Re: Statisticians Reject 'Global Cooling'

[Leonard]

On 4/21/12 8:25 PM, in article bbj6p7d06t812bn01...@4ax.com, "AGWFacts" <AGWF...@1800reaklity.com> wrote:

Statisticians Reject 'Global Cooling'

http://www.americanscientist.org/science/pub/-170

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2009/oct/26/us-sci-global-cooling-102609/?science

By SETH BORENSTEIN, The Associated Press
Oct. 26, 2009

WASHINGTON  ˜ Have you heard that "the world is now cooling"
instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the
Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one
problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers
done by several independent statisticians for The Associated
Press.

The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent
weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a
while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a
longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent
statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling
them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true
temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend
within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,"
said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of
South Carolina.

Yet the idea that things are cooling has been repeated in opinion
columns, a BBC news story posted on the Drudge Report and in a new
book by the authors of the best-seller "Freakonomics." Last week,
a poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent of
Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for
global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.

Global warming "skeptics" base their claims on an unusually hot
year in 1998. Since then, they say, temperatures have dropped ˆ
thus, a cooling trend. But it's not that simple.

Since 1998, temperatures have dipped, soared, fallen again and are
now rising once more. Records kept by the British meteorological
office and satellite data used by climate "skeptics" still show
1998 as the hottest year. However, data from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration and NASA show 2005 has topped 1998.
Published peer-reviewed scientific research generally cites
temperatures measured by ground sensors, which are from NOAA, NASA
and the British, more than the satellite data.

The recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA's climate data
center to re-examine its temperature data. It found no cooling
trend.

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern
record," said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. "Even if
you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually
positive, which means warming."

The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA's year-to-year ground
temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of
satellite-measured temperatures preferred by "skeptics" and
gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long
upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop
in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during
the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as
1880.

Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically
legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University
statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Identifying a downward trend is a case of "people coming at the
data with preconceived notions," said Peterson, author of the book
"Why Did They Do That? An Introduction to Forensic Decision
Analysis."

One prominent "skeptic" said that to find the cooling trend, the
30 years of satellite temperatures must be used. The satellite
data tends to be cooler than the ground data. And key is making
sure 1998 is part of the trend, he added.

It's what happens within the past 10 years or so, not the overall
average, that counts, contends Don Easterbrook, a Western
Washington University geology professor and global warming
"skeptic."

"I don't argue with you that the 10-year average for the past 10
years is higher than the previous 10 years," said Easterbrook, who
has self-published some of his research. "We started the cooling
trend after 1998. You're going to get a different line depending
on which year you choose.

"Should not the actual temperature be higher now than it was in
1998?" Easterbrook asked. [Answer: No] "We can play the numbers
games."

That's the problem, some of the statisticians said.

Grego produced three charts to show how choosing a starting date
can alter perceptions. Using the "skeptics'" satellite data
beginning in 1998, there is a "mild downward trend," he said. But
doing that is "deceptive."

The trend disappears if the analysis starts in 1997. And it trends
upward if you begin in 1999, he said.

Apart from the conflicting data analyses is the eyebrow-raising
new book title from Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, "Super
Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why
Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance."

A line in the book says: "Then there's this little-discussed fact
about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder
over the past several years, the average global temperature during
that time has in fact decreased."

That led to a sharp rebuke from the Union of Concerned Scientists,
which said the book mischaracterizes climate science with
"distorted statistics."

Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, said he does not
believe there is a cooling trend. He said the line was just an
attempt to note the irony of a cool couple of years at a time of
intense discussion of global warming. Levitt said he did not do
any statistical analysis of temperatures, but "eyeballed" the
numbers and noticed 2005 was hotter than the last couple of years.
Levitt said the "cooling" reference in the book title refers more
to ideas about trying to cool the Earth artificially.

Statisticians say that in sizing up climate change, it's important
to look at moving averages of about 10 years. They compare the
average of 1999-2008 to the average of 2000-2009. In all data
sets, 10-year moving averages have been higher in the last five
years than in any previous years.

"To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the
planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous,"
said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution
at Stanford.

Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy's
Lawrence Livermore National Lab, called it "a concerted strategy
to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and
policymakers" ahead of international climate talks in December in
Copenhagen.

