If You Don't Like People Saying That Climate Science is Absurd, Stop Publishing Absurd Un-Scientific Charts
Kevin Drum can't believe the folks at the National Review are still calling global warming science a "myth". As is usual for global warming supporters, he wraps himself in the mantle of science while implying that those who don't toe the line on the declared consensus are somehow anti-science.
Readers will know that as a lukewarmer, I have as little patience with outright CO2 warming deniers as I do with those declaring a catastrophe (for my views read this and this). But if you are going to simply be thunderstruck that some people don't trust climate scientists, then don't post a chart that is a great example of why people think that a lot of global warming science is garbage. Here is Drum's chart:
The problem is that his chart is a splice of multiple data series with very different time resolutions. The series up to about 1850 has data points taken at best every 50 years and likely at 100-200 year or more intervals. It is smoothed so that temperature shifts less than 200 years or so in length won't show up and are smoothed out.
In contrast, the data series after 1850 has data sampled every day or even hour. It has a sampling interval 6 orders of magnitude (over a million times) more frequent. It by definition is smoothed on a time scale substantially shorter than the rest of the data.
In addition, these two data sets use entirely different measurement techniques. The modern data comes from thermometers and satellites, measurement approaches that we understand fairly well. The earlier data comes from some sort of proxy analysis (ice cores, tree rings, sediments, etc.) While we know these proxies generally change with temperature, there are still a lot of questions as to their accuracy and, perhaps more importantly for us here, whether they vary linearly or have any sort of attenuation of the peaks. For example, recent warming has not shown up as strongly in tree ring proxies, raising the question of whether they may also be missing rapid temperature changes or peaks in earlier data for which we don't have thermometers to back-check them (this is an oft-discussed problem called proxy divergence).
The problem is not the accuracy of the data for the last 100 years, though we could quibble this it is perhaps exaggerated by a few tenths of a degree. The problem is with the historic data and using it as a valid comparison to recent data. Even a 100 year increase of about a degree would, in the data series before 1850, be at most a single data point. If the sampling is on 200 year intervals, there is a 50-50 chance a 100 year spike would be missed entirely in the historic data. And even if it were in the data as a single data point, it would be smoothed out at this data scale.
Do you really think that there was never a 100-year period in those last 10,000 years where the temperatures varied by more than 0.1F, as implied by this chart? This chart has a data set that is smoothed to signals no finer than about 200 years and compares it to recent data with no such filter. It is like comparing the annualized GDP increase for the last quarter to the average annual GDP increase for the entire 19th century. It is easy to demonstrate how silly this is. If you cut the chart off at say 1950, before much anthropogenic effect will have occurred, it would still look like this, with an anomalous spike at the right (just a bit shorter). If you believe this analysis, you have to believe that there is an unprecedented spike at the end even without anthropogenic effects.
There are several other issues with this chart that makes it laughably bad for someone to use in the context of arguing that he is the true defender of scientific integrity
- The grey range band is if anything an even bigger scientific absurdity than the main data line. Are they really trying to argue that there were no years, or decades, or even whole centuries that never deviated from a 0.7F baseline anomaly by more than 0.3F for the entire 4000 year period from 7500 years ago to 3500 years ago? I will bet just about anything that the error bars on this analysis should be more than 0.3F, much less the range of variability around the mean. Any natural scientist worth his or her salt would laugh this out of the room. It is absurd. But here it is presented as climate science in the exact same article that the author expresses dismay that anyone would distrust climate science.
- A more minor point, but one that disguises the sampling frequency problem a bit, is that the last dark brown shaded area on the right that is labelled "the last 100 years" is actually at least 300 years wide. Based on the scale, a hundred years should be about one dot on the x axis. This means that 100 years is less than the width of the red line, and the last 60 years or the real anthropogenic period is less than half the width of the red line. We are talking about a temperature change whose duration is half the width of the red line, which hopefully gives you some idea why I say the data sampling and smoothing processes would disguise any past periods similar to the most recent one.
