Chris Knight

Just taken the Missus out to see them. The best since last year, but sadly no charged battery in camera :lol: Wait a minute, I could charge it before dawn begins to break in an hour or so... hold this thread, and be prepared for disappointment, and bags under the eyes.

How do I know what?

Looking at anomalies alone makes any discontinuity between prior and post-change values invisible, as you neatly showed. The new trend can only follow that of the post-change stations, and any prior trend is not only eliminated, but lost back in time depending on the period of smoothing used to distinguish the trend-line from the noise. At the end of a time series we cannot know the actual trend, until the time series has been further extended. Terry Pratchett puts my view of "science" much better than I can in this excerpt from "The Hogfather" where Death (who always speaks in Capitalised text) is explaining the concept of "Lies told to children" to his granddaughter, Susan. Science is also a large lie. It cannot be done by data mining, model building, or controlled by schools of thought. Laws of nature are manmade, and subject to revision, and in the main are special cases restricted to our limited experience of the cosmos. The atom is belied by sub-atomic particles. Concepts such as "mean global temperature", "sea level", "ocean heat content" can not be measured, any more than the "human genome" can be absolutely sequenced. They are nonetheless useful and probably necessary in aiding our understanding, as are imaginary numbers in mathematics. Without the discipline of mathematics, concepts can be misrepresented and used to show almost any desired result. I may differ in my genome from the standard human model by perhaps 25468 single nucleotide polymorphisms, you have maybe 37208. You could say that you are more highly evolved, I could say I am more human... Climate science is pretty much at the stage where folks are arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's good fun, but if it is to be science, the ground rules need to be defined. It's difficult to see where to start for a young science, where many different disciplines come together, with a basis of incomplete, uncertain, and possibly manipulated (however honestly done) data, much of which was never originally collected to be used for this purpose. Give it another fifty years of consistent data collection, and we may be able to judge if climatology is a valid scientific pursuit, or just a political tool that failed to generate consistent future predictions. Merry Hogwatch D.

Many thanks to Diessoli for an extremely clear explanation of why a single missing continuous record should not affect the anomaly trend. The original idea for the graph was D'Aleo, but In this case, it was taken from McKitrick, as the links I posted above show. The GHCN data show that pre and post 1990 temperature data are not comparing like for like, as about two thirds of the pre-1990 stations were discontinued in the network, probably for extremely good reasons. However the effect is for the more recent station sample to show a globally sampled land surface mean of a degree and a half more than the pre-1990 mean of 10 degrees C for up to 15,000 stations. The lost stations (a majority) therefore had a mean of around 8.6 degrees. (This varies depending how the means were calculated.) A subset of 5,000 stations with mean temperatures of 11.5 degrees generally must come from different climate regions than a subset of 10,000 whose mean was three degrees lower. The usual cited global mean temperature for 1951-80 is 14.0 +/- 0.7 deg C, so assuming some degree of global warming in the last 30 years, the land-based stations may still be oversampling cold regions, or is the mean sea surface temperature higher than mean land surface temperatures? It is difficult to find separate definitive global land and sea estimates. Roy Spencer's AMSU-A site says 21deg C or thereabouts for sea surface temperatures - is that so? The supposed problem due to Siberian station loss was that an already an area of sparse coverage was made even sparser, and that to continue the record for that region, interpolation is used to fill in missing data from surrounding gridded data, apparently for the CRU record and an IPCC AR4 report. If the stations now used to supply that data are interpolated from the remaining sites that show the increased warming (with a possible +1 degree or more in the D'Aleo/McKitric GHCN graph), because use of cooler stations have been discontinued, the gridded homogenised adjusted data now has a considerable recent warm bias since the number of stations has been reduced. In Siberia, the recent warming occurs in the winter, rather than the summer, either due to human observation bias (readings missed, or misreported due to extremely unfavourable weather!), or urban heating effects, or both. As the station data from the MetO become available, sites like appinsys.com are presenting plots of CRU and GHNC data, with their own commentary, such as this on coverage and this on the Siberian data. As one would expect from the subject matter, the site does not lean to the warm side.

"nice": Yes, I try to say things simply. Could you simplify the stuff above? Does it mean things seem warmer because people deleted some of the colder records?

The Norse lifestyle required firewood. Like the Easter Islanders. Lack of firewood doomed them both after a few centuries.

If you say so, but where do they indicate which is "raw data" and which is tampered with "adjusted"? If you are in the know, can you help? Sure it was available, I downloaded cruwrlda2.zip and reported it here BS! If the adjustments are added to the record since the anomaly reference period, the anomalies are inflated by the degree of adjustment. Also works backwards in time on the trendline. The Russians are not the only ones annoyed by the misrepresentations - Australians, New Zealanders, and pretty soon the rest of the English-speaking world when the US lawyers get their teeth into the climate exaggeration money machine. Boy, do they suck dry!