President Barack Obama weighed in on the topic Friday at MIT. He
said some opponents "make cynical claims that contradict the
overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change ˆ
claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we
know is necessary."

Earlier this year, climate scientists in two peer-reviewed
publications statistically analyzed recent years' temperatures
against claims of cooling and found them not valid.

Not all "skeptical" scientists make the flat-out cooling argument.

"It pretty much depends on when you start," wrote John Christy,
the Alabama atmospheric scientist who collects the satellite data
that "skeptics" use. He said in an e-mail that looking back 31
years, temperatures have gone up nearly three-quarters of a degree
Fahrenheit (four-tenths of a degree Celsius). The last dozen years
have been flat, and temperatures over the last eight years have
declined a bit, he wrote.

Oceans, which take longer to heat up and longer to cool, greatly
influence short-term weather, causing temperatures to rise and
fall temporarily on top of the overall steady warming trend,
scientists say. The biggest example of that is El Nino.

El Nino, a temporary warming of part of the Pacific Ocean, usually
spikes global temperatures, scientists say. The two recent warm
years, both 1998 and 2005, were El Nino years. The flip side of El
Nino is La Nina, which lowers temperatures. A La Nina bloomed last
year and temperatures slipped a bit, but 2008 was still the ninth
hottest in 130 years of NOAA records.

Of the 10 hottest years recorded by NOAA, eight have occurred
since 2000, and after this year it will be nine because this year
is on track to be the sixth-warmest on record.

The current El Nino is forecast to get stronger, probably pushing
global temperatures even higher next year, scientists say. NASA
climate scientist Gavin Schmidt predicts 2010 may break a record
[it did], so a cooling trend "will be never talked about again."

ø Gavin Schmidt is Hansen’s statistics doctor
   He would not admit a true fact if he saw one.

[Leonard]

On 4/21/12 10:10 PM, in article y_KdnUJG8aEM9Q7S...@mchsi.com, "Sam Wormley" <swor...@gmail.com> wrote:

> See: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/scienceshot-no-letup-in-worlds.html
>
> Global warming contrarians remind the public that the world has not warmed all that much, if at all, during the past decade or so. But that's the atmosphere. Oceanographers with their thermometers in Earth's biggest reservoir of heat—the world's ocean—report in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters that greenhouse warming has in fact been proceeding apace the past decade, not to mention the past half century.

        ø  ROTFLMAO
            Science mag is well larded with bullshit and the
            worm does not tell fact from factoids.

 ø        Warming seas are a sure sign of global cooling.
         
 
ø The world's oceans are being heated by
     underwater tectonic activity - underwater
     volcanic eruptions and blisteringly hot magma
     seeping up from cracks in the sea floor.

     The heated ocean water creates high levels of
     CO2 that it sends aloft along with huge amounts
     of moisture. That moisture becomes precipitation
     — rain in the spring, summer, and fall, and snow
     in the winter. Increased amounts of moisture in
     the upper atmosphere equals increased amounts
     of precipitation.

     The hotter the oceans, the more water vapor sent
     heavenward and the heavier the precipitation. This
     explains the large number of record-breaking
     rainfalls we've been seeing in the past couple of
     years — with as noted above, areas of the United
     States getting 20 inches of rain in a day or so.

We are being bombarded with horror stories about how
the arctic regions are warming and the polar bears are
disappearing (actually their number numbers have
increased by some 20,000) but we are not informed by
Mr. Gore and his acolytes as to how a warming arctic
region can continue to send more and more record
breaking cold waves southward, creating the incredibly
frigid weather much of the northern U.S. is shivering
under.

If your refrigerator is running low on freon it will not
keep its contents cold. If the arctic is our refrigerator,
and the refrigerator is rapidly running out of coolant,
how can it create colder and colder weather fronts??

The mechanics here are simple. The earth is getting
warmer in some areas thanks to the heat being given
off by the seas – picture standing next to a pot of
boiling water – you'll feel the heat. Stand next to a
heated ocean and you'll feel the warmth.