Update: Kevin Drum posted a defense of this chart on Twitter. Here it is: "It was published in Science." Well folks, there is climate debate in a nutshell. An 1000-word dissection of what appears to be wrong with a particular analysis retorted by a five-word appeal to authority.
Update #2: I have explained the issue with a parallel flawed analysis from politics where Drum is more likely to see the flaws.
Sam L.:
Anyone who believes these "climate scientists" have not been cherry-picking and prevaricating and faking data (as their e-mails so indicate), please stand up.
December 17, 2013, 6:04 pmMatthew Slyfield:
December 17, 2013, 6:43 pmFelineCannonball:
The global paleoclimate record is what it is and certainly diminishes the apparent size of events related to internal climatic oscillations (i.e. ocean-intermediated "oscillations) and potential short term global events -- like volcanic aerosol cooling events that almost certainly happened repeatedly in the Holocene.
To calculate one point on the above curve you need 10s to 100s of geographic data points with proxy climate data. Lack of temporal precision means that short term events cancel out or are diminished in amplitude.
This is because geochronology in sedimentary records involves interpolating between C14 dates which themselves have error bars and sedimentary averaging (bioturbation, transport mixing, etc.). The temporal uncertainty in the best holocene climate records is probably around a hundred years.
You can look at a single core's proxy record with more temporal precision but it's meaningless to pretend you have a higher resolution global record. Climate skeptics make this mistake when they look at individual records to "prove" the medieval warm period was warmer. Individual proxy records are not global records and lining them up in ways not supported by their age control is just wishful thinking. Amateur climate change proponents make the mistake when they imprecisely say "this year is the warmest in the Holocene."
--------------
You're more or less right about it being two graphs*. It's something climate scientists understand and something that is explicit in publications. However, Imprecision in the age control of paleoclimate records is not something they engineered to hoodwink the public. They publish every C14 date they can afford to run.
*Age control actually gets less and less precise as time goes back to the beginning of the Holocene in a bit of a continuum. More recent data is weighted with more tree ring and speleothem data that is annually resolved and can be placed on an annual absolute time scale.
December 17, 2013, 7:18 pmrkball:
If you like your climate graph you can keep your climate graph!
December 17, 2013, 9:26 pmNathan Brazil:
The earth is around 4.5 billion years old....How do the 'GlobalWarming 'The sky is Falling' Hypocrites+Liars Club' think they've proven 'cause and effect' using sketchy data thats not even a 'blink of an eye' in the history of this earth... Even if they had 10,000 years of digital accurate temp recordings, it still proves nothing. (Get back to me after the 'study' has continued for another couple hundred-thousand years or longer) We could guess as to what it all means. It's still a GUESS. And only fools would let idiots run around trying to control every aspect of our lives, claiming there's no questioning their conclusion. I can't believe that we've allowed an eFFing idiot like Al Gore to get filthy rich with this crap either....Carbon Credits...give me a break!
Someday the earth will have another Ice-Age, and there's nothing we can do about it. I wonder how the grifters of that time will work the Science, data etc. to aquire weath and consolidate power?
If any of Al Gores decendants survive 'till the coming of the next IceAge, will people be as stupid then, as we are now?
December 17, 2013, 10:07 pmFelineCannonball:
OK, here I am. I'm pretty familiar with the science and its limitations and the personalities involved. I'm on a few Nature papers on the subject. I would say I don't believe there has been systematic intentional cherry picking or faked data and Warren's argument is mostly a strawman as climate scientists are aware of the assumptions involved in the standard hockey stick graphs and the limitations in the data. There are publication biases and there are problems with raw data publication and there are problems with several different paleoclimate proxies, but there is no climate change cabal set on orchestrating global economic collapse through CO2 caps and mandatory solar powered beanies.
December 17, 2013, 10:10 pmFelineCannonball:
Various proxy records for temperature and CO2 go back through the entire Cenozoic -- some 60 million years. An incomplete record goes back through the last billion. There are significant limitations and subjects of controversy, but the overall processes of solar forcing, CO2 forcing, and limited conditional positive feedbacks are supported by the geological record. The record also provides distinctly different conditions at various points in the geological record against which GCMs can be tested.
