Gov't Proposes "National Climate Service" For the US 599
Standing Bear writes "NPR reports that 140 years after the creation of the National Weather Service, the US government is proposing the creation of a similar service that will provide long-term projections of how climate will change. 'We are actually getting millions of requests a year already about: How should coastal cities plan for sea-level rise? How should various other agencies in the federal government or in state governments make plans for everything from roads to managing water supplies?' says NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco. 'And a lot of that is going to be changing as the climate changes.' Under the plan, the new NOAA Climate Service would incorporate some of the agency's existing laboratories and research programs, including the National Climatic Data Center, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and the National Weather Service's Historical Climate Network. Meanwhile, as plans for the new climate service shape up, NOAA launched a new Web site, climate.gov, designed to provide access to a wide range of climate information."
Re:When... (Score:2, Informative)
now that global warming is proving to be a farce and the numbers are skewed,
Citation needed.
If you're talking about Climategate, sorry, I know it sounds like a cop-out, but that was an isolated incident. Thousands of other studies have confirmed that the climate is changing, and that humans are responsible.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
The source code for quite a few models is publicly available. Here are three: one [ucar.edu], two [mpimet.mpg.de], three [jussieu.fr]. The last one even does development in a public repository (click "browse source" in the menu bar) and features quite detailed documentation.
Re:When... (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't an isolated incident. The Russians are now complaining that their data was misused as well.
Re:Great (Score:2, Informative)
Release the source code of your data models
This won't help much because the original data was destroyed by CMU years ago. All you have is the data that had been normalized and re-normalized, and you can't use that. And it will take a long time to re-gather the data and to repeat all the processing. But I guess if climate scientists want to get somewhere they'd better start on that.
Re:When... (Score:5, Informative)
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.
Re:When... (Score:4, Informative)
This is not an isolated incident, Climategate just opened the door and started the revelations.
Re:When... (Score:0, Informative)
No one was predicting global cooling. They said that geologically speaking, we're do for another ice age soon. But in geological terms, "soon" means in the next 11,000 years or so. 11k years is barely a moment in geological terms.
Re:When... (Score:2, Informative)
I swear, I'll never understand your obsession with Gore. It's the views of ~97% of climate scientists [uic.edu] that we care about. Gore's opinions have no more bearing on the science than Christopher Monckton's or Michael Crichton's do.
Re:When... (Score:5, Informative)
So then your sources are a Russian think tank (who, by the way, tried to publish papers on their claims, but failed to pass peer-review on them), and now a meteorologist (*very* different from a climatologist) and a computer programmer? Really?
Here's why the idiots who push these "omitting stations" claims can't pass peer-review on them: they're *supposed* to omit stations. It's not done manually; it's done algorithmically. The primary reason for this is yet another thing that the deniers fault them for, without realizing that their two attacks are in direct contradiciton with one another: that a lot of the stations are bad. So what they do is first look for regional trends. A heat wave hitting NYC will also tend to hit Philadelphia, but not Los Angeles. So you find the correlation in temperature anomalies between stations. You then have it look for individual stations that buck the trend. You also have it look for individual stations that suddenly experience a persistent discontinuity. Stations with problems are automatically either corrected for or eliminated, so long as each region that shows consistent correlated temperatures has representative stations. The results of this are then validated by a number of subsequent papers. For example, urban heat island effect elimination is demonstrated by comparing trends on windy days with those on calm days (heat island effect is diminished on windy days).
Additionally, there are a few "inconvenient" facts for the people who push these arguments. One, the same trends show up when you just dumb-average all stations, or just rural stations, or just urban stations. Even more inconvenient is that the stations that Watts' team of deniers flags as "bad" show *more* warming than those that he flags as "good". Why? Because the "bad" stations tend to be located near human settlement, and are generally a cheaper type of sensor than the fully-standalone ones that tend to be in "good" locations. The cheaper sensors have a small tendency to report cooler temperatures than the better, standalone ones.
