Mar 172008

THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS

At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.

This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:

Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.

Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.

Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.

(Click the ‘comments’ link below if the input box does not appear)

 

10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”

  1. Peter Geany and Jasper Gee, Re; Max’s 7813 in part:

    “…There is no doubt that Patrick 027 is knowledgeable and logical in his argumentation…”

    I too once held this view but after continuing a debate started and closed at RC, over at Chris Colose’s website, I concluded otherwise:

    http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/an-update-to-kiehl-and-trenberth-1997/#comment-981

    The volume of text produced by this guy was amazing and was sprinkled with heaps of impressive technical jargon, much of which was not relevant to the issues I raised. After a while it became clear to me that it was largely waffle. (and sometimes he seemed to have lost track of what both I and he had already written). I found it impossible to address all of the waffle and tried to keep it on track, but it became progressively irrelevant and illogical.

    Interestingly, Chris C allowed some of my related posts that were deleted without comment at RC

  2. Barleysane 7816

    You referred to an open letter from my old friend Prof Morner concerning the silly publicity stunt by the Maldives govt when they held a cabinet meeting underwater to highlight global warming

    http://icecap.us/images/uploads/OpenLetter.doc.pdf

    Of all the many inaccuracies in TAR4, that about sea level is demonstrably untrue. A glance at Chapter five and the various graphs will show that global sea levels calculations derive from a reconstruction from three incomplete NH tide gauges to 1870, then extrapolated back to 1700. This data does not not actually exist, it is invented.

    The graph at the end of that chapter shows the tiny number of gauges in the NH and SH prior to 1900. In no way do they represent the 70% of the global surface that is water.

    Satellite altimetry is inaccurate up to 15cm and can’t capture sea movements to fractions of a cm. Latest results show a rise of 0.4mm since 2005.

    We have no real idea what current sea levels are doing other than on a case by case basis by studying local tidal gauges. We have even less idea what they were doing gobally back to 1870.

    Tonyb

  3. Germany breaks record for ‘lowest ever October temperature’…

    http://www.thelocal.de/society/20091020-22693.html

  4. Gavin Schmidt is no lightweight on climate issues:

    http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/gschmidt/

    Max may choose to highlight recent exchange with Gavin, who clearly has finally had enough of Max, but overall he shows remarkable patience in dealing with the general public.

    Its quite rare for a scientist of international standing to take the time and trouble to interface with the general public as Gavin and others do on Realclimate. I don’t think that many would be quite so restrained as Gavin if they were accused of participating in a hoax or a scam.

  5. Pete,

    Your sycophantic hero worship of Schmidt is amusing.

    Do you have a man crush on the guy?

    Get a grip Pete……Schmidt is an environmentally fanatic……WEATHERMAN.

    He just doesn’t have enough charisma to make it on the 5 o’clock news……

  6. Here’s another reasoned proposal from the “Global Warming” lunatics.

    Pete,

    I honestly don’t understand how you can support this kind of thing. Is this the circle of “scientist of international standing” that you support?

    Sustainable living now includes “edible pets” to curb global warming

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/21/sustainable-living-now-includes-edible-pets-to-curb-global-warming/

    Cat

  7. TonyN,

    I did as you asked, and I sent an email to David Cameron to ask his opinion on the £6 million campaign with the suggestion that he should show some lead on this issue. I’m not sure it will do any good. If he’d wanted to say anything about it he would have done so already. To use a cricketing metaphor, I would suggest that he’s quite happy to let that ball go through to the keeper.

    Your comment, on the other thread, that the UK Conservatives have use the AGW issue to “detoxify” their image was interesting if somewhat puzzling. If you are right, or from your point of view, how can it be good politics to suggest spending taxpayers’ money on a non-existent problem?

  8. Max,

    Your comments that “the world (with all its faults) is an infinitely better place today than it was 100 or 150 years ago.

    and:

    To “roll back” all of that in order to destroy a virtual computer-generated hobgoblin called “anthropogenic global warming” would be self-destruction.

    illustrates your real motivation better than any of your particular scientific objections to the consensus position on AGW. You’ve decided that its not a good idea to “roll back” the progress that has been made, and therefore the consensus must be wrong.

