New Peer-Reviewed Study Finds ‘Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence’

[parmenides3]

Hi PP; sorry, just saw your post. As I understand it, in the example of temperature, the use of uncertainty allows for the possibility that unpredicted external factors have a small probablility of affecting the reliability of the measuring system. This doesn't mean that a thermometer is wrong, just that, when collecting the information and collating it, a good statistician/scientist will allow for the possibility that there may/could have been a mismeasurement at one or more points. Luckily, there are well-tried formulae which can be used to relate this probability to the data being measured. As a result, the data is presented as being 'within a range', even though, in the real world, the temperature at any given place/time, as measured by the instrument, was probably exactly that shown.

Does this help, or confuse?

:)P

[VillagePlank]

Hi PP; sorry, just saw your post. As I understand it, in the example of temperature, the use of uncertainty allows for the possibility that unpredicted external factors have a small probablility of affecting the reliability of the measuring system. This doesn't mean that a thermometer is wrong, just that, when collecting the information and collating it, a good statistician/scientist will allow for the possibility that there may/could have been a mismeasurement at one or more points. Luckily, there are well-tried formulae which can be used to relate this probability to the data being measured. As a result, the data is presented as being 'within a range', even though, in the real world, the temperature at any given place/time, as measured by the instrument, was probably exactly that shown.

Does this help, or confuse?

Confuse!

Much better to post a cliche laden post such as what follows:

It's all about sensitive dependence on initial conditions - chaos theory. Briefly, extremely small, and statistically insignificant changes in the input data can have significantly high impacts down the line. The so called butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo causing a thunderstorm in London.

Given that we know both climate and weather behave in this manner, scientists push the boundaries of the initial conditions ever so slightly to see what happens. This is entirely justified on the basis that discrete computing uses rounding and that something apparently as insignificant as 1/1000th degC out can make a huge difference. How accurate are today's measuring devices?

The fellow who discovered all this was a guy called Edward Lorenz. On his computer he used to program what can, in modern terms, be called a climate model. One day, like all computers do, it crashed. No problem, thought Lorenz, I'll retype the conditions that I have on my printout. He did this, and, as one would rationally expect, he expected the output to be the same. It was for a little while, but a little later, the output varied massively from the previous runs. Confused? So was Lorenz, but he eventually discovered that the difference was due to the fact that the number entered from his printout was to 3 decimal places, and the original figures were to six decimal places. Out by a maximum of 1/1000th and chaos theory was born

Edited December 13, 2007 by VillagePlank

[PersianPaladin]

Hi PP; sorry, just saw your post. As I understand it, in the example of temperature, the use of uncertainty allows for the possibility that unpredicted external factors have a small probablility of affecting the reliability of the measuring system. This doesn't mean that a thermometer is wrong, just that, when collecting the information and collating it, a good statistician/scientist will allow for the possibility that there may/could have been a mismeasurement at one or more points. Luckily, there are well-tried formulae which can be used to relate this probability to the data being measured. As a result, the data is presented as being 'within a range', even though, in the real world, the temperature at any given place/time, as measured by the instrument, was probably exactly that shown.

Does this help, or confuse?

:huh: P

But the gripe in that 'realclimate' article was that this report was overly confident in the measurements extrapolated from surface and satdata and did not take into account sufficient uncertainty. Who says which formulae applies to what data-set?

I would have thought the authors of this report would understand the principle of standard-deviation; to ensure that controls are being put to make sure the data records are consistent enough to get a mean-trend or correlation co-efficient. The fact that they didn't take into account forcing from ENSO events is also important; which could reveal more information about background warming trends. There WILL always be anamolies in data-sets at certain periods that stand-out but this doesn't mean it will affect things down the line and result exponentially into chaos-theory.

[Admiral_Bobski]

It states in the report that several runs of the GCM model were compared against actual records at various parts of the troposphere in the tropics; but unless I'm reading it incorrectly..it doesn't state the beginning date of the model runs and the location of the data derived from the tropics. It also states that for one simulation the latitudinal interpretation for tropics was 20N to 20S whereas the other was 30N to 30S.

I'm confused.

Hi PP,

I'm right in the middle of reading the paper, but I thought I'd jump in while it's fresh in my mind...!

