As I type this, it’s currently 35 degrees, at 9am on an October morning in Brisbane. And, while one day’s temperatures don’t prove anything, a string of studies have shown that the increasingly frequent heatwaves in Australia can be reliably attributed to global warming. We haven’t had an El Nino yet, but according to NOAA, the last 12 months have been the hottest such period on record.
It will be interesting to see what the denialists come up with in response to this combination of record breaking local and global warming. We can safely rule out anything along the lines of “as a sceptic, I like to wait for convincing evidence before accepting a new hypothesis. But, with the steady accumulation of evidence I’m now convinced”. I suspect we’ll get more along the lines of
* Graham Lloyd, reporting a new study by Jennifer Marohasy, showing that the communists at the Met Bureau are artificially pumping hot air through Australian cities to cover up the fact that they rigged the data to show exactly this warming
* The Telegraph, with a front-page story of an old codger saying something like “You think this is hot? Back in ’23, we had heat waves in July so bad that concrete footpaths melted”
* Andrew Bolt will readjust the start dates so he can continue to claim “no significant warming for the past x years”, omitting the crucial word “statistically”
John Quiggin 
Yep, the Old Testament provides innumerable opportunities to satirize rise the subjective, so called ‘private’ beliefs, of the loony hard right Xstian in Australia. My preference is to go to the apocrypha. For example, among the long expunged old texts is the Apocalypse of St Peter which offers detailed descriptions of hell in which the punishment fits the crime so that
It’s almost programmatic.
@phoenix
There’s nothing in that to give any reason for revising the view I expressed in my earlier comment — unsurprisingly, since you avoid discussing the view I expressed in my earlier comment. You posted yours as a response to me, but really it isn’t.
@zoot
I promise he’s not a false flag sock, at least not mine.
@J-D
There will come a time, not so distant, in which a community AVO will shut people like you down.
In the light of that, I suggest that you “run for the hills”, out Lightening Hill way, where you and your ilk can be rounded up, twice yearly, like the Oz Military coppers already do in a sweep. Oh, they’ll never thin to look for me in Kal…except they do!
Run.
Once again, Lenore Taylor cuts through the thicket of weeds to find the truth…and it ain’t pretty, it never is. I am so over this current mob of jokers in power.
There’s something poetic about ‘false flag sock’. I love some of the language the web gives us.
Thankyou for letting my post through moderation.
It is quite an ironical honour to be called more ‘delusional’ than the standard delusionist (especially considering delusion in the context of the pseudo-science of AGW/CC; a ‘belief’ in a pseudo-science that goes beyond the pinnacle of delusion)
“any plausible fit to the data involves a statistically significant time trend.”
It is a central tenet of the AGW/CC pseudo-scientific belief to “fit the data” , but unfortunately for AGW proponents the hockey stick prediction , based on homogenized virtual data, did not fit the real world data from observation and so the alarmist AGW theory is down the toilet.
Just because the observed effect is larger than we would expect by chance (statistical significance) can we reject the null hypothesis that there is no effect. The truth is that in most situations, the null hypothesis is never true. An effect could be statistically significant, but that doesn’t in itself mean that it’s a good idea to spend money/time/resources into pursuing it in the real world. Tests of statistical significance say virtually nothing about the importance of a research result.
What is important in the real world is ‘practical significance’ (something economists have very little experience of). Practical significance is about whether we should care/whether the effect is useful in an applied context.
The virtual and homogenised data in the models made up from sparse patchwork of non-research quality instruments with huge data voids around the world, that are either ignored or in-filled with fictitious data might be ‘statistical significance’, but so what. It is a very small sample in the context of the atmosphere. At least with the satellite data it measures the bulk of atmosphere and is 100 fold more accurate than the virtual homogenised data, even if its time series is relatively short. The practical significance of the satellite data is we do not have much discernible warming thus far.
It is delusional is to say science is settled because it never is.
J-D
My post linked to the TOTAL satellite data that goes back to 1979; so I am not cherry picking the data and it does not seem to show much discernible warming thus far. This is in stark contrast to the alarmist hockey stick predictions linked in my previous post, that were bandied about by the true ‘believers’ in AGW. The ‘practical significance’(as opposed to statistical significance) of these flawed hockey stick predictions is that the credibility of the AGW in the real world is very low.
Anyway,
Kind regards
phoenix
A windsock out on the airfield is a flag sock.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
@John Goss
Yeah I think it carries a kind of wind sock metaphor so you get a picture of a wind sock that is somehow blowing the wrong way, and also a false flag (being false and blowing the wrong way too) and a puppet in the mix – the language, it’s so good.
