tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post3814393018876005915..comments2024-03-18T22:50:29.792-07:00Comments on Cliff Mass Weather Blog: Climate DistortionCliff Mass Weather Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-4571083487022663102014-01-05T11:35:09.534-08:002014-01-05T11:35:09.534-08:00Something other than global warming produced the l...<i><b>Something other than global warming produced the lion's share of the heat wave</b>...and we know what it was: a major change in the circulation over the U.S. last summer. A big area of high pressure and high heights over the center of the U.S.</i><br /><br />Good thing you put the first half of that statement in bold, Dr. Mass, because otherwise your readers would have been thinking, "Gosh, I wonder what caused the high pressure and major change in circulation over the center of th US..."<br /><br />I mean, such blocking highs themselves just can't be <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nzwJg4Ebzo" rel="nofollow">a result of climate change</a>, right?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06133226578157538785noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-1056446698412796222013-07-29T10:00:53.836-07:002013-07-29T10:00:53.836-07:00To Cliff: As you admit, the planet is heating up....To Cliff: As you admit, the planet is heating up. I live in South Carolina where the Division of Natural Resources reported a change is the shrimping season due to increased ocean temperatures. These increases are continuing over time and are just one of the many ways in which we observe a shifting climate. To name a few: cherries blooming in D.C. glaciers receding, changes in insect ranges. All one has to do to be convinced of climate change is to look.<br /><br />The danger of assuming that the climate change is limited is that it may not be. If the temperature gets too high, what happens to the deposits of methane? At some point we may no longer be able to slow it down or reverse it. For that reason, I think you are very short-sighted in your view.<br /><br />It looks like there can be a tipping point, beyond which nothing we can do will slow down the climate change. We need to act to prevent a tipping point.Nell Hhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05632755649994819107noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-89101303807822209152012-08-12T21:27:01.334-07:002012-08-12T21:27:01.334-07:00Mr. Naumer,
I wonder why your friend cannot c...Mr. Naumer,<br /> I wonder why your friend cannot comments himself (a gmail account only takes a minute)...but let me answer this.The key point is that Mr. Hansen's article DID NOT go through proper peer review. That is a key issue here! An academy member can select a few friends to send an article to and then makes the decision to publish themselves. A very strange procedure and one out of keeping with the reputation of the Academy.<br /><br />And I do plan on submitting a comments to a peer reviewed journal, as I have done for the snowpack issue a few years back.<br /><br />..cliff mass<br /><br />Cliff Mass Weather Bloghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-77526083196988059812012-08-12T19:08:18.657-07:002012-08-12T19:08:18.657-07:00Mr. Mass, my friend, Ed Hummel, a retired meteorol...Mr. Mass, my friend, Ed Hummel, a retired meteorologist, has tried to post a comment here, but finds he cannot as he has no gmail or google account. We exchanged emails about this post today, and I asked him if I could post a particular email of his. He said to go ahead.<br /><br />This is what he wrote this morning:<br /><br />If Mass feels so strongly about his views, let him publish them in a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal and then we'll see what happens! Hansen has been publishing his views in a variety of legitimate, peer-reviewed journals for decades, and they've all stood the test of time better than just about anybody else's!! To denigrate the National Academy of Sciences journal is just sour grapes in my opinion. Mass just seems to be another example of a meteorologist who thinks that climate science is only "stamp collecting" in Darwin's words. In doing so, he denigrates all the interdisciplinary research that ties everything that affects climate together. When he's had the volume of research and published work that Hansen has had for the last 50 years, then he can start knocking Hansen's work which as I said has certainly stood the test of time. In fact, as Hansen has himself pointed out, even he has underestimated the speed at which the changes are taking place. One of the quotes that really sticks in my mind in recent years was Richard Alley's statement a few years ago which maintained that the Arctic ice is disappearing a hundred years ahead of schedule. Mass can make all the statements he wants about agreeing with human induced climate change, but until he understands all the research that's been done on all the nonlinear changes that are occurring and will continue to occur at even faster rates, he should stick to watching the Chinese pollution float across the Pacific.Tenney Naumerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11843130378338023902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-67411483699167959282012-08-12T13:26:30.581-07:002012-08-12T13:26:30.581-07:00Cliff, there are some faculty who feel they are be...Cliff, there are some faculty who feel they are beyond peer review. :-DWestside guyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07171473508596734156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-51209191486490733092012-08-11T14:47:23.104-07:002012-08-11T14:47:23.104-07:00Eadler2,
