RSS Shows Big Jump for April Temperature

RSS is out with their April lower troposphere anomaly: +0.333°C. That's the 6th-warmest April in their 34-year record.

A commenter here believes it implies a UAH LT anomaly of about +0.35°C.

By the way, the current "decade" (i.e. last 120 months) is 0.13°C warmer in the lower troposphere, as measured by RSS. That makes it absurd to claim that global warming has "stopped."

Added: The Arctic, as measured by RSS, is 0.55°C warmer than 10 years ago. Over the entire RSS record the Arctic has warmed at a linear rate of 0.34 ± 0.06 °C/decade. That projects to 6.1°F in a century.

Fwd: Dumb and dumber

Now I'm receiving insulting email from Anthony Watts....

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Dumb and dumber
Date:	Thu, 3 May 2012 14:44:40 -0700
From:	Anthony <awatts@itworks.com>
To:	<david.appell@gmail.com>
CC:	[Roger Tattersall], [Christopher Monckton]

Simon Turnhill reports http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2012/05/anu-threats-not-reported-to-police-the-australian/
that there's a new story in the Australian saying that the police were never contacted over the alleged "death threats", indicating that the ANU didn't even take the non-existent "death threats" seriously enough to even report it!
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/police-not-told-of-threats-to-anu-climate-scientists/story-e6frg6nf-1226346268884
Time to fess up, you got punked. What you do now Mr. Appell, will forever define you henceforth. I predict that rather than apologizing for your own ineptitude and hatred, you'll write yet another smear.

Cordially,

Anthony Watts

Hulme, The (Disappointing) Finale

I've finally finished Mike Hulme's book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, and I have to admit I was disappointed with the ending.

First, I have to say that it's a very good book and I learned a lot from reading it and thinking about his many points. I recommend it to anyone -- though be aware that it leans more towards a scholarly presentation than popular writing.

After nine chapters discussing the question in his title -- with chapters such as "The Social Meaning of Climate," "The Endowment of Value," "The Things We Fear," "The Challenges of Development," "The Way We Govern" -- he took the last chapter to sum up and make suggestions. Perhaps I wasn't expecting (drum roll) and the answer is!, but what came felt like a letdown -- essentially that we should use the climate change problem for the purposes of peace, love, and understanding:

"The function of climate change I suggest, then, is  not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. Solving climate change should not be the focus of our efforts any more than we should be 'solving' the idea of human rights or liberal democracy. It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change -- the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and material flows that climate change reveals -- to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come....

"As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our geographical, social and virtual worlds in creative ways. The idea of climate change can stimulate new thinking about technology. It can inspire new artistic creations in visual, written and dramatised media. It can invigorate effects to protect our citizens from the hazard of climate. The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking about our relationship with the future. It can around new interest in how science and culture interrelate. It can galvanize new social movements to explore new ways of living in urban and rural settings. And the idea of climate change can touch each of us as we reflect on the goals and values that matter to us. These are all creative applications of the idea of climate change, but they are applications that do not demand agreement. Indeed, they may be hindered by agreement. They thrive in conditions of pluralism and hope, rather than in conditions of universalism and fear...."

-- Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, pp 362-363

This is all too theological for me, in the broader sense of the word. It not only directly undercuts the many warnings scientists and others are giving about the decades ahead, but pushes all the buttons of why many are dubious of the issue and untrusting of the warnings.

And these things are going to happen anyway, if the changes ahead are anything like what are expected.

It dilutes everything. And this kind of thinking already seems to be happening: the IPCC 5AR Zero Order Drafts that were leaked a few months ago already seem to be going far beyond science. For example, the 13th Chapter of Working Group 2, "Livelihoods and Poverty," has subsections on "Inequality and Marginalization," "Indigenous People," and "Gender," among others.

Gender! What is that doing in a document assessing science?

