Why have global average surface temperatures?

In business every transaction is recorded (twice!). This raw data is used to calculate a balance sheet which describes the state of the business.

Finally, you have the bottom line, a single figure profit or loss for the year which can be compared with other years.

Global average surface temperatures are a bottom line for climate.

I fully agree that changes in the measurement location/instrument/timing are valid reasons for adjusting the data. I see no justification for GISS frequently adjusting historical data about which nothing is known. I know that the adjustments are tiny, but so is the signal of interest. I also feel uncomfortable with the concept of a fluid historical record.

I am also concerned about the possible over use of statistical manipulation and the increasing treatment of data by models and algorithms even before the analysis begins. It was found that NOAA was using an algorithm which gave a different result each time it was run. There is also increasing opportunity for circular reasoning to creep into the system.

The infamous ReadMe.txt in the ClimateGate disclosures gave an eye opening account of the cavalier handling of data with no formal coding architecture, labelling, quality control or documentation. Even the original data was lost. Around that time we had numerous examples of station removal, poorly sited stations, UHI effects and a myriad of controversial adjustments. The global record is close to being unfit for purpose, but as I said earlier, it is all we have and today its is scrutinised fairly closely.

What was I just saying? It seems that ClimateGate style measurement and data handling handling is still alive and well, just more modern.

http://joannenova.com.au/2017/10/our-bom-electronic-thermometers-are-purpose-designed-were-not-sure-what-purpose/

Where did the science debate go?

We seem to be back among the conspiracy theories once more.

Oct 20, 2017 at 10:16 PM | Entropic man

As you deny any problems with the Hockey Team or Cook's 97% Skeptical Skience Fabrications, why should Taxpayers pay for Climate Science?

All the theory and money, and the models are useless. Any chance of a mis-selling investigation, refunds etc?

If only Climate Science could find proof of any previous debate.

The first disquieting note, the first thing that causes the novice to this to frown with unease or hang his mouth open with alarm, and the experienced skeptic to laugh bitterly, comes ten mails in, text document 0842992948. Two scientists - one cajoling the other to try to wring more from his data than the latter thinks it warrants, to try to turn some mildly interesting samples into a reconstruction of past climate - share a joke about a third who appears to have been notoriously fastidious about jumping to conclusions: 'Are you not being (in the time honoured Don Graybill fashion) too demanding of the response function results when you say deriving a transfer function is not justified? We all strive for perfection but does it exist? Seriously, it would be easier as regards publication policy to get the Editor to accept a reconstruction...'

Keith Briffa to one Gary Funkhouser. Funkhouser laughs but declines the suggestion:

'I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though - I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions - he laughed and said that's what he thought at first also. The data's tempting but there's too much variation even within stands. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just are what they are (that does sound Graybillian).'

[0843161829]

Silly old finicky Graybill died some years ago. I had to do an internet search for this Gary Funkhouser who - sheepishly, laughing at himself - manages to resist temptation: unlike Briffa he has not become a household name in climate science.

A while later, Briffa is being interviewed by New Scientist [0845217169]: a draft of the article is copied into an e-mail to him from the reporter. It details efforts to isolate man's fingerprint on weather patterns: at this point problems with the theory, the models and the raw data can still be admitted to outsiders. It is still 1996 and the existence of a Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age may be acknowledged. There is frank, excited talk of how the problems might be resolved. Keith's on a high: he may be the man to do it. 'The modellers are queuing at Briffa's door to find out what his tree-ring data shows about the real world beyond the computer simulations.'

Even knowing how the story ends, I found their enthusiasm infectious. A glimpse of men doing what they were born to do is always vicariously exhilarating, the spectacle of humans applying their intelligence uplifting.

But already the fatal flaw is evident. One of the more cautious scientists, one who has actually fought with the IPCC to keep caveats as to the uncertainty of models within their reports, one who does not underestimate natural variability, has set up a group to examine patterns of forcings on the climate. He says, 'What we hope is that the current patterns of temperature change prove distinctive, quite different from the patterns of natural variability in the past.'

I think they are not supposed to 'hope' things in that way. There is a human tendency to magnify the evidence that proves the things we hope to find and diminish that which does not, and scientists of all people are supposed to guard rigorously against this. They are a forensic team looking to bring a murder home to a pre-determined suspect. Without even being sure there is a body.

