Thread: Global warming?
View Single Post
Old 06-15-2011, 01:59 PM   #739
tw
Read? I only know how to write.
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 11,933
From The Economist of 24 Jan 2011 entitled "Climate change and evolution":
Quote:
By itself, as we always say, one hot year doesn't prove anything. The fact that every one of the twelve hottest years on record has come since 1997 is a little harder to wave away. 2010 was also the wettest year ever, corresponding to the expectation that higher heat means more water vapour. More countries set national high-temperature records in 2010 than ever before, including the biggest one, Russia. Arctic sea ice in December was at its lowest level ever, temperatures across a broad swathe of northern Canada have been 20 C higher than normal for the past month, the record temperatures are coming despite the lowest levels of solar activity in a century and a La Nina effect that should be making Canada colder rather than warmer, and so on. It is of course possible that global warming plateaued this year; it's also possible that it plateaued this morning. One can always hope! For now, though, this is the basic shape of things:

The George Will "global warming has ended" moment shows up as that little dip towards the end, before it returns to trend. So, what effect will the new data have on that meme? Quite possibly none. People who tried to cast doubt on global warming in 2009 based on a few years one could isolate so that they didn't show a discernible trend will now no doubt respond that a couple of very hot years don't prove anything. Which underlines how often the conclusions one draws from data are determined by a combination of the hypotheses you're framing, and at what point you start looking.
So naysayer pretend this is not happening? Those ostriches continue by simply denying and ignoring.

Blogs (not science) dispute facts. Subjective reasoning replaces quantitative facts and reality?

Expecting science to subvert climate change advocates, a Republican Congress sought immediate testimony from Dr Muller. Only to learn what their political agenda is again contradicted by science.

From The Economist of 31 Mar 2010 entitled "A record-making effort":
Quote:
Various criticisms of the methodology and probity of the temperature records have been made, though much more often in the blogosphere than in the scientific literature. Erring on the side of extra caution is not a bad idea, and various efforts are underway to develop, corroborate and better to underpin the work on temperature records that has been done to date. One such effort is the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature programme, which Dr Muller heads. ...

Rather than look at carefully (and similarly) selected subsets of the data it would look at everything available, just as astrophysicists frequently seek to survey the whole sky. Rather than using the judgement of climate scientists to make sense of the data records and what needed to be done to them, it would use well designed computer algorithms. Put together under the aegis of Novim, a non-profit group that runs environmental studies, the team gathered up a bit over half a million dollars - including $100,000 from a fund set up by Bill Gates and $150,000 from the Koch foundation, whose animosity towards action on climate change made the Berkeley project look yet more suspicious to some climate-change activists - and got to work. ...

The results look very like what the other three teams have seen. ... The earth has warmed by about 0.7 C since 1957, just as the other teams claimed. Adjustments made to the data on a site-by-site basis which have had some suspicious sceptics hopping mad seem to have made no appreciable difference. ...


Dr Muller also, more controversially, reported on results that pertain to a specific point made by climate sceptics; that the temperature record is contaminated because many of the stations used to compile it are in inappropriately located. This idea is particularly associated with Anthony Watts, a former television weatherman who runs an extremely popular website catering largely to a climate-sceptic crowd. Mr Watts has led an impressive crowdsourcing movement devoted to checking out the meteorological stations that generate climate data in America. This has found that a really surprising number of the instruments concerned are not sited in the way that they should be, being inappropriately close to buildings, tarmac and other things that could cause problems. ...

The Berkeley team compared the data from the American sites Mr Watts thought were worst situated and the sites he thought best. It found no statistically significant difference in the trends measured in the two different categories, though the warming trend in the better sites is slightly stronger.

This analysis echoes one carried out last year by scientists at NOAA, which when looking at a subset of Mr Watts's data found much the same thing. The Berkeley team's result, though, is perhaps more striking, in that Mr Watts had made all his data available to Mr Muller and his colleagues, a step he seems now rather to regret.

Impressed by the Berkeley set up, Mr Watts wrote in a post published March 6th:

Quote:
I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I'm taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let's not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results. I haven't seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team, but the method isn't the madness that we've seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU, and, there aren't any monetary strings attached to the result that I can tell. ... That lack of strings attached to funding, plus the broad mix of people involved especially those who have previous experience in handling large data sets gives me greater confidence in the result being closer to a bona fide ground truth than anything we've seen yet.
Results did not agree with his political agenda. So now Mr Watts is attacking the study. Of course. The science only makes sense when it agrees with a political agenda. The same political agenda that can only deny numbers and provide none.

Quote:
The Berkeley work, especially after it is published and disseminated in full, may increase the acceptance of the reality of global warming among people who have so far managed to maintain a comforting and sometimes self-serving feeling that maybe the people who deny that anything is going on are actually right. It doesn't in itself show how much of the warming is due to human activity. Dr Muller, in a somewhat cavalier way, chose to suggest that about half of what had been seen since 1900 was. Other scientists would put the proportion higher.
So where is science that disproves it. Yes, the same naysayers will post the same subjective denials. Subjective reasoning also said Saddam had WMDs. No way around facts with numbers. Global warming does exist. It is created (fully or in part) by man. With adverse planetary effects.

How much? How fast? How severe? Only those are controversial. Involves numbers. Numbers also proved Saddam WMD claims were mythical. Numbers also define global warming. Numbers are always missing in posts that deny only for a political agenda.

A political agenda said Muller would expose data discrepancies. Those discrepancies cites by a political agenda do not exist when numbers are provided. Only exist in subjective (also called low intelligence) reasoning. Same reasoning massacred 4,500 Americans soldiers (more numbers) in Iraq for no useful purpose. All praise extremism for rationalizing subjectively to advance mankind.

Honest posters, Coign, post with numeric facts.
tw is offline   Reply With Quote