But srsly as Senator whatsisname (senior moment excuse me, can’t google right now either) would say, I don’t get these people. I checked the link Phoenix posted and the guy who put up that graph (satellite temperatures from 70s to present) obviously thinks he is making some killer point against global warming, even though the graph shows an upward trend. And he says he has a PhD!
I had a similar experience when deniers were putting up evidence about how we supposedly often get bushfire in September or October. I checked their evidence and it actually shows the opposite – they used to be rare but appear to be becoming more common (I wrote about this on my blog, can’t link here because moderation). In that case I think the person concerned was not very smart, but a person with supposedly a PhD posting evidence that contradicts his point, what is this?
I know all about conservative white male effects and whatchamacallit cognition, etc, but I still don’t get this. I blame drugs 🙂
Senator Ludlum, sorry, came back to me. The cognition one hadn’t yet though
Off topic. The Guardian has a segment “Gary Younge on a slice of America where democracy doesn’t work”
I thought “Oh gee, this must be a map of the USA.”
Really very silly stuff, only interesting for the fact that a few people are still clinging to such publicly debunked wrongness in 2014….
Phoenix, the ‘Hockey Stick’ was a reconstruction of the past, not a prediction. As a reconstruction it comes with clear caveats on the limitations of proxies. The thing is, the hockey stick emerges from climate reconstructions using differing suites of proxies, with varying geographical distributions. And you and Sunday Christian George Christensen MP know not a jot why data homogenisation is a standard tool of statistical work…even though, in the case of climate data, BoM have dedicated public pages to explaining their methodology. Here is another good overview
Just so people know, this is what no global warming since 1979 (or whenevah) looks like:
I would include picutres of retreating glaciers and navigable North-west Passages, but multiple links tend to result in posts being put on hold.
@Ronald Brak
Yes, I wonder if they would take a stock market graph that looked like that and say “Stock markets rises won’t occur any more”, Or would they take the opposite tack and say “You don’t look at short term fluctuations, you look at long term trends.”
One would have to ask why use one principle to interpret warming trends and another principle to interpret stock market trends? Their fallacious approach is more than just about cherry-picking data its about cherry-picking (incorrect) data interpretation methods as well.
@phoenix
Shorter phoenix: “La, la, la, I can’t hear you, stop trying to introduce facts into the discussion.”
@Val
Val, I think this might be what you were looking for ‘Cognitive dissonance’.
@Ikonoclast
Na, they just say there is a (30/60/100/140) year cycle, only it hasn’t quite crested…
@Val
Val, that was my thought exactly! Leaving aside the fact that just eyeballing data is not a substitute for mathematically rigorous analysis, the graph phoenix produced clearly shows a warming to the naked eye. This seems to have reached a pinnacle of cognitive dissonance, where one can look at a graph that supports warming and blithely claim it falsifies it.
@Debbieanne
I thought perhaps “motivated cognition”, but cognitive dissonance certainly works too.
Cognitive dissonance, motivated cognition, how about metaphysical solipsism?
I think that it is the case that we avoid cognitive dissonance by using motivated cognition to not go anywhere near the thoughts that cause us dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance creates confusion and we humans need to feel that we are a consistent self entity; an individual. Avoiding the confusion provides us with the motivation to think – not reason – in ways that lessen the confusion, and we feel better.
It seems that some people are better at self-criticism than others.
Why won’t anybody debate phoenix? is it easier to sneer?
@chrisl
The debate already happened. Phoenix posted a graph and claimed it didn’t show a warming trend, when in fact it does. Unless, he can answer that objection, what’s the point continuing?From what I can see, everything else he wrote was meaningless name-calling.
Nathan: What is the warming?
@chrisl
I don’t really know what you’re asking.
As you’re presumably aware, there a several independent lines of empirical data that show the Earth is warming over the long term, but in this instance we’re talking about the satellite data for lower-tropospheric temperatures shown in the graph. Alternatively, you could have a look at some of the other data posted in the comments above.
@phoenix
I agree with Nathan about the graph issue being solved and so there is nothing really to debate about that.
I would like to understand why you believe that you can see things that the scientists cannot see.
Could we start a debate with you providing a list of the evidence and a rational argument that will explain to me why so many people working in this area of science are so wrong and what it is about you that means you can see this when I cannot?
@chrisl
There’s the old ‘wrestling with a pig’ and ‘playing chess with a pigeon’ analogies to explain it.
Arguing with climate science deniers or other cranks is worse than a waste of time. It grants them a dignity to which they have no claim.
Nathan : Again… Where is the warming?
“, there a several independent lines of empirical data ”
Ok That just sounds like nonsense!
But you do have more don’t you?
Well Chris, if you think data is nonsense then I guess I won’t be able to help you!
Fair call Nathan! Somehow you have to convince people like me.There are no convincing arguments. This is how it always ends!
@Fran Barlow
and arguing with them often leads to face-palming which is not fun if one forgets to take one’s glasses off.