This is what happens when a paper is...Eadler2,<br /> This is what happens when a paper is not properly peer reviewed...and a real embarrassment for PNAS. Just because someone is a member of the NAS does not mean they should be able to publish papers without a real review. ...cliffCliff Mass Weather Bloghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-50023075161648068062012-08-11T14:36:17.299-07:002012-08-11T14:36:17.299-07:00I agree that Tamino's explanation of why the d...I agree that Tamino's explanation of why the decadal graphs in fig 4 diverge so much makes sense, and what we are seeing seems to be a result of the temperature increase rather than a increase in standard deviation.<br /><br />If Hansen had written out his procedure and conclusions in more detail, he might have caught this problem himself.EADLER2https://www.blogger.com/profile/17947925370864935807noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-58003310587270021222012-08-11T10:03:15.303-07:002012-08-11T10:03:15.303-07:00Cliff Mass - your comments on the standard deviati...Cliff Mass - your comments on the standard deviation problem go to the heart of this issue. I looked at Tamino's analysis and it brings out how contrived Hansen's presentation really is. But Hansen normalized the area under his curves in figure 9 to unity and aligned them so that you can compare the variance change from decade to decade. And if you also know what temperature was doing each decade this will give you an idea of what information these curves carry. First thing to note is that the normalized curves for the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies fall accurately on top of each other. Why is that? It's simple- there was no temperature change during these thirty years and their curves show no change in variance. Next, the curve for the eighties is slightly shifted to the right, and one would expect some temperature change to be involved. I attribute this to the great Pacific climate change of 1976 which raised global temperature between 1976 and 1980 by approximately 0.15 degrees. The next decade is the nineties and its distribution is more noticeably shifted to the right. It includes the very warm super El Nino of 1998 and its warmth must have had an influence on widening the distribution. Finally, the decade of the 2000-s is strongly broadened, indicating a sizable increase of global temperature during this decade. And this is what the record shows: the step warming initiated by the super El Nino of 1998 raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius by 2002 and then stopped. This is a substantial warming because IPCC gives only 0.6 degrees warming for the entire twentieth century. It was caused by the large mass of warm water the super El Nino had carried across the ocean and not by any imaginary greenhouse effect. It is this warmth that is responsible for the temperature records set during that decade. And all the Moscow, Texas and Oklahoma droughts that Hansen mentions by name also fall into this decade. Hansen is trying to say that there has been greenhouse warming during the entire period he includes but he is dead wrong. The only real warming within the last thirty years is the step warming brought to us by the super El Nino. His own data fit that interpretation well if you grant that they reflect statistics of warming events dependent upon global temperature.Arno Arrakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11083554979081830429noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-89676715194434376502012-08-11T09:24:31.914-07:002012-08-11T09:24:31.914-07:00I think tamino skewered Hansen on this one. I was...I think tamino skewered Hansen on this one. I was wondering when somebody would get around to posting that. ;-)<br /><br />It's a bad paper, it should never have been written and , Hansen surly must be fully aware of the problems with it, which is the really baffling part of this.Carrickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03476050886656768837noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-44485816888552618512012-08-11T07:56:34.167-07:002012-08-11T07:56:34.167-07:00A nice analysis of the standard deviation/variance...A nice analysis of the standard deviation/variance issue, showing some of the problems with Hansen's analysis is found her:<br /><br />http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/increased-variability/Cliff Mass Weather Bloghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-43463206517316983522012-08-11T07:22:11.136-07:002012-08-11T07:22:11.136-07:00Eadler2
You are not correct. Look at his pap...Eadler2<br /> You are not correct. Look at his paper..he shows the distributions for other base periods and it supports what I say. Furthermore, if you look at plots of numbers of extremes for 100 years stations, the 1930s have far more extremes...a period he conveniently doesn't use in his base period standard deviations. This is simply disappointing science from someone who should know better...cliffCliff Mass Weather Bloghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-59587870404740103282012-08-11T07:12:43.279-07:002012-08-11T07:12:43.279-07:00"Because 1950-1980 was a period with less war..."Because 1950-1980 was a period with less warm extremes than periods BEFORE or AFTER it."<br /><br />Correct. It is highly unscientific to use PART of a dataset as a base line, it skews the results. A baseline should be all available years, except the one you are comparing to. For example, if you want to see how hot 2012 has been you would use all available years, say from 1900 to 2011, and compare that to 2012. Makes one wonder what these people are trying to hide, doesn't it.Richard Wakefieldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05011854125762805571noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-78884024202285479942012-08-11T06:56:42.294-07:002012-08-11T06:56:42.294-07:00Cliff Mass says,
"There seems to be a lot of...Cliff Mass says,<br /><br />"There seems to be a lot of interest in the standard deviations. Lets talk about this more. If you look at his results, the bell curve only widens for later decades when one uses the 1950-1980 base period. For a longer periods base periods, there is virtually no different. Why might this be true? Because 1950-1980 was a period with less warm extremes than periods BEFORE or AFTER it. This is not good. And AGAIN, you are hard pressed to see the increase in standard deviations in Figure 2. A lot of issues here folks."<br /><br />Cliff what you are saying is incorrect. No matter which base period you choose in figure 4 to use as the standard deviation to which you reference the temperature anomaly, the distribution widens for each decade as the date range increases by a decade beginning with 1951-1961. <br /><br />The earlier data is not in the paper, and you haven't shown it. It is not relevant your previous contention the statistics in figure 4 appeared obviously wrong simply by inspection of figure 2. <br /><br />If you have actually have analysed earlier data in the same way that Hansen did to produce figure 4, it would be interesting to see it. In fact the global average temperature in the years 1935-45 was actually warmer than 1951-1961. If warmer temperatures resulted in wider temperature distributions, it would be consistent with Hansen's contention that warmer temperatures produce relatively more extreme temperatures.EADLER2https://www.blogger.com/profile/17947925370864935807noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-85366662642901283422012-08-10T21:23:22.985-07:002012-08-10T21:23:22.985-07:00There seems to be a lot of interest in the standar...There seems to be a lot of interest in the standard deviations. Lets talk about this more. If you look at his results, the bell curve only widens for later decades when one uses the 1950-1980 base period. For a longer periods base periods, there is virtually no different. Why might this be true? Because 1950-1980 was a period with less warm extremes than periods BEFORE or AFTER it. This is not good. And AGAIN, you are hard pressed to see the increase in standard deviations in Figure 2. A lot of issues here folks.Cliff Mass Weather Bloghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-15500694052101206222012-08-10T20:49:50.541-07:002012-08-10T20:49:50.541-07:00To my eye, it looks like their is more yellow and ...To my eye, it looks like their is more yellow and light blue/teal over the Northern Hemisphere in figure 2 for the last 30 years compared to the 30 years prior for June,July, and August, which does agree with figure 4.Matthewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03924852053592427776noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-80229002781475765352012-08-10T20:34:42.574-07:002012-08-10T20:34:42.574-07:00Cliff Mass Weather Blog said...
"Eadler...tak...Cliff Mass Weather Blog said...<br />"Eadler...take a look at Hansen's Figure 2. The summer standard deviations hardly change...particularly over the midlatitudes. Those Gaussians he shows seems inconsistent with Figure 2."<br /><br />I disagree. The standard deviations in figure 2 left versus center are for 30 year periods 30 years apart. It is possible to see that some regions have shifted colors upward. The change is bigger between left and right without detrending. The changes are not very visible in the global graph, because all significant shifts do not result in a visible color change in a particular grid. <br /><br />In figure 4 the each curve represents a single decade, not a 30 year period. Since the latest decade 2001-2011 is showing a much larger shift than 1991-2001 and 1981-1991, it is not easy to compare figure 4 and figure 2 by inspection and make the claim that you are making.<br /><br />You are being hasty in condemning Hansen and the peer review process, without having done a real calculation yourself.EADLER2https://www.blogger.com/profile/17947925370864935807noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-18010394609818675002012-08-10T18:34:59.471-07:002012-08-10T18:34:59.471-07:00All of this is making the huge assumption that the...All of this is making the huge assumption that the climate actually fits a gaussian model of variability. I strongly suggest people read Nassim Taleb's work - either the Black Swan or related papers - to understand that the applicability of these models to the natural world is highly questionable. The climate belongs to the "4th quadrant" where these models simply don't work. And, if fact, the models of climate change aren't working. The Economist recently ran an article showing how the temperature change is on the absolute edge of the predicted range, and that can't give us confidence in the use of these models. <br /><br />Another great site to understand the limits of climate models and statistics is called allmodelsarewrong.comConnectitecturehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00830300034621903980noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-56419262102653463962012-08-10T18:11:09.779-07:002012-08-10T18:11:09.779-07:00I have a problem with your use of global warming