Dot Earth on O10

Andy Revkin of Dot Earth has published a post on our Antarctic results among other things. Eric Steig has placed some far more detailed comments on our results on line with it.

2) The results appear to confirm all of the key results in our 2009 Nature paper, notably the significant warming in West Antarctica, with especially strong warming — very widespread and including all of West Antarctica and much of East Antarctica — in spring.

I do wonder what it means when a paper with half the calculated warming trend agrees with another but I’m just an engineer.  The column marked S09 below is Steig’s result for comparison to the two primary methods demonstrated in O10.  You can see the “all of West Antarctica” comment is interesting when the EW version came up with statistically insignificant trends.  RLS though is probably more correct but compared to S09’s very high trend of 0.2C/decade or 2C per century it’s quite a bit lower.   What it means though is that we can barely tell if any real warming happened at all vs the certainty of S09’s 0.2 +/- 0.09.

Botched predictions of the past

Fox news has an interesting post on extremist environmental claims of the past two decades.  It’s fun because they contacted some of the scientists for their responses.  Who knew bikes could be pedaled backwards with such vigor.

Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts

One wonders if these intellectual giants will ever learn.

 

Projection , Regression

You would never believe what the government will fund and peereviewlitrachur will approve of.

Title: “A scaling theory for the size distribution of emitted dust aerosols suggests that climate models underestimate the size of the global dust cycle”

regressomatic.

wow.

Merry Christmas Friends

May your holiday’s bring you joy and happiness.

 

Smashmatiticians prove weather is climate!!

Sometimes when you don’t feel like thinking about AGW extremist stupidity, and you find yourselves reading about some news article or another that makes your head want to explode, it’s good to have a blog.  Our leftist news and science (yes they collaborate) has gone so far outside of reality that it is hard to imagine how people read this stuff.  Well gee, the scientist said it, why would they say something if it weren’t perfectly reasonable.

Fixing the basic AGW calcs II

This comment was left in the thread of Judith Curry’s blog.  It is an explanation of the problems introduced when the simple black body sphere estimate for basic forcing is not used.  While Tomas makes the point that the solution is nonsense, these things can still be estimated and do have uses so I’m not as dismissive as he of the idea, however on the complexity of the problem we agree.  So when people say 33 C from global warming gasses, you have to wonder where they got their facts or if they understand them.  The 33C value is just an estimate which is likely to be a poor quality one.

–

Tomas Milanovic | December 14, 2010 at 7:23 am | Reply

Judith just look at how bungled this “sensitivity” concept is .

(1) F = ε.σ.T⁴(definition of emissivity)
dF = 4.ε.σ.T³.dT + σ.T⁴. dε => dT = (1/4. ε.σ.T³).(dF – σ.T⁴. dε)

Ta = 1/S . ∫ T.dS (definition of the average temperature at time t over a surface S)

Now if we differentiate under the integral sign even if it is mathematically illegal because the temperature field is not continuous we get :

Fixing the basic AGW calculations

Derek Alker, has kindly offered what is definitely the most skeptical thing I’ve ever posted here.  Please don’t interpret this as my work in any way as my views on these things differ, but as I have no time  at least it will make for interesting discussion.  Derek has obviously put a  huge amount of effort into this so, lets see if anyone can find problems with his work or dramatic conclusions.

Instead of doing the full reformatting which would take hours, I’ll just post a link to the discussion and spreadsheet.

The article:

Derek – Free to all pdf to end AGW scam Saturday 18_12 version.

The spreadsheet:

Derek – Excel sheet calculator, disc, sphere, hemisphere temps 18-12

 

Lazy Redux – part Deux!!

So in my last lazy post I asked, What is the amount of warming you expect for the next 100 years?  Thirty five comments before morning..

LOL,

There were so many opinions, many with statistically significant trends.  I wonder how it is that someone like me who reads endless papers blog’s and opinions hasn’t worked it out?  Still I wonder further, by your own numbers do those who had statistically significant or insignificant trends, has a clear scientific reason why..

Of course there were plenty of just plain funny comments but really I’m curious what drives people to conclusion where I can find none?

