Global Warming is over.

[rwh11385]

wow
so now the data that feeds the IPCC (did you know the IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific org?) is somehow misleading? that actual data cannot be referenced in any anttempt to question your deeply held faith?
i posted data from independent sources, and as i was typing i was wondering about how even the data would be rejected by you and members of the AGW cult.

and Q5, why stop at 50 years, which conveniently misses the global cooling period just before it (yes, with CO2 rising)? why not go back further, eons ago, when atmospheric CO2 was multiples higher than today and global mean temps were lower?

The fact that you are attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for being a political organization (duh) while your primary source is a college dropout is laughable. It is still sad you do not understand that drawing a flat line is not a statistical analysis. Have you ever calculated a least squares regression? It's pretty simple and I'd say most high schoolers or even middle schoolers could do one and understand the charts I posted showing what is an actual regression vs. just putting a line on a chart to fool math-illiterate people.

Why not use all the data available? And why worry about data sets when you don't understand the most basic concepts of statistics and want to draw a trend that isn't based on any math but rather strictly what you want to see.

When was CO2 at multiples of today? Because this chart doesn't seem to have the same "reality" that you seem to believe in:

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence

But I mean, NASA and NOAA are just scientific organizations where I think pretty much everyone actually graduated from college unlike Anthony Watts.

Important to review what you seem to want to ignore:

Certain facts about Earth's climate are not in dispute:

The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.2 Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many JPL-designed instruments, such as AIRS. Increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth’s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.3

Then again, do you actually understand that law that energy cannot be created nor destroyed? Where exactly does the additional energy go? Disappears?

[gwb72tii]

"The modern obsession with "pre-industrial levels of CO2" displays a profound ignorance of this planet's atmospheric and biological history, as the graphic above demonstrates. Closer inspection of the motives of the leaders of the carbon hysteria orthodoxy demonstrates monetary payoffs via carbon trading, international carbon ransom payments, and other economic maneuvers of questionable legality and wisdom."

http://oilprice.com/The-Environment/Global-Warming/Climate-Concerns-May-Soon-Be-A-Thing-Of-The-Past-As-Scientists-Work-On-Splitting-CO2.html

[rwh11385]

"The modern obsession with "pre-industrial levels of CO2" displays a profound ignorance of this planet's atmospheric and biological history, as the graphic above demonstrates. Closer inspection of the motives of the leaders of the carbon hysteria orthodoxy demonstrates monetary payoffs via carbon trading, international carbon ransom payments, and other economic maneuvers of questionable legality and wisdom."


http://oilprice.com/The-Environment/...tting-CO2.html

And George, what was the sun's output in the precambrian era?

Ignoring the basics and instead pointing fingers at international carbon ransom payments... typical tinfoil hattery.

And clearly oilprice.com is the world's leading source of science news.

[BraveUlysses]

Climate science once again finds itself fighting with hockey sticks

About a month ago, a team of scientists came out with a clearer picture of a story whose rough outlines we already knew. These researchers simply wanted to reconstruct the temperatures that the Earth experienced during the Holocene, the current warm period that started at the end of the last glacial period. Although the new perspective didn't include anything especially surprising, it set off howls of controversy on the Internet, which reached such intensity that the authors of the research felt they needed to publish an FAQ describing their work in more detail.

Why did all of this happen? Because the subject of the paper was the climate and amid their research, the authors found that we're experiencing an unusual warming. We'll take a look at the science behind the controversy, and explain why most of the controversy misses the point.

The paper, which we covered in some detail, focused on the planet's temperature during the Holocene. The glacial cycles are driven by changes in the planet's orbit and axis of rotation, and these effects can be calculated in some detail. These calculations suggest that the peak of the warming caused by orbital changes occurred over 5,000 years ago, and the planet has been slowly cooling since, with the next glacial era over 1,000 years still in our future.