i...I have a problem with your use of global warming interchangeably with greenhouse warming. Greenhouse warming simply does not exist and all global warming, such as it is, is natural warming. Let me walk you through. Starting with the twentieth century, its first ten years saw cooling, not warming. It was followed by the early century warming that started suddenly in 1910 and stopped equally suddenly in 21940. There was no concurrent sudden increase of carbon dioxide in 1910 and by the laws of radiation physics this rules out greenhouse warming as a cause. There was no warming in the fifties, sixties, and seventies while carbon dioxide relentlessly increased. People were worried about the coming ice age and newspapers and magazined had articles about it. There is no satisfactory exolanation for the failure of increasing carbon dioxide to cause warming for thirty years. There are just contorted hypotheses to try to explain it away. One of them is smoke and aerosols from war production blocking out the sun. There was no warming in the eighties and nineties either while carbon dioxide kept going up. Don't forget Hansen testified in 1988 that global warming had started. He still remembers the very warm summer of 1988 which was nothing more than an El Nino. There were five of these in the eighties and nineties, each one followed by a cool La Nina, with the average temperature staying the same for twenty years. Real warming started with the super El Nino of 1998, twenty years after Hansen spoke. In four years global temperature rose by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. Since then there has been no more warming for more than ten years. A third of a degree is half of the entire warming that IPCC assign to the entire twentieth century and explains the very warm first decade of our century. As tomArctic warminbg, that one has nothing to do with carbon dioxide and is caused by Atlantic currents carrying warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic Ocean. With that, we can say that there has been no greenhouse warming within the last 100 years. And all of Hansen's drought observations refer to the twenty-first century when the step warming brought to us by the super El Nino was controlling global temperature. To learn more, read "What Warming? Satellite view of global temperature change."Arno Arrakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11083554979081830429noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-26908068174365682712012-08-10T17:02:06.801-07:002012-08-10T17:02:06.801-07:00Gary
I understand...but look at figure 2...ther...Gary<br /> I understand...but look at figure 2...there the standard deviations don't seem to change...isn't something very wrong? Why are the two approaches to viewing the distributions so different?..cliffCliff Mass Weather Bloghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-60507728383653385922012-08-10T17:01:03.747-07:002012-08-10T17:01:03.747-07:00A few things need repeating:
1. Hansen's paper...A few things need repeating:<br />1. Hansen's paper was NOT peer-reviewed.<br />2. Cliff is not the only scholar questioning the attribution of extreme weather to anthropogenic global warming. Many articles question such a link. E.g.:<br />Kenneth E. Kunkel et al., Monitoring and Understanding Trends in Extreme Storms: State of Knowledge<br />http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00262.1?af=R&&<br />The authors find no significant trends in severe thunderstorms, overall ice storms, or change in the percentage of the contiguous US impacted by extreme snowfall; trends in tropical cyclones are controversial and indeterminate. The authors state that "attribution of trends to anthropogenic forcing [man-made global warming] remains controversial."<br /><br />In fact, the claim that extreme weather is on the increase is actually not borne out by facts, if one takes the trouble to look at the historical record. E.g., a paper in the Geophysical Research Letters finds global cyclone activity at an historical low:<br />Ryan N. Maue<br />Recent historically low global tropical cyclone activity,<br />GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L14803, 6 PP., 2011 doi:10.1029/2011GL047711<br />"In the pentad since 2006, Northern Hemisphere and global tropical cyclone ACE (cyclone energy) has decreased dramatically to the lowest levels since the late 1970s. Additionally, the global frequency of tropical cyclones has reached a historical low." <br /><br />The recent trend to talk up "extreme weather" seems to be an attempt to compensate for the lack of GLOBAL warming in the past decade. It may be warm or hot in the midwest US, but that's not much more than 1 or 2% of the planet. During the US hot spell, it's been very cold in the southern hemisphere (and rather cool in the Pacific Northwest).<br /><br />3. We have to keep in mind that the attribution of global warming to man-made causes is mostly the result of ideological and political machinations, not the expression of scientific research. See Bernie Lewin's detailed and eye-opening 3-part series on the wranglings about attribution in Madrid 1995 at Enthusiasm, Skepticism and Science.<br /><br />4. In fact, attributing whatever warming has been going on to CO2, let alone human-produced CO2, ignores that fact that when the IPCC was created, its members were charged with investigating the effects CO2 on the climate, without considering the possibility that<br />a) the observed warming might be due to natural causes, and that<br />b) there are many factors other than CO2 that contribute to the climate.