Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Does deforestation cause any higher, lower, or any changes in global temperatures?

A member of the House of Lords raised eyebrows in the chamber on Wednesday, when he said there could be a link between global warming and the large amount of baked beans consumed in the UK, causing people to produce so-called “smelly emissions”.

...draw for yourself a standard x-y plot, with x the time and y the measure of interest, say temperature. At some early time point, place a dot for the first “temperature”. And at some later point, place a second dot higher than the first.

Now I ask you: was there a trend in the data?

This is why hypothesis testing is so toxic. Once a wee p-value is spotted, “randomness” or “chance” are rejected as causes and whatever other idea the researcher had in mind is said to be the cause. This is wrong in every possible way. Randomness and chance are never causes, and to assume a cause is not a proof this was the sole correct cause.

...there is no way to tell because there is no definition of trend.

Okay, let's concede that two points on an x-y plot are not a trend, same as one grain of sand does not make a heap.
Now what? Does this mean there are no heaps and no trends?

The presumption of a trend requires a causal model -from which predictions can be made and verified- to be useful… No?

Answer one question for me (to show your level of understanding of the field): What is the definition meaning of the term statistical significance?

Global Warming (or Climate Change or whatever bad name is given to it in English) is a statistically verified trend.

Sure, as soon as you answer if causes exist. Yes or no and how you came to believe so.

It's the use of that "trendy" language that leads so many astray…

Scientists should want to know why!

The AGW groups have focused upon CO₂, and hence fossil fuels… But their best models have failed to be validated by reality: They're predictions were wrong for almost two decades, now.

The trends are not the data; they are not the hypotheses. They are merely murky hints from which intelligence guesses at answers. If it stops there (as that statistician you berate notes, it often does…) nothing will be learned…

Of course, causes exist!
My first memorable experience that such was so was when I was three or four… Living in Riverside, California, where we had mild winters — mostly. But sometimes it got cold. My father would come home from work and stand upon the floor-mounted heating grates to warm his still shod feet. And one day I followed his example: I stepped, bare-foot, upon them… The burns were quite painful!
Sometimes, B follows A — as a result. (Sometimes not…) It's important to be able to distinguish such cases.

Do you need more?

Do you think I didn't notice how you switched from scientists to "AGW groups"? You evidently are not talking about the science anymore, but about the politics. Conflation of science and politics, not good.

As I have repeatedly said, "Global Warming" is the wrong name for the phenomenon. You are very much hooked up with the name and you refuse to look at the phenomenon behind it.

If the best accepted models positing a cause (or group of causes in conjunction) yield predictions that consistently fail, those models are wrong… Which is to say, they've not got the causality right.
How are they still science, then?

I take it, you like the idea of Global Warming, as a looming civilizational catastrophe! (That seems unlikely, to me; surely, you know better. But I could be wrong.)

Does not statistics deal primarily with our estimation of our lack of knowledge?

What would you call "the phenomenon" and how would you characterize "the phenomenon behind it"?

We're in an inter-glacial epoch, which may soon end… We don't know.

Oh, I would take my chances on you nuking us jimbro. Judging by the lack of geography awareness over there gives a 50-50 chance of survival.

The Lend-Lease Act of March 11, 1941, was the principal means for providing U.S. military aid to foreign nations during World War II. The act authorized the president to transfer arms or any other defense materials for which Congress appropriated money to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Britain, the Soviet Union, China, Brazil, and many other countries received weapons under this law.

By allowing the president to transfer war matériel to a beleaguered Britain–and without payment as required by the Neutrality Act of 1939–the act enabled the British to keep fighting until events led America into the conflict. It also skirted the thorny problems of war debts that had followed World War I.

Increasing climate instability due to greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

What else have you got in this discussion besides the authority of the statistician with crap logic?