But, none of this has crap to do with Al Gore. The science stands independent of what people want to do with model projections and uncertainty. I can tell you that oil companies are preparing for an ice free arctic and insurance companies are eying sea level projections. Other organizations are not so responsive. A lot depends on economic timeframe on which decisions are being made, and whose capital is being risked.
December 17, 2013, 10:32 pmmishong:
Of course there is.
December 17, 2013, 10:35 pmFelineCannonball:
I guess I can't rule out the possibility that I wasn't invited to the secret meetings.
December 17, 2013, 10:44 pm5JimBob:
Solar powered Beanies? Where can I get one! This tinfoil thing gets really hot in the sun!
Proof of global warming, by the way.
December 17, 2013, 10:47 pmRambleOnDude:
Dear Mr. Coyote Blog, you've made an error here. This curve from Mr. Drum is a reproduction of the Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix Paleolithic temperature graph derived from falsified data. It was debunked by Mr. Steve McIntyre, link...
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/16/the-marcott-shakun-dating-service/
Marcott and the APGW community, after a brief period of feeble protestation, attempted to put a good face on the embarrassment and/or obfuscate the obvious malfeasance by subsequently relabeling their up-tick as "modern data". Nobody, including the authors, takes this seriously. But you're doing yourself a disservice by not pointing out the real (and much more damning) original falsification of data. There are any number of articles treating this embarrassment available, many quite entertaining, ie...
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/04/01/were-not-screwed/
December 17, 2013, 11:02 pmRambleOnDude:
If you are a climate scientist then you surely are familiar with this graph's fraudulent origins.
December 17, 2013, 11:05 pmFred_Z:
So, where does your pay check come from?
Cui bono?
And, does 'there are problems with' mean the same thing as 'it is wholly unreliable'?
December 17, 2013, 11:15 pmCraig Good:
So... Newer data is of higher quality and resolution, therefore we shouldn't trust it? That's not cherry picking, it's bulldozing the whole orchard.
December 17, 2013, 11:22 pmFelineCannonball:
Yes, you get to the heart of it. The solar powered propeller cools by advection. The other half of the equation is perforating the tin foil. It still has the desired aesthetic and Faraday cage properties that deters the female members of the cabal and prevents mind control by the standard 1.2 cm carrier wave.
BTW, I don't think you'll find geologists using the term "proof." We've been wrong too many times on too many different things. You'll see "evidence" more often and "interpretion" quite frequently. Interpreting the geological record is always going to involve some complicated, tortured, and somewhat fragile logic. I take some issue with Warren's "unscientific" but not as much as you might think.
December 17, 2013, 11:24 pmCraig Good:
You refer to the vast majority of experts on climate science? The ones who adjust their view of how the climate works based on actual data rather than making up their minds ahead of time?
If you think those famous emails show that they have been "faking data" then you've only been reading ideological interpretations. The data are all quite public. There are no hidden data used to back up the notion of global warming. That charge is beyond silly.
On the other hand, deniers spreading FUD about climate always cherry pick and distort data. If you see a data set starting in 1997 or 1998 you know that it was cherry picked.
December 17, 2013, 11:26 pmFelineCannonball:
Currently work with Shell. Paleoclimate was my post doc.
Some publications and proxies are unreliable. You pretty much have to be in the field to muddle through. Publish or perish is still the mantra so you have a lot of junior people publishing before they learn how to ask the right questions or select the right sample suite. Lots of kernels and lots of chaff.
December 17, 2013, 11:29 pmRambeOnDude:
Again, the curve is a fraud, this discussion is pointless. Read this...
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/04/01/were-not-screwed
December 17, 2013, 11:31 pmNathan Brazil:
OK. Prove their accuracy then. Might be spot on. Might not. The climate change question has not been answered to any scientific certainty.