That's all you are doing Dev, word games. Come on, lets have a sensible discussion. There is nothing in the scientific literature that makes a strong case for future Arctic summer conditions. Not by Mark Serreze or David Barber, or any other Cryosphere experts. Many isolated sound bites, which have been exaggerated from "may" to "will" with regard to open water at the pole, were made in the summer of 2008, before the ice failed to match the record loss of 2007. All that can be said by such experts is that if the models are right, then it will happen, but the question I asked several posts back was: "If an Ice-Free Arctic Ocean ever were to happen in the next 30 years, what exactly would that mean?" and then I suggested: "A few days around the autumn equinox with next to no ice floating around the north pole." What would you expect? Hang on I know the answer, Dev: A knock-down argument, no discussion. We know your views on the various climate agencies that can do no wrong. That is not the point. The point is that an "ice-free Arctic" would be a very brief phenomenon, not much different to the September of 2 years ago, and of no real lasting consequence. The Arctic winter radiation balance makes that clear. Any evidence to the contrary? Sorry, Dev, I missed this on first reading of your links. I know how you feel

Used to be at the bottom of each page on the forum, you could see who was likely to be reading what you were about to diss them with. Will that sneak preview up the kilt (as it were) of the membership be available in the future or has it gone the way of the CRU historic station data?

Dev, I have just re-read this post from the beginning. You link to two blogs only - where's the science in that? Had I linked to the Air Vent, or Junk Science - would you have taken that as serious evidence? Now argue your point properly, or admit that there is no point in speculating about a mythological concept like an "Ice-free Arctic", at least in the near future. I said "move along" previously - you now state that this is not "going anywhere...". We agree!

I like Ice. It is a distraction from the soft, warm fluffy things that we often think of as comfortable. It is hard enough to tear through reinforced steel hulls of ocean-bound passenger liners and to remodel river valleys into dramatic fjords and create emphasised vertiginal faces on mountain peaks, with otherwise impossibly high waterfalls. Good old Slartibartfast, eh? Strong drinks that otherwise would have you red-faced and coughing on the first sip become smooth and friendly under its influence. My 3-y-old Siberian Husky, Tikaani (that's his picture up on the left) loves ice and snow, and this morning was doing his own version of "Snow Angels" - sadly I didn't take my camera. He lies on his side, uses his legs to rotate his body in about a 270 degree arc and bites and swallows the snow as he goes round. Does not look much like an "Angel" when he gets up, but he is only three. At least the snow does not stick to him. On the other hand, he loves children, and because there were many who had the day off today, he didn't go hungry today - no, seriously, he only ate enough to satisfy his appetite, and no children. They were lining up to make him "sit", "give me a paw", "give me your other paw" - I never taught him any of these things - he was a rescue. Anyway, I have to go. The fridge is empty and the off-licence beckons. Nice to have the opportunity to chat tho!

Sorry there is no "good evidence" that any things "might happen" - it is just plain idle (digested or otherwise) speculation - unless there is scientific, or even historical evidence that says otherwise.

The MetO have released part of the data as I mentioned here, and it is adjusted, homogenised data, and not the raw data that would meaningfully allow independent researchers to discover whether any adjustments or homogenizations have coloured the CRU temperature record that agrees with the other major long-term global temperature records (this is the reason given by CRU and UEA apologists that we should trust the data that has been generated by the CRU - that it agrees with NASA GISS and NOAA temperature records - so it should, they use essentially the same raw data, just slightly different adjustment and homogenisation algorithms, the American agencies are literally keeping up with the Joneses ). Here is an interesting graph: It shows how the unadjusted temperature rocketed in 1990 and beyond when loads of stations worldwide were discontinued from the network, many from the former Soviet bloc countries. link to spreadsheet The data sources and implications are discussed here, with other links This whole "Global warming" thing is a matter of trust, and the agencies that control the data are not trustworthy IMO. If the GHCN had up to 15,000 stations in 1970, why did the UK's premier climate research centre only hold data from about 5,000 historical stations. I see yet another smokescreen.

It hasn't happened. It won't. Move along, nothing to see here. Unless there is scientific evidence to support a different view, of course?

If an Ice-Free Arctic Ocean ever were to happen in the next 30 years, what exactly would that mean? A few days around the autumn equinox with next to no ice floating around the north pole. Then the usual rapid freeze to roughly the same winter ice extent as recent historical extents. Not weeks of cruise liners, oil tankers, and heavily laden container ships emitting dieselly exhausts on their dash from Atlantic to Pacific ports and back. Not even September ski breaks on the slopes of Northern Greenland. Why should this be? We need only to look at what happens every October, as the sun sinks below the horizon at the north pole. It gets very cold. I would suggest we move along: there is very little of interest in this area of discussion.