And, largely, that's what the study, authored by Oregon State's Shaun Marcott, showed. Marcott used samples termed proxies that help track global temperatures—things like ice core records and sediment samples—from around the planet to create a reconstruction of global temperatures for the entire Holocene. And, in that reconstruction, the Holocene's temperatures peaked about 7,000 years ago, and have been declining since. Until recently, that is; the instrument record shows that the decline has experienced a dramatic reversal in the last 100 years.

Not only is the Marcott paper consistent with our expectations, but it is also consistent with a variety of reconstructions of climates that focused on the past 1,500 years. These studies of more recent times have used many more proxy measurements, and their methods have a much better temporal resolution, so they'd be expected to be more accurate than Marcott's study for the most recent years. Yet they and the Marcott study got essentially the same answer, which was "indistinguishable within uncertainty" from the other results, as the new paper put it.

So, there'd be plenty of reasons to think that the Marcott study was at least in the right ballpark, and a strong first attempt at this sort of all-Holocene global reconstruction.

Except there is one problem. The studies of the past 1,500 years are what created the so called "hockey stick" temperature graph, which shows a dramatic uptick in recent temperatures. By replicating that result, the authors waded in to what sometimes seems like an entire industry dedicated to convincing everyone that the hockey stick doesn't exist.
I don't want to believe

The response has been about what you'd expect. Steve McIntyre runs the "Climate Audit" website, and has devoted a lot of the material there to arguing against most of the scientific community's proxy reconstructions of historic temperatures. In the last month, he's published 10 blog posts that reference the Marcott paper. The less moderate "Watts Up With That" site has already run 19. Some of those are truly bizarre, such as one in which the global temperatures are compared to a single site in Greenland; the title of another asks "How long before Science has to retract Marcott et al?"

Unfortunately, almost all of the controversy was completely off-target, and a lot of it displayed a significant misunderstanding of the claims of the Marcott paper.

Most of the ire is focused on the blade of the hockey stick, the sudden rise in temperatures that has occurred over the last century or so. We know it has happened because of the instrument record and a large number of global changes in ice volume, species ranges and migrations, etc. And some of the rise shows up in most proxy records, including the one generated in the Marcott paper.

But the uptick in the Marcott proxy records isn't the main point of the paper. In fact, the authors clearly say that their data there is pretty limited. To begin with, they had to stop their reconstruction in 1950 because the proxies more or less give out then (we'll get to that in more detail below). And, even in the decades before that, they note that the data is very uncertain because of "the [limited] temporal resolution of our data set and the small number of records that cover this interval." In fact, for the figure shown in the paper, the team interpolated some data in order to fill out the sparse records; if they hadn't, the warming would have been over half a degree Celsius higher. In other words, they took steps to underplay the recent warming.

Why is the record so poor? It's a product of the sort of proxies used in longer term studies. To give a specific example, we can look at the ice cores. The layers in the ice form annually, and are relatively easy to distinguish; major events like volcanic eruptions provide clear markers of specific years. So, the temporal resolution of the ice is good. It's just that the temperature record isn't. That's derived from the isotopes in gasses trapped in air bubbles that form in the ice. But these air bubbles can exchange some limited amounts of gas with the atmosphere for over 200 years after they form. So, the record isn't a single sharp point, but rather a somewhat weighted average of decades. And there are essentially no records that are current—the ice simply hasn't sealed off yet.

Similar things apply to other records used in the study, like sediment cores. As a result, if you're looking for a hockey stick, the Marcott record shows a hint of it, but it's not one that we should place high confidence in, as the paper itself makes clear. And yet, oddly, that's precisely the point of the paper that has attracted almost all the controversy.
Missing the forest for the hockey sticks

Even the more scientifically literate criticisms on these sites have included vague hints of conspiracy from Marcott and the scientists who've found results like his. Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has highlighted how many of the temperature records were re-dated compared to their original values, which he's implied was done in a way that specifically creates an artificial hockey stick. But the re-dating was done based on carbon-14 radioactivity dating, and uses software that's produced by someone else—and that software has been posted online for at least the last two version releases. If there were a conspiracy involved in the re-dating, it's a pretty poorly conceived one. And it doesn't mean that the new paper is right, just that the tools needed to show it's wrong are available to anyone.