When that warm air coming north from the tropics
meets the frigid air coming south from the pole, it
creates violence. And the hotter the air from the south
and the colder the air from the north, the more violent
the collision will be. Tornadoes, violent storms, and
blizzards are some of the results.

This process feeds on itself. As the amount of
atmospheric moisture increases more precipitation is
sent poleward, resulting in more snowfall to build
heavier and heavier polar ice packs which fail to
decrease in summertime because the cloud cover
created by the moisture-laden air transported from the
tropics prevents any thawing.

As the ice packs grow deeper and heavier, more
magma is squeezed out and sent toward the equators,
creating more volcanic activity, which spews more
and more volcanic ash into the upper atmosphere,
along with enormous quantities of greenhouse gasses.
This results in greater and greater amounts of
moisture-laden clouds being sent poleward. And so on.

As the glaciation process continues, winters will get
longer and longer; that's colder air reaches farther and
farther toward the equator. Summers will get shorter
and shorter, and growing seasons will slowly vanish.

Areas previously blessed with temperate climates are
transformed into subarctic regions, and the subtropics
turn colder and colder.

And all this can happen in a matter of a very few years.
So few, that the world may very well learn that the post
interglacial period has been replaced by the glaciation
process before the end of the next decade — or even
earlier.

ø BTW those statisticians are working with bad data.


            

[Sam Wormley]

On 4/25/12 7:19 PM, Leonard wrote:
> Science mag is well larded with bullshit and the
> worm does not tell fact from factoids.

The AAAS folks will be sorry to hear that, Leonard.

Have I got a good deal for you, Leonard: Pod casts that can
improve your mind and make your life better.

> Global Warning Podcasts by Professor John Chiang
> http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Science/Environment/Global-Warming-Podcast/21917
>
> This lower division course introduces global warming as both a scientific and social issue. We will introduce the physical science that sets the stage for the problem, from the basic concepts of climate (carbon cycle, greenhouse effect, climate feedbacks) through to the climate model projections of future climate changes and their impacts. Social scientific perspectives will be integrated throughout, including the history of climate science, the geographical and political-economic implications of fossil fuels and industrial production, and the challenges posed to existing regulatory and governance systems by the current and prospective impacts of global warming. Several guest lecturers will give in-depth reviews of specific topical issues, potential examples being climate models, carbon sequestration, and impacts on public health. We aim to provide students with a solid understanding and information base with which to analyze and evaluate ongoing developments and (often heated) deba
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[Sam Wormley]

On 4/25/12 7:19 PM, Leonard wrote:

> Warming seas are a sure sign of global cooling.

...or global extinction event.

> The Last Great Global Warming
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-last-great-global-warming
>
> Rob Dunbar: The threat of ocean acidification
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evfgbVjb688
>
> Ocean acidification on track to be among the worst of the last 300 million years
> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/ocean-acidification-could-become-worst-in-at-least-300-million-years.ars
>

[Leonard]

On 4/21/12 10:52 PM, in article g5OdnShVnu_x7w7S...@mchsi.com, "Sam Wormley" <swor...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 4/21/12 9:40 PM, Peter Webb wrote:

> ______________________________________________
> Umm, *what* follows the exponential rise in population? Certainly not
> global temperatures, they have decreased since 1998.
>

   Umm Peter, you are missing something very important.

>
> See: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/scienceshot-no-letup-in-worlds.html
>
> Global warming contrarians remind the public that the world has not warmed all that much, if at all, during the past decade or so. But that's the atmosphere. Oceanographers with their thermometers in Earth's biggest reservoir of heat—the world's ocean—report in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters that greenhouse warming has in fact been proceeding apace the past decade, not to mention the past half century.

            Those statisticians are working with bad data.
            The worm, sciencemag, and Geophysical
            Research letters could not be more wrong.

            Where I am sitting the end of April is usually
            10C degrees warmer and this week it has been,
             at best, 6°C. There is little or no greenhouse
             warming at best ever.

             In the past 15 years there has been zero
            warming in the Northern Hemisphere and the
            trend is go for a cool wet summer.  

[Sam Wormley]

On 4/25/12 7:50 PM, Leonard wrote:
> Those statisticians are working with bad data.
> The worm, sciencemag, and Geophysical Research letters could not be more wrong.

F-