Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. on two recent “game changing” climate papers

“Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. on two recent “game changing” climate papers” (2012-07-31). “In case you missed it”, Anthony Watts wants you to know that someone important is singing the praises of his submitted paper manuscript final draft “discussion paper”. Occasional collaborator Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., who has spent years declaring with a straight face that Anthony “is devoted to the highest level of scientific robustness”, still thinks that every time Anthony flaps his trap he educates the world.

It’s a game changer! Yes, but what’s the game?

Pielke Sr. started backing away within a day: “To be very specific, I did not play a role in their data analysis. [Anthony] sent me the near final version of the discussion paper and I recommended added text and references.” He tries hard to maintain BFF status though: “Anthony Watts clearly understands the research process in climate science.” This is like telling someone they’re not fat, just “big-boned”.

But surely co-author and obsessive skeptic Steve McIntyre will back Anthony unequivocally? Nope:

Anthony sent me his draft paper. In his cover email, he said that the people who had offered to do statistical analysis hadn’t done so (each for valid reasons). So I did some analysis very quickly, which Anthony incorporated in the paper and made me a coauthor though my contribution was very last minute and limited. I haven’t parsed the rest of the paper.

http://wottsupwiththat.com/

USA June 1934 v June 2012:

June 1934 - 48 US states had max temps over 100F

Denier Comment of the Day July 30, 2012

Today’s comment is a special one as it is actually multiple comments in celebration of Anthony Watts’ somewhat anticlimactic announcement.

For those who don’t know, Anthony Watts of WUWT infamy, announced in a most dramatic manner that he was closing his blog over the weekend in preparation for a “major announcement that I’m sure will attract a broad global interest due to its controversial and unprecedented nature.”

Well, with much anticipation (not really) I waited for an opportunity to facepalm at denier comments that were sure to come when he released whatever his “major announcement” was.

So what his announcement? A draft copy of a manuscript (no, it’s not a paper yet you morons) that he has coauthored with John Christy, Steve McIntyre and some other goose I haven’t heard of. It allegedly shows what the actual surface temperature rise of the United States is if you take into account the urban heat island blah blah blah. It’s the same drum he’s been banging on about for as long as he could make money out of it. I read the thing and skipping over the multitude of typos and other errors came to the conclusion that it is unlikely to be published in a respected journal because quite frankly, I’ve marked university assignments that were of a higher standard. I’m sure it will get a good run in the blogosphere though and maybe Energy and Environment will give it a run. After all, they will take anything as evidenced by their acceptance of David Archibald’s garbage. That aside, the purpose of this post is to examine some of the fantastic comments posted by his followers.

But first, a preface. Anyone who accepts the AGW hypothesis and blogs about it or comments on blogs has encountered deniers who say things like, “Your blind following of the AGW religion and the words of its priests, Mann et al…..” or ” You sheeple all bow down at the altar of your god Al Gore….” etc etc. I always chuckle at the religious overtones and am also puzzled by the hypocrisy in those kinds of statements. A trip over to WUWT to read the statements being made by Watts’ supporters makes me wonder who the religious nuts are. I haven’t chosen any of the dozens of bootlicking ones, you can go and read them for yourself.

http://uknowispeaksense.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/denier-comment-of-the-day-july-30-2012/

What would you have to post about CeeBee if you couldn't download those specially prepared daily updates of "Denier talking points" ?

(I do not reply to the trolling posts)

Climate change is here — and worse than we thought

By James E. Hansen

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.

But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.

But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.

The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.

Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.

This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.

The future is now. And it is hot.

link

Record early snow melt in the Austrian Alps

One of the longest meteorological data records at high altitude comes from Sonnblick, Austria, on a mountaintop in the Alps with an elevation of 3106 meters (10,200 feet.) The observatory typically sees maximum snow depths of 3 - 4 meters (10 - 13 feet) during winter.

According to weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, the snow had never completely melted at Sonnblick until the summer of 1992. Complete snow melt did not happen again until August 12, 2003, and has happened an average of once every two years since then--but always in September.

On July 31, the snow completely melted at Sonnblick, the earliest melting since record keeping began in 1886.

It's been an exceptionally hot summer in Austria, which experienced its 6th warmest June since record keeping began in 1767.

Sonnblick Observatory recorded its all-time warmest temperature of 15.3°C (60°F) on June 30.

Vienna hit 37.7°C (100°F) that day--the hottest temperature ever measured in June in Austria.

Note that the two mountains in the Alps with long climate records, Saentis in Switzerland and Zugspitze in Germany, beat their records for earliest melting last year in 2011 (Saentis beat the previous record of 2003, and Zugspitze tied the record set in 2003.)

link

Up to 2010, the year 1934 was a very hot year in the United States, ranking third behind 2006 and 1998. However, global warming takes into account temperatures over the entire planet. The U.S.'s land area accounts for less than 2% of the earth's total surface area. Despite the U.S. heat in 1934, 1934 was not so hot over the rest of the planet, and is barely holding onto a place in the hottest 50 years in the global rankings (in 2010 it ranked 47th).

Skeptics like to point to 1934 in the U.S. as proof that recent hot years are not unusual. However, this is another example of "cherry-picking" a single fact that supports a claim, while ignoring the rest of the data. Globally,up to 2010, the ten hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998, with 2005 as the hottest.

The fact that there were hot years in some parts of the world in the past is a weak argument against climate change. There will always be regional temperature variations, up and down, as well as hot and cold variations from year to year. These happened in the past, and they will continue in the future along with the long term global surface temperature upward trend that is evident in all the different data sets.

Not really - we like to point out 1934 in the US as proof that the temperatures are being adjusted beyond rational explanation.

Who's 'cherry picking'?

1) Most consecutive days above 100 °F (37.8 °C): 160 days; Marble Bar, Western Australia from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924....a record that still stands to this day.

2) Fastest temperature rise: 27 °C (49 °F) in two minutes; Spearfish, South Dakota, 22nd Jan 1943.....a record that still stands to this day.

3) GLOBAL extreme weather events - 1933-1938

All you believers are so tied up with the so-called 'science' of AGW / ACC, that you totally forget/ignore/defy the historical facts/data.

Is it just a coincidence George M and CeeBee both registered on this site on exactly the same day and within a minute of each other? Not that I’m reading anything into it - just seems odd two pro AGW posters register at nearly exactly the same time?

Really I guess its irrelevant but I thought it interesting.

Move along – nothing to see here….

It is very odd and suspicious.

Though I do not contribute much to these threads, I am always reading these threads. I have been noticing, particularly within the last 12 months, new members that sign up around the same time and immediately start posting in these threads and these threads alone. All of them remain 100% anonymous leaving their profiles blank and their posts all seem very similar. Fortunately most of them just disappear after they have stirred the pot.

My suspicion is they have come on WZ through another forum or a social network site. Possibly members of GetUp, AYCC, Uni campus societies/clubs or similar activist groups.

It is all fun to watch though.

Heh - the paranoia and suspicion on display here by you sceptics is very telling. It won't matter what I say cos you won't believe me anyway so I'll happily leave you to stew in your silly little conspiracy theories.

How long to the climate change tipping point?

Climate change is a serious enough problem, but it could be a lot worse. About half of the carbon dioxide we’ve pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has been absorbed by plants and oceans, rather than staying in circulation to drive up temperatures.

Scientists are convinced this can’t go on forever – but a new study in Nature shows that we haven’t come to the danger point yet. Over the past 50 years, says the report, humans have quadrupled our emissions, but the planet has kept up by doubling the amount of CO2 it absorbed.

That comes as something as a surprise: several earlier, small-scale studies have suggested we might be on the verge of a tipping point where the planet can’t absorb any more carbon dioxide. “So we decided to take a step back and ask, ‘do we see this at a global scale?’” said Ashley Ballantyne of the University of Colorado and lead author of the new report, in an interview, “and the answer is no.”

To get that answer, Ballantyne and his co-authors used what Ingeborg Levin of Heidelberg University, writing in a Nature commentary, called “a strikingly simple approach.” They took estimates of how much CO2 humans have been pumping out over the past half-century and subtracted the amount that has stayed in the atmosphere. Whatever’s left over must have been absorbed by the land (or more accurately, by plants growing on land) or by the ocean; there’s nowhere else it could have gone.

The calculation is so obvious, it probably could have been done long ago, but, said, Ballantyne, “we [scientists] can become too focused on details, and lose sight of the big picture.” It wasn’t quite as easy as it might sound, however. “Our ability to measure CO2 in the atmosphere has gotten a lot better over the years,” Ballantyne said, “but our ability to measure emissions has actually gotten worse.”

The reason, he said, is that nobody measures carbon dioxide emissions directly. Instead, they use economic activity as a proxy – reasonable enough, since economies run on energy, and that energy comes largely from fossil fuels. In developing countries like China and India, he said, “growth is happening really fast, and emissions accounting isn’t necessarily keeping pace, so there’s more error.”

Indeed, said Ballantyne, “10 per cent of our work went to making the calculations, and 90 percent was scratching our heads over the uncertainties.” In the end, the scientists combined emissions estimates from three different sources to ensure they had the best possible information.

What the new study doesn’t answer is where, exactly, the CO2 is being absorbed. One possibility is the lush vegetation in the tropics, where plants take in CO2 for growth, and where, said Ballantyne, very little data is available. Another is the deep oceans – again, a place where scientists and their instruments haven’t gone.

Knowing where the carbon is going is important because it could give scientists a better handle on how much capacity is left.

Sooner or later, however, that capacity will disappear.

Plants take in more CO2 if there’s more in the atmosphere, but only up to a point. The oceans will ultimately stop absorbing carbon dioxide as well, in part because plankton and other sea-based plants will reach their own limits, and also because sea water gets less and less able to take in CO2 as it warms (in some ways, this will be a good thing ).

When the Earth finally does reach its absorption limit, all of the CO2 humans emit will stay in the atmosphere, and that will turbo-charge the pace of global warming.

“We don’t know exactly when we’ll reach the limit,” Ballantyne said, “but our models suggest things will turn around on land, at least, sometime in the coming century, maybe even by 2030-2050. I would really hope,” he said, “that we can cut back on fossil fuel emissions before that.”

link

Woohoo! Yet another freaked out scaremongering tactic emloyed by people with an agenda who openly admit they have no idea whether what they are saying has any basis in reality.

The admins have access to IP Loookup tools that will tell if the members are registering from the same computer/server, and they can also drill down and see where they are posting from and with cooperation from a facility such as say Sydney University they can resolve IP addresses to a network port and mac address of a computer.

Not hard to do with the right tools and know how. Traceroute can do a similar thing.

Members also require a legitimate email address to register from so if two or more members register from a email adress like @sydney.edu.au and both registered within a couple of seconds of each other smacks of trolls registering, there will more than likely be several more that haven't been used yet so they can fall back on them when it gets too hot or they get banned under one username they create another one. It was pretty basic trollish tactics on several forums I have owned and quite easy to deal with. (You just ban them by a combination of username/email/ip address.

They probably think they are super cool uber cyber heroes fighting against the horrible planet wrecking sceptics and just like most hare brained uni students once they leave uni and engage in the real world they find their ideals sadly lacking in credibility.

It's becoming obvious that a lot of regular posters on this forum are actually starting to get a good laugh out of the rigidly fixated pre-ClimateGate / pre-Copenhagen mind set and antics of Ceebee, PG and one or two of their parrots who put their heads up.

CeeBee at least does seem to have a reasonable intelligence quotient. Pity he doesn't make use of it for a more constructive purpose. At the moment it is just a sad waste of a mind.
_PG_, probably intelligent but judging by his past performances and posts on this forum, the IQ exhibited here at times arguably matches his shoe size.
The parrots? Who knows?

Might be interesting to do a post on the psychology of the warmist believers sometime as the two or three rigidly dogmatic warmists on this forum seem to exhibit a psychology that matches a lot of the psychological attributes of cultism.

For the first time in history, people shouting “the end is nigh” are somehow the sane ones, while those of us who say it is not are now the lunatics!

Quote from the "NZ Climate Science Coalition".

And to help make the rest of CeeBee's and PG's day from no less than the radical leftist, Robert Manne.

Robert Manne's article is a must read for both sides of the debate.

AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE: RESPONSE TO MANNE – THE DIAGNOSIS IS OUTSTANDING, IT IS THE CORRECTIVE THAT IS NEEDED

Firstly, Robert Manne should be congratulated on his outstanding contribution to our understanding of the history of climate denial, its effectiveness and its achievements.

Manne writes with all the erudition, mastery of facts and passion one has come to expect of him as a writer and intellectual.

Titled “A dark victory: how vested interests defeated climate science“, the essay provides a condensed history of the denial movement, its key achievements and the shape of its “victory” – the defeat of global agreements on carbon dioxide reduction and the turning of public opinion against science and scientists.

For those of us familiar with the details of the debate, the players and their tactics there is nothing we don’t know: Manne cites the work of Oreskes & Conway (Merchants of Doubt), Gelbspan (The Heat is on), Hoggan (Climate cover up), Schneider (Science as a contact sport) and Mann (The hockey stick and the climate wars).

This is by no means a criticism, as the majority of Australians are either indifferent to the debate or ignorant to the players and their way in which they have sought to manipulate public opinion. Manne’s essay provides an extremely useful summary of the literature on climate change denial. It serves as a useful primer for anyone hoping to understand how we arrived at such a lamentable state.

Read full article

And Robert Manne even has his say in post 29 on that now arch skeptic and former warmist "JoNova's" site.
Along with the commenters of course.