[Vision2020] Some reasons I'm skeptical about anthropogenic globalwarming

[Bill London]

P-
You are not a pariah.
By participating in a rational discussion on this open community list, you 
are involved, caring, and motivated...
BL



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Rumelhart" <godshatter at yahoo.com>
To: "Vision2020" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009 10:41 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Some reasons I'm skeptical about anthropogenic 
globalwarming


> Since I feel I've basically made myself into a pariah on this list
> because of my skepticism towards anthropogenic global warming, I thought
> I'd go whole hog and totally alienate myself from all free-thinking
> people by expanding upon my opinion by giving more detail and examples
> of why I'm skeptical.
>
> A Note About Skepticism
>
> Someone who is skeptical about a subject is not the same thing as a
> "denier" or a "contrarian".  A "denier" would be someone who is
> unequivocally stating that the subject is incorrect.  A "contrarian"
> would automatically be stating the opposite conclusion is true, no
> matter what was said.  A skeptic, on the other hand, is merely
> expressing doubt about the topic.
>
> Thus, I will explain some of my doubts.
>
> Climate vs. Weather
>
> Weather and climate are different, yet related, topics.  In effect,
> climate is an aggregation of weather data over a large period of time.
> How warm is the Earth, today?  Right here, it's very cold.  There are
> blizzards in the mid-west.  In Tokyo, it's 52F.  In Sydney it's 77F.
> These temperatures change quickly over time.  If you took an average
> temperature right now at every weather station on the globe, how good a
> representation of the Earth's temperature would it be?  There are large
> parts of the globe that are a large distance away from a weather
> station.  In some places, you may be a short drive from several.  Factor
> in the temperature of the water in the oceans in various spots and at
> various depths and the temperature of other bodies of water such as
> lakes and rivers and the temperature at various altitudes in our
> atmosphere, and you have a confusing jumble of data that you're trying
> to coalesce into one number.
>
> How useful is that number?  It's presumably useful for long-term trends,
> but may not tell you much on it's own.  How long-term?  A few days?  A
> few months?  A few years?  A few decades?  Longer?  How chaotic is the
> system?  Does that number change fractionally from hour-to-hour,
> day-to-day, or month-to-month?  Does it jump all over the place?  If you
> had a thermometer that was connected to all of these data sources and
> more that could show you the exact averaged temperature at any moment,
> what would it look like?  Would the needle be rock-solid or would it be
> vibrating like mad?
>
> I've learned from playing around with the NCDC global temperature
> datasets that more information does not automatically lead to clearer
> conclusions.
>
> The State of the Data Past 1850 or So
>
> Unfortunately, we don't have data going back before about 1850 that is
> global in scope.  That's about 160 years, which is a small fraction of
> the amount of time we should be looking back.
>
> The current global temperature data that we do have available comes from
> three places and covers data from around 1850 onward.  Some of it comes
> from NASA's Goddarad Institute for Space Studies, some of it from the
> NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, and some of it from the CRU at the
> University of East Anglia, which is the victim of that data hack (or
> whistle-blowing event) that hasn't been all over the mainstream media.
> The CRU and NCDC datasets are averaged data for the month for each
> station.  I haven't looked at the GISS data yet, so I don't know if it's
> averaged by month or not.
>
> I won't belabor the point about my current mistrust of the CRU dataset
> too much, suffice it to say that since they have "lost" the original raw
> data and don't have methodologies posted that I can find about how they
> made it into their current "value-added" set of data, so I'm pretty much
> discounting it completely.
>
> I am somewhat familiar with the NCDC's dataset, since that's the one
> I've been playing around with plotting. There are stark differences
> between the raw dataset and the adjusted dataset.  Sometime in the
> future I'll have some nice plots that will show these adjustments.
> However, at least we have access to the raw data.  I did dig around on
> the net a little, and came across this:
> http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
> Take a look at that graph, and think what would happen if you took any
> old mp3 file and plotted it's waveform as if it's global temperature
> data, then applied that adjustment to it.  What would it show?  Yep, you
> guessed it, global warming.
