This is a continuation of a remarkable thread that has now received 10,000 comments running to well over a million words. Unfortunately its size has become a problem and this is the reason for the move.
The history of the New Statesman thread goes back to December 2007 when Dr David Whitehouse wrote a very influential article for that publication posing the question Has Global Warming Stopped? Later, Mark Lynas, the magazine’s environment correspondent, wrote a furious reply, Has Global Warming Really Stopped?
By the time the New Statesman closed the blogs associated with these articles they had received just over 3000 comments, many from people who had become regular contributors to a wide-ranging discussion of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, its implications for public policy and the economy. At that stage I provided a new home for the discussion at Harmless Sky.
Comments are now closed on the old thread. If you want to refer to comments there then it is easy to do so by left-clicking on the comment number, selecting ‘Copy Link Location’ and then setting up a link in the normal way.
Here’s to the next 10,000 comments.
Useful links:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
The original Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs thread is here with 10,000 comments.
PeterM
For shame!
You post (524) a partial CET record (by Parker) which truncates the late 17th/early 18th century warming period, to which I referred (and which was greater than the most recent warming period).
Ouch!
Max
Link for 522 [remove !]
[h!ttp://www.reef.crc.org.au/publications/explore/feat37.ht!ml]
Peter
Re GST, I’m not familiar with Australian taxation, but I had a quick look just now and note that your then PM (John Howard) had previously promised never to introduce it! Politicians, eh?
My main objection is that it is bureaucratic, involving all parties in the chain of production, instead of just the final transaction. If your business has to record all the inputs and outputs just to claim the difference, don’t you mind all the extra work?
PeterM
Your comments to Brute on Europe versus USA do not necessarily apply for Switzerland, which has less government-owned industry than, for example, France (or, for that matter, the USA, now that it “owns” chunks of GM, etc.).
Switzerland is also not feeling the recession as badly as either the USA or many EU countries, although there are worries that the strong Franc (versus the Euro) will cause problems for the Swiss export and tourist industries (EU is largest trade partner). As a result, the Swiss National Bank is buying Euros to try to bolster it.
It is true that the “middle class” pays the price of a recession (all over the world) and also reaps a significant portion of the benefits of a boom.
The “poorest” are covered by a “social net”, which is not much different in Switzerland (or EU countries) than in many US states. They may suffer a bit from “entitlement cuts” during a deep recession (and gain a bit from more generous “entitlements” when the economy is booming), but they are much more immune to swings in the economy than the middle class.
The “wealthiest” seem to do well regardless of the economy (at least here in Switzerland).
As far as the “middle class” getting “out on the streets”, this happens regularly in France and hardly ever in Switzerland. In the USA it appears that there are grassroots movements to do so (Tea Party, etc.), but it is also less of a “habit” than in France.
Do Englishmen ever “go out on the streets” in protest? I cannot recall many instances of this (“stiff upper lip, and all that”), but maybe one of the English posters here has another thought on that.
Max
Brute / PeterM
What percentage of the economy does the government run?
US government spending (federal, state, local) represents 45% of GDP in 2010 (up from 32% in 2000).
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
In Germany, this was 48.8% in 2007, while France had 61.1%, UK 50.0%, Switzerland 37.8% and Greece 50.7%. Australia was at 43.6% and Canada at 48.2%.
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/03/government-spending-as-percentage-of.html
Looks like the USA has “moved up” to the same level as the EU!
Strangely, this was only 22.0% in China and 20.9% in Russia, while it was 30.9% in Japan.
Max
Max
Not very often, and since about a million turned out to tell Tony Blair not to support Dubya’s mission to Iraq, and were studiously ignored, I guess we don’t bother so much. We can’t assemble within a kilometre* of Parliament, anyway, now.
*A curious choice of measurement, since metric units are not (yet) allowed on road signs!
Peter and Max
Peter, that was a curious attempt at changing the time scale as seen in your #524. I will charitably assume you were being mischievous, rather than trying to put forward a serious counter argument by changing the game whilst mixing apples and oranges.
