study shows climate deniers know facts but just dont care

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It's not that I don't "believe." It's a matter of knowing humans are hardly ever accurate about this sort of thing. They cough up percentages but there is barely any certainty EVER. My faith in their abilities is rather dismal.

One prediction I can make; forced limitation of family size is on the horizon with possible forced sterilizations of certain individuals. It will be an act of desperation by the governments to limit the human population which will keep growing by leaps and bounds.

GGP, I've run a metrology lab. You don't need to lecture me on measurement practices. Our company supplied systems that NIST uses to characterize their master artifacts. My direct supervisor sat on an ASME committee that writes measurement standards. I trained under Livermore's chief metrologist.

What you mentioned is only a unit-definition. SI says nothing about how to make an accurate instrument, calibrate it, or use it correctly. That's handled by ISO and ASME. (There is an ASME standard, B40.200.)

The case for AGW depends on comparing old measurements to new ones. I brought up the meter bar as an example of how to do that correctly. Scales drift all the time. That's why so much work was put into protecting the meter bar. It's why we still fuss over the kilogram. The constant in the SI definition that you cited (299,792,458) is there to make it fit the meter bar. That means that I can use a pre-1960 length measurement (which would predate the current standard) without worrying too much about systematic drift in the scale. There isn't a thermal equivalent to that, so you're at the mercy of whatever instruments and practices someone used 100 years ago. You can't use correction factors because the data that you'd need to estimate them is long gone.



I'm aware of many of those. Skyhook and Woods Hole's Alvin were both General Mills projects, and I knew people who worked on them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_balloon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin

There's also sounding rocket data going back several decades.

But regarding your link, I'm only seeing proxy measurements at 173 sites. That's not much coverage for an entire planet. Your source's charts also show only a 0.2 degree (C) change since 1940. (The quality of instruments was poorer before then.) I can tell you from working in a laboratory that just breathing on a specimen can raise its temperature by more than that.

Last edited by NobodyKnows on 11 Jul 2014, 7:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas was established over 100 years ago. As the developing world matures we'll only get more of it. No mystery involved.

When I was a kid everyone's parents smoked and a great many people doubted that it caused cancer. You'd hear the "scientists have it all wrong about smoking" speech from people you knew. That's what they needed to believe so of course they believed it. Now those people are dead or better informed through experience. And some of the same paid researchers who say AGW is wrong once said smoking was safe. Some of them are far right characters who despise government. If a problem exists that government might play a role in dealing with they are psychologically compelled to dismiss the problem. They cannot allow for such a problem to exist. Period. Their entire world view is threatened.

The best information we have now suggests anthropogenic global warming. May that change in the future? Maybe. But right now, this is what we have, this is what we know. There is a huge pile of evidence, going along multiple lines of evidence supporting AGW, so are we just going to ignore it, because there might be some uncertainty?

If you ask for 100% certainty from science, then science will never satisfy you, in any way or on any question.

Exactly.

I was thinking about how much Greenland has changed earlier when I was with my mom who is a anthropogenic climate change denier and started talking about Greenland the way it looked when it was in Social Studies in sixth grade, totally different. No doubt some places are being greatly affected by warmer weather. I just look for the overall dramatic affect. Like where I live, it isn't as easy to discern as it is a place like Greenland.

I've never smoked anything, legal or otherwise. Neither my parents nor my grandparents smoked, nor any of my aunts or uncles.



1) I'm atheist, so I have no religious motive to disagree with the AGW hypothesis.

2) I've been a bike commuter since I was in junior high. I've been a year round commuter since high school. I didn't even get my driving license until I was in my mid-20s. I have a single-speed with carbide-studded tires that I ride down to about -16 degrees fahrenheit. It handles OK in snow up to six inches deep.

3) I've been vegetarian for over 15 years.

My world isn't "threatened" at all by any need to lower CO2 output, since my carbon footprint is already lower than most people reading this.

I'm not talking about you personally.



See above.

There are far right-wing, pro-business, anti-socialist, anti-government types involved in drumming up this conspiracy talk. The guys who get posts at right-wing think tanks. They are anti-regulation so no problem that requires regulation can be allowed to exist. George C Marshall Institute, Heartland, etc.

Some are right-wing, anti-socialist, Jesus freaks too. For example the guy who passes around the Oregon Petition from his "institute" / farm. He also sells creationist home schooling material and how to survive the bomb material.

In all of the cases that I know enough to critique, the measurement uncertainty is greater than the 0.2 degree (C) temperature change that's allegedly being measured. That's a lot of uncertainty in this context.