Gender

"Research and empirical work on gender and climate change provides further evidence that specific configurations of uneven social relations of power, social and cultural norms that determine division of labor, inequality in economic and political positions, and discriminatory institutional practices all shape unequal access to 1 and control over household and community decision-making processes, and hence result in gender-differentiated impacts of climate change... Adger et al. 2007 (AR4, Ch 17) note higher vulnerability of women than men to weather-related disasters, including higher numbers of death and disproportionate amount of burden in recovery and rehabilitation, due to broader patterns of structural gender inequality. However, more cent work suggests that mortality during natural calamities is tied to socially constructed vulnerabilities such as discrimination, lower caste and lower class, and social conditioning and expected gender roles, rather than being a woman per se (Arora-Jonsson 2011). More concerted efforts are emerging to understand the underlying reasons for gendered impacts and the role social differentiation plays in assessing and potentially remedying the very processes and conditions that perpetuate gender and other inequalities and those that reduce harm through enhanced adaptive capacities (Tschakert and Machado 2012; Tuana et al. 2013)."

It's not the these aren't important issues, but we're being told climate change requires immediate action to, essentially, rebuild the infrastructure of civilization. We can't possibly solve all of humanity's endless number of problems while reconnecting the pipes, and to try would be to dilute the effort until it dissolves into nothing.

I'm sure we're going to see much more of this kind of thing in the run-up to the Rio+20 conference next month. That seems to me to be a big mistake, one that gives me fewer reasons to worry about the problem and its solutions, not more.

Gloating Over the Australian Report on Threats

In his report on alleged email deaths threats received by Australian climate scientists last year, the Australian Privacy Commissioner determined that, in his opinion, "...10 emails do not contain threats of harm against the recipients or the ANU." Of the 11th, he wrote:

I give separate consideration to the email describing a participant's behaviour and comments at the off-campus event which the ANU regarded as threatening. In my view, the exchange as described in the email could be regarded as intimidating and at its highest perhaps alluding to a threat. In its reasons for decision, the ANU stated that it did not report this incident to the AFP because the incident occurred off-campus and it is incumbent upon people who are directly involved in an incident to make a first person report to the police. The ANU advised that University security encouraged the staff member to report the incident to police. I consider the danger to life or physical safety in this case to be only a possibility, not a real chance.

(Emphasis mine.)

For some reason that is difficult for me to understand, people like Anthony Watts find this a reason to gloat.

An "intimidating" email "perhaps alluding to a threat" with a "possibility" of danger to life or physical safety hardly sounds innocent or something worth cheering about -- particularly if you're the one who received it. It sounds to me exactly like how it was taken -- as a death threat. Is the recipient supposed to wait until the Privacy Commissioner moves the email from the category of "possibility" to the category of "real chance" before being frightened?

Given the climate surrounding the Australian carbon tax debate last year, and the death threat captured on video against Hans Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (the one scrubbed by Anthony Watts), and knowing of the death threats against US scientists (reported on by ABC News), one could hardly blame Australian scientists for being jumpy and requesting protection when suspect emails start coming in. The recipient of an email is the one who decides if it's a threat, and they can't wait months for a ruling.    

But that's the state of some in the blogosphere these days, where many like Watts have no hesitation about using such threats, including death threats, as more ammunition for whatever they think their cause is.

These years -- and unfortunately, I doubt they are finished -- will be viewed as an extremely ugly period in the history of science. People like Watts and Morano will not fare well in the judgement of the future, and it won't be their arguments they're remembered for, or even their denial of science, but their willingness to distort, contort, and bully people who are simply trying to do the best science they can. Their best hope is probably that, like most computer formats, HTML fades into obscurity and will be unreadable by whatever chips, goggles, and implants serve up the reading material of the future.

Unless this era gets labeled something like the Watts-Morano Thermal Maximum (WMTM), in which case they will be remembered for millions of years.

PIOMAS Verifies

First-year results are in for the recently launched CRYOSAT satellite that can measure sea ice volume, and contrary to what you might have once read, they verify the PIOMAS model results. The BBC:

Tuesday's release shows a complete seasonal cycle, from October 2010, when the Arctic Ocean was beginning to freeze up following the summer melt, right through to March 2011, when the sea ice was approaching peak thickness. Cryosat found the volume (area multiplied by thickness) of sea ice in the central Arctic in March 2011 to have been 14,500 cubic kilometres.