Here is CET (again) back to 1659 showing the modest slope.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jdrake/Questioning_Climate/_sgg/m2_1.htm
The corrected hockey stick -as Max points out- shows this period more clearly and that the MWP was warmer than today.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/cycles/fig3.htm
We know of the characteristic warmth of the MWP from around 950 to 1300AD, we also know of the brief brush with the LIA before renewed warmth around 1400, the warm period around 1470 is widely mentioned, and we can trace by instrumental record the warm periods around 1670 and 1700 and 1750 which are of course all strangely omitted in the truncated chart you suddenly produced.
This repeated link
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/05/the-great-dying-of-thermometers/
gives a great animation from 1701 showing the rise and fall of thermometer numbers.
From here you can debate with such as Warwick Hughes what is happening in Australia concerning thermometer readings and climate in general.
What with the stations distressing habit of frequently moving (often to Airports), being engulfed by the surrounding warm urbanisation and the potential of poor siting, the idea of this precise global temperature is a threadbare concept.
Tonyb
Oh dear, after a burst of fairness, it looks like RC have returned to their old policy of editing out any inconvenient comments. Here follows a screen copy of my first comment on Mike the manna man’s thread; “What we can learn from studying the last millennium or so“:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
However, it disappeared after a few hours. I re-posted it later in the day, and it too disappeared.
Looks like it touched a raw nerve, or maybe a moderator wanted to shield it from Mikes eyes?
TonyB
JoNova’s youtube showing the number of temperature changes over time (your 532) is amazing!
What is particularly interesting is the lack of stations in most of the world until the early 20th century, the rapid build-up until around 1990 and the drastic elimination of stations after 1990.
If anyone had any real confidence in this temperature record before seeing this demonstration, it would surely be lost afterward.
Max
Bob_FJ
Re ur 533
Looks like the RC site is returning to its old (pardon me, Peter) Josef Goebbels policy on censorship, allowing only the AGW-groupies, like John Mashey, DB Benson, Ray Ladbury, BP Levenson, Hank Roberts, etc. to gush praise on the lead blog authors (in this case “mighty Mann” himself), while blocking out any serious critique.
Non illegitemi carborundum.
Max
Max
You said;
“If anyone had any real confidence in this temperature record before seeing this demonstration, it would surely be lost afterward.”
You’d think that wouldn’t you, but if you’re a true believer it’s more conmforting to ignore such things and keep eating the spaghetti soup.
tonyb
Max and Tony,
There is no attempt to deceive. I didn’t realise you were so concerned about the period up to around 1750! I’ll put my own graphs up again which has the whole period.
It is a record of central England only, which has a similar latitute to Canada, but a milder climate which is very dependent on ocean currents, so its not necessarily representative of the climate globally. For instance, the early 20th century warming which is apparent in the global record doesn’t show up at all.
Peter
Hubert Lamb spent a lifetime examining thousands of records from all over the world and much of what he has to say remains relevant today.
Precisely because of our geographical location he thought the UK was a good proxy for much of the Northern Hemisphere. You wil remember the close mirroring it had to Zurich figures on the graphs I posted last year. Zurich then diverged over the last fifty years because of considerable -unaccounted for- urbanisation. The Cet figures from 1974 also suffer from this -although to a slightly lesser extent
We shall no doubt remember your new found enthusiasm for 10 year rolling averages at another time.
Tonyb
PeterM
Glad you again include the entire CET record, including the 50-year pre-industrial period 1690-1739, which shows greater and more rapid warming than the most recent 50-year period, 1960-2009.
How do you explain that, despite the fact that there was no human CO2 over this period it warmed more than the most recent period with record CO2 emissions?
Could it be that CO2 feally does not play such an important role (despite the myopic fixation IPCC has put on this one trace GH gas as the principal driver of our planet’s climate)?
Appreciate your explanation for this (you know what my explanation is, I think).
Max
PeterM
You wrote of the CET record (538):
This is not true, Peter.
If you plot the 35-year period 1915-1949, you will see that it has a linear warming rate of 0.24C per decade or 0.8C over the period.
Check stuff out before you make statements, Peter.
Max
TonyB
You wrote to Peter
Yeah. For example, if the recent cooling trend suddenly reverses itself again after 10 years or so of cooling, you can be sure that “10 year rolling averages” will be dropped like a hot rock by the “mainstream consensus of 2,500 climate scientists” plus Peter.
As the saying goes:
Max
Hi Max
I don’t know if you ever saw my article here concerning the gradual lessening of the LIA through the 19th Century, as viewed through the prism of Charles Dickens.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/bah-humbug/
He and other commentators had a profound effect on our belief in the period as one of unremitting cold when really it was much more episodic than the word ‘age’ implies and there were very warm periods in between. This implies considerable variability, explicitly denied by the Met office.
Most of our ‘warming’ has come about through a lessening of the severe winters which we can observe over the last 320 years, and which in turn has raised the annual mean average. That there were other cold episodic periods going much further back than that is also evident from such graphs as the one you originally posted, and which I repeated in my #532
Leaving aside the nonsense of an accurate global termperature, what I would like to see explained are the reasons for the very cold interludes we can observe over the last 3 or 4 hundred years, in order to determine whether they can recurr.
Tonyb
TonyB
Enjoyed your “Dickens and English climate” blog.
Really points out how silly all this commotion about AGW really is, if one looks a little bit further into history.
Thanks.
Max
TonyB, I’d like to second what Max has said; your “Bah Humbug!” is an excellent and informative essay. As important as the graphs and number-crunching are, I find that nothing brings home the truths of our weird, wonderful (and highly variable!) climate quite like a historical perspective, such as the one you presented there. Any thoughts about writing a book on climate history?
Alex and Max
Thanks for your kind comments.
Several people have suggested I write a book on climate history as following the deaths of John Daly and Hubert Lamb-both giants in their field- there are very few people currently writing on the subject.
The trouble is that I write for the internet age, whereby the links are an integral part of the articles narrative as well as being a cross reference.
So it would work well as an online book but I’m not aware of any funding mechanism that could make this a viable proposition.
I currently have around another 5 articles on the go, of which my one on the LIA is the most ambitious.
Collectively I havbe already written around 6 articles so this would form the nucleus of a considerable volume of work.
I do like to try and put things in their historic perspective but unfortunately we have a large group of people who prefer hypothetical computer models to real stories.
Tonyb
TonyB:
Yes, as Alex says, an excellent and informative essay. Thank you. BTW in a follow-up comment you say, “It would be fascinating to see what proxies have to say about the same period, so if anyone has any particular expertise in this field it would be good to hear from them.” Did anyone respond?
Max,
I’m surprised that you didn’t link to these graphs. I thought you might be interested in Switzerland’s climate.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/temperature-record-of-the-week-switzerland/
TonyB,
Do you have reference to the Zurich temperature data you mentioned?
PeterM
Tamino’s graphs of selected Swiss temperatures (up to year 2007) are interesting, but do not really tell us anything new.
We all know that it warmed by around 1.7C from 1900 to around 1950, cooled by around 1.0C from 1950 to 1975 and then warmed by about 1.5C from 1975 to 2007 (with slight cooling since then).
So what?
Don’t try to tell me this has anything to do with atmospheric CO2 concentrations (either here in Switzerland or halfway around the globe in Hawaii).
Max
JamesP,
This was a common argument when GST was introduced
“My main objection is that it is bureaucratic, involving all parties in the chain of production, instead of just the final transaction. If your business has to record all the inputs and outputs just to claim the difference, don’t you mind all the extra work?”
which I must say I’ve never understood. Recording the inputs and outputs are what every business should be doing anyway, regardless of the tax implications. You just need to be able to understand what 10% means to work out the tax. How hard is that?
Anyway that’s maybe a pretty boring contribution from me today!
Robin
I received a variety of graphs and some borehole material plus tree ring estimates-the latter didn’t always match the instrumental records.
Peter
There was an awful lot of background to these Zurich graphs as the city had grown something like five fold since the war. There is also a good view of the station now engulfed by urbanisation.
This was the subject of a considerable number of posts between Max and myself a year or so ago.
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/combined_mencken.xls
tonyb