Friday, October 25, 2013

Singer: I Don't Like Saying They're Fraudulent, But...

Fred Singer, in an interview in the San Diego Union Tribune, says he doesn't like to call the IPCC "fraudulent," but they're "fraudulent":
Q: How are policy makers, journalists and the public, who are not scientists, supposed to filter out who’s right and who’s wrong?

Singer: The IPCC has a way of ignoring inconvenient facts. It’s actually fraudulent but we don’t like to use that term, not because we’re scared of being sued but because all it does it get the other side’s back up.
Singer also says "there has been no rise in temperature for some 17 years," which is downright false: HadCRUT4 shows 0.11 ± 0.06 °C of warming over the last 17.0 years (uncertainty is 2σ calculated via OLS). GISS data has it at 0.15 ± 0.06 °C.

Of course, it's also false because it ignores the strong ocean warming over that time.

There's also this bit of obfuscation:
Singer: Well, it depends on where you start. If you start from the last ice age, 18,000 years ago, it certainly is much warmer. If you start 1,000 years ago, from the medieval climate warming, then it’s slightly cooler. If you start from the (Middle) Ice Age or let’s say around 1700 or so, then it is definitely warmer. So it has been warming. The earth is warming, not steadily, but in jumps.
When historians of the year 2200 write the history of climate change, is anyone going to come out worse than Fred Singer?

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

When historians of the year 2200 write the history of climate change, is anyone going to come out worse than Fred Singer?

Michael Mann comes to mind.

Unknown said...

Lets see, how has the temp behaved since the super nino of 1997

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/1-s2-0-s0921818112001658-gr11.jpg

Wow, thats interesting, since the super nino, sure looks like temps have leveled off. But co2 continues up, and it seems that air temp is moving in tandem with the ocean temps! Now lets do a close up.. how have they behaved since the PDO flipped

http://models.weatherbell.com/climate/cfsr_t2m_recent.png

actually looks like its starting down.

Isnt that special.

Oh and about that missing heat in the ocean...Bill Gray explained this 35 YEARS AGO with his thermohaline ideas. You can read his latest here,

http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf

You guys love to discover something that is a known to people believing in natural climate cycles, and then blame co2 even though it was a known before. That is fraudulent, not Dr Singer



Your attack on Dr Singer is without basis, and typical of the Alinsky tactics of the AGW people now.. isolate demonize, destroy. Wont work if people can see the truth

Brad Keyes said...

"Of course, it's also false because it ignores the strong ocean warming over that time."

Your criticism defies logic, Mr Appell. The ocean warming has no bearing at all on the truth-value of statements about the surface temperature. Think.

"When historians of the year 2200 write the history of climate change, is anyone going to come out worse than Fred Singer?"

Yes.

David Appell said...

Brad: Singer didn't restrict his remark to the "surface."

David Appell said...

Joe Bastardi: HadCRUT3 is an inferior dataset to HadCRUT4.

Learn to calculate. Since Jan 1990, HadCRUT4 shows 0.10 +/- 0.06 C of warming. GISS shows 0.13 +/- 0.06 C of warming.

David Appell said...

Also, Joe Bastardi, HadSST2 has been replaced by HadSST3. Since Jan 1999 (a short interval more representative of oceanic weather and not climate) it shows a warming of 0.09 +/- 0.04 C.

Unknown said...

From Werner Brozek from an article in WhatsUpWithThat:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/05/has-global-warming-stalled-now-includes-january-data/

For RSS the warming is not significant for over 23 years.
For RSS: +0.127 +/-0.134 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1990
For UAH the warming is not significant for over 19 years.
For UAH: 0.146 +/- 0.170 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1994
For Hadcrut3 the warming is not significant for over 19 years.
For Hadcrut3: 0.095 +/- 0.115 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1994
For Hadcrut4 the warming is not significant for over 18 years.
For Hadcrut4: 0.095 +/- 0.110 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1995
For GISS the warming is not significant for over 17 years.
For GISS: 0.111 +/- 0.122 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1996

David Appell said...

