Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Dec 05, 2009 5:10 pm

Top of my head: what about the 30,000 and plus scientists who have signed a petition that says AGW is bullshit (which threatens all the carbon tax and cap & trade schemes)?

Some scientists have pointed out that volcanoes have a strong responsibility in the emission of sulfur and carbon, and the acidification of rain. Some have pointed out that since 1998, on the average, the planet is cooling and estimate that we will get those cold 70s winters in one or two decades.

Some have pointed out that the increase of temperature by carbon is actually ludicrously low. Other will tell that there are no coal power plants on Neptune, or that there are traces that people of Greenland grew crops on what now rests as frozen landscapes. Many will point out that while a part of the scientific and bureaucratic community has spent unreasonable amounts of time looking at places were ice was melting, they missed the parts were ice was forming.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Dec 07, 2009 2:51 am

You will probably want to read this.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Wed Dec 09, 2009 8:36 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:You will probably want to read this.
A pretty nice page.
2046 wrote:To review, you are repeating the AGW alarmist claim that modern CO2 levels are rising at a historically unprecedented rate, which will cause unprecedented warming and assorted other ecological changes.

This is a flawed claim, because, to paraphrase myself:

1. The data from the distant past is not adequate to support the claim of no prior rapid changes in CO2 due to low 'scan resolution'.
From the distant past, no. From the ice core and tree ring past, though, we do have pretty reasonable decade-level resolution.
1a. Slower-change correlations indicated by the available data from the distant past do not show changes in CO2 forcing temperature increases. Over timescales of millions of years there is only vague and sporadic correlation between the two at all . . . over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years there is rough correlation, but not causation, because CO2 increase lags behind temperature increase.
Which is precisely as I have described.
2. The data from the present (e.g. 1940-1980, or post-2000) is not adequate to support the claim of rapid changes in CO2 directly forcing rapid temperature increase, because we have seen continuing CO2 increase mixed with temperature steadiness or decline, with no explanation from the AGW camp over these 'correlation breaks'.
Specifically limited sets of data don't show a correlation. Big surprise? There are a lot of short-term climate effects.

Nor is there no explanation whatsoever. Mount Pinotubo caused a temporary cooling effect in 1991. Anything that increases particulates will tend to cause momentary cooling effects. A nuclear war between Pakistan and India would cause short-term global cooling.

Similarly, in 1998, El Nino is implicated in unusually high temperatures.

The models predicted continued increase this decade, and we saw something of a levelling off. But in the context of the historical data, it's still showing an Earth in which CO2 and temperature are tightly tied.
So with the data not supporting that conclusion,
Except the data do support it.
Indeed, that sort of religious fervor just makes me want to go start a smoky bonfire
Smoke: Particulate emission, causing some short-term cooling when there's enough of it.
Carbon dioxide: Causes mid-to-long term warming.
Wouldn't continual CO2 increases imply continual temperature increases according to mainstream AGW?
No. Climate data is noisy as all get-out. There are multi-year fluctuations and a number of complex patterns. CO2 is not the only factor, and it's not the only factor is the model.
I realize you're arguing for not quite as direct a relationship, but CO2 is claimed to be one of the largest climate forcing agents by "mainstream" AGW guys like Hansen the Nut. This climate forcing agent is supposed to be continually on the rise to unnatural degrees, per your own statements, and per your own statements we've overwhelmed nature in that regard. So doesn't it seem like they ought to have an explanation for almost a half-century slip during the time of Packards and Cadillacs and Skodas, and now during the time of SUVs and China?
Mr. Oragahn's link says so. And I am not the least bit surprised, because it sounds quite familiar.

Now, with regard to the last decade's levelling off... yes, they are having trouble accounting for some of it. There is some natural decline post-1998 simply because we don't have the 1998 El Nino that caused a spike in global average temperatures.
Because the science was too young ... they saw a recent trend and flipped out. Nowadays, the science is too young ... they see a recent trend and are flipping out.
They saw a recent trend - but they also had pretty bad data, too.

The trend they're currently seeing is not especially recent.
The problem there is that according to theory, the 100,000 year cycle has as an engine the planet Earth. The cycle's been going on for millions of years, and is based on natural orbital mechanics cycles. AGW guys are trying to claim that we can overwhelm that via CO2 and such, but I do not think they have yet made their case, since they're basically arguing we can overwhelm the orbital mechanics of the planet.
That a greenhouse effect can be the dominant factor of a planet's average temperature is illustrated reasonably well by Venus.
We're talking completely cross purposes here, you know. You're seeing a short-term "lockstep" and I'm talking about the two major deviations comprising 50 out of the last 100 years and we're not getting anywhere. Frankly, your methods are flawed, and I can tell you why.

First, you are ignoring the geological record showing only a weak relationship (the orange graph from posts ago),
No, not particularly. The hypothesis in question isn't being particularly tested by the geological record - which does not display precedents for what we have now.
and even the shorter-but-still-long term rough correlation that shows CO2 lagging behind and not forcing. This same forgetfulness mixed with claims of how CO2 could be a greenhouse gas enables AGW guys to ignore the causation indicated by history, and instead try to reverse it so that CO2 (all 0.038% of it) is suddenly a greenhouse uber-gas that will kill us all.
Could be?

The absorption spectra of CO2 is known. Has been for over a century. The resolving science has not been about what CO2 actually does while in the atmosphere, or what magnitude of effect it should have; the resolving science has been more in what the other dampers, amplifiers, and drivers in the system are doing. Estimates of the impact of CO2 in isolation, with other parts of the system not responding, have basically not changed in the past 113 years.

