April 4, 2012
Category: climate science
Another one in the eye for the solarists. K. Rypdal, JGR VOL. 117, D06115, 14 PP., 2012 doi:10.1029/2011JD017283:
I show that the peak-to-peak amplitude of the global mean surface temperature response to the 11-year cyclic total irradiance forcing is an order of magnitude less than the amplitude of a cyclic component roughly in phase with the solar forcing which has been observed in the temperature record in the period 1959-2004. If this cyclic temperature component were a response to the solar forcing, it would imply the existence of strong amplifying feedbacks which operate exclusively for solar forcing, such as top-down mechanisms responding to the large variability in the ultraviolet part of the solar spectrum. I demonstrate, however, that the apparent cyclic component in the temperature record is dominated by the response to five major volcanic eruptions some of which incidentally took place a few years before solar minimum in four consecutive solar cycles, and hence that the correlation with the solar cycle is coincidental. A temperature rise of approximately 0.15 K over the 20th century ascribed to an increasing trend in solar forcing is more than offset by a cooling trend of about 0.3 K due to stratospheric aerosols from volcanic eruptions.
Or in other words, you can't do attribution just by looking for cycles that you'd like to see in the records. That wazzock Scafetta springs to mind.
They even provide a list of Key Points:
* Solar cycle signal in global temperature is no more than 0.02 degrees K
* A 0.2 K periodic signal observed in phase with solar cycle is due to volcanoes
* Volcano cooling in 20th century more than offsets solar activity warming
Disclaimer: I've only read the abstract, but it seems clear enough.
Refs
* The 11 year solar cycle signal in transient simulations from the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model - not directly relevant, mind.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 7:51 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 2, 2012
Category: wikipedia
Strange - you might think - but not so bizarre that some people don't think it. Here is the quote
William, given the article's clearly supposedly-sceptical viewpoint, I did not expect my edit to survive but, 8 minutes! Wow, you are red hot! I note your track record of getting into trouble with Moderators over edit-warring issues, so will not be so foolish as to do the same with you myself. However, is there anything you would care to say in your defence that will prevent me from writing you off as a climate change denier?
Why does he call me "William"? I don't know him, he doesn't know me. Is he a foreigner? No, he is British - or so he claims. But clearly not a well-bred one. I delicately suggested that he might get a clue (as the hip doodz say) from Conservapedia, but he doesn't seem to have done so.
What has him so hot under the collar? The runaway greenhouse effect article. This has always been rather poor: largely because, as the article says, A runaway greenhouse effect is not a clearly defined term; and because it was edited by Andrewjlockley, who is part of the AMEG crowd. And because people keep confusing it with positive feedback. Our man wanted something less ambiguous, and there is a not-very-exciting talk page thread.
All this has odd echoes of last week's tempest but Martin Charles Lack is not Andrew Judd - he seems to know when to back off, for one thing.
Largely irrelevant refs
* [[List of Viz comic strips]]. Check for "Captain Oats" - I still remember that one. I personally rescued Mickey's Monkey Spunk Moped from redirection.
* No lessons learned from Climategate ? Fred Pearce and the New Scientist attack anti-nuclear book - this is a guest post at WUWT by Martin Cohe[n]. It contains refs to "Climategate", therefore by WUWT standards it is publishable; but it is so laughably incoherent that even the regulars think it should be pulled. My comment.
* The Fireplace Delusion - meant to be about religion, but would fit the denialists, too. h/t Paul.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 4:10 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 31, 2012
Category: generic stupidity
Well, so what's new with that, I hear you say? And indeed, not much is the answer. But its a saturday night so some knock-about fun is in order.
So, Watts, along with most of the septic blogosphere, was all over An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula by Zunli Lua et al.. Not because they care about the science, but because the abstract says This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula. In septic-world, it is very important that the MWP and LIA be global, so that instantly turned into a headline of "Yes, I know, I covered it first: The Medieval Warm Period was Global" in Watts-world. Actually, I have reservations as to whether their figures support even their text (it is yet another "we found some warm bits and we found some cold bits, and since the MWP and LIA time-spans are so vague, we called the warm bits MWP and the cold bits LIA").
But all this misrepresentation, although obvious enough, has clearly annoyed the authors, who now say
"It is unfortunate that my research, "An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula," recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has been misrepresented by a number of media outlets.
Several of these media articles assert that our study claims the entire Earth heated up during medieval times without human CO2 emissions. We clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the Antarctic Peninsula. The results should not be extrapolated to make assumptions about climate conditions across the entire globe. Other statements, such as the study "throws doubt on orthodoxies around global warming," completely misrepresent our conclusions. Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend."
Watts has been obliged to update his post, but is still in denial, errm, which is exactly where he is supposed to be so that is all right then, best beloved.
And in other news
* General Motors pulls funding from climate sceptic thinktank Heartland. As they say The funding cut - just $15,000 a year - is small beer for the institute, which has a multi-million dollar turnover, largely from a single anonymous donor, so this isn't as exciting as it might seem.
* BA has a nice pic of an underwater volcano errupting, visible from its plume in the water.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 4:42 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 27, 2012
Category: climate communication
Nice article in physicstoday.
Other stuff
* Wiley coverup: The great Wegman and Said "redo" to hide plagiarism and errors - the Wegman stuff keeps rumbling on. Wegman reminds me of the TSA guy here - what he says isn't believeable, but he has powerful organisations propping him up, because having him admit error would be embarrassing.
* Hansen Wins - Wabbett sez the US is going to require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. That would be a good result, but the wrong way to do it. The right way is a carbon tax, not an arbitrary limit.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:07 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 25, 2012
Category: politics
So, the Tories have been naughty boys again and everyone is shocked - shocked, I tell you - to discover that all that money that people pay to the political parties is actually paid for something, rather than just given for love. Well, its a bit of fun but I doubt it goes anywhere, because no-one is surprised. Labour will posture, but then squirm when their union money comes up. The house of Lords is stuffed with people who bought their way in.
My 'umble prediction is that the "main" damage will come from an impression of incompetence, and it won't be much. They are supposed to be sufficiently competent to do this stuff quietly. Its similar - ha, obligatory link to climate stuff - to the Heartland stuff; their main damage from that is going to come from anonymous donors, who won't trust them to keep their names quiet.
Misc
* The U.S. Navy - Navigating Through a Changing Climate - h/t Todd.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:12 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: wikipedia
Wiki isn't as exciting as it used to be - the days of vast opposing armies swirling across the blood-soaked plains of global warming laying waste to innocent and combatant alike have faded into myth. Nowadays we (or rather they; I don't even need to join in) have exciting discussions about exactly how to portray the 97%-of-scientists-agree stuff.
But now and again something interesting happens, and it has just recently, culminating in a chap called Andrewedwardjudd getting himself indef'd for legal threats. This throws up a couple of interesting issues. The first is, that though wiki can look rather free-n-easy, and while it is possible to be completely useless, do nothing but get in the way of other productive editors, and still not get blocked for years on end; there are some things that wiki does care about and that will get you instantly indef'd: and making legal threats, or things that can be interpreted as such, is one of them (see WP:NLT). The offending text is There are laws against libel, and Wiki should not be encouraging this kind of law breaking by so openly supporting such stupid behaviour. That gets you You have been blocked indefinitely from editing for making legal threats or taking legal action. If you would like to be unblocked, you may appeal this block by adding the text {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}, but you should read the guide to appealing blocks first. The correct response, and the expected response from people who were acting in good faith but got rather carried away, is "oops, sorry, I didn't mean to make a threat, please accept my assurances that what I wrote was misinterpreted, and just to be on the safe side I now withdraw/rephrase what I said". The incorrect response (at least, incorrect if you want to be unblocked) is to make the threats explicit.
This may be a good place to point out that "indef'd" - as in, indefinitely blocked - just means "blocked with no explicit duration". It doesn't always mean "blocked for a long time", either (it can sometimes, but not in this case; it just means blocked-until-you-come-to-your-senses).
Soooo... how did this regrettable situation arise?
It is all a fight over wording on the Greenhouse effect article. Oddly, it isn't a "skeptic"-vs-science fight; Aej was, he thought, just correcting the science; or perhaps the wording - he never managed to make his point quite clear (I'm not going to bother go into the details, since they aren't the point; some of the 2nd-law-of-thermo-stuff you see around; for example, this). However, what he did manage to do was to break WP:3RR, which is the don't-revert-more-than-3-times-in-24h rule (I remember the "good old days" before this rule came in; things could be utter chaos. Indeed, even after the rule came in it was initially interpreted quite tightly; you could edit war for weeks on end unblocked, as long as you stuck to 3-per-24h. But nowadays admins would call that "edit warring" and warn-then-block you for it fairly soon). He got a warning about it, which he ignored; he got a note that he'd broken it and an offer to hold off if he'd take a break; he got a note from a heavyweight admin advising him to take a break and he ignored it all; so I reported him for edit warring.
And he got a 48h topic ban. Which was a fairly lightweight result - most people could expect a block for all that; but there was a fairly clear sense that he was trying to do his best and could potentially be valuable. At this point, anyone sane is expected to get the hint, back off, and lie low for 48h. The motto coming here is, if you can't do that, you need to step gently away from they keyboard. But he didn't, he just broke the topic ban instead. And so he got blocked for 48h instead. This, again, should have been a hint to stop escalating but no; he just responded with more fire which lead to his indef. The lesson here is that wiki is looking for some hint that you are prepared to work with others; to act reasonably; to de-escalate; any of those, combined with some kind of decent editing, can be made into an unblock. The reverse - continual escalation all the way up to legal threats, then digging in even deeper (amusingly headlined "You guys just dont know when to give up do you?") is doomed. Once you start talking like that, people know what to do with you and what pigeon hole to put you in, and getting out again is hard (did someone mention self-awareness?).
So children, remember: if you want to edit wiki, please do, but if you start getting heavy hints that you are out of line, its best to cast around for some advice rather than just keep on digging.
(Incidentally, since I'm here, Photon polarization looks like it needs help from someone competent).
Update: the saga now includes the final step in the process: if you make enough unblock requests without thinking, and continue the legal threats, then your talkpage access will be revoked.
Update: I was wrong! There is a further step in the saga, one I should have anticipated. The next step is for the banned user to either (a) WP:SOCKpuppet or (b) get someone else to post for him, aka WP:MEATpuppetry. We've now got (b): [1], [2] is "Andrewswife" who has been thrown into the middle of this dispute to defend her husband (to be fair, I doubt they even knew this wasn't allowed; neither seem terribly familiar with the rules). That isn't a tenable position; fortunately Vsmith has drawn a veil over the process, hatting the discussion with Proxying for indef blocked user and blocking "Andrewswife". That is, arguably, a bit harsh, as I doubt she knows what is going on.
Update: just to make it clear that there is nothing desperately exciting about this, here is another chap, just indef'd for edit warring at Free will. And another, for edit warring at Angle trisection.
Refs
* http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/01/A childs garden of wikipedia
* Over in the comments at Rabett Run - Eli being a bit cruel.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 6:05 AM • 82 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2012
Category:
As this Economist debate demonstrates, the people in charge are stupid, complacent, wasteful, smug, mendacious and incompetent. Not that uncommon, alas.
Refs
* The Economist Debate on Airplane Security
Posted by William M. Connolley at 6:26 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 22, 2012
Category: sea ice
Arctic Methane Emergency Group? refers. Via GP I find this discussion on a "geoengineering" newsgroup (gosh how quaint - people still use newsgroups? Maybe retro is back). AJL finds my article "damming" but Ken C finds it "a little distasteful". But both are worried, quite rightly, about credibility if the AMEG's wilder claims (and people) aren't challenged.
Ken C points to September Arctic sea ice predicted to disappear near 2oC global warming above present (JGR, doi:10.1029/2011JD016709) which is interesting, because that is very non-catastrophic and very non-nearterm: 2 oC puts it at ~2070 or something, depending on your scenario.
A recalibration of an ensemble of global climate models using observations over 28 years provides a scenario independent relationship and yields about 2oC change in annual mean global surface temperature above present as the most likely global temperature threshold for September sea ice to disappear, but with substantial associated uncertainty.
Which brings me on to Now, and Cryosphere Today has a nice interactive chart, which I've inlined above (see-also). This year - yellow - seems quite wobbly; from bumping along the bottom it is now well up in the middle of the pack. But that is midwinter; there is still all to play for in the year ahead.
Switching very briefly to methane (the AMEG people were a bit annoyed their nice discussion had got hijacked by sea ice), the pic here shows... nothing very exciting. And it is Barrow, not global, per special request of Eli. This provides some kind of constraint on the hugeosity of whatever methane release is occurring in the Arctic.
And so, in the end, back to the Dark Side, where Watts had some story about sea ice. I ignored the bit about the Skate - if you're interested, Eli has the story on that, and the other half too. But the bit about IPCC '90 using pre-1978 sea ice was more interesting. Its true, they did (though it was a surprise to me). Presumably because back in 1990 the SSMI/R record was rather short, and it wasn't obviously silly to use other stuff (for the full story, and exactly what other stuff, read RMG who knows). Anyway, I guessed wrong: it wasn't ESMR (couldn't have been, as RMG points out, because there would have been gaps). But what is fun, if you're a detatched spectator, is how the Watties once again jump onto the good old conspiracy theories of how things were pure then but the global conspiracy has subsequently conspired to wipe out any memory of our giant reptilian overlords whatever. This is definitely a case where you don't need fancy explanations for their errors. There is a constant stream of junk, no time to think or evaluate, and no need anyway - its all denialotainment, nothing real, and like the headline in the Daily Mail will be conveniently forgotten very soon.
Oh, and don't mention Scafetta.
Refs
* Anthony Watts Misleading His Readers About Surface Temperature Record - it might be convenient to put this where I might find it again
* How reversible is sea ice loss? J. K. Ridley, J. A. Lowe, and H. T. Hewitt
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:10 PM • 40 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 21, 2012
Category: fun
I like this (h/t: QS):
The change from "Oh look that's fun, lets stop and watch" to the brief "Oh shit" to the "Ha ha, we all lived, that was great fun" to "who got it on video?" is oh-so-typical of our species.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 7:46 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My family and me.