The model runs cover the period 1979-1999 and the observational data cover the period 1979-2004 (Page 4 of 9, Section 3.1 "Trends").

The tropics are considered, for the purposes of the investigation, to be between 20N and 20S, but one set of models uses the narrower band of 30N-30S, so a comparison of model output within one range with observational values winthin another range would be inappropriate. Presumably they have refined the observational dataset accordingly (but I haven't got to that part yet!)

:huh:

CB

[BrickFielder]

Well I think they are right and wrong and actually a little misleading. What climate models are quite good at is modelling global temperatures, but they have some known problems with particular areas of the globe. There was a few questions raised a while back about differences in radiosonde and satellite data which real climate talk about but this is slightly seperate. A known problem with climate models and the tropics is being addressed with the latest models (take a close look at the model versions in the paper), so to some extent they are highlighting a problem which is likely to be removed from newer models. Their claim about feedbacks of clouds and air moisture is partially wrong in that moisture content is very low in the stratosphere where the greenhouse affects would be strongest. They also follow up with some explanations which could come straight from svensmarks work about cosmic rays.

I think it is a bit of a shame because there is a real issue here with the models and the truth about why the models got this wrong is interesting and hinted at in the real climate article. Climate models are not very good at picking up ENSO signals or Walker and Hadley cell size changes and the corresponding cloud patterns that result with their affects on localised and global climate. The implication here is that the climate sensitivity to different forcings may not be as the IPCC report states. The danger is that global warming may be more a combination of factors rather than largely CO2 and emphasis needs to be placed in other areas as well, or equally that they have underestimated the effects of CO2 in which case are reduction targets are way to low.

[Admiral_Bobski]

The article isnt listed on the Royal Society webpage: -

you need to look in the "International Journal of Climatology" section - if you follow the link below (to the Early View page of the next issue) you should find it listed fourth from the top:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/4735/home

One would have to suppose that the paper stand up reasonably well to scrutiny or else it would not have appeared in such an august publication, so it must have passed a peer-review process. Unless the process is flawed, of course... :huh:

CB

[VillagePlank]

Unless the process is flawed, of course... :huh:

Trust me - the process is flawed. Whether or not it is to the extent where one would consider the process is redundant is something entirely different. When the scientific community wake up and start implementing processes such as two-phase commit, then I might have second thoughts (that was a joke, by the way)

I have spent large amounts of my professional time bringing IT departments and multi-national corporations to ISO-9001, especially the newer BS/EN stuff like business continuity. Nearly every process I have had the dubious pleasure to look at is flawed. But it still works - why? Because the nature of human beings is to make the process work at any cost. You can make a fortune out of delineating such costs ....

Edited December 13, 2007 by VillagePlank

[Gray-Wolf]

One would have to suppose that the paper stand up reasonably well to scrutiny or else it would not have appeared in such an august publication, so it must have passed a peer-review process. Unless the process is flawed, of course... :huh:

CB

Yeah, and cold water fusion was picked up before publication (and that was a repeatable experiment!).......

[Admiral_Bobski]

Yeah, and cold water fusion was picked up before publication (and that was a repeatable experiment!).......

At the risk of going completely OT...

The experiment was repeatable but the results weren't.

Clearly there was a problem with it!

CB

[Gray-Wolf]

At the risk of going completely OT...

The experiment was repeatable but the results weren't.

Clearly there was a problem with it!

CB

Who ? you?

I would love for them to 'iron out the problems' ,really I would.

Contamination of their initial result does seem the only plausible (to me) reason that the results cannot be replicated (and the repeats were not as close to sources that could 'queer' the results).

[West is Best]

Hi, La Nina.

So, you are saying that quite a lot of scientists have deliberately chosen to deceive each other and us, by producing material which does not follow the basic principles of science, and that the universities, institutions and journals have all agreed to conspire to allow them to do this? Of the two suggestions, once again, I think I know which I find more likely.

:)P

I think it's becoming clearer that the IPCC report distorted science, so in that sense yes. Actually to be fair we possibly ought to distinguish between the science behind the IPCC work and the way the governing body chose to present that science.

Now the holes are beginning to show. It's not going to be pretty, and it's not going to do the AGW cause a lot of good. In my opinion ...