Rearranging the Deckchairs

Less Wrong has an excellent post on Creationism and Global Warming ‘Scepticism’:

We are, I think, dealing with that old problem of motivated cognition. As Gilovich says: “Conclusions a person does not want to believe are held to a higher standard than conclusions a person wants to believe. In the former case, the person asks if the evidence compels one to accept the conclusion, whereas in the latter case, the person asks instead if the evidence allows one to accept the conclusion.” People map the domain of belief onto the social domain of authority, with a qualitative difference between absolute and nonabsolute demands: If a teacher tells you certain things, and you have to believe them, and you have to recite them back on the test. But when a student makes a suggestion in class, you don’t have to go along with it – you’re free to agree or disagree (it seems) and no one will punish you.

Read the whole thing

Even soil feels the heat: Soils release more carbon dioxide as globe warms: “ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2010) — Twenty years of field studies reveal that as the Earth has gotten warmer, plants and microbes in the soil have given off more carbon dioxide. So-called soil respiration has increased about one-tenth of 1 percent per year since 1989, according to an analysis of past studies in the journal Nature.”

Simply make up a high trend, and see if you can ‘connect’ it to information reported in IPCC AR4. Just a word or number in common may be sufficient to fool some ’sceptics’.

Lucia shows how it is done:

a trend equal to exactly 0.2 C/decade falls outside the ±95% confidence intervals for the trend consistent with the NOAA/NCDC data observations.

[...]

Quite often, if we chose a confidence level of 95%, the result of a statistical analysis guides us to conclude a trend that we can connect to information reported in the IPCC AR4 is found to be is false. (For example, the trend of 0.2C/century is diagnosed as false above.)

But a trend of “exactly 0.2C/decade” cannot be connected to information reported in IPCC AR4. That document refers to a trend of “about 0.2C/decade”.

From AR4, Section 3

For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emissions scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all GHGs and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected. Afterwards, temperature projections increasingly depend on specific emissions scenarios (Figure 3.2).

There are no doubt many reasonable interpretations of “about” but “exactly” isn’t one of them.

Of course this was pointed out to Lucia yonks ago.

Seems like not many of the global cooling crew are willing to put their money where their mouths are:

Will Global Average Temperatures for 2010-2011 be THE warmest on record?

Update: looks like the price graph above is live updated. Still a remarkable absence of betters on ‘global cooling’ so far :-)

Eli Rabett has spotted some excellent points in the Royal Society of Chemistry submission to the Parliamentary inquiry into the CRU hack.

Regional rainfall in a warming world: “

By John D. Cox | Fri Mar 5, 2010 05:15 PM ET

Slowly but surely, a picture of climate change at the regional scale — where it really matters — is beginning to take shape.

Apart from the obvious warming at the high polar latitudes, which already is affecting Arctic sea ice, the rate of Greenland ice cap melting, and Antarctic ice shelves, new details are beginning to emerge about the impact of global warming in the Tropics — the boiler-room of Earth’s climate and weather.

This is the home of El Niño, and the generator of Asian monsoons, the towering cumulonimbus storms that deliver water vapor to the atmosphere and drive patterns of rainfall over much of the world.

In the March issue of the Journal of Climate, a team of University of Hawaii researchers led by meteorologist Shang-Ping Xie offers a preliminary look at what a relatively uniform warming does to a climate system that is chock o’block with regional patches of hot and cold and wet and dry. …

Regional Rainfall in a Warming World

“

(Via Technozoic.)

Via Tim Lambert:

A talk by Naomi Oreskes on her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

As with any talk by Naomi Oreskes, it is well worth a watch. Though she makes a couple of minor slips, for me there was only one bum note in the whole thing, where she suggests that ’sceptics’ as a whole are responsible for the CRU emails hack.

The banquet analogy she uses is excellent, and reminded me of a classic piece of standup from the Seinfeld episode ‘The Stock Tip’. Unfortunately I can’t find the clip on youtube, so you’ll have to settle for the script:

JERRY: Went out to dinner the other night. Check came at the end of the meal, as it always does. Never liked the check at the end of the meal system, because money’s a very different thing before and after you eat. Before you eat money has no value. And you don’t care about money when you’re hungry, you sit down at a restaurant. You’re like the ruler of an empire. “More drinks, appetizers, quickly, quickly! It will be the greatest meal of our lives.” Then after the meal, you know, you’ve got the pants open, you’ve got the napkins destroyed, cigarette butt in the mashed potatoes – then the check comes at that moment. People are always upset, you know. They’re mystified by the check. “What is this? How could this be?” They start passing it around the table, “Does this look right to you? We’re not hungry now. Why are we buying all this food?!”

Tim Worstall writes:

For, you see, no one is saying that the Arctic Oceans, at 50 metres down, have been getting warmer.

Yes they are.

Certainly not getting warmer as a result of anything that we’re doing with fossil fuels or cow burps.

Yes they are.

The results of CRUTEM have been replicated, reimplemented and/or corroborated at least six times by now, using a variety of analyses, written in different languages, by different people. (more…)

I am making a collection of climate ’sceptic’ arguments that flatly contradict each other. Here’s what I have so far. You will sometimes encounter these arguments in the same paragraph.

“We can and cannot compare past temperatures with the present”

“Figures faked to show warming show cooling, and this is why it is warming”

“The records are and are not reliable”

“We can and cannot predict the future climate”

“Do and do not trust complex models”

Mind of Dan has another.

Climate WTF has more

Update:
Skeptical Science has lots more!