Analysis of the data has indicated that this pretty well known influence accounts for most of the short-term variation in climate; that other effects are weaker. A lot of those other effects have been nailed down; a few haven't. The main sources of CO2 are known; some of the sinks aren't.
Second, you are picking a short timeframe (yes, I know, Mauna Loa's only been at it for a little while). However, at any point over the past 400,000 years, there are short periods where the two correlate well and periods where they do not. From 1980 to 2000 they correlated quite nicely . . . other times, not so much at all. It's a cherry-pick that happens to not look like one because it happens to correlate to a time of our most sensitive data gathering methods.
Cherry-picking is looking at a smaller data set. In particular, looking at the whole set of good data gives a very strong conclusion - though not some selected subsets. Looking at the broad data gives a weaker correlation - and it's claimed to normally be acting as an amplifier, rather than a driver, of climate.
Third, you are stripping even the concept of the chronology out of the picture by doing things the way that blogger dude Grumbine does. His method is convenient because it removes time, and thus effectively hides the periods I've described, turning them into dots a little more distant from the line but still appearing to support the line.

This is why I agree with a general correlation over time, but not this "lockstep" of yours, because during some historical periods the correlation looks non-existent, provided you're looking at the right timeslice. Picking the 1980-2000 timeslice and saying "we're all gonna die!" is unconvincing to me.
Desorting the data by time takes other cyclic and temporal effects and classes them out into simple noise - which has the de facto effect of filtering for CO2 alone.

Not especially well, there are better ways of doing it.
Again, you are claiming that CO2's present rate of increase is a special and historically unprecedented case that will produce unprecedented warming.
Unprecedented? No. Large climate shifts have happened in the past. We've got a long way to return to Cretaceous temperatures.

Unprecedented in cause? Perhaps. Monumentally inconvenient? Yes. Sharp climate shifts tend to do that.
This is new and strange and exceptionally young, with major hypotheses just a couple of years old
Not especially. See above.
Ah, I see they're finding out where some of the extra carbon is going. And an indication that we can expect some extra biological sinks coming into play around 1000 ppm.

And that is one of the things I'll admit climate scientists have been less than optimistic on. We can expect that there are probably some sinks that will kick in at higher carbon concentrations, but nobody is modelling these unknowns. There's not really any way to.

That is actually fairly nice. The last study I saw of ocean pH effects on ocean life was rather discouragingly bleak.
And ClimateGate is not like Piltdown Man. ClimateGate would be more like Thomas Huxley running around trying to modify animals and burying fake fossils all over the world trying to support it, and getting caught shovel-in-hand.
No, I would say it's quite like Piltdown Man. One team of today is like one lone scientist of yesteryear; a single fossil then corresponds to a similar significance as one team's models today.
Earth may be warming (though for whatever odd reason they've been cooking the books on that as well, which is a real pisser), but to ascribe the cause to man's activities is too far a jump at this time.
Not really. We do know where all of those pieces fit together. We know exactly what CO2 does to climate, and exactly where it's coming from.

We also know that of the change we've seen this century, very little can be traced to other causes.

We know that warming is not necessarily the end of the world. It's been warming. However, it upsets things. Sea levels rise, ecosystems are rearranged, et cetera.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by 2046 » Thu Dec 10, 2009 9:29 pm

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
2. The data from the present (e.g. 1940-1980, or post-2000) is not adequate to support the claim of rapid changes in CO2 directly forcing rapid temperature increase, because we have seen continuing CO2 increase mixed with temperature steadiness or decline, with no explanation from the AGW camp over these 'correlation breaks'.
Specifically limited sets of data don't show a correlation. Big surprise? There are a lot of short-term climate effects.
Quod erat demonstrandum, chief . . . after all, aren't you guys making a claim based on a specifically limited set of data? Yes, you are, because you're talking about the past 100 years. Yet 50 of those (one large gap of 40 and then the most recent 10) don't work for you.

You guys reduced the planet's history to the last 100 years, and I reduced it by a factor of two, and all the sudden I'm logically invalid somehow? I think not.
So with the data not supporting that conclusion,
Except the data do support it.
I await proof.

I've pointed out where the gaping holes are in the claim over long and short timescales. The circular reasoning and argumentation they send out will not move me.
Indeed, that sort of religious fervor just makes me want to go start a smoky bonfire
Smoke: Particulate emission, causing some short-term cooling when there's enough of it.
Carbon dioxide: Causes mid-to-long term warming.
I also await the return of your sense of humor from behind the AGW alarmist veil.
They saw a recent trend - but they also had pretty bad data, too.
Present data is scarcely better. It pretty much all comes from the GHCN one way or another, and that's sad. In the US, for instance, only about 10% of surface monitoring stations meet the specs for a good station (i.e. errors of less than a degree Celsius). And worldwide, about half the stations got decommissioned circa 1988-1991, and the remainder showed a much higher average, by weight.

On the good side, we have satellite data, but these are calibrated and corrected off of ground sites and radiosondes, which themselves are subject to error and calibration by ground station. So they're really severely weighting things toward the ground stations, of which there are fewer and of which many are of poor quality (i.e. errors of one or more degrees Celsius).

Considering they are claiming accuracy of tenths of a degree and factoring that against the real error potential of their input, I'd say they have pretty bad data.
That a greenhouse effect can be the dominant factor of a planet's average temperature is illustrated reasonably well by Venus.
I don't recall denying the possibility of a planetary greenhouse effect, merely its plausibility in regards to Earth's short-term temperature trend as claimed by AGW folks. Hell, Mars is losing its southern icecaps as of 2005 data . . . insert your own joke there about rovers-as-SUVs.
First, you are ignoring the geological record showing only a weak relationship (the orange graph from posts ago),
No, not particularly. The hypothesis in question isn't being particularly tested by the geological record - which does not display precedents for what we have now.
DING DING DING!!! My point exactly . . . have I not been saying that the whole AGW claim is based on NOW? This gives them free reign (in their mind) to ignore the past. The problem I've pointed out is that they can't do that, and that even if we allow it their claim doesn't hold water for the time period they claim is extra-special, because half of that time period fails their claim!

Even acknowledged periods of 'abrupt' change from the past are not attributed to CO2. Modern change pales in comparison to these.
{from earlier} From the distant past, no. From the ice core and tree ring past, though, we do have pretty reasonable decade-level resolution.
Tree rings are generally recent (when reliable . . . Mann and company had to cherry-pick the cores they wanted to use and even then couldn't make them work past 1960, though they still pretended perfect reliability prior to that).

