Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

[bcassill]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

Parts of California such as the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) and the Los Angeles Basin appear to have more trees now than ever before. Entire urban forests are now appearing and replacing desert scrub, especially in Southern California.

I was watching a program on forest fires and they were interviewing the man in charge of all the federal fire fighters (I think they call them smoke jumpers). Anyhow, his prediction was that they are looking at losing about half of all the forested areas in the U.S. west of the Mississippi due to drier climate and the densification of forests.

[c1ue]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

I was watching a program on forest fires and they were interviewing the man in charge of all the federal fire fighters (I think they call them smoke jumpers). Anyhow, his prediction was that they are looking at losing about half of all the forested areas in the U.S. west of the Mississippi due to drier climate and the densification of forests.

If I were an AGW believer, I'd be saying since this isn't peer reviewed it is irrelevant. And a firefighter isn't trained or dedicated to studying trees.

But as it is it would be interesting to understand the rationale for this belief.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

If I were an AGW believer, I'd be saying since this isn't peer reviewed it is irrelevant. And a firefighter isn't trained or dedicated to studying trees.

But as it is it would be interesting to understand the rationale for this belief.

Wherever I travel in the West of America, I am impressed at how well forests are doing, even with fire, and maybe even helped by fire.

There are small outcrops of forest ( in fact, old growth forest ) on the High Plains of North America. There are small enclaves (sp?) of redwood forest in central California, even southern California's Frazier Park north of Los Angeles, also in the San Bernadino Mountains, even in the Penninsular Range of southern California and the state of Baja California Norte.

Between Tijuana and Mexicali, guess what: small ponderosa pines, spaced far apart! Two inches of rainfall per year in Mexicali, BCN, never-the-less, small ponderosa pines appear, up on top of the mountain range west of the bleak salt-flats of the Mexicali Valley.

In the Upper Midwest, forests of old Norway pines are doing wonderfully, especially in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Ontario has over 1000 miles of solid forest from Lake Ontario straight through to the Manitoba border and beyond, and all the way north until the Hudson Bay Lowland.

The Kiabab Plateau of Arizona and New Mexico have old growth ponderosa pine above 7000 feet, albeit spaced far apart. The tops of the mountain ranges in the entire Great Basin region have old growth forest above 7000 feet.

There is no case to be made for the de-forestation crap coming from the ecology bunch to-day. The evidence is just the opposite: Forests are fine and doing well, at least in North America. Trees are everywhere, even in the arid West.:rolleyes:

[Starving Steve]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

If I were an AGW believer, I'd be saying since this isn't peer reviewed it is irrelevant. And a firefighter isn't trained or dedicated to studying trees.

But as it is it would be interesting to understand the rationale for this belief.

Not only is the evidence lacking for de-forestation, but the evidence is just the opposite: the forests in the Western U.S. have become too thick, too dense, with so much over-growth and manzanita scrub that the forests are now in danger of uncontrollable fires. There is a need for fire-breaks and proper land management by mankind, which heretofore has been resisted by environmental groups.:rolleyes:

And even worse than this, drug gangs have used the over-growth of manzanita scrub as a way to hide their meth labs and pot-fields in forests. Some fires have broken-out by fires from illegal meth labs in forests, and some drug gangs have even set fires purposefully to cause havoc.

[necron99]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

**Sigh** it's so futile to try and change political attitudes with facts, but Master Shake and WDCRob are not on the same page here. Being careful with our terminology might help.

Was 1998 the hottest year in United States history, as most reporting on climate change has presumed? Or was that record set back in 1934 before "global warming" became a scary household phrase?
A corrective tweak to National Aeronautics and Space Administration's formulation shows that the hottest year on record in the US indeed was back during the Dust Bowl days.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0823/p02s01-wogi.html

[MASTER SHAKE] Now, if you want to argue that anthropogenic global warming is still a concern, go ahead, but don't repeat disproven "facts."

OK, please let's take this slow. 1934 was proven to be the hottest year on record in the USA, as the CSMonitor article says. It turns out to be 0.02 degrees hotter than 1998, which is well within the margin of error of the study, so this is not a statistically significant change in the data. Here is a useful article explaining the measurement correction: RealClimate

The larger problem is that the US is not the globe. If you want to talk about "GLOBAL warming," then 1998 or 2005 was still the hottest year in terms of the global average (depending which study method you use).