>
> I'm not familiar with the GISS dataset, so I can offer no conclusions
> about it's trustworthiness.
>
> Another problem is that the stations that provide this data move around
> or change in some other way over time.  What used to be an isolated
> station perfect for measuring weather gets a parking lot put in next to
> it, raising the temperature by 1C.  A station gets moved behind a
> building, too close to an exhaust fan for the air conditioning.  You
> name it, it's happened.  Look at http://surfacestations.org for an idea
> of the quality of data we're getting from these stations.  Take a good
> look at the pie chart labeled "USHCN - Station Site by Quality Rating".
> Notice that with 82% of the sites surveyed, 69% of them are categorized
> as having an error bar of >= 2C, 61% of them as having an error bar of
> >= 5C.  That's in the US, I don't know how other countries stack up.
>
> The State of the Data Before 1850 or So
>
> Well, there isn't much.  Not that I've seen, anyway.  There are probably
> temperature records that go back farther than that, but they are
> sparse.  Before that, it's anecdotal.  Descriptions of storms, bad
> winters or good summers, etc.  Go far enough back, and there is no data
> whatsoever produced by man.
>
> This only gets you back a short amount time compared to the time frame
> of the Earth.  It's just a blink of an eye, geographically speaking.
>
> Temperature Proxies
>
> So how do we graph temperature going back before 1850?  Using
> temperature proxies.  These are measurements that are only indirectly
> related to temperature.  These are things like tree ring growth, coral
> growth, composition of snow, and others.  You basically take some
> natural process that can be measured currently that has a history of
> growth fluctuations over time and try to determine based on what causes
> those fluctuations what the past was like.
>
> The simple example, which is central to some of the debates about the
> CRU email hack, is tree rings.  Trees grow better in certain temperature
> ranges, and they grow a new ring every year.  So you can go back and
> measure the size of the rings to get a basic determination of how well
> the tree grew that year.  That, presumably, gives you some idea of what
> the temperature record was like in the past.
>
> The problem with this is that temperature is not the only variable that
> affects tree growth.  There are other factors which affect this, such as
> moisture, tree placement (how much competition it has for sunlight),
> disease, soil composition, and who knows how many others.  You can
> measure tree rings on a lot of trees to try to average some of these
> factors out that affect individual trees, but you are still stuck with a
> few that should be taken into consideration, such as moisture or
> rainfall.  How much each of these factors affects trees varies by the
> kind of tree that is being sampled.
>
> You take your tree ring growth chart and your reconstructed temperatures
> and you run them against known temperatures for that region (1850 to
> present, if the temperature record there goes back that far), and
> compare the data points.  If there is a good fit, then you have some
> validation that the proxy you are using might be correlated with
> temperature.  This is still doubtful to some degree, because we only
> have a temperature record that covers about 160 years, which may or may
> not be really accurate.  These proxies are being used, by looking at
> fossils of trees, to go back one or two thousand years.
>
> The controversy about "hide the decline" that you may have heard about
> has to do with tree rings for pine trees in Yamal in Siberia.
> Apparently, if you compare the reconstruction with current temperature
> records, you get a pretty good fit until about 1960 or so.  After that
> point, the reconstructed temperature falls off while the temperature
> record goes up.  The trick to hide the decline had to do with splicing
> the temperature record onto the reconstructed temperature record at 1960
> and smooth the curve, then cut it at 1960 in order to make the curve
> that ends at 1960 appear to be curving up instead of down.  There is a
> good explanation of this here:
> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/20/mikes-nature-trick/  In my
> opinion, that discrepency (50 years over at most 160 years don't fit)
> should have signaled to them that that proxy was not a good proxy for
> temperature.  Instead, they tried to make it appear that it fit better
> than it did, so that they could show that the remainder of the
> reconstruction record before 1850 was more valid than it would otherwise
> appear to be.  Another criticism I've seen about this study is that they
> used a small number of trees to get their data points.  Twelve trees, I
> think.  That's obviously not enough to get an accurate reconstruction,
> even if tree rings are a good proxy for temperature.