Some ice core data I'm finding does have superior resolution at least over recent millenia, though, as good as 5 year and maybe better. See here, but note that none of the links work at present so I'm kinda guessing by title. These are the ones listed as having data over the first century CE. Other ice core data I've found (where the links are also not working now, implying a problem as of this writing) relating to Vostok cores had resolution for the past 250,000 years as low as 80 years at times, as I recall, but seldom better than that.

However, over geological time (which, of course, comprises the vast majority of Earth's history), we don't have even that kind of resolution, meaning significant events (e.g. the Industrial Age) could be completely missed.
and even the shorter-but-still-long term rough correlation that shows CO2 lagging behind and not forcing. This same forgetfulness mixed with claims of how CO2 could be a greenhouse gas enables AGW guys to ignore the causation indicated by history, and instead try to reverse it so that CO2 (all 0.038% of it) is suddenly a greenhouse uber-gas that will kill us all.
Could be?
Yes, "could be". CO2 could, in isolation or as an atmosphere all its own, function as a pretty powerful greenhouse gas. However, in the real atmosphere, where it represents a mere 0.038%, it seems to be of limited effect, even in spite of recent contrary claims.
The absorption spectra of CO2 is known. Has been for over a century.
No crap. However, the pretense that it is a danger is based on (1) ignoring climate history of what forces what, (2) considering its effect in theoretical isolation, outside the actual climate system, and (3) ignoring the temperature and CO2 history of the planet over the past few hundred million years.
Cherry-picking is looking at a smaller data set.
Then stop.
In particular, looking at the whole set of good data gives a very strong conclusion - though not some selected subsets. Looking at the broad data gives a weaker correlation - and it's claimed to normally be acting as an amplifier, rather than a driver, of climate.
That statement is incorrect . . . it is claimed to be the primary driver of climate change by mainstream AGW sources. Hansen says it, the AGW apologists of RealClimate make fun of those who deny it, the EPA's recent BS said it, and so on.

I suppose you may have some scientific paper in mind declaring that modern CO2 warming is mere amplification of some other warming source, but that very concept would deflate the AGW claim that it's all man-made anyway, and thus I don't see the mainstream AGW guys going with your version.
Third, you are stripping even the concept of the chronology out of the picture by doing things the way that blogger dude Grumbine does. His method is convenient because it removes time, and thus effectively hides the periods I've described, turning them into dots a little more distant from the line but still appearing to support the line.

This is why I agree with a general correlation over time, but not this "lockstep" of yours, because during some historical periods the correlation looks non-existent, provided you're looking at the right timeslice. Picking the 1980-2000 timeslice and saying "we're all gonna die!" is unconvincing to me.
Desorting the data by time takes other cyclic and temporal effects and classes them out into simple noise - which has the de facto effect of filtering for CO2 alone.
Let me put it this way . . . if I ever wanted to lie with a graph, I would use that method. In the real world, correlation implies a temporal component, otherwise they are disconnected events. We do not say things correlate when they bear no relationship to one another in or over time.

In short, removing the temporal component to prove correlation doesn't, and picking a particular period of known correlation and ignoring periods where correlation fails doesn't either.
Again, you are claiming that CO2's present rate of increase is a special and historically unprecedented case that will produce unprecedented warming.
Unprecedented? No. Large climate shifts have happened in the past. We've got a long way to return to Cretaceous temperatures.
Unprecedented warming . . . e.g. a rate, not a temperature. Or are you suggesting that rapid warming of the type you believe to be now occurring has happened before? And praytell, did it have CO2 as a primary driver, as is claimed for modern times? Or was CO2 either lagging behind or perhaps even increasing along with temperature decrease, as is observed in the actual record?

(And hell, according to some ice core data, we've got a long way to go just to get to Medieval temperatures, at least for Greenland.)
And ClimateGate is not like Piltdown Man. ClimateGate would be more like Thomas Huxley running around trying to modify animals and burying fake fossils all over the world trying to support it, and getting caught shovel-in-hand.
No, I would say it's quite like Piltdown Man. One team of today is like one lone scientist of yesteryear; a single fossil then corresponds to a similar significance as one team's models today.
No, Piltdown was an outlier, from an outlier, with many skeptics. CRU isn't quite Darwin (that's Hansen), but judging by the IPCC it is/was the leading source of information. And its data and the data of its allies was terrible beyond reason, and has poisoned any research that relied upon any of it.
We know that warming is not necessarily the end of the world. It's been warming. However, it upsets things. Sea levels rise, ecosystems are rearranged, et cetera.
We can agree on this, at least.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Dec 11, 2009 12:52 am

1. Some say CO2 plays a small role in the greenhouse effect.
2. The website I linked to is there because of a question of fairness, but I have already checked several of their pages, debunking supposedly, and I have problem with many of them.
One of interest to me, solar irradiance, because it's a big argument, highlights the problem in the collected data. In It's the Sun, Stupid, the author says:
According to PMOD at the World Radiation Center there has been no increase in solar irradiance since at least 1978 when satellite observations began. This means that for the last thirty years, while the temperature has been rising fastest, the sun has shown no trend.
The page dates from 2006. Needless to say, three years later, with a scientific community that split apart, much more data has been gathered, and interpreted by now.
Notice, that because of the date of the page, the second link is now gone (404).
More to the point, many scientists say that there's actually been a steady increase in the solar irradiance, and that's why some also look at the albedos of other moons and planets, especially Mars. We understand that the average Joe cannot attest of the quality of the methodology here, sicne measuring the albedo as part of the evidence of an increasing solar irradiance requires knowing very well what leads to a greater or lower albedo, and being sure that there's no trick due to properties of a planet we're not exactly in the best position to observe, despite the data we got from that place when the robots went there.

Later, the same author says:
There has been work done on reconstructing the solar irradiance record over the last century before satellites were available. According to the Max Plank Institute where this work is being done, there has been no increase in solar irradiance since around 1940. This reconstruction does show an increase in the first part of the 20th century that coincides with the warming from around 1900 til the 1940's. This trend in irradiance is not enough to explain it all, but it is responsible for a large portion of that trend in temperature. See this chart of the observed temperature, the modelled temperature and the variations in the major forcings that contributed to 20th century climate.
http://www.mps.mpg.de/images/projekte/s ... limate.gif
The first chart stops at 2000, and implies that while solar irradiance stagnated after the increase up to 1940, atmospheric temperature grew regardless of the non evolving solar irradiance, since the 70s/80s.