What some anonymous meteorologist on the internet thinks is probably worth less than a nickel to climatologists. Feel free to publish your musings and show NASA, NOAA, MIT climate group, etc, etc.. We can all find a hundred sites where astrologers, Christian veterinarians, holistic medicine fans and the like supply vague anecdotes about the failures of widely accepted science. Means as much to me.

Since the temperature records from these 173 sites almost align perfectly with the instrumental record (see below), your dismissal of the results from the study (Anderson et al.) is nothing more than speculation.


There is no justification for omitting the 1880-1940 time period from the Anderson et al. study when it has been established that the instrumental and proxy records reach similar results (again, see below). The entire premise of the study was to test if the critique of the older instrumental record was valid (see the introduction on page 1). It was not.


You are confusing the uncertainty of a single point observation with the uncertainty of a trend.

The Anderson et al. study showed a decadal warming trend from 1880-1995 based on the combined proxy record of 0.043 C +/- 0.011 C. (see page 3, table 1, 6th statistic from the top).

The NOAA combined land and ocean instrumental temperature record (GISTEMP and HADCRUT4 are almost identical) from 1880-1995 shows a decadal warming trend of 0.048 C+/- 0.008 C.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global

Not only does this establish that the instrumental and proxy records of temperature are almost perfectly aligned, thus eradicating any concern about the pre-1940 instrumental record. It also demonstrates that the error margins in temperature trend based on both proxy and instrumental records are anywhere between 18 and 25 times lower than your 0.2 degree estimate. It would seem that climate scientists are more than capable of achieving accurate measurements of the global average temperature.

Also note that I cut off the record at 1995 to compare the two in the same time period. If data until 2013 is included, this will yield an even higher warming trend of 0.064 C +/- 0.008 C per decade, as global warming has been accelerating.

The only way to reach an error margin close to 0.2 C is to use a single year temperature using only land observations (no ocean, balloon or satellite data, etc.). For instance, the 2013 global average temperature deviated from the 20th century average by 0.99 C +/- 0.19 C according to the NOAA land instrumental record.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2013/13

However, this is in no way "a lot of uncertainty". In fact, it is establishes the existence of global warming with almost ridiculous certainty.

NOAA used a 95 percent (fairly standard) two-tailed confidence interval to derive the margin of error for temperature records. A 0.19 C margin (one-way) thus corresponds to 1.96 standard deviations assuming a normal distribution. The deviation from the average 20th century temperature in 2013 is 0.99 C, or equal to ((0.99/0.19)*1.96) a whopping 10.21 standard deviations.

For comparisons, the highest standard of evidence in science is 5 standard deviations in particle physics, and the probability of an observation exceeding 7 standard deviations (the highest I could find actual probabilities for) from the expected value by chance is 1 in 390,682,215,445, or 0.000000000256 percent.

It is thus aptly illustrated that measurement error is basically completely irrelevant to the conclusion about the existence of global warming, as the temperature record deviates so massively from the average temperature in the 20th century. This applies to the trend data as well: If one computes the probability of the trend data from Anderson et al. and NOAA above appearing by chance, one ends up with deviations from the expected value in the 7-12 standard deviation range, also exceeding any and all scientific standards of evidence by several orders of magnitude.

Simon_says, I'm a metrologist (link), not a meteorologist. Everything that you've taken issue with is within what I'm trained to do (by some of the best people in the world).

Very bright people get these things wrong all the time. I once asked why government nuclear labs bought so much of our laboratory equipment, since it seemed unlikely* that an implosion bomb core really needed to be spherical to 250 nanometers. The chief metrologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (who I mentioned earlier) explained that when the first bombs were being built, the people responsible for making them asked how spherical the core needed to be. The physicists' calculations were all based on perfect Euclidean spheres, and after some back-and-forth they decided that factoring in the imperfections in measurement and manufacture would make the calculations unmanageable. Their response was 'Just make it perfect.' That left them with no theoretical estimate of the effect of uncertainty on bomb implosion and yield. An upper bound was only established after the Trinity test. If it's too complicated for Oppenheimer and Teller, then you can bet that it's too complicated for the average climatologist. That's why there are specialists to deal with it.

(*due to the way that ductile solids behave in compressive failure)

By "irrelevant," you mean that you don't like dealing with it. That puts you on the wrong side: http://i1207.photobucket.com/albums/bb4 ... sfaith.jpg

Those measurement practices apply to everyone. Nobody gets a free pass, not even press-baiting climatologists.



No, you're confusing precision with accuracy. You said:



A bad sample is still a bad sample no matter how big it is, and the onus is on your source to prove that it's good.