My experience as Lead Author in the IPCC TAR, Chapter 2 “Observed Climate Variability and Change”, allowed me to observe how a key section of this chapter, which produced the famous Hockey Stick icon, was developed. My own topic was upper air temperature changes that eventually drew little attention, even though the data clearly indicated potentially serious inconsistencies for those who would advocate considerable confidence in climate model projections.
First, note these key points about the IPCC process: the L.A. is allowed (a) to have essentially complete control over the text, (b) sit in judgment of his/her own work as well as that of his/her critics and (c) to have the option of arbitrarily dismissing reviewer comments since he/she is granted the position of “authority” (unlike peer-review.) Add to this situation the rather unusual fact that the L.A. of this particular section had been awarded a PhD only a few months before his selection by the IPCC. Such a process can lead to a biased assessment of any science. But, problems are made more likely in climate science, because, as noted, ours is a murky field of research – we still can’t explain much of what happens in weather and climate.
The Hockey Stick curve depicts a slightly meandering Northern Hemisphere cooling trend from 1000 A.D. through 1900, which then suddenly swings upward in the last 80 years to temperatures warmer than any of the millennium when smoothed. To many, this appeared to be a “smoking gun” of temperature change proving that the 20th century warming was unprecedented and therefore likely to be the result of human emissions of greenhouse gases.
I will not debate the quality of the Hockey Stick – that has been effectively done elsewhere (and indeed there is voluminous discussion on this issue), so, whatever one might think of the Hockey Stick, one can readily understand that its promotion by the IPCC was problematic given the process outlined above. Indeed, with the evidence contained in the Climategate emails, we have a fairly clear picture of how this part of the IPCC TAR went awry. For a more detailed account of this incident with documentation, see http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/.
We were appointed L.A.s in 1998. The Hockey Stick was prominently featured during IPCC meetings from 1999 onward. I can assure the committee that those not familiar with issues regarding reconstructions of this type (and even many who should have been) were truly enamored by its depiction of temperature and sincerely wanted to believe it was truth. Skepticism was virtually non-existent. Indeed it was described as a “clear favourite” for the overall Policy Makers Summary (Folland, 0938031546.txt). In our Sept. 1999 meeting (Arusha, Tanzania) we were shown a plot containing more temperature curves than just the Hockey Stick including one from K. Briffa that diverged significantly from the others, showing a sharp cooling trend after 1960. It raised the obvious problem that if tree rings were not detecting the modern warming trend, they might also have missed comparable warming episodes in the past. In other words, absence of the Medieval warming in the Hockey Stick graph might simply mean tree ring proxies are unreliable, not that the climate really was relatively cooler.
The Briffa curve created disappointment for those who wanted “a nice tidy story” (Briffa 0938031546.txt). The L.A. remarked in emails that he did not want to cast “doubt on our ability to understand factors that influence these estimates” and thus, “undermine faith in paleoestimates” which would provide “fodder” to “skeptics” (Mann 0938018124.txt). One may interpret this to imply that being open and honest about uncertainties was not the purpose of this IPCC section. Between this email (22 Sep 1999) and the next draft sent out (Nov 1999, Fig. 2.25 Expert Review) two things happened: (a) the email referring to a “trick” to “hide the decline” for the preparation of report by the World Meteorological Organization was sent (Jones 0942777075.txt, “trick” is apparently referring to a splicing technique used by the L.A. in which non-paleo data were merged to massage away a cooling dip at the last decades of the original Hockey Stick) and (b) the cooling portion of Briffa’s curve had been truncated for the IPCC report (it is unclear as to who performed the truncation.)
In retrospect, this disagreement in temperature curves was simply an indication that such reconstructions using tree ring records contain significant uncertainties and may be unreliable in ways we do not currently understand or acknowledge. This should have been explained to the readers of the IPCC TAR and specifically our chapter. Highlighting that uncertainty would have been the proper scientific response to the evidence before us, but the emails show that some L.A.’s worried it would have diminished a sense of urgency about climate change (i.e. “dilutes the message rather significantly”, Folland, 0938031546.txt.)