This figure is very similar to that suggested by PIOMAS (Panarctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System), an influential computer model that has been used to estimate Arctic sea ice volume, and which has been the basis for several predictions about when summer sea ice in the north might disappear completely.

Of course, it was always an insult to the PIOMAS scientists from bloggers who thought a few whipped-up blog posts were going to counter the careful work of professionals, who needless to say work very hard to analyze and improve their model's performance.

Temperatures in the Near-Future

Skeptical Science links to a relatively simple demonstration by John Nielsen-Gammon that shows, once again, how the recent haitus in surface temperatures is due to La Nina.

Also, earlier Dana at Skeptical Science did something very clever: knowing the dependencies of surface temperatures on the variables that were multiply regressed by Foster and Rahmstorf, he took the predictions for ENSO, solar insolation, and CO2 for the short-term future and predicted surface temperatures from those. Absent a major volcanic eruption, they look to be at or near records:

As Table 1 shows, 2012 may break the temperature record, though the prediction is well within the margin of error. Thus if the El Niño doesn't form as soon or as strong as expected, or if solar cycle 24 stalls, or if one of the factors not included in this simple analysis (such as aerosols or clouds or other ocean cycles) acts in the cooling direction, 2012 will probably not break the record.

However, all three of the major temperature influences will be in the warming direction in 2012 as compared to 2011, assuming the El Niño develops as predicted. All three may also be in the warming direction in 2013 as compared to 2012, again with ENSO being the main question mark. Thus it appears quite likely that 2013 will break the surface temperature record, and quite possibly by a large margin, with a solar cycle peak and possible El Niño year. There is also a reasonable chance that both 2012 and 2013 will break the surface temperature record.

These are predictions worth watching. If they come true, my guess is that deniers will go back to questioning the validity of the surface stations, which curiously seem to be of sufficient quality to detect a lack of warming but not to detect the presence of warming.

This would be a good time to give my "entertaining" guess for the April UAH lower troposphere anomaly:

UAH LT April 2012 anomaly prediction = +0.26°C

If this value is accurate, it would be the 4th-warmest April in their 34-year old record. I was almost spot-on for March, but I suspect that was just luck. We'll see.

Future Wars Over Geoengineering?

"Our descendants may not thank us for the legacy of an atmosphere over-supplied with greenhouse gases, but neither may they thank us for handing them the gift of a global thermostat over the control of which their future wars may be fought."

-- Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Chapter 10

Re: Diviner result

Ned:

Agreement with measurement is the true test of a theory, right?

As I've shown, standard radiative theory, properly applied, fully accounts for the dayside lunar temperature at all points. Hence, your (increasingly convoluted) ideas about emission temperatures and such must be incorrect.

Please read the comments of Joel Shore of the Rochester Institute of Technology:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/04/norfolk-constabulary-made-wrong-charges.html?showComment=1333542409674#c5805847283678492801

In particular, this: "There are many temperature distributions with many different average temperatures that are all compatible with a blackbody emitting 240 W/m^2 (which is what the Earth has to emit as seen from space to be in radiative balance). Which one is actually realized depends on details like the body's thermal inertia, thermal transport, etc. However, none of these temperatures is higher than 255 K, which is what a body with a perfectly uniform temperature distribution has to have to emit 240 W/m^2. Nobody has successfully explained how one can satisfy conservation of energy if a planet is at an average temperature of ~288 K, emitting about 395 W/m^2, while the planet (including atmosphere) is only absorbing ~240 W/m^2 from the sun unless you invoke a radiative greenhouse effect. And, it is a fool's errand to try to do so because it is impossible."

----
I'll go through the derivation of the lunar temperatures one more time, filling it all in.
Here are the Diviner measurements:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/nikolov-and-zeller-reply-to-comments-on-the-utc-part-1/

I'll focus on the equator, since it's simplest, but the same physics applies at all latitudes.

