Oh really? So if a scientists tells you that pink bunnies fly and spread fairy dust that we should all take their word for it? Give me a break...

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Absolutely! No...wait...

Anyway, I saw a show on the History Channel called Little Ice Age - Big Chill. Good show BTW. They talked about the warm period before the little ice age. Warm weather father north and such. I think that's what we're in now. A warming period to be followed in a few hundred years by another chill. I don't think we are having that big of an effect on the weather. That doesn't mean we should not try to take care of the place though. At anyrate summer here looks like it's going to be a whole lot of no fun.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

Hey Dragon Star -was that you on the academy awards? I thought I saw you in one of the "epic" clips. You award winners are all alike. I think the footlights do something to people. Frontal warming? Gas-house effect? I wonder why they call it "O S C A R"? OH Be- Haaaaaaav!

Certainly it is not the only evidence, but I was replying to a point that was specifically about alpine glaciers. The book does a great job of outlining the current situation with what we are learning by studying alpine glaciers.

Of course, there are hundreds of journal articles, starting with Science and Nature, on the topic of why the current climate change is unusual.

Besides, what is wrong with books? Libraries can be good sources of information. I realize that is somewhat old-fashioned.

The BA had a nice blog entry on March 5, Comic Science, which of course, covers the anti-science response to climate studies (as well as other scientific studies).

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/

NOTE: Edited to remove some comments that were personal.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

Like I told Taks, if you have overwhelming evidence that the article (and all similar articles) are flawed, write a response.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

I have closed this thread for a short time while we sort out who is slinging ad homs. Hopefully during this time heads will cool, and you can debate the issue without feeling insulted.

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Forming opinions as we speak

A reminder: please keep the discussion polite.

There's no need to get personal or snipe at other posters. If that happens again, formal warnings will be issued for civility & decorum violations.

I have reopened the thread. Keep it cool. No official warnings this time.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Ok..Ok..I am sorry for snapping on you aurora, i just got a little hot is all.

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The upside is being able to see a beautiful conifer forest in Antarctica peninsula....

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

and so far, they have almost ALL been based on flawed statistical analyses. looking back at the climate change over history, really, i dare you to define "normal."

nothing at all. my point is you expect us to believe this is an unusual amount of change based on... a book. and no, there is not "hundreds" claiming our current climate change is not normal. most claims of statistical abnormality revolve around a very small group of dedicated scientists... of which, many were recently discredited pretty badly in the NAS forum on just this topic (well, climate change in general).

we've already seen exactly how reliable the evidence of a long-term shrinking of the antarctic is... not very.

haven't read it yet... i will. and i'll probably comment.

a statistical analysis of flawed statistics, btw, is not an anti-science response.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

is there? i know the peninsula is warming, well, the waters around it are warmer for sure. the la nina might change that, however.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

there's been lots of proof, aurora, and i've posted links to several statistical studies. Here is a great place to start with the debunking of the IPCC's much treasured hockey stick view as presented by mann, et. al. oddly, mann's bio calls out his expertise in applying statistical methods to climate research, yet he walked out of the NAS panel briefing saying "i'm not a statistician!"

the climate changes all the time, aurora, hence the MWP and LIA. those were changes that occured in much shorter periods with much greater overall increases/decreases. the overall warming seen this century (er, 20th century) is less than 1 C. we can't even claim accuracy of the current global mean temperature to 1 C (NASA GISS estimates +/- 1 C is our estimated measuring accuracy) yet somehow 1 C is statistically meaningful? really, it's a joke that there are ANY scientists claiming our current "trends" are abnormal.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

I started "Here" and see no references in any links there to the data used for the graphing of temp. chge. ? Maybe I should start somewhere else? Simply put, what is the data based on? temp at one location? many places? tree rings? glacial layers? "HELP."