December 17, 2013, 11:39 pmI mention Al Gore, just because this idiot is a lear-jet liberal hypocrite and is somehow treated as if he has knowledge or some level of expertise by the media, the hollywood crowd, and stupid people in general.
RambleOnDude:
This very graph is an example of fraudulent global warming activism. You gentlemen are at risk of mildly embarrassing yourselves, take a moment and look into the issue.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html
December 17, 2013, 11:41 pmRambleOnDude:
The "more recent data" is weighted by re-dating alkenone cores incorrectly.
December 17, 2013, 11:43 pmChemman01:
Is it? Lots of problems with modern data. From siting problems to minimal measurements in a number of states in just the U.S.
December 17, 2013, 11:48 pmFelineCannonball:
I think Warren does a pretty good job of discussing the basic physics and processes. He doesn't seem to believe in limited conditional positive feedback which is pretty much necessary to explain the amplitude of climate shifts in the more recent climate records. He doesn't seem to trust independent global climate models based on the same basic physics he does a decent job of explaining. And he hasn't followed up on some of the research and reviews addressing questions he puts forward in his climate presentation. Those are minor quibbles really.
Nothing is rock solid. With the paleoclimate record I would be somewhat suspicious of global temperature as its a complicated parameter. Greenland or Antarctica ice records are pretty much as accurate and temporally precise as you can get and go back hundreds of thousands of years. Temperature and CO2 are buried in the record and there are some unexpected results which have indicate complex solar forcing at the onset of ice ages. Older records involve more hand waving but foram isotopes and alkenones can be trusted back 40 + million years to give course scale paleoclimate histories.
restrict myself to the last 30 thousand years if you want decent age co
December 18, 2013, 12:01 amBen Franklin:
Oh, horseshit. You can't just wave your hands and pretend you understand what the temperature was with any certainty or resolution going back that far. We have proxy records you say... which is just another way of saying we have no actual records so we have to resort to reading tea leaves.
It's this sort of arrogance that makes people in the hard sciences so skeptical of climatologists. Real scientists don't speak with the certainty climatologists speak with when their knowledge is so sparse. Until climatologists can actually predict temperatures with consistency over geologically significant amounts of time then it is all just guesswork based on a very primitive understanding of how we think climates work. It is unsubstantiated.
So far what we have been treated to are assurances that they are ever more sure we are all going to die while their predictions diverge further and further from reality with each IPCC report. True, the timescale is short, but if CO2 is as potent as they say, and acts as they say it acts, then we should be seeing it cause much more warming than we have seen. Certainly, if there were a hockey stick we would not be sitting on 17 years with no statistically significant warming given the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere each year.
I am sure some people are eying worst case scenarios... which has as little to do with the science as Gore does... although I will note he is so little concerned with the prospect of rising tides that he just bought millions of dollars worth of coastal property with his own money. That seems to be significant to you so I thought I would point it out... with his own money. And indeed, none of the alarmists are acting... well, you know... alarmed enough to actually bother changing their own behavior.
In reality we have been consistently warming since before the industrial age. I assume we will continue to do so at some rate as that seems to be the cycle we are on. How much of that is due to man is something no one has proven they can say with any certainty. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing that the planet is getting warmer.
But what we DO know for sure is that the "cures" being proposed are ruinous. Even nibbling at the edges of carbon reductions has proven too costly of lives, liberty and treasure to sustain. I suspect the research will follow suit and become increasingly less alarmist as the market for that sort of thing dries up. You have to remember that the same government who decided the political opposition would not be allowed to form non-profit entities during the last election is the one deciding who gets funding in the sciences. Personnel is policy. That applies to the sciences more than people would like to imagine. If Climategate proved anything it is that one group was absolutely determined to be the gatekeepers in the field.
I guess I will add one further observation. If the climatologists understood things as well as they pretend to then they could make at least one prediction which they could all agree would falsify their work should it fail to occur. So far they haven't been able to do such a thing. There is a reason for that.
