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Since the US is the largest and most influential country on earth and can change how the world will become... its pretty sad seeing religious beliefs trump science and reason.
The US could in fact "force" other countries to produce more environmentally friendly, bot with buying power and soft power.
Instead some people refuse to belive we can harm the environment, because that would hurt the bottom line of the Fossil fuel companies and in return them in somehow with reduced spending power.
Instead they are voting for the choice that the US can pollute as much they want... then China, India, Brazil, Saudis, Russians etc etc can just burn of whatever resources they have as well.. why should they do anything less?
So, now you have run away, dont give a Fk attitude by the poorest nations, that its OK, because the richest and most powerful country does not give Fk.. so why should we. Its easier to pollute, then to become more efficient with their resources.
That is the problem- CO2 IS NOT A POLLUTANT. That contention is insane. CO2 is an integral part of life on earth, which could not exist without CO2. As before, the carbon atoms that make up the carbon based compounds in your body (which is essentially all of them, save for a select few) were once CO2.
I am a staunch environmentalist. Instead of focusing on a problem that does not exist, let's focus on actual pollutants such as"
1. pesticides that are causing the extinction of insects- we need insects for our survival. Oddly, libs hate GMOs, which could markedly reduce our reliance on pesticides.
2. chloro-fluro carbons in emissions
3. heavy metals in emissions, batteries, and computer waste. How many computers do you have at home and how often do you change them?
4. sulpher emissions which produce acid rain
5. plastics which are polluting the oceans- I would bet that every AGW believer on this site drinks bottled water, which is resulting in masses of floating plastics in the oceans
6. Expansion of cities into green spaces, reducing trees and wildlife habitats. How many libs live in the suburbs?
We have real, not imagined problems that are threatening the environment. Logic would dictate that we focus on those problems that have clearly been identified as actual pollutants and stop the attack on CO2, which is a gross misallocation of resources.
Strange that we can accurately measure that the temperature suddenly shot up, faster then anytime over the last 22.000 years, just a few decades after we started to industrialize and produce Co2.
And Co2 is the highest its been in the last 800.000 years.
PS: The International Conference on CC is a shame organization. (see link above)
These are qualitative attacks on the characters of those promoting data contrary to AGW- so what?
Part of the problem with the "hockey stick", which our AGW colleagues seem to always forget (or never knew in the first place, is the trouble with "temperature measurement" in the past.
As the first mercury thermometer was invented in the early 1700s, there were not such measurements prior to this time. Further, locations that used the mercury thermometer were not uniformly distributed around the world until recent history.
1. temperatures in the past were inferred, not actually measured, via temperature "proxies".
2. Temperature proxies include pollen density, tree rings, ocean sediments, coral densities, ect.....
3. There is far greater variability in the proxy "measurements" than actual temperatures taken today
4. When using proxies, the variability in these measurements is "massaged out" by averaging to produce a very specific temperature measurement, which could not have possibly been arrived at, given the large margin of error of the initial data.
5. Thus the "hockey stick" graph is an artifact of using different temperature measurements over time (proxies vs actual temperature measurements) and eliminating the margin of error for the proxy data, inferring a specific point, rather than a much larger range of temperatures that have a higher margin for error (basically the standard deviation of data points is very high with the proxy temps, vs actual measured temps.
6. Given the above, you can basically make whatever type of graph you want to prove a point by using
a. different techniques to measure temps at different times
b. techniques that have markedly different "accuracies" or margins of error, while not using those error bars in the graphed data
c. "averaging" or massaging individual proxy temps to one temp which is falsely attributed a much smaller margin of error.
7. Inconsistencies in location of measured temps and the time of day. Can one actually equate the temperature measured in the east coast of the US at a particular elevation and time of day with a pollen or coral reef inference or proxy of time? Not by a long shot. What time of day does a bristle cone pine pollen particle reflect? Noon? 2 am? I prefer my pollen in the evening hours, such that it does not cause allergies!
Are the temperatures where you live different at different times of day?
8. Given that thermal energy (that is what we are concerned about here) in the atmosphere has wide swings during the course of the day everywhere on the planet, should not a calculus integration of actual Joules per cubic meter of atmosphere be used to infer energy, rather than thermometer measurements? Such measures would reduce the "wobble" in temps and be a more reflection of true thermal energy, as it would reflect the conditions throughout the entire day.
9. Such measurements, as above, require very careful, precise measurements which can be inferred with the same margin of error as tree rings or coral populations in the sea.
Think of this in this fashion. We have a gnat and we want to measure how long it is. One measurer is given a yard stick, calibrated in inches, and the other is given a micrometer, calibrated in mm. Do you think that such measurements would yield different results??
Thus----- Global Warming! A slight of hand using vastly different means of measurement and massaging statistics.
It is no wonder that the predictions of an underwater NYC and Miami (made 20 years ago) have turned out to be incorrect.
