Posts Made By: Dean Rowe

Dave Snope said:So we have something that costs over $100M to build and save over $1.2M per year. My computer-like mind says that the base investment will take over 80 years to recover. If it lasts that long. But what about operating costs? Labor, maintenance, and parts? I'm going to guess 4 workers with generous benefits and healthcare costs totaling $500K, a very small 0.5% maintenance & parts costs for another $500K, netting $300,000 in savings per year. Now our ROI is 333 years.

Of course the AF only had to pay $100K in capital costs. Now THAT's some freakonomics. Where can I sign up to get a solar plant for my house for only 1/10 of one percent of actual purchase costs?

Whether this is "freakonomics" or not depends on just what the "public/private partnership" entails, which isn't detailed here at all. There's nothing here that says the AF will be responsible for operation or maintainance or that the AF will save, or even plans on saving, $1.2M a year in the future.

All we have here is the public (the AF) part of the story but nothing about what the private side of the partnership involves. That's not much to reach a conclusion with.

That article is is a one-sided telling of the story from McIntyre's (climateaudit.org) perspective.

Here's a post from the other sides perspective
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/

There's much in that the Bishop Hill article leaves out. If you are really interested in paleo reconstructions and the hockey stick flap, here's a good read:
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676

That's the report put together by the National Research Council at the request of Congress following a Congressional investigation into the matter.

Here's an interesting reaction to the report from none other than a skeptic favorite Roger Pielke Jr.

"My reading of the summary of the report and parts of the text is that the NAS has rendered a near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al."

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000859quick_reaction_to_th.html

I saw nowhere in the Bishop Hill article that even mentions this. To me that's a strong indication that it's not giving you a very complete presentation controversy

Hugh Bartlett said:
But this is by satellite data, which is less prone to the vagaries in measurement technology that plague surface meassurements (urban heat island effects, etc.).

I don't know if I'd say the satellite data is "is less prone to the vagaries in measurement technology" - it too has it's share of problems - stitching together data from multiple satellites, diurnal & orbital drift etc. Interestingly, the UAH interpretation (the set in your link) has undergone several re-dos, each time resulting in an increased trend.

The UAH interpretation also seems to suffer from some sort of seasonal oscillations that really shouldn't be there. If you take the average of each month's anomalies, there's almost 0.1 degree C from the high in February to the low in *June*. Here's a chart for you:

Not any more, check your link again.

Are you aware that Carlin plagiarized large parts of his "report"?

For example page 64 of Carlin's piece here:
http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/25560.pdf

And Patrick J. Michaels piece here, about 1/3 of the way down:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/11/19/why-the-epa-should-find-against-endangerment/

Given your (and Mark's) earlier expression of disdain for plagiarism with Pasken, do you think Calin should be fired?

Hugh Bartlett said:

Check this out for June 2009:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

Okay, it is the lower atmosphere, not surface temperature. But this is by satellite data, which is less prone to the vagaries in measurement technology that plague surface meassurements (urban heat island effects, etc.). The baseline is 1979-1998, the period of greatest surface warming, but if there is a greenhouse effect, it is in the atmosphere that it would be manifesting itself. There, the trend is basically flatlined over the last 30 years.

FWIW, this has been changing very fast such that Roger Pielke, Jr. called July 14th "The Warmest Day Ever" in the UAH dataset
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/07/warmest-day-ever.html

You can play with current UAH numbers here and see how quick it has been going up
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002

Looks like the El Nino is picking up very fast.

Eh - weather happens.

Dave Snope said:
Statement #2:

“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely” ... “When climate models failed to retrospectively produce the temperatures since 1950 the modellers added some estimated influences of carbon dioxide to make up the shortfall,”... “The close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions. The available data indicate that future global temperatures will continue to change primarily in response to ENSO cycling, volcanic activity and solar changes.” ... “Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, ETS (emission trading scheme) will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”

Influence of the Southern Oscillation on Tropospheric Temperature, pub 23 July 2009, Peer Reviewed

J. D. McLean, Applied Science Consultants, Croydon, Victoria, Australia

C. R. de Freitas, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

R. M. Carter, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Dave - these quotes are from the press release and not from the published paper which you can see in entirety here:
http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/mclean_defreitas_carter_jgr_2009.pdf

First off, that there's a close correlation between ENSO and temperature variation is no surprise - heck I showed that in my post here:
http://www.astromart.com/forums/viewpost.asp?forum_post_id=664243&poll_id=&news_id=&page=2

However, your first quote isn't supported by the paper because in the analysis in the paper, they [COLOR="Red"]take out the trend[/COLOR] in the temp data after adjusting for a 7 month lag in the temps and took out the influence of Pinatubo & Chicon. In my post I did a very similar thing by detrending the RSS data.

Here's their's:



And here's mine:



See the similarities?

Basically all they do is show that ENSO correlates very well with fluxuations in temperature - which is well known and widely accepted. Where they are way off base is then claiming that because of this correlation in the fluxuation, ENSO therefore is the cause of the trend when there's nothing to support that - it correlates only if you remove the temperature trend first!

Dave Snope said:

Good news, if you like ice in the south. The Antarctic sea ice extent continued it's climb in late September and is now 1 million square miles greater than the 1979-2000 average.

Which is just what the IPCC said the models predict.

Current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and gain mass due to increased snowfall. However, net loss of ice mass could occur if dynamical ice discharge dominates the ice sheet mass balance.

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf - Page 47

Why is it that "skeptics" like to point out expanding antarctic ice extent yet don't seem to want to mention that's whats predicted to happen?

Dave Snope said:
Thanks to Steve McIntyre's persistence in getting original data, we can now see what happens when you use the full set of tree ring data instead of just the 5 or 10 selected trees from selected sources used in the CRU. See black line in graph. Green line is merged data sets. The 20th century is no longer the warmest century.



[big snip]

Eh - the uptick at the end isn't from the tree ring data, it's from the instrument record. you can see it here where it's specifically labeled as such:

http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/arctic2k.jsp

So what - are skeptics tossing out the instrument record in favor of proxies now?