The Basics: What is Global Warming and What is the Greenhouse Effect?

[Grat3fulh3ad]

So choosing 'weseekthetruth' as a nic, is along the same lines as when you nicname the bald guy 'curly' or your big boned friend 'tiny'... nice, always a big irony fan.

 

[WeSeekTheTruth]

So choosing 'weseekthetruth' as a nic, is along the same lines as when you nicname the bald guy 'curly' or your big boned friend 'tiny'... nice, always a big irony fan.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

I must admit that from all of the information provided so far I fear that we are quickly slipping into another ice age. This could spell the end of humanity as we know it today.

If we cannot pump a lot more CO2 and water vapor into the atmosphere I'm afraid we're doomed!

Doomed I say!

your opinion is well and good and all, but... you're going to have to support it with better evidence than "from all of the information provided so far I fear"... exactly what information makes you fear that, and for exactly what reason? (please be as specific as possible)


(nice to see you're still here after you burnt your other nic)

 

[White-rhino]

Actually its more religion than politics. And it looks like the head priest is aboot to get charged with attempted rape. How fitting since he attempted to rape the economy too.

Global Warming is a dead religion. But this thread belongs ONLY in the religion section.

P.S. Hide the decline!!

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

"Mike's Nature trick" and "hide the decline"
The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures (emphasis mine):

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
"Mike's Nature trick" refers to a technique (aka "trick of the trade") used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.

The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm




SO NOW WE W ANYONE WHO SAYS "HIDE THE DECLINE" AS THOUGH IT MEANS ANYTHING PERTINENT, IS TROLLING (or very confused)

 

[White-rhino]

Hiding the emails was the trick. Hiding the decline was the crime. And now they're all hiding from the questions about hiding the decline.

- The Guardian (George Monbiot): "Pretending this is not a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Phil Jones has got to go."

- The Atlantic Monthly (Clive Crook): "The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering."

- UK Telegraph (Christopher Booker): "This is the worst scientific scandal of our generation."

- Financial Times (Michael Schrage): "Secrecy is at the rotten heart of this bad behavior."

Dr. Jones and his global warming alarmist colleagues have a fundamental problem: The planet hasn't warmed since 1998, and -- according to satellite measurements -- has cooled significantly in the last two years. The emails indicate how they dealt with it. Blogger Ed Morrissey (Hot Air) summarizes:

· Prominent environmental scientists organize a boycott of scientific journals if those journals publish scholarly material from global warming dissidents.

· The scientists then orchestrate attacks on the dissidents because of their lack of scholarly material published in scientific journals.

· The scientists block from the UN's report on global warming evidence that is harmful to the anthropogenic global warming consensus.

· The scientists, when faced with a Freedom of Information Act request for their correspondence and data, delete the correspondence and data lest it be used against them.

· The scientists fabricate data when their data fails to prove the earth is warming.

The heart of the scientific method is falsifiability. Scientists share data with each other to see whether or not their experiments can be replicated. By massaging data to meet a preconceived conclusion, and by hiding data from skeptical colleagues, Dr. Jones and his associates were acting more like criminal scam artists.

For instance, in an email Nov. 16, 1999, Dr. Jones told three other scientists: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps for each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

("Mike" is Dr. Michael Mann of PennStateUniversity, author of the "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures which Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKittrick demonstrated to be fraudulent. "Keith" is Dr. Keith Briffa of the CRU, whose temperature graphs from tree ring data from Yamal, Russia, also have been shown by McIntyre and McKittrick to be unreliable.)

"Where the heck is global warming?" asked Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis section of the NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, of Prof. Mann Oct. 12. "We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the last two days for the coldest days on record...The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

There's much more in the emails, but you won't read them in the New York Times. Andrew Revkin, who writes the Times' environmental section, said Friday "the documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."

The Times has not hesitated to publish classified information illegally leaded about U.S. intelligence programs. But for Mr. Revkin and others in the news media, protecting global warming hoaxsters from scrutiny is more important than U.S. national security.

Climategate ought to be the death knell not only of the fraud of global warming, but the fraud of "mainstream" liberal journalism as well.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

<continues merrily ignoring the trolls>

‘climategate’ scientists cleared of wrongdoing

LONDON - British scientists accused of manipulating climate change data were not involved in any “deliberate scientific malpractice”, an independent review published Wednesday said.


The row which erupted in December centred on hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) which sceptics claimed showed that the experts had manipulated data to support a theory of man-made global warming.

But a detailed review of 11 scientific papers from the CRU published over 20 years found “absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever”, according to the inquiry.

It said the scientists at the research unit arrived at their conclusions “honestly and sensibly”. The investigations were carried out by a panel of independent scientists, led by Ronald Oxburgh, a geologist.

The review did not analyse whether the conclusions drawn by the scientists were correct, but gave the scientific processes at the CRU a “clean bill of health”, said Oxburgh.