Still, funnily, the second chart tells another story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clima ... bution.png
While one would easily focus on the parallel between the greenhouse gas increase (and that again is a source of another argument) and the temperature rise, the chart actually completely fails to explain the increase between 1910/1920 to 1940 with solar irradiance alone, proving that none of the elements present on the chart explain the first temperature rise.
Notice, indeed, how despite the solar irradiance rise coming to a halt around 1920, the temperature keeps rising until 1940.

And to fall back onto my initial point about an opposition of data on the qualitative plane, what about this then?

1st chart:
A peak of temperature in 850 AD that dwarves whatever we may have experienced yet.
You can also appreciate the sharp rises and falls.

2nd chart:
On the average, a very slow rise of temperature, with somehow a clear average gain after El Niño.
Shows that since 2007, it's getting cooler, and in 2009, we're yet to match any of the maximums reached during the first years of the new millennium.
Last edited by Mr. Oragahn on Fri Dec 11, 2009 3:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Dec 11, 2009 1:17 am

On bleaching corals...

From the same global scienceblog website:

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscienc ... icanes.php

Hurray for hurricanes!

And then... this.

Proof being that the debate is far from settled, and as such, the ideas of carbon taxing, cap & trade and even birth policies based on the idea that AGW is all too real, are actually completely unscientific, totally biased and pure hasty agglomerates of weak assumptions.
But that's the problem of politicians knowing very little about science and listening a bit too much to who feeds their pockets.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Dec 11, 2009 3:41 pm

More solar irradiance variations:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/22/t ... hort-essay

Most interesting, perhaps, is the following commentary:
crosspatch (09:08:32) wrote:
AGWscoffer: I am less interested in what some “weather prophet” might have said in the past than I am in seeing the the current reality is accurately measured and presented to interested parties.

We seem to have a basic disconnect at the moment over the simple basic question if it is currently warming or cooling. Some will point to surface records and claim that 2006 was the hottest year since the founding of hell. Others will point to the satellite record and say that it has been cooling since 1998.

The problem is that no matter what anyone’s personal agenda, you can find data to validate the position. The data are all over the place.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Cocytus » Sat Dec 12, 2009 12:55 am

Hmm. A good comment.

Global warming is, for better or for worse, (for worse, I think) a political issue. It's detractors will trumpet this "ClimateGate" as definitive disproof of global warming (either anthropogenic specifically, or any warming) and its supporters will dismiss it. I'm dismissing it. It doesn't really affect my ability to do my job anyway. Energy consciousness has a certain social cachet that so-called "green designers" exploit to sell things, which is the definition of consumer culture.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Mon Dec 14, 2009 1:53 am

2046 wrote:Quod erat demonstrandum, chief . . . after all, aren't you guys making a claim based on a specifically limited set of data? Yes, you are, because you're talking about the past 100 years. Yet 50 of those (one large gap of 40 and then the most recent 10) don't work for you.
Not really, no. The claim being made vis-a-vis carbon as a driver is that it accounts for:

-About a third of the variation prior to the period of manmade global warming
-Significantly more of the variation of recent years

The hypothesis is that a fundamental shift has been made in where the changes in climate are coming from. Normally dominated by solar and orbital cycles, it is currently being dominated by CO2.

The element that is significant is that there is a change in the speed of variation in carbon. This is so far supported by the ice core data, which - while not especially close to the CO2 year data - clearly sufficient to resolve the decade-level shifts we've seen lately.

The closest you could find was not in the same order of magnitude - and that was considered a "significant" event in the record. Carbon generally changes slowly, it's generally a lagging indicator, and the rare short-term massive carbon emissions tend to be point sources tied to particulate emissions (volcanic eruptions). There have been very dramatic shifts in climate in single-year events that had nothing to do with carbon (see the "Year With No Summer", for example).
You guys reduced the planet's history to the last 100 years, and I reduced it by a factor of two, and all the sudden I'm logically invalid somehow? I think not.
Not by a factor of two, precisely.
Present data is scarcely better. It pretty much all comes from the GHCN one way or another, and that's sad. In the US, for instance, only about 10% of surface monitoring stations meet the specs for a good station (i.e. errors of less than a degree Celsius). And worldwide, about half the stations got decommissioned circa 1988-1991, and the remainder showed a much higher average, by weight.

On the good side, we have satellite data, but these are calibrated and corrected off of ground sites and radiosondes, which themselves are subject to error and calibration by ground station. So they're really severely weighting things toward the ground stations, of which there are fewer and of which many are of poor quality (i.e. errors of one or more degrees Celsius).
Which is why meteorology has gone down the tubes in the past two decades?

I think not. These same instruments are being used by meteorologists, not climatologists, who have gotten a little bit better during this period. And it's much better than the tree ring and ice core data we have for the pre-instrumental period, or the geographically limited distribution of the "pre-modern" instrument period, which is what we're comparing it to.
Considering they are claiming accuracy of tenths of a degree and factoring that against the real error potential of their input, I'd say they have pretty bad data.
Actually, if I have ten thousand sensors with independent errors of ten degrees, I can claim an accuracy on the order of a tenth a degree from their aggregate. That's basic statistics there - error goes down with square root of the number of measurements. The main cause for worry is if there are trends within the data, i.e., urban heat island effects.

Moreover, with what they have and the amount of noise they perceive in the system, they aren't making forecasts claiming to be accurate to tenths of a degree. They are claiming post-facto measurements aggrating to within a couple tenths of a degree over the last century - reasonable, all things considered, since any unmeasured bias in the instrumentation over time should be less than that - but the forecasts have margins of errors of whole degrees.
I don't recall denying the possibility of a planetary greenhouse effect, merely its plausibility in regards to Earth's short-term temperature trend as claimed by AGW folks. Hell, Mars is losing its southern icecaps as of 2005 data . . . insert your own joke there about rovers-as-SUVs.
Well, here's the deal. We know straight up from the physics how much of an effect to expect for each gas. Straight-up black-body radiation terms combined with atmospheric abosrption-emission spectra is pretty much what the 19th century model I pointed out used. It makes similarly dramatic predictions.