P.S. Aurora: Books, Old Fashioned? The day that digital retrieval of data no longer needs black symbols on white paper (books) will be a sad day only surpassed by when the lights go out.

fr. wayne: there are plenty of places to find temperatures... a bit of a tutorial first, and then i'll try to hunt down some good links for you.

type 1: actual temperature records. these go back about 100-150 years, though the further back, the less reliable AND, the less dense (in terms of total coverage of the earth). there are a variety of places to find these temperatures, but it is harder to find an "aggregate." the latter will always be difficult as there is much debate on what a mean temperature is, and means from a statistical standpoint (trying to describe a chaotic system with a simple "mean" value over a year's worth of data is quite the task).

type 2: single proxy studies. this is where a scientist takes a sample of some sort and attempts to calbrate it against temperature. these are typically unreliable, yet sometimes they still slip through (for example, how can a single cave in china with slagmites be a good indicator of global temperature?)

type 3: multi-proxy studies. these are the most prevalent in the literature. this is where they take several studies, most prominently the much touted tree-rings, and attempt to combine them to look at past temperatures. these, as well, need to be calibrated against measured temperatures to determine their validity. this is the primary area of my interest from a statistical standpoint.

type 4: satellite temperatures, typically of the upper troposphere. the newest, and therefore least reliable in terms of long term trends. these, however, are probably the most accurate measurements we have as far as actual temperatures... you just can't use them to calibrate anything longer than a decade or so. the hard part is pushing down through the troposphere to predict surface temperatures.

NASA's GISS website has a pretty long record. there are a few others, and the best i can say for now is to hit the climateaudit website and browse their links on the bottom right hand side of the page...

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

btw, aurora, i read the blog from the 5th, what does that have to do with this discussion? i'm not a huge fan of marburg either...

anyway, i got to thinking and here's a good argument for you:

first, you claim that current temperature (er, climate) changes are "not normal." fine, i'll accept your thesis for the purpose of this construction.

given current abnormal climate change, i'll assume you have some idea of what constitutes "normal," right? if not, then the first thesis is, by default, unprovable therefore a moot point and not worth discussing any further.

i'll accept that you have some idea of normal as a basis of comparison (what is abnormal without normal to compare it too?)

now, i have two choices, either disprove your normal basis, or show that the current changes are not abnormal at all, but within statistical expectations given past climate (both of which go back to the idea of normal, btw).

i'll start with a statistical expectation on past climate applied to today. assuming that we define abnormal as > 0.6 C change in 100 years (current, discounting urban heat island effect, which could drop that some unknown amount).

given a definition of abnormal as above, all i need to do is show a similar climate change in the past. i.e. proof by contradiction.

i offer both the little ice age and the medieval warming period. both are known to be the result of several degrees C swing within in a century or so (the decline out of the MWP into the LIA was very drastic).

simply put, we've seen worse, twice, within the last 1000 years. QED.

of course, you could always argue that we don't know the temperature accurately enough 1000 years ago to make that assumption.

this brings me to my second proof, discounting your normal basis. if we don't know the temperature accurately enough 1000 years ago, how can you arrive at what is normal, and therefore formulate a basis for your claim of what constitutes abnormal?

taks

PS: what's funny about the idea of a "normal" climate, is that bathcat (was that his name) was hollering something about "nobody is claiming that there was some standard temperature and now it has changed!" yes, they are claiming that... lots of people are.

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

SUMMARY: Researchers have completed the first comprehensive survey of Antarctic ice mass; not surprisingly, ice loss is on the rise - mostly from the West Antarctic ice shelf. From 2002 to 2005, the continent lost enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 1.2 mm (0.05 inches). The measurements were made by the GRACE satellite, which detects slight changes in the Earth's gravity field over time. This is the most accurate estimate of Antarctic ice loss ever made.

View full article
What do you think about this story? post your comments below.

Ok, Taks, your explanation of multi-proxy is good enough for me. I suspect that your approach is strong on data and Aurora's is long on conjecture. All of us have had our share of alarmist headlines prior to Y2K and should brace for another round in Maya2012. I do see one red flag concerning glaciers and/or ice records which may or may not mean anything more than a shift in water/wind currents. It boils down to not temperature variations but actual water supply. So my main interest in following this thread is an irrational fear that water is somehow escaping our atmosphere as opposed to recycling. No I don't believe aliens are stealing it. But with all the past ice ages studied (e.i. massive continental-size glaciers capable of moving mountains only 10,000 years ago) we still know so little about the totals of water volume on Earth. Is it depleting? No matter how much water we humans use THAT amount is totally recycleable. But what if the Sun periodic outbursts are stripping away our supply without temperature change? These questions I have for this thread. The data to discern any scientific answers must lie in the ice records.

On the other hand, there weren't 6.5 billion people back then.

OK, climate is changing. That is a fact. We know that a stable climate is a myth. In fact, the post-Ice Age climate has been unusually stable which may have helped in the rise of human civizations.

