There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998

[bigfish]

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?

More

Bob Carter seems to check out, too. According to Sourcewatch he's merely a "climate skeptic".

 

[citydreams]

Does it matter? We're still choking to death on CO2s, PM10s, PM2.5, NOX; destroying ancient forrestry; eradicating culture, living on future productivity gains and losing the war on poverty.

 

[guinnessdrinker]

of course, CO2 isn't the only factor in global temperatures. sulphur emissions by aeroplanes can make the weather colder. so if you carry on flying to the canaries every weekend, it might get colder....

no seriously, we're talking anthropogenic influences on the weather and they're not getting any weaker...

 

[rogue yam]

Does it matter? We're still choking to death on CO2s, PM10s, PM2.5, NOX; destroying ancient forrestry; eradicating culture, living on future productivity gains and losing the war on poverty.

Nonsense. Aside from its potential effect as a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is harmless at present and any conceivable future atmospheric levels. Atmospheric concentrations of particulate and oxides of nitrogen are decreasing throughout the advanced industrialized world. Capitalism and liberal democracy will bring these gains to the rest of the world if they are allowed to. The rest is bollocks as well. Modern environmentalism is largely socialism disguised. Yet socialism is proven to be harmful to the environment, thus making most modern eco-wankers frauds and hypocrites of the first order. I want a clean environment and a free and prosperous society. Therefore all of you whiny watermelons (that's green on the outside, red on the inside, mate) can sod the fuck off!

 

[citydreams]

Capitalism and liberal democracy will bring these gains to the rest of the world if they are allowed to

I might bother answering your inept political mumblings once I've stopped laughing

 

[friedaweed]

Nonsense. Aside from its potential effect as a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is harmless at present and any conceivable future atmospheric levels. Atmospheric concentrations of particulate and oxides of nitrogen are decreasing throughout the advanced industrialized world. Capitalism and liberal democracy will bring these gains to the rest of the world if they are allowed to. The rest is bollocks as well. Modern environmentalism is largely socialism disguised. Yet socialism is proven to be harmful to the environment, thus making most modern eco-wankers frauds and hypocrites of the first order. I want a clean environment and a free and prosperous society. Therefore all of you whiny watermelons (that's green on the outside, red on the inside, mate) can sod the fuck off!

So mature
Is this why freeper gave you the shoulder spam

 

[rogue yam]

I might bother answering your inept political mumblings once I've stopped laughing

If you want to establish any credibility, you'll have to explain the concept of "choking to death on CO2".

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

Can someone please tell me if these graphs are just 'made up' - and if they are, where I can find a better one? Cheers.

Both from: http://www.koshland-science-museum.org/exhibitgcc/historical01.jsp

 

[citydreams]

If you want to establish any credibility, you'll have to explain the concept of "choking to death on CO2".

Of course i meant carbon monoxide.. Was just getting het up that anyone could be so dismissive of the effects of human industrialisation.

 

[citydreams]

Can someone please tell me if these graphs are just 'made up' - and if they are, where I can find a better one? Cheers.

Aren't they the figures that Chief Scientist Prof King uses in his "we've got 30 years left" speech?

 

[rogue yam]

Can someone please tell me if these graphs are just 'made up' - and if they are, where I can find a better one? Cheers.

Correlation is not causation. Science 101.

 

[bluestreak]

Correlation is not causation. Science 101.

is the traditional argument of capitalists everywhere. "until it can be proved beyond all reasonable doubt then you have no right to argue or to expect us to restrict our practices and profits".

of course, "indications are" is not considered good enough, nor can "the balance of probablity".

hey, global warming is possibly caused by the space pixies.

 

[free spirit]

interesting stats... off the top of my head I'd be thinking this is likely to be due to the vast forest fires across half the world over the last decade, keeping temps down temporarily as the soot in the upper atmosphere blocks out sunlight and leads to greater high level cloud formation.

same as after a big volcanic eruption.

that's just a hunch though, I might go find some evidence either way.

 

[friedaweed]

is the traditional argument of capitalists everywhere. "until it can be proved beyond all reasonable doubt then you have no right to argue or to expect us to restrict our practices and profits".

of course, "indications are" is not considered good enough, nor can "the balance of probablity".

hey, global warming is possibly caused by the space pixies.

Driving these

 

[free spirit]

Correlation is not causation. Science 101.

so then rogue yam, can you explain the mechanism whereby changing temperatures lead to corresponding changes in co2 emmissions? because I can explain it the other way round... or are you seriously arguing it's a coincidence?

 

[TAE]

Atmospheric concentrations of particulate and oxides of nitrogen are decreasing throughout the advanced industrialized world.

Is that because corporations were allowed to do whatever they wanted or because pressure groups convinced governments to put legislation into place?

 

[rogue yam]

hey, global warming is possibly caused by the space pixies.

I know nothing of these space pixies. Ask friedaweed. He's the go-to guy on all spaced-out matters.

 

[rogue yam]

Is that because corporations were allowed to do whatever they wanted or because pressure groups convinced governments to put legislation into place?

Both.

 

[bluestreak]

I know nothing of these space pixies. Ask friedaweed. He's the go-to guy on all spaced-out matters.

what do you think causes global warming? how do you think we should protect ourselves?

 

[rogue yam]

what do you think causes global warming?

Predominantly the same things that have caused it sporadically since long before the Industrial Age.

...how do you think we should protect ourselves?

By spreading capitalism and liberal democracy, and promoting education and honesty, fair-dealing and good government, thereby utilizing our consequent wealth and technological prowess. You know, the "American Way".

 

[citydreams]

You know, the "American Way".

 

[friedaweed]

I know nothing of these space pixies. Ask friedaweed. He's the go-to guy on all spaced-out matters.

You should try it maybe it would help you with your uptight little dream world.
Mind you looking at some of your posts I've been wondering when you might put the crack-pipe down

Are you an eco-'warrior' yammy

 

[TAE]

... promoting education and honesty, fair-dealing and good government ...

If only it were so.

 

[kage]

Crack's not nearly mind bending enough, he must be on a LSD/PCP combo drip.

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

Correlation is not causation. Science 101.

Yip yip yip you said that last time. We know.

What I was specifically asking was is there any other available data that contradicts that shown in the graphs:

Your response sort of says: 'No there isn't, Mr. Bandit, the data in the graphs is totally correct' -but I'd like to make sure.

I'm not particularly interested in what you might think causes the data in the graphs to appear as it does, assuming you do.

 

[friedaweed]

Crack's not nearly mind bending enough, he must be on a LSD/PCP combo drip.

 

[free spirit]

having looked at the data taken from the same source as the article, I have to conclude that if this guy isn't on the pay of the oil companies then he's definately making a firm bid to get on the payroll.

what he neglects to mention in his article is that 1998 is the hottest year on record, so while all the years since then are in the 10 hottest years on record, they have just not managed to actually eclipse the hottest year yet.

Had he taken his dataset as starting in 1997 his conclusion would have been totally different as 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 are all hotter.

basically 1998 was an annomally being 0.17 degree's higher than the year before and 0.24 degree's higher than the year after, his arguements bollocks and he knows it.

 

[Jazzz]

I'm not particularly interested in what you might think causes the data in the graphs to appear as it does, assuming you do.

Ouch!

 

[bigfish]

Can someone please tell me if these graphs are just 'made up' - and if they are, where I can find a better one? Cheers.

McIntyre's and McKitrick's March 2 2006 Presentation to the National Academy of Sciences Expert Panel, “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 1,000-2,000 Years” appears to raise serious doubts about the underlying statistical reliability of Mann's IPCC "hockey stick" graph.

(PDF) Presentation with illustrations

(b) With respect to Mann et al. [1998, 1999] (MBH98-99), our most important objections [see McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d and www.climateaudit.org] are:

• The study used “new” statistical methods that turned out to “mine” for hockey stick shaped series. These methods were misrepresented and/or inaccurately described in important particulars and their statistical properties were either unknown to the authors or unreported by them.
• The reconstruction failed an important verification test said to have used in the study. This failure was not reported and the statistical skill was misrepresented both in the original article and by the IPCC.
• Dominant weight was placed on proxies known to be inappropriate temperature proxies, along with, at best, misleading information about their impact and, at worst, actual withholding of adverse results;
• The method of confidence interval calculation leads to unrealistically narrow confidence intervals;

(c) No. Systematic obstruction was placed at every step of the way of replication attempts. The underlying data were exceedingly hard to identify and obtain. The methodology was not accurately described in the paper and the computational code was withheld until the intervention of a Congressional investigation.

More here

 

[laptop]

McIntyre's and McKitrick's March 2 2006 Presentation to the National Academy of Sciences Expert Panel, “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 1,000-2,000 Years” appears to raise serious doubts about the underlying statistical reliability of Mann's IPCC "hockey stick" graph.

But McIntyre and McKitrick are obsessive, compromised, unqualified, and behave like loonies.

A more serious accusation has come from two non-climate scientists from Canada, who claim to have found a flaw in Mann's statistical methodology. Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician and oil industry consultant, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, Ontario, base their criticism on the way Mann used a well-established technique called principal component analysis. This involves dividing "noisy" data into different sets and giving each set an appropriate weighting. McIntyre and McKitrick claim that the way Mann applied this method had the effect of damping down natural variability, straightening the shaft of the hockey stick and accentuating 20th century warming.

There is one sense in which Mann accepts that this is unarguably true. The point of his original work was to compare past and present temperatures, so he analysed temperatures in terms of their divergence from the 20th-century mean. This approach highlights differences from that period and will thus accentuate any hockey stick shape if - but only if, he insists - it is present in the data.

The charge from McIntyre and McKitrick, however, is that Mann's computer program does not merely accentuate this shape, but creates it. To make the point, they did their own analysis based on looking for differences from the mean over the past 1000 years instead of from the 20th-century mean. This produced a graph showing an apparent rise in temperatures in the 15th century as great as the warming occurring now. The shaft of the hockey stick had a big kink in it. When this analysis was published last year in Geophysical Research Letters it was hailed by some as a refutation of Mann's study.

McIntyre and McKitrick say that their work is intended to show only that there are problems with Mann's analysis; they do not claim their graph accurately represents past temperatures. "We have repeatedly made it clear that we offer no alternative reconstruction," McIntyre states on his Climate Audit blog.

The obscure statistical arguments were overshadowed in late 2005 when Mann refused to give Congressman Barton his computer code. Mann regarded the code as private property, but his opponents claimed he feared refutation of his findings. Mann did eventually publish the code, but the damage was done.

In the meantime, three groups had been scrutinising the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick. Hans von Storch of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, concluded that McIntyre and McKitrick were right that temperatures should be analysed relative to the 1000-year mean, not the 20th-century mean. But he also found that even when this was done it did not have much effect on the result. Peter Huybers of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts came to much the same conclusion.

The work of Eugene Wahl of Alfred University, New York, and Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, raised serious questions about the methodology of Mann's critics. They found the reason for the kink in the McIntyre and McKitrick graph was nothing to do with their alternative statistical method; instead, it was because they had left out certain proxies, in particular tree-ring studies based on bristlecone pines in the south-west of the US.

"Basically, the McIntyre and McKitrick case boiled down to whether selected North American tree rings should have been included, and not that there was a mathematical flaw in Mann's analysis," Ammann says. The use of the bristlecone pine series has been questioned because of a growth spurt around the end of the 19th century that might reflect higher CO2 levels rather than higher temperatures, and which Mann corrected for.

What counts in science is not a single study, however. It is whether a finding can be replicated by other groups. Here Mann is on a winning streak: upwards of a dozen studies, some using different statistical techniques or different combinations of proxy records (excluding the bristlecone record, for instance), have produced reconstructions more or less similar to the original hockey stick.

('Scuse huge C&P: I need the whole chunk because here Fred is being scrupulously fair, and the original is available only to subscribers, at http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg18925431.400.html)

What McIntyre and McKitrick have latched onto is the fact that politicians want not to think - so they don't need to attack the science of climate change, they attack a striking picture. And this isn't just my opinion; it's a summary of my detailed discussions with senior people in NOAA.

And as far as I can tell your obsession with this subject is a misplaced personal grudge - Bernie Gunther shot down some other quite separate conspiranoid fantasy of yours so you decided you'd claim that his well-researched posts on climate change were somehow "a conspiracy".