Posts by NomNomNom

Re: The public is probably not so ignorant

"I think history shows that mankind is actually rather adept at putting right its mistakes."

Give me an example of a mistake on a global climate scale that man has put right.

Man could barely cope with plugging a relatively small oil leak in the gulf two years back.

Re: Scientists despair of the public's waning interest

"The thing that amazes me most is the life of this silliness given that a casual look at a sea level curve over geological time (e.g. 250 million years) will show that the rate of rise and fall of sea level is quite variable."

And the dinosaur cities survived just fine didn't they!

Re: (Slightly) longer term view

That's the annual mean trend you've calculated there. The summer minimums is declining much faster. Unfortunately woodfortrees allows me to highlight the summer minimum, but not to stick a trendline through it unless anyone can figure out how?

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:1979.6/every:12/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/trend/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/trend/every:12/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/scale

Re: Biggest thing my cat ever brought in...?

the worst is when you open the boot of your car and find someone's body and you have to get to work, do you leave the body in the boot and go to work anyway or do you take it out and bury it?

Re: Science Grade: Prince of Wales (E-)

"You want self replicating nanobots that eat anything? Leave a slice of bread out for a month and watch it go mouldy. Mould is severely limited in speed because chemical reactions take time. You can't change the laws of physics and chemistry."

Imagine that human beings, animals and crops suddenly had no resistance to mould. How long would it take for everything to die?

Re: Please could you run this past me again?

I ran out of stack space processing that statement

Re: US leadership in space

The US has leadership?

Re: FUD

WTF is a FUD? is it short for "fuddy duddy"? I dont even know what that means but I have heard it before. Hope it isn't racist...

Re: Good work as always Lewis!

You are almost beyond parody. Massive grants from the "world governments"? The conspiracy theory is not even about a "world government" anymore, there are now several of them. I guess the Illuminati run one and the reptilians another? Do clue me in.

The conspiracy theory of a long-game to raise taxes is a joke. If governments wanted to raise taxes they could do so far quicker and easier by simply using any old short-term excuse - oh look we need taxes for the war, we need taxes for the economic downturn to bail out the banks, etc.

The idea that politicians would plan to fund an otherwise esoteric field of science just so in 40 years time some completely different politicians have a setup to levy a specific tax is utterly ludicrous. It doesn't even make sense from a motive point of view, let alone a human behavior point of view.

Re: I didn't bother reading it

I had to laugh at your suggestion, because in my opinion Lewis Page has far more credibility than WUWT.

Imagine a group of people desperately trying to deny and ignore and attack the science and making countless errors doing so. You've just imagined WUWT. It was the site that pushed the now discredited "Watts paper" that told everyone NOAA had adjusted stations two times too warm. We were told it was a "game changer". Days later fatal flaws were discovered in the logic of the paper which rendered that conclusion unsupportable. But funnily enough the claim still got cited as fact in senate testimony.

Then consider the double standards. When Professor Muller of Berkeley released a draft paper without the backing data and code and made a song and dance about it in the media, WUWT and climate skeptics viciously attacked him for doing so. Label it as "science by press release". See how this article handles it for example:

"However each announcement has been aggressively trialled in the press not only before the peer review process had judged them ready for publication - which may not be a major issue - but also before anyone outside the BEST project could examine the papers at all. This requires the ordinary reader to take BEST's accompanying press releases on blind faith - which is not a barrier for some journalists, but is far short of acceptable practice."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/31/best_barnum/

But the Watts paper wasn't peer reviewed either. It was released suddenly and with much hype in a "press release" and the data and code were not made available (and are still not available) for others to "examine the papers". Yet climate skeptics had no problem with this because the paper is cosy for climate skeptics. So it gets the "game changer" treatment:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/30/watts_et_al_temperature_bombshell/

To really grasp the double-standard bear in mind that both the above articles were published just a day apart by the same author.

The pattern is simple: Skeptics clearly don't believe their own complaints about "science by press release" if they are happy to do it themselves. What they are actually doing then is finding any excuse to attack papers they don't like, and heavily advocating the ones they do.

eg "The uptake of carbon dioxide by the oceans and by ecosystems is expected to slow down gradually," Tans said. Oceans, for example, are already becoming more acidic as they absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide pumped into the air by human activities. "As the oceans acidify, we know it becomes harder to stuff even more CO2 into the oceans," Tans said. "We just don't see a letup, globally, yet."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120801132430.htm

Re: My Criticism

"Apart from corrections for UHI - why do the data from good quality stations need adjusting ?"

