Category: science

… but I’m distracted. I’ve been watching some sci-fi shows and I’m amazed at their views of the future. The original 1960’s Dr. Who (William Hartnell) provides some laughs. They go to futuristic places with technology way beyond what the present day earth has and yet they still have telephones attached to cords and computers that take up an entire wall. That stuff is forgivable, I mean, c’mon, they made that in 1965. Far more interesting to me is the Max Headroom series. No, not his interview show, the drama that centered around a courageous reporter, always searching for the truth… That show was based on technology, there were computers galore and the namesake of the show was an entity that was totally digital and was an AI. They came so close… The beginning of every show said that it was set “20 minutes into the future.” The show was deliberately retro in some aspects, old, manual typewriter keyboards are seen everywhere along with cars from the 60’s and odd architecture. There’s no question of when the show was made (1986/86), just look at the hair and the outfits! They got the wireless communications right, and they got the people sitting around screens right, and they got the idea of having lots of computers around and lots of data available. They even got the concept of of an entity living inside the computers, but they missed several important things. First, everything dealing with computers is strictly text based as far as input goes. There are no mouses, there isn’t a GUI, it’s all command line baby, just like the computers were back in 85. Most importantly, they never saw the internet coming. They got a lot of the concepts right, but they were focused on the wrong medium. They used TV and its satellites for all of the communication, data gathering, and even as the conduit for the AI Max Headroom. They used computers for many things, but they didn’t see the interactive aspect of networked computers coming. To be fair, I doubt that any of us did, I was excited by my 9600 baud modem attached to my Commodore 128D (yeah, I’m old school) and I didn’t use a GUI until I got out of college in 94.

It just goes to show that even if we get a lot of our guesses about future technology and its consequences right, we’re going to miss a lot. Back in ’85, no one saw the power of broadband and networked computers that would be in place as early as ’91 (that’s when I started surfing the net, on a Digital Vax machine running UNIX. It was all GOPHR and WAIS servers back then…) and would be common by ’95. Right now we have people creating online worlds (Second Life anyone?), who knows what the next 10 years will bring us…

A recent report says that ice in the antarctic is melting at an increasing rate. This leads to many worries about water levels rising since there is a significant amount of water stored down there. As expected, this news is being used to “prove” how global warming is ruining the planet. There’s only one problem, there isn’t an appreciable rise in temperatures down there.

This article in today’s Washington post is what alerted me to this. They mention that the temperature has not changed and they think that ocean currents are to blame for the melting of the ice. Shortly after that, the “scientist” says that they believe that CO2 forcing is what caused it. Umm, that’s not science, that’s conjecture. Hell, it isn’t even conjecture, it’s a statement of faith. There isn’t any evidence of warming in Antarctica, there isn’t any evidence of warming in the oceans in the southern hemisphere, but melting ice HAS to be caused by CO2 forcings on the “global” temperature…

Don’t get me wrong, rapidly melting antarctic ice is a big problem, I just wish that there was some science involved in determining the cause and any potential corrective actions that need to be taken. a similar situation in the arctic made people gnash their teeth about the plight of the polar bears and how warm things were. It turns out that the temperature had not changed significantly (so by definition, there was no warming) and with a little more analysis from NASA it was determined that changing sea currents are what caused the loss of arctic sea ice. It was also thouight that this trend would turn around soon. Before we jump to conclusions, we need to have some science done…

This article in “Ecoworld” is an excellent one. It’s an interview with Roger Pielke and he outlines some of the problems with current thinking on global warming as it relates to climate change. Notably, he thinks that:

1) Land use is a large driver of climate change and
2) People do not experience climate change as an average over the entire world, the effects are very local and specific to the location.

From what I’ve seen, I agree with him that man’s use of land is an enormous driver of climate change. The more I read and research, the more skeptical I become about CO2 having much effect. The second point is even more important I think. Many people think that the effects of climate change will be an average rise across the board, but there’s no reason to believe that to be true. Different parts of the world react differently, even if there was an across the board rise in temperatures. The other night I was thinking about what an overall temperature rise would mean and it occurred to me that it could very well be a positive thing. Right now, vast swaths of land are essentially uninhabitable and useless. I’m thinking of large parts of Russia, Canada, Greenland, and of course Antarctica. If things really did warm up, regaining those lands would be an unambiguous good thing for humanity. The trade off would probably be making the Sahara more hellish than it already is, but that’s not a given. No one knows if higher temperatures would lead to drought or more rain (due to more water being evaporated from the oceans). Anyway, he makes a lot of good points, and they seem to be able to be backed up by actual science instead of the usual hand waving that the “scientists” resort to when trying to rationalize their CO2 theory. Here’s the link.

The more I look into the methodologies used to calculate “average” temperatures, the more I shake my head. Urban areas are hotter than rural ones. This is due to all sorts of things. From heat absorbing concrete and asphalt to air conditioners, there are plenty of things that give rise to the so called “urban heat island” effect. Over the past 100 years, many of the temperature stations in the US have been swallowed up by urbanization. One would assume that they would give us higher temperature readings than the stations in the country do.

All pretty logical, no? Well get this, the people at NASA that publish the most often used temperature data for climate change have a rather odd methodology. When they look at a specific geographical area, there are both urban and rural readings to choose from. One would think that the rural readings would be the more accurate. If they were to use the urban readings at all, you would think they would introduce a downward “correction” based on the rural readings. How much downward is certainly debatable, but the general direction it should go in isn’t in question. What do they do? They bias the rural readings upwards to come closer to the urban readings! I can’t think of a defense for this at all, assuming that accuracy is the goal of course… There are some glaring examples of this. The station in the Grand Canyon can be assumed to be an accurate reading location. There’s nothing there that could really screw things up. The Flagstaff location on the other hand is on an asphalt parking lot and is lined with air conditioning vents on one side. Not surprisingly, the Flagstaff station records significant;y higher temperatures. The Grand Canyon result is “corrected” upwards to come closer to the Flagstaff result. Unbelievable…

Not only is there weird things going on with individual stations, but entire periods of time have had a “correction” done to them. The early part of the 20th century was “corrected” downwards. In other words, the people at Nasa (Hanson cough cough) feel that the the stations during the early part of the century were giving us readings hotter than they should have and the stations now are giving us readings cooler than they should. What?! If anything, the opposite should be true, what mechanism would bias readings hotter back then? Urbanization can certainly help explain higher than expected readings at some stations, but not back then… Weirder and weirder.

… go to this site. They are attempting to document the measuring sites used by NASA and other organizations to make sure that they are adhering to the guidelines set up for accurate temperature readings to be made. This is an important aspect of the science of climate change and global warming in general. By documenting the sites, researchers can tell which sites are more reliable than others and possibly be able to figure out corrections for sites that are being affected by their position. This site has already brought to light some really awful measuring areas (on an asphalt parking lot next to air conditioners for example) and with any luck they will be excluded/corrected in any sort of survey. This is good stuff and you can get directly involved with Global warming and climate science!

It’s over at U of Colorado I think. It’s a very science minded place, lots of discussion about statistical methods and the quality of observation sites. I particularly like their “Main conclusions.”

• The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.
• Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.
• Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.
• The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.
• In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
• Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting regional and local climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.
• Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.
• A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.

NASA has revised their temperature database used in climate science downwards due to over-adjusted readings caused by a software bug. The result? Now 4 of the hottest years of this century are in the 1930’s! See Warren’s report here.This has huge implications for how people view warming trends amid the whole global warming scare. Things are not as bad as we’ve been told. Despite this, this good news will not be mentioned in any of the news outlets. In fact, I will make the bold prediction that most people will somehow see this as bad news. This is good, things are not as hot. With any luck, this will cause some reevaluations among the global warming community.

