Simple minds – selected highlights

Two themes have emerged in recent days amongst New Zealand's most earnest global warming believers.

One is the irritating way they continue to parrot things they've heard as if they are proven fact, writ in stone, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

One perfect example is rock jockey Phil Scadden, a geologist who hangs out at Hot Topic and who repeatedly tries to argue that the only valid measurement of climate is a 30 year period:

scaddenp November 3, 2009 at 11:41 am

Boy, am I sick of reiterating this. CLIMATE is about a 30 year trend. The models predict what happens on a 30 year trend.

 

Phil Scadden November 30, 2009 at 3:08 pm

tdperk… you do know climate is a 30 year trend?

Sometimes he's joined by Rupert Wood:

RW December 1, 2009 at 10:53 am

Are being deliberately stupid, or is it congenital? …10 years is too short a period in which one can draw climatological conclusions, and that has also been explained ad nauseam. It is a trivial matter to look at shortish timespans in the record and conclude that there was no warming during those periods – or even a little cooling.

Go away, learn some elementary statistics and in particular, learn something about NZ climatology. Otherwise, shut up and stop wasting other people's time.

You'd think these guys would have learned their lesson on the significance of 30 year climate trends, after the release of this email from CRU head Phil Jones making the case for using a 20 year trend instead:

20 years (1981-2000) isn't 30 years, but the rationale for 30 years isn't that compelling. The original argument was for 35 years around 1900 because Bruckner found 35 cycles in some west Russian
lakes (hence periods like 1881-1915). This went to 30 as it easier to compute.

Personally I don't want to change the base period till after I retire!

Cheers
Phil

What part of "the rationale for 30 years isn't that compelling is lost on the boys over at Hot Topic, or are the little lights that go on in their heads those slow-to-brighten, low-watt dimbulb CFL jobs?

The other continuing meme is the claim that somehow Michael Mann's hockey stick was never debunked, this from Sam Vilain commenting at Public Address:

On the hockey stick... from a highly relevant Real Climate post

One prominent example was a comment in Science showing that a challenge by Von Storch et al. (2004) to the "hockey stick" climate reconstruction of Mann et al. (1998) "was based on incorrect implementation of the reconstruction procedure". We discussed the implications on Realclimate after the comment appeared. Another recent example was a comment by Schmith et al. on a Science paper on sea level rise by Stefan, noting that he failed to account for the effect of smoothing on the autocorrelation in the data he used. In his response, Stefan acknowledged this mistake but showed that it does not affect his main conclusions.

This appears to be the source of the original "debunked hockey stick" myth.

Firstly, nothing at RealClimate is "highly relevant" – the bloggers there no longer have any credibility and even their scientific colleagues are suggesting they be sidelined from any further work on IPCC global warming studies, if not prosecuted in some instances.

Secondly, the Mann hockey stick was debunked by a panel of expert statisticians led by Edward Wegman who blew the climatologists out of the water for failing to understand basic statistical analysis.

Thirdly, when questioned in a Congressional hearing, panel members of the National Academy of Sciences who are widely reported on believer's websites as having "cleared" Mann's hockey stick, said this:

Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his coworkers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.

Doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me. What you had in the NAS report was a face-saving summary designed to leave the IPCC, which had relied on Mann's discredited hockey stick, intact, while what one climate scientist described as "the extensive and deep criticism of the MBH methodology" was buried inside the NAS report in Chapters 9 and 11.

Subsequent studies have confirmed that efforts by Mann's colleagues to shore up his hockey stick were proven flawed as well.

Perhaps SamV and others figure if they keep repeating their errors often enough, we will forget they are errors. Fat chance. We'll just keep rubbing your noses in it.

Comments

[Bamm Bamm]

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/eternal_melting/

From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:

• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”

• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”

• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”

• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”

• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”

• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”

• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”

• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”

• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”

• 2004: “There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.”

• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting - a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.”

[Falafulu Fisi]

I asked Sam Villain on the other thread to clarify what he meant by Bohr's law and he simply just disappeared. As someone who has done nuclear physics study (in a real linear accelerator), I am not aware of any Bohr's law that deals with atmospheric physics except his work on atomic physics and quantum mechanics.

I suspect that Sam is/was fibbing, unless he can point me out to some Bohr theory that I have never been aware of.

This guy is everywhere on the net trying to debate scientific issues which is beyond his capability of understanding as a pearl programmer.

[Falafulu Fisi]

The Oracle at Hot Topic, umm, what's his name? He is trying to promote topics that is also beyond his understanding capability. I mean climate system for someone who's background is in writing children's books and bed-time story.

[BaamBamm Bammmy]

Hello Falafulu!

Also worked on accelerators.

There is no 'Bohr's Law' that I am aware of ...

[CM]

>>>the rationale for 30 years isn't that compelling<<<

One guy (Jones) says that and all of a sudden that's written on a tablet somewhere as gospel? Please.
The 30 year period was only ever a general vague stretch of time that was long enough to include pretty much all the natural variations, but short enough to be able to use reputable data.

Desperation (meaningless stuff.

[CM]

>>>Subsequent studies have confirmed that efforts by Mann's colleagues to shore up his hockey stick were proven flawed as well.<<<

How about with boreholes, stalagmites, and glaciers (and without tree rings)?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hockey-stick-without-tree-rings.html