When we met in February 2000 in Auckland NZ, the one disagreeable curve, as noted, was not the same anymore because it had been modified and truncated around 1960. Not being aware of the goings-on behind the scenes, I had apparently assumed a new published time series had appeared and the offensive one had been superceded (I can’t be certain of my actual thoughts in Feb. 2000). Now we know, however, that the offensive part of Briffa’s curve had simply been amputated after a new realization was created three months before. (It appears also that this same curve was apparently a double amputee, having its first 145 years chopped off too, see http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/23/13321/.) So, at this point, data which contradicted the Hockey Stick, whose creator was the L.A., had been eliminated. No one seemed to be alarmed (or in my case aware) that this had been done.
Procedures to guard against such manipulation of evidence are supposed to be in place whenever biases and conflicts of interest interfere with duties to report the whole truth, especially in assessments that have such potentially drastic policy implications. That the IPCC allowed this episode to happen shows, in my view, that the procedures were structurally deficient.
Even though the new temperature chart appeared to agree with the Hockey Stick, I still expressed my skepticism in this reconstruction as being evidence of actual temperature variations. Basically, this result relied considerably on a type of western U.S. tree-ring not known for its fidelity in reproducing large-scale temperatures (NRC 2006, pg. 52).
At the L.A. meetings, I indicated that there was virtually no inter-century precision in these measurements, i.e. they were not good enough to tell us which century might be warmer than another in the pre-calibration period (1000 to 1850.)
In one Climategate email, a Convening L.A., who wanted to feature the Hockey Stick at the time (though later was less enthusiastic), mentions “The tree ring results may still suffer from lack of multicentury time scale variance” and was “probably the most important issue to resolve in Chapter 2” (Folland, 0938031546.txt). This, in all likelihood, was a reference to (a) my expressed concern (see my 2001 comments to NRC below) as well as to (b) the prominence to which the Hockey Stick was pre destined.
To compound this sad and deceptive situation, I had been quite impressed with some recent results by Dahl-Jensen et al., (Science 1998), in which Greenland ice-borehole temperatures had been deconvolved into a time series covering the past 20,000 years. This measurement indeed presented inter-century variations. Their result indicated a clear 500-year period of temperatures, warmer than the present, centered about 900 A.D. – commonly referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, a feature noticeably absent in the Hockey Stick. What is important about this is that whenever any mid to high-latitude location shows centuries of a particularly large temperature anomaly, the spatial scale that such a departure represents is also large. In other words, long time periods of warmth or coolness are equivalent to large spatial domains of warmth or coolness, such as Greenland can represent for the Northern Hemisphere (the domain of the Hockey Stick.)
I discussed this with the paleo-L.A. at each meeting, asking that he include this exceptional result in the document as evidence for temperature fluctuations different from his own. To me Dahl-Jensen et al.’s reconstruction was a more robust estimate of past temperatures than one produced from a certain set of western U.S. tree-ring proxies. But as the process stood, the L.A. was not required to acknowledge my suggestions, and I was not able to convince him otherwise. It is perhaps a failure of mine that I did not press the issue even harder or sought agreement from others who might have been likewise aware of the evidence against the Hockey Stick realization.
As it turned out, this exceptional paper by Dahl-Jensen et al. was not even mentioned in the appropriate section (TAR 2.3.2). There was a brief mention of similar evidence indicating warmer temperatures 1000 years ago from the Sargasso Sea sediments (TAR 2.3.3), but the text then quickly asserts, without citation, that this type of anomaly is not important to the hemisphere as a whole.
Thus, we see a situation where a contradictory data set from Greenland, which in terms of paleoclimate in my view was quite important, was not offered to the readers (the policymakers) for their consideration. In the end, the Hockey Stick appeared in Figure 1 of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, without any other comparisons, a position of prominence that speaks for itself.
So, to summarize, an L.A. was given final say over a section which included as its (and the IPCC’s) featured product, his very own chart, and which allowed him to leave out not only entire studies that presented contrary evidence, but even to use another strategically edited data set that had originally displayed contrary evidence. This led to problems that have only recently been exposed. This process, in my opinion, illustrates that the IPCC did not provide policymakers with an unbiased evaluation of the science, whatever one thinks about the Hockey Stick as a temperature reconstruction.
(source)

