Major analysis confirms global warming is real

On 09/12/2011 11:20, Peter Webb wrote:

"Martin Brown" wrote in message
...

Rubbish!!! The limit as h - 0 only exists in symbolic algebra and
pure mathematics.

No, its used constantly throughout real science. In real science, you
establish that a rate exists by measuring over shorther and shorter
timeframes until you are certain that reducing the timeframe does not
change the rate which is calculated. Otherwise you don't call it a rate.

For example, the rate of expansion of the Universe. We measure this over
time baselines of about 10^-9 seconds and do so repeatedly and get
identical answers; we know it can therefore be approximated as a linear
function over periods of decades. Because we can form the limit if not
to zero but at least to 10^-9 seconds, we can condifently talk about the
rate of expansion of the Universe. If this fluctuated wildly at the
timescale of 10^-9 seconds, astronomers would not and could not talk
about te rate of expansion of the Universe.

Lets see evidence of these measurements of the cosmological expansion of
the universe using a time baseline of 10^-9 seconds or 1ns.

Most cosmologically distant objects are very dim and will not provide
enough photons to even detect on this short timescale.

It took Hubble about 10 years to accumulate enough points on his graph
and 10 years against the roughly 10,000,000,000 years age of the
universe is not that bad an approximation to epsilon. And for some of
his points he had to watch Cepheid variables through a couple of cycles
to determine their period and hence absolute luminosity.

The cosmological expansion does provide a useful illustration of how
science deniers, lying dittoheads and creationists would argue though.

[fake claim I] The Andromeda galaxy is blue shifted and actually coming
towards us so clearly there cannot be any expansion.

[fake claim II] It is all a trick by Mr Hubble et al to get more grants.

To the best of my knowledge all serious determinations of the Hubble
constant rely on the results of many days of observational spectroscopy
and photometry on extremely faint and distant objects spread out over
several years and many observers. A handful of exceptions occur when the
distant galaxies obligingly display a bright enough supernova standard
candle to allow quicker determinations.

Another classic case is where astronomers determine rate of expansion of
supernova remnants and again to get anything meaningful you need the
largest telescopes operating at the highest resolution and a baseline of
a few years to allow the object time to expand. For example the secular
expansion of Cass A between 1978 and 1994 was by a whopping 1.3%.
Luckily it is large and just fits in the VLA field of view at 6cm.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/np...3720d85a605246

In this case the average expansion was measured over 16 years - a nice
MPG movie of it has been made. In this case a baseline of about 5 years
is sufficient to observe secular differences with sufficient spatial
resolution to allow the expansion rate to be measured adequately.


It does not exist when you have noisy experimental data although you
can still determine the gradient of a graph.


Not of the data itself, no. It is not a continuous function. You can
determine billion figures for the gradient, depending on how you choose
to calculate it.

Most physics and engineering students are taught how to use a ruler and
a pencil to construct the gradient of a set of plotted data points.
Apparently you skipped that class or as seems more likely you pretend
that is it impossible because it suits your purposes.

Unless that is you are a lying dittohead with an agenda.

Like proving the earth is warming?

There is no doubt at all about that unless you are a lying dittohead

And there is a choice of how to model the derivative and they will
give slightly different answers. The quick and dirty method as I
described is easily seen to be good enough

Good enough for what?

To see the trends in raw climate data by applying a low pass filter.

How low and why?

Choose any low pass filter you like. It doesn't have to be much more
than 5 years boxcar average to suppress the sharp inter annual
variations from El Nino, La Nina and other short lived transients.

How long does weather last, anyway?

Seasons are observed over 12 months. The longest of the well known
periodicities driving the Earth's climate is the 11 year sunspot cycle.

I suspect that there are a couple of other terms around the 60 year and
93 year mark which represent lunar solar tidal effects. See the Keeling
Tides papers for details - the favoured model today is non-linear
oceanic currents as the preferred explanation.

Or are you trying to remove more than just weather?

Weather and short term transient oceanic currents. The object is to get
something that shows only the slow baseline variations.

The instantaneous rate of change is pretty well useless for planet
Earth. It is far too noisy

No. It has no noise at all.

It is entirely noise by any reasonable definition ignoring the practical
difficulties of measuring it in the first place.

and we cannot measure it adequately.

Yes.

However, that doesn't prevent us measuring more slowly varying
components.


And your motivation for doing this is what?

Because you can?

Why do you think this better approximates the "global warming rate"?
Could you give us the definition of the global warming rate, so we can
work out what manipulations to the data best approximate this quantity?

The amount by which the average global temperature changes over a
timescale of 30 years. Usually expressed in terms of K/century.

Changes on a decadal scale or longer.

"Or longer" ?

20 million years?

Or is it that the period can be anything, as long as it shows global
warming?

And why 10 years? Weather doesn't last 10 years, not as I know it,
Melbourne can have fours seasons in one day and the weather can be
completely different a 1,000 kms away, using the central limit thereom
(because weather is independent over timescales of a few weeks) these
will average out very quickly. Weather is not a 10 year phenomenum.

So, why 10 years or greater?

It is a reasonable compromise to show the underlying climatic trends of
the average global temperature. I am not all that attached to it as a
number - indeed I prefer odd length convolution kernels.

For about the tenth time, I urge you to learn the concept of a limit,
and in particular a crazy little thing we like to call epsilon delta.

Relevant in pure mathematics of continuous functions and algebraic
manipulation only.

If only this were true.

It is true.

You can define and measure a meaningful rate of change over a baseline
of finite extent provided that you specify the start and end points.

The original diagram from Hubble's famous paper illustrates this point
rather nicely (fig 1 online in a paper at PNAS). Look how crude his
original data points and lines are compared to a more modern version.

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/1/8.full

Celebrating landmark papers published in PNAS (and elsewhere)

Regards,
Martin Brown

On Dec 9, 3:50*pm, Martin Brown
wrote:

The cosmological expansion does provide a useful illustration of how
science deniers, lying dittoheads and creationists would argue though.


The idea that a person can witness the evolutionary timeline of the
Universe directly is in big trouble as it is not possible to view any
evolutionary timeline that way and unless a person wishes to believe
that they can see their own evolution from child to adult
directly,they had better drop this 'big bang' ideology fast.Geological
and biological evolution relies on a relaxed approach and unless
people have noticed,they took are in the stream of creation so that a
group who imagines they can stand outside evolutionary sciences are
far,far worse than those who don't believe in evolutionary sciences at
all.

"Greg Hennessy" wrote in message
...
On 2011-12-09, Peter Webb wrote:
So, do they show global warming at the rate of 1,000 degrees per decade
as
both my back-of-an-envelope calculation and actual measurement show?

No. The acutal measurement, as presented in Vinnikov, shows the
variance in the trend at 0.05K/decade, as shown in Table 2.


That's the variance in the trend. That's not the rate of diurnal warming.


You *have* read Vinnikov, haven't you?

If you had, you certainly would have read the text:

[16] For analysis of the temperature time series (4), it is generally
only necessary to consider frequency components up to the second
harmonic in the seasonal and diurnal cycles for A(t) and only up to
the first harmonic in the diurnal cycle for B(t). Furthermore, the
daily and seasonal oscillations nearly average out to zero when taking
the yearly averaged expected value over the coplete 26-year time
series so that hYi = ^b0 + d^0t, where d^0 is the long-term climatic
trend in annual averages and ^b0 is the detrended value of hYi.
However, a complete set of coefficients, up to the second harmonic, is
needed to display the diurnal and seasonal variations of the expected
value. Also, as mentioned previously, the expected value coefficients
are dependent so that the addition of a second harmonic component in
A(t) can modify the linear trend coefficient, d^0.


Yes.

So?

The above is about numerical methods to smooth data to produce long baseline
data.

It is not about the rate of diurnal warming and cooling. According to
Vinnikov, that is about 0.3 degrees per day, or 1000 degrees per decade.
This is not based upon a theoretical argument (as my similar result was),
but on actual temperature measurements.

If you think that he is wrong, what do you think the typical diurnal
temperature variation is?