Re:Premature (Score:3, Informative)
The main hypothesis of the global warming theory is one that has been borne out by evidence. Sea levels are rising,
glaciers are melting and rainfall patterns are shifting.
So yes, some places will get less snow. Other places will get more snow because the wind patterns in the upper atmosphere will have shifted to bring moisture to those parts. In addition, there will be more variation in climate everywhere. You'll have many more very wet years and very dry years - what will be missing are the moderate years.
Re:Premature (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I remember those climatologists -- if I remember right, they were Patrick McDoesntexist and Jonathan Strawman.
Actually, it was [washingtonexaminer.com] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who isn't a climatologist, but is an "environmental lawyer" (and thus one would have hoped he'd fact-check before publishing...)
If you haven't already, watch this video. (Score:4, Informative)
Professor Richard Alley [wikipedia.org] recently gave a presentation [agu.org] called "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History," in which he makes the case that climate models simply don't work right unless you incorporate CO2.
The key point he makes is that there is a record dating back over 400 million years that provides proof that climate is sensitive to CO2. Doubling CO2 adds 3 degrees C to global temperature.
There are multiple lines of evidence to support climate sensitivity, and additional research is filling in what gaps might have been missing, and further strengthening the argument.
Re:When... (Score:5, Informative)
1) How did the IPCC come into this? We were discussing how the different peer-reviewed temperature datasets are built up. Oh, that's right, you wanted to change the subject to whatever talking points you had handy.
2) "wasn't even derived from a single fact" -- Yes, it was. The New Scientist got the digits reversed. It was a typo that got spread. Saying that it "wasn't even derived from a single fact" is false; it was derived from the date of 2350.
3) It wasn't an "off-the-cuff number". It was a number from an upcoming paper.
4) "IPCC trusts WWF" -- first off, the IPCC explicitly *is* allowed to use industry, NGO, and governmental sources, not just peer-reviewed sources. This is typically only done in WG2 and WG3, which, contrary to how this is being played, are *not* about the science of global warming. WG1 is about the science of global warming, and is much more heavily reviewed. WG2 is basically a news report, and WG3 is how to avert AGW. Over, even in WG2 and WG3, the overwhelming percent of cites are peer-reviewed papers. If you want to attack the science of AGW, you need to attack WG1. And furthermore...
5) the complaints are about a handful of places in a *three thousand page report*. And we're not talking about a handful of *pages* in a 3,000 page report; just a handful of *claims* (there are generally a couple dozen claims per page). So, it's your turn: write a 3,000 page report with dozens of claims per page without a single error, *then* complain to me about a lack of perfection. If you want to show that the IPCC report (let alone WG1, if you want to attack the science rather than the news) is unreliable, you're going to need a *much* greater error rate than ~0.003%.
Re:Premature (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I've heard it. It is said by idiots who don't know anything about weather.
Read Changnon et al, 2006. 61-80% of major (over 6") snow events in the US occurred in warmer-than-average years, among other things. Warmer weather in temperate, subarctic, and arctic climates leads to more snow. It only leads to less snow in tropical climates and borderline-subtropical climates.
There is no temperature in which it's "impossible" to snow. But it does become decreasingly likely as temperatures fall. Ever looked at a precipitation map of Antarctica [theoildrum.com]? Most of the continent is a desert. Only the coastal areas and peninsula get relevant snowfall; the air just can't hold enough moisture for it to snow much inland.
Re:Premature (Score:4, Informative)
I think he's trying to claim that they don't rely on first principles, which is complete nonsense. Actually, what's most notable about the models is how *few* parameters there are. Very little is dealt with statistically -- primarily cloud formation, as we still don't have a good handle on it. Cloud formation easily has the biggest error bars of all feedbacks -- although even the 95th percentile case is still well under the GHG forcing levels.
Re:When... (Score:3, Informative)
He won the Peace Prize, not a Nobel Prize in a science. Once again, it's the science and the views of scientists in the field that we care about. What is hard for you to understand about this?