Unlike on Earth, when the Sun shines on the Moon you can't assume equilibrium, so radiative theory must be applied pointwise. So, at the point on the Moon where Sunlight is normal to the surface, the temperature will be

sigma*T^4 = S*(1-alpha)

when lunar solar constant is the same as the Earth's, 1362 W/m2. The lunar albedo is 0.11 (via http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut26-1.htm), so this gives

T0 = [S*(1-alpha)/sigma]^1/4 = 382 K

Notice that agrees exactly with the Diviner result (black curve) as per the chart referred to above. (There may be some small astronomical factors I'm not going to worry about.)

Elsewhere on the equator, the intensity of sunlight is reduced by a factor of the cosine of the longitude L. This changes the result for T only by a factor of [cos(L)]^(1/4), which exactly describes the shape of the curve in the Diviner plot.

The average dayside temperature will thus be T0 times the average value [cos(L)]^(1/4) from -90 degrees to 90 degrees. Using the standard calculus method to calculate this average, it equals 2.69991/pi. So the average dayside temperature will be

<dayside lunar equatorial temperature> = (2.69991/pi)*T0 = 328 K

Again, the nightside temperature can't be determined by radiative considerations alone, since it depends on heat conduction through the regolith. (See, for example
"Near-Surface Temperatures on Mercury and the Moon and the Stability of Polar Ice Deposits," A. R. Vasavada et al, Icarus 141 (1999) 179-193
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge151/references/vasavada_et_al_1999.pdf ).

I'll just call it Tn, which from Diviner is apparently about 95 K.

Hence the entire average is

<lunar equatorial temperature> = 0.5*(328 K + 95 K) = 212 K.

EXACT AGREEMENT, both for the average and for the entire dayside.

I fail to see what is lacking, especially since your ideas have not accounted for any lunar temperatures at all.

David

[deleted]
On 4/27/2012 8:34 PM, David Appell wrote:

To: Christopher Monckton
Cc: Andrew Watts, Roger Tattersall, Ned Nikolov

On 4/25/2012 8:19 AM, Christopher Monckton wrote:

NASA gives 270.6 K; and the IPCC's value of 255 K for the characteristic-emission temperature is based on similar considerations. In the light of the Diviner results, this value may be too high, in which event so is the Planck parameter. - M of B

Mr Monckton,

*WHERE* does NASA give a value of 270.6 K? More importantly, why do you think it matters? Scientific truth doesn't depend on who wrote it -- it depends on whether theory agrees with experiment.

As I've shown you twice now, a correct application of standard radiative theory gives not only the correct average for the lunar equatorial temperature as measured by Diviner, but it provides all the values (such as the maximum) and shape (~[cos(longitude)]^(1/4)) of the entire sun-side equatorial temperature, at all sun-side longitudes.

[And again, the nightside temperature cannot be determined by radiative transfer alone, but depends on heat conduction through the lunar regolith. See, for example
"Near-Surface Temperatures on Mercury and the Moon and the Stability of Polar Ice Deposits," A. R. Vasavada et al, Icarus 141 (1999) 179-193
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge151/references/vasavada_et_al_1999.pdf ]

Thus, standard theory completely -- and easily -- explains the Diviner measurements. Claims that it somehow disproves the canonical calculation of the Earth's greenhouse effect is simply wrong, due an incorrect application of basic science promulgated by Roger Tattersall, Ned Nikolov, and Karl Zeller. They are wrong.

Will you be correcting your WUWT post?

David
   

----- Original Message -----

From: David Appell

Sent: 04/25/12 03:16 PM

To: Christopher Monckton

Subject: Re: Diviner result

On 4/24/2012 3:33 AM, Christopher Monckton wrote:

Now, the method that NASA used in order to derive the 270 K value for the Moon is the same method that is routinely used in climate science to derive the 255 K mean characteristic-emission temperature for the Earth, raising the possibility that 255 K is also too high.

Such a result, whoever did it (I doubt it was NASA), is an incorrect application of the physics of radiation transfer. Unlike on Earth, on the Moon you can't assume equilibrium, so radiative theory must be applied pointwise.

Here's how standard theory gives not just the correct curve, but the correct average too:

On the sunlight side of the moon, the average temperature will be

=B*integral

where, as usual,

B=[S*(1-alpha)/sigma]^1/4 = 382 K

and the integral results from averaging the angular factor (a cosine to the 1/4th power) from -pi/2 to +pi/2, which must be done numerically. So on the sunlight side of the Moon the average temperature is

(2.7/pi)*B

The temperature of the dark side cannot, as you imply, be considered from radiative theory, since it also depends on heat conductance. From the data it is approximately

=95 K.

Averaging these two numbers gives

=212 K

in exact agreement with the data.

David

----- Original Message -----

From: David Appell

Sent: 04/24/12 05:55 AM

To: Christopher Monckton

Subject: Diviner result and standard theory

To: Christopher Monckton
Cc: Anthony Watts, Roger Tattersall
Re: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/23/why-there-cannot-be-a-global-warming-consensus/

Mr. Monckton:

Your 4/23 post on WUWT saying that standard theory cannot explain the Diviner measurement of lunar temperature is incorrect.

In fact, as I show here:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/04/norfolk-constabulary-made-wrong-charges.html

standard theory not only easily gives the exact measured value for the average lunar equatorial temperature, but it explains that temperature for all longitudes.

Sincerely,
David

 [deleted]

This Ought to Win An Award

This kind of thinking ought to win an award for...something:

Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment, which has opposed any attempt to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, said even if there is global warming, Americans and the world will still need coal, gas, and other fossil fuels to run the technology, including air conditioning, to deal with it.

And he said proposals to reduce use of coal and fossil fuels will make it impossible to survive any warming that occurs.

Ebell goes on to say that scientists, such as Michael Mann, who have gone public with their concerns about climate change are "not trustworthy, "con men," and "bad apples." Whether that's true or whether that's false, it's a big statement, but the reporter (Don Hopey) doesn't question him at all and just dutifully writes it down as if he's a stenographer.

China's Soaring Demand For Coal

Here's a startling chart, from Sightline in Seattle:

China's jump in coal use of about 2000 Mt/yr in just a decade represents about 6 gigatons of CO2 emissions a year -- one-fifth of current world emissions.

(No, I'm not blaming them -- China's per capita CO2 emissions are still less than 1/3rd that of the US. India -- who seems headed up the same arc as China but about 30 years behind -- emits less than 1/10th that of the US. If China and India were to emit at the same per capita rate as the US, and the rest of the world stayed constant, worldwide emissions would more than double to 63 Gt CO2/yr. If the entire world emitted like the US, emissions would be 114 Gt CO2/yr, almost 4 times the current level.)

By the way, total US coal production is only about 1,000 Mt/yr, and it peaked in 2008. So you can see why they want to send it on trains from Wyoming to eastern Oregon, ship it by barges down the Columbia River, then ship it across the Pacific Ocean to China. There's a big fight starting here in Oregon about this.

An Impressive Fact About Carbon Dioxide

Here's an interesting statistic(*) from the conclusion of David Archer's book The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate:

"If we add up the total amount of energy trapped by CO2 from the gallon of gas over its atmospheric lifetime, we find that our gallon of gasoline ultimately traps one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) kilocalories of useless and unwanted greenhouse heat. The bad energy from burning that gallon ultimately outweighs the good energy by a factor of about 40 million."

(*) Except I think the last number should be 3.5 million, not 40 million. Archer says a gallon of gasoline "yields about 2500 kilocalories of energy," which is 2.8 MJ/L. But all the numbers I've found are about 32 MJ/L, such as here and here and here. That factor of 11.5 knocks down the final ratio to a still impressive 3.5 million.

(If I made a mistake, let me know.)

Re: Diviner result

To: Christopher Monckton
Cc: Andrew Watts, Roger Tattersall, Ned Nikolov

On 4/25/2012 8:19 AM, Christopher Monckton wrote:

NASA gives 270.6 K; and the IPCC's value of 255 K for the characteristic-emission temperature is based on similar considerations. In the light of the Diviner results, this value may be too high, in which event so is the Planck parameter. - M of B

Mr Monckton,

*WHERE* does NASA give a value of 270.6 K? More importantly, why do you think it matters? Scientific truth doesn't depend on who wrote it -- it depends on whether theory agrees with experiment.