The journalist says: 'For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable "sign" of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity.' I don't think I need point out how that sentence should have sounded alarm bells.

From: Gary Funkhouser <gary@LTRR.Arizona.EDU>
To: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk
Subject: kyrgyzstan and siberian data
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 15:37:09 -0700

Keith,

Thanks for your consideration. Once I get a draft of the central
and southern siberian data and talk to Stepan and Eugene I'll send
it to you.

I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material,
but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk
something out of that. It was pretty funny though - I told Malcolm
what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating
the response functions - he laughed and said that's what he thought
at first also. The data's tempting but there's too much variation
even within stands. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle
the chronology statistics any more than I already have - they just
are what they are (that does sound Graybillian). I think I'll have
to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.

Not having seen the sites I can only speculate, but I'd be
optimistic if someone could get back there and spend more time
collecting samples, particularly at the upper elevations.

Yeah, I doubt I'll be over your way anytime soon. Too bad, I'd like
to get together with you and Ed for a beer or two. Probably
someday though.

Cheers, Gary
Gary Funkhouser
Lab. of Tree-Ring Research
The University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
phone: (520) 621-2946
fax: (520) 621-8229
e-mail: gary@ltrr.arizona.edu

Like an Aristophanes satire, like Hamlet, it opens with two slaves...

I like this: "They are a forensic team looking to bring a murder home to a pre-determined suspect. Without even being sure there is a body."

Clipe & Steve Richards

Thank you for finding the quality of debate, that Climate Scientists are used to.

Dendrochronology is a proven technique for dating timber, by comparing patterns of varied growing seasons, but offers no explanation of why one growing season was better or worse than any other.

Mann acquired his "expertise" from Jacoby and d'Arrigo
https://climateaudit.org/2016/01/29/cherry-picking-by-darrigo/

Googling "Climate Audit" and "Jacoby" reveals interesting results. Curiously, Jacoby was never keen to reveal his results to Climate Audit, and as for Mann and ClimateGate ........

aTTP and Entropic Man

Can we agree that tree rings are not suitable for reconstructing temperature records, and that bit of climate science is settled?

"Can we agree that tree rings are not suitable for reconstructing temperature records, and that bit of climate science is settled?"

Again this is trivial to verify experimentally by selecting a suitable tree with a nearby temperature record agreeing the method to on the tree rings to show temperature and then see how it does. If you do this a few times and find one that does really badly you could then ignore them for any historical temperature records from then on.

I agree that climate scientists postulated that CO2 might lead to warming then set about their alarmist agenda using the most exaggerated projections.. The IPCC was set up on the assumption that cause and effect was not in question. The UN wanted to use alarmist consequences to drive its political agenda.

An interesting paper discussed at No Tricks Zone examines the idea that delay of photons in their journey from the surface to space via radiative gases leads to the observed ambient temperature. It concludes that the GH contribution to warming is negligible. It claims that the residual warming is due to other factors.

EM - You are good at bringing the "official approved science" to the table in our discussions. Have a look at the NTZ paper I mention above.

I don't remember any work to quantify the delay and warming consequence of the GHG effect. Rather, it was arrived at by radiative balance calculation. Is that correct? I need to remind myself of the details but you probably have it on the tip of your tongue....

An interesting paper discussed at No Tricks Zone

Do you have a link?

I downloaded Davies's paper. I also tried a few calculations of my own.

You may remember that we talked earlier about the radiative delay effect of CO2. That is what he's looking at.

He says that total GHG radiative delay stores enough heat in the atmosphere to warm it by 0.14K and that the contribution from CO2 is 0.001K. He may even be right. The extra photons trapped by greenhouse gases would be expected to produce a small increase in heat content.

I did a quick calculation. Sans GHGs it would take an IR photon 3*10^-4 seconds to leave the atmosphere Assume, as he does, a free path length of 50m and each photon will be absorbed and remitted 200 times.. Each cycle takes 640 picoseconds, 6.4*10-^8 seconds. That is a total delay of 1.28*10^-5 seconds.

Add that to the unconstrained travel time aand you go from 3*10^-4 to 3.13*10^-4. Doubling CO2 would increase the delay to 3.26*10^-4. Davies is unclear on the relationship between RDE and temperature, but hints that it is linear. If so, doubling CO2 would increase his 0.14C RDE warming by 0.01C.