We know from the geological record that there have been huge climate shifts in the past. However, although they've been rapid, the current change is predicted to be much more rapid.

It is of course possible that we've been overestimating the effect of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In that case, the current change is normal and reverses eventually.

But if the current change is due to human activities and is speeding up, we're on the brink of a catastrophe of unprecedented scale. Rapid changes changes in nature stress ecosystems, which has inexorable effects on humans.

For that possibility, even if it just a possibility, I think it is irresponsible to just dismiss global warming. We simply don't know what may happen. I don't think that economic losses (which are often exaggerated) is a good reason not to curb greenhouse gas emissions. It really isn't waste of resources, because it helps cleaning the air also from other pollutants, which already have dire effects on health of millions of people. And that costs.

PS. ...on the other hand, I don't mind warmer climate here. It is already March and in the morning the temperature was -26 °C. Brrrr....

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

QED? I don't think so. The MWP was about 0.5° warmer than before, and the LIA was about 1° cooler than the WMP. Furthermore, the change wasn't very drastic at all: it went over about 200 years for the WMP, and some 300 years from the WMP to the LIA.
See e.g. this page from the University of California.
Looking at other graphs that are smoothed out (as annual changes make it harder to see a trend), we notice regional temperature graphs that do not support your assertion, like this Czech one, or this North American one (notice that the timescale is larger for the older data, so a "spike" in the past is in fact a much smoother change than a recent spike). A reconstruction for the whole of the Northern Hemisphere doesn't show those "several degrees swing within a century", but a variance of max 0.4° C between the year 1000 and 1800. The increase since then is quite impressive though.
A larger change from MWP to LIA is seen in China, but again the current warming is more pronounced, and there are no changes of several degrees in one century to be seen.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

For those interested in water loss, see http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/physicsearth.html
basically says So my "one red flag" turns out to be "yellow?"

I could be possible if the trend continues. A cold temperate Antarctic peninsula could be a place for future climate refugees (like me)...

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

To those in denial of global warming and the inevitable impacts, Antartica was the last bastion. First, there was the interpretation of satellite mean atmospheric temperatures, which seemed to show no increase in mean temperature. The researchers retracted this conclusion when it was pointed out to them that in their data mining, they had neglected time slippage in the satellite orbits, and they were comparing nighttime temperatures to datetime.

Then there was (and is) the massive increases in snow and Ice depth in certain parts of Antartica. But this buildup is clearly being out-paced by Ice depletion around the edges. The pace is chilling.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

that's the point!

i.e. there weren't 6.5 billion people yet STILL the climate managed to change, rather drastically, twice in the last millenium. that destroys the whole "normalcy" theory as well as human influence being a strong forcer.

yeah, to think that in the past, climate changes were even more drastic than we've seen recently. ugh.

depends upon who you're reading. if you follow mann, et. al. yes. however, when they run their latest set of models, after training on the known temperatures from the late 1800s to the mid-late 1900s, they're experiencing a "divergence problem" with the model and actual measured temperatures since about 1980 to now. in other words, their prediction method can't really predict (past or future, actually).

it is also possible that we've overestimated cause and effect. i.e. CO2 may be an effect, not a cause, of what we are seeing. climatological records may support this. see dgruss23 for more on the subject.

define rapid and also, not many scientists are claiming any changes are speeding up.

yes, i agree, we don't know. which begs the question "why do anything other than adapt?"

long-term, yes. rather, i mean, we should be developing alternative sources of energy, as well as technology to better adapt to changes in the environment and even technology to better protect the environment. unfortunately, the policies recommended by the alarmists are MUCH more restrictive for now...

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

yes.

man, really, how much longer are you going to continue posting links to the same data set from jones and mann?

this is a tree-ring proxy reconstruction which was intentionally used to remove the impact of the MWP and LIA!

edit: i've read through the others and the ones that i can actually discern a data source, are all tree-ring proxies. not a surprise.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

it should be noted that jones is famous for this quote to warwick hughes:

so much for science and reproducibility. and no, jones still does not release his data. mann did, finally, after the barton committe forced him to.

they also finally release their r2 statistic, for cross-validation, and it was near zero, meaning the tree-ring proxies are all but worthless as a temperature record. most proxies actually are worthless in this respect simply because they correlate to many variables, not just temperature.

it should also be noted that every participant save one (michael mann) at the recent NAS panel, when asked "can we estimate the temperature 1000 years ago to within 0.5 C", said no. mann still claims 0.2 C. we can't even measure our current temperature within a half degree, nor 1000 years ago, yet somehow we know that current trends are abnormal?

yeah, right.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

My point was that during these climate shifts there were much less people and there were also much less stress on the environment back then. If now we encounter similar shifts, the consequences may be devastating.

I really, really hope that we have been wrong and the predicted global warming doesn't occur. But if we see the symptoms already, it may be too late to act.

Couple of degrees in a century is rapid change. It is not known if the warming becomes self-sustaining.

There is a saying that an intelligent person finds out how to solve a problem, but a wise person avoids it.

What we really need is more knowledge how the climate works, and climate data. We also must keep our heads cool, and solve the problem rationally. This has become way too much a battle between nothing's-gonna-happenists versus we're-doomedists.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

gotcha... maybe, maybe not, however... we're pretty adaptable.

as if we can do anything anyway... at least, without bankrupting ourselves and creating disaster that way. like i said, the apocalyptic predictions are statistically invalid. one of the presenters at the NAS conference noted that given the confidence in some of the predictions, floor-to-ceiling intervals are possible. i.e. it could be anywhere, we don't know.

true and true, but we've only seen about 0.6 (depends upon who you're referencing) and that does not account for urban heat island effect (the impact on stations that are near urban areas).

hehe, sounds intentionally facetious (the saying, not you saying it...). i.e. sort of an ignorance is bliss kinda thing.

YAY!!! i agree 100% with this. really, this all starts with reproducibility of results. the scientists that are sounding the alarm (so to speak) and driving the IPCC to recommend massive changes to policy need to open their data and methods to scrutiny by others. why this has not happened is beyond me, but statements like those uttered by jones (above) are unbelievably counter to everything ANY true scientist should ever believe.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...

One of my links is Jones et al., the others not.We know how you think about that one. The other ones are not all "tree-ring proxies" (and we all know what you think about these as well), the Chinese one e.g.:
A multi-proxy, not a treering proxy.
The "Little Pine Lake" data aren't treering proxies at all, but pollen based.

And I haven't seen any evidence for your claims, only empty dismissals of my counterevidence.

But perhaps you want more counterevidence? A study from the temperatures in the Central Alps (Stalagmite record, no tree rings around) shows a difference between the MWP mas and the LIA min of 1.7°, with current temperatures already back at that max temp of the MWP.
What more do we have? Oh, yes, Moberg 2005, combining treering with other proxies, agrees with me as well.
This Chinese stalagmite study also shows no "several degrees C swing", and show that the current temperature is the highest od the last 2500 years in that area.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

did you even bother to read the link? the third line clearly states "records obtained from ice cores, tree rings, lake sediments and..."

bold mine.

the tree-rings studies are almost all multi-proxy. the tree-rings just happen to dominate the results. i've discussed this at length.

as i said, i couldn't tell which data set these all came from. this is a single proxy, which can hardly be used to determine global temperatures. the argument i made is about global mean temperature.

the mere fact that we can't measure past temperatures within a half a degree, nor current temperatures within a half a degree is enough to prove my point. and i also made that clear. as for empty dismissals, it's not hard to dismiss multitudes of evidence when every paper is the same data set. not sure how many times i have to repeat the same argument in the face of identical evidence.

uh, this actually supports my argument, btw, that the changes back then are no worse than now (i've never claimed the MWP was much warmer than now anyway). note also that this, again, is a single proxy study.

also, from the abstract "The high correlation of this record to Δ14C suggests that solar variability was a major driver of climate in Central Europe during the past 2 millennia." that's dgruss23's argument.

again, using tree-rings is the problem. these are ALL using the same data. moberg is just another rehash of the same flawed data. the tree-rings dominate the result.

moberg's been beat up pretty badly for his statistical arguments as well. we still haven't figured out how using a wavelet analysis provides any benefit since they are nothing more than filter banks.


this supports my argument, too? do you realize what you're saying? this article clearly states that the last few millenia have seen rapid scale swings in temperature. that's what the basis of my argument was...

also, again, this is a single proxy study, and more correlated to CO2 than anything. i've pointed this out to you as well once before, from the abstract: "Observations of soil CO2 and drip water suggest that the temperature signal is amplified by the soil-organism-CO2 system and recorded by the annual layer series."

thanks for the help, btw.

taks

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goodbye richard pryor :(...