"Greg Hennessy" wrote in message
...
He didn't make it up, 30 years is the standard time interval to define
climate. 30 years was chosen because it's long enough to eliminate
year-to-year variations.


Way longer than is needed to do this. Nor do I understand why you would
want
to.

We are well aware that you don't understand. I have faint hopes you
might actually learn something. I don't have much hope that you will.


Perhaps if you explained why you want to eliminate year-to-year variations?

Why not decade to decade or century to century variations as well?


Your lack of understanding is something only you can change.

There are even some years which are unusually warm du to e.g. a
strong El Nino effect (which transfers heat from the ocean to the
atmosphere).

And El Nino is not a climactic event?

How do you figure that?

El Nino, and La Nina are oscillations. They transfer heat back and
forth between the ocean and the atmosphere, but long term the average
temperature of the oceans remains the same, and long term the average
temperature of the atmosphere remains the same. That makes them
"weather" not "climate".


The ice ages are also oscillations. After they happen, the long term the
average temperature of the oceans remains the same, and long term the
average temperature of the atmosphere remains the same.

Therefore ice ages are "weather".

Indeed, your definition is so stupid that there is no climate, it is all
weather. Anything which goes down and then up or vice versa is suddently
weather, apparently leaving nothing left.

30 years was chosen because it's long enough to eliminate year-to-year
variations.

And you want to do that because ....

Because they aren't climate.


Climate defined as "something to do with temperatures that is increasing".

30 years does seem an awfully long time to average out local weather. Are
you sure you aren't averaging out something other than local weather?

"Greg Hennessy" wrote in message
...
On 2011-12-09, Peter Webb wrote:
The actual figure was 10,000 degrees per century, not that different to
the
estimation above.

Of course only a moron would take a diurnal figure and try to
extrapolate it to a century.


I didn't.

It is a rate calculation. I am just converting to the units that you and
others have used for discussing warming rates, being degrees per century.
Which you had no problem with before.

Or is climate "science" only valid if we pick a particular set of units for
measurement? If so, that would show a strong anthropogenic component, but
not in a good way!

On Oct 22, 2:55*pm, Mike Collins wrote:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1021144716.htm

Wow! 0.8"/year of bedrock rise from ice melt is seriously impressive.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-...s-bedrock.html

http://translate.google.com/#
Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG / “Guth Usenet”

"Martin Brown" wrote in message
...
On 09/12/2011 11:20, Peter Webb wrote:

"Martin Brown" wrote in message
...

Rubbish!!! The limit as h - 0 only exists in symbolic algebra and
pure mathematics.

No, its used constantly throughout real science. In real science, you
establish that a rate exists by measuring over shorther and shorter
timeframes until you are certain that reducing the timeframe does not
change the rate which is calculated. Otherwise you don't call it a rate.

For example, the rate of expansion of the Universe. We measure this over
time baselines of about 10^-9 seconds and do so repeatedly and get
identical answers; we know it can therefore be approximated as a linear
function over periods of decades. Because we can form the limit if not
to zero but at least to 10^-9 seconds, we can condifently talk about the
rate of expansion of the Universe. If this fluctuated wildly at the
timescale of 10^-9 seconds, astronomers would not and could not talk
about te rate of expansion of the Universe.

Lets see evidence of these measurements of the cosmological expansion of
the universe using a time baseline of 10^-9 seconds or 1ns.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshif... terpretation

The baseline for Doppler measurements is of the order of the frequency of
the light whose redshift is being measured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_effect

That is why (for example) Doppler radar can detect changes to speed which
are (from a human perspective) absolutely instantaneous.


Most cosmologically distant objects are very dim and will not provide
enough photons to even detect on this short timescale.

It took Hubble about 10 years to accumulate enough points on his graph and
10 years against the roughly 10,000,000,000 years age of the universe is
not that bad an approximation to epsilon. And for some of his points he
had to watch Cepheid variables through a couple of cycles to determine
their period and hence absolute luminosity.


Whereas the resolution that can be obtained using Cepheid variables is of
the order of the frequency of their cycle, which is far less than the
frequency of the light being emitted.