December 18, 2013, 12:04 amMoa:
The CO2 follows the temperature, it does not lead it. Plus, any decent physicist knows that after the first 50 ppm of CO2 the additional levels of concentration have fsck-all effect on radiative transfer. It's water vapor and solar radiation that are significant (also related to the complex variation in the radius of Earth's orbit).
Finally, even if you don't actually understand physics (ps. I used to be an astrophysicist, so am no climate shaman as you, but do understand radiative transfer well enough) you can look at the *observed* temperature profile. There is no correlation between CO2 concentration (which most definitely increasing) and terrestrial surface temperature. Furthermore *every* climate model published cannot reproduce the observations. Why can't you climate shaman/shawoman admit that your models are borked and you don't understand all the complex factors *at all*. That would be the scientific thing to do. Meanwhile, don't overtax the economy and cause energy prices to rise based on your superstitions about what *might* be happening. As the cost of energy goes up you are causing *deaths* as old people cannot afford heating (it's actually vastly colder than average in the US at the moment), and cause food costs to go up too.
Come back when you have real data, and some models that even remotely match the observed behaviour. At the moment climate science is a 'joke' (I find it hard to believe that there are sciences even worse at fitting observations than astrophysics - but the climate witchdoctors are shamefully woeful at it - yet want everyone to swallow their bs without question).
Finally, learn what Cultural Marxism is, and how de-industrialization of the West is part of that agenda. Climate 'science' and reporting it driven by political concerns too! you should learn about them, all real scientists are skeptical about science so massively biased by political effects.
December 18, 2013, 12:13 amFelineCannonball:
It wouldn't surprise me if they had some chronology problems. It's a complicated endeavor. I know there is at least one proxy and multiple publications that I would throw out of Mix and Marcott.
December 18, 2013, 12:15 amjeez:
Marott's own words: "Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack
is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of
global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our
conclusions."
They then hand wave to say as is common in Klimate Science that it doesn't matter, because it's proven elsewhere.
Source, despite how painful for me it is to link to ReelKlimate.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/
December 18, 2013, 12:18 amjeez:
I meant Marcott
December 18, 2013, 12:18 amRambleOnDude:
Absolutely stellar post.
December 18, 2013, 12:34 amFelineCannonball:
The geological record is complicated to interpret, but much depends on the precision you want. Palm trees on the Arctic Ocean in the Eocene is pretty easy to digest. And hard scientists shouldn't have too much trouble with D/H and 18O in ice cores or methane and CO2 reconstructions from ice bubbles for that matter. Core top calibrations for foraminifera isotopes and alkenone ratios are pretty straight forward. And covariance of multiple SST proxies in ODP cores is pretty convincing to me. There are questions it can't answer, but there are many that these tools can. As a paleoclimate researcher and someone who works with modellers I see no reason to expect fast feedbacks with CO2 or a simple expression of climate change with out complications from internal oscillations or components of the system that take time to reach equilibrium. The ocean is a giant heat sink that will take 1000s of years to respond to any perturbation, be it natural or anthropogenic. Ice albedo feedbacks won't be instantaneous and permafrost will only melt in most places by conduction. Vegetation and soil feedbacks again likely take centuries to reequilibrate. The only thing that might be fast is water vapor, but it can only be a partial response. If you are talking about models that try to take all of this into account, then yes the models have shown them self to be imperfect in these time scales. Most of the explanations to date are poorly understood internal climate oscillations. If that is the reason the models are off this decade, it won't really effect long term projections though.
Paleoclimate research isn't Newtonian physics, but much of it is decent work by geological standards. We use much cruder proxies and models at Shell to successfully find oil.
And again I'm not arguing for carbon caps. I don't think they're even conceivable. Not all climate researchers are idiots with respect to global economic realities.