He said the reviewers found that the CRU scientists could have used “better statistical methods” in analysing some of their data, but that it was unlikely to have made much difference to their results.

The row overshadowed the discussions at the UN special conference on climate change in Copenhagen last December. The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, stepped down from his post for the duration of the investigations.

By Karla Adam and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 15, 2010
LONDON -- In the second of three investigations of the scandal known as "climate-gate," a panel of academic experts said Wednesday that several prominent climate scientists did not engage in deliberate malpractice but did not use the best statistical tools available to produce their findings.

The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit has been under intense scrutiny since November, when hackers posted more than 1,000 pirated e-mails and a raft of other documents that highlight the scientists' hostility toward global warming skeptics. But the review -- which follows a British parliamentary review that defended the institution's research but faulted its tendency to withhold information -- did nothing to bridge the divide between many climate researchers and their critics.

After interviewing staff members and analyzing 11 peer-reviewed articles published between 1986 and 2008, the panel concluded: "We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."

Newspapers Retract 'Climategate' Claims, but Damage Still Done

A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on, as Mark Twain said (or “before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” in Winston Churchill’s version), and nowhere has that been more true than in "climategate." In that highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal, e-mails hacked from computers at the University of East Anglia’s climate-research group were spread around the Web by activists who deny that human activity is altering the world’s climate in a dangerous way, and spun so as to suggest that the scientists had been lying, cheating, and generally cooking the books.

But not only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.
It’s worth quoting the retraction at some length:
The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as “green campaigners” with “little scientific expertise.” The article also stated that the authors’ research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.

In fact, the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure . . . was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that . . . Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.

The article also quoted criticism of the IPCC’s use of the WWF report by Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds and leading specialist in tropical forest ecology. We accept that, in his quoted remarks, Dr Lewis was making the general point that both the IPCC and WWF should have cited the appropriate peer-reviewed scientific research literature. As he made clear to us at the time, including by sending us some of the research literature, Dr Lewis does not dispute the scientific basis for both the IPCC and the WWF reports’ statements on the potential vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest to droughts caused by climate change. . . . A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate account of his views on these points. We apologise for this.
In another retraction you never heard of, a paper in Frankfurt took back (apologies; the article is available only in German) its reporting that the IPCC had erred in its assessment of climate impacts in Africa.
The Times's criticism of the IPCC—look, its reports are full of mistakes and shoddy scholarship!—was widely picked up at the time it ran, and has been an important factor in turning British public opinion sharply against the established science of climate change. Don’t expect the recent retractions and exonerations to change that. One of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, “No, we were wrong about X,” most people still believe X. As Twain and Churchill knew, sometimes the truth never catches up with the lie, let alone overtakes it. As I wrote last summer in a story about why people believe lies even when they’re later told the truth, sometimes people’s mental processes simply go off the rails.

 

[White-rhino]

Trick #17

When world finds out you are a fraud. Appoint an independent panel to investigate self, and conclude no wrongdoing had occurred.

Seen it all before.

 

[master shake]

Sea levels are pretty constant over the last 50 years... Global warming must not be enough to melt ice...

Thanks for the worthless thread.


Why do you even smoke weed?? You apparently get so high off your ego and imaginary knowledge that a bowl of some haze would bring you down...

Enough, you're not convincing anyone!

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

White Rhino,
stop trolling this science based thread with your political rhetoric.
if you have any science to bring, bring it, ant we'll happily add it to the body of knowledge...
keep your politics out of it....

you've reminded everyone that the news organizations hastily printed a story which they later retracted and apologized for and they called it climate-gate. Good deal... it is all out in the open, and you have illuminated it with your spotlight... maybe now you can STFU about old news and move on to something relevant.

politics will get your post deleted, so be sure to include some substance in your next one.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

Sea levels are pretty constant over the last 50 years... Global warming must not be enough to melt ice...

Thanks for the worthless thread.


Why do you even smoke weed?? You apparently get so high off your ego and imaginary knowledge that a bowl of some haze would bring you down...

Enough, you're not convincing anyone!

actually i've educated quite a few, and been thanked for doing so...
why do you even bother posting if you're not going to say anything?

 

[master shake]

LOL, me? Politics??? Where?

You're delusional.

It's starting to all make sense to me now.

Thanks for the clarification...

edit: Ah I see you're referring to another heathen

I'll just say this.. If and when I do start to see climate change through my own eyes (get it??) I'll be embarrassed and come crawling to your feet with all your other disciples, great one. But so far, the weather has been fine and as I've always remembered it! Good luck to ya, don't drink the kool-aid

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

Sea levels are pretty constant over the last 50 years... Global warming must not be enough to melt ice...

i'll add links and illustration.

