bump

[Edited on July 18, 2010 at 12:38 AM. Reason : ``]

7/18/2010 12:37:27 AM

^ Oh, yeah? Well, I'm gonna bump mine, too, then!

7/18/2010 2:33:11 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25friedman.html?_r=1

7/26/2010 7:44:34 PM

way to cherry pick



Also keep in mind that glacial ice doesn't count as sea ice.

7/27/2010 1:36:08 AM

Odd... as I understood greenhouse theory, CO2 should have its biggest impact during the winter, as its warming effect is drowned out during the summer by H2O. Quite peculiar that the graphs show summer melt to be the only change, with winter growth even higher to compensate. What could explain this?

7/27/2010 2:46:13 AM

^probably the fact that CO2 concentration isn't a big player in global climate

7/27/2010 9:09:37 AM

^^ hahaha. speaking of cherry-picking... did you even BOTHER to look at the southern sea ice? you know, where it's INCREASING?



how about global sea ice? steady as a rock...

7/27/2010 7:05:26 PM

Haha, and you don't think losing all the sea ice in the northern hemisphere and replacing with sea ice in the southern hemisphere will change the earth one bit do you? You really have no idea what the implications are.

Climate change and global warming are two different things.

7/27/2010 8:47:47 PM

Quote :

"how about global sea ice? steady as a rock..."

Umm are you blind? After ~2000, the clear majority of the graph is beneath the average.

7/28/2010 2:54:12 AM

and yet, it's all still well within the margin of error. hmmm...

7/28/2010 7:15:12 AM

^That 2nd graph clearly shows a decline in ice. The chosen scale of the graph makes it appear less significant than it is.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html

Warmest Decade On Record

7/28/2010 4:58:01 PM

nope. within the margin of error. nice try, though

7/28/2010 5:57:00 PM

Yo burro do you have a link to the actual datasets and not the images? Are they published? Just curious

7/28/2010 6:30:14 PM

it's from the university of illinois. you could look around there if you want

7/28/2010 6:38:51 PM

I am sure the link is found somewhere within the margin of error.

7/28/2010 6:40:21 PM

or it could actually be that there is no overall trend... even McDouche will tell you that there is a reason we talk about statistical significance.

7/28/2010 6:46:58 PM

So I decided to take the data that was used to generate the images above (northern sea ice from 1870 - 2007 ... I excluded 2008 because it had two missing values) and do some really basic analysis.

Here's the sea-ice averages plotted across years:



To see if there's a trend, usually it's better to analyze moving averages. I calculated moving averages for both 5 year and 10 year intervals:

5 year:


10 year:


Over the last ~140 years I think it's safe to conclude there's a downward trend in Northern sea ice.

7/28/2010 7:42:48 PM

Trying to find the ascii datasets for southern sea ice.... will do similar plots for those numbers and for the sum of northern + southern sea ice.

7/28/2010 7:44:25 PM

good work, man. it is clear that there is a decline in northern sea ice, though I would point out that the pre-satellite numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, for obvious reasons.

[Edited on July 28, 2010 at 7:50 PM. Reason : ]

7/28/2010 7:49:42 PM

I don't think that data is pre, although I'm not sure what algorithm was used to produced the extent estimates.

I haven't found a southern sea ice extent data set to compare versus above. I did find this, though:

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2010/070610.html

Quote :

"Meanwhile, in Antarctica At the end of June, Southern Hemisphere mid-winter, the sea ice surrounding Antarctica was more than two standard deviations greater than normal. On June 30, Antarctic sea ice extent was15.88 million square kilometers (6.13 million square miles), compared to the 1979 to 2000 average of 14.64 million square kilometers (5.65 million square miles) for that day. While recent studies have shown that wintertime Antarctic sea ice has a weak upward trend, and substantial variability both within a year and from year to year, the differences between Arctic and Antarctic sea ice trends are not unexpected. Climate models consistently project that the Arctic will warm more quickly than the Antarctic, largely due to the strong climate feedbacks in the Arctic. Warming is amplified by the loss of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean in areas that had been ice-covered for decades, and by the warming of Arctic lands as snow cover is lost earlier and returns later than in recent decades. Moreover, rising levels of greenhouse gases and the loss of stratospheric ozone appear to be affecting wind patterns around Antarctica. Shifts in this circulation are referred to as the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO). As greenhouse gases have increased, and especially when ozone is lost in spring, there is a tendency for these winds to strengthen (a positive AAO index). The net effect is to push sea ice eastward, and northward, increasing the ice extent. As the current sea ice anomaly has developed, the AAO index has been strongly positive. See the (http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/aao/aao_index.html) NOAA AAO Index Web site. For more information about the differences between sea ice dynamics in the Arctic and Antarctic, see the NSIDC All About Sea Ice Web site. (http://nsidc.org/seaice/characteristics/difference.html)"

(I took out the photo -- see link for a useful graph. The photo messed up the formatting too much.)

I haven't done any of this analysis myself, but if the AAO index is covarying strongly (and positively) with an increase in Southern sea ice extent (despite alarmingly steep declines in Northern sea ice extent), then there's a decent case that changing wind-patterns is the culprit.

Here's a site that talks some about the differences in Northern and Southern hemisphere sea ice dynamics:

http://nsidc.org/seaice/characteristics/difference.html

Useful summary table in that link.

[Edited on July 29, 2010 at 9:03 AM. Reason : ..]

7/29/2010 8:58:02 AM

The report above claims that AAO significantly and positively increased in a way that covaried with the increase in Southern sea ice extent.

Southern sea ice doesn't persist year-long though, really.

7/29/2010 9:22:38 AM

I have a hard time getting excited over any climate data because the sample is so incredibly small in relation to the age of the planet.

how can anyone reach a conclusion?

7/29/2010 12:05:04 PM

Depends on the memory of the system. Just because a system's been around for billions of years doesn't mean you need billions of years of data to make inferences from samples to mechanism.

Quote :

"how can anyone reach a conclusion?"

Read the articles?

[Edited on July 29, 2010 at 12:16 PM. Reason : .]

7/29/2010 12:16:01 PM

If the globe is warming it's only because we're being brought closer to God's heat. Anyone who doesn't like swimming in December can suck it. LOL

7/29/2010 1:54:55 PM

Quote :

" Indonesia's coral reefs dying at alarming rate JAKARTA, Indonesia – Coral that survived the 2004 tsunami is now dying at one of the fastest rates ever recorded because of a dramatic rise in water temperatures off northwestern Indonesia, conservationists said, warning Wednesday that the threat extends to other reefs across Asia. http://tinyurl.com/3xb66zq "

[Edited on August 18, 2010 at 5:21 PM. Reason : .]

8/18/2010 5:20:23 PM

^always refreshing to see you posting something that proves exactly nothing.

8/19/2010 11:03:23 PM

Quote :

"Noted anti-global-warming scientist reverses course With scientific data piling up showing that the world has reached its hottest-ever point in recorded history, global-warming skeptics are facing a high-profile defection from their ranks. Bjorn Lomborg, author of the influential tract "The Skeptical Environmentalist," has reversed course on the urgency of global warming, and is now calling for action on "a challenge humanity must confront." http://tinyurl.com/3x9tcna "

9/1/2010 12:39:33 PM

when did genius boy b/c the resident AGW idiot troll?

9/1/2010 11:45:16 PM

^^^You disagree that warmer waters have an affect on calcification?

[Edited on September 2, 2010 at 8:18 AM. Reason : k]

9/2/2010 8:18:08 AM

Quote :

" Home of "Ice Giants" thaws, shows pre-Viking hunts JUVFONNA, Norway (Reuters) – Climate change is exposing reindeer hunting gear used by the Vikings' ancestors faster than archaeologists can collect it from ice thawing in northern Europe's highest mountains. "It's like a time machine...the ice has not been this small for many, many centuries," said Lars Piloe, a Danish scientist heading a team of "snow patch archaeologists" on newly bare ground 1,850 meters (6,070 ft) above sea level in mid-Norway. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100914/lf_nm_life/us_climate_vikings_1"

9/14/2010 2:28:27 PM

Quote :

"It's like a time machine...the ice has not been this small for many, many centuries"

except for when it was the last time...

9/14/2010 7:21:37 PM

^exactly, I mean how do you think the Vikings got there in the first place? Probably the same way they colonized Greenland..you know, when it was warmer.

9/14/2010 9:26:31 PM

A highly respected physics professor (Harold Lewis) has resigned from the APS over the AGW sham. His resignation latter is below:

Quote :

"Dear Curt: When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be? How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society. It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist. So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example: 1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate 2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake. 3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work. 4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.< 5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council. 6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition. APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization? I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question. I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends. Hal"

Quote :

"Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)"

10/14/2010 1:24:37 PM

clearly he is in the pocket of the oil companies

10/14/2010 6:32:20 PM

Quote :

"It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave."

I wish I knew how to dip into the trillions of dollars corrupting us physicists, since I have seen none of it. As a card carrying member of the APS I do wish for my share.

Seriously, the numbers he throws around are just nuts. Trillions? Millions of climate physics money to Princeton's Physics department--which doesn't even have faculty in atmospheric physics? I never heard of Lewis before his letters, although Google tells me he had a promising early career and found a cushy second career as a UCSB professor and advisor to the defense industry.

What's interesting his 1990 book "Technological Risk" discusses global warming in a way that gets my full agreement:

"The GCMs in use nowadays do a pretty good job of calculating the effect of a potential doubling of the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, but more research is truly needed... The details of the impending changes of climate are still beyond our grasp, though the broad outline is clear."
....
"All models agree that the net effect will be a general and global warming of the earth; they only disagree about how much. None suggest that it will be a minor effect, to be ignored while we go about our business."
...
"Yet, despite the complexity, the bottom line is that the earth will be substantially warmed by the accumulation of man-made gases, mainly carbon dioxide, and that warming could conceivably approximate the climate at the time of the dinosaurs. It seems likely, but not certain, that sea level will rise accordingly, conceivably by several feet or more. We are doing this to ourselves."
.....
"[CO2] has been increasing ever since [the industrial revolution], and has just passed 350 ppm, with no end in sight. Why is it happening, is it bad, and what can be done? The answer to the last question is easy---very little. The answer to the next to last question is also easy---yes, it is bad."