As I've shown you twice now, a correct application of standard radiative theory gives not only the correct average for the lunar equatorial temperature as measured by Diviner, but it provides all the values (such as the maximum) and shape (~[cos(longitude)]^(1/4)) of the entire sun-side equatorial temperature, at all sun-side longitudes.

[And again, the nightside temperature cannot be determined by radiative transfer alone, but depends on heat conduction through the lunar regolith. See, for example
"Near-Surface Temperatures on Mercury and the Moon and the Stability of Polar Ice Deposits," A. R. Vasavada et al, Icarus 141 (1999) 179-193
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge151/references/vasavada_et_al_1999.pdf ]

Thus, standard theory completely -- and easily -- explains the Diviner measurements. Claims that it somehow disproves the canonical calculation of the Earth's greenhouse effect is simply wrong, due an incorrect application of basic science promulgated by Roger Tattersall, Ned Nikolov, and Karl Zeller. They are wrong.

Will you be correcting your WUWT post?

David
 
--
David Appell, PhD, independent science journalist
e: david.appell@gmail.com
w: http://www.davidappell.com
m: St. Helens, OR  USA

 

----- Original Message -----

From: David Appell

Sent: 04/25/12 03:16 PM

To: Christopher Monckton

Subject: Re: Diviner result

On 4/24/2012 3:33 AM, Christopher Monckton wrote:

Now, the method that NASA used in order to derive the 270 K value for the Moon is the same method that is routinely used in climate science to derive the 255 K mean characteristic-emission temperature for the Earth, raising the possibility that 255 K is also too high.

Such a result, whoever did it (I doubt it was NASA), is an incorrect application of the physics of radiation transfer. Unlike on Earth, on the Moon you can't assume equilibrium, so radiative theory must be applied pointwise.

Here's how standard theory gives not just the correct curve, but the correct average too:

On the sunlight side of the moon, the average temperature will be

=B*integral

where, as usual,

B=[S*(1-alpha)/sigma]^1/4 = 382 K

and the integral results from averaging the angular factor (a cosine to the 1/4th power) from -pi/2 to +pi/2, which must be done numerically. So on the sunlight side of the Moon the average temperature is

(2.7/pi)*B

The temperature of the dark side cannot, as you imply, be considered from radiative theory, since it also depends on heat conductance. From the data it is approximately

=95 K.

Averaging these two numbers gives

=212 K

in exact agreement with the data.

David

 

----- Original Message -----

From: David Appell

Sent: 04/24/12 05:55 AM

To: monckton@mail.com

Subject: Diviner result and standard theory

To: Christopher Monckton
Cc: Anthony Watts, Roger Tattersall
Re: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/23/why-there-cannot-be-a-global-warming-consensus/

Mr. Monckton:

Your 4/23 post on WUWT saying that standard theory cannot explain the Diviner measurement of lunar temperature is incorrect.

In fact, as I show here:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/04/norfolk-constabulary-made-wrong-charges.html

standard theory not only easily gives the exact measured value for the average lunar equatorial temperature, but it explains that temperature for all longitudes.

Sincerely,
David

      --   David Appell, independent science journalist   e: david.appell@gmail.com   w: http://www.davidappell.com   m: St. Helens, OR  USA       

 

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley 
c/o Brooks's, St. James's Street, London SW1A 1LN 
Cell +44 7814 556423: monckton@mail.com  > 

   --   David Appell, independent science journalist   e: david.appell@gmail.com   w: http://www.davidappell.com   m: St. Helens, OR  USA   

 

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley 
c/o Brooks's, St. James's Street, London SW1A 1LN 
Cell +44 7814 556423: monckton@mail.com  

Arctic Sea Ice Melting Faster

There's an interesting debate about Arctic sea ice predictions versus observations going around amongst Tamino, Roger Pielke Sr, and Skeptical Science. I don't have anything to add to it, but this graph is mildly interesting and probably not original: it shows the annual difference between the yearly maximum of sea ice extent and the yearly minimum. The difference is increasing as time goes by, which I suppose is just an indication that there is less old ice and more new ice, and new ice, especially first year ice, melts faster.