Quoting NASA and the IPCC of course immediately marks me as a communist who wants to exterminate all mankind, but this is what the people who actually handle the data have to say:

(NASA) Finally, we note that a minor data processing error found in the GISS temperature analysis in early 2007 does not affect the present analysis. The data processing flaw was failure to apply NOAA adjustments to United States Historical Climatology Network stations in 2000-2006, as the records for those years were taken from a different data base (Global Historical Climatology Network). This flaw affected only 1.6% of the Earth's surface (contiguous 48 states) and only the several years in the 21st century. ...the effect of this flaw was immeasurable globally (~0.003°C) {emphasis added} and small even in its limited area. Contrary to reports in certain portions of the media, the data processing flaw did not alter the ordering of the warmest years on record. Obviously the global ranks were unaffected. In the contiguous 48 states the statistical tie among 1934, 1998 and 2005 as the warmest year(s) was unchanged. In the current analysis, in the flawed analysis, and in the published GISS analysis (Hansen et al. 2001), 1934 is the warmest year in the contiguous states (not globally) but by an amount (magnitude of the order of 0.01°C) that is an order of magnitude smaller than the uncertainty.
... "Global warming stopped in 1998," has become a recent mantra of those who wish to deny the reality of human-caused global warming. The continued rapid increase of the five-year running mean temperature exposes this assertion as nonsense. In reality, global temperature jumped two standard deviations above the trend line in 1998 because the "El Niño of the century" coincided with the calendar year, but there has been no lessening of the underlying warming trend.

(IPCC via U of Colorado) Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850). {emphasis added} The 100-year linear trend (1906-2005) of +0.74°C is larger than the corresponding trend of +0.6°C (1901-2000) given in the Third Assessment Report (TAR). The temperature increase is widespread over the globe and is greater at higher northern latitudes.

These are my notes superimposed on a graph from NASA and University of Colorado... Just to keep the readings in perspective here.

...note that the above graph refers to GLOBAL mean temperature, not U.S. temperature.

Mathematical averages can be somewhat tricky things when we're talking about the whole globe: land and water, cities and forests and ice. But they can be done and they are meaningful. So, yes, every few years, somebody says that this record or that data set is off by two-hundredths of a degree. But that doesn't disprove the larger body of evidence. The vast majority of studies from satellite measurements, tree rings, ice cores, sea-bottom gases, and atmospheric isotope studies all support the theory of human-caused global warming. Quibbling with a few hundredths of a degree in this or that data set does not cause us to throw out the entire theory. The theory is still predictive and leads us to the conclusion that we face drastic risks, most especially including economic risks, if mankind doesn't change our ways.

[goadam1]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

Oh, good. Now that global warming is settled we can move on to myth busting mercury in the fish and dioxin in the rivers.

[c1ue]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

Mathematical averages can be somewhat tricky things when we're talking about the whole globe: land and water, cities and forests and ice. But they can be done and they are meaningful. So, yes, every few years, somebody says that this record or that data set is off by two-hundredths of a degree. But that doesn't disprove the larger body of evidence. The vast majority of studies from satellite measurements, tree rings, ice cores, sea-bottom gases, and atmospheric isotope studies all support the theory of human-caused global warming. Quibbling with a few hundredths of a degree in this or that data set does not cause us to throw out the entire theory. The theory is still predictive and leads us to the conclusion that we face drastic risks, most especially including economic risks, if mankind doesn't change our ways.

Ah yes, the famous hockey stick which has been thoroughly disproven, but still has a strong grip on the imagination.l

Well, here's another graph for you:



Strange, it seems that recent (last 10 years or last 17 years depending on POV), the trend is completely opposite to what the hockey stick says.

The above is a compendium of ALL the various data sources.

Even within the data sources, there are extensive projects underway to review the climate stations; it seems that due to urbanization, the monitoring stations on land are almost certainly giving higher temperature readings at least partly due to siting.

Even the IPCC 'scientists' like Latif have been backtracking and saying that cooling for the next 20 years is possible. Again, hockey stick WRONG.

[Dr.No]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

When the stock market goes up, does it do it a little bit at a time? Or do you have some up days and some down? When the market is at all-time highs do you set a record every day? Or do you sometimes reach new highs, and fall back for a few weeks?

1998 is the hottest year on record. The years since haven't breached that high, but temperatures remain historically elevated.

You'd be wise to give someone trying to make the case that this proves cooling the same deference you'd give a TV 'stock analyst' who says that the Dow dropping a few tenths of a point off a new high for a few weeks proves that a bear market is in.

- Gold just broke $1062 on the 5 minute chart...must be a new bear market!

[WDCRob]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

Ah, the Big Lie. Not only is the "record" about 100 years, give or take, but even for that blip in geological time, it's not true.

