Warmers ....another pesky data point

According to AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Joe Lundberg, "Some locations in the Northeast are challenging their coldest February on record."

"Live steam"....Steve McQueen

This Basque couldn't even read a rain forest article without getting confused....a real granola type.

Well here is the probability distribution of temps for Chicago over 50 years. How often do we see temps 30 degrees off normal? Almost never but this fool is relying on his little Al Gore picture. Dumb and opinionated.

Basque you haven't contradicted one word I have said....all you have done is quote your experts....and quote badly. One expert was a war correspondent....hahaha. You really don't have a clue do you? Well here's another bit of information to ignore. When this month is over two of the  top ten coldest Febs in the last 150 years in the American heartland, will have occurred in the last two years.

"This February is on track to be the fifth-coldest on record in Chicago, according to the weather service. The coldest February in Chicago was in 1875, when the mean temperature was 14.6 degrees, according to weather service records. The average temperature so far this February is 16.9 degrees, Seeley said. (February 2014's average temperature of 17.3 degrees made it the ninth-coldest on record.)"

The top ten coldest Februaries on record in Chicago are:

1. 1875
2. 1936
3. 1979
4. 1978
5. 1895
6. 1901
7. 1905
8. 1904
9. 2014
10. 1885

Last fall the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which consists of hundreds of scientists operating under the auspices of the United Nations, released its fifth report in the past 25 years. This one repeated louder and clearer than ever the consensus of the world’s scientists: The planet’s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the warming since the mid-20th century. Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the most powerful Republican voices on environmental matters, has long declared global warming a hoax.

The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable—scientists love to debunk one another. It’s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.

The news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers . The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses. Not so. The (boring) truth is that it usually advances incrementally, through the steady accretion of data and insights gathered by many people over many years. So it has been with the consensus on climate change. That’s not about to go poof with the next thermometer reading.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming.

The “science communication problem,” as it’s blandly called by the scientists who study it, has yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe—and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus. It’s not that they can’t grasp it, according to Dan Kahan of Yale University. In one study he asked 1,540 Americans, a representative sample, to rate the threat of climate change on a scale of zero to ten. Then he correlated that with the subjects’ science literacy. He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger views—at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.

Americans fall into two basic camps, Kahan says. Those with a more “egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change. In contrast, people with a “hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to—some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

In the U.S., climate change somehow has become a litmus test that identifies you as belonging to one or the other of these two antagonistic tribes. When we argue about it, Kahan says, we’re actually arguing about who we are, what our crowd is. We’re thinking, People like us believe this. People like that do not believe this. For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.

“Take a barber in a rural town in South Carolina,” Kahan has written. “Is it a good idea for him to implore his customers to sign a petition urging Congress to take action on climate change? No. If he does, he will find himself out of a job, just as his former congressman, Bob Inglis, did when he himself proposed such action.”

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt. “People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.”

Meanwhile the Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts. Gone are the days when a small number of powerful institutions—elite universities, encyclopedias, major news organizations, even National Geographic—served as gatekeepers of scientific information. The Internet has democratized information, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to penetrate the bubble? How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help. Liz Neeley, who helps train scientists to be better communicators at an organization called Compass, says that people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values. She has personal experience with this. Her father is a climate change skeptic and gets most of his information on the issue from conservative media. In exasperation she finally confronted him: “Do you believe them or me?” She told him she believes the scientists who research climate change and knows many of them personally. “If you think I’m wrong,” she said, “then you’re telling me that you don’t trust me.” Her father’s stance on the issue softened. But it wasn’t the facts that did it.

If you’re a rationalist, there’s something a little dispiriting about all this. In Kahan’s descriptions of how we decide what to believe, what we decide sometimes sounds almost incidental. Those of us in the science-communication business are as tribal as anyone else, he told me. We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community. When I mentioned to Kahan that I fully accept evolution, he said, “Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

Maybe—except that evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences. The people who believe vaccines cause autism—often well educated and affluent, by the way—are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “The University of Google is where I got my degree from.”)

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.

Some environmental activists want scientists to emerge from their ivory towers and get more involved in the policy battles. Any scientist going that route needs to do so carefully, says Liz Neeley. “That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,” she says. In the debate over climate change the central allegation of the skeptics is that the science saying it’s real and a serious threat is politically tinged, driven by environmental activism and not hard data. That’s not true, and it slanders honest scientists. But it becomes more likely to be seen as plausible if scientists go beyond their professional expertise and begin advocating specific policies.

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Scientific thinking has to be taught, and sometimes it’s not taught well, McNutt says. Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method. Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is. The scientific method doesn’t come naturally—but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did.

Now we have incredibly rapid change, and it’s scary sometimes. It’s not all progress. Our science has made us the dominant organisms, with all due respect to ants and blue-green algae, and we’re changing the whole planet. Of course we’re right to ask questions about some of the things science and technology allow us to do. “Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.” We need to get a lot better at finding answers, because it’s certain the questions won’t be getting any simpler.

There was also complete concensus around the role of fat in heart disease and the advisabilty of eating carbs. Turns out that was dead wrong. You don't need a conspiracy when all the grants are only handed out for proving climate change. So far we know:

1) The temperature has supposedly increased by 1.2 degrees C over 115 years.

2) Part of that is undoubtedly because the Sun was more intense at the end of the 20th century. Two scientists in a peer reviewed article for a respected Climate Journal estimated about 40% of the 1.2 degrees can be attributed to the sun effect.

3) All of the climate models predicted much higher temps by now.

4) The rain forests are not a CO2 source as predicted, but are showing dramatic growth and are in fact a major CO2 sink.

5) The antarctic ice extent is at record levels

6) Temps haven't increased at all for at least 15 years.

You may find that compelling proof of man made warming, I don't.

1.  you love to argue and would take any ridiculous position just to be contrary (some would say this is the behaviour of a "stirrier"; 
   




2. you can be convincing regardless of how ridiculous the position you take; for you the more ridiculous the better
   




3.  the company you keep on this "anti-warmer" argument. Our good friend Beeno is your main supporter. Which gives you a serious credibility problem.
   

Looks like NASAs in on the scam, the left wing grant blagging crack pots....

2014 was the warmest year on record, with global temperatures 0.68C (1.24F) above the long-term average, US government scientists have said.

The results mean that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century.

The analysis was published on Friday by Nasa and Noaa researchers.

Last month, the World Meteorological Organization released provisional figures that predicted the past 12 months were set to be record breakers.

The long-term global average temperature is calculated from data collected between 1951 and 1980.

"This is the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades," said Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases," he added.

Nasa and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) maintain two of the three global datasets of global temperatures. The UK's Met Office maintains the third.

Data from all three are used by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and formed the basis of its provisional figures in December.

Talking to journalists, Dr Schmidt said the results from the two sets of data showed "a lot of warmth in the oceans".

"It shows very clearly that it has been the warmest year on record in the oceans but it wasn't quite the warmest year in the land records but combined it did give us the warmest year," he explained.

Hot water

During a presentation of the two agencies' reports, Thomas Karl, director of Noaa's National Climatic Data Center, said there was a "considerable amount of area where we saw the record highest temperature observed, such as many portions of Europe and every ocean had parts that were [the warmest on record]".

If all you can do is google global warming and reproduce a bunch of old material, it's not going to be much use is it. Why aren't they talking about the complete absence of Atlantic hurricanes. And if we have had 14 of the 15 warmest years on record, why is there a concensus global warming has stalled?

These are miniscule increments as is obvious from a rise of 1.2 degrees C in a 115 years, not all of which is due to man made activity. After all the only thing that warms the planet is the sun and the sun is hotter than it was 115 years ago....google the charts.

And yes NASA is deeply committed to global warming, it's a big part of a dwindling budget.

Unless you have something original to say let's stop. You are perfectly at liberty to believe what they tell you.

Look at your graph....the graph is comprised of 11 year averages. And it stops at 2000. In fact temps have stalled since 1995 almost exactly when solar activity dropped off it's peak. But solar output is still well above the level it was in 1900.....so unless the sun isn't what is warming the planet, part of the 1.2 degree temp rise HAS to be because of sun activity. Two respected climate scientists put the sun effect at about 40% of the rise.

And then there is this:

"Commuters make their way on a frigidly cold day in New York on February 20, 2015. The temperature in Central Park Friday morning was 2 degrees Fahrenheit (-16.6C). The previous record for this date was 7 degrees Fahrenheit (-13.8C), set in 1950. AFP PHOTO/JEWEL SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)"

The record was smashed in NY by 5 degrees . That's massive and it's occurring all over the country East of the Rockies. It's not one data point, its hundreds adding to the hundreds last winter.

If we are warming significantly, given the thin tailed probability distribution above, we should rarely see new all time lows. And I dare say we should never see all time lows by 5 degrees.

Warmers are in trouble

Temperature isn't even real temperature...it's restated temperature. Apparently the old data has to be "normalized".....and of course that means it has to be reduced to make the temp increases more dramatic.

The fact is there is plenty of room for manipulation.

You can't manipulate a 5 degree drop in the record low in NY though  ....it's an embarrassment for the warmers.

Dear me, we keep producing various 120 year graphs which show a huge hockey stick when we are only talking about 1.2 degrees centigrade. And Basque says theere is no Hiatus in temps. But this is what www.climate.gov....the  US goverment's official site on global warming says:

The “pause” in global warming observed since 2000 followed a period of rapid acceleration in the late 20th century. Starting in the mid-1970s, global temperatures rose 0.5 °C over a period of 25 years. Since the turn of the century, however, the change in Earth’s global mean surface temperature has been close to zero. Yet despite the halt in acceleration, each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.

And t hese guys are raving warmers....enjoy your crow!

Actually no....the data point I gave was for NY city which was 5 degrees colder than ever on Feb 23. And if you don't understand that is significant you don't understand probability distributions. Perhaps something simpler. Here we have CO2 data from Mona Kea.

You will note several things. Firstly CO2 rose at least half as much between 1850 and 1900 as it rose between 1900 and 1950, despite the vastly greater increase in industrial activity.

Secondly the temperature increase on Basque's chart is no greater for 1910 to 1940 than it is for 1980 to 2010, despite CO2 spiking in the period from 1980.. Showing two things... firstly there has been a natural CO2 increase over this period along with an industrial one. And secondly bigger increases in CO2 don't lead to proportionately bigger increases in temp.

In fact CO2 has continued to rise steeply since 2000 while temps have stayed flat. Warming pundits are scrambling to find the missing heat.

And of course it's all a storm in a 1.2 degree tea cup. Be unafraid.