New study on climate change

That tends to hapen when you see rediculous things posted day after day in a forum or in public conversations with people who do not have the first clue about science. You obviously have issues with smugness since this is not the first time you've posted about it and your avatar is a dead give away. If you don't like my attitude then tough. Stick me on ignore. I do work in the field with two organizations (watershed ecology and Vernal Pool habitats) so schooling is not my only source of information. In closing if you have something to add regarding the inaccuracy of my orginal post then please inform us, if not then you have nothing of worth to add to the discussion.

 

And actually if you talk to meteorologists and climatologists that are not making their living on grant money funding CO2 research, the consensus is that global warming is likely a Natural cycle and not induced by the CO2 input of fossil fuel burning.

I am not with a university, instead in the real world of business and research...thus not politicaly biased or driven by the grant system. I am merely putting forth the other side of the global warming issue, the issue that most researchers are afraid to talk about.

 

David, your opinions on getting papers published or attaining favorable reviews is completely understandable and makes sense. I've read about a lot of breakthrough papers that were scoffed at when first published only to be vindicated 5 years or more down the road (think Alfred Wegener and continental drift or Eugene Parker's solar wind idea). That being said you have to understand how opinion pieces or non-consensus science websites come across and are regarded with skepticism. Now if you are trying to create a site similar to RealClimate.org where the majority of contributors are in the field (or related fields) then that is different in that the information is not aimed at the general public and expecting them to peer-review your information.

I'm interested in seeing how you handle the project as it seems your main goal is to get your information out to the world and scientific journals are not an avenue for you. Here's to hoping you shed new light on the subject and are not acting as another contrarian with an agenda (political, power, monetary, etc.)

 

Thank you F8. You hit the nail right on the head, although I am not trying to creat a RealClimate page. I am trying to get the information out to the world by circumventing the politics.

 

I thank all of you for your kind support concerning my effort to release information to the public. I am currently rewriting the website and when posted the research will be worded (hopefully) that most of the general public can understand the information. Trying to meet halfway on my writing (for researchers and the public).

 

Hey David,

How's it coming along?

 

Right. New update.

So much for having to listen to cites of Douglass et al.

Tropical tropospheric trends again

Back in December 2007, we quite heavily criticised the paper of Douglass et al (in press at IJoC) which purported to show that models and data were inconsistent when it came to the trends in the tropical troposphere.

Even when Douglass et al was written, those authors were aware that there were serious biases in the radiosonde data (they had been reported in Sherwood et al, 2005 and elsewhere), and that there were multiple attempts to objectively address the problems and to come up with more homogeneous analyses. We mentioned the RAOBCORE project at the time and noted the big difference using their version 1.4 vs 1.2 made to the comparison (a difference nowhere mentioned in Douglass et al's original accepted paper which only reported on v1.2 despite them being aware of the issue). However, there are at least three new papers in press that independently tackle the issue, and their results go a long towards addressing the problems.

The papers in question (all in press at the Journal of Climate) are from Lanzante and Free, Sherwood et al and Haimberger et al. Note that there are additionally at least two other papers on the way which are relevant but which are not yet publicly available - we'll mention them when they appear.
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Full text at headline link above

 

The Douglass et al. paper was also discussed in another thread here. Data issues aside, the authors simply made a math error, as the folks on realclimate pointed out. The authors confused the precision with which they estimated the average prediction, with the precision of the prediction itself. They took the variance of the roughly 22 point predictions from models, used that variance to construct the error bars for their graphs. Forgetting that those weren't points, they were probability densities that themselves had considerable spread (ie, they were predictions, not datapoints). Using those incorrect error bars, they "rejected" the hypothesis of man-made global warming. But that's just flat wrong. The precision which which you have measured the average prediction is not the same as the precision of the prediction. (Otherwise, if you'd tweaked the models and rerun them a million times, your error bars would shrink nearly to zero, and you'd have a perfectly precise prediction. Or, in my homey example, if you wanted a perfect prediction of the rate of inflation in the year 2100, all you need to do is ask a million economists, then average their responses. Clearly nonsense.) Realclimate provided the appropriate error bars, and the data in fact fall within 2sd of the model predictions. Yes, there is an issue with models apparently over-predicting the warming trend by height in the tropics, but no, the models (at least, the one shown by Realclimate) does not appear to be so off as to warrant rejecting even that aspect of the models' predictions (let alone all the rest). All the hard data issues aside, their arithmetic was simply incorrect, and its surprising that it ever passed peer review.

 

I checked out that guy Dilley's site. For $9.95 you can download his 42 page ebook explaining global weather cycles. And he offers a for-pay forecasting service. Gotta give the guy credit for going for a market test of the value of his research. But the first few pages of the book (which you can read for free) were enough to convince me there's not much there.

First, he doesn't think the current increase in atmospheric carbon is man-made.

"The reader will learn that carbon dioxide rises naturally following all natural rises in temperatures during global warming cycles."

Well, yes and no. Sure, if you warm up water it'll hold less gas. Fair enough. But no, that's a demonstrably false analogy to the current situation. It's not like that's the only way you can get carbon into the atmosphere. And it's not like that occurs rapidly in any case.

As an economist, I like to say, we've got receipts -- for our carbon. We know how much we emit. Global trade statistics tell us how much fossil fuel is burned and how much cement is made. Add to that a fairly accurate estimate for the effects of changes in land use, and you arrive at the estimate of manmade C02 release. That's just accounting, really. And the estimated annual man-made release is larger than the annual increment in C02 in the atmosphere, meaning that Mother Nature remains a net carbon sink at present. If the oceans were offgassing C02 now, the annual increment in atmospheric C02 would have to be larger than the annual manmade output. Which it is not. (In addition, we know it's fossil carbon due to the measured dilution of C14 in the atmospheric carbon -- C14 half life is about 6000 years, so fossil carbon has no C14.)

So, from the get-go, Mr. Dilley does not appear to be in command of the basic facts on quantities of carbon released by man annually.

He reveals the actual reason for the current warming:

" ... global warming and cooling cycles occur naturally in response to specific long-term changes in the gravitation cycles due to variations within the moon's orbit."

Again, fair enough I guess, I have no particular basis from which to judge that. I understand Milankovich (sp?) cycles but haven't run across this one before. But if that explains it, it still doesn't explain why manmade C02 is not warming the earth. I mean, the basic physical calculations behind the effect of increased C02 gas in the atmosphere are pretty sound, I think. So, as with most denialist arguments, it's only half complete. It offers an alternative explanation for the warming, but it doesn't complete the answer: it doesn't explain why manmade C02 is apparently not warming the earth.

Anyway, I went with an open mind, but unless and until he makes a commercial success of his weather prediction business, I see little reason to pay attention to his theory. Prove it in the marketplace and I'll pay attention to it. (Yeah, I know, pet rocks were proven in the marketplace, but I hope you get my intention.)

As an afterthought, if his research really does yield a unique and more accurate system for prediction of annual variation in the weather, he'd make far more money in agricultural commodities speculation than in publishing the underlying research at $10 a pop. Large commodities funds will pay a significant premium for private forecasts that are even marginally better than public information. I believe the same holds true for large insurance companies as they attempt to plan cash-flow needs. A better approach to predicting drought and flood years would extremely valuable.