Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler?

@Schultz

"Scientists reached a wide consensus that [global warming is] SCIENCE!"

As a scientist, I protest against the idea that "consensus" can determine what is science.

That said, it is not surprising that we are getting different observations from different sources. It is reasonable to expect that such observations, especially on a short amount of time (only a few years) are going to differ significantly, as will the models which are built from them.

What I would like is for people to stop yelling abuse against each other every time they get different results. If we suppose earth is getting warmer by 0.6 C every year, it is normal to assume some will measure +1.2 C, and some will measure no change. Remember, science is not as exact as (we) scientists try to make it seem.

Personally, I don't doubt global warming, but I do wonder how much of it is human-made. The models are brand new and have little data to work with. Also, Earth had had tropical ages in the past, before there was any human to pollute.

@ Simon 'references at my fingertips' Pope

Just because a lot of people believe something to be true does not make it true, ask any Liverpool supporter....

Models Creed

Sometimes you need to remember that modelling is like masturbation. You need to keep reminding yourself that it is not the real thing.

Paris, for obvious reasons.

m-s-m

'I suppose you're talking about the USA? In the UK scientists are funded by research councils and so this argument is completely false. Also, you may be interested to read into the peer review process...'

The research councils are funded by the government which has a vested interest in people believing in global warming because that enables them to effect change by taxation!! Additionally, it doesn't really matter who supplies the money. If the scientists say there is no global warming/cooling, they get no money. If they say there is global warming/cooling, they'll get money. Simple really. Do the scientists want to live comfortable lives or exist in cardboard city/

Paris, got she's simple too.

Simon Pope

'I am dismayed that some readers appear to genuinely believe that scientists have a vested financial interest in pushing climate change and creating a panic. The simple truth is that climate change scientists' most fervent hope is to be wrong about climate change. Unfortunately, climate change science does not stand or fall on Mr Goddard's temperature data sets. The best scientific consensus about climate change has been derived from a large, peer-reviewed, and well-debated set of science. Readers can look at the Summary for Policymakers in the IPCC 4th Report for details. Further to that, some important current climate science (that at the time of the compilation of the 4th report was in its early stages from a scientific dilligence perspective) was not included in the IPCC assessment. This later science, taken at a whole, would seem to imply that the IPCC 4th assessment was a very conservative assessment, and that the likelihood that it is much worse is at least as likely. Readers are invited to refer to the bibliography below for an overview of this newer science.'

Scientists hope is that they can continue on living comfortable lives with money from somewhere. That's preferable to being a job nobody wants with no money.

Additionally, if the trend is upwards, what about the ice ages and hot spots throughout history (as in tens of thousands of years). The last ice age? Got colder. Should mankind have fired a few forests? What about the hot spots and cold spots before? Did mankind cause those as well? It seems nature is quite capable of swinging temperatues quite wildly and well beyond our current changes all by itself. So, why is the current change automatically attributed to humans? Just because you can't find a natural answer doesn't automatically make it mankind causing it. That's bad science, unless you're looking for the grants!!

Re: Can someone explain this to me, please?

Well, a fairly vain hope you'll read this, but it works somewhat like this.

When the heat is trapped at the earths troposphere, the stratosphere has less heating since it still has the same amount of solar radiation coming in but less earth re-radiation coming out.

If you want something closer to the truth than this simpler version (it's still on the "true" axis) then look into it yourself.

@ m-s-m and Mad Mike

"The research councils are funded by the government which has a vested interest in people believing in global warming because that enables them to effect change by taxation!!"

I think that it's more likely that the Govt. wants to be seen "to be doing something", particularly by the vocal single issue lobbies who get lots of lovely press and all the ickle children who plead with us to save the planet.

Driving the agenda and making changes/passing laws is now more acceptable for the Govt. than to do the right thing.

Re:@ Simon 'references at my fingertips' Pope

And just because the vast majority DO believe in something doesn't make it false.

So you have any FACTS to add???

And Uncle Al, please. Out of thousands a dozen were ignored. So what? Out of thousands of religious personages on telly, Ike "I'm the son of god" is ignored.

Maybe because he's a nut.

@Mad Mike

No, Mad, the best way to continue to get funding is to ensure there's plenty of controversy going around so "we need more research to see if this is really happening or not".

Of course, if you're pre-disposed to not believing AGW, the only non-biased option is to say AGW isn't happening, isn't it.

@Mark

Hmm sounds similar to the 'Nuclear Winter' scenario that they used to scare us with when I was at school. I guess that as you get older you see so many wild and contradictory scare stories that you become immune.

Young people are just too dumb to understand this. They should stick to having fun and lots of sex and leave the thinking to us old farts.

Ah, yes. Global warming

Is the world getting warmer? Of course it is. Remember those honking big glaciers used to be parked in your back yard? Notice they seem to have gone missing? Why do you think that happened? There is no debate about warming; it is real and it is happening.

The only question are:

1) how much are our activities affecting this process?, and,

2) What will be the long-term effect?

i would submit that nobody knows the answers to either of those questions. In the immortal words of George Box, "All models are wrong, some are useful." We have yet to establish that any of the current climate models have reached the level of usefulness.