You are trying to tell the time using a calendar. Use something with much
finer resolution.

The cosmological expansion does provide a useful illustration of how
science deniers, lying dittoheads and creationists would argue though.

[fake claim I] The Andromeda galaxy is blue shifted and actually coming
towards us so clearly there cannot be any expansion.

[fake claim II] It is all a trick by Mr Hubble et al to get more grants.


I see you would much rather try and defend astronomy than try and defend
climate "science".

And who could blame you?


To the best of my knowledge all serious determinations of the Hubble
constant rely on the results of many days of observational spectroscopy
and photometry on extremely faint and distant objects spread out over
several years and many observers. A handful of exceptions occur when the
distant galaxies obligingly display a bright enough supernova standard
candle to allow quicker determinations.

Still defending astronomy?




Another classic case is where astronomers determine rate of expansion of
supernova remnants and again to get anything meaningful you need the
largest telescopes operating at the highest resolution and a baseline of a
few years to allow the object time to expand. For example the secular
expansion of Cass A between 1978 and 1994 was by a whopping 1.3%. Luckily
it is large and just fits in the VLA field of view at 6cm.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/np...3720d85a605246

In this case the average expansion was measured over 16 years - a nice MPG
movie of it has been made. In this case a baseline of about 5 years is
sufficient to observe secular differences with sufficient spatial
resolution to allow the expansion rate to be measured adequately.


Still defending astronomy?

Why?

I actually believe astronomy to be a real science. I have in fact already
used it as an example of such.

So why are you generating all of this material in support of the expansion
of the Universe, which we both agree is happening?

Typical crank response: just completely change the topic to something
irrelevant if you can't give a scientific justification.





It does not exist when you have noisy experimental data although you
can still determine the gradient of a graph.


Not of the data itself, no. It is not a continuous function. You can
determine billion figures for the gradient, depending on how you choose
to calculate it.

Most physics and engineering students are taught how to use a ruler and a
pencil to construct the gradient of a set of plotted data points.
Apparently you skipped that class or as seems more likely you pretend that
is it impossible because it suits your purposes.

I was always taught to use a numerical method which best approximated the
definition of the gradient for that set of points.


Unless that is you are a lying dittohead with an agenda.

Like proving the earth is warming?

There is no doubt at all about that unless you are a lying dittohead


You even talk like a crank.


And there is a choice of how to model the derivative and they will
give slightly different answers. The quick and dirty method as I
described is easily seen to be good enough

Good enough for what?

To see the trends in raw climate data by applying a low pass filter.

How low and why?

Choose any low pass filter you like. It doesn't have to be much more than
5 years boxcar average to suppress the sharp inter annual variations from
El Nino, La Nina and other short lived transients.


So I can use a formula for global warming which is

Rate at time t = (T(t) - T(t-5))/5

Is this the formula which you say is acceptable?

If not, could you supply it?



How long does weather last, anyway?

Seasons are observed over 12 months. The longest of the well known
periodicities driving the Earth's climate is the 11 year sunspot cycle.

How long does weather last, anyway?

I know how long seasons last, and the sun's sunspot cycle. I was asking
about weather, a word which is notably absent from your "answer".



I suspect that there are a couple of other terms around the 60 year and 93
year mark which represent lunar solar tidal effects. See the Keeling Tides
papers for details - the favoured model today is non-linear oceanic
currents as the preferred explanation.

Or are you trying to remove more than just weather?

Weather and short term transient oceanic currents. The object is to get
something that shows only the slow baseline variations.


Weather *and* oceanic currents! The rules now change (again).

How long does weather last?

How long do "short term transient oceanic currents" last? And why do you
want to remove them? Aren't ocean currents an important determinant of
climate?



The instantaneous rate of change is pretty well useless for planet
Earth. It is far too noisy

No. It has no noise at all.

It is entirely noise by any reasonable definition ignoring the practical
difficulties of measuring it in the first place.

No.

The practical difficulties of measuring it do not introduce noise.




and we cannot measure it adequately.

Yes.

However, that doesn't prevent us measuring more slowly varying
components.


And your motivation for doing this is what?

Because you can?

Why do you think this better approximates the "global warming rate"?
Could you give us the definition of the global warming rate, so we can
work out what manipulations to the data best approximate this quantity?

The amount by which the average global temperature changes over a
timescale of 30 years. Usually expressed in terms of K/century.

30 years?

How long does weather last again?

Perhaps if you were to *define* weather first, then you would be able to
define a numerical technique which best removes it? This is how things like
this are done in science. You work out what you are trying to approximate,
and then you work out what numerical method best approximates it. They don't
just invent a numerical method and use it because it gives them the answer
they want.



Changes on a decadal scale or longer.

"Or longer" ?

20 million years?

Or is it that the period can be anything, as long as it shows global
warming?

And why 10 years? Weather doesn't last 10 years, not as I know it,
Melbourne can have fours seasons in one day and the weather can be
completely different a 1,000 kms away, using the central limit thereom
(because weather is independent over timescales of a few weeks) these
will average out very quickly. Weather is not a 10 year phenomenum.

So, why 10 years or greater?

It is a reasonable compromise to show the underlying climatic trends of
the average global temperature. I am not all that attached to it as a
number - indeed I prefer odd length convolution kernels.

How do you decide which is the better approach?

In real science, you would start with a definition of what you are trying to
approximate, and *then* devise the numerical method which best approximates
it. You seem to have just simply invented a numerocal method with no concept
of what it is supposed to be approximating.




For about the tenth time, I urge you to learn the concept of a limit,
and in particular a crazy little thing we like to call epsilon delta.

Relevant in pure mathematics of continuous functions and algebraic
manipulation only.

If only this were true.

It is true.

You can define and measure a meaningful rate of change over a baseline of
finite extent provided that you specify the start and end points.

That is true, but not what we are discussing. We are discussing whether your
formula approximates the instantaneous rate of chnage. Clearly it doesn't.
So what is it approximating?




The original diagram from Hubble's famous paper illustrates this point
rather nicely (fig 1 online in a paper at PNAS). Look how crude his
original data points and lines are compared to a more modern version.

http://www.pnas.org/content/101/1/8.full


The difference derives from random measurement errors.

These are very substantial in radio astronomy, and effectively zero in the
temperature record for the last 150 years. We have a *lot* of independent
data points.



Celebrating landmark papers published in PNAS (and elsewhere)


Hubble's paper is good science.


Regards,
Martin Brown


So clearly you would prefer discussing that, rather than climate "science".

You *have* read Vinnikov, haven't you?

You haven't answered this question. Have you read the Vinnikov paper?

The above is about numerical methods to smooth data to produce long baseline
data.

There was no mention of smoothing data. Have you read the paper?

It is not about the rate of diurnal warming and cooling. According to
Vinnikov, that is about 0.3 degrees per day, or 1000 degrees per decade.

Vinnikov says the first, not the second.

Perhaps if you explained why you want to eliminate year-to-year variations?

Becasue year to year variations are not part of climate, but are of
weather, the effect of the earths orbit around the sun, and multi year
phenomenon such as ENSO.

I've explained this before. Why do you ask me to repeat my self
multiple times?

Why not decade to decade or century to century variations as well?

Century to century variations are considered part of climate. Decade
to decade are in the mid point, some people subtract them out, some
leave them in.

Therefore ice ages are "weather".

Ice ages are not considered weather by climatilogists.

Indeed, your definition is so stupid that there is no climate, it is all
weather.

Liar. I never claimed everything was climate.

You seem to be a pathological liar.

Climate defined as "something to do with temperatures that is increasing".

No, climate is not defined as that. How stupid are you?

On 2011-12-10, Peter Webb wrote:
Of course only a moron would take a diurnal figure and try to
extrapolate it to a century.

I didn't.

It is a rate calculation. I am just converting to the units that you and
others have used for discussing warming rates, being degrees per century.

The units to discuss century long events are different than the units
for discussion diurnal events.

You don't measure the distance between cities in micron.