In any case, this criticism is also focused on the hockey stick trajectory, which the paper itself said wasn't a very robust result. Nevertheless, it generated so much attention that the authors of the paper felt compelled to respond, posting an FAQ at the RealClimate blog. In this, they go into far more detail about why the 20th century record shouldn't be considered the key point of this work:

(1) the different methods that we tested for generating a reconstruction produce different results in this youngest interval, whereas before this interval, the different methods of calculating the stacks are nearly identical (Figure 1D), (2) the median resolution of the datasets (120 years) is too low to statistically resolve such an event,(3) the smoothing presented in the online supplement results in variations shorter than 300 yrs not being interpretable, and (4) the small number of datasets that extend into the 20th century (Figure 1G) is insufficient to reconstruct a statistically robust global signal...

So, the tail end of the temperature graph (the bit that shows a rise in 20th century temperatures) that came out of this study shouldn't be viewed as especially significant. And the people who are obsessing about it are misdirecting their energies.

Putting the 20th century in context

That said, a lot of the media coverage of the paper (including our own) focused on what the Marcott study told us about 20th century temperatures. That's because the paper did have something to say about them—it just wasn't in the graph that showed a hockey stick pattern.

The simplest way it does this is by providing an independent verification of the proxy reconstructions of the last 1,500 years—as mentioned above, the two records line up nicely within their experimental errors. And those more recent reconstructions do show a hockey stick. In fact, it was one of those reconstructions, most closely associated with Mike Mann, that first generated the comparisons to sports equipment.

But that isn't the only aspect the paper was able to address. Although the proxy records have known margins of errors in their temperature measurements and a limited temporal resolution, it was possible to analyze them statistically and figure out what the distribution of temperatures throughout the Holocene looked like. The authors performed this on a decade level, and built a list of the probable temperatures for every decade of the last 10,000 years or so. Then, they compared these to more recent decades as recorded by the instrument record.

As we reported originally, the decade from 1900-1909 was among the coldest 95 percent of the Holocene, as you'd expect from the general trend towards cooler temperatures. In contrast, the decade from 2000–2009 was among the warmest quarter on the record. And, given the general shape of the Holocene record, it's likely that most or all of the warmer ones took place over 5,000 years ago. Hence, the U-turn in temperatures that we referred to in our headline.

One residual question is whether this sudden temperature shift is likely to be unique in the record. After all, since the proxy records have poor temporal resolution, there's a chance that a short, sudden shift would be blurred out by appearing to be spread across hundreds of years. Of course, there are limits to how much you can blur something out; a sudden rise of 5°C would almost certainly show up in the record, no matter how inexact the proxies are.

So, an obvious question is whether the 20th century warming is large enough to show up in a record like Marcott's. I was looking into how to analyze this when someone else did the job for me. A writer at a blog called Tamino used a technique similar to one I've seen in exoplanet searches: he took the data used in Marcott's paper and introduced three temperature spikes that looked a lot like the one we're currently experiencing: a rise of about 0.9°C over a century. Although there's no expectation that we're likely to see cooling any time soon, the artificial spikes used a symmetrical drop back to preindustrial temperatures over the following century.

With the spikes in place, the data was then "smeared" by shifting the different records in a random direction in time based on the uncertainties in the original data—in essence, he attempted to mimic the sorts of uncertainties that Marcott's analysis needed to handle. Although they dropped a bit and flattened out, the spikes were clearly visible. Repeating the process 100 times, and they were still visible; same with a thousand iterations. The clear implication is that, if the planet had seen this sort of temperature rise earlier in the Holocene, it's likely that the Marcott study would have spotted it.
Putting climate science in context

So, is this blogger's analysis the final word on the topic? We asked NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, who is also one of the people behind the RealClimate blog. "It's a useful analysis," Schmidt told Ars. "But more work is needed to make the point conclusively." There are a lot of technical details in the original paper—statistical noise, age calibration errors, etc.—that aren't fully incorporated into the analysis. To really provide a thorough answer on the visibility of the recent warming, Schmidt suggested, would require a lot of work, potentially an entire research paper's worth. In that sense, the blog post was a solid first try, and one that points the way towards something that's potentially interesting.