December 18, 2013, 12:42 amRambleOnDude:
And it somehow got more complicated while copying the curve from his thesis to this paper? Please stop. It's embarrassing. Seriously. I don't see the need to argue in an internet comment thread, and it's obvious you have an investment of some sort, but just stop posing as an authority. Nobody with any expertise in the field would fail to instantly recognize that graph and its history. Nor would they excuse sample tampering or say any number of the ridiculous things...
December 18, 2013, 12:51 amFelineCannonball:
The first is an old fallacy. The atmosphere doesn't behave as a single filter. Escaping infrared radiaton is absorbed and re-emitted many times before it escapes and the dynamics of mixing and absorption-emission is what largely defines the temperature profile of the atmosphere (if we ignore the ionosphere for the moment). Loss of radiation to space largely occurs in cold layers high in the atmosphere where CO2 has an outsized presence. Water is very important too lower in the atmosphere in creating this temperature profile. Essentially it's the number of infrared opaque layers that matter, not just the fact that the atmosphere is infrared opaque.
Water can't drive global climate shifts as atmospheric moisture resets on the time scale of a few months. CO2 has a much longer half-life in the atmosphere with biological fixation and ocean dissolution diminishing atmospheric perterbations somewhat in the short term and weathering removing it on a multi-thousand year time scale.
Try modeling Venus's surface temperature with 50 ppm CO2 and 98% CO2 and then compare the result to reality.
And yes CO2 follows temperature in previous deglaciations. In the natural system it is often a secondary feedback response to orbital perturbations and related ice-albedo feedbacks in the northern hemisphere. It's probably related to warming soils, sediments, permafrost after northern hemisphere solar insolation starts to increase due to the combined effects of orbital cycles.
December 18, 2013, 1:20 am5JimBob:
Thanks for the technical advice. One question and one comment:
What is the maximum allowable hole size for my hat? Maybe I can just salvage one of those grid-thingies from the door of an old microwave and tuck it under a baseball cap? I'm really getting tired of the looks I get from other people on the street and I think it's because of the hat. I have a really nice John Deer cap I picked up after a Tea Party rally and I'd like to be able to wear it safely.
I don't really want to deter the female members of the cabal! I can't get any other females to even talk to me!
December 18, 2013, 1:26 amFelineCannonball:
I have to say I don't keep up all the time with skeptic literature. And when I did do paleoclimate work it was deeper in time than Marcott or Mann or whoever. I have colleagues who had their work hoovered up by the synthesis authors. Sedimentary geology and climate proxy work really is bigger than these guys and most people focus such that they only read the few hundred papers relevant to their own work and geographic locale.
I am interested in what you are talking about if you have a link.
December 18, 2013, 1:30 am5JimBob:
Thanks for the technical advice. One question and one comment:
What is the maximum allowable hole size for my hat? Maybe I can just salvage one of those grid-thingies from the door of an old microwave and tuck it under a baseball cap? I'm really getting tired of the looks I get from other people on the street and I think it's because of the hat. I have a really nice John Deer cap I picked up after a Tea Party rally and I'd like to be able to wear it safely.
I don't really want to deter the female members of the cabal! I can't get any other females to even talk to me!
December 18, 2013, 1:32 amFelineCannonball:
The microwave grid would be perfect, with one cautionary note. Black helicopters may not see your head on radar. An American flag on the John Deere hat could help them avoid collisions.
December 18, 2013, 1:41 amFelineCannonball:
I hadn't read it before but I have now. I had assumed Marcott had tacked on an instrumental record instead of a few recent cores. It would have been obvious to anyone reading the supplemental. There are problems with both -- but the problems are pretty much built in and understood by the paleoclimate community. It's unfortunate the press release didn't explain the details better.
It's pretty much impossible to create proxy records on a global scale throught the 20th century at that resolution. These are rare sites with high rates of deposition and they likely reflect coastal conditions where proxies can have complications from freshwater influence. Mann's disjointed curve is the better way to go and would show the same thing.
It is tempting for a grad student to over interpret and present available data that isn't yet ready for the global curve. The difference between a global curve and local curve is huge however, and using the local curve in this context is wrong.