"scientific proof"

Surely this involves repeating an experiment/situation from the beginnnig and getting the same results every time?

When was the last time anyone rewound the world a few thousand years and got the same results? "Scientific Proof my arse" as Jim Royle would say.

I'm not saying GW/CC is directly attributable to human activity, or that it is not. It definitely occurs - dinosaurs running around now would have a pretty rough time of it over most of the globe, which same they did not during earlier times when the globe was much hotter.

What I am saying is, until someone rewinds the Earth and gets the same results time and again, it is NOT scientific proof at all but one group of people shouting louder/longer than all the others.

And isn't it funny how nobody seriously considered Al Gore for the position of President of the United States of America, but now he's an "expert" on Global Warming, so many people believe everything he says... even above those who have years of experience in the subject.

Paris, as she's got more idea than many of these so-called "scientists".

Excellent Article

What is most interesting here is that unreliable ground based temperature analysis seems to have poor correlation with other ground based temperature analysis (Hadley vs NASA) but the satellite based analysis has high correlation with other satellite analysis. This directly implies that the error from satellite measurement is far lower (although with only 2 sample points the theory isn't proven). That means I am much more likely to believe the satellite data that says temperatures have gone down for 10 years and are fractionally higher than the 30 year average, than scaremongering from the IPCC that tells us we are all already drowned by the melted icecaps.

I dont believe it!

Well the title says it all

What I dont believe is the various climate models run by the 'experts'

why?

Because if you start at 1850 temperature levels, then add the amount of Co2 to the atomsphere created in the following 100 years, the various models come nowhere even close to reality.

Boring boring Register

The next time I go near reading one of these "we're the Register and now we have a climate agenda" articles will someone please shoot me. Message to El Reg - please stick to IT. It's what you know and what you're good at. You're basically a bit crap at this other stuff.

As for these comment "debates" - sheesh. Shouting about it don't make it so.

Verdict on Climate Scientists: Sad 60's hippy says:

I am just a poor boy and my story's seldom told

I've squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises

All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear

And disregards the rest .. Paul Simon 1968

What A Load of Hooey! (I tried to be polite.)

This article reminds me of those Fundamentalist religious types that use the Bible to justify their latest intolerance and bigotry. You can find it in there somewhere and twist it around to where it says we need to hate all gays or ethnic types, or beat your child regularly. Look hard enough and you can prove whatever your agenda is.

My guess is that The Register hired someone they knew would say what they wanted him to say. Why? To create controversy? To get more readers? To get people riled up? They actually believe that humans aren't affecting world climate?? Who knows. The bottom line is that both of the first graphs are showing a general rise in temperature since the last 25 years of the 19th century, about the time we became industrialized and started spewing toxic fumes into the air. There is no controversy about that.

The last decade is a blip in the general scheme, and who cares how hot or how cold it was last month?! The fact is, we are a species that is short-sighted, wasteful, self-centered, motivated by greed, with an attitude of entitlement. My only hope is that because of the global warming scare, (whether it exists or not people can argue until they are blue in the face) the next generation will find ways to pollute less, use renewable energy, and become totally independent from foreign oil. Which frankly is the cause of much misery at the present.

We need to look at the big picture.

@ " Scientific Prufe "

Well Al Gore did invent the Internet as any fule do know and is obviously too busy saving the planet to be president. And all you concerned greens should be thankful that he accepted the Nobel Prize on your behalf so saving you the bother.

At last! The True Colour of "Green..."

@ Lego: "The fact is, we are a species that is short-sighted, wasteful, self-centered, motivated by greed, with an attitude of entitlement. "

As a species we're also incredibly inventive and creative. We never stop being inventive and creative. We devise economic systems that put our inventiveness and creativity all over the planet.

I hear what you're saying: you hate humans and you hate being one yourself. You'd be happy if most of the humans disappeared and the planet was left to itself.

I'm so glad you've found a cause where you can put this into practice.

"This article reminds me of those Fundamentalist religious types..."

It takes one to know one.

@Mark

Convenient to label someone a "nut", thereby justifying the decision to ignore what they say. Wait a minute...Mark, you're a nut. There, now I can ignore everything you say.

that's what I love about climate modification.

No where else will you find such a range of educated to ignorant opinion (on both sides of the fence).

Perhaps excepting the subject of intelligent design vs evolution.

My view; climate change is likely to exist, and if it is assumed that it exists then it is likely to have been influenced by humans.

In much the same way that the anthropomorphic argument of 'why is the universe the way it is? - because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here to ask that question' is not necessarily correct, but has strong explanatory power; the argument of 'what makes us think that our massive industrial development is influencing the world climate? - because we have massive industrial development that might be influencing the world climate and there are no obvious other causes' is a useful first approximation, and reasonable assumption until we have better causes.

As previously noted the real problem is that everyone would like absolutes, and mainly they would like absolutes that fit the prejudices they held prior to 'investigating' the subject in the sunday papers. If that means picking on specific words, ignoring the intent, and making wild accusations regarding the issue on the basis of a deliberate (or possibly just honest but dumb) misinterpretation then all the better.