@phoenix
Lost at one set of goal posts, move on to another… Global warming denial never ends.
“Somehow you have to convince people like me.” As you say, an impossible task since there is no conceivable argument or evidence that will convince you (see title of OP).
Fortunately, we don’t have to convince people like you, only outnumber you, as we already do.
@chrisl
0.6 degrees C of global surface warming since the 1960s, for example: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1960/to:1970/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1960
@chrisl
If it’s terribly important to you to have somebody debate phoenix, you could always take on the job yourself. I don’t understand why it would be important to you, though.
@Chris O’Neill
It looks pretty flat at the top of that graph. Is that the hiatus they are talking about?
@chrisl
The top of the graph is objectively flatter than the middle, but how flat it looks depends on an arbitrary choice of how to scale the graph.
@chrisl
There is no statistically significant slowdown at the top of that graph.
Looking for evidence that supports your hypothesis is what we call “confirmation bias”.
[there’s a whole messy subthread here about the differences — some of them biological — between inductive and deductive reasoning and why certainty can only come through deduction: evidence for your hypothesis is not automatically evidence against other hypotheses, and stuff like that. Large swathes of thinking are learned skills, techniques, rather than being innate: how well do you trust your education?]
Collin Street : It is chartmanship Pick your start and finish dates, Adjust the y-axis.Bingo
As to how well I trust my education, well I was educated in Australia so it wasn’t very good!
Sadly it has been dumbed down a lot since then!
chrisl,
There is a 100 years temperature chart here that is quite easy to read:
http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2014/08/22/climate-change-hiatus-shmiatus-or-cold-reality/
The blog post explains the thoughts on the temperature trends. But you have to remember that weather naturally has some variation from year to year – so even climate change is not going to affect the weather in such a way as to take out all the variations and ups and downs. But you can see looking at the 100 years charts that temperature has been very much on an upwards trajectory.
The term I was trying to think of above was “motivated cognition” but I agree there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and probably some metaphysical solipsism (‘the world is what I think it is’?) going on!
Motivated cognition is something we all can do. I have done it myself on a couple of embarrassing occasions when I was working in politics and I really, really wanted to think the government had done something wrong, so I misread the data. The difference is that normal people, when they realise what they’ve done or someone points it out, accept it, get very embarrassed, apologise, and try to be more careful in future. (I should say of course that it only happened a couple of times with me – would be more serious if it was happening all the time of course).
The difference with denialists is that they don’t ever seem to admit they were wrong. I’m not trying to pick on Phoenix personally, but Phoenix is showing the typical pattern – when it’s clear that that you’ve been called out and you were wrong, you drop out of the discussion. Possibly you go somewhere else where people aren’t as well-informed.
When you see this quite frequently, as I’ve done and I’m sure others here have, you have to start thinking this is not just motivated cognition, or stubbornness, and it’s not just trolling either – it looks like a campaign which is not about proving anything, but about trying to create doubt and confusion, and upset people (which is like trolling, except trolling is for the pleasure of seeing people upset, while this seems more calculated for a broader agenda).
As I’ve seen in my research, if you can make an issue seem difficult, awkward and embarrassing – something that a lot of people get hot under the collar about – many people will start avoiding it. They may not know much about it, but they know it creates bad feelings, and I think that’s enough to make many people think there is something wrong, not just with the issue, but with those who try to talk about.
ZM I had a look at it, Chartsmanship.one of the commenters picked it up. ” Do you know, for the NOAA graph, what is the vertical scale? It’s weird that it’s not shown on the graph.”
Adjust the y-axis. Bingo
On the graph itself it says the trend is .06 degrees C per decade!
Is that what all the fuss is about?
@Val
Dan Kahan the researcher who does a lot of work on Motivated Cognition is at pains to explain that all humans do Motivated Cognition, all the time.
This way of thinking is the default way that our brains work. Some people can learn to look for these patterns in their thinking and moderate the automatic thinking that is very efficient usually.
It is the context now that has highlighted this tendency in one group of people.
Dan Kahan goes to great lengths to explain that motivated cognition is not restricted to people on the right of politics; he is very much not in favour of the ‘asymmetry’ theory in which it is argued that people on the right are less intelligent or more fearful or whatever.