Well for example if the person monitoring the station switched behaviour and started taking readings at 10pm instead of midnight. There's an error irrespective of station quality is in that case.

Another example would be instrument errors. The station quality metrics are about station placement. An flawed instrument at a good quality sited station can still result in an error.

Re: My Criticism

"But one will make note from the PowerPoint presentation that good and bad stations are adjusted to almost the identical level. Logically, that indicates it is a result of homogenization, not TOBS."

Homogenization is supposed to adjust stations to the same level. The contention is whether that level is too high. But to know that we'd have to know what the TOBS adjustment is in order to compare like with like.

"But USHCN TOBS adjustment is only a little over 0.1 C per Century"

From the graph USHCN TOBS I recollect most of the adjustment is in the latter half of the 20th century. In which case the trend since 1979 would be a lot higher than 0.1C/century.

Re: Simple! Just ignore data you don't like

"They mostly revised up recent temperatures and revised down past temperatures, to exaggerate the trend"

Claims like this are devoid of evidence.

The source code for Hansen's algorithm has been available to download for years (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/). If FORTRAN isn't your thing, someone has even ported it to python (http://clearclimatecode.org/)

Should be easy then to show everyone the part of the code that "revised up recent temperatures and revised down past temperatures, to exaggerate the trend". Yet no-one has ever demonstrated it...

Re: My Criticism

I apologize for using terms like "Lets review where the numbers come from" and "if what I've gleaned" as if I was some kind of celestial guru/pretentious git, I was just in an numbers-in-my-head-im-talking to-myself-to-stay-focused mood. but the main reason for posting another comment here is I didn't emphasize enough that my criticism could be entirely wrong, it should be titled "potential criticism" really

Re: Not likely

Ah ok its just a slight mixup then. Hansen is GISTEMP which is NASA. Hansen/GISTEMP is a different record than NOAA.

On the the otherhand I don't agree with the caption in the figure one of the article you have highlighted. It makes it sound like NOAA has deliberately adjusted well located stations in the wrong direction toward poorly sited stations. Unless NOAA had access to time travel they couldn't have known which stations this paper would classify as well located and poorly sited in order to do that.

Of course the claim could be that NOAA inadvertently adjusted incorrectly, but my impression is that isn't the angle the article is intending to portray.

Re: Seems like good science

"The point is that those labelled as "deniers" by the "true believers" do not disagree about a rise in temperatures."

You'd be surprised at how often climate skeptics do disagree about global warming. For example the Anthony Watts who is subject of this article authored a report in 2010 which contained a "Summary For Policymakers" section. The first point in that summary was:

"Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century."

When every scientist regards 20th century warming as a fact, that certainly does constitute a disagreement with the science. A jaw dropping disagreement IMO.

Re: Not likely

"Hansen's choice to revise upward figures from non-urbanized areas, rather than reducing figures from temperature stations in built-up areas, or producing a weighted average of the two based on land area, looks awfully questionable"

I think you are completely wrong in your description of Hansen's algorithm.

See here where it is described, in particular this part:

"in step 2 they adjust the non-rural stations in such a way that their long-term trend of annual means matches that of the mean of the neighboring rural stations. Records from urban stations without nearby rural staitons are dropped."

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/hansen/hansen.html

Non-rural stations are adjusted to towards rural stations. When there are no rural stations the non-rural stations are excluded.

Can you explain where you got the impression that the opposite adjustment was being made?

Re: @ 90% of population lives near coast

populations will try to hold back the rising seas as long as possible and it'll only end when disaster strikes.

^^ Doesn't trust mans ability to adapt.

Eg New Orleans.

Re: Hang on a second...

"the temperatures of Earth, Mars, Titan, Saturn, and the Gallilean satellites have all risen since the late seventies, and that solar activity (spots, flares, plages, etc) has increased in the same time, for over three sunspot cycles."

We only know that temperature of Earth has increased, not those other bodies you mention. We don't have temperature measuring satellites nor surface instruments measuring sufficient area of any non-earth body to determine it's temperature trends.

More importantly, solar activity has decreased, not increased, since the late 70s (http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1970)

Re: Not man-made

If you can come up with a physical mechanism by which loki can warm the earth then sure