Re:I actually think this is a good idea (Score:5, Informative)
I think it will be important in 5 years to say: We've got a climate model that's made correct predictions for the last five years, so you should trust that model as a good guide to the future.
They've made plenty of predictions. They're just always wrong. The IPCC was established in 1989 and published its first assessment report in 1990. In that report, they predicted an increase of 1.3 to 2.3 degrees C. That didn't materialize and in 1997, the IPCC had their asses handed to them in front of congress: [loc.gov]
So, the IPCC went back to the drawing board and returned with Mann's infamous Hockey stick graph. They declared DOOM. End of the world. Humanity was fucked. They extrapolated from 1998 temperatures (an unusually hot year) that climate change was 'for real' this time and was about to run out of control. When the skeptics got their hands on his computer model, they found that entering random data produced hockey stick graphs too. [newsweekly.com.au] Oops.
So, uh, yeah, they've got egg on their face with that one. Nevermind that their prediction was wrong, again. Temperatures peaked in 1998 and haven't been that high since. In fact, it doesn't take a lot of searching to find examples of where their model predictions do not match reality. [sciencedaily.com]
In spite of all this, there are still people out there who believe in the IPCC. They cannot explain how this planet managed to have an ice age with atmospheric CO2 levels around 4200ppm during the Carboniferous period. They cannot account for three gigatons of CO2 that simply vanishes [eoearth.org] right out from under their noses each year. But hey, there's a consensus. The IPCC says so. So "the debate is over."
Nevermind Hansen's faked data. [telegraph.co.uk] Nevermind the
Re:When... (Score:3, Informative)
Clearly the more scientists who agree on something, the less true it is!
You mean like the consensus that plate tectonics and continental drift was "Utter, damned rot!" etc?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/12/are-scientists-always-smart/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
Re:bad enough we have wasted billions on futility (Score:3, Informative)
"climate change will cause drought", then "climate change will cause stronger storms, then "climate change will cause flooding"...depending on what the global weather at the time seemed to be doing.
Actually it's often the media that say these things when they want to make some simplified link between the weather and "climate change". Scientists are well aware that weather is not climate [newscientist.com]. For example, with Hurricane Katrina you had some commentators saying that "Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming". It's a nice, simplistic soundbite that the average American television viewer can understand. However, scientists understand that the world is more complex than that [newscientist.com], which is why they actually say things like [realclimate.org]:
The correct answer–the one we have indeed provided in previous posts (Storms & Global Warming II, Some recent updates and Storms and Climate Change) –is that there is no way to prove that Katrina either was, or was not, affected by global warming. For a single event, regardless of how extreme, such attribution is fundamentally impossible. We only have one Earth, and it will follow only one of an infinite number of possible weather sequences. It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance).
Due to this semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming – and of course it is just as indefensible to blame Katrina on a long-term natural cycle in the climate.
Scientists are also smart enough to understand that there will be regional differences in climate change effects ("Prediction of the detailed regional distribution of climatic anomalies, where and when it will be wetter and drier, how many more floods might occur in the spring in California or forest fires in Siberia in August, is simply highly speculative.") [newscientist.com], which is why regional cooling does not disprove global warming. [newscientist.com]
Thus exposing their basic methodology of cooking the books to conform to what answers they wanted, including taking a 25 year period and extrapolating into the future to get the "hockey stick". They when planet earth went off the hockey stick, "where is the heat going?" the "climatologists" were wailing, and now the public is awakened to their scam.
The "Hockey Stick" was endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, after it was asked to investigate the issue by the U.S. Congress. So unless you think the U.S. National Academy of Science is part of a conspiracy of fraud, or is fundamentally incompetent, then you'd have to agree with their statement that: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".
Re:Sounds like a bad idea (Score:3, Informative)
You obviously missed the part where the Climate Service is going to be part of NOAA. What they are doing is taking the already existing, climate related offices in NOAA that are scattered about in different line offices, and putting them in to their own line office. The offices don't change what they are doing, or even where they are located. What happens is they can now more easily work with each other on a shared mission.