Their 'temperature-sensitive proxies' are not metrological instruments. Good instruments are also insensitive to other factors. Their samples aren't:

1) Speleothem growth rates will vary with rainfall, independent of temperature. Data on them can only come from caves that people explore, which are more likely to be close to developed areas. That exposes them to non-AGW effects: Pumped groundwater is replaced by surface water, raising the ground temperature. (Groundwater changes are not small-scale effects, by the way: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 133440.htm) Opening a cave entrance will raise its temperature.

2) Coral data comes from littoral areas where other human effects are more pronounced.

3) Grape harvests have as much to do with soil quality as temperature. (I've grown them.) The PI series overlaps with improvements in soil management. (Guano mining started before the earliest year in their chart, 1880.)

4) Ice cores will show chemical composition and perhaps some crystallographic changes. The latter could provide very good evidence for your position if it were used correctly. Most of what I know about crystallography comes from metallurgy, and there are surprisingly detailed traces of past temperature cycles in metals. I don't know whether that's also true of ice. Most microstructural phases in metals are influenced by both composition and temperature, so if ice behaves similarly, you'd need to consider both.

The trend that you cite isn't causally-specific because the curve isn't unique to AGW. Most side-effects of human development will follow a similar curve.



No, I was referring to the Merged Land-Ocean Surface Temperature data (MLOST in your source's chart), not their proxy measurements. That was pretty clear from my reason for dropping it: "The quality of instruments was poorer before [1940]." The MLOST data was the only data in the chart that depended on period instruments.

Last edited by NobodyKnows on 13 Jul 2014, 6:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's also a standard charge of creationists regarding the evidence for evolution. The Hail Mary of various denialist movements. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard it..... Anyway when you have something more than vague charges of inaccuracy make sure you let someone know.

I omitted the part about you "knowing some people" who worked on some project, as it had no relevance to the subject matter. See your own post. I immediately refuted your claim about lack of precision with the Anderson et al. study, btw.


The entire point of the study was to validate the instrumental data in the period 1880-1995 by using the proxy record. Which it did. You are ignoring both the premise and the conclusions of the study. Once again, read the introduction on page 1 in the article. Unless you can provide evidence to the contrary, your claim is refuted by the evidence.

And this applies not only to the aforementioned surface temperature record. If we look at the instrumental sea temperature record (which has lower margins of error) we similarly see that - even when taking into account known sources of measurement error and bias - the global warming trend remains the same.

See figure 11 on page 12 in the study below, which once again replicates the global warming trend. The same figure also demonstrates that the total uncertainty of the annual sea level temperature estimate has been been below 0.10 C for more than a century.

Kennedy, J. J., Rayner, N. A., Smith, R. O., Parker, D. E., & Saunby, M. (2011). Reassessing biases and other uncertainties in sea surface temperature observations measured in situ since 1850: 2. Biases and homogenization. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984?2012), 116(D14).

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hads ... inline.pdf

So please provide an independent peer-reviewed source for your claim about the lack of precision in measurements of global average temperature. You have provided exactly zero documentation and evidence for your claims so far in this thread. You can't accuse me of ignoring contradicting evidence - as per the "cute" image you posted - if you have no contradicting evidence.

I have now produced both documentation (from the instrumental temperature record itself) and 2 peer-reviewed scientific studies which refutes your claim about the lack of precision in the instrumental temperature record. If you have evidence to the contrary, then please post it (title, author, date and journal, please) instead of persisting with personal anecdotes.

Sure, and fundamentalists make apocalyptic predictions and accuse everybody else of having their heads in the sand - just like you. If we're going to write-off any argument that religious people have used, yours won't fare well.

They also called people doubters, which isn't much different from "deniers".

They refused to debate anyone who wasn't well-versed in scripture, even though any fool can skim Genesis and say "Hey, wait a minute... Why are there two conflicting creation stories?" Climatologists play the same game: The produce voluminous arguments and accuse people of being unqualified if they haven't read every single one of them, but it's taken them decades to figure out that their own weather stations data isn't global, and that the stations themselves were never designed to be accurate.

That's a real doozy. When a co-worker first pointed it out to me, my response was 'That can't be right. There's absolutely no way that so many trained researchers could review this data and all miss something that obvious.' That was in 2006. I spent a year reading AGW literature to figure out what he'd missed, and I finally had to concede his point.

One more: Creationists claimed absolute proof, and when reasonable doubt kept piling on, they switched their argument to "But you can't disprove the existence of a creator because there could still be intelligent design." Climatologists claimed for years that AGW was indisputable - to the point of comparing anyone who questioned them to geocentrists. Now they've had to to admit to sleeping through freshman statistics, so they've switched to casting doubt on other people's doubt.

Right, the "I am X or I have done X (therefore I am right or I know better)" or the like, is pretty much funny and useless.


By the way, I am a physicist and a biologist, and you just have my word for it.