Here's the annual decline in volume, from PIOMAS:

Oreskes' Succinct Summary of the Situation

This is a wonderfully succinct summary by Naomi Oreskes of the essence of today's situation on climate change and the debate, from last night's Australian TV program "I Can Change Your Mind About...Climate." Somehow, this clip did not make it into the final show.

On Manufacturing Doubt for Levitus 2012

Willis Eschenbach, still trying to kill off Levitus et al 2012, asks:

Regarding the climatology, they say that it is from the World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09), viz: ” … statistics at all standard levels and various climatological averaging periods are available at http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/WOA09F/pr_woa09f.html “

So I went there to see what kind of numbers they have for the monthly climatology at 2000 metres depth … and I got this answer:

"The temperature monthly climatologies deeper than 1500 meters have not been calculated."

Well, that sux. How do the authors deal with that? I don’t have a clue.

In fact, the authors say how they do this in their Supplementary Material, which has not been published yet. (I guess now it's too much to wait until scientists' results are actually published before attempting to destroy them.) But a preprint version is here. The authors write:

"The results describing the variability of ocean heat content shown here are based on 745 gridded (1-degree latitude-longitude grid), interpolated fields at standard depth 746 measurement levels have statistical estimates of reliability associated with them."

(emphasis mine). And while the the monthly climatologies below a certain depth aren't available, the quarterly climatologies are -- at least, for every depth I've checked below 1500 m.

Does it matter if quarterly climatologies are used instead of monthly climatologies? I guess it's a fair question, but it's sufficiently technical that I would be sure to first ask the people who know the nuts-and-bolts of the data and analysis before writing a few little subroutines, making a lot of assumptions, and then labeling their work with names like "goofy." (It's also exactly the kind of things that get picked through on peer review.) But then, that's why I enjoy primarily doing journalism and more in-depth writing than being a blogger, especially a blogger in a realm that is really only looking to manufacture doubt about the science rather than fairly evaluating it (which is always more complicated than a few hours work.)

Miscellaneous Stuff of Varying Interest

Miscellaneous stuff that is interesting, but too short for a post of its own:

• The University of East Anglia paid £113,000 ($182,000; €138,000) to an outside consultancy group (=PR company) to manage the 2009 Climategate episode. (Incidentally, that firm's managing director was arrested last summer in the News of the World phone hacking scandal (where he was earlier an editor).
  
• Researchers suggest violent childhood abuse may affect telomeres -- the end caps of DNA that may influence aging and disease. Another researcher says "there's a lot of doubt in the field." No comments on how this might affect political party affiliation. 
• Keith Kloor has an interesting post, pointing to an earlier interesting post of his, saying again that the shelf life of green catastrophism has expired.
  

  "Just because the eco-collapse narrative remains the same doesn’t mean it won’t eventually come true.
  
  The problem for the green traditionalist is that this redundant message has lost its power. There have been too many red alerts, accompanied by too many vague, screechy calls to action. Today, the green traditionalist is like a parent who incessantly yells at his child to behave–or else. The parent grows angrier and increasingly frustrated when the child inevitably tunes him out."

• This is a couple of months old, but it's a great Peter Sinclair video of ocean scientist Josh Willis succinctly explaining where the sea level rise went. And he was right, as the recent surge in sea level shows.
  
  
  
• 
  

Uncertainties in Ocean Heating Results

After some fair questions about measurement uncertainties for the Levitus et al GRL paper-in-press on ocean warming, I've asked some scientists for more information. The paper has Supplementary Material that will be included when it appears in final published form. I have a copy, and needless to say the authors take great care to explain how the uncertainties are calculated.

This WUWT post from Willis Eschenbach misses a crucial point. He converts heat changes back to temperature changes (dT = dQ/mc), and writes:

Here’s the problem I have with this graph. It claims that we know the temperature of the top two kilometres (1.2 miles) of the ocean in 1955-60 with an error of plus or minus one and a half hundredths of a degree C.... So I don’t know where they got their error numbers … but I’m going on record to say that they have greatly underestimated the errors in their calculations.