On line

Our article on Antarctic temperatures has finally made it on line: Some results and ALL of the code is archived here: http://www.climateaudit.info/data/odonnell/,  the SI can be down loaded from that link.

A detailed analysis is presented of a recently published Antarctic temperature reconstruction that combines satellite and ground information using a regularized expectation-maximization algorithm. Though the general reconstruction concept has merit, it is susceptible to spurious results for both temperature trends and patterns. The deficiencies include: (a) improper calibration of satellite data; (b) improper determination of spatial structure during infilling; and (c) suboptimal determination of regularization parameters, particularly with respect to satellite principal component retention. We propose two methods to resolve these issues. One utilizes temporal relationships between the satellite and ground data; the other combines ground data with only the spatial component of the satellite data. Both improved methods yield similar results that disagree with the previous method in several aspects. Rather than finding warming concentrated in West Antarctica, we find warming over the period of 1957–2006 to be concentrated in the Peninsula (≈0.35°C decade⁻¹). We also show average trends for the continent, East Antarctica, and West Antarctica that are half or less than that found using the unimproved method. Notably, though we find warming in West Antarctica to be smaller in magnitude, we find that statistically significant warming extends at least as far as Marie Byrd Land. We also find differences in the seasonal patterns of temperature change, with winter and fall showing the largest differences and spring and summer showing negligible differences outside of the Peninsula.

Question

I wonder what readers really think.  What is the amount of warming you expect for the next 100 years?

Do you have any opinions on this?

Judith Curry on CO2

Judith has yet another nice post on CO2 sensitivity.  Her blog has quickly gained celebrity status although I’ve heard complaint that too may ‘skeptics’ are visiting. I’m not sure why a questioner is a bad thing.

My guess is that several here could add to the conversation.  It will be interesting to see how this thread will develop.

CO2 no feedback sensitivity

Cancrap

Ya can’t stop stupid.

Global accord on climate change hailed as breakthrough

Some bullet points on the Cancun agreement:

OLMC 10, What does it mean…

[edit]

Nic and Ryan both emailed their views to Andy Revkin and gave permission to post their emails here.  Rather than post in their entirety, I’ll find the good parts so you don’t miss your hockey or football games.  Nic’s letter first, my bold throughout.

The Reviews

Ryan O’Donnell

The most pervasive theme in the “Doing It Ourselves” thread was what the reviews said. Rather than respond individually, I thought it would be best [read: less work for me!] to do a post on it.
This post will focus on the comments that required changes to the manuscript. With one exception, I will not spend any time on the comments that we addressed without changes. There are a number of reasons for this. The biggest reason is that several of these comments required only wording changes for clarity as the comments were motivated by misunderstandings. Another reason is that successfully addressed comments have no bearing on the science that will be published.
As I mentioned before, there is one exception that I would like to bring up, because it makes a salient point about how important wording can be in a paper. Quoting from S09:

Warpspeed – Steig Confirms O’Donnel Result

UPDATE:  It looks like Steve McIntyre has posted the results from the SI on line here. Perhaps it was just a replot with an improved scale.

Real Climate is comprised of the best of the best, after this there can be no question.  Steig, who just recently left a request for a copy of the paper:

Back when Ryan O had written comments at RC, I said something like “I encourage you to submit this work for publication.” I’d glad to see that this work has gone through the peer review process, and I look forward to reading it.

I appreciate also Ryan’s comment that “I would hope that our paper is not seen as a repudiation of Steig’s results, but rather as an improvement” and his emphasizing that their results (evidently) back up our most important point – -the significant warming West Antarctica.

This is indeed the way things ought to work — and evidently do. Too bad Steve McI seems bent on spinning it otherwise. His claim that this new work ‘refutes’ mine is a prime example of why I cannot take him seriously.

Ryan, if you don’t mind sending me a preprint, and a link to your reconstructed data, I’d appreciate it.

I will presumably have more to say after I get a chance to read the paper, but it’ll be a month or more as I’m simply too busy with current projects.

has now replicated our results completely!!!!  What’s even more amazing is that it was done before official publication!!  It took us months!  Man these guys are good.

And our paper’s plot: