Wednesday
Feb232011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Weathermen more sceptical
Feb 23, 2011 Climate: Sceptics A survey of meteorologists has found that many became more sceptical of global warming in the wake of Climategate.
Among the respondents who indicated that they had followed the story, 42 percent indicated the story made them somewhat or much more skeptical that global warming is occurring. These results stand in stark contrast to the findings of several independent investigations of the emails, conducted later, that concluded no scientific misconduct had occurred and nothing in the emails should cause doubts about the fact which show that global warming is occurring.
Reader Comments (39)
Well, meteorologists... The "Butterfly Effect" (aka modern Chaos Theory) was, after all, kick-started by one Dr. Lorenz - a meteorologist who concluded in the Sixties that his computerized weather models could never work.
If only the UK Met Office would stick to weather forecasting, they might actually save the country money, and save lives.
Slashing, or abolishing state funding for the Met Office, should be on the political agenda
It just goes to prove that seeing the evidence in the emails for oneself is much more convincing than being told by some "independent" committees that there is nothing to see in the emails.
No proper scientist would ignore the evidence and take someone else's word for it.
The issue isn't whether global warming is occurring, but whether mankind's activities are having a significant effect on the warming (or rather, on the lack of warming since 1998).
I wouldn't be surprised if 42% of Joe Public who 'followed the story' became 'somewhat or much more skeptical', as well as the weathermen.
It would be interesting to know how many of the remaining 58% were already sceptical before Climategate.
They don't believe it..................
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLNrLI3OBwg
As David C points out, the phrasing remains unhelpful. Regardless, I think it's safe to assume that a meteorologist who is trying to predict the weather is not unfamiliar with the magnitude of natural climate variability - it is his/her arch nemesis when it comes to making a good forecast, after all.
If the question had been received and interpreted by meteorologists as "natural warming", I think nearer 100% of respondents would have answered in the affirmative. It seems safe to assume that the meteorologists surveyed instead interpreted the question as referring to warming of the highly politicised, ethereal anthropogenic variety.
"on the lack of warming since 1998"
Feb 23, 2011 at 4:48 PM | David C
David, I'd appreciate your taking the time to anwer a couple of questions for me which I'm deeply curious about.
1) Setting aside for a moment, the peculiar way in which you seem to be looking at global average temperature, why do you say there has been no warming since 1998? 2 out of the 3 major temperature datasets say otherwise.
2) Why do you think 1998 is a useful year to start looking at the analysis of global temperature? In climate terms, it's not very long ago, it was also a highly unusual year, which would make it a rather poor choice for an analysis starting point. Also, in order for your claim to be correct, you would have to actually ignore all the intervening years, and finish your trend line in 2009, otherwise the trend is still up. I don't really see what you can usefully take from such an unusual and highly selective way of looking at temperature anomoly.
.....or anomaly, if you want to spell it that way.
I think it's because weathermen want actual data.
someone say cooling trend?
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
I was already sceptical long before Climategate. I'd already visited RealClimate and seen their spittle-spewing, mouth-foaming, ad hominem-ranting, fallacy-chanting posts and recognized them for what they were: pseudoscientific propaganda. Those who possess the truth do not need to present it in that manner. Climategate merely confirmed my suspicions as to the parallel darker side of CAGW "scientists."
ZEDs
I almost wet myself when I read your 2) - I think we have been saying similar things to you for a very long time now.
You can turn up with all the temp anomaly guff you want BUT It is quite obvious to more and more who study it that the atmosphere is not warming excessively in the way that Hansen predicted 20 years or so ago, or in line with model predictions even in the last IPCC report. Manhattan fringes are not under water.
I have always been sceptical (agnostic at first) but now a few things tell me to be more than sceptical after ClimateGate.
Boring link to those two graphs again (the first two)
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/01/the-warmest-year-antidotes/
CO2 warming the atmosphere and we will all fry - 25% of all Man-made CO2 produced last 15 years and no significant warming says Phil Jones.
Hmm - wonder how credible this survey is?
Where is it? Oh look, at George Mason Uni - home of Fred Singer. By the logic used here, that would render it ineligible straight away.
Who's been polled? TV presenters. Is it a requirement for American weather presenters to study Meteorology? No, actually, it's not.
When was the survey carried out? Actually during climategate at the beginning of last year.
Most astonishingly, only 82% had heard of climategate. That means that 18% of US weatherforecasters polled had never even heard of it. You'd have thought, that if they had any idea at all what they were doing, they might have at least heard of it.
Has there been a follow-up survey in the year since? No, there hasn't. Or if there has, it's not been released, which is in itself suspicious. You would have thought that anyone genuinely interested in the impact, would have done a follow up by now.
This survey is really a total puff-piece. A poll of TV presenters taken during a story about doubt in climate science asking whether they now doubt climate science more. This thing is paper thin and clearly only designed with one possible outcome in mind.
Once again, Andrew posting this here is a perfect example of bias-confirmation. Posting up anything, no matter how worthless, if it agrees with you, whilst at the same time dismissing the entire body of climate science, for flimsy or perceived flaws.
And you call yourself 'sceptics'. You couldn't be any further from it.
Do keep up, ZDB:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
(those are the satellite ones without the dodgy adjustments found in GISS etc)
Although of course you know much more about it than Dr Spencer as he only runs a dataset.
(oops, I forgot, that's an argument from authority which is only acceptable when you or RealClimate do it)
Retired Dave
You've just pointed me to two graphs which show a significant, and accelerating increase in warming from the 2nd half of last century onwards. Both make global warming seem very much a sad reality. Is that really what you intended to achieve?
Is for your reference to Phil Jones, you got the quote wrong. Also, why so keen to use a quote from a BBC interview from a few years back rather than referencing his work? I'm also rather confused as to why you're using Phil Jones as a source at all. Are you saying he's a credible scientist who's work you find convincing? If so, he's strongly of the opinion that AGW is very real indeed. If not, then why reference him?
zeds...try this video...about 19 minutes in, you get the temperature graphs that show no warming for the last 13 years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI
diogenes.
Argumentum ad Youtube? I really, really hope you're joking.
Do not feed the cognitive dissonant troll. When we are 1km under ice, she'll still be warning of dangerous warming.
Zeds: "Argumentum ad Youtube? I really, really hope you're joking."
So just because it's on Youtube it's not a reliable source. Is that what you're implying? Even though it is nothing more than a video of respected physicist Richard Muller! What an odd creature you are.
You obviously couldn't even be bothered to take a look judging by the speed of your response so what is the point in trying to educate you? You're just a waste of time, aren't you?
Begone troll.
Zeds you said -
"You've just pointed me to two graphs which show a significant, and accelerating increase in warming from the 2nd half of last century onwards."
Oh sorry ZEDs I thought you were a scientist friend.
The two graphs don't show anything of the kind
Graph 1.shows that the temperature has been on an increasing trend since the end of the LIA well before much CO2 was emitted by us (1940 is generally thought to be the earliest it could be significant) with a cyclic multi-decadal oscillation. The temperature fell from 1940's to around the middle of the 1970's, then the temperature has risen from then to around the late 90's and the temperature in 2009 shown as a red dot is consistent with the likely oscillation as shown. The graph has marked on it the range of possible temperatures predicted by the IPCC around 2000. Clearly even their best case (lowest warming) is well above current temp. Their forecast is not happening.
Graph 2 using data supplied by Phil Jones (that well known sceptic) shows that the previous two oscillations have shown the same rate of warming as the one that came to an end in the late 90's. So much for unprecedented warming.
Phil Jones is supposed to be a world expert on this subject - he has admitted that
a. There has been no statistically significant warming since 1995
b. The world warmed at the same rate in 1860-1880, 1919-1940, and 1975-1998.
Keep up Zeds - he still says he believes in AGW (well it pays his bills doesn't it - try getting a job if you turn sceptic) but I think you will find his opinion is not so strong these days.
He was asked if the debate was over????? he said "Well, some scientists just said that, I’m not sure why, and it’s not really over. " That was less than a year ago.
As James Lovelock said recently some at the top of the AGW team are growing very nervous. It will be the foot soldiers like yourself who will fight on, eventually realising that the Generals have all gone.
From the (cherry-picked?) Doran Survey again-
'In analyzing responses by sub-groups, Doran found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 and 64 percent respectively believing in human involvement. Doran compared their responses to a recent poll showing only 58 percent of the public thinks human activity contributes to global warming.
"The petroleum geologist response is not too surprising, but the meteorologists' is very interesting," he said. "Most members of the public think meteorologists know climate, but most of them actually study very short-term phenomenon."
He was not surprised, however, by the near-unanimous agreement by climatologists.
"They're the ones who study and publish on climate science. So I guess the take-home message is, the more you know about the field of climate science, the more you're likely to believe in global warming and humankind's contribution to it." '
That survey was taken in late 2008. So that makes 36% of meteorologists already sceptical well before Climategate. If 42% of meteorologists are more sceptical after Climategate, we could in theory have up to 78% sceptical.
Retired Dave
Little project for you Dave. Print out that page with the graphs. Take a pen, and as smoothly as possible, draw a trend line through them both. Guess what, both have a curve that get's increasingly steep towards the end. It's that simple.
As for Phil Jones - you seem in a terrible muddle. You endlessly reference him when it suits you, yet seem to think that his work showing AGW to be real is wrong. You need to make your mind up, do you think his work is sound or not - and what are your reasons for coming to that decision?
If his work is sound, then you much accept his overall conclusion that AGW is the correct theory. If you don't, then stop using his work. Aren't you able to understand that contradiction?
Pharos
You start by being dismissive of the Doran study, then use it. Same thing as retired Dave - you can't have it both ways.
Also, one can fairly safely assume that the 42% and the 36% are almost entirely overlapping, rather than mutually exclusive.
Z
As a Doran-defiled reprobate petroleum geologist, I am entitled so to do.
Your Grace,
Is it possible to put the "date, time, commenter name" at the top left of the pane, rather than the bottom right corner?
In recent days it has been necessary to quickly scroll down every pane before reading to see if there is a troll at work.
This is tiresome and spoils the blog experience, which is of course the objective of the troll.
However, such a modification would not affect those who like to engage the trolls.
Zed in a thread, destroys the threads continuity.
I'm sure it’s his intension as he adds nothing to the thread proper.
I just wish people would ignore him, or at the very least, there was an ignore button, though I’d still have to read through the responses to him.
don't you like using your eyes and ears, Zed? If you look at the tgemperature data for the last 10 years, it is very hard to see an upward trendbut I am sure you could just crayon one in anyway.
Brownedoff
You soon get to recognise her by the first two or three words, believe me.
Superciliousness drips from everything she says.
Zed
We refer to Jones because YOU believe in him.
Wow, I guess according zeedeadbeat, anything out of Ohio State, U. Virginina, U. Maryland, U. Miami, and the US Navy is also not to be believed. Nice trick. If you can't argue the facts, try to invalidate the source.
BTW, these are some other polling results from GMU recently. It's obvious to me these are all a crock too.
http://eagle.gmu.edu/newsroom/797/
http://eagle.gmu.edu/newsroom/824/
Once more, the Warmists are forced to face the inconvenient truth that saying something (that Climategate was irrelevant) doesn't make it true.
If only these weak, selfish Warmists could grow up, we might be able to concentrate on making a better environment for everyone.
Speaking of weather forecaster, Autonomous Mind has caught out the Met Office again.
They really need to stop their ostriching.
An extremely good anology for Zeds appearances is that of Seagull Management, can't remember who orginally posted it but it fits really well. Comes in for short visits and drops Seagull Guano and leaves others to clear up the mess.
Entertaining at first but now very boring with repetitive citations of not very good science and a lot of arm waving. Ignores counter armunments and when stumped dissappears for a few days.
I will be following the 'do not feed the troll' advice, when followed the visits are noticably shorter and with starvation with hopefully have a premanent effect.
Bofa
The full version of seagull management includes 'they eat your lunch'. The moral is keep your sandwiches away from gulls (and trolls).
ZDB
Best get your snow shovel out again, because in about a week you will have more snow in Truro if what's been happening this winter continues. Our worst snow storm since 1976 is about to hit northern California.
Bay Area Snow
An excellent suggestion. Or at least "ZED says:" as they do in other blogs.
All; ZDB
Sorry I missed this. Busy.
The best way of dealing with Zed is to come up with a decent counter-argument.
Like this:
Yes, the major indices of GATA all show C20th warming which flattens into no trend since 1998. This cessation of warming was not expected by the climate science community, whatever they say now.
Start with 1998 and you get this. Trends are ~ 0.09C since 1998 for UAH, ~0.05C from RSS and ~0.02C for HADCRUT3. GISTEMP is higher at ~0.17C, but that’s an effect of GISTEMP’s interpolation (estimation) of Arctic temperatures.
HADCRUT, GISTEMP, UAH and RSS 1979 to present, with linear trends 1979 – 1998 and 1998 – present. Note the extent to which GISTEMP diverges from the rest and maintains its near-monotonic upward trend post-1998.