The modern models are much more complex - but the carbon greenhouse element is pretty well understood, in and of itself. Solar irradiance is pretty well understood, in and of itself. Again, that's essentially a black-body problem, so it's easy to model. Cloud formation? Not so easy. Oceanic heat transport? Not so easy.

What we have as a modeling problem isn't figuring out what carbon dioxide does; we know that, just like we know what causes the Earth to zip around the Sun and what causes a nuclear meltdown. It's not figuring out where it comes from; we know that, just like we know approximately how much steel has been manufactured, how much gold has been mined, to a pretty good degree from the economic records.
DING DING DING!!! My point exactly . . . have I not been saying that the whole AGW claim is based on NOW? This gives them free reign (in their mind) to ignore the past. The problem I've pointed out is that they can't do that, and that even if we allow it their claim doesn't hold water for the time period they claim is extra-special, because half of that time period fails their claim!
Half the period doesn't fail. There are other effects in play - solar irradiance, particulates - and carbon isn't supposedly causing all the variation in temperature. Simply most of it.
Even acknowledged periods of 'abrupt' change from the past are not attributed to CO2. Modern change pales in comparison to these.
Because generally, large shifts in CO2 are triggered by temperature shifts. Thus, CO2 does not - normally - trigger changes, merely make them a little more dramatic.

The catastrophic thermohaline climate shifts are part of the "alarmist" models you're complaining about, though. That's why there's worry that if too much ice melts at once, it might trigger sharp cooling in Europe even as the globe overall is warming.
Tree rings are generally recent (when reliable . . . Mann and company had to cherry-pick the cores they wanted to use and even then couldn't make them work past 1960, though they still pretended perfect reliability prior to that).

Some ice core data I'm finding does have superior resolution at least over recent millenia, though, as good as 5 year and maybe better. See here, but note that none of the links work at present so I'm kinda guessing by title. These are the ones listed as having data over the first century CE. Other ice core data I've found (where the links are also not working now, implying a problem as of this writing) relating to Vostok cores had resolution for the past 250,000 years as low as 80 years at times, as I recall, but seldom better than that.

However, over geological time (which, of course, comprises the vast majority of Earth's history), we don't have even that kind of resolution, meaning significant events (e.g. the Industrial Age) could be completely missed.
Could be missed, yes. But the ice core record gives us a lot more data to work with.
Yes, "could be". CO2 could, in isolation or as an atmosphere all its own, function as a pretty powerful greenhouse gas. However, in the real atmosphere, where it represents a mere 0.038%, it seems to be of limited effect, even in spite of recent contrary claims.
The fact that it only accounts for a few hundred PPM is accounted for. We know quite well how much radiation of what kind CO2 will absorb and emit.

It is a fact that we've seen less warming than we would see were CO2 levels the only things driving shifts in climate. Hansen, quite recently but not too recently (2000, to be precise) was suggesting that since aerosol and excess carbon emissions are generally tied together, the aerosols have been providing a pretty good dampening effect on the carbon.
No crap. However, the pretense that it is a danger is based on (1) ignoring climate history of what forces what, (2) considering its effect in theoretical isolation, outside the actual climate system, and (3) ignoring the temperature and CO2 history of the planet over the past few hundred million years.
Except that (1) doesn't apply - we know what CO2 does, and it normally acts as an amplifier for warming effects - unfortunately, we've introduced a new magic source for CO2 outside of the model. If the models are correct about where carbon comes from and goes to, then we won't find any period of geologic history where CO2 is a primary driver of climate.
Then stop.
I'm not the one trying to isolate this decade or 1940-1980 from the rest of the data.
That statement is incorrect . . . it is claimed to be the primary driver of climate change by mainstream AGW sources. Hansen says it, the AGW apologists of RealClimate make fun of those who deny it, the EPA's recent BS said it, and so on.
How many times is this going to take before you get what I - and they - are actually saying? Not that CO2 is always, or even is usually, the primary driver of climate change, but only very recently has it gained that status.

And that in geologic past, CO2, while having a significant effect on climate, has served the role of an amplifier - since warmer temperatures release CO2 from the ocean, which warms the planet a little further. Similarly, cool temperatures lead to ice formation, which increases albedo, leading to further cooling. This is what helps the Earth find multiple short-term equilibria - ice ages, warm periods, et cetera.
This is why I agree with a general correlation over time, but not this "lockstep" of yours, because during some historical periods the correlation looks non-existent, provided you're looking at the right timeslice. Picking the 1980-2000 timeslice and saying "we're all gonna die!" is unconvincing to me.
The only slices I'm interested in looking at separately are those in which something demonstrably different is happening. The only person wanting to divorce 2000-2009 from earlier time measurements in this thread is you.
Let me put it this way . . . if I ever wanted to lie with a graph, I would use that method. In the real world, correlation implies a temporal component, otherwise they are disconnected events. We do not say things correlate when they bear no relationship to one another in or over time.

In short, removing the temporal component to prove correlation doesn't, and picking a particular period of known correlation and ignoring periods where correlation fails doesn't either.
Not really. There are a number of identified short-term cyclic effects that do nothing but introduce noise into the relationships.

I could plot monthly data, and this mysterious 12-month cycle would strongly permeate the data. The annual carbon cycle and the annual temperature cycles would dominate the entire relationship. I could plot by year, and I have the El Nino/La Nina cycles going bonkers, plus an 11-year sunspot cycle throwing in a little extra noise. I have volcanic eruptions at odd times. I have ice freezing and melting, and seasonal movements of water vapor from one area to another.

But CO2? CO2 plays a very immediate role, one that has no relationship with the past CO2 levels. Tomorrow, the sun will rise, and it will shine down light outside my window. Some of it is absorbed and re-radiated down in the infrared spectrum; some of that is reabsorbed and re-radiated back down by carbon dioxide. If I'm living under 1000 ppm, it'll be a little warmer today than if I'm living under 100 ppm - and in particular, tomorrow night will be a good bit warmer.

And unless I'm keeping track of the serious long-term carbon and heat reservoirs and accounting for their behavior in my model, all I'll get is a blurrier picture putting them on a timeline. I want to put them on a timeline - but then, I want to have all those other effects in there, too. So if I'm sitting there and I want to isolate carbon as a variable, knowing it has a pretty immediate impact - I may as well desort by time.

It's actually a very useful trick when you have data with a lot of cyclic noise - take time out. Plot X to Y alone, look for trends in that data. And here, you can
Unprecedented warming . . . e.g. a rate, not a temperature. Or are you suggesting that rapid warming of the type you believe to be now occurring has happened before? And praytell, did it have CO2 as a primary driver, as is claimed for modern times? Or was CO2 either lagging behind or perhaps even increasing along with temperature decrease, as is observed in the actual record?
Rapid temperature shifts can occur for any of a wide number of possible reasons. If the Sun were to enter a true flare period, for example, as other stars are wont to do, or a major impact or eruption occurs, or any of a number of other causes, we could easily see even sharper temperature shifts than we see now.

It is unprecedented to have rapid warming triggered by a CO2 increase. It is a remarkable warming within the record we have. It is certainly one with the potential for economic catastrophe and significant costs; the amount of property too close to the beach, and thus moving into erosion/storm surge/underwater areas is disproportionately high. For
According to some, but not others. One flaw in ice core and tree ring data is that it's strictly local, and as you no doubt noticed when you were linking to D-O events, it's quite possible for the Antarctic to warm while the Arctic cools, or vice versa. Some of the more "alarmist" models have had Europe entering a new ice age while most of the rest of the planet fries. Climate change is not simply a uniform heating or cooling.

Even the sea level does not rise evenly everywhere.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by 2046 » Mon Dec 14, 2009 9:52 am

My points in earlier posts were very simple, and you even admit them here:
Jedi Master Spock wrote:The hypothesis is that a fundamental shift has been made in where the changes in climate are coming from.
So they are hypothesizing a new climatic relationship . . .
If the models are correct about where carbon comes from and goes to, then we won't find any period of geologic history where CO2 is a primary driver of climate. {...} It is unprecedented to have rapid warming triggered by a CO2 increase.
. . . unprecedented in history . . .
I'm not the one trying to isolate this decade or 1940-1980 from the rest of the data.
. . . and for which both historical or recent evidence of the hypothesis being wrong is disallowed.

QED.
How many times is this going to take before you get what I - and they - are actually saying? Not that CO2 is always, or even is usually, the primary driver of climate change, but only very recently has it gained that status.
Oh, I'm understanding very well . . . but what you are failing to understand is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable. Otherwise it is no different than a religious view.

Thus far, any time counterevidence is brought up you've evaded, either discussing some basic matter or proclaiming what climate science supposedly knows.

For instance, statistical reduction of error by aggregate means is fine, provided it was done correctly, yet the entire point is that these guys were not doing it correctly in any way, were modifying the data willy-nilly, and so on, while still claiming tenth of a degree accuracy. It's bull, and you're ignoring it, and the temperature mumbo-jumbo modifications are a systemic problem, because the vast majority of stations (the few that remain) are crap per their own ranking scheme . . . good enough for the weatherman, but not good enough for input in half-broken Fortran models with codified output fiddling to make things look better. Oh wait, I guess it is good enough for that.

But in any case, I'm still not seeing any real point in continuing, here. You clearly believe that the climate scientists are virtually omniscient save for a few data points, and in spite of the fact that they have made no predictions corresponding with reality and in spite of what we've seen out of ClimateGate you still believe in them utterly and completely. It makes me feel like I'm debating your religion with you, and I don't like to do that sort of thing.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Dec 14, 2009 11:47 pm

2046 wrote: But in any case, I'm still not seeing any real point in continuing, here. You clearly believe that the climate scientists are virtually omniscient save for a few data points, and in spite of the fact that they have made no predictions corresponding with reality and in spite of what we've seen out of ClimateGate you still believe in them utterly and completely. It makes me feel like I'm debating your religion with you, and I don't like to do that sort of thing.
Well, amusingly, you may appreciate this:
T. Blair wrote:It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be. [...]
Source.

Oopsy?
This guy really seems to have an issue with the word evidence, doesn't he?

But perhaps all we need is the good old Inquisition?

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Tue Dec 15, 2009 12:02 am

2046 wrote:. . . and for which both historical or recent evidence of the hypothesis being wrong is disallowed.

QED.

Oh, I'm understanding very well . . . but what you are failing to understand is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable. Otherwise it is no different than a religious view.
Like all scientific hypotheses, it's quite falsifiable.

Here is the hypothesis in question, in full specificness, which causes such political controversy:

Human activity is causing a medium term (decades to centuries order) warming effect through the production of greenhouse gases, especially and most particular carbon dioxide.

This hypothesis is comprised of a chain of falsifiable hypotheses. Any of the following discoveries would falsify the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming:
  1. Carbon dioxide (& company) do not in fact inhibit the re-radiation of heat when placed in a mixture with other gases as present in the upper atmosphere. This would be big news in spectroscopy and/or chemistry.
  2. Human activity is not largely responsible for the variation in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
  3. Other human activities are producing a cooling effect equal to, greater than, or statistically indistinguishable from the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions.
  4. The climate is not actually warming in the mid-to-long term.
I have listed these events in ascending order of probability. I consider it most likely that some heretofore undiscovered mechanism will act as a brake on climate change in the future and halt the warming trend.

I do not expect human particulate emissions and other not-necessarily-warming activities to dominate over human carbon emissions in the long term, but it is not inconceivable.

Human activity being not the primary force responsible for the variation in atmospheric carbon was a common claim at one point in recent history. The data does not support this claim, but it's possible that the data will change in the future.

The spectral properties of carbon dioxide are highly unlikely to have been mistaken. It is still hypothetically falsifiable, but much like Newton's Law of Gravitation, any falsification of it is highly unlikely to have any relevance to a terrestrial application.