Did you actually read the article? Or just follow the link to the headline from Rush Limbaugh's site?

For one, the reranking didn't affect global records, and 1998 remains tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record, the Los Angeles Times notes, quoting climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

"The data adjustment changes 'the inconsequential bragging rights for certain years in the U.S.,' he said. But 'global warming is a global issue, and the global numbers show that there is no question that the last five to 10 years have been the hottest period of the last century.' "

The point about recent records and geologic time is an excellent one though. Fortunately there are other ways of recovering data from the past, and they support the observed findings.

[Master Shake]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

Did you actually read the article? Or just follow the link to the headline from Rush Limbaugh's site?



The point about recent records and geologic time is an excellent one though. Fortunately there are other ways of recovering data from the past, and they support the observed findings.

No, I didn't find any link from Limbaugh. Is he your favorite bogeyman?

Speaking of the geological record, if you examine it, you'll find that we are still at an historically low concentration of CO2, regardless of all our fossil fuel burning.


Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time

Late Carboniferous to Early Permian time (315 mya -- 270 mya) is the only time period in the last 600 million years when both atmospheric CO2 and temperatures were as low as they are today (Quaternary Period ). Temperature after C.R. Scotese http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm CO2 after R.A. Berner, 2001 (GEOCARB III)

[Starving Steve]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

**Sigh** it's so futile to try and change political attitudes with facts, but Master Shake and WDCRob are not on the same page here. Being careful with our terminology might help.

OK, please let's take this slow. 1934 was proven to be the hottest year on record in the USA, as the CSMonitor article says. It turns out to be 0.02 degrees hotter than 1998, which is well within the margin of error of the study, so this is not a statistically significant change in the data. Here is a useful article explaining the measurement correction: RealClimate

The larger problem is that the US is not the globe. If you want to talk about "GLOBAL warming," then 1998 or 2005 was still the hottest year in terms of the global average (depending which study method you use).

Quoting NASA and the IPCC of course immediately marks me as a communist who wants to exterminate all mankind, but this is what the people who actually handle the data have to say:

These are my notes superimposed on a graph from NASA and University of Colorado... Just to keep the readings in perspective here.

...note that the above graph refers to GLOBAL mean temperature, not U.S. temperature.

Mathematical averages can be somewhat tricky things when we're talking about the whole globe: land and water, cities and forests and ice. But they can be done and they are meaningful. So, yes, every few years, somebody says that this record or that data set is off by two-hundredths of a degree. But that doesn't disprove the larger body of evidence. The vast majority of studies from satellite measurements, tree rings, ice cores, sea-bottom gases, and atmospheric isotope studies all support the theory of human-caused global warming. Quibbling with a few hundredths of a degree in this or that data set does not cause us to throw out the entire theory. The theory is still predictive and leads us to the conclusion that we face drastic risks, most especially including economic risks, if mankind doesn't change our ways.

Arguments AGAINST man-made global warming:

1.) All the atolls (sp?) of the world's oceans are still high and dry, and doing just fine, thank you;

2.) December 2008 was the third coldest on record at Victoria, BC, and all along the Pacific Coast of North America, December was very cold, to say the least. Summer 2009 in the North-east US was the second coldest on record. And early October in the U.S. has brought near record cold and snowfall in the upper Midwest, hurting the corn crop. Already Watsonville, California has recorded 41F (+5C) for a morning low, and temperatures inland in the Salinas Valley have been as low as 33F (+ 0.5C). Early October! The wettest October on record has also occurred in central California, and the month is not even half-over yet;

3.) The ignored fact of life that buildings, even unheated and uninhabited and unelectrified buildings, block heat from being radiated to outer space at night has biased nearly all climate records to show warming, especially low temperature warming;

4.) The Earth is still recovering from the Ice Age which ended just 10,000 years ago, so a warming mega-trend of about 1F (0.5C) is natural and has been happening for thousands of years; sea-level rise from this warming is about as measured: 6 or 7 inches per century;

5.) Climate models have a built-in tacit assumption that the relationship between CO2 and temperature on Earth is known. But no-one has any basis to quantify what affect CO2 has upon climate except to say that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, one of many such gases on Earth. So using climate models to predict global warming is junk science, at best. ( Thus, the logic behind climate modelling is circular: the model(s) predict global warming because the models are mis-calibrated to prove global warming.)

[Starving Steve]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

Arguments AGAINST man-made global warming:

1.) All the atolls (sp?) of the world's oceans are still high and dry, and doing just fine, thank you;

2.) December 2008 was the third coldest on record at Victoria, BC, and all along the Pacific Coast of North America, December was very cold, to say the least. Summer 2009 in the North-east US was the second coldest on record. And early October in the U.S. has brought near record cold and snowfall in the upper Midwest, hurting the corn crop. Already Watsonville, California has recorded 41F (+5C) for a morning low, and temperatures inland in the Salinas Valley have been as low as 33F (+ 0.5C). Early October! The wettest October on record has also occurred in central California, and the month is not even half-over yet;

3.) The ignored fact of life that buildings, even unheated and uninhabited and unelectrified buildings, block heat from being radiated to outer space at night has biased nearly all climate records to show warming, especially low temperature warming;

4.) The Earth is still recovering from the Ice Age which ended just 10,000 years ago, so a warming mega-trend of about 1F (0.5C) is natural and has been happening for thousands of years; sea-level rise from this warming is about as measured: 6 or 7 inches per century;

5.) Climate models have a built-in tacit assumption that the relationship between CO2 and temperature on Earth is known. But no-one has any basis to quantify what affect CO2 has upon climate except to say that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, one of many such gases on Earth. So using climate models to predict global warming is junk science, at best. ( Thus, the logic behind climate modelling is circular: the model(s) predict global warming because the models are mis-calibrated to prove global warming.)

6.) The modellers of climate change are benefiting from research grants from interests which benefit from model results supporting the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming thesis; similarly, studies which question the AGW thesis are suppressed and go unpublished. :rolleyes:

[necron99]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

Ahhh, futility, futility...

6.) The modellers of climate change are benefiting from research grants from interests which benefit from model results supporting the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming thesis; similarly, studies which question the AGW thesis are suppressed and go unpublished. :rolleyes:

...but at least I can still enjoy a good laugh when somebody asserts that a few million dollars of grant money throw a whole branch of science into question, whereas trillions of dollars of fossil-fuel profits don't have any influence on the debate at all. (Geez, read the "Experts" page of the ICECAP site where c1ue got his graph, and you can just check-off all the people who've received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Western Fuels Association (Balling, Baliunas); Exxon (Idso, Fred Singer); and on and on.) Although ICECAP doesn't disclose its funding, I see that the institutions where these guys worked while they produced the graph declared over $830,000 in funding from Western Fuels and Exxon, so it's just hilarious for Steve to say that 'skeptic' thesis "are suppressed and go unpublished." :rolleyes: Oh yeah your guys are just getting a well-deserved paycheck for making an honest living doing unbiased research; whereas our guys are sellouts who will say anything for a buck. Not a very objective line of argument there.

Any of my fellow iTulip-ers who might actually be approaching this subject with an open mind... ya just gotta make a decision who you trust:

• a group who jumps on a 0.02°C change in America's temperature record as "de-bunking" the world's temperature, and who cite a 15-year graph as "de-bunking" 100 years of data;

or,

• the actual, y'know, rocket scientists who work at NASA, JPL, National Academy of Sciences, and hundreds of other well-respected science institutions around the world. Whom I linked to.

I just hope that iTulip-ers pick their stocks with better data than these guys pick their scientists. Without a doubt Steve, Shake and C1ue really do pick their stocks with a lot better unbiased research than the way they argue Global Warming, so it honestly puzzles me how or more importantly why they assert these things.

Good night and good luck.

[thousandmilemargin]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

.

...but at least I can still enjoy a good laugh when somebody asserts that a few million dollars of grant money throw a whole branch of science into question

It is quite possible for a whole branch of science to be sidetracked into dogma with out any significant financial incentive. All that is needed is the granting of career advancement to those who adhere to the party line.

Economics during the 20th century would be the obvious example. The Keynesians and Friedmanites managed to completely dominate academia. The Austrian school was marginalised to the point where it was functionally irrelevant - there was just the odd eccentric here and here who read Mises or Hayek, but it had no influence on public policy.

I'd say the same thing happened in Modern Art, modern orchestral music, psychology after Jung, critical theory, cultural studies and to a large extent history. The fields were captured by fashionable ideologies and took a left turn into whacko land.

I say a left turn, because in the Humanities in particular what happened was the successful capture of academia by Cultural Marxism.

In a past life I actually majored in Critical Theory. One of my main units was called "Western Marxism and Modern Cultural Theory". There wasn't any attempt to hide that fact that the humanities had been captured by Marxism - it was simply studied as a historical fact.

If a field of science has significant political implications, it should not be suprising if the same kind of ideological capture which was explicitly advocated as means of social progress by progressive activists from the 60s onward takes place in that field.

Let me put it another way completely....

If you go to a Catholic University, and ask the chair of the Theology department to draw up a summary of the consensus view amongst academics at the University on the nature of God, you will get a summary that adheres to the published doctrine of the Catholic Church, and there will be no dissenters or deniers.

Does that mean that all debate about the nature of God is settled? No, it means that you are dealing with an institution that has expelled all those who don't adhere to the established doctrine.

We haven't gone that far though. Richard Lindzen still holds a chair at MIT.

[c1ue]

Re: Cracks in the Global Warming Case?

...but at least I can still enjoy a good laugh when somebody asserts that a few million dollars of grant money throw a whole branch of science into question, whereas trillions of dollars of fossil-fuel profits don't have any influence on the debate at all. (Geez, read the "Experts" page of the ICECAP site where c1ue got his graph, and you can just check-off all the people who've received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Western Fuels Association (Balling, Baliunas); Exxon (Idso, Fred Singer); and on and on.) Although ICECAP doesn't disclose its funding, I see that the institutions where these guys worked while they produced the graph declared over $830,000 in funding from Western Fuels and Exxon, so it's just hilarious for Steve to say that 'skeptic' thesis "are suppressed and go unpublished." :rolleyes: Oh yeah your guys are just getting a well-deserved paycheck for making an honest living doing unbiased research; whereas our guys are sellouts who will say anything for a buck. Not a very objective line of argument there.

Let's follow the money shall we?

Federal money spent on climate research from 1989 to 2007: $30 billion

Oil money spent on fighting AGW by Exxon over the same period: $23 million

Al Gore: gets paid $100K to $300K per appearance. Has at least one a month. Al personally comes close to matching all the Exxon 'denier' money.

Any of my fellow iTulip-ers who might actually be approaching this subject with an open mind... ya just gotta make a decision who you trust:

• a group who jumps on a 0.02°C change in America's temperature record as "de-bunking" the world's temperature, and who cite a 15-year graph as "de-bunking" 100 years of data;

Yes, must be cherry picked data like this paper examining the Hadley center's 20th century temperature trends:

http://climaterealists.com/attachmen...teRealists.pdf

Global cooling by 0.71 deg C from 1878 to 1911, for 33 years.
Global warming by 0.53 deg C from 1911 to 1944, for 33 years.
Global cooling by 0.48 deg C from 1944 to 1976, for 32 years.
Global warming by 0.67 deg C from 1976 to 1998, for 22 years.

That looks like CO2 induced global warming all right. The 1944 to 1976 saw no CO2 growth - the US wasn't building the interstate highway system and Americans weren't buying cars left and right in the golden era of American prosperity.

Then there's the tragedy of the past 10 years. Seems like global warming is actually global cooling. Where's the yearly march of upward temperatures? Is it perhaps that the 'hockey stick' is too simplistic and wrong?

or,

• the actual, y'know, rocket scientists who work at NASA, JPL, National Academy of Sciences, and hundreds of other well-respected science institutions around the world. Whom I linked to.

Yes, like these rocket scientists - err astronauts - who both say AGW is not true: Buzz Aldrin, Harrison Schmitt - both doctorates as well

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11254

What about the 31,000 scientists who've signed up to this statement:

http://www.oism.org/pproject/

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.

And the 80 members of the American Physical Society who've put their names on an open letter decrying the editorial AGW slant of their executive council:

http://conservativebusinessnetwork.c...ysical-society

And the 19 members of the ACS who wrote letters decrying the editorial AGW slant of the ACS Council:

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/letters/87/8730letters.html

I just hope that iTulip-ers pick their stocks with better data than these guys pick their scientists. Without a doubt Steve, Shake and C1ue really do pick their stocks with a lot better unbiased research than the way they argue Global Warming, so it honestly puzzles me how or more importantly why they assert these things.

Good night and good luck.

I'm honestly puzzled why the questions being raised are so difficult to dismiss?

Why there are so many scientists who are willing to go against 'settled science'? When there is so much more money on the 'settled' side?

Why AGW folk are so rabidly against other opinions to the point of excluding a polar bear researcher from a polar bear research conference because his global warming, but non-AGW views are 'not helpful'?

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/exi...non-believers/

I even posted a debate between a prominent denier and a prominent AGW proponent. Examine the quality of the AGW 'debate: in IPCC we trust, let's be safe, climate models are good.

Contemplate the difference between dogma and inquiry.