Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Convenient truth?
Has global warming at least temporarily stopped during the last ten years? Link and link.
On the small chance there are climate scientists or statisticians reading this post, I'd be interested in your reactions.
10 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Mar 12, 09:59:00 PM:
The problem is sample size. Always was; always will be.
Put differently, in order to determine a link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures, one (duh!) needs to run a regression. This regression must have sufficient data so that one does not draw projections (what economists call false evidence) by extrapolating outside the data set. So, it would be nice to have, say CO2 and temperature data from the 1100s, 10,000 BC, 400 BC, 1600, 100,000 BC, etc., etc., to get a dispersion of CO2 levels and temperatures to determine if and what the relationship is.
Without that, one is guessing. Prudence may suggest, if there appears to be a trend, to draw a line that errs on the side of avoiding catastrophe, but incrementally without a truly good data set.
In fact, we just don't have such a data set, and can't. Therefore, what exists is really no different than the "anecdotes" the Left used to decry Reagan for invoking. That's what it is, 10 year in the history of a 2 million year span of time, with no CO2 data or temperature data for most of that time, is like trying to draw a conclusion about how tall you are from looking at a slice of your body measuring 1/100 of a millimeter. Yup. 1/100 of a millimeter. Who would ever try to guess someone's height on that basis.
(You may want to post this response.)
By , at
Thu Mar 13, 12:14:00 AM:
If AL GORE and the wackos from GREENPEACE were realy intersted in stopping global warming then why dont the stop flapping their big fat lying pieholes?
By , at
Thu Mar 13, 01:30:00 AM:
You don't need to be a scientist to observe weather.
Down here (NZ), 1997 and 98 were warm summers, but after that we were burning firewood notably longer into our spring/early summer periods and experiencing more cold weather events in winter.
Perhaps more convincingly, every time Al Gore traveled, or our weather people blathered on AGW, we had record snow storms. In a silly sort of way the sheer inconsistency of the words compared to the actual weather experienced provides it's own "proof" of how little we actually know of what's going on.
We are just finishing a long warm summer (like they usta be) and funnily enough, the warmenists haven't been able to take advantage of this because this summer is so grotesquely warmer than any in the past decade, it's made a mockery of the previous decade when we were supposedly frying.
Now finally, the ultimate proof that AGW is a hoax.. after a decade of trying to frighten the crap out of us, and doing nothing.. the Govt will commit about 2% of GDP to counteract AGW this year, and everyone knows that Govts don't do anything about a problem until it's safely over.
JC
By , at
Thu Mar 13, 07:41:00 AM:
[puts fingers in ears, closes eyes]
SHUT UP...SHUT UP...SHUT UP...SHUT UP...SHUT UP...SHUT UP...SHUT UP
signed,
Al Gore
By , at
Thu Mar 13, 08:50:00 AM:
Right now, we are technically in an ice age - permanent polar ice caps. Ice core data implies that atmospheric CO2 levels rise in response to global warming, not as a cause of it - the oceans lock it away, take awhile to heat up and release it. Some of the most interesting research I've seen lately is from a solar scientist who suggests that the sunspot cycle should have been getting more active about a year ago and is over a year delayed - he worries that we are heading into a Maunder Minimum (little ice age).
By , at
Thu Mar 13, 10:21:00 AM:
JC,
If I am not mistaken the data says the southern hemisphere is not experiencing global warming. The warming has taken place in the northern hemisphere. You guys down in NZ should be okay. ; - )
Even though I live in the US, the temp data for the last 100 years shows cooling in my area. So I think I'm good too.
By , at
Thu Mar 13, 02:40:00 PM:
Sample size is irrelevant for extrapolating into the future. Only deep understaning of physics of the entire collection of processes going on in such an enormous system as Earth-Sun would allow for a meanigful projection. And replacement of actual Sun's input with its average is not adequate substitute to generate a believable model.
As an aside, it beats me how Al Gore und Co. can claim that they discern a CO2 signal when it is quite a few 1000 times weaker than elementary water vapor. They, apparently never experienced summer night-time temperatures in the middle of Sahara and Bangladesh.
By 
Assistant Village Idiot, at
Thu Mar 13, 09:50:00 PM:
Ruddiman from UVA believes that AGW started 8,000 years ago with the beginning of agriculture and the domestication of animals. Without it, we would be deep in an Ice Age at this point. I don't know if the theory will hold up under scrutiny, but I blogged about it last year.
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2007/01/plows-plagues-petroleum.html
By , at
Fri Mar 14, 12:43:00 AM:
MAKE ME AL GORE DROP DEAD YOU GREEN NAZI SQUAWK SQUAWK
By , at
Sat Mar 15, 10:50:00 PM:
... as a neighbor of yours part of whose research involves climate models, I thought I'd see how likely a 7 year period with nearly no change was. In one of the IPCC scenarios run at my lab which had an average 7 year temperature change of 0.16C over the 21st century, approximately 1/6 of the seven year spans within the century had negative globally averaged temperature changes.
So the expectation would be that if you took three consecutive 7 year periods, the chance that none of them would show a negative trend would be (5/6)*(5/6)*(5/6) or only 57%. Over a 35 year period, the chance drops to 40%. In other words, at least one seven year temperature *drop* would be expected in terms of natural variability alone- but the expectation would be that it was interspersed with larger temperature rises.
In this same model, no 20-year period in the 21st century drops below 0. So the current run would have to go on significantly longer before it would falsify the models.