    Its a common human reaction, when faced with an uncomfortable truth, to engage in denial. In principle its no different to the Creationists denial of Evolutionary theory. Or an HIV positive person’s denial of the link between that particular virus and AIDS. Or, the denial of a heavy smoker for the scientific evidence on the health effects of tobacco.

    Fortunately there are more intelligent ways of addressing the issue. We don’t have to revert to a medieval lifestyle. It is possible to still maintain human progress without letting atmospheric CO2 levels rise out of all conrol.

  9. Brute,

    I’ve asked this question before without ever getting a satisfactory answer but maybe you can do better.

    How much would you say you understand of Gavin Schmidt’s work? I’d say not very much. S,o how is it that you “know” he’s wrong?

    Previous retorts to this question have been along the line of “How do you know he’s right?”. I don’t know if a lot of scientific knowledge is right. For instance, I have only a very hazy understanding of Watson and Crick’s Nobel prize winning work on DNA. I, like many others, don’t know if they are right, but anyone would have to be real dickhead to start saying they weren’t without a good understanding of the Biochemistry involved.

  10. Re: Peter Martin, #7832

    I suggested contacting the press office, not the party leader personally, but it would be very surprising if you do not get some kind of reply from Cameron’s office eventually.

    There was considerable discussion of the detoxification of the Conservative Party image by espousing green issues in the UK media some time back. The most conspicuous sign of this image change were Cameron’s photo-op on a Scandinavian glacier and the new ‘green tree’ logo for the party. Even his opponents agreed that it had been successful.

    I’m interested that you know what my point of view is. Which one and how did you find out.

  11. Peter Martin

    You wrote (7832):

    “Your comments… illustrate your real motivation better than any of your particular scientific objections to the consensus position on AGW. You’ve decided that its not a good idea to “roll back” the progress that has been made, and therefore the consensus must be wrong.”

    Sorry, Peter, you’ve got that backward.

    Let me repeat to you how the logic flowed here.

    I first heard about “global warming” several years ago. This was before it had become a craze. I did a bit of checking on the “science” behind the AGW premise and found that it was based upon an as yet unvalidated (in the scientific sense) but highly plausible greenhouse theory.

    But then the avalanche of alarmist press releases started, from sources (such as Hadley, NASA, etc.) that had up until that time reported the facts without any hysterical undertones, as they are empowered to do by the governments that pay them.

    So I began to apply the filter of rational skepticism to all the hype, and found much of it to be grossly exaggerated. In many cases, there was no scientific justification for the disastrous predictions for the future that were made.

    I suppose that IPCC 2007 SPM was the final straw in turning me into a skeptic. Curiously, it was first published in February 2007, several months before the AR4 WG1 report, which provided its scientific backup.

    I went through this report in some detail and found:
    · areas where published scientific reports were ignored or not accepted,
    · unfounded claims of severe weather events caused by AGW,
    · discounting the importance of the UHI distortion of the surface temperature record,
    · discounting the importance of the unusually high level of 20th century solar activity on our climate by counting only the impact of direct solar irradiance, despite the disclaimer that IPCC’s “level of scientific understanding” of solar climate forcing was “low”,
    · changing of measurement method and scope on sea levels to show an artificial acceleration in late 20th century sea level rise which did not exist,
    · untrue statement that the discrepancy between the surface and satellite records had been largely reconciled,
    · cleverly worded comparisons of short-term and long-term temperature trends to show an apparent acceleration in late 20th century warming which did not exist,
    · questionable statements about the 20th century being the warmest in 1,300 years based on dubious hockeysticks and their spaghetti copies but ignoring at least 20 reports from all over the world confirming a MWP that was warmer than the late 20th century,
    · serious omissions of scientific work on alternate theories, in addition to
    · alarming forecasts for the future that simply did not pass the test of reason.