You think that (4) has already happened; however, the exceptional temperatures of 1998 must be kept in mind (which were expected to produce short-term appearance of cooling, naturally, following a temperature spike) and we've barely had an 11-year solar cycle completed since that year. Noise can be expected to frequently dominate any overlying trend under such a small window.

So I don't think we yet have enough data to claim the warming trend over. SSTs and air temperatures are holding basically constant this decade (with much noise), but we're losing a lot of sea ice this decade as they do so. Right now, the preponderance of evidence still says we're in a warming phase; we could be entering a phase where another mechanism is coming into play, or, more likely, it's just noise.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by 2046 » Tue Dec 15, 2009 6:40 pm

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
2046 wrote:. . . and for which both historical or recent evidence of the hypothesis being wrong is disallowed.

QED.

Oh, I'm understanding very well . . . but what you are failing to understand is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable. Otherwise it is no different than a religious view.
Like all scientific hypotheses, it's quite falsifiable.

Here is the hypothesis in question, in full specificness, which causes such political controversy:

Human activity is causing a medium term (decades to centuries order) warming effect through the production of greenhouse gases, especially and most particular carbon dioxide.
And yet we have 50 of the last 100 years (in two groups of four decades and one decade) which do not show that, as well as a record spanning the existence of the planet which does not give any direct indication of CO2 forcing temperature upward. It is argued to reinforce existing temperature hikes, though so far as I have seen this is merely a hypothesis based on CO2's physical parameters in isolation (e.g. not as part of the actual atmosphere and climate system).

One would think these facts would give pause.

Further, I would have no particular issue with the thesis as you've presented it had it focused on the periods 1980-2000, for instance (save for some quibbling here and there), so you probably want to make sure that you're talking about a warming effect that (1) is continuing and which (2) will be dangerous and which (3) will continue to be our fault over time.

I use the phrasing "continue to be our fault over time" because if the damage is done, there's nothing politically to do. Thus greenhouse gases were needed, but since the really naughty ones claimed in the past were already gone it finally hit someone to go all out . . . that this religion needed the Original Sin. And CO2 was it.

As for the continued and dangerous warming effect, Al Gore, for instance, claims the northern ice cap will be completely gone (though he changed this days later to 'mostly gone save for winter waterway freezes') in 5-7 years.

But instead of simple falsification of predictions, you lay out a very specific and artificial criteria of what can falsify global warming:
Any of the following discoveries would falsify the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming:

Carbon dioxide (& company) do not in fact inhibit the re-radiation of heat when placed in a mixture with other gases as present in the upper atmosphere. This would be big news in spectroscopy and/or chemistry.
Note the very specific phrasing. The question is not whether the climate system could 'react' to additional CO2 (or the natural changes in temperature) by other means in the above, but very specifically whether a mix of CO2 and other gases suddenly shoots heat away.

If the atmospheric system has a 'response' to higher temperature/CO2, then CO2 (and human output thereof) becomes largely irrelevant.
Human activity is not largely responsible for the variation in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Given that AGW argues we're putting in 3% above normal CO2 (thus 3% of less than 0.04% of the atmosphere), then this is a unique phrasing also.

Nonetheless, I concur that between deforestation and fossil fuel burning, we do allow higher than "normal" CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, given evidence of widespread ancient wildfire cycles and so on (repeated soot (aerosol) and CO2 events), I think there are still a lot of questions in regards to what is "normal", and the concept of carbon sinks being overwhelmed by a mere couple of extra percent output is very odd.
Other human activities are producing a cooling effect equal to, greater than, or statistically indistinguishable from the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions.
That's what the "how to talk to a skeptic" guy that Oragahn linked to claimed . . . that since we quit putting out some aerosols and whatnot on environmentalist grounds, their cooling effect has allowed the warming effect of CO2 to flourish. That's his claim, and I'll leave you with the irony.

I had started writing a response to that guy, by the way, but never got around to finishing it. I might get back to it later.
The climate is not actually warming in the mid-to-long term.
Oh, I think there's some warming in some places, and cooling elsewhere. The net effect is probably of warming. But frankly, I don't know beyond a reasonable doubt that we can even say that with certainty at this point. The claims of warming have been wildly overstated by some scientists (CRU's data-fixing, New Zealand, Antarctica, surface station culling, failure to account for UHI and other bad surface station siting, et cetera), which muddies the water greatly.

AGW research is so alarmingly full of crap that if climate research were my business I'd be sorely tempted to fire the whole lot of them and start fresh. I have no concept of how one can sit there and see so much deceptive activity yet believe the conclusions unquestioningly.

But beyond that, AGW does not get to set the rules of its own falsification. You have, for instance, provided some uniquely phrased falsification criteria, ignoring several others. Of those you allow you make them sufficiently narrow to be either useless, irrelevant, or unprovable. That's just not gonna fly.

CO2-based AGW must first show its own validity as a hypothesis. The only time it can do so significantly is 1980-2000 or so, and maybe pre-1940 for a little while. Much of what is left as proof is so heavily monkeyed with that I'm scared to touch it in fear of monkey-poo being all over it.

That's not science. There's a good reason so many scientists from other disciplines point and laugh . . . because climate researchers seem to be of the opinion that they can divorce themselves from reality. To borrow from this excellent essay's quote of Feynman:

”In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. It’s that simple statement that is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is---if it disagrees with experiment (observation) it is wrong."
- Dr. Richard Feynman, “The Character of Natural Law”, the MIT Press, 1965, p. 156.

Similarly, it doesn't make any difference what the consequences of your guess are. If it fails against reality it's dead wrong, and just because you're in love with your own guess it doesn't mean you get to make your own rules as to what it takes for the guess to be wrong.

From that essay, I'm rather fond of the fellow's point . . . water vapor is 95% of the greenhouse gas total in the atmosphere, and AGW people commonly ignore water vapor altogether. CO2 represents 3.6% . . . and we make about 3% extra CO2 according to the best AGW claims. So we've added a whopping 0.1% of the total greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Even in combination of all such gases, we've only added about a quarter of a percent of the greenhouse gases, and of course any cooling stuff we've added.