Fifty Ways To Fudge Your Data
The problem is all inside your ethics she said to me
The answer is easy if you don’t take it logically
I’d like to help you in your struggle to earn a fee
There must be fifty ways to fudge your data
She said it is my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning will be lost and misconstrued
But I’ll repeat myself until it sinks in, dude
There must be fifty ways to fudge your data
Fifty ways to fudge your data
You just pick a new date, mate
Cherry picking’s a plan, man
Be arbitrary, Mary
Get yourself a fee
Become a hack, Mack
Appear on radio that’s talkback
Become like me, see
And you’ll get a fee
She said it grieves me so to see you use your brain
Don’t you know a little mistruth will gently ease the strain
And I said hypothetically speaking would please explain
About the fifty ways
She said why don’t you work all through the night
And through fatigue make mistakes that you’ll claim are slight
Then she paid me and I realised she probably was right
There must be fifty ways to fudge your data
Fifty ways to fudge your data
Ignore fact, Jack
Mis-scale a graph, Garth
Don’t care who you destroy, boy
Just get yourself a fee
Claim conspiracy, Lee
Ignore ice free arctic sea
Lie like an Aussie PM, Sven,
And get yourself a fee
– not quite by Paul Simon
@chrisl
Explain what you mean by “all the fuss”?
But why do you think that you are entitled to an explanation or any response from people here?
Are you one of those entitled people that Hockey talked about?
chrisl,
The blogger responded to that comment, if you just read one comment further. The axis was labeled in Fahrenheit but we use Celsius in Australia, so he took away the label:
“Sarah Webber
Posted August 22, 2014 at 5:49 pm | Permalink
Great post – I love your break down of some of the dodgy ways numbers are used in this debate! Do you know, for the NOAA graph, what is the vertical scale? It’s weird that it’s not shown on the graph.
dcrock
Posted August 22, 2014 at 10:40 pm | Permalink
…
Sarah – yeah sorry, there was a scale on the right in Fahrenheit but I removed it. The anomalies for the last 10-15 years are all in the +0.5-0.6 C range… The scale is in 1C increments so it doesn’t show up well unfortunately.”
it says the trend is .06 degrees per decade – but if you think about this you can see it would add up over time, so in a century from 1914-2014 it would add up to .6 degrees.
You then have to remember this rapidity of climate change started around 1750 with the industrial revolution – and as the world has become more and more industrialised the ghg emissions have increased. So that the trend for the last century is 0.06 degrees, doesn’t mean this 0.06 rate is constant because it will increase according to the rate of increase of ghg emissions.
My understanding is there is around about a 30 year delay in ghg making the warming – so the increase in temperature from pre-industrial norms we have now is related to cumulative ghg emissions up to the 1970s or 1980s. The effects of the cumulative emissions up to 2014 won’t be seen for another 30 ish years.
At the moment if I remember correctly we are at about 0.8 degrees of warming from pre-industrial norms. Then you would add on what is in the pipeline from cumulative emissions up to 2014 – and I think we would be at above 1 degrees of warming from pre-industrial norms in the pipeline.
James Hansen a scientist from NASA thinks 350ppm co2 equivalent is about as far as it is possible to increase ghg in the atmosphere without causing too much destabilisation of the climate systems.
At the moment we are hovering around 400 ppm.
The government’s at Copenhagen agreed to stay within 2 degrees, which from memory is around 580ppm co2 equivalent.
At the moment on current trends it looks like we are heading to 4-6 degrees of warming in the pipeline by the end of our century.
There was a book published on Australia at 4 degrees of warming late last year, which is interesting but worrying reading. The climate is very complex, so the book gives possible scenarios for what might happen.
In human written history we have not before now had this high level of ghg in the atmosphere. You have to go back and look at geological and fossil records to get an idea of what it was like. But the world was quite different in these long ago times. One problem with climate models is our data records (except for geological records) are reasonably recent – so it has been hard to back cast in the models say several million years ago and get results that align with the geological records. Although you might be concerned that this shows some inadequacy in the models – the problem is actually that the models are producing results too similar to our current climate, when the geological records show a vaster difference. This is quite a worry when you think about things like the Siberian permafrost starting to melt.
This is a very basic summary, but I am not a scientist. You could find more information on these points on the Internet by scientists , and confirm if I have remembered the correct numbers.
ZM
How do you even measure .06 degrees per decade?
This is the actual warming that you referred me to … .06 degrees per decade.
So how do you get to 2 degrees(Copenhagen) or 4-6 degrees in the “pipeline”?
The actual data has flat-lined fot the past 18 years (see above)
So the graph has to come out of it’s flatline and suddenly shoot up by 4-6 degrees
Colour me sceptical
Fortunately, the social and institutional processes of science are not subject to the biases of individual psychology (at least not systematically, and not over the medium term). That’s how and why science works.
Efforts to persuade individuals suffering from strong counter-factual biases that science has found what science has, in fact, found are the stuff of politics (and blogs for that matter). As (probably more) significant in practical terms, certainly, but distinct and secondary.
Personally I think anyone not convinced at this stage is entirely lost to reasonable discourse, and not worth engaging.
(The only response making much sense: please write your revolutionary papers, win the inevitably consequent Nobels, but until then, go away)