    Another thing that caught my eye, when comparing SPM 2007 with the earlier TAR report was the arrogant tone of the later report. It was truly a “sales pitch” directed at “policy makers”, who were not going to check into the details, anyway, but needed a hard pitch.

    When the AR4 WG1 backup report came out several months later, I started digging into it as well. Instead of supporting the claims of SPM, I found several additional problems:
    · the false claim that the troposphere had warmed more rapidly than the surface, thereby confirming the greenhouse fingerprint,
    · the unsubstantiated rationalization that the mid-century cooling was caused by human aerosols rather than natural factors,
    · a strange logic that AGW had to be a major cause for late 20th century warming because the GCMs could not explain it any other way (when the same GCMs were unable to explain the slightly higher early 20th century warming),
    · model “storylines” and “scenarios” which had atmospheric CO2 growing exponentially at rates up to 5 times the current rate, to levels higher than possible even if all fossil fuels on the planet were consumed,
    · exaggerated assumptions on “positive feedbacks”, most notably from clouds, where all models assumed these to be strongly positive based on extremely dicey model outputs rather than actual physical observations, despite conceding “cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty”
    · despite the fact that the “Mann hockeystick” had been thoroughly discredited and was removed from the SPM as a “centerpiece” of evidence of unprecedented 20th century warming over the past 1,300 years, it again shows up in the WG1 AR4 report as a relevant paleoclimate study.

    So after reading all this, I became convinced that there was something strangely unscientific going on here.

    Only then did I really start to look more deeply into the political and economic aspects of the AGW movement.

    I realized that it had become a multi-billion dollar big business and that it was being used to promote a program of direct and/or indirect taxation on carbon that would run into the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars, with every man, woman and child picking up the costs and all sorts of people and organizations lining up to get a piece of the cake.

    But the rational skepticism of the science supporting the “consensus” premise that AGW is a potentially serious problem, caused principally by human CO2 emissions, came first in my case, and your reasoning is dead wrong.

    It would be just as silly as if I accused you of first wanting to tax the inhabitants of the wealthy nations of this world for redistribution to the poorer ones and then, later, accepting the science behind the “consensus” position because it supports you ideas on global wealth leveling. Get the point?

    The science comes first, Peter.

    Max

  12. Max

    My 7827

    Peter Martin #7833 is doing what he has become expert on-diverting attention away from the IPCC version of science and down another path entirely. He has successfully done this on Arctic ice, glaciers, historic temperatures, GISS coding, lack of allowance for UHI in figures, amongst others.

    He of all people must be aware of the politics driving the AGW agenda, which superceded the science years ago.

    With my #7827 I commented on the nonsense of sea level rise. I can quote chapter and verse if required. The historic sea levels quoted in TAR4 -from which everything is derived- are not supportable. THe IPCC admit this themselves in their comments on uncertainty and the degree of reconstruction used.

    I challenge Peter to attempt to support them and would-as always- be pleased to hear your take on this.

    Tonyb.

  13. Brute and Peter M (7829/7830)

    Regarding Gavin Schmidt, his type is probably best described in Peter Taylor’s book (pp.371/72):

    A member of “a small cabal of computer specialists” who have “little real comprehension of ecology and in particular of past ecological environments” who are “fundamentally mathematicians and physicists, chemist and computer technicians and prone to all manner of ambitions to further their field of knowledge and make a play for saving the world from what they genuinely believed could be a future threat”.

    His performance on RC shows that he is highly opinionated and does not allow any opinion to be expressed that conflicts with his own. He does this by either attempting to put down the other opinion with an often irrelevant but snotty comment full of double-talk or (if he is unable to do this) simply censoring it out with a “snip”.

    If this is the kind of guy we rely on for unbiased and objective scientific opinion, heaven help us!

    Max

  14. “-diverting attention away from the IPCC version of science” ???