One thing that this case highlights is that most of this data is not available to public or peer review. Once again, a professional statistician has had to force an agency to admit that it’s numbers are all screwed up. he found this not by looking at their algorithms (which are not released) but by backward engineering them. This is the same guy who demolished the so called Mann’s hockey stick. There is an incredible lack of transparency with climatology and why it is tolerated I have no idea. There isn’t any other branch of scientific inquiry that tolerates the hiding of methods that seem to be standard practice in the global warming machine. I have never thought of it this way, but I am now seriously wondering if all of the money being funneled into hyping global warming is causing people to be really loose with their methods. That argument usually goes the other way with people claiming that oil companies bribe people into denying the global warming orthodoxy, but surely the side with the most money is the one to be suspected, no? It is estimated that the anti global warming (or more accurately the anti man made global warming) crowd is outspent by a factor of 50 by the proponents of the man made catastrophe theory. I’m starting to think that all that money is making people do some questionable things…

Warren over at Coyote Blog has written an excellent wrap up that summarizes the skeptic’s issues with the anthropological cause of global warming. It’s still a work in progress, but all of the “data” is there. My skepticism has always come from the statistical realm, all of the data and models I have seen are a mess, and the CO2/warming trends only match reasonably well if you are really lenient and ignore about 40 of the last 100 years. It’s one thing to eyeball a regression or correlation and think it’s pretty close only to find the data doesn’t fit. It’s quite another to eyeball a regression or correlation, realize that it doesn’t fit at all, and then futz with the data until it sorta, kinda works. Mann’s “hockey stick” has been entirely discredited thank God, it wasn’t even mentioned in the last release of the UN’s report even though it figured prominently in the previous version. That was 5 years ago.. settled science my ass…

Warren also brings to light some other interesting facts such as:

CO2’s effect on the atmosphere is one of diminishing returns. Co2 can only raise the temperature by about 1.5-2 degrees celsius. All of the other temperature increases in the various models are ascribed to “positive feedback” mechanisms that so far no one has been able to predict or even demonstrate that exist. The earth has been warmer in the past, and yet these positive feedback loops did not kick in and turn the earth into Venus.

In addition to assuming positive feedback loops, there is the assumption that there will be no negative feedback loops despite the fact that stable systems tend to (and always have) lean towards negative feedback systems. Water vapor is a prime example. Water vapor is much more efficient as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is. If a lot of water vapor is put into the atmosphere, it will cause much more warming than CO2, assuming that it doesn’t form clouds instead. Clouds are a negative feedback process, they tend to cool the earth. Negative feedback is not included in any of the models used even though they are much more likely than run away positive feedback…

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has indeed increased, from .0280% of the atmosphere before the industrial revolution to a whopping .0378% currently. That would be less than 4 one hundredths of a percent. As he says, if you were taking a trip from LA to NYC, .0378% wouldn’t get you off the runway at LAX…

And there’s a bunch more, alternative models that show at least as much correlation as the CO2 models and in some cases much tighter fits, measurement issues, econometric issues (The UN used a calculation that assumes that North Korea, South Africa, Libya and Turkey will all have a higher GDP than the US by 2100. They estimate future CO2 production on these figures. It’s safe to say that they’ll be a ways off…) and more.

“But Isaac, isn’t the downside significantly large to just be careful?” It has gotten to the point that not only would I have to be wrong, but the the overestimated worst case scenario would have to be off by a factor of 5 or more for any of us to worry. The UN’s worst case by 2100 is a 15-17 inch rise in the sea level. What people (at the UN and elsewhere) are purposing in order to “fix” this would stop the economic progress of developing countries (China and India are on the cusp of breaking out of the crushing, lethal poverty that they have been caught in for centuries) and hold us way back from where we would be otherwise. As wealth grows so do life spans, peaceful relations, and yes, even environmental quality (would Brazil cut down more rain forest if it were wealthy or if it were poor?). In my opinion, people either have total doomsday scenarios in mind that are totally unfounded, or they really don’t understand the cost that would be required in order to deal with it. Or maybe both…

I have sent this paper to two of my readers that have told me that they don’t agree with my skepticism, if anyone else wants a copy, let me know and I will forward it to you.