You are doing numerology, not physics.

In physics, you first decide what you want to know, and then you calculate.

If you want to know about trends in "climate," you figure out what such a period would be, and THEN calculate the trends in all relevant parameters -- including, in this situation, ocean warming.

You are doing the reverse -- calculating trends first, without deciding if they are representative of climate, and ignoring ones that do not meet your preconceived notions.

That's numerology and pseudoscience, not physics.

Brad Keyes said...

"Brad: Singer didn't restrict his remark to the "surface.""

That restriction is implicit in all declarations about "temperature" in the climate context, and has been for decades. (The surface is where the climate is.)

I don't understand why you are sticking to this criticism. It's obviously invalid.

Brad Keyes said...

Having read Singer's remarks in situ I'm now even more confident in calling your "oceanic" criticism meritless. The context of the interview makes it unmistakably clear to any reasonable reader that they're specifically talking about the Earth's surface.

Why elect to perseverate in this, David? Do you actually expect historians to look kindly on you for it?

David Appell said...

Because Singer is wrong. Especially if he is only referring to surface temperatures. Any competent/honest scientist should know that the true measure of global warming is the ocean, which captures over 90% of the extra heat. The surface is subject to a lot of variation due to internal ocean cycles. The ocean as a whole isn't, and it is warming strongly.

Brad Keyes said...

"the true measure of global warming is the ocean"

Strange. I don't recall anyone "knowing" this until recently, when the surface warming had undeniably diminished. I guess nobody was a "competent scientist/historian" until a couple of years ago. Your remark certainly makes James Hansen and all his epigones, what with their pretensions to foretell surface warming, look both naive and irrelevant. And I suppose the entire dendro field will never have anything to tell us about global warming, since trees can't possibly take the "true measure" thereof. Science funding bodies will certainly be relieved now that they can trim *that* fat.

Have you run this revelation of yours past, oh, Michael Mann, David?

David Appell said...

“One of the things emerging from several lines is that the IPCC has not paid enough attention to natural variability, on several time scales,” he [Kevin Trenberth] says, especially El Niños and La Niñas, the Pacific Ocean phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models, and the longer term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) which have cycle lengths of about 60 years.

"From about 1975, when global warming resumed sharply, until the 1997-98 El Niño, the PDO was in its positive, warm phase, and heat did not penetrate as deeply into the ocean. The PDO has since changed to its negative, cooler phase.

“It was a time when natural variability and global warming were going in the same direction, so it was much easier to find global warming,” Trenberth says. “Now the PDO has gone in the other direction, so some counter-effects are masking some of the global warming manifestations right at the surface.”

http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/05/wither-global-warming-has-it-slowed-down/

David Appell said...

"These large changes in ocean content reveal that the Earth’s surface is not a great place to look for a planetary energy imbalance. “This means this heat is not being sampled by the global average surface temperature trend,” he [Roger Pielke Sr] says. “Since that metric is being used as the icon to report to policymakers on climate change, it illustrates a defect in using the two-dimensional field of surface temperature to diagnose global warming.”

http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/05/wither-global-warming-has-it-slowed-down/

David Appell said...

Strange. I don't recall anyone "knowing" this until recently, when the surface warming had undeniably diminished.

I don't know if your recall is accurate, but before the recent pause there was probably less emphasis on ocean warming (though many people were working very hard to measure it accurately -- see the work of Sydney Levitus). In the '80s and '90s, it was easier to detect the global warming signal, as Trenberth noted in what I quoted a little earlier, primarily because it was going in the same direction as the PDO (warming), and no large ENSOs got in the way.

Since then science has done what it ALWAYS does -- if observations do not agree with expectations, it looks around and sees what's different and what else might explain, or falsify, the expectations.

In this case it is ocean warming -- it clearly indicates the Earth has an energy imbalance. Singer choosed to ignore that fact, and that makes his conclusions wrong and probably dishonest.

This is just science doing what science has always done, and when all the new evidence is considered, there is no reason to think that the enhanced greenhouse effect has diminished in any way.