    On the contrary. I’d very much like to draw your attention to the IPCC reports. In practice there isn’t much , if any difference, between what they and any other reputable science organisation are saying on the AGW issue. I’d include your Hadley Climate research centre, Brute’s NASA, NOAA and NSIDC, and ‘our’ CSIRO. I’m not sure what Max has in Switzerland but they’ll be pretty much of the same opinion too.

  15. On sea level rise this is pretty much the scientific position:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise

    There doesn’t look to be any noticeable recent acceleration in sea level rise. If there is no acceleration, we can expect about another 200mm sea level rise this century.

    However as many scientists have pointed out, and as economists have recently been reminded by world events, tipping points can and do occur. You can’t always predict the future by an extrapolation of a straight line!

  16. Pete ~7840

    I suggested you went to TAR 4 Chapter 5 not wikipedia. The science says nothing of the sort.

    Current sea level rise is estimated at 0.4mm per year (University of Colorado) plus or minus 15cm (yes cm) error from satellite altimetry

    We have no idea -other than observationally in specfic localties,-as to what it has been in the past,as the historic ‘factual’ information has been imaginatively created from three (THREE!!) NH tide gauges back to 1700.

    http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/author_archive/jevrejeva_etal_1700/

    Above is reconstruction from 1700 which is the grand daddy of all sea level charts

    Amsterdam from 1700 (van Veen 1945)
    Liverpool since 1768 (woodworth 1999)
    Stockholm since 1774 (Ekman 1988)

    These three are taken to represent global figures since 1700, although much data is missing and has been subsequently interpolated.

    This comments on the differences even in the same ocean basin between tide gauges of up to plus or minus 6cm
    http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/author_archive/jevrejeva_etal_1700/2008GL033611.pdf

    Chapter five of the IPCC 4 assessment is the relevant document (link given below)

    Figure 5.13 on page 410 is the genesis of the most commonly seen graph, which provides context in as much it expresses the IPCC’s own considerable caveats (which can be read in chapter 5 of the link below)
    (read the notes under the graphs)

    It can be seen that much of the this historic sea level record is a computer generated model as the actual historic global tidal gauge measurements either simply do not exist or are based on data from the 3 highly fractured historic tide gauges already mentioned.

    In this respect it is useful to look at figure 5A2 which shows tide gauge numbers used. These slowly grew from 1870 until in 1900 they stood at 20 in the Northern Hemisphere and 2 in the Southern Hemisphere.

    FAQ5.1 on page 409 ‘global mean sea level deviation’ lies at the heart of much of the sea level rise debate, giving a scary future prediction through the selection of a particularly pessimistic IPCC ‘scenario’.

    The historic global tide gauge data is a woefully inadequate representation of the 70% of the globe that is water, and becomes more theoretical the further back in time one goes.

    http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter5.pdf

    I invite you to examine what IPPC actually say and read the graphs and documents. Our knowledge of historic sea levels does not support the assertions made that there has been a rapid rise in the last 100 years which in the future will become a catastrophic rise which will add up to 20 metres (James Hansen and AL Gore) or even the ‘up to 1 metre’ the IPCC themselves expect to 2100.

    These are COMPUTER models not reality Peter.
    This is what we keep trying to point out.
    Observation and History tells us quite a different story to the one woven by the IPCC.

    Tonyb

  17. Jack Hughes (7821)

    Richard Black makes a reasonable case for his own lack of bias, but I hardly think that extends to the rest of the BBC. In fact, I seem to recall a comment a couple of years ago from some senior BBC person (doubtless irritated at the repeated accusations of bias over what was then called global warming) that they weren’t obliged to report opinions from dissenters on a subject that was so clearly already settled. Does anyone remember who and when?

  18. Peter M

    You can’t always predict the future by an extrapolation of a straight line!

    Perhaps you should point that out to the IPCC…

  19. Pete,

    Regarding your childlike reverence to people such as Gavin Schmidt I found it coincidental that I found this passage today from a book that I’ve been reading chronicling the fall of the Berlin Wall. The book reviews the events that occurred in Europe of the period before, during and after the fall.

    One of Nicolae Ceausescu’s replies to his interrogators reflected his posture. “I am the president of Romania and the Commander in Chief of the Romanian Army. I am the president of the people. I will not speak with you provocateurs any more, and I will not speak with the organizers of the putsch.”

    As for Elena Ceausescu, she was no innocent bystander. She was a Politburo member and first deputy premier. At her trial, she occasionally piped up with remarks like “Such impudence! I am a member and the chairwoman of the Academy of Sciences. You cannot talk to me in such a way!”.

    The remark from Elena Ceausescu is particularly telling in that she believed that she was somehow above reproach due to her membership in the Academy of Sciences. That somehow she had some “Messianic insight” that was unfathomable to the common man. That her decisions and conclusions, no matter how destructive and oppressive, were justified due to her station in life.

    Reading through Gavin Schmidt’s comments and submittals I see the same arrogance……that somehow his thought process is sacrosanct and anyone that dares question his views is beneath contempt, (or comment)……not worthy of his precious time. Further, his arrogance and self aggrandizement are fueled by people such as yourself, people that stroke and inflate his ego to the point that both you and he feel that he has achieved some god-like, mythical, unapproachable status………

    Your opinion of Gavin Schmidt’s persona as well as his self-opinion is dangerous.

  20. PeterM and TonyB

    Not to get into a topic where TonyB is much more qualified to speak than I am, but concentrating only on how IPCC AR4 (and SPM 2007) has mishandled sea level, here are my comments.

    The key IPCC error here (in AR4) is its switch from one
    · method of measurement (tide gauges) covering one
    · scope of measurement (several coastal points, where sea level has a significance for us land dwellers) over one
    · time period (prior to 1993)

    to a totally different
    · method (satellite altimetry),
    · scope (the entire ocean except coastal and polar regions, which cannot be captured by satellite), and
    · time period (1993-2003),
    ·
    and then comparing the two to claim an acceleration between the two time periods.

    They only call attention to this change in a small footnote (Table SPM.1, p.7 of the SPM report):

    “Data prior to 1993 are from tide gauges and after 1993 are from satellite altimetery.”

    This is not only bad science, it is downright skullduggery (or lying, if you prefer).

    Then, in an example of clever chartmanship, IPCC does not show a graph with rates of sea level increase in mm/decade (the topic of interest) but with the absolute sea level in mm, expressed as a “difference from 1961-1990”.

    The reason for this is obvious, if one looks at the longer-term record. The rate of sea level change has gone up and down in multi-decadal swings from net reduction to net increase, with no apparent trend whatsoever, while the absolute sea level has shown a steady upward trend since the record started in the 19th century.

    By switching methods and scopes and cleverly picking the periods for comparison, IPCC made the claim (SPM, p.5):

    “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm per year.”

    A quick look at the tide gauge record shows that the statement is untrue.
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/3144596227_545227fbae_b.jpg

    In fact a close look at the long-term record (with all its faults, as pointed out by TonyB) shows an average of 1.74 mm/year rise over the 20th century with a slight deceleration in the rate of sea level rise over the period.

    Comparing several estimates for the period 1993-2003 shows that the claim of 3.1 mm per year quoted by IPCC is out of line with other estimates.

    Two different Proudman tide gauge records (Holgate 2004 and 2007) show 2.0 and –0.3 mm per year, respectively for this time period. Probably the study by Carl Wunsch et al. gives the best estimate for this period. Using both satellite and tide gauge data this study entitled “Decadal Trends in Sea Level Patterns: 1993-2004” concluded that the increase over this period was 1.6 mm/year (or around one-half the rate reported by IPCC and slightly lower than the average for the entire 20th century). The authors did conclude, however that

    “systematic errors are likely to dominate most estimates of global average change” and the [satellite] “database is insufficient to compute sea level trends with the accuracy necessary to discuss the impact of global warming”

    .

    IPCC (SPM p.7) tells us:

    For 1993 to 2003, the sum of the climate contributions is consistent within uncertainties with the total sea level rise that is directly observed (see Table SPM.1). These estimates are based on improved satellite and in situ data now available.

    To the uninitiated reader (the “policymaker” at whom this report is aimed), this sounds like satellite altimetry is an improvement over the old tide gages.

    As TonyB has pointed out, satellite altimetry has an error range measured in several centimeters (15 cm), yet is supposed to be giving us meaningful data on something that is changing by millimeters per year.

    Even the NOAA scientists performing these measurements tell us that satellite altimetry is not able to give reliable results.
    http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU04/05276/EGU04-J-05276.pdf

    “However, every few years we learn about mishaps or drifts in the altimeter instruments, errors in the data processing or instabilities in the ancillary data that result in rates of change that easily exceed the formal error estimate, if not the rate estimate itself.”

    “It seems that the more missions are added to the melting pot, the more uncertain the altimetric sea level change results become.”

    So IPCC has lied to us in its statement (p.5, SPM):

    There is high confidence that the rate of observed sea level rise increased from the 19th to the 20th century.

    [The record shows no such increase.]

    and in its implication that satellite altimetry is an improved method of measurement over the old tide gauges.

    [Even the NOAA scientists working with this method concede that it is not reliable.]

    Enough said.

    Max
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/3144596227_545227fbae_b.jpg

  21. Poll: Americans’ belief in global warming cools

    http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/poll-americans-belief-in-169483.html

  22. Max and Peter

    Very nice work. Hopefully Peter will realise that sea level data is as phoney as the Hockey stick and arctic ice data.

    Perhaps we can start to educate him on the nonsense of ‘global’ temperatures, a subject dear to my heart as you know. The way this data is presented is surprising. GISS uses a virtually impenetrable and much patched up computer code. Still, that is better than Hadley, who found they had lost their original ‘1850’ data. It took an enquiry under the Freedom of information act before they said this though. Phil Jones’s colleague at CRU is ‘Tree rings’ Briffa.

    Giss, Hadley and the IPCC have very conveniently glossed over the numerous warm periods that operate in definable cycles that stretch back to the MWP-that were interspered with the very cold winters for which this era is snyonymous.

    Warm periods in the LIA?

    In the Mid 1500’s people swam in the Rhine in January, whilst in January 1660/61-the year the Royal Society was established- English diarist Pepys observed;
    “It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.”

    Charles Dickens published ‘A Christmas Carol’ in December 1843. Much of the Anglo-Saxon world view it -through books, films, and TV- as a metaphor for a freezing 19th century. He wrote it during a heat wave and lived through what still remain as the two warmest winters in the 350 year British on record. Publication took place during what is still one of the warmest Decembers

    IPCC say ‘All published reconstructions find that temperatures were warm during medieval times, cooled to low values in the 16th 17th 18th 19th centuries, then warmed rapidly after that.’ FAQ 6.2 Page 114 of TAR4. This seems an extraordinary thing to say and is unsupported either by thermometers or actual records and contemporary observations.

    Whilst there were low values, equally there were many high ones and in that context modern temperatures have barely warmed beyond those, and not reached the levels enjoyed during the Medieval warm period (MWP)

    In this latter respect the UK Met office-a prime contributor through the Hadley centre to the IPCC assessments, assert:

    http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/policymakers/policy/slowdown.html

    Extract “Before the twentieth century, when man-made greenhouse gas emissions really took off, there was an underlying stability to global climate. The temperature varied from year to year, or decade to decade, but stayed within a certain range and averaged out to an approximately steady level.”

    Variability in the global climate has encompassed the documented little ice age and documented warm periods between them. In addition there are numerous documented examples of an MWP.

    Let us (if only for the sake of this argument) accept the view expressed by Govt climate change organisation UKCIP that;

    ‘Globally the MWP may have been slightly cooler by 0.03deghree c during the mwp than in the early and mid 20th century‘

    If we take this very slightly cooler MWP than now at face value, and factor in the accepted reality of the Little Ice Age, the variability is self evidently much greater than currently. Consequently this assertion can not be substantiated.