When he talks about the effect of RDE alone he does fine. The consensus would probably agree that it is a minor effect of GHGs contributing less than 1% of the observed warming.

Unfortunately he then goes off into a lot of pseudoscientific arm waving. He rejects all the other effects of GGGs and attributes the warming to an unspecified massive thermal insulation effect:-

"at the surface, the intrinsic atmospheric radiation generated by molecular
collisions, along with direct thermal conduction, allow the atmosphere to act as a thermal buffer reducing the
daily surface temperature range and in doing so cause the surface temperature to rise by 60 K or more."

I know of nothing in the physics of heat flow or in observations to support that.

http://brindabella.id.au/climarc/dai/RadiativeDelay/RadiativeDelayInContext170828.pdf

EM - I think some of the heating is attributed to the Kinetic Energy which is concentrated in the denser part of the atmosphere as a consequence of atmospheric mass and gravity.

Thanks.

Scrodinger's cat

" I think some of the heating is attributed to the Kinetic Energy which is concentrated in the denser part of the atmosphere as a consequence of atmospheric mass and gravity."

We've already been through this once.

Most of the kinetic energy held by the atmosphere is at low altitudes because that is where most of the molecules are. They are there because of the downward pressure of the molecules above them, which is due to gravity. The pressure and temperature gradients emerge in accordance with the gas laws. That's it.You dont get "thermal buffering" or other imaginary effects.

Nor can you harvest heat from the gravitational potential energy of Earth's atmosphere. Each molecule rising is balanced by another falling. The total gravitational potential energy of the atmosphere remains constant.

The total gravitational potential energy of the atmosphere remains constant.

Yes. The only way this would not be true would be if the atmosphere were contracting, converting gravitational potential energy into thermal energy. It is not.

Scrodinger's cat

" I think some of the heating is attributed to the Kinetic Energy which is concentrated in the denser part of the atmosphere as a consequence of atmospheric mass and gravity."

We've already been through this once.

Most of the kinetic energy held by the atmosphere is at low altitudes because that is where most of the molecules are. They are there because of the downward pressure of the molecules above them, which is due to gravity. The pressure and temperature gradients emerge in accordance with the gas laws. That's it.You dont get "thermal buffering" or other imaginary effects.

If Davies were correct it would be obvious. You would find that the gas laws did not work at low altitudes.

Nor can you harvest heat from the gravitational potential energy of Earth's atmosphere. Each molecule rising is balanced by another falling. The total gravitational potential energy of the atmosphere remains constant.

Sorry, finger trouble. :-/

Schrodinger's cat

There would be an easy test of Davies' idea.

Remember the simple form of the Ideal Gas Law, PV/T=k. k should remain constant for an adiabatic gas.

Monitor pressure, temperature and volume at low altitudes. If they changed in accordance with the gas laws k would remain constant and Davies would be wrong. If k was higher by day than by night it would indicate that extra energy is accumulating by an unknown process and Davies might be correct.

If his NTZ curriculum vitae is correct Davies should have both the expertise and the equipment to demonstrate this. I look forward to his next paper, provisionally titled "Gas law violations as evidence of thermal buffering."

So it is settled science, with a consensus, that tree rings should not be used as proxies to construct temperature records, due to the inherent unreliability of dendrochronology for such purposes.

Whatever the mistakes in climate science and physics that existed in the 1990s, they have still not been found, as Climate Scientists still deny they got anything wrong. They have never looked, because they had settled the science, and obtained a consensus to prove it, all without any proof at all.

Mother Nature defies the IPCC, and Climate Scientists can blame bad botany and computer programmers, even though the computer models were supplied with the settled science and dodgy data, as directed by the Climate Scientists.

Friday, January 9, 2015

On Appeals to Authority, “Climategate” and the Wizard of Oz: a Personal Journey from "Trust Me" to "Show Me"

In the comments section of an earlier posting I have been in discussion with a prominent former modeller (Dr. Michael Tobis) and the author of a blog on climate science (…and Then There's Physics). My initial posting included the following line

The show me crowd looks at the “good science” and points out that many historical predictions of doom and gloom (that previously met the test of good science) have been shown to be overheated or just plain wrong

Some people refuse to read (or refuse to admit reading) climategate emails. No prizes for guessing who or why.