December 18, 2013, 2:06 amSharpshooter:
"but there is no climate change cabal set on orchestrating global
economic collapse through CO2 caps and mandatory solar powered beanies."
Answer: IPCC
Do I need to quote to you some of their more outrageous statements?
December 18, 2013, 2:42 amSharpshooter:
" Paleoclimate was my post doc."
Okay, "doc", how about a paragraph or two describing the Scientific Method, and given your summary above, explain to us hicks how the above squares with said Scientific Method?
December 18, 2013, 2:44 amSharpshooter:
"BTW, I don't think you'll find geologists using the term "proof.""
You won't find ANY scientist using the word "proof", only "evidence".
And certainly not the word "consensus".
Your peers seem to throw around terms more amateurishly than kids in middle school science classes.
My Civil Engineer peers probably know the scientific method better than YOUR peers.
December 18, 2013, 2:49 amSharpshooter:
Quite! Selective time data series is one form of cherry picking. Leave that BS to the theologists.
December 18, 2013, 2:50 amSharpshooter:
" There are significant limitations and subjects of controversy, but the
overall processes of solar forcing, CO2 forcing, and limited
conditional positive feedbacks are supported by the geological record."
Oh, really? Then why is the sequence BACKWARDS as compared to such hacks as Algore presents, with the approval of your peers?
December 18, 2013, 2:52 amSharpshooter:
"The geological record is complicated to interpret, but much depends on the precision you want."
Say, temperature 20, 50, 100 years from now, within 0.1C?
And at what point does CO2 forcing plateau? 200ppm? 400? Where?
December 18, 2013, 2:54 amSharpshooter:
Okay, you've just blown your credibility to hell. At least as far as reading comprehension goes.
I suspect your post doc was fairly recent, right? In the age of "dumbed down" education, clear up through the post doc level?!?
December 18, 2013, 2:57 amSteven Wilson:
There's so much heat and so little light from most AGW discussions, do you suppose it's the discussions themselves that are driving the phenomenon of climate change.
December 18, 2013, 4:36 amsurellin:
Clever to set the time limit at 11,500 ya on that chart. It relieves them of having to explain the Younger Dryas.
December 18, 2013, 5:13 amMoneyrunner:
This discussion is instructive in one entertaining way. We have FelineCannonball waving his/her expertise as a Paleoclimate post-doc. It’s posts use a lot more technical jargon than the other people commenting, giving them a much greater appearance of authority. Then we are informed that the authors of the Marcott, Shakun, Clark study have admitted that their graph is – to use a technical term – a total screw-up. “It's a complicated endeavor” explains our Paleo-climatologist. Hilarity ensues.
December 18, 2013, 5:36 amWilliamK:
It is not, or should not be, debatable that in the past, before the ICE or even man, the planet was much hotter and much colder than it is now. That has to be explained before we can trust AWG pseudo-science.
December 18, 2013, 5:59 amRufus T. Firefly:
Not being an actual scientist, I'll admit to not knowing enough to decide where the truth lies. However, some of the "proof" of AGW offered is pretty shaky, and the proposed solutions always seem the similarly ineffective and socialistic.
Until I'm convinced, one way or the other, my fallback position is: I'll believe it's a crisis when the people telling me it's a crisis start behaving like it's a crisis. That ain't happening yet.
December 18, 2013, 6:12 amJoe_Da:
Following up on the warmer/cooler MWP debate. There are a lot of individual proxies, ice cores, tree rings that show the Mwp was cooler. There are also a lot of non climate science proxy data that shows the mwp was warmer such as higher mwp tree lines in the alps, chilean andes, near mendenhal glacier, there are written records of citrus tree cultivation in china 300 miles north of the current day range during the mwp, there tree stumps dating from the mwp & holecene period being uncovered by retreating glaciers. Granted these are isolated proxies, all of which indicate a warmer mwp, yet the climate scientists seem to discount these items and/or fail to recalibrate their "climate proxies" to other known evidence.
December 18, 2013, 7:23 am