    However the Met office is to be congratulated on the extraordinary precision of this measurement of a global event that occurred 1000 years ago.

    Clear cyclical patterns of natural variability through the centuries can be observed with a gradual lessening of catastrophic cold since the end of the LIA and a gentle warming of the climate back towards the levels in the period that preceded the LIA-the MWP.

    This warming is beautifully described by Thomas Jefferson in one of the climatic interregnums he experienced during the 1700’s

    (Taken from his extensive weather records when the warm weather of the early 1700’s gave way to intense cold then another period of warmth)

    http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch07.html

    “A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their development, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those over flowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now. “
    (from observation 1772 to 1779 written in 1781?)

    (Some)temperatures have risen since the Little Ice Age. Who would have thought it? Funny how no one mentions the dozens of locations worldwide that have been cooling for at least the last thirty years.

    Tonyb

  23. TonyB,

    I think you’ve got hole of the wrong end of the stick as regards the Uni of Colorado’s sea level measurements.

    What they are saying is:

    3.2mm +/-0.4mm /yr

    http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

    Not 0.4 +/-150mm . I don’t know where you’ve got that from.

  24. Peter

    As you well know the sea level figure I quoted of 0.4mm is the factor used to correct the satellite error and was used in the context of the graph in the Wikipedia article you were quoting which showed a highly theoretical increase of 2.8 to 3.1mm a year (plus or minus-4mm per year)

    That Wiki figure was up to 2003. Since then the rate of rise has been a theoretical 0.96mm per year plus or minus 0.4mm.

    (Against all this is the admitted margin of real error of up to 15cm.)

    Why does the graph stop at 2003? I suggest you go to your own link and go to the ‘discussion’ and ‘history’ tabs.

    This page was edited as recently as yesterday. Comment has been made as to the current sea level ‘fall’ (or to be more precise fall in the rate of theoretical rise).

    They have had six years to put up a more recent graph. It is a high profile page and the first source many turn to. Why do you think the graph remains as it has?

    An up to 1 metre rise will take a highly theoretical 1000 years. That assumes it won’t go down again as it has done since the MWP.

    Max’s graph accurately depicted the 20th Century falling trend in sea level increase-not a rising trend.

    That start point anyway is again theoretical due to the paucity of accurate tide gauge measurements. Max clearly pointed out the manner in which tide/satellite data had been interpreted.

    This is as big a concoction as the Hockey stick but receives much less attention.

    As you seem to have time to email David Cameron why don’t you email Wiki and ask why they don’t update their pages? Address your email to William Connelley.

    Tony

  25. PeterM and TonyB

    Here are some data from the Holgate report I cited earlier:

    The period measured by Proudman was 1904 to 2003.

    The total period showed an average rise of +1.74±0.16 mm/year or 15.8-19.0 cm over the century.

    The first half (1904-1953) showed an average rise of +2.03±0.35 mm/year.

    The second half (1954-2003) showed an average rise of +1.45±0.34 mm/year (29% lower than the first half).

    The decade with the highest annual rate was the period 1975-1984, with an average rate of +5.31 mm/year.

    The decade with the lowest annual rate was the period 1960-1969, with an average rate of –1.49 mm/year.

    From this we can conclude that longer-term trends (such as 50 or, even better, 100 years) may be meaningful, provided consistent measurement methods are used throughout, but shorter term (i.e. 10 year) periods are totally meaningless, since the multi-decadal fluctuations far outweigh the trend.

    Yet another reason why the IPCC claim of “faster rate of sea level rise” based on a 10-year sample is meaningless.

    Of course, as pointed out earlier, what makes the IPCC claim fraudulent is that it is based on comparing “apples” with “oranges” by changing the scope and method of measurement.

    But I agree with TonyB. We have beaten this dog to death (unless you have something constructive you would like to add).

    If not, let’s move on to the validity of the “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomaly”, being used to sell us on the validity of the AGW premise,

    Max

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