And, in many ways, Schmidt said, you could describe the Marcott paper the same way. No paper is the final word on anything, and he expects further results will focus on some of the uncertainties in the new paper, or questions that the authors didn't directly address. It's part of the normal, iterative nature of science. Even if nothing in the big picture changes (and, as noted above, there's not much reason to think it should) we'll eventually have a clearer picture of the temperature variations of the Holocene.

And that, to some extent, will give us a better perspective on the climate's current warming. And that is ultimately why something that seems to be a solid first effort like the Marcott paper can't just be left to stand as that. Some people are so invested in believing that the most recent warming is nothing out of the ordinary that the paper can't just be seen as limited; it has to be viewed as so badly flawed that it will need to be retracted. Even if that view requires focusing on data that the authors themselves highlighted as uncertain, all while ignoring the paper's substantive points.

The over-arching irony of all of this is that, although it's helpful to place the current warming in a larger context, that context isn't really needed in order to motivate action on carbon emissions. Carbon dioxide is clearly a greenhouse gas, one that equally clearly acidifies the oceans. We've obviously been sending vast quantities of it into the atmosphere. And the instrument record clearly shows the temperatures are rising as the carbon dioxide builds, at a time when no other driver of the climate seems to be changing.

Knowing that the current warming is unique within the Holocene would add to the concern. But there's plenty of cause to be concerned without it.

[cale]

oilprice.com

My favorite thing about that article is not that it ended with a summary of why climate science is wrong, but instead explains the necessity of fossil fuels. Certainly no agenda bias there.

[Q5Quint]

wow
so now the data that feeds the IPCC (did you know the IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific org?) is somehow misleading? that actual data cannot be referenced in any anttempt to question your deeply held faith?
i posted data from independent sources, and as i was typing i was wondering about how even the data would be rejected by you and members of the AGW cult.

and Q5, why stop at 50 years, which conveniently misses the global cooling period just before it (yes, with CO2 rising)? why not go back further, eons ago, when atmospheric CO2 was multiples higher than today and global mean temps were lower?

Trolled ya! Temps were higher and we also got all our mass extinctions at over 1000ppm co2. Do you really want to test that theory out again? The theory that all major extinctions happen at over 1000ppm co2?

http://www.countercurrents.org/glikson160313.pdf

For the last 400k years of temperature it looks like we are going +2C down to -6C ranging from 200ppm co2 to 300ppm co2. Would you like to remind me what co2 levels are now and how different that number is from THE LAST 400 THOUSAND YEARS?

That paper above describing the link in 'rate of change in temperature' and 'mass extinctions' is particularly exciting.

[Q5Quint]

Ah, that is impressive energy savings. I'm very familiar with Mr. Lstiburek. Good stuff. I also do structural, residential mainly. What are your thoughts on solar in NC? A neighbor down the street intstalls at $4 per watt. He says fed pays 35% and state pays 30% (until they kill that incentive at the end year). So a $30k , 7.5kwh system costs the consumer $10,500 after tax credits. That doesnt include the added value to the house. Sounds pretty good. What am I missing?

We are installing at 4-5$ a watt up here as well.

You will get the most benefit if you also use the heat-pump water heater as well, but if the reds pass a tax on 'power producers' then your panels might actually cost you each year in taxes, or at least zero themselves instead of having the traditional payback period. If that isnt pro-business anti tax smaller government for you the irony doesn't taste quite as bloody as it does. Maybe they will pass a tax on hybrid drivers too since they arn't using as much gas and therefore not paying their fair share of road tax.

7.5kw is a pretty large system~ 10kw is the cutoff for 'residential' in most places. We usually do 2-4kw systems here with micro inverters.