I wonder what happened since he wrote this twenty years ago...alzheimer's (he is 87) or maybe cognitive dissonance (whether CO-2 changed the opacity of the atmosphere in a meaningful way was determined more by physics rather than one's political beliefs twenty years ago). Curious.

10/14/2010 9:10:35 PM

Quote :

"None suggest that it will be a minor effect, to be ignored while we go about our business."

Absolutely untrue. Quite a few models suggest the warming will be on par with the warming the earth has already experienced.

10/14/2010 11:32:59 PM

Quote :

"Thinning ozone could be leaving whales sunburned LONDON – The thinning ozone layer could be leaving the world's whales scarred from severe sunburn, experts said Wednesday. A study of whales in the Gulf of California over the past few years shows that the sea-going mammals carry blisters and other damage typically associated with the skin damage that humans suffer from exposure to the ultraviolet radiation. That makes it yet another threat for the already endangered animals to worry about. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101110/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_sunburned_whales"

11/9/2010 10:29:07 PM

And this is in the Global Warming thread why?

11/9/2010 10:40:39 PM

figure it out.

11/10/2010 3:16:46 AM

No, I want you to explain to all of us how ultraviolet radiation warms the atmosphere, thus having any place in this thread.

11/10/2010 5:22:15 AM

^He's Genius Boy, apparently he answers to nobody.

Somewhat interesting poll results from Scientific American readers

Quote :

"A New Consensus Global Warming: Wouldn't the followers of Scientific American have a pretty good understanding of what's really going on with the climate? If a reader poll is any indication, they're skeptical man is heating the planet. For years we've heard that scientists have reached a "consensus" that the earth is warming due to a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions resulting from man's use of fossil fuels. No use in discussing it further, Al Gore and others have said. It's happening. Not every reader of Scientific American magazine is a scientist. But the responses of the 7,000 readers (6,767 as of Friday morning) who've taken the magazine's online poll strongly suggest that claims of a consensus are, at best, an exaggeration. More than three-fourths (77.7%) say natural processes are causing climate change and almost a third (31.9%) blame solar variation. Only 26.6% believe man is the cause. (The percentages exceed 100 because respondents were allowed to choose more than one cause on this question.) Whether climate change is man-caused or natural, most respondents don't believe there's anything that can be done about it anyway. Nearly seven in 10 (69.2%) agree "we are powerless to stop it." A mere one in four (25.7%) recommend switching "to carbon-free energy sources as much as possible and adapt to changes already under way." It seems even some of those who would endorse changing energy sources don't believe the benefits are worth the costs (which indicates they aren't taking the alarmists' claims seriously). Almost eight in 10 (79.4%) answer "nothing" to the question: "How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?" A small but apparently hard-core 12.3% say they'd be OK with spending "whatever it takes." Only 4.9% choose "a doubling of gasoline prices" while 3.4% don't mind paying "a 50% increase in electricity bills." That small, but hard, core likely makes up most of the 15.7% who think "the IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is an effective group of government representatives, scientists and other experts." These holdouts are overwhelmed, though, by the 83.6% who agree the IPCC "is a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda." This isn't what we expected from the readers of a magazine that Cato's Patrick Michaels says "has been shilling for the climate apocalypse for years." Yet we're not shocked. A new consensus is emerging as the unraveling of the global warming tale picks up speed"

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/553695/201011121850/A-New-Consensus.htm

11/16/2010 9:43:33 AM

Quote :

"Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue CHERSKY, Russia – The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame. Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_climate_siberian_meltdown"

11/21/2010 2:13:50 PM

This is nothing new. What would be new, however, would be your explanation of how ultraviolet radiation heats the atmosphere.

11/21/2010 4:36:46 PM

Quote :

"What would be new, however, would be your explanation of how ultraviolet radiation heats the atmosphere."

11/22/2010 10:20:14 AM

Quote :

"Iran declares holiday over high air pollution"

Quote :

"Hong Kong Air Pollution Hits `Very High' Level at 143 in Central District"

11/23/2010 3:34:00 AM

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-26/world-may-record-warmest-year-as-u-k-meteorological-office-adjusts-data.html

woops, we need to adjust those temperatures up again! isn't it funny that every time there is a "correction," it pushes temperatures up even higher? hmmm...

[Edited on December 1, 2010 at 7:51 PM. Reason : ]

12/1/2010 7:50:51 PM

how's that global warming treating you today, NC?

12/4/2010 8:12:52 PM

Considering it was 64 degrees with a tornado watch and severe thunderstorm warnings just three nights ago, this really isn't all that surprising. Oh wait, you were trying to be funny.

12/4/2010 9:24:55 PM

aaronburro drank so much republican kool-aid, he's got diabetes....



[Edited on December 4, 2010 at 10:54 PM. Reason : ]

12/4/2010 10:53:31 PM

Quote :

"how's that global warming treating you today, NC?"

Can we please refrain from this retarded line of thinking? Especially after a warmer than usual Autumn.

12/6/2010 10:23:00 AM