Since no bunny reads comments
An update on the Senate mid-term all nighter from E. Swanson (is that Eric from sci.environment?? Eli asks. If so welcome, if not also welcome.)
- The Congressional Record has the all night Climate Change session up for readers (PDF Warning). It's much faster to skim/read the proceedings compared to watching a video...
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13/3/14 8:24 AM
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E. Swanson said...
- In my previous post regarding the all nighter, I missed the first batch of speeches. They were listed as Morning Business, which fooled me. there was an even earlier reference, which recorded a presentation by Senator Sessions from Alabama.
Sen. Sessions includes a graph showing a comparison of "actual temperature measurements" with model results. That chart, which can be seen at time point 0:23:40 (4:23PM) into the C SPAN video, appears to be one from Roy Spencer, which is similar to one Spencer presented in his Senate testimony back in July of 2013. Back then, Spencer showed the MSU MT data series from 20S to 20N, claiming that these data proved there was no warming.
Of course this would be the expected result from the MT, since the MSU channel 2 data is contaminated with emissions from the stratosphere and the stratosphere has long been known to exhibit a strong cooling trend in the satellite data, such as found in Channel 4. McNider and Christy presented a similar MT graph in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on 19 February. This latest graph from Spencer looks like a later version which appears to use the TLT data and the plot of the average model results is shifted upwards, just as McNider and Christy did for their WSJ commentary. These graphs use a 5 year smoothing, which adds a 2 1/2 year phase shift to the data, thus the endpoint at 2013 should actually be placed at 2010.5.
I think that Spencer, Christy and McNider know full well that presenting these charts is intended to deceive the viewer. The presentation in the WSJ is especially troubling, as this is a major source for financial information for the investing public and was timed to appear just before the Supreme Court was to hear a case about Climate Change, thus these efforts could be considered fraud.
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8 comments:
First we have The Ship of fools, now The Chamber of Fools.
Eli, yup, that's me, back to wandering the Net after TheOilDrum became an archive.
After looking at the graph from Senator Sessions, I decided to try to reproduce it. Using the UAH TLT 5.6 anomaly data for global temperature, I applied a 60 month moving average, "centering" the result on the middle of the 60 months. That is, each data point represents an average for the data combining that date with the previous 29 and following 30 months of data. The last month of 1978 and the first month of 2014 were left of the average
HERE's the Result.
Notice the peak at July 1989 and the absence of the 1998 spike, which has been smeared by the averaging process. Using the centered average, there's no result before June 1981 or after June 2011. The graph which Sessions presented appeared to continue to the end of 2013, so one wonders how this was done. Perhaps Spencer just calculated a trailing average, though he (or was it Christy) knows of the problem. I doubt that Sessions is aware of the subtle manipulation in the graph...
Things seem to be escalating into the realm of rhetorical overkill, with both sides fantasizing about the brave punishments they hold in store for the other- I hope Eric does not end up in competition with the author of"
The 19 eminent scientist who had co-written the dozen learned papers in the special issue had suggested – tell it not in Gath and Ashkelon – that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a racketeer-influenced criminal organization headquartered in Switzerland (which conveniently has no RICO statute ...
Digging still deeper into the void, I found the source of the graph which Senator Sessions threw up in the Senate. It's a graph presented by John Christy before a hearing on 11 Dec 2013 before the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. HERE's a LINK to Christy's written statement. The graph uses data for the Middle Troposphere, that is, the UAH and RSS MT products, as well as balloon data, all shown as 5 year trailing averages. The balloon data using radiosonds records temperature at discrete altitudes and is thus processed to simulate the UAH/RSS measurements. These data are said to be for the tropics, not the full global data. This would appear to be an earlier version the graph which McNider and Christy showed in their WSJ commentary on 19 February. The satellite data suffers from the problem of contamination by the contribution of emissions from the stratosphere, a fact which has been known for more than 20 years. As a result, the "actual temperature measurements" surely understate the warming trend for the globe, both because of the contamination and the fact that the higher latitudes are excluded.
" Make that some billionaire generosity. Sen. Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats are doubtlessly thrilled by leftist hedge fund manager and environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has pledged to spend as much as $100 million to pressure politicians to enact climate change laws. Steyer spent $11 million last year helping to elect Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia. He spent additional millions on a Massachusetts Democratic congressional primary. And as the New York Times is forced to admit, Steyer is “seeking to build a war chest that would make his political organization, NextGen Climate Action, among the largest outside groups in the country, similar in scale to the conservative political network overseen by Charles and David Koch.”
"
Anon@3:15,
Yet another quote without attribution. This one is by rightwing nutjob Arnold Ahlert, who thinks that the Kochsuckers should have a monopoly on buying the gummint.
I took another look at the UAH data. I downloaded the latest TMT time series file, uahncdc_mt_5.5.txt , then played with it in a spreadsheet, plotting the tropical data.
HERE's the Graph
As expected, the trend is very small and the moving average smoothed curve appears to show little apparent warming.
anon n+1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/03/18/senate-democrats-talk-about-climate-threat-increase-risk/
Senate Democrats talk about climate threat, increase risk
" Senate Democrats are willing to talk about climate change all night if it will please a major donor, but when it comes to casting tough votes they take a pass. Despite all the talk, no serious climate legislation is on the table in the Senate. Worse, the same Senators who claim climate change is an urgent problem support legislation to increase the nation’s vulnerability to the threat of warming-enhanced storm surges and potential sea-level rise. Just three days after the climate talk-a-thon, all-but-one of the Senate Climate Caucus voted to gut recent reforms of the National Flood Insurance Program that reduced federal subsidies for coastal development. In other words, the same Senators who say climate change is an urgent threat are happy to have taxpayers and other premium payers subsidize coastal development that lies in harm’s way. "
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