Quote from: ersi on 2015-06-14, 23:41:47

Increasing climate instability due to greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

Where is the evidence of "increasing climate instability"?

And why would you call greenhouse gases pollutants?

I see… Your memory seems to be so short, your penchant for ad hominem so ingrained that you look like a mime stuck in a box!

I became interested in AGW after the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC… I've tried to keep up.

Third Assessment Report of 2001? I was first introduced into the topic of ozone depletion in mid-80's. You have no way to catch up with my far longer memory.
And, as I suspected, you are really only interested in the politics, not the science. Case closed.

But the politics says nothing about the science and you really haven't said anything about the science yet. And neither has your statistician.

You missed the question I asked: Would you say ozone depletion was unreal? This gives you an idea about the evidence.

I'm quite aware of what happened in the '80s regarding the Montreal Protocol… The acceptance of the Precautionary Principle was a milestone of … stupidity. (If one applied it to itself it would have to be rejected… Is your antiquated logic able to derive that? Of course, it is; yet you don't… Hm!)

You close the case, because you are ignorant of it. But the regime of attaining a less than 400 ppm concentration of atmospheric CO₂ is just plain silly. And precluding a 2º C increase in the earth's temperature is a feat that modern technology cannot perform.

You have a very odd definition of science…
The models make predictions. The predictions fail.
The data don't confirm the models. The data are "adjusted".

So, are there any that you've read that should convince me? (Yes, the phrasing of that question was deliberate. Alternately, I could have asked "What paper(s) convinced you?" You can only dodge this question by quitting the field…)

I don't want an "idea" about the evidence… I want the evidence!
(I'm sure you'll think that quibbling. )

To reject the precautionary principle by "applying it to itself" you must suspect that it poses a risk to the environment. Show me how it does so.

So, as I thought, global warming is strictly limited to CO₂ and temperature measurements for you. No concern about wider industrial impact on ecology.

industrial impact on environment is an acute first-hand problem for me.

Are you denying ozone depletion, seriously? This shows that you only scoff at evidence.

Quote from: ersi on 2015-06-15, 23:17:19

To reject the precautionary principle by "applying it to itself" you must suspect that it poses a risk to the environment. Show me how it does so.

The Precautionary Principle requires that whatever protocol or process is considered, it must first be proven to be safe… Proven as in proven! (To use a Briggsian loquation. )

Prove that the Precautionary Principle won't produce deleterious effects…

A simple example from long ago: DDT was banned, because of unfounded environmental harms predicted. Millions of people died from disease that reasonable application of DDT would have eradicated.
(But Europeans get to sell mosquito netting to sub-Saharan Africans! A Win-Win? )

DDT is a persistent organic pollutant that is readily adsorbed to soils and sediments, which can act both as sinks and as long-term sources of exposure contributing to terrestrial organisms. [...] DDT is toxic to a wide range of living organisms, [etc.]

Did you really think air-conditioning was going to cause something akin to the Black Plague via skin cancers?! (Think back, ersi: Did you really think so, back then?)

(I'm willing to accept that you yourself only use vegetable matter you've grown on your own land…)

I'm sorry that your previous masters were such rapacious assholes. And, if your current government hasn't undone the damage, I'd say help them do so.

Or am I wrong? Would you just like to see others suffer? Would that make you feel better? If so, my only question is Why?

Cite the effects of supposed Ozone depletion… Please.

Ozone, while a minority constituent in Earth's atmosphere, is responsible for most of the absorption of UVB radiation. The amount of UVB radiation that penetrates through the ozone layer decreases exponentially with the slant-path thickness and density of the layer. When stratospheric ozone levels decrease, higher levels of UVB reach the Earth’s surface.

The principle is that when the safety of a policy/action is not certain, you reject the policy/action.

Feel free to cite any published academic paper to support — well, whatever.

When one lacks arable land to grow food, I see it as end of life.