More Warming News!

[seer]

I won't participate in a seer bashing discussion Sea of Red, or slap you in the back for doing it. I've tried gracefully distancing myself from it, but don't go on. Seer is a very good friend of mine, and I respect him. He doesn't share the same opinions as me, and I disagree with him on a number of things, but I admire his determination.

Thank you for that Leonhard.

[Jedidiah]

No, you actually can't. That is not how science works. There has never been, nor will there ever be such a thing as "settled science". All science is variable. The only thing you can be sure of in science is that it will change as new data and hypotheses are introduced.

That was my point exactly. Perhaps I should have used sarcasm tags, eh?

[Sea of red]

I won't participate in a seer bashing discussion Sea of Red, or slap you in the back for doing it. I've tried gracefully distancing myself from it, but don't go on. Seer is a very good friend of mine, and I respect him. He doesn't share the same opinions as me, and I disagree with him on a number of things, but I admire his determination.

That's fine.

Remaining loyal to friends is a good quality to have, which I understand.

[Leonhard]

I won't participate in a seer bashing discussion Sea of Red, or slap you in the back for doing it. I've tried gracefully distancing myself from it, but don't go on. Seer is a very good friend of mine, and I respect him. He doesn't share the same opinions as me, and I disagree with him on a number of things, but I admire his determination.

[Sea of red]

I think seer means well, but I don't think I want to continue in this thread if it turns into news blasting. I could play that game all night and post three critical article citations for every citation he came up with. That's not a dialogue though. I could get the same experience just typing words into Google.

You're being naive young Skywalker.

He's playing stump the chump with you in a game where he simply wastes your time. These kind of people have no intention of reading or following up on the points you've made, nor do they plan to respect the amount of time it takes to write up in depth responses. Each time you have him, he'll simply move on to a new point without any acknowledgment of being incorrect. I know this because I've been to this rabbit-hole hundreds of times and given myself indigestion.

[Leonhard]

Good.

I'm glad I didn't waste my time responding to somebody that doesn't know what they're reading.

I think seer means well, but I don't think I want to continue in this thread if it turns into news blasting. I could play that game all night and post three critical article citations for every citation he came up with. That's not a dialogue though. I could get the same experience just typing words into Google.

[Sea of red]

Personally I was surprised that there wasn't a greater effect when that second group did exactly what Watts wanted.

But no not really, seer randomly linked to an article not really connected to the OP, disputing that the average land temperature (GISS) had set a new record. The author in that article first mentioned data from remote sensors indicated something different, failing to mention that those sensors were focused on the surface sea temperature.

Secondly the author posts the unadjusted (read uncalibrated) data, and vaguely gestures at there being willful manipulation of the data, but providing no real evidence, or argument in the favor of that, except for some link I didn't follow.

Good.

I'm glad I didn't waste my time responding to somebody that doesn't know what they're reading.

[Leonhard]

I'm too lazy to go back and read this whole thing.

Is this that old argument about the urban heat island (UHI) being responsible for the high readings?

Personally I was surprised that there wasn't a greater effect when that second group did exactly what Watts wanted.

But no not really, seer randomly linked to an article not really connected to the OP, disputing that the average land temperature (GISS) had set a new record. The author in that article first mentioned data from remote sensors indicated something different, failing to mention that those sensors were focused on the surface sea temperature.

Secondly the author posts the unadjusted (read uncalibrated) data, and vaguely gestures at there being willful manipulation of the data, but providing no real evidence, or argument in the favor of that, except for some link I didn't follow.

[Sea of red]

I'm too lazy to go back and read this whole thing.

Is this that old argument about the urban heat island (UHI) being responsible for the high readings?

[Leonhard]

You don't plan on interacting with anything I say Seer? I did posts like this with someone on this forum who tends to believe conspiracy theories, and it got old since he would post a news segment. I'd analyse it. He wouldn't respond. Another news segment. Rinse repeat.

There's a lot of nonsense out there. People should pretty much not buy any news report from the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Huffington post.

I'll quickly run through the points, giving a blow by blow and you can ask for more information if you want. This is a letter, not a news article, so its even more dubious. It might as well have been a blog post.

RSS is based on satellite measurements yes, but they measure the sea surface temperature, not land temperature which is what we tend to talk about. I don't know about you, but I don't live in the ocean. The temperature of the ocean is fairly complex and controlled by the face that we have two gigantic icecubes on this planet, with currents running between them, we have odd things such as hot water sinking down because for water colder than 4 degrees celcius, getting closer to 4 degrees makes water denser (hence sinking) hence the ocean is heating from the floor up, not the top down.