Re:When... (Score:3, Informative)
Per Dr. Phil Jones:
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html##ixzz0fWNe9VeK
Spin it!
Oops! (Score:3, Informative)
Per Dr. Phil Jones:
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html##ixzz0fWNe9VeK
Re:Oops! (Score:3, Informative)
OF course, you can read it from the Horse's keeper's month:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511701.stm
Re:When... (Score:4, Informative)
You're complaining about 'spin' while linking to the Daily Mail? Really? How about you get it from the original [bbc.co.uk] source [bbc.co.uk], then you might have some idea of what he actually said.
Daily Fail says:
BBC says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
And also (text in bold here and further on is the questions by the BBC):
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
Daily Fail says:
Phil Jones says:
Re:When... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, if you want to disregard what the Wegman Report says, that's up to you.
Oh, god, don't get me started on the Wegman Report. Let's start by pointing out that the NRC and the NAS analyzed the Mann paper and confirmed it, and that there have been numerous reconstructions since Mann et al, all of which show the same general shape -- but using different data (including, now, boreholes, which are a much less opaque science than dendrochronology). No fewer than four papers rebutted McIntyre and McKitrick, and when they tried to publish a counter to some of their criticism, they failed to pass peer-review.
Republican representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield, two prominent global warming deniers, arranged the Wegman report. They picked Peter Spencer, another political denier, to arrange the process. The National Academies of Sciences itself offered to conduct an independent investigation, but they rejected this because they wouldn't have enough control over the process. Actual climate scientists were banned from the process. McIntyre remained in contact with Wegman throughout the entire process of drafting conclusions, while Mann was not, automatically biasing the outcome -- something that McIntyre tried to keep secret for years, but was only recently exposed. The committee *picked its own peer reviewers*. I could go on and on. When the National Academies of Science saw how it was being conducted, they sent a letter expressing their concerns. It was promptly ignored. They ultimately launched their own investigation.
But it's all a moot point, since McIntyre has widely been rebutted in the peer-reviewed literature since, and hasn't been able to pass peer-review in response, as well as different lines for historical climate reconstruction coming up with the same curve.
This is only true if there are no adjustments made to the temperature reading AND the "cooler" temperature is greater than the heating effect. If these aren't true, then obviously it would depend on the amount of the adjustment and amount of error in the reading.
Wait, so what's your argument then? Adjusted, the warming is shown. Unadjusted, the warming is shown. Are you arguing that there should be adjustment, but just not the ones currently used?
You know very well that the # wasn't significant in the argument. It's fine to eliminate grossly incorrect readings this way. It's another thing entirely to adjust a good reading because the surrounding stations have more error.
Since when is that happening?
You have a remarkable confidence that this algorithm is very accurate. You can read the conclusion of here
Pass peer review on that or it's worthless. Everyone *else* has to pass peer-review. No exception for critics.
Even comparing calm/windy days will be influenced by the location of the unit (walls close by) and topological influences.
The heat island effect extends to the upper troposphere. Those are some giant walls. And, FYI, there has been more lower tropospheric warming than there has been surface warming, which doesn't fit the heat island explanation at all.
Proof by Innuendo. There's science for you. Are you actually trying to argue that algorithms are better than calibration?
Red herring. Of course perfect, flawless calibration is ideal. But we live in the real world where budgets and practicality mean that's not an option. So you do the best that you can with the data that you have.
If you assume all this is due to CO2 (ie there is no solar forcing)
Both of those are untrue. First off, there's *always* solar forcing. Did you mean *changes* in solar forcing? They're intensely studied, too. Secondly, CO2 is just one of a number of GHGs, and there are a lot of non-GHG factors considered as well, everything from carbon-black to contrails. Third, assume nothing; CO2 forcing is calculated mathematically, experimentally, and historic planetary CO2 responses are studied as well.
, one