[gwb72tii]

Climate science once again finds itself fighting with hockey sticks

you do realize Marcott admitted to the following

"20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions."

[Farbin Kaiber]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...her-mac-donald

[herbivor]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...her-mac-donald

So I guess you're not a fan of science being taught in school? I suppose you also prefer they teach creationism as a theory in science class as well?

[Farbin Kaiber]

Assumptions, you has them.

[rwh11385]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...her-mac-donald

What's else is the National Review going to fight? The teaching of the theory that we descended from apes??

http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-winnick101802.asp

Those in the scientific mainstream say there is no genuine dispute over evolution — at least not within scientific circles.

scientists argue that public opinion has no place in science education

...

"Science is not democracy," said professor Lawrence Lerner, professor emeritus at California State University and author of a 2000 report from the Fordham Foundation which showed that 19 of this country's states were remiss in how they taught evolution.

"Science is not a viewpoint," said Eugenie Scott. "There's an objective reality about science. If the Discovery Institute is really interested in convincing scientists that their reality is false, then they would be attending scientific meetings rather than selling their ideas in the marketplace of political ideas."

Likewise, if people want to prove that climate change isn't real - don't repost stupid bull from a college dropout who is on the take from the Heartland Institute like George does, but learn the facts of science (and stats) and do research and find an explanation for the effects of GHG and what happens with the additional absorbed energy. Ignorance doesn't disprove what you don't understand.

[Q5Quint]

you do realize Marcott admitted to the following

"20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions."

On a paper titled "A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years" you would almost expect them to focus on the previous 11,000 instead of the last 300....... especially when the climate deniers jump all over them if they even mention it getting warmer in the last 300 years.

It is easy to see what these liberals are doing- trying to solidify without a doubt scientific fact about how hot it used to be, so that when we actually look at our data of actual temperatures recorded FROM A THERMOMETER in the last 200 years we will say 'oh shit, it is getting a shitton hotter than it was in the last 10 thousand facking years'.

We cant argue over ice core data temperatures if people keep testing them and getting the same conclusions! Dang liberals and their hippy science!


Also you better not actually read the paper:
"Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios." -Marcott et al

All his paper is stating is what the temps for the last 10k years have been- and that if you look at the ipcc models you will see that we are predicting that temps will be higher than they have been for the last 10k years. This could be used to 'prove' that the ipcc temp models are whack because they are way off from what temps have been in the last 10k years, or this could be used to say 'holy balls all these emissions are making the planet hotter than ever was in the previous 10k years'!

Marcott seems to conclude neither as that is not the purpose of his research, only states what the temps used to be based on data.

Now when I go outside and look at my thermometer I can say 'wow it is hotter than it has been in the last 10k years (according to Marcott, et all)! weird!'

Q: Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?

A: Our study did not directly address this question because the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century.

Wow so he even says they didnt look at the hockey part of the stick. Interesting...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/33.../1198.abstract

[Fusion]

Prime example of coming to conclusions and ideologically blaming anything and everything on false, politcally regulated "science".

What caused the 2012 Central Great Plains Drought?
The central Great Plains drought during May-August of 2012 resulted mostly from natural variations in weather.
• Moist Gulf of Mexico air failed to stream northward in late spring as cyclone and frontal activity were shunted
unusually northward.
• Summertime thunderstorms were infrequent and when they did occur produced little rainfall.
• Neither ocean states nor human-induced climate change, factors that can provide long-lead predictability, appeared
to play significant roles in causing severe rainfall deficits over the major corn producing regions of central Great
Plains.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/nid...web-041113.pdf

[herbivor]

Prime example of coming to conclusions and ideologically blaming anything and everything on false, politcally regulated "science".





ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/nid...web-041113.pdf

The NOAA agrees that Global Warming is anthropogenic. They have produced many articles discussing the man-made evidence. Are you trying to imply that this conclusion reverses their position and negates all of the evidence to date? I didn't seem to find that in the article. And if you are skeptical of such scientific organizations, why are you citing them to try and support your own opinions?