In other words, the RSS data is important (and includes bouyes as well as satellites which the articles doesn't mention either).

That article uses unadjusted GISS data as if that's a good thing. I've worked with sensors in the lab, and there were tons of things to adjust for. That's called calibration. On the instruments I worked with, calibration was a straightforward matter, for the microscope you use, have something with a known height and width, adjust software parameters until the measured height and width match the known values. Without that I would sometimes have errors as large as a factor of 2.5. Yes I've taken images of perfectly circular objects, squashed into fat cigar shapes.

The article vague arm waves at this being dubious, but doesn't offer up any problem with it. There's nothing for me to critique, because he never points out anything wrong.

People have already taken the surface temperature data, and done a complete work over of it, excluding all the station that Watts found to be dubious, doing all the work themselves. Watts infamously said that he'd accept the finding of that group. When it came up with something pretty much matching the GISS results... well, lets just say that they're pariahs now.

Until someone can clearly articulate what's wrong with the GISS data, it can be taken as pretty good.

[seer]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/1...#disqus_thread

Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).

But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as “the hottest year ever”.

[Jesse]

Wrong on the underlined. It's claimed about evolution all the time.

Well you got me there . I consider those types no more realistic than the AGW crowd.

[Jesse]

The facts I put on the table about global warming in post #31, haven't varied for decades now. Point to anyone one of them that's undergone any significant amount of change. The only one I can even think of is the holocene warming period, but we've known that one wasn't global and its only only been confirmed later. That's it.

This is all well and good. Decades, when we are talking about global temperatures over time, are not even a decent percentage of what has happened in the last 50 millennia or so. To claim "settled science" when you can not adequately deal with such a large variable data field is nonsense. It can and will change drastically.

Plenty of settled things within biology and physics. The theory of general relativity is largely correct, even if we'll one day discover some extreme (likely Big Bang or blackhole related) extreme cases where something different will occur, the fact that GR describes the motion of things in the universe is utterly settled. Ain't gonna budge. No matter what the Einstein haters will say, clocks slow down when things go faster.

Too many examples from physics to list.

The same with biology.

Fundemental revolutions in science are rare.

I think you are taking what I am claiming much further than I am. I never stated some things where not well established, I said they weren't settled. Nothing in science is ever settled. If it were, scientists would have no need to still test established theories. That is science. To test and see if they still hold up against new-found data and experimentation. Sometimes they still hold up, other times they do not. Again, science is a process. AGW is not even in the same league of other established theories. But time will tell if I'm right.

It does to me, because conservatives playing the "global warming is a liberal conspiracy" strategy is a bad game. First of all its wrong, so they'll never have the evidence on their side on it, those politicians who try to play that game will inevitably smell of crank.

I say, change the game and beat the liberals on their own turf.

Or go on losing. Its up to you guys. At least in Denmark we don't play this game.

I can see it matters to you. I am saying it doesn't matter to me. Why would I care what political philosophies have to say about science? Let conservatives and liberals beat each other over the head with silliness. It doesn't effect me one way or the other.

[Paprika]

In that sense I agree, however they would not be able to do this if it wasn't in fact within the confines of a random fluctuation. If temperature growth has actually flat-lined, they'll be able to find that out eventually

And what does this ambiguous 'eventually' mean? Reduced rate of warming for 11 years is considered within the bounds of natural fluctuation, you said earlier that 30 years (twice and a bit) would falsify the theory but I'm sure a lot of scientists will disagree.

In fact I'm not really sure what you and I are discussing right now. We seem to be in agreement, except we hold different opinions (maybe?) about whether the evidence supports the science of global warming.

I'm primarily dubious about whether the science is of any use now at the moment, since the more severe projections (that there would be disasters abounding) have largely failed or been proven unlikely ("statistically, it’s pretty unlikely that an 11-year hiatus in warming, like the one we saw at the start of this century, would occur if the underlying human-caused warming was progressing at a rate as fast as the most severe IPCC projections").

IMO the climate scientists need to sort out their house given the many wrong predictions and failed models before they (or others) use the products of what is still an immature science to push for drastic economic changes.

[Cerebrum123]

My only bone of contention lies in the idea of claiming "settled science" in an area of science where it could not possibly be the case. For the area is too wide. I have only seen the proponents of AGW use this terminology. You do not see scientists in the area of physics, biology, etc. make such a claim. Nor would they ever dare too because they know their field is too wide and variable.

Is there global warming? I personally believe there is since we should be naturally warming from the last ice age. Does that mean it's man made? No. The jury is still out on that part of it. There is no "settled science" here.

Wrong on the underlined. It's claimed about evolution all the time.