And yet you really think that a quarter of a percent deviation is going to wreck civilization?

Actually, I agree that it can, if we allow AGW alarmists to make us freak out about it.

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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Dec 19, 2009 4:22 pm


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Re: Global Warming Supported Via SDN Tactics

Post by Jedi Master Spock » Sun Dec 20, 2009 1:27 pm

2046 wrote:And yet we have 50 of the last 100 years (in two groups of four decades and one decade) which do not show that, as well as a record spanning the existence of the planet which does not give any direct indication of CO2 forcing temperature upward. It is argued to reinforce existing temperature hikes, though so far as I have seen this is merely a hypothesis based on CO2's physical parameters in isolation (e.g. not as part of the actual atmosphere and climate system).
The correlation is not trivial even in the periods you criticize.
One would think these facts would give pause.

Further, I would have no particular issue with the thesis as you've presented it had it focused on the periods 1980-2000, for instance (save for some quibbling here and there), so you probably want to make sure that you're talking about a warming effect that (1) is continuing and which (2) will be dangerous and which (3) will continue to be our fault over time.
For what class of dangerous?

We have a very general idea what sort of changes will happen as warming occurs, and that involves some very specific costs (such as slight changes to coastline, salt water leeching into water supplies, et cetera) and some uncertainties (we're already in a large-scale extinction period due to human activity, how much ecological damage will the shifting climate actually commit?).
I use the phrasing "continue to be our fault over time" because if the damage is done, there's nothing politically to do. Thus greenhouse gases were needed, but since the really naughty ones claimed in the past were already gone it finally hit someone to go all out . . . that this religion needed the Original Sin. And CO2 was it.

As for the continued and dangerous warming effect, Al Gore, for instance, claims the northern ice cap will be completely gone (though he changed this days later to 'mostly gone save for winter waterway freezes') in 5-7 years.
The amount of permanently frozen sea ice has dropped sharply. Much more of it is seasonal than ten years ago, as seen here. That's a very recent and very dramatic shift. Winter ice levels haven't changed much, which is why Al Gore correcting his statement was probably a very good move on his part.
But instead of simple falsification of predictions, you lay out a very specific and artificial criteria of what can falsify global warming:
The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is the most general hypothesis being examined. A diversity of models exist supporting this claim, but they don't all agree with each other in terms of specific predictions. An inaccurate specific prediction does not test the general hypothesis, although it does test the specific models being used. The general hypothesis is more difficult to falsify, but quite clearly not impossible.
Note the very specific phrasing. The question is not whether the climate system could 'react' to additional CO2 (or the natural changes in temperature) by other means in the above, but very specifically whether a mix of CO2 and other gases suddenly shoots heat away.

If the atmospheric system has a 'response' to higher temperature/CO2, then CO2 (and human output thereof) becomes largely irrelevant.
Such a [currently undiscovered] response would fall under something a little lower on the list, and something I consider more likely:
I, earlier wrote:I consider it most likely that some heretofore undiscovered mechanism will act as a brake on climate change in the future and halt the warming trend.
Certainly, there will be people looking to find a cause for any significant deviation from their models. If it's a strong deviation with a pattern, hopefully they can find a physical real cause. If they're not doing their job well, they may just tweak a couple numbers to try to get it to fit.
Given that AGW argues we're putting in 3% above normal CO2 (thus 3% of less than 0.04% of the atmosphere), then this is a unique phrasing also.

Nonetheless, I concur that between deforestation and fossil fuel burning, we do allow higher than "normal" CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, given evidence of widespread ancient wildfire cycles and so on (repeated soot (aerosol) and CO2 events), I think there are still a lot of questions in regards to what is "normal", and the concept of carbon sinks being overwhelmed by a mere couple of extra percent output is very odd.
Except it's what we're seeing in the carbon data. Annual average CO2 levels have increased literally every single year on the Mauna Loa record - and done so, moreover, at a rate less than that of the excess human output. The evidence says that the entire rest of the system is a net sink over this span - and that the CO2 levels are increasing anyway, meaning that yes, we are "overwhelming" the natural carbon sinks.
That's what the "how to talk to a skeptic" guy that Oragahn linked to claimed . . . that since we quit putting out some aerosols and whatnot on environmentalist grounds, their cooling effect has allowed the warming effect of CO2 to flourish. That's his claim, and I'll leave you with the irony.

I had started writing a response to that guy, by the way, but never got around to finishing it. I might get back to it later.
Ah, but very true. Large amounts of certain kinds of particulates and pollutions have been very strongly linked to cooling (e.g., as in major volcanic eruptions and impact events). We get nuclear winter from that scenario as well.

There is a measure of irony, yes, but only to the degree that it underlines that understanding the total impact of human activity on the environment is something difficult to do. I do think it's true that human industrial activity outside of China has largely been getting better about particulate emissions following the environmental successes in politics of the 1960s and 1970, but it's definitely something that needs to be considered carefully.
CO2-based AGW must first show its own validity as a hypothesis. The only time it can do so significantly is 1980-2000 or so, and maybe pre-1940 for a little while. Much of what is left as proof is so heavily monkeyed with that I'm scared to touch it in fear of monkey-poo being all over it.
This is not really true. I drew up for you the correlation from 1959 forward. You can also see the relationship in the whole 150 year instrumental record.

Where you don't see the correlation is in limited subsets of the data. You see it in all the big-picture sets, to one strength or another; your biggest problem is noise and the generally thin nature of older data.
Someone mentioned that Russia is a major oil exporter, and the IEA is a "market-oriented" think tank over there (think Cato Institute - the two are associated), but not adjusting for urban heat island effects correctly is one of the things that can throw a monkey wrench in whether or not we see warming actually taking place.

There's a nice graph here looking at the different subsets. I found this article explains what the graph means a little better.

It's nice timing on his part, but really a side-show compared to the actual 'climategate' incident. The fellow making this claim is a political hack, basically - no more a working climate scientist than Al Gore or Bill O'Reilly.

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