Steadily increasing levels of CO2 are supposed to cause steadily increasing forcing of atmospheric temperature.
In response to this divergence between observations and hypothesis, climatologists started looking around for the ‘missing’ energy.
After all, if the radiative physics is correct (it is) energy should be accumulating within the climate system.
Really the only place it can have gone is into the oceans.
So, to validate the hypothesis, we need an increase in ocean heat content (OHC) sufficient to account for the ‘missing’ energy and flat trend for tropospheric warming since 1998. Bear in mind that the orthodoxy is insistent on the point that all feedbacks net positive. The increase in OHC should therefore be monotonic as there is no mechanism by which the rate of energy accumulation can decrease.
This question is addressed by Knox and Douglass (2010), which examines data from the ARGO float network measuring the OHC of the upper oceans (0 – 700m):
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/KD_InPress_final.pdf
From the abstract:
The IPCC consensus is for a global mean net anthropogenic radiative forcing at ~1.6 W/m2 (-1.0, +.8), (AR4 WG1, Summary for Policy Makers, figure SPM.2)
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf
James Hansen and numerous co-workers including Josh Willis and Gavin Schmidt had previously calculated the projected forcing for the upper ocean layer (0 – 750m) as 0.6W/m2 and 0.11 W/m2 for the deep ocean (below 750m).
Hansen et al. (2005) http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2005/2005_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
There have been ongoing problems with the ARGO floats and uncertainty about the robustness of the data. The ARGO project leader Josh Willis has informally released the latest (unpublished) estimates of OHC which do indeed appear to show warming but the period is very short – 2005 – mid-2010. The amount of warming measured by the ARGO array is equivalent to a radiative forcing of 0.16 W/m2 per year for this period.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/where-is-the-missing-argo-upper-ocean-heat-data/
A recent study of deep ocean heat content claimed to find warming of the abyssal oceans (below 4000m) equivalent to a radiative forcing of 0.095 W/m2 from the approximately 1995 – 2005 (Purkey & Johnson. 2010):
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3682.1?prevSearch=%5Ball%3A+Purkey%5D&searchHistoryKey=
Taken together, the unpublished estimate of 0.16 W/m2 for the upper ocean (ARGO) and the 0.095 W/m2 for the deep ocean gives us an approximate estimate of 0.255 W/m2. Bear in mind that the deep ocean estimate is 1995 – 2005 and the ARGO estimate is 2005 – mid-2010.
Nevertheless, this is a very long way from the 0.6 W/m2 forcing estimated by Hansen et al.
Obviously this is crude in the extreme, but to me at any rate strongly indicative of a real problem with the numbers. It does NOT falsify AGW but it casts doubt on the oft-repeated ‘fact’ that the ‘heat has gone into the deep oceans’. Well, if it did, it left no signature in the OHC data on the way down, and it isn’t showing up strongly in what observations we have of deep ocean OHC.
So where is the ‘missing’ energy? It doesn’t seem to be in the upper ocean layer, which has warmed, but not nearly enough. Nor, clearly, is it in the troposphere, which has trended flat for temperature change since 1998 – except according to GISTEMP. Perhaps it has radiated out into space.
If this is the case, then it begs a very important question: how? This question is central to projections of AGW because it deals with the climate system’s ability to ‘get rid’ of accumulating energy from CO2 forcing more efficiently than is currently hypothesised. In other words, the question is about the real value for climate sensitivity to CO2.
It suggests that we are missing something important (moist convective transport; net change in low ocean cloud cover and optical depth?) and the consensus estimate for climate sensitivity as +3C per doubling is too high.
[I have dashed through this much too quickly. Apologies for the inevitable errors, bad links and poor wording.]
"ZED says"
I somehow feel that should be 'ZED sez'. Don't want to lend too much gravitas...
Zed
The blanket condemnations again ;-)
See above @ 5:29pm. Just for you.
Imagine a person called GBZ. 'GBZ' gets on her motorcycle and travels all the way from Edinburgh to London, makes the big trip. Then she pretty much lives there for 20 years, driving all over London everyday on her motorcycle.
Now when someone asks her 'how far have you gotten' in the past 20 years, GBZ insists on saying '400 miles'. Others keep pointing out 'Uh GBZ, we know you've been driving around a lot, but it is all been inside London, and the real movement happened when you took your big trip 20 years back'.
GBZ answers: 'you call yourselves sceptics?'.
:blink: