Wat,

I quickly browsed your last post. There is at least one inaccuracy. Observations from the Cobar Meteorological Office did indeed begin in 1962. They would have been manual observations back then, as automatic weather stations weren’t around until later, but records have been made from this location from 1962, which is the important point. Prior to that, from 1882 to 1962 observations were made at the Post Office.

I can’t be bothered looking for more inaccuracies in your posting right now.

Wart,

If I were you I’d be wary about trying to patronise me on climate science. I won’t bother addressing you again, but I will correct some of the disinformation you have posted, for the benefit of impressionable readers.

At least one of the images in the “wattsup” slide show looked strangely familiar … here it is :

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo5.png

Gee wizz, it sure looks like the Mediaeval Warm Period was warmer than the present day!!

Let’s be transparent. Here’s the data behind the graph :

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt

Nice! It turns out that the last data point in that graph is 0.0951409 thousand years before present (“present” being 2004 in this case).

So, the last century (a period of strong warming) is absent from the graph.

Another problem with that graph is that it uses only a single data set; this is very interesting if you’re actually interested in temperatures on Greenland glaciers, but you get more widely applicable results if you widen your data base.

For those who wonder what it looks like with all the available data, it’s something like this :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

(this plots ten different published reconstructions of global temperature over the past thousand years. They are a fair representation of the range of results appearing in the published scientific literature. Not one of them shows the mediaeval warm period as warmer than the present time. It is still controversial whether the MWP was a regional or planetary phenomenon.)

My question to you, Wart (it’s a rhetorical question, in that I’d be amazed if you answered it) : Given that you have posted demonstrably misleading (to put it mildly) stuff from a climate-cynic site, did you do so knowingly, or unwittingly?

To put it another way, are you
a) a liar, or
b) a fool?

To me it’s ever-useful to consider Cui Bono or “who benefits?” It is often a shortcut when you are struggling to read and comprehend all the science. If some groups clearly stand to benefit, you worry a bit more. You start being suspicious, reading the science more.

Consider these cynical thoughts from an article heavily based on Bloomberg in http://www.globalresearch.ca (whole longer article is 16449):

1. The giant banks (like JP Morgan) will make a killing on carbon trading. They are right now preparing speculative derivatives contracts that will allow their clients to hedge their future price risks. They will try to inflate the carbon market. They will recruit investors from hedge funds and pension funds and sell them (very speculative) carbon derivatives, just as they previously sold them bits of shonky house mortgages.

2. Bloomberg says the carbon trading scheme will centre round derivatives. Fund managers say speculators will end up controlling carbon prices.

3. Speculative derivatives are what caused the current economic crisis (CDS – credit default swaps).

4. Listen to some wise words from (Democrat) US Senator Maria Cantwell: “People are going to be cutting up carbon futures, and we’ll be in trouble… You can’t stay ahead of the next tool they are going to create.”

To me, this is one answer to “who benefits” or Cui Bono. This is going to be the new giant moneymaker for the banks.

I’d be less suspicious about whether we need to assume a future of warming, or whether it is a giant con (not the sort you might think), if I couldn’t find an answer like this. But I can.

Regurgitating pseudo-science from a climate-cynic blog won’t score you any points, Wat.

The only “CO2 saturation issue” is the fact that the ocean now absorbs much less CO2 than in previous decades, because it is approaching saturation (hence oceanic acidification). The idea that the atmosphere is “saturated” with respect to the absorption of radiation is seductive, to those who want to believe that it is not causing global warming, but honest to God sceptical scientists have shot that theory down in flames because it doesn’t pan out.

As for what is alarming in the recent data :

The decade now ending is by far the warmest in the historical record. 2009 is the fifth warmest year on record (as predicted in December 2008 by both the UK Met Office and NASA). 2010 will be hotter because of the emerging El Nino (La Nina has been depressing temperatures for the last couple of years). China and India are pumping out aerosols as fast as they are pumping out CO2, but they will clean up their air and there will be a sudden temperature spike when they do. The hole in the ozone layer is healing (there’s one anthropogenic climate change effect that is beyond all dispute), unfortunately since the hole had the effect of lowering temperatures over the Antarctic, there will be major warming there starting fairly shortly, with unpredictable effects on the icecap.

OK for starters?

I understand Wat.

You want me personally to waste the time repeating answers to each of the posts on these blogs and fisking them when the answers are already contained in the context threads on RealClimate. Hell, I have done several of them already… so it can’t be that hard. Then when I am done you’ll go to the next blog and ask me to do it again.

Seriously, all of those points/issues have been discussed and context provided which makes it QUITE clear that the most serious issue is Jones’ attitude towards openness.

Sorry mate. I’ve done enough today.

It seems you can’t be bothered looking for the truth, just for blogs by other people who ALSO can’t be bothered looking for the truth. I am not going to be your gofer.

Since Harry actually succeeded in reforming the data, it would seem that you are barking up the wrong tree … again.

You go ahead and keep working at it. Temperature rising faster than we have any record of it doing since the end of the last ice-age. CO2 rising 50 TIMES faster than we have any record of it doing, EVER.

I don’t know if YOU noticed, but the person who put that presentation together lied comprehensively with his pictorial sequence. He set the slope of the blade in the first image and never altered it while the scale of all the rest of the data was altered. You have some professional liars you are referring to Watt. I suggest that you stop.

You go to RealClimate or to Tamino’s blog and ask your questions. Politely. NOT like you do here. The people there can answer.

Also, try to check through the index to find the answers FIRST.

I am going to try to do some stuff I actually NEED to do.

BJ

Trevor29,

With regard to the CO2 saturation issue, as has been discussed before you are talking about an effect at the margin. You can’t repeal the laws of physics, which are that comparitively less and less longwave radiation is absorbed by additional CO2 as it increases the density.
Now, if the additional CO2 were not increasing the density, but were instead all simply increasing the depth of the atmosphere, then you would be right. But that’s not the case at all. The density is increasing – that’s what those parts per millions numbers mean. The effect you are referring to is only happening at the margin.

As for feedbacks – on what basis do you assume they are positive? Did the temperature run away due to positive feedbacks during the Medieval Warm Period? Clearly not. Did it run away when CO2 was at 1100ppm? Clearly not.

- “And reducing our dependence on imported oil and LPG would be good for our economy and our balance of payments.”

How would replacing cheap energy with expensive energy be a good thing?

- “tell me how many of the last 10 years appear in the top ten of the hottest years of the last 100 year ”

A hundred years? How is that in any way significant? Especially when you pick your starting point from the tail of the Little Ice Age.

Surely, to show any significance at all, you should point to current temperatures in the context of at least one or two thousand years. So why don’t you do that?
Not only that, but most of the recent warming occurred before large-scale post-war industrialisation, so you can hardly blame CO2 for that. But then there was cooling after the war till about 1974, which ended in 1998: followed by a decade of flat temperatures. So your whole theory is based on only 24 years of warming, which ended a decade ago. And that’s not counting the urban heat island effect which has been ignored in these measurements, and the other manipulations adding a false warming trend (to quote from one of the leaked emails: “Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.”)

Here is recent (exaggerated) warming in context:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/noaa_gisp2_icecore_anim_hi-def3.gif

As you can see, there is absolutely nothing remarkable or even noticeable about it.

bjchip,

Your continued defence of the gross scientific malpractise revealed by the Climategate emails does you no credit whatsoever. In fact, by doing so, you are displaying exactly the same mentality as the exposed “scientists” themselves.

Here’as a brief summary of some of the behaviour you deem scientifically “acceptable”
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2009/11/rolo-compressor-de-verdades.html

And remember, these are just the ones he didn’t deem bad enough to delete.

And the incompetence which beggars belief:
‘Botch after botch after botch’
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/11/29/11967916-sun.html

So, could someone please remind us, just what precisely are we supposed to be alarmed about?

Seriously.

Not just arm-waving generalities about “warming.” Can any of you alarmists actually specify what exactly you see in the recent climate data which is so alarming.

the theory and “proof” is being directed by a very small group of people.

Not a small group at all. Nor do scientists take “direction” very well. Certainly large enough to ensure that the needed questions DO get asked.

You know that we humans do not organize well in groups of more than about 200. Which is another reason to doubt that Copenhagen will actually succeed

respectfully
BJ