Democracy Has Prevailed.

June 10, 2015

Hey, Look What I Found - CLIMATE SCIENCE AT THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW!

This piece from the AP:
Global warming has not stopped or even slowed in the past 18 years, according to a new federal study that rebuts doubters who've claimed that heating trends have paused.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration readjusted thousands of weather data points to account for different measuring techniques through the decades. Their calculations show that since 1998, the rate of warming is about the same as it has been since 1950: about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit a decade.

The so-called hiatus has been touted by non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science. Those claims have resonated; two years ago, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt the need to explain why the Earth was not heating up as expected, listing such reasons as volcanic eruptions, reduced solar radiation and the oceans absorbing more heat.

“The reality is that there is no hiatus,” said Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, N.C.. He is the lead author of a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science One key to claims of a hiatus is the start date: 1998. That year there was a big temperature spike; some of the next years were not as hot, though even hotter years followed in 2005, 2010 and 2014, according to NOAA, NASA and temperature records kept in England and Japan. This year is on pace to break last year's global heat record.
Here's the paper, btw.

My guess is that the AP writers are quite aware of the ongoing discussion about the so-called "hiatus" and so found some very interesting scientific support for this peer-reviewed paper.  For example:
Several outside scientists contacted by The Associated Press said the new and previous adjustments are sound. Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the new work was “good and careful analysis” but only confirms what most scientists already knew, that there was no such hiatus.
And this:
A few years ago, a group out of University of California Berkeley — funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of climate doubter groups and the tea party— took what was initially billed as a skeptical look at the previous NOAA data. But they pronounced the earlier adjustments legitimate. The same scientists now say the new NOAA adjustments are also proper.

“NOAA is confirming what we have been saying for some time that the ‘hiatus' in global warming is spurious,” Berkeley team chief and physicist Richard Muller said in an email. Muller said global warming continues but in “many fits and spurts.”
This last part is going to cause some climate "skeptics" some trouble, for example Judith Curry, who's not exactly a skeptic, but is used as one on Fox. Take a look:
“While I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on,” Judith Curry, a climate science professor at Georgia Tech, wrote in a response to the study.
If you follow the link to her response, you'll find this:
My bottom line assessment is this. I think that uncertainties in global surface temperature anomalies is substantially understated. The surface temperature data sets that I have confidence in are the UK group and also Berkeley Earth.
Guess what Berkeley Earth is?

That's the group "funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation" and founded and directed by Richard Muller - the same guy who just said that the "hiatus" in global warming is "spurious" and whose scientists now say that "