Oh, and to answer some of the interesting 'the greenies want us to go and live in a field - that's silly' arguments, well, those that do are indeed silly, but sensible regulation of emissions can be achieved with minimal economic upset. Evidence? Because whenever environmental legislation has been introduced the industry so regulated has survived, and the costs of implementation have been dramatically lower than expected, or claimed. This has occurred in a number of heavy industries in a number of jurisdictions - I am not going to give examples - go and search them out, that way you might be convinced.

It's game theory - there is no downside to taking sensible practical action whether climate change is real or false, natural or man made.

There is no downside to taking no action if climate change is false, or natural.

On the other hand if it is real and man made and we do nothing....

Icon; because the most likely outcome in my opinion is 'real' 'man made' 'do nothing (or not enough anyway)'

@Dr Stephen Jones

"As a species we're also incredibly inventive and creative. We never stop being inventive and creative. We devise economic systems that put our inventiveness and creativity all over the planet."

Huh?... Did you just imply the human species is great because we invented ECONOMIC SYSTEMS??

Shit. I've seen people admiring human arts, literature, music, possibly science and technology, but it's the first time I see somebody justifying the existence of the human species by the economic systems it devised. It is especially rich, considering how great the global economy is doing now...

Paris, because I have more respect for her than for the economic models.

HA!

There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians. Tell me again who wrote this article?

Statistics - not

I can only assume the author is neither a statistician nor a scientist.

So your thesis is that because much data before about 1970 seems to have been adjusted down, and much data after that moved up, it must be a conspiracy.

Here's a thought: maybe the methodology for calculating the mean temp changed in the 1970s. Maybe a previous error in the model was noticed and fixed, but not backdated at the time. Maybe someone recently reran the old raw data through the new model. Maybe someone refined the model and ran _all_ the data through to remove another error. Maybe technological changes (computers anyone? hmm, 1970... sounds significant) meant the 1970 onwards data was better processed. Maybe a billion billion other normal things happened which caused the analysis to need updating.

Or...its an enormous conspiracy by NASA to make us all - what? Invest in space homes? Buy more space shuttles?

Or maybe we should read up on William of Ockham.

Adjustment vs. fitting

Thanks again for the feedback everyone.

There is a big difference between adjusting data and fitting data. All of the data presented in this article is directly from the NASA, Hadley, UAH, RSS, and ORNL web sites. The video is a demonstration of a fit - where one version of NASA data is "fitted" to another, in an effort to reverse engineer the "adjustment" which was done at NASA. I did not change any of the data points - just applied a simple rotation to the entire graph as a visual tool.

As far as the coin toss statistics go, I was attempting to avoid a more technical discussion by using an oversimplification. The actual standard deviation of the Gaussian generated by 70 coin tosses is sqrt(70 * 0.5 * 0.5) = 4.18 . The mean is 70 / 2 = 35, and the odds of the coin toss results being as lopsided as 55/15 are approximated as follows -

35 - 15 = 20, which is nearly 5 sigma (standard deviations) away from the mean. The probability of a five sigma event is extremely low. Again, I recommend that some posters take a basic course in statistics before betting on an outlier like that in Vegas - or at least they should watch the movie "21" which was pretty good entertainment, and much less boring than a statistics lecture.

I am not qualified to make judgments about the climate one way or another, but I do think that the community would be better served if the handling of data was done in a universally more transparent fashion, and if the key players spent more time working on the science and less on politics.

Having worked in the past on government contracts, I can personally testify that the idea of a funding "cash cow" can be tempting to a normally struggling government scientist. Government scientists rarely if ever get rich, but they do like to keep their jobs and reputations in tact as long as possible. The mentality is in some ways similar to a trade union - i.e. don't rock the boat (or else.)

Remarkable information

Benoit Prezeau - I had a look at the NASA links you provided and was fascinated by this table. I think you have led us to something extremley interesting.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/US_USHCN.2005vs1999.txt

Have a look at the year 1998. In the USHCN table it shows the 1999 version at +1.23 and the 2005 version at +1.24.

Yet Dr Hansen's graph from 1999 (referenced in my article as NASA's original data: 1999) shows 1998 at about +0.9. This is difference of 0.24 from the table. They are supposed to represent the same data! Similar discrepancies for almost all the years in the table. 1986 is shown in the table at +0.73, but the graph shows 1986 at about +0.3.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/fig1x.gif

Apparently there was a huge data adjustment made sometime after 1999 which is not clearly documented. Thanks again.

------

The Bulldog claim that NASA has better polar coverage than UAH doesn't appear to be correct. UAH has excellent coverage in the Arctic and Antarctic - as can be seen here :

http://climate.uah.edu/

Compare vs. the very poor coverage of NASA - as seen on their 250 mile plots

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=3&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=03&year1=2008&year2=2008&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=250&pol=reg

If that link doesn't last, go to http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ set the smoothing radius to 250, and hit the "Make Map" button. The 250 mile radius shows the actual locations of their stations. Zero stations in the Canadian Arctic. Zero stations in Southern Africa. Maybe 5% coverage of Antarctica.

Time for Tamino to put that argument to bed.