A common error in climate debate is drawing conclusions from narrow pieces of data while neglecting the whole picture. A good example is the recent claim that sea level rise is slowing. The data cited is satellite altimeter measurements of global mean sea level over the past 16 years (Figure 1). The 60 day smoothed average (blue line) seems to indicate sea level peaked around the start of 2006. So one might argue that sea levels haven't risen for 3 years. Could one conclude that the long term trend in sea level rise has ended?


Figure 1: Satellite altimeter measurements of the change global mean sea level with inverse barometer effect (University of Colorado).

To answer this question, all one has to do is view the entire 16 year dataset. A noisy signal is imposed over the long term trend of sea level rise. These fluctuations mean there will be short periods where sea level shows no trend. For example, 1993 to 1996 or 1998 to 2000. In other words, there have been several short periods of several years over the last 16 years of steady sea level rise where sea level appears not to rise.

This is inevitably the case when you have a noisy signal imposed over a long term trend. We see exactly the same phenomenon occur in the temperature record (which is why we also see the same erroneous conclusions). The lesson from this is to treat with skepticism anyone who concludes long term trends from several years of a noisy signal (after all, skepticism should cut both ways).

In addition to this, Figure 1 is a particularly noisy signal because it displays unfiltered data. Sea level is subject to the "Inverse Barometer" Effect. This is where sea level is depressed in areas of high atmospheric pressure, and raised in areas of low pressure. When barometric pressure effects are filtered out, the result is a less noisy signal and a clearer picture of what's happening with sea level.


Figure 2: Satellite altimeter measurements of the change global mean sea level with inverse barometer effect filtered out (University of Colorado).

A broader view of sea level rise
Global mean sea level (eg - the global average height of the ocean) has typically been calculated from tidal gauges. Tide gauges measure the height of the sea surface relative to coastal benchmarks. The problem with this is the height of the land is not always constant. Tectonic movements can alter it, as well as Glacial Isostatic Adjustment. This is where land which was formerly pressed down by massive ice sheets, rebounds now that the ice sheets are gone.

To construct a global historical record of sea levels, tide gauge records are taken from locations away from plate boundaries and subject to little isostatic rebound. This has been done in A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise (Church 2006) which reconstructs global sea level rise from tide gauges across the globe. An updated version of the sea level plot is displayed in Figure 3:


Figure 3: Global mean sea level from 1870 to 2006 with one standard deviation error estimates (Church 2008).

Tidal estimates from sediment cores go even further back to the 1300's. They find sea level rise is close to zero in the early part of the sedimentary record. They then observe an acceleration in sea-level rise during the 19th and early 20th century. Over the period where the two datasets overlap, there is good agreement between sedimentary records and tidal gauge data (Donnelly 2004, Gehrels 2006).

What we're most interested in is the long term trends. Figure 2 shows 20 year trends from the tidal data. From 1880 to the early 1900's, sea level was rising at around 1mm per year. Throughout most of the 20th century, sea levels have been rising at around 2mm per year. In the latter 20th century, it's reached 3mm per year. The five most recent 20-year trends also happen to be the highest values.


Figure 4: The linear trends in sea level over 20-year periods, with one sigma error on the trend estimates shown by the dotted lines. From 1963 to 1991, there were a series of volcanic eruptions which caused cooling and hence contraction of the upper ocean. This temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise.

So a broader view of the historical record reveals that sea level is not just rising. The rate of sea level rise has been increasing since the late 19th century.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

LOL, me? Politics??? Where?

You're delusional.

It's starting to all make sense to me now.

Thanks for the clarification...

lmao... you're delusional... I was replying to white rhino first... don't overestimate your significance.

 

[master shake]

lmao... you're delusional... I was replying to white rhino first... don't overestimate your significance.

You're a bit slow there huh partner??

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

You're a bit slow there huh partner??

i guess you are, replying as though i said something to you about your politics....

my response to you was to use the science which nulls your premise... sea level has risen and is rising... no politics.

 

[master shake]

i guess you are, replying as though i said something to you about your politics....

Did you not see my edit? I'm sure you're just thrilled to have your thread go in this direction.

I'M OUT!

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

no, i did not see any edit at 11 minutes past the hour when i quoted you.
i see it now, forgive me for not re-reading your post enough times...
see ya 'round...
when you get ready to look at the evidence come on back.

 

[White-rhino]

White Rhino,
stop trolling this science based thread

Not a science based thread. Its religion based. Proven fraud. Sorry if that fact bothers you.

And stop posting graphs. They're all a fraud, based on fraudulent numbers. Hidden processes. By disgraced and debunked hacks.

And I will continue to post in this thread until your leftist enablers who run this site ban me. Get used to it. And when you get everyone banned in this thread, and decide to start another, I'll be there too, exposing you as a fraud.

The "science" isn't settled. And never will be. It will only be debunked.

The scientist at the center of the "Climate-gate" e-mail scandal has revealed that he was so traumatized by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide.

He should have gone with his gut instinct.

P.S. Hide the decline!!

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

ok... your opinion is noted... stop trolling now.