<br /><br />One interesting paper in this respect is Barnett et al, "Estimates of low frequency natural variability in near-surface air-temperature."<br />http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/barnett1996.pdf<br /><br />Also interesting and encouraging is the fact that a report by the Research Council of Norway (“Norwegian Climate Research: An Evaluation), stresses that a good understanding of the climate system cannot be reached without a dedicated effort to understand the contribution of natural processes to climate change.<br /><br />5. When we talk about peer review, we have to keep in mind that it is actually quite often "pal review" instead, as clearly revealed by the Climategate emails (in fact "pal review" has unfortunately be documented to be quite common in disciplines other than climate studies). This has led Andrew Revkin to acknowledge that the work of some bloggers (e.g., Steve McIntyre) contributes much more to scientific rigor and integrity than the vaunted "peer review."<br /><br />Cliff is doing a service to science and to readers of his blog by raising objections to some mostly unsupported claims (unsupported and at odds with other scientific results which they ignore) which the media eagerly parrot and feed to an unsuspecting audience. I for one do want to keep my eyes open and refuse to be included in the parroting sequence. I can only do that with the help of people like Cliff Mass, Steve McIntyre and a few other well informed and qualified bloggers.sciencefirsthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00238193381399403583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-2122127759246961172012-08-10T15:36:25.571-07:002012-08-10T15:36:25.571-07:00Cliff, There is some increase even in the global ...Cliff, There is some increase even in the global sigma (0.5 to 0.58), but the lower set of panels in Fig. 4 show the analysis just using NH land data (due to data issues over water). The frequency distributions grow wider with time by decade in Fig. 4.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09680332553135745078noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-77257405769607117422012-08-10T15:17:35.485-07:002012-08-10T15:17:35.485-07:00Gary...look at his figure 2 (which shows the stand...Gary...look at his figure 2 (which shows the standard deviations) and tell me whether it looks like the standard deviation over the U.S.--or over most of the U.S. is changing...doesn't look that way to me. The Gaussians they show are for the whole hemisphere...and they look funny. This is something that would have been caught BEFORE publication if the paper was properly reviewed...which it obviously wasn't...cliffCliff Mass Weather Bloghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13948649423540350788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-1177956113020619142012-08-10T15:07:16.163-07:002012-08-10T15:07:16.163-07:00Hi Cliff, I read the Hansen et al. paper today. ...Hi Cliff, I read the Hansen et al. paper today. One of the main points they make is that *sigma* is increasing with time (the bell curve is getting wider). It is more than just the shift. You don't seem to address this in your blog.<br /><br />Your points about the PNAS peer-review process are sobering.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09680332553135745078noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-76051841814557173562012-08-10T13:40:11.412-07:002012-08-10T13:40:11.412-07:0043Overall, I endorse the notion that only some rel...43Overall, I endorse the notion that only some relatively small fraction of the anomalies can be attributed to AGW - it should be evident that assigning numbers to that is ... complicated. It seems difficult to find ground upon which most can agree. From my perspective, one year's worth of weather doesn't allow us to say much about how AGW contributed - many of us have been battling the deniers on this very point, so it would be hypocritical to do similar things. On the other hand, when we begin to accumulate year after year of record-breaking heat, it seems evident that some signal is evidently emerging from the large variability.<br /><br />Whatever else one might think about his blog, Prof. Mass has surely provided some thought-provoking perspective. It's not evident to me that dropping media bombs in some sort of 'shock and awe' campaign is doing the cause of seeking mediation of AGW much good.Chuck Doswellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03099345055614900157noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7478606652950905956.post-82686085470526441922012-08-10T13:14:11.016-07:002012-08-10T13:14:11.016-07:00There seems to be some confusion about whether the...There seems to be some confusion about whether the Hansen paper is peer-reviewed. <br /><br />Above, Schoedinger quoted the PNAS review method for Direct Submissions. The direct submission method is a normal peer review. But Hansen's paper appears,to be a Contributed Paper. See The section "contributed submissions" at http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/iforc.shtml/ .<br /><br />The PNAS member/author himself selects two reviewers and provides their comments to PNAS. The only apparent limits on this "pal review" is that the two reviewers chosen by the author cannot have collaborated with the author of the contributed paper within the last 24 months.<br /><br />If the paper is, as it appears, a contributed paper then it is NOT peer-reviewed in the normal sense.Charliehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17751567362228199326noreply@blogger.com