You will recall that last February, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, debated Ken Ham, the Not-So-Science Guy, on the question of creationism as a viable explanation for the Earth’s history. The debate was held in Ham’s home territory, at the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky. Nye didn’t really debate Ham. He ate him for breakfast. Form now on we shall call him Ken Bacon and Eggs.
Anyway, people, including me, who have been engaged with the “debate” between science (evolution) and not-so-science (creationism of one kind or another) were very concerned when we heard that this debate might happen. There are reasons to not engage in such a debate. We worried. But then the debate happened and we saw the debate and the debate made us glad. Word.
Well, in May 2014, which as far as I can tell is in the future (Bill Nye has some amazing powers!) Bill Nye published an Article in the Center for Inquiry’s Skeptical Inquirer about the debate: Bill Nye’s Take on the Nye-Ham Debate. In it, Nye gives the story of how the debate came to be, what his concerns and hopes were, how he prepared, what happened during the debate, and the debate’s aftermath. I think Nye’s explanation for his decision to debate is very much worth a read and can be appreciated by anyone interested in this topic. His description of the debate itself is fascinating, as inside stories often are. Also of great interest are Nye’s comments on an aspect of this debate that concerned several people: The way in which the debate was used, or perhaps, was not used, as a means of fund raising. Nye opens up questions that he suggests may be best addressed by the community of journalists in Kentucky. Hopefully that will happen.
I strongly recommend that you read Bill Nye’s essay. It is very interesting, and I very much appreciate his writing it.
… and by that I mean the El Niño phase of the El Niño Souther Oscillation climate pattern.
We have been in an ENSO neutral phase for a while. Climate scientists have a hard time predicting El Niño, which arrives in Summer, Fall, or Winter, this early in the year, but nonetheless most prediction sources, and most models, now tell us that we are likely to have one staring, really, any time, but most likely Summer or Fall. Here’s a graph of several models. The bottom colored area is Le Niña, who we assume was Jesus Christ’s sister, and the top colored area is El Ninño, with the middle part being neutral. What is being measured here is sea surface temperature anomaly in certain areas of the Pacific Ocean.
The ENSO is complex and I won’t try to explain it all here, but the bottom line is this: During some periods heat accumulated on the surface of the Pacific is moved by currents (driven by winds) deeper into the ocean. During other periods, El Niño, the heat moves back to the surface again.
It is interesting to note that there are probably two kinds of El Niño: Regular and “Modoki”. Modoki is Japanese for “Similar but different.” So perhaps we can think of Modoki El Niño as Brian. Anyway, the Modoki El Niño is different in a few ways, one of those being that while regular El Niño tends to attenuate Atlantic hurricane activity by causing more tropical storm-killing vertical wind shear, the Modoki variety may enhance the likelihood of landfalling hurricanes in the US. I’ve not seen any predictions that we are more likely to have Modoki El Niño this year, but a paper just coming out on a related topic, that I’m busy writing up suggests that it may be the case.
For more information on this year’s predictions, see these sources:
My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that rightfully disqualified the study. The planet is headed for a cliff and the scientific evidence for climate change is way past a debate, in my opinion. Why even debate this with contrarians? If scientists think there is a debate, then why not debate this scientifically? Why help the ostriches of society (always are) keep their heads in the sand? Why not focus even more on the science of climate change? Why not develop potential scenarios so that society can get prepared? Is that not what scientists do? Does anyone really believe that a public lynching will help advance anything? Who comes off as the biggest nutter? Activism that abuses science as a weapon is just not helpful at a time of crisis.
I’m not sure if this being his own personal opinion gets him out of trouble here. As an assistant field chief editor that is.
The authors of the retracted paper
Please avoid the passive voice. “As the authors of the paper I supervised the undue retraction of.” There, I fixed that for you.
and their followers
Oh, I see, you think is a cult or something. Interesting.
are doing
Actually, I think it is you who is doing something here. They just wrote a paper in their field of expertise, published it in a peer reviewed journal, etc.
the climate change crisis a tragic disservice
No, this research is important in understanding the astonishing and critically important fact that there is a virtually 100% consensus among scientists that climate change is real, human caused, and important in contrast to something closer to a 50-50 distribution of belief among the general public that it is even a thing. This discordance is one of the most important facts of our age, because a) climate change is one of the most important things happening on this planet right now and b) humanity seems entirely unable to address it. There are reasons for this and one of those reasons is the behavior, strategy, and tactics of the denialist community. Recursive Fury was a scholarly study of an important aspect of that. Which you published. Then, the denialist community pressured you into retracting it. That, good sir, is a tragic disservice. You are the perpetrator of a tragic disservice.
by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study.
Writing about and analyzing public comments without referring to the source is unethical. You have this backwards, It is generally accepted by the research and publishing community that you have this wrong.
They made a monumental mistake,
Well, you got that right. They should have picked a different journal. Generally, I think it would be a good idea henceforth for people to pick a different journal.
refused to fix it
Even though the paper is fine the way it is they did not “refuse to fix it” but rather worked with the editors of Frontiers (perhaps you should meet them some time!) to follow one or more paths to addressing this issue. So, that’s just a lie, apparently.
and that rightfully disqualified the study.
Disqualified the study? That you published?
The planet is headed for a cliff and the scientific evidence for climate change is way past a debate, in my opinion. Why even debate this with contrarians?
Since you are acting as a hobgoblin of the climate science denialists, I’m a little surprised to see that you accept the reality of climate change so readily. But that’s good, good for you. As to why there should be an academic study of denialism, there are two answers to that. a) academics traditionally study whatever they want, and b) see above.
If scientists think there is a debate,
They don’t, yet there is one and that debate is hampering our efforts to do something about it. This is worthy of study and investigation. Somebody should do that!
then why not debate this scientifically?
There isn’t a valid debate, but there is a debate nonetheless. THAT issue is worthy of scientific study. Lewandowsky et al. did that. You have repressed the study.
Why help the ostriches of society (always are) keep their heads in the sand?
Exactly. Let’s address this faux debate. In this case, we need to understand it better. Academic study of the debate is a good thing. Which the authors did. Which you agreed to, published, then under pressure from the denialists, retracted.
Why not focus even more on the science of climate change?
This is a very interesting question. Lewandowsky is not a climate scientist. Others involved both in this paper and other projects are also not climate scientists. For that matter the vast majority of denialists are not climate scientists either. But the issue of climate change has many aspects, including denialism, which was the subject of an academic study that your journal accepted, published, then under pressure from science denialists, retracted.
Why not develop potential scenarios so that society can get prepared?
Get prepared? Oh, I see. You actually ARE a denialist! There are many kinds of denailists, including those who think there is nothing we can do about climate change. This statement seems to suggest that this is your position. That is very interesting. This may be the most important statement I’ve seen coming out of Frontiers. This could explain the whole retraction thing. Huh.
Is that not what scientists do?
What scientists do is they study stuff and write papers and put the papers in peer reviewed journals, and part of that is the process of editorial oversight and review. That is what Lewandowsky et al did. They did what scientists did. You, and Frontiers, did something else, something that editors should not do about the science in their journals. Repress it.
Does anyone really believe that a public lynching will help advance anything?
Most people believe that study of denialism is important. Most people believe that public lynching of scientists who study climate change or climate science denialism does not help advance anything. Did I answer your question correctly? 🙂
Who comes off as the biggest nutter? Activism that abuses science as a weapon is just not helpful at a time of crisis.
Did you just call the authors of the paper you repressed nutters? Wow.
First, as I’ve mentioned before, there is a Reddit “As Me Anything” (AMA) going on right now with Stephan Lewandowsky, and if you are into Reddit AMA’s and climate change related issues you should check it out. Lewandowsky is a co-author of the famous Frontiers Retracted paper, though the subjects being discussed at the AMA range far beyond that particular issue.
Second, there is new paper out that looks very interesting. I’m still trying to absorb it and I’ve asked the author for some clarifications on some issues, but already the Global Warming Deialosphere is all over it, so it must have some merit! 🙂
Is global warming just a giant natural fluctuation?
An analysis of temperature data since 1500 all but rules out the possibility that global warming in the industrial era is just a natural fluctuation in the earth’s climate, according to a new study by McGill University physics professor Shaun Lovejoy.
…Rather than using complex computer models to estimate the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions, Lovejoy examines historical data to assess the competing hypothesis: that warming over the past century is due to natural long-term variations in temperature.
“This study will be a blow to any remaining climate-change deniers,” Lovejoy says. “Their two most convincing arguments – that the warming is natural in origin, and that the computer models are wrong – are either directly contradicted by this analysis, or simply do not apply to it.”
Lovejoy’s study applies statistical methodology to determine the probability that global warming since 1880 is due to natural variability. His conclusion: the natural-warming hypothesis may be ruled out “with confidence levels great than 99%, and most likely greater than 99.9%.”
…
“We’ve had a fluctuation in average temperature that’s just huge since 1880 – on the order of about 0.9 degrees Celsius,” Lovejoy says. “This study shows that the odds of that being caused by natural fluctuations are less than one in a hundred and are likely to be less than one in a thousand.
“While the statistical rejection of a hypothesis can’t generally be used to conclude the truth of any specific alternative, in many cases – including this one – the rejection of one greatly enhances the credibility of the other.”
This Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego website provides daily updates, analysis, and information on the state of climate. Follow @Keeling_curve to get daily updates of the CO2 value. Through this site, the public can also help support the continuation of the iconic Keeling Curve and of complementary measurements of atmospheric oxygen made at Scripps. These measurements enable society to witness climate change and inform strategies to address it.
The last hurricane season in the Atlantic was anemic, being one of least active periods on record. This was attributed to extra dust blown off the Sahara which inhibits hurricane development.
According to this prediction, there will be nine named storms in the Atlantic, three of which will become hurricanes, one of those a major hurricane (Category 3 or above), with a 35% chance of a major hurricane hitting the US coast somewhere.
Personally, I’m not sure about the effects of El Nino, should it occur. There haven’t been that many El Ninos during the period for which there are high quality records. This year’s El Nino, if it materializes, will occur during a period when we are experiencing strange and different things in the Arctic. Many of the teleconnections between El Nino and other conditions elsewhere in the world are highly variable and many are not all that well understood. Overall, with global warming, conditions may simply be different enough this year from any other prior year that predictions may be off. While it makes sense that if there is an El Nino we should expect an attenuated Atlantic hurricane season, I’m not going to be surprised if several of the usual links between El Nino and various weather conditions are different than “usual.”
This is a post I wrote elsewhere, a while ago, and just realized was never put on this blog, so here it is. I thought of this post and the topic because of the recent data of the Ms Jesus Scroll, which does indeed appear to be old. But they are still arguing about it, of course. Post is slightly revised.
A while ago I asked on my Facebook page whether anyone had seen the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. As one might expect, a couple of people, who possibly thought I was joking, noted that the Dead Sea scrolls were part of the Bible, and all that stuff was implausible stories handed down by ignorant Bronze Age shepherds over the generations, etc., etc., etc.
My first reaction to that, as an anthropologist, was this: “Hey, Imma let you say that now, but if you diss any of my people like that I’ll kick your ass. Metaphorically, of course.” In other words, I do find it rather condescending when western occidento-hetero-caucasoido-normative types take it on themselves to make blanket statements that some other group of people of which they know nothing are stupid. I understand the whole being annoyed at the Bible thing. I mean, it is probably the most annoying book ever written. But this is where modern-day “New Atheists” can be thoughtless when unpracticed in their philosophy and its application.
But it was only a Facebook comment.
My second thought was this: I never read the sports section of the newspaper, but a few years ago when I came across a large fragment of a 30-year-old sports page from the local paper, hidden inside a wall, I read every word of it. Wouldn’t you? And the Dead Sea Scrolls are two thousand years old, and about a topic that is pretty much as interesting to me as hockey scores and basketball.
In the end, I went to see the exhibit. Twice. And I assure you, the part about the stupid Bronze Age shepherds is not only overwhelmingly outdone by other aspects of the scrolls, but in fact is rather inaccurate. The keepers of the scrolls were more like Moonies than shepherds, except when they were also tour guides. Also, it wasn’t the Bronze Age.
So a while back I visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs site in southwestern Minnesota. That’s also a religious exhibit of sorts, if we assume (and we probably should) that the symbols pecked and carved into two-billion-year-old red quartzite played a role in various Native American cultural practices having to do with spirits, gods, afterlife, and so on. Jeffers has thunderbirds, lightning symbols, warriors doing battle with shamans, turtles, magic turtles, hands, bison (probably the extinct kind), atlatls, and more. The guides, polite and well informed caucasionormatives, describe various hypotheses about the symbols and who made them and why, play down the violent parts — maybe that one of the guy with the spear in his chest bleeding all over the place is all about the transition from boyhood to manhood? — and try to link the religious nature of the site to the presumed religiosity (or, at least, spirituality!?!) of the visitors. The prayer we make now at this site is enhanced by the thousands of years of others coming here to pray. And so on.
And both subjects have their holocaustic contexts. The Dead Sea Scrolls were probably kept by a Jewish religious sect, or at the very least, were part of a Jewish Renaissance following an exodus of sorts, and were a big deal in a Jewish world increasingly controlled and colonized by repressive and violent outsiders known today as heroes of Western Civilization. And the next two thousand years is, as they say, bloody history.
Jeffers is much older and diffuse in its cultural associations but was a sacred site to the Dakota (and others) at a time when the practice was to do war with the Indians, kill a lot of them, cut off some of their body parts to sell later in town as curios, or deflesh their bones, varnish them, keep them on display in your office, and to do all the killing in a way that maximized your votes, if you happen to be a politician. And, just to put this in perspective, I think we as a civilization came to abhor the Jewish Holocaust at the time it was revealed, in the mid 1940s. In contrast, most of the native body parts harvested during the Dakota Uprising (centered geographically near Jeffers) were returned decades later, between 1971 and 1990, and by force of law, not because of a sense of shame or propriety. Some still sit on mantles or in boxes in closets.
I recommend a visit to both. But don’t be a dick about it. Your ancestors have already pretty much taken care of that.
Here’s the Ms. Jesus papyrus fragment, in the news recently because it has been “dated” (not really) and is probably old (plausibly). (Image modified by me from Harvard Magazine). I’ve included the translation because it makes me LOL.
On April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg during her maiden voyage. The collision occurred at 11:40 PM ships time, and by 2:20 AM the ship broke apart and foundered with over a thousand people still on board. Of the 2,224 people on board just over 700 were rescued.
There have been a number of theories about the iceberg; where did it come from, why were there so many icebergs in the area at the time, how big was it, and so on. It has become general belief that the number of ice bergs in the area was exceptionally large. However, a new paper released a few minutes ago suggests that this is not the case, and also questions some of the other theories about ice berg calving that year are also now in question.
Yes, there were a lot of icebergs that year, about 2.5 times above the average year. Iceberg experts focus on the number of ice bergs that float south of 48 degrees N latitude, and during the iceberg season of 1912 it is estimated that 1038 of the things passed that line. So that’s a lot, but according to this research, it is less than the 90th percentile for the century-plus period for which data are available.
Importantly, the number of icebergs in the region has gone up recently. Figure 4 from the paper shows the erratic annual data, with a clear increase in the last several decades.
There are probably a few reasons for this. The main reason is probably the IIP itself, which keeps track of icebergs and provides important information to the ships. Another set of reasons probably has to do with the technology of seeing icebergs and communicating about them. This makes the iceberg situation along the Labrador and Newfoundland coast a microcosm of a larger question we have these days about the effects of climate change. There has been a recent and rather heated debate about this. Roger Pielke Junior has produced a number of studies that seem to show that there has been no effect of climate change on the outcome of natural disasters such as major storms. There are a number of reasons that this research is probably wrong, including the fact that the effects of major storms has increased in some cases because of factors directly linked to climate change. The most obvious of this includes increased sea surface temperatures powering up a handful of otherwise already large hurricanes to cause more of a punch (eg. Katrina, Haiyan, Sandy) and increased sea levels resulting in higher storm surges. But also missing from Pielke’s analysis is the fact that some of the effect, or more exactly, the cost, of such events is prepaid in the form of preparation. New York City was aware of the fact that their subways were likely to flood when Superstorm Sandy came along (which itself may have been an effect of climate change due to increased sea surface temperatures and unusual steering winds resulting from Arctic Amplification effects) so they were able to shut down or otherwise secure certain systems. For that to happen there needed to be an ongoing system of making predictions about tropical storms. Similarly, rebuilding or retrofitting infrastructure to handle larger storm surges is something we are going to see all along coastal areas. Also, properties that may have been high value because of their sea-side location in many areas now have very little residential or commercial value because they have to be disoccupied.
In the case of North Atlantic Icebergs, ships don’t run into them because we have spent time, effort, and money to not let that happen, every year since the Titanic. If one did a Pielke style analysis of the effects of icebergs in the region it might look like this:
A Pielke Style Analysis of the effects of climate change via iceberg-ship collisions
And that would be misleading.
The current budget of the IIP is just under 6.0 million dollars a year, which doesn’t seem like much given the benefits, but to this we must add the additional costs of ships following suboptimal routes because of iceberg threats and the costs of all those technologies and procedures that they follow. The point is, the cost of increased icebergs in the North Atlantic is not zero based on a lack of collisions. It is non-zero and to the extent that there is a correlation between bad iceberg years and costs, it is increased with more icebergs and there are more icebergs.
The researchers carried out a nifty modeling program of iceberg formation in the Titanic year, in part to test some of the ideas previously presented. One of the more interesting ideas was that an exceptionally high tide had lifted the glacial margins more than usual and this caused the production of more icebergs than usual. But this research sowed that the Titanic iceberg came from a part of the Greenland coast that would have been frozen fast during that short interval, so this is unlikely. Also, the increase that year as well as at other times of iceberg formation is thought to be related to a change in weather conditions in Greenland. This is complicated and not well understood, and the subject of work in progress by one of the authors. For now, it appears that relatively warm conditions in the Arctic result in changes in snowfall pattern that affect iceberg formation in the fall, which then propagates to additional icebergs passing south of 48 degrees North latitude over the next few years.
Between the increase in iceberg formation under current warm Arctic conditions and the extreme lack of sea ice in the region which tempts ships north, we can expect there to be more potential contacts between boat and ice over coming years. I’m thinking the International Ice Patrol should get a funding bump. Just in case.
Stephan is a cognitive scientist who has done a lot of important work related to climate change. He’s doing a reddit “Ask Me Anything” on Monday, April 14th from 7:30AM EST onwards. Which, conveniently for him, is 7:30PM in Australia, if I have my time zones right.
There are two topics he mentioned to me that he’d like to address, which I will describe to you by citing blog posts:
I needed a copy of the “False Hope Graph” that Michael Mann painstakingly created for his Scientific American piece “Earth Will Cross the Climate Danger Threshold by 2036” for a presentation I’m doing, but it had to be simpler, leave some stuff off, and be readable across the room on a screen. The original graphic looks like this:
It is a major contribution showing the relationship between climate sensitivity and climate change in the future depending on various important factors. The graphic I made from it is here (click on it to get the big giant version):
You’ll notice I left only one sensitivity + aerosol forcing line on it because in my talk I’ll use that as the most likely. Some of you might find it helpful.
You should go read the original post, but here’s a key part of it:
Frontiers retracted a perfectly fine (according to their own investigation) psychology paper due to financial risks for themselves. It can only be seen as at best a rather lame excuse or at worst rather patronizing, if Frontiers were to claim to be protecting their authors from lawsuits by removing the ‘offending’ article. This is absolutely no way to “empower researchers in their daily work“. In the coming days I will send resignation letters to the Frontiers journals to which I have donated my free time for a range of editorial duties.
And now, on a completely unrelated note, for your amusement:
Ugo Bardi is a scientist who until a few moments ago served as Chief Specialty Editor at the journal Frontiers. As you know, Frontiers has recently retracted a perfectly good paper, initially indicating that the retraction was due to pressure from the climate science denialist community, who did not like the paper because it was about them. Later, Frontiers changed its tune and claimed that the paper was retracted because of ethical violations of the authors, even though the journal had earlier clearly stated that there were no issues, ethical or otherwise, with the paper. I talk about this here.
The climate of intimidation which is developing nowadays risks to do great damage to climate science and to science in general. I believe that the situation risks to deteriorate further if we all don’t take a strong stance on this issue. Hence, I am taking the strongest action I can take, that is I am resigning from “Chief Specialty Editor” of Frontiers in protest against the behavior of the journal in the “Recursive Fury” case. I sent to the editors a letter today, stating my intention to resign.
Ugo is being very brave here, because now that he has taken this action he may well be next on the list for the climate science denialists to go after. Of course, I have a feeling he’s been in that position before because he is a strong and articulate spokesperson for climate science.
Bardi also notes something that I’ve also been concerned about. He and I are big supporters of OpenAccess journals. Frontiers is a major player in that area, and I saw their acquisition a while back by Nature Publishing Group as an excellent move in the direction of increased OpenAccess publication. I don’t assume that there is a connection between being OpenAccess and BoneHeaded. But this, as Bardi says, may be a bit of a setback for this important movement.
It is said that global warming has taken a break over the last decade or so. This is not true. Surface temperatures (air, sea surface, and ice) have increased over this period of time, though less so than previous years. Also, there are various indicators that the coming year or so may be extra warm, depending on what happens in the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps more importantly, deep sea temperatures seem to have gone up, and since most of the effects of anthropogenic global warming are seen in the ocean (over 90% of the extra heat goes there), changes in the rate of global warming at the surface can easily be the result of short term changes in exactly where the heat goes. (I discuss this in detail here: The Ocean is the Dog. Atmospheric Temperature is the Tail and About That Global Warming Hiatus… #Fauxpause.)
Recent research has suggested that part of the recent slow down in global surface warming, and other fluctuations, have resulted from the fact that the Earth’s surface is not as evenly sampled as one would like, and certain areas that have heated up quite a bit lately such as the Arctic and interior Africa are underrepresented in the data.
Some of the variation in surface warming has been attributed by some researchers to a phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). “Oscillations” are a common phenomenon in climatology. Generally speaking, this is where a major variable (temperature or air pressure) in a given area or between two areas shifts back and forth around a mean. The AMO in particular has been a bit difficult to figure out, or for that matter, to prove that it really even exists. Part of the problem is that a single oscillation, which involves seas surface temperatures over the Atlantic Ocean, may have a period of forty or even eighty years. For this reason, the high quality record of surface temperature change allows us to only see a couple of full oscillations, and this makes it hard to characterize and even harder to explain causally.
According to Michael Mann, lead author of a paper just out addressing the pause and its relationship to the AMO, “Some researchers have in the past attributed a portion of Northern Hemispheric warming to a warm phase of the AMO. The true AMO signal, instead, appears likely to have been in a cooling phase in recent decades, offsetting some of the anthropogenic warming temporarily.”
One application to understanding recent changes in the rate of warming in the context of the AMO is the so-called “Stadium Wave.” This is an actual Stadium Wave, a phenomenon seen at sporting events:
The climate Stadium Wave idea as proposed by Judith Curry suggests that certain changes in surface conditions related to the AMO result in swings in surface temperature that actually explain the long term “global warming curve” enough to discount or reduce the presumed effects of global warming. Curry’s Stadium Wave is a kind of emergent property of climate, where this and that thing happens and results in a large effect because of compounding variables.
It’s complicated. Here is an abstract from a paper by MG Wyatt and JA Curry explaining it:
A hypothesized low-frequency climate signal propagating across the Northern Hemisphere through a network of synchronized climate indices was identified in previous analyses of instrumental and proxy data. The tempo of signal propagation is rationalized in terms of the … Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Through multivariate statistical analysis of an expanded database, we further investigate this hypothesized signal to elucidate propagation dynamics. The Eurasian Arctic Shelf-Sea Region, where sea ice is uniquely exposed to open ocean in the Northern Hemisphere, emerges as a strong contender for generating and sustaining propagation of the hemispheric signal. Ocean-ice-atmosphere coupling spawns a sequence of positive and negative feedbacks that convey persistence and quasi-oscillatory features to the signal. Further stabilizing the system are anomalies of co-varying Pacific-centered atmospheric circulations. Indirectly related to dynamics in the Eurasian Arctic, these anomalies appear to negatively feed back onto the Atlantic‘s freshwater balance. Earth’s rotational rate and other proxies encode traces of this signal as it makes its way across the Northern Hemisphere.
This led to a number of statements and predictions by Curry, which have been parsed out here.
For the past 15+ years, there has been no increase in global average surface temperature…
The stadium wave hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for the hiatus in warming and helps explain why climate models did not predict this hiatus. Further, the new hypothesis suggests how long the hiatus might last.
The ‘hiatus’ will continue at least another decade
Climate models are too sensitive to external forcing
Hiatus persistence beyond 20 years would support a firm declaration of problems with the climate models
Incorrect accounting for natural internal variability implies: Biased attribution of 20th century warming [and] Climate models are not useful on decadal time scales
So, the Stadium Wave model goes a long way to explain recent surface temperature trends, and seriously calls into question the viability of climate models that show a strong human influence on global warming and that predict future catastrophic warming. For this reason, the Stadium Wave hypothesis brings up key questions, and if there is evidence either supporting it or falsifying it, that would be of utmost importance.
The paper under consideration here, “On Forced Temperature Changes, Internal Variability and the AMO” by Michael Mann, Byron Steinman, and Sonya Miller, addresses the Stadium Wave issue (and other matters). This is a very complicated study and if you really want to understand it I recommend getting at least a Masters Degree in Atmospheric Science then sitting down with it for a long time. The way I got through the paper was asking the lead author a bunch of questions. Here, I mainly want to address the Stadium Wave issue. The short version of the story is this: Curry’s Stadium Wave is an artifact of her methods. A second and probably more important finding is that the AMO, previously thought to have contributed to warming surface temperatures over the last ten years, is now thought, based on this new analysis, to have contributed to a relative flattening out of the warming, and thus may account for the so-called “hiatus” in part.
Previous work, including that done by Curry but also others, treated the AMO as a long term change in sea surface temperature that could be identified by removing other signals using some standard statistical techniques, most notably “detrending.” Detrending is where you have a known (or presumed) signal that imposes a certain pull on the system over time. This is then numerically removed from the signal as a linear adjustment. For example, if I want to know the average heart beat rate of a set of people, I could just hook them up to a monitor and collect data and get an average. But say I don’t want my signal to be messed up by certain factors, such as caffeine intake, aerobic exercise, or watching episodes of exciting TV shows. So, I estimate the effects of these other activities on heart rate using some independent information and come up with a linear fudge factor. Then, I record when my subjects are drinking their Latte, engaged in their Cardio-Kick class, or watching The Walking Dead. For those periods of time I adjust the heart rate data based my numerical model of those effects, and the result is the detrended heart rate.
A more straight forward use is found in climate studies. We know that there is long term global warming caused by the release of fossil Carbon (mainly as Carbon Dioxide) into the atmosphere. So if we want to observe something like the AMO all by itself, we take the long term temperature record of sea surface in the Atlantic, subtract a numerical value representing anthropogenic global warming over time, and what is left should be the AMO.
But there is a problem with that technique.
The relationship between different variables in a complicated system has to be known or assumed to do this kind of adjustment. For example, let’s say that drinking a latte before Cardio-Kick makes the effects of Cardio-Kick five times more intense on the heart rate. If you didn’t know that, than your detrending of heart rate would get messed up. If you knew about this non-linear relationship, you could adjust for it, but if you don’t know about it, or assume it to be not significant and thus ignore it, than your results will be wrong.
Here’s another analogy that may help. Let’s say you know how to drive a car. That includes how to steer the car through a turn. This involves turning the wheel in a certain direction a certain amount as the car goes through the curve, then straightening out the wheel to go straight after the curve. Now, lets say you get a job flying a high performance fighter jet. But, you slept through flight school. Now, you are flying the jet and you want to make a small turn, so you turn the “wheel” of the plane a bit, then straighten it out to continue in a straight line after the turn.
If you did that, you would actually tilt the plane with your first turn of the wheel, and it would stay tilted indefinitely thereafter, continuing with the turn. To properly turn the jet you have to tilt it, let it start flying in the new direction, then untilt it. In other words, if you fly a jet fighter like you drive a car, you will fly it wrong because you made incorrect assumptions about the relationships between the key variables leading to the final outcome (the direction you are going in). I recommend that you don’t do that with fighter planes or climate data.
Mann, Steinman and Miller, in this new paper, tried something interesting. They recreated a set of scenarios in which they could observe the AMO and other climate variables over time, but rather than having the AMO be a variable subject to emergence after other factors are accounted for, they introduced a known AMO. This way they could see the exact effects of the AMO on surface temperatures and other variables and explore the relationship between the variables. They call this the “differenced-AMO approach.” Knowing the true AMO signal they were able to produce a correct climate signal, and when the AMO signal was detrended in this scenario, the final result failed to match known internal variability. In other words, using the previously applied techniques, such as used by Curry, the modeling did not work. More importantly, the detrended AMO signal had an artificially increased amplitude, with lower lows and higher highs, and these peaks occurred at the wrong times.
Go back to the fly vs. drive analogy. Imagine you are now driving something … a car or a plane … with a blindfold. Your job is to drive or fly around for a while then later show your path on a map. You know how to drive a car. You drive around a bit at a regular speed, make four left turns, and when you are done you may be able to draw your path on a map with reasonable accuracy because you have an accurate expectation of what happens when you turn the wheel of a car. Now, do it with the high performance jet fighter but using your car-driving expectations. You think that first turn to the left made your path turn 90 degees to the left but it really sent you into an unending circle. Now you make two more left turns and you think you’d be back to the starting point like you would be in a car, but what you’ve really done is to send the jet into a tighter and tighter turn and while you think you flew in a big square, your actual path is more like something a kid might draw with a Sprograph(TM). That appears to be what Judith Curry did.
The Stadium Wave is alleged to happen when the AMO and other related climate factors peak and wane in sync, but this new paper shows that this is a statistical artifact. According to Mann, “Past studies arguing for a large AMO temperature signal with a substantial contribution to recent warming have assumed that the forced component of climate change (human factors such as greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols, as well as natural factors such as volcanoes and solar output changes) is a simple straight line, a linear trend. That is the null hypothesis they assume. They subtract off that linear trend and interpret what is left over as an “oscillation”. But the significance of that oscillation rests upon the validity of the null hypothesis of a simple linear forced signal. That null hypothesis is just wrong.”
Driving a jet plane like a car.
“We estimate the forced signal (which includes a cooling component from 1950s–1970s due to human-generated sulphate aerosols) using a variety of climate model results, and show that the residual “internal variability” that results when you subtract off a more valid estimate of the forced climate trend is very different. The AMO signal turns out to be much smaller (and the estimated amplitude is consistent with findings from coupled model simulations that exhibit an AMO oscillation).”
So, the Stadium Wave hypothesis now looks more like this:
As I mention above, another important finding of this work is that the AMO probably accounts for part of the recent decade’s warming being less than previous years. According to Mann, “Rather than contributing to recent warming, the correctly-estimated AMO signal appears to have contributed cooling over the past decade, i.e. it offset some greenhouse warming.”
The previously used detrending also missed the contribution of other factors that probably make the AMO look like something it isn’t. There have been a number of other effects on surface temperatures that are left behind after anthropogenic warming is detrended out of the data, especially the effects of sulfate aerosols, which come from power plants and such. “These aerosols have cooled substantial regions of the Northern Hemisphere continents in recent decades, thus masking some of the warming we otherwise would have seen,” Mann told me. “But aerosols have tailed off in recent decades thanks to the Clean Air Acts, etc. That has allowed the hidden warming to emerge in recent decades. If you subtract off a straight line from the temperature trend, you will appear to have an “oscillation”, but that oscillation is just mostly due to the non-linear nature of the long-term forcing, with a substantial positive forcing (warming through 1950s, then slight warming or even cooling from the 1950s–1970s due to a large sulphate aerosol cooling contribution), followed by the accelerated warming in recent decades as aerosols have tailed off. We show in the paper that subtracting off a simple linear trend when you have this more complicated time history of human forcing of climate, gives rise to a spurious apparent “oscillation”.”
Go back, if you dare, to the abstract from Curry’s paper. Back when I used to teach multi-variate statistics for grad students (co-taught with a brilliant statistician, I quickly add) this is the kind of abstract we would look for to use in class. It demonstrates an all too common error, or at least potentially demonstrates it well enough to examine as an exemplar of what not to do. Climate systems are complex. There are a lot of known variables and accessible data sets, but those variables and data sets have often hidden relationships, or important factors are unknown, either entire variables or relationships between variables. If you take a set of possible causal variables and one or two ideal outcome variables, it is possible to mix and match among the candidate causal variables until you get a model that matches the outcome. Perhaps, in doing so, you’ve figured something out. Or, perhaps you just made up some stuff. One way to know if you’ve really explained a phenomenon is to have a sensible, even expected, physical process that links things together. In other words, you have a logical cause as well as a statistical link. The latter without the former is potentially wrong. A second way to evaluate your finding is to seek internal statistical or numerical relationships that result in apparent meaning but that are actually artifacts of your methods. In this case, Mann et al have done this; as demonstrated in this new paper, Curry’s stadium wave is one possible, but meaningless, outcome from the process of making statistical stone soup. Such is the way many theories of everything, large or small, seem to go.
Mann also told me that some of the other large scale oscillations that make up part of the standard descriptions of Earth climate systems could be subject to similar artifactual effects. It will be interesting to see if further work allows further refinement of our understanding of these systems over coming months or years. The models climate scientists use are pretty good, but this would make them more useful and accurate.
… Mohammad Musa Khan appeared in court in the city of Lahore last week, charged with attempted murder along with his father and grandfather after a mob protesting against gas cuts and price increases stoned police and gas company workers trying to collect overdue bills.
“Police are vindictive. Now they are trying to settle the issue on personal grounds, that’s why I sent my grandson to Faisalabad for protection,” the baby’s grandfather, Muhammad Yasin, told Reuters, referring to a central Pakistani city.
The baby is on bail and due to appear at the next hearing on April 12 but Yasin said he was not sure if he would take him to court for the case.
…
At his first appearance in court last week, Musa cried while his fingerprints were taken by a court official. Later, the baby sucked on a bottle of milk and tried to grab journalists’ microphones as his grandfather spoke to the media.
“He does not even know how to pick up his milk bottle properly, how can he stone the police?” Yasin asked journalists at the court last Thursday.
