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Post by Acolyte on Dec 20, 2008 6:44:57 GMT
Near as I can tell there's only one way to work out the average temperature for the planet. You take the energy coming in & subtract the energy coming out. Anything else runs smack into the complexities of a poorly understood system.
And given there's nobody with a satellite pointing 24/7/365 at the Earth measuring all radiated wavelengths I would think we don't really know what the average global temperature is.
What we see here is agw'ers continually pretending to know all about what is going on, what is coming and why it is all occurring while the more sicence-oriented keep trying to point out contradictory evidence in the results of what are basically computer games.
Recently I've noted a sad trend by the sceptics to start trying to predict the trends as well - I think we should stop that in its tracks & stick to debunking the BS coming from the politically motivated sectors & comittees. We simply don't know enough to be making predictions yet - the system is chaotic & very complex.
Until we get to where we can model ALL the complexities, we haven't a chance of doing much more than assigning general probabilities to general trands - & a chaotic system means that at any point, those probabilities can be overturned by the real-life changes going through the system.
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Post by bob9000 on Dec 20, 2008 6:48:44 GMT
Aaaaages ago, at wattsupwiththat, and no, I can't be bothered finding the link cos I just can't, but Anthony Watts set up three weather stations in Stevenson screens. Two had different kinds of paint on them, one was unpainted. The three weather stations were in a big field, the only structures around. The temperatures they measured differed by up to 2 degrees fahrenheit.
And this is three identical weather stations in the same field. In the real world its far messier, with Urban Heat Island effects, air coniditoning units, etc. The short answer is, no we can't measure anything to much of an accuracy at all. Even the .2-.4 degree anomaly we're showing at the moment is just noise. We're so close to "normal" in terms of what humanity has experienced these last 4000 years that any divergence is so within the massive error bars any measurement would come with if people were being honest.
Personally, I disagree with the "Ice Age!!!" people as much as the "Global Heat Catastrophe!!!" people. I think things are going to be 'normal' for the forseeable future. I'm not saying the extremes couldn't occur, I'm just saying, chances are, they won't. I think people just like the prospect of scary scenarios and being able to say "I'm gonna sing the doom song now".
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Post by twawki on Dec 20, 2008 7:45:39 GMT
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Post by socold on Dec 20, 2008 16:11:04 GMT
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Post by socold on Dec 20, 2008 16:22:23 GMT
If we adjust the last 30 years of the GISS surface record for the "Hansen factor", the "urban heat island factor" and the "surface stations built on roofs factor", that leaves us with a GISS surface record with much less warming over the last 30 years than any of the other records. What's the explaination for that again? Where in the world do you guys get your information from? GIStemp has been diverging from the other data sets for the last two decades. This can be reproduced with Excel. If we adjust GISS surface record downwards, then the other records will show more warming over the past 30 years. If you believe the GISS surface record should show significantly less warming over the last 30 years, you have to explain why the lower troposphere is warming significantly faster than the surface.
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Post by trbixler on Dec 20, 2008 18:31:19 GMT
How does one account for the fact that 2008 is the 5th coolest in the last 30 years? CO2 is up, but the temperature will not listen to the models. ;D The problem is no one has figured out how to cap and tax a cooling trend, unless maybe some new science can be invented to now show CO2 really cools the planet. I am waiting for this new wrinkle to be proposed. AGW became climate change so that now as it is not warming it is still climate changing. Chu will be working on the tax soon.
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Post by nautonnier on Dec 20, 2008 19:56:49 GMT
Near as I can tell there's only one way to work out the average temperature for the planet. You take the energy coming in & subtract the energy coming out. Anything else runs smack into the complexities of a poorly understood system. And given there's nobody with a satellite pointing 24/7/365 at the Earth measuring all radiated wavelengths I would think we don't really know what the average global temperature is. What we see here is agw'ers continually pretending to know all about what is going on, what is coming and why it is all occurring while the more sicence-oriented keep trying to point out contradictory evidence in the results of what are basically computer games. Recently I've noted a sad trend by the sceptics to start trying to predict the trends as well - I think we should stop that in its tracks & stick to debunking the BS coming from the politically motivated sectors & comittees. We simply don't know enough to be making predictions yet - the system is chaotic & very complex. Until we get to where we can model ALL the complexities, we haven't a chance of doing much more than assigning general probabilities to general trands - & a chaotic system means that at any point, those probabilities can be overturned by the real-life changes going through the system. A quote on this that has been on the board before: ""It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of Earth", Bjarne Andresen says, an an expert of thermodynamics. "A temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system. Furthermore, the climate is not governed by a single temperature. Rather, differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate".
He explains that while it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average 'global exchange rate'."www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070315101129.htm
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Post by ron on Dec 20, 2008 20:05:34 GMT
Pretty convincing article. What's the source of the data for the chart?
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Post by twawki on Dec 20, 2008 22:47:18 GMT
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Post by twawki on Dec 20, 2008 23:00:27 GMT
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Post by jimg on Dec 21, 2008 0:59:48 GMT
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Post by socold on Dec 21, 2008 3:22:03 GMT
There should be a positive bias in ground surface temperatures over time, but not in the ground surface temperature records which are adjusted to eliminate the UHI bias.
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Post by socold on Dec 21, 2008 3:25:05 GMT
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Post by twawki on Dec 21, 2008 3:36:19 GMT
There should be a positive bias in ground surface temperatures over time, but not in the ground surface temperature records which are adjusted to eliminate the UHI bias. So how are they eliminating the urban heat island bias when they are adjusting the city temperatures upward? You would think when country sites show a cooling trend around cities then the country sites would be more accurate as the UHI bias is often non existent. www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=125www.warwickhughes.com/climate/seozuhi.htmwww.climateaudit.org/?p=1152Major problems with the microclimate exposure of a subset of surface Historical Climate Network (HCN) sites have been photographed Easterling et al. 1996; Davey and Pielke 2005]. The temperature instruments that are used in the HCN are often sited close to buildings, under trees, and near other local influences on the microclimate. These microclimate influences also change over time." Mahmood, Rezaul , Stuart A. Foster, and David Logan, 2006: The Geoprofile metadata, exposure of instruments, and measurement bias in climatic record revisited International Journal of Climatology Brooks, Ashley Victoria. M.S., Purdue University, May, 2007. Assessment of the Spatiotemporal Impacts of Land Use Land Cover Change on the Historical Climate Network Temperature Trends in Indiana. Major Professors: Dev Niyogi and Michael Baldwin. Poorly sited locations can not be "corrected" by using nearby better sited locations in order to provide added sources of independent data; see Pielke Sr., R.A. J. Nielsen-Gammon, C. Davey, J. Angel, O. Bliss, N.Doesken, M. Cai., S. Fall, D. Niyogi, K. Gallo, R. Hale, K.G. Hubbard,X. Lin, H. Li, and S. Raman, 2007: Documentation of uncertainties and biases associated with surface temperature measurement sites for climate change assessment. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 88:6, 913-928., where we concluded that"The use of temperature data from poorly sited stations can lead to a false sense of confidence in the robustness of multidecadal surface air temperature trend assessments".
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Post by Acolyte on Dec 21, 2008 4:10:40 GMT
This speaks for itself... Unfortunately for the agw folk, the closures should have been spread a little more across time. As things stand it makes it a little too clear why things supposedly got warmer. The PDF from which the data comes is here!
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