have to try not to release insane emails for a bit if we want that to happen (and no damned shrinking fish papers -  I can’t resist those).  Also, it would be helpful if our politicians didn’t try to pass cap and trade but today, I don’t care what they do.   Science is fun.

Think about that, I’m probably the loudest and most outspoken of the scientific climate bloggers –not to my credit but the lack of snips is due to the credit and profile of the readers.

That is very unusual in blogland.  And of all the sites on all the blogs, that is a huge rarity.

Wow…Someone calc the probability of that happening here!!

There are a variety of snips which could have been used:

The intended snip: