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April 12, 2010 · 54 Comments

Another open thread. Enjoy!

Categories: Global Warming
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54 responses so far ↓

  • Magnus W // April 12, 2010 at 5:19 pm | Reply

    A some what strange but informative poll of Swedish climate researchers show strong belief in IPCC: http://uppsalainitiativet.blogspot.com/2010/04/overwhelming-majority-of-swedish.html

  • Kevin McKinney // April 12, 2010 at 11:34 pm | Reply

    Well, it’s fitting–homeland of Arrhenius, Ekholm, Bolin & Erikson, and Rossby (and for a time home to Bjerknes.) Sweden is disproportionately well-represented in the development of modern meteorology/climatology & modelling, it seems to me.

  • Crispy // April 12, 2010 at 11:36 pm | Reply

    A crack team of contrarians has finally crunched the numbers on a global gridded temperature using the GHCN data set…

    http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/thermal-hammer/

    This has been up a few weeks and I haven’t seen any comment on my science blogs of choice. The author states, “There are high trends from GHCN, so high in fact that anyone who questions Phil Climategate Jones temp trends will need to show some evidence. Certainly Phil is an ass, but it no longer seems to me that he has ‘directly’ exaggerated temp trends one bit. ”

    Some of the subtext in the comments thread is deeply conflicted and amusing to work through. But of course not an inch is given. The trend may show up, but it’s all the UHI effect apparently.

    I gather RomanM is behind this and I know there is scant respect for his work here. But I thought some of you might be interested. And I’m always interested in your take on such things.

    • David B. Benson // April 13, 2010 at 12:23 am | Reply

      Just look at temperature trends using SSTs.

      No UHI in the oceans.

    • J // April 13, 2010 at 2:13 am | Reply

      Crispy, there have been a bunch of these lately. One by Tamino, one by Zeke Hausfather at Lucia’s place, one by Ron Broberg (rhinohide.wordpress.com), one by Nick Stokes (moyhu.blogspot.com), and probably others that I’m forgetting. Plus of course the exact replication of GISSTEMP by Clear Climate Code.

      Many of the above also did some examinations of the station dropout issue, too. Unsurprisingly, the decrease in the # of stations over the past couple of decades doesn’t seem to have had any impact on the trends.

      • Crispy // April 13, 2010 at 1:35 pm

        Yes, thanks J, I’ve seen some of these and followed them with interest, but Zeke and Ron and Nick and Mr T are all working either neutrally or in support of the science. The graph at The Air Vent is the first I’ve seen from the denialist side, and the blogger who executed it seems to be a couple of pink pills short of making himself a tinfoil hat, if his other posts are indicative. So it kinda jumped out at me when I spotted it.

  • dhogaza // April 13, 2010 at 3:17 am | Reply

    I gather RomanM is behind this and I know there is scant respect for his work here. But I thought some of you might be interested. And I’m always interested in your take on such things.

    I think RomanM is respected as a statistician in these parts.

    Perhaps his denialist side will become less snide now that he’s shown that … umm … a lot of the shit he has presumed to believe in previously turns out not to be true.

    If he doesn’t respect his own work showing that

    Certainly Phil is an ass, but it no longer seems to me that he has ‘directly’ exaggerated temp trends one bit.

    after all, then obviously his reputation for honesty and integrity will sink further rather than be resurrected.

  • Petro // April 13, 2010 at 3:22 am | Reply

    Since this is an open thread, I’d like to vent a bit. I have followed discussions in Real Climate and got frustrated its moderation policy. To my mind, its simply wrong to not allow regular commenters to shoot down denialists’ there. The moderators do not have time to check everything, and it is really loss to science, if the products of the BS machine are left there with no response.

    Ok, now I got that from my heart.

  • PolyisTCOandbanned // April 13, 2010 at 1:01 pm | Reply

    It’s good to see this kind of stuff come out. The problem with denialist work is that generally it never gets to much of a finished state (in fact a lot of preliminary snide accusations and leading remarks are made, and then never finished up) and also that “extents” of issues in the methodolgy are not estimated (just the “PR” gotcha soft story), and that different issues are mushed together, rather than disaggregated (again useful for PR, but bad for logical science insight). McI is very, very prone to all these flaws (but at least is good at math and programming and reading papers and has a high IQ). Watts has these flaws, but lacks the smarts to do hard core science. Id is sort of in between.

  • Bart Verheggen // April 13, 2010 at 1:15 pm | Reply

    Zeke posted some graphs of how different temp reconstructions look like, including the ‘grassroots efforts’ by different individuals (incl JeffID/RomanM):
    http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/04/reconstructing-surface-temperatures/

    Also discussed over at Lucia’s (http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/comparing-global-land-temperature-reconstructions/)

  • barry // April 13, 2010 at 5:41 pm | Reply

    there have been a bunch of these lately. One by Tamino, one by Zeke Hausfather at Lucia’s place…

    So far I’ve bookmarked web pages:

    6 comparing raw temps to official surface records

    1 on NH raw station temps v GISS (this blog)

    2 comparing GHCN raw to GHCN adjusted

    2 comparing recent GHCN analyses

    3 on station dropout

    1 on NH station dropout (from this blog)

    1 re-analysis of GHCN temps (no comparison, but the trend is higher than surface records)

    1 US raw v adjusted

    1 study comparing USHCN 1 & 2 to all (Menne et al)

    1 analysing UHI in the US

    1 comparing NH/SH, rural/urban and airports (Stokes)

    1 on US rural/urban, big cities/small towns

    2 histograms of global cool/warm adjustments

    There’s a bit overlap because some blog pages cover two or more of the issues above.

    Barring the NCDC page, these analyses got done within the last 2 months. But denialist claims against the surface records have gone on for years.

    If anyone asks I’ll pop them all together in one post (again, but with more) for reference. I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about this. 15 references.

  • Mike Bantom // April 13, 2010 at 7:17 pm | Reply

    UAH Puzzle

    I’ve been looking at the data for the UAH satellite lower troposphere temperature series
    http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

    Back in February I saved a copy of the UAH satellite data. This was still their 5.2 version

    Year Mo Globe Land Ocean USA48
    2009 8 0.23 0.31 0.19 -0.22
    2009 9 0.42 0.62 0.30 0.51
    2009 10 0.29 0.21 0.33 -1.44
    2009 11 0.50 0.64 0.42 1.45
    2009 12 0.29 0.24 0.32 -1.44
    2010 1 0.72 0.94 0.59 0.14
    Trend 0.13 0.17 0.11 0.22

    I saved another copy in March after they switched to their 5.3 version

    Year Mo Globe Land Ocean USA48
    2009 8 0.24 0.28 0.22 -0.28
    2009 9 0.50 0.66 0.40 0.59
    2009 10 0.35 0.26 0.41 -1.33
    2009 11 0.51 0.66 0.42 1.42
    2009 12 0.26 0.26 0.27 -1.46
    2010 1 0.63 0.89 0.47 0.10
    2010 2 0.62 0.87 0.48 -1.55
    Trend 0.13 0.17 0.11 0.22

    No change in the trend values and you don’t expect one after just another month of data.

    So now I am looking at their current data up to the end of March:

    Year Mo Globe Land Ocean USA48
    2009 8 0.24 0.54 0.06 0.15
    2009 9 0.50 0.93 0.25 1.01
    2009 10 0.36 0.56 0.25 -0.96
    2009 11 0.50 0.90 0.27 1.65
    2009 12 0.29 0.51 0.16 -1.31
    2010 1 0.64 1.12 0.37 0.14
    2010 2 0.61 1.05 0.36 -1.52
    2010 3 0.66 1.14 0.38 0.86
    Trend 0.13 0.24 0.07 0.28

    Now I understand they did some monthly anomally adjustments to the data when they switched versions, but those shouldn’t affect the trends. The global trend is indeed the same, but the Land & Ocean trends have changed dramatically as has the USA48 trend. It appears the Land adjustments have been significantly upward and the ocean adjustments significantly downwards which would also explain the greater USA48 warming.

    What could have warranted these adjustments? Is there any documentation on why this was done? And how consistant is this with Land & Ocean warming trends of other datasets?

    I can’t find Land & Ocean trend split for the RSS series.

  • Jeffrey Weiss // April 13, 2010 at 7:48 pm | Reply

    I thought I would let you and your readers know that I posted a Mathematica demonstration inspired by your post “Don’t get fooled, again”. The demonstration allows you to look at short term warming and cooling trends within a random walk and within GISS data. It is available at http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ShortTermTemperatureTrendsWithinLongTermWarming/

  • David B. Benson // April 14, 2010 at 12:27 am | Reply

    Thought experiment: what happens if CO2 is held at 0 ppm? Does the ocean freeze over, eliminating water vapor as a global warming agent?

  • Phil. // April 14, 2010 at 1:56 am | Reply

    David B. Benson // April 14, 2010 at 12:27 am | Reply

    Thought experiment: what happens if CO2 is held at 0 ppm? Does the ocean freeze over, eliminating water vapor as a global warming agent?

    Basically yes, eventually.

  • jyyh // April 14, 2010 at 6:14 am | Reply

    Thought experiment: what happens if CO2 is held at 0 ppm?
    What is the carbon compound at 255K at earth surface with lowest energy level? While it’s true the excess of carbon to oxygen in the universe makes an atmosphere for such planets as Jupiter (methane). I don’t remember if Gas giants have much CO2 in them (possibly as liquid or solid?). I’m not so certain of relatively large terrestrial planets. I’d guess the rarer spacial oxygen would aggregate in the atmosphere of such planets and (via lightning or auroras) combust any excess carbon produced by stars to monoxide or dioxide, the thing is not so easy to get totally rid of (not to talk about weathering which may happen both ways, but I don’t know of a reducing atmosphere currently on this planet (though some dead zones on ocean may come close to reducing the carbonates…)) (I blame hangover, Alastair Reynolds and spring for this post)

  • jyyh // April 14, 2010 at 7:36 am | Reply

    Seems I remembered the local abundances of the elements wrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SolarSystemAbundances.jpg) … This means water in the universe should be a quite a common compound too. And lo, the comets are possibly the origin of earths’ water (http://www.universetoday.com/2006/03/24/comets-may-be-the-source-of-earths-water/) or are they (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news008.html) (D doesn’t decay) ?

  • Barton Paul Levenson // April 14, 2010 at 11:58 am | Reply

    jyyh,

    Gas giants are mostly hydrogen and helium. CO2 seems to show up on any terrestrial planet with significant gravity, and is the major atmospheric constituent on Venus and Mars.

  • JMurphy // April 14, 2010 at 1:44 pm | Reply

    Now that the Oxburgh Report into CRU backs Jones et al, the deniers will obviously be pinning all their hopes on Russell.
    What will they say when all three reports are in and the deniers are left empty-handed ? Conspiracy whitewash !!!

    Actually, I reckon that then the only deniers left will be the troofer kind, who believe that EVERYTHING is a conspiracy.

    • MapleLeaf // April 14, 2010 at 6:13 pm | Reply

      Great news. JMurphy, don’t forget PSU. The denialists are currently 0-3, and I would be surprised if it is not 0-4.

      Of course, nothing other than a public flogging of Mann et al. at the hands of McIntyre would make them happy.

      This is going to make for a very good read one day, and history is not going to look favourably on M&M.

      Note to those in denial, time to cut ties with the charlatans.

  • John Mason // April 14, 2010 at 3:03 pm | Reply

    Nice bit of news – CRU cleared again:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8618024.stm

    Now can they be allowed to get on with the important task in hand – studying the climate?

    Let us hope so.

    Cheers – John

  • Hank Roberts // April 14, 2010 at 3:32 pm | Reply

    http://www.weirdwarp.com/tag/gas-giants/

  • bluegrue // April 14, 2010 at 6:13 pm | Reply

    The UEA press release and the Oxburgh Report are here:

    http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/oxburgh

    http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/Report+of+the+Science+Assessment+Panel

    No evidence of manipulation found. Statistical procedures OK, but possibly with room for improvement. Recommned to work together with professional statisticians.

    Sounds fine to me.

  • David B. Benson // April 14, 2010 at 7:05 pm | Reply

    Here is my simple minded analysis: CO2 + H2O keep the surface about 33 K warmer that without those gases, 288 K. Each component is credited with about 50% of the effect.

    Now eliminate the CO2 to lower the average temperature by about 16.5 K to 271.5, only 0.5 K above the freezing point of salt water. From CC, H2O varies abut 6% per 1 K. 16.5×6 = 99% so the ocean completely freezes over and the temperature drops to 255 K.

    Do I have it right?

  • arch stanton // April 14, 2010 at 7:07 pm | Reply

    But wait! The skeptics were right all along.

    All our carbon and energy problems have been solved by Rockwell International :

    http://home.comcast.net/~steveham21/turbo.mpg

    It’s all in the sinusoidal dingle arm!

  • Zeke Hausfather // April 14, 2010 at 8:06 pm | Reply

    Nick Stokes added in HadSST into his temp reconstruction today to make the first truly global amateur effort; its worth a look: http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2010/04/incorporating-sst-and-landocean-models.html

  • Magnus W // April 15, 2010 at 10:30 am | Reply

    Any one got an estimate of what the volcano might do to global temperatures?

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8586442.stm

    • Kevin McKinney // April 15, 2010 at 11:47 am | Reply

      A previous story had this:

      “This was a rather small and peaceful eruption but we are concerned that it could trigger an eruption at the nearby Katla volcano, a vicious volcano that could cause both local and global damage,” said Pall Einarsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland’s Institute of Earth Science, Associated Press news agency reported.”

      • dhogaza // April 15, 2010 at 5:20 pm

        Kevin, I think that previous story may be referring to the first eruption less than a month ago. This one’s much bigger, with thousands of flights having been cancelled and many northern european airports closed at the moment.

    • Gavin's Pussycat // April 15, 2010 at 1:05 pm | Reply

      Not much, probably. It would have to reach the stratosphere first.

      • Gavin's Pussycat // April 15, 2010 at 4:04 pm

        Actually it seems it reached the stratosphere… now it has to break the tropics-only rule. Eight months continually like Laki could do it…

  • Didactylos // April 15, 2010 at 12:19 pm | Reply

    Magnus W: My estimate is – nothing.

    The volcano is too far north, and has not emitted sufficient SO2 for it to have a measurable climate impact.

    There aren’t really any estimates of total SO2 volume yet, but the satellite pictures barely show anything that can be extracted from the noise.

    Deniers have this funny idea that it is the ash that matters – that somehow it literally blocks out the sun and creates cool weather. Obviously, it doesn’t work that way at all.

    Keep an eye on the SO2, though. This particular volcano has emitted unimaginably vast quantities of SO2 in past eruptions.

  • Gunner // April 15, 2010 at 5:15 pm | Reply

    Interesting paper in Phys. Rev. Lett. by Rypdal and Rypdal (one is a physicist, the other a statistician – sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t) For those of you who have access, the link is http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v104/i12/e128501

    The paper is in reply to an earlier Phys. Rev. Lett. by Scafetta and West that claimed the Global Temperature Anomaly and the Solar Flare Index tracked with each other and followed Lévy walk statistics with the same waiting-time exponent. The new paper says the older paper is in error, and that the older paper’s claim of sun-climate complexity linking is wrong. The new paper says the SFI can be described as a Levy flight, but the GTA cannot, and is instead described as a persistent fractional Brownian motion.

    I’m a physicist and not a statistician, so many of the paper’s statistical arguments are unfamiliar to me. Because the site’s owner and most readers are statisticians, I’d be interested anyone’s take on the paper, if they’ve read it.

  • Gunner // April 15, 2010 at 5:19 pm | Reply

    The last paragraph of my previous post is the abstract from the Rypdal paper, and probably shouldn’t be there because of copyright restrictions. I apologize for that, and hope the site moderator can remove that paragraph.

    [Response: I believe quoting the abstract constitutes "fair use." However, at your request I removed it.]

    • dhogaza // April 16, 2010 at 2:03 am | Reply

      Quoting for purposes of criticism or commentary is fair use (though one can always lose a lawsuit whether or not one is in the right).

  • Petro // April 15, 2010 at 8:44 pm | Reply

    Speaking of the Arctic sea ice, it is just about to melt massively. Look at the increase of yellow around Spitsbergen during 4/10 – 4/14:
    http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html

    This surely will be reported duly at WUWT.

  • arch stanton // April 15, 2010 at 11:23 pm | Reply

    “massively”

    Not to defend WTF, but is it any more than what should be expected this time of year?
    http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png

    • dhogaza // April 16, 2010 at 2:10 am | Reply

      Probably depends on whether or not your expectations are based on the last few years (i.e. Goddard’s selective comparison with a german source that has only been tracking extent for a few years, all record low years compared to the 1970-2000-ish time frame, leading him to claim that sea ice has returned to “normal”), or on a longer timeframe.

      Yes, Goddard’s right, sea ice extent has “recovered” to being kinda normal for the 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 time frame.

      But normal people might suggest that this is a really silly POV since these years represent record lows in the satellite record …

  • Hank Roberts // April 16, 2010 at 1:17 am | Reply

    > more than what should be expected

    Look at the amount of first-year ice, this year.
    http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/WsvPageDsp.cfm?ID=10975&Lang=eng

    http://nsidc.org/sotc/images/npseaice_ssm_200902.png

    http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html

    http://earthsky.org/earth/icesat-team-flies-over-thinning-arctic-sea-ice

    • dhogaza // April 16, 2010 at 2:10 am | Reply

      If winds set up to transport ice south in any part of the arctic, a lot of melting might result.

      We’ll see. One thing’s for certain, claims of “recovery” are just crap.

    • Sekerob // April 16, 2010 at 10:20 am | Reply

      NOAA has a nice Sept’09/Mar’10 comparison up for MYI content and also the history of the past 31 years.

      http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100406_Figure6.png

      The EU just had an ice thickness measurement satellite shot up with a Russian rocket in replacement of a sat that blew up 5 years ago … so sad for having lost 5 years detail.

  • arch stanton // April 16, 2010 at 2:27 am | Reply

    Thanks for the links Hank. Perhaps I should have said “more than what should be expected given the time of year”. ‘Tis the season to anticipate massive arctic melting.

    Don’t get me wrong. I believe summer Arctic ice is not long for this planet. But I would still give it a decade or so, barring unusual winds like we had a couple years ago.

    I guess my point is that speculating on anticipated dramatic short term sea ice changes seems a bit of a folly, but then again perhaps Petro (or others here) know more about it than I do (that’s not hard to imagine).

    According to the folks at NSIDC – there is actually is slightly more >1yo ice this year than there was last year. Check out fig 6 here: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

  • arch stanton // April 16, 2010 at 2:43 am | Reply

    CryoSat-2 will be a welcome addition. I remember reading that it was supposed to start returning data within 48 hours of launch, but I realize that it could take months to calibrate.

  • Petro // April 16, 2010 at 7:41 am | Reply

    Thanks Hank! The sorry state of the Arctic sea ice is, that once the conditions similar in 2007 happen next time, it is all gone.

  • arch stanton // April 16, 2010 at 3:08 pm | Reply

    >Goddard’s selective comparison
    >Look at the amount of first-year ice, this year
    >If winds set up to transport ice south in any part of the arctic, a lot of melting might result.
    We’ll see. One thing’s for certain, claims of “recovery” are just crap.
    >barring unusual winds like we had a couple years ago.
    >The sorry state of the Arctic sea ice is, that once the conditions similar in 2007 happen next time, it is all gone.

    I think we all agree.

  • Hank Roberts // April 16, 2010 at 4:45 pm | Reply

    > there is actually is slightly more
    >1yo ice this year than there was last year.

    Yep. The less of the ocean is covered by ice that survived the previous summer, the more one year ice can form. The increase in “one year” ice is a marker of the problem of loss of older ice.

  • Hank Roberts // April 16, 2010 at 4:47 pm | Reply

    wups, that quoting style gets confused by the “greater than” symbol, sorry. Yes, there’s more “more than one year” ice this year–since the big melt in 2007 in fact.

  • arch stanton // April 16, 2010 at 5:26 pm | Reply

    >wups

    I agree my shorthand was confusing. You got my point though.

    However, to credit anything other than “noise” for the (very minor) increase of older ice would be a mistake at this point IMHO.

    Since the NSIDC graph is only “percentages” and not absolute values you could make the argument that IF the total area had actually decreased much over the last couple years – the change in percentage might NOT reflect an overall increase in multiyear ice but a decrease in first year ice. I don’t think that is the case however.

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