The basic point is that the statistical uncertainty of an average can be much less than that of any temperature measurement.

If you measure the temperatures T₁ and T₂ of two different objects, each to an uncertainty of ΔT, what is the uncertainty ΔA in their average A? The typical way this is done is explained in most freshman physics labs, such as this. So the average temperature of the two objects will be (T₁ + T₂)/2, and the uncertainty in the average will be

ΔA = ΔT/sqrt(2)

which is less than ΔT. For N measurements the denominator becomes sqrt(N), so the uncertainty is much less. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but it's akin to the statistics of coin-flipping -- over the long haul, the expected average is 50% heads, with a variance (standard deviation) that goes like 1/sqrt(number of flips).

This is essentially what Levitus et al do, and it's completely legitimate. Experimental scientists take uncertainties religiously, and it is often a major part of the analysis, even more so than simply getting a result.

I don't know yet what the uncertainty of an ARGO buoy sensor is, but (to this point) I suspect it's significantly less than 1°C. That comment asks:

There is an amusing example in which they say if you measure the length of an object to the nearest millimetre often enough, you ought to be able to resolve individual atoms. Since atoms are 10^-8 mm you need about 10^16 measurements. What do you think? Is it possible in principle?

But this confuses two completely different concepts -- an individual measurement, and averaging. A measurement of a length is a completely classical measurement, with no notion of "atoms" or discreteness. So there's nothing wrong with a huge number of measurements resulting in an uncertainty less than an atomic length in a statistical sense. (Casinos, of course, rely on this to make their money.) But that says nothing about any particular measurement, only about the average of the measurements. So you're not "resolving atoms," which would necessarily happen in a particular measurement.

Just because the average height of U.S. men is 5 ft 9 in doesn't mean all U.S. men have a height of all U.S. men is 5 ft 9 in -- only the "average man," which is an abstract thing, not a thing that exists in the same sense that any of the men exist. (Viz. the average is a mathematical object. Men aren't.)

My Article on AGW's Parallel to the Problem of Space Debris

I have an article today on the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media: "The Climate Problem: We've Been Here Before."

It's about how the climate issue is tracking the arc of earlier problem: space debris. That environmental issue was once ignored, even as models from a few far-sighted researchers forecast a problem called the "Kessler Cascade."

That cascade -- an exponential increase in the amount of space debris due to collisions, as each collision creates a quantum jump in the number of pieces of debris, resulting in an increased probability of yet more collisions -- became apparent in 2009 with the collision of an Iridium telecommunications satellite with an old Russian satellite. The Kessler Cascade has the potential to render orbital space unusable, and even to create a belt of debris around the Earth that could someday effectively trap us on the surface. The world space community is now scrambling to find a solution, but some think it's already too expensive to clean up space and we'll simply have to live with the problem.

Read it here.

Diviner result and standard theory

To: Christopher Monckton
Cc: Anthony Watts, Roger Tattersall
Re: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/23/why-there-cannot-be-a-global-warming-consensus/

Mr. Monckton:

Your 4/23 post on WUWT saying that standard theory cannot explain the Diviner measurement of lunar temperature is incorrect.

In fact, as I show here:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/04/norfolk-constabulary-made-wrong-charges.html

standard theory not only easily gives the exact measured value for the average lunar equatorial temperature, but it explains that temperature for all longitudes.

Sincerely,
David

--
David Appell, independent science journalist
david.appell@gmail.com
http://www.davidappell.com
m: St. Helens, OR USA

[gse-aa] Auroral Alert

There may be an aurora tonight visible across the northern US and UK....

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	[gse-aa] Auroral Alert
Date:	Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:40:44 -0800
From:	<...>
To:	<gse-aa@gi.alaska.edu>

A solar event near the limb took us by surprise. The effects of this event were first felt early on the 23rd GMT, but the ejecta from the sun arrived just now (5:30pm Apr 23 GMT). Tonight there will be aurora over the northern tier of the US, Northern UK, Southern Scandinavia, and Southern Alaska. Observers in Southern New Zealand and Tasmania should watch the sky tonight, if the activity proves to be long-lasting.

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