Last edited by hawkeye2009; 02-11-2019 at 11:08 AM..
4. When using proxies, the variability in these measurements is "massaged out" by averaging to produce a very specific temperature measurement, which could not have possibly been arrived at, given the large margin of error of the initial data.
5. Thus the "hockey stick" graph is an artifact of using different temperature measurements over time (proxies vs actual temperature measurements) and eliminating the margin of error for the proxy data, inferring a specific point, rather than a much larger range of temperatures that have a higher margin for error (basically the standard deviation of data points is very high with the proxy temps, vs actual measured temps.
What you are pointing out is somewhat correct although how data are subsequently used is not correct.
You are right that there are errors in the data. This is true of virtually all measurements since all instruments have calibration and other errors. A huge part of data analysis is the analysis of errors and this is why peer-reviewed papers are so critical, part of the review process is to make sure the authors did a proper job of error analysis.
So typically a paper will be published with the measured value + the error bars for that value. For statistical data, the error bars typically are the standard deviation and the value itself is the statistical mean. For non-statistical data the error bars are going to be more about accuracy of the instrument.
But all of that (data and error margins) is presented in credible papers and the authors will demonstrate that whatever they are asserting is justified as being significant relative to the margins of error they report. You seem to be implying that errors are not accounted for or are swept under the rug. That simply does not happen in any credible journal - the peer reviewers won't let that happen. They will reject the paper and tell the author they need proper error analysis.
Any result that goes into the AGW debate should be peer-reviewed by people who understand instruments and data analysis. This is true of both sides of the debate. If someone is advocating a position in AGW based on non-peer-reviewed material, it should be discarded as low quality science. I looked at the links in the KS post above and none looked to be peer-reviewed material to me.
These are qualitative attacks on the characters of those promoting data contrary to AGW- so what?
I know you misuse science words but now you are misusing the term qualitative.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hawkeye2009
Part of the problem with the "hockey stick", which our AGW colleagues seem to always forget (or never knew in the first place, is the trouble with "temperature measurement" in the past.
1. temperatures in the past were inferred, not actually measured, via temperature "proxies".
You don't even have the story correct.
A critique of the hockey stick was published in 2004 (McIntyre 2004), claiming the hockey stick shape was the inevitable result of the statistical method used (principal components analysis). They also claimed temperatures over the 15th Century were derived from one bristlecone pine proxy record. They concluded that the hockey stick shape was not statistically significant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hawkeye2009
5. Thus the "hockey stick" graph is an artifact of using different temperature measurements over time (proxies vs actual temperature measurements) and eliminating the margin of error for the proxy data, inferring a specific point, rather than a much larger range of temperatures that have a higher margin for error (basically the standard deviation of data points is very high with the proxy temps, vs actual measured temps.
Wrong again.
An independent assessment of Mann's hockey stick was conducted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Wahl 2007). They reconstructed temperatures employing a variety of statistical techniques (with and without principal components analysis). Their results found slightly different temperatures in the early 15th Century. However, they confirmed the principal results of the original hockey stick - that the warming trend and temperatures over the last few decades are unprecedented over at least the last 600 years.
While many continue to fixate on Mann's early work on proxy records, the science of paleoclimatology has moved on. Since 1999, there have been many independent reconstructions of past temperatures, using a variety of proxy data and a number of different methodologies. All find the same result - that the last few decades are the hottest in the last 500 to 2000 years (depending on how far back the reconstruction goes). What are some of the proxies that are used to determine past temperature?
Changes in surface temperature send thermal waves underground, cooling or warming the subterranean rock. To track these changes, underground temperature measurements were examined from over 350 bore holes in North America, Europe, Southern Africa and Australia (Huang 2000). Borehole reconstructions aren't able to give short term variation, yielding only century-scale trends. What they find is that the 20th century is the warmest of the past five centuries with the strongest warming trend in 500 years.
Stalagmites (or speleothems) are formed from groundwater within underground caverns. As they're annually banded, the thickness of the layers can be used as climate proxies. A reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature from stalagmites shows that while the uncertainty range (grey area) is significant, the temperature in the latter 20th Century exceeds the maximum estimate over the past 500 years (Smith 2006).
Historical records of glacier length can be used as a proxy for temperature. As the number of monitored glaciers diminishes in the past, the uncertainty grows accordingly. Nevertheless, temperatures in recent decades exceed the uncertainty range over the past 400 years (Oerlemans 2005).
Of course, these examples only go back around 500 years - this doesn't even cover the Medieval Warm Period. When you combine all the various proxies, including ice cores, coral, lake sediments, glaciers, boreholes & stalagmites, it's possible to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures without tree-ring proxies going back 1,300 years (Mann 2008). The result is that temperatures in recent decades exceed the maximum proxy estimate (including uncertainty range) for the past 1,300 years. When you include tree-ring data, the same result holds for the past 1,700 years.
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