>
> The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age
>
> Why did they try so hard to make their reconstruction look better than
> it did?  Because they wanted to minimize the "Medieval Warm Period" and
> the "Little Ice Age".  This came out in the hacked emails.  Here is an
> explanation of this from a blog post:
> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/06/american-thinker-understanding-climategates-hidden-decline/
>
>
> The MWP was a period of time (about 800 - 1300 AD) during which the
> temperature of the Earth appeared from historical writings to be at
> least as high as the current temperature or even higher.  The LIA was a
> period of time from about 1500 or so to 1850 during which temperatures
> were low and slowly climbing, with minimal temperatures at various
> points interspersed with periods of slight warming.
>
> There is evidence that both of these phenomena were global in scale,
> although the exact periods of time change a bit in different areas of
> the Earth.  You have the Vikings colonizing Greenland and farming there
> for 400 years, and you have various other measurements that coincide
> with this.  The Wikipedia article on MWP has a handful of them:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_warm_period  For example, here is
> a link to a description of an article that was published in Nature that
> describes how the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool may have been as warm during
> the MWP as it is today: http://www.physorg.com/news170598165.html
>
> So why try to minimize the MWP and the LIA?  Look at how it frames the
> debate.  If it was naturally warmer one thousand years ago than it is
> now, and we're recovering from a severe cold bout that has lasted 600
> years, then global warming can be seen as a natural correction to the
> LIA.  Furthermore, life during the MWP was prosperous, not some sort of
> hell on earth that killed billions.  It's much more profitable and much
> more ego-building to show that you are trying to save the world from a
> mistake that we as a species has made, since we can presumably do
> something about it.  That's why I am skeptical of these tree ring
> proxies and our ability to state with any confidence exactly what the
> temperatures were like.
>
> Conclusions
>
> Well, I was going to write about Climate Model accuracy, Milankovich
> Cycles, the Maunder Minimum, the Earth's history of Ice Ages and a few
> other topics, but this has already turned into a book.  Look them up if
> you're curious.
>
> So, basically, I'm doubtful of the following things, to one degree or
> another:
>
> Our ability to accurately graph global temperature with accuracy over
> extended periods of time and have it mean much.
>
> The "adjustments" made to the three basic datasets that we use for
> plotting temperature.
>
> The accuracy of our current temperature measurements used in these 
> datasets.
>
> Our ability to accurately reconstruct temperature before 1850 based on
> various temperature proxies.
>
> The predictive ability of tree-ring proxies in particular and their
> explanatory ability for past temperatures.
>
> The removal of the Medieval Warm Period from the temperature record, and
> indeed our general idea of what temperature has been like over the last
> 2000 years.
>
> Now, on to what I'm not saying.  I'm not saying that the Earth is not
> warming.  It seems pretty clear that it is warming, or has been since
> 1850, generally speaking.  I'm not saying that carbon dioxide does not
> have an affect on temperature, or that man is not having an affect in
> other ways as well.  I'm not saying that massive amounts of CO2 aren't
> harming our oceans.
>
> But I am skeptical about the science being "settled", and I'm skeptical
> that we have enough of an understanding of the problem to warrant the
> massive media campaign that is currently going on and the massive
> expenditures that could come out of Copenhagen.  There is room for doubt
> here about a lot of things.  Let's do more science.
>
> In twenty years, when it's all been proven and it turns out that the AGW
> hypotheses were correct, will I feel like an idiot for being skeptical
> of it now?  No.  In my opinion, the question is still up in the air and
> I won't feel even a little bit chagrined then for doubting some of their
> conclusions now.  How would some of these scientists handle the opposite
> answer 20 years from now, I wonder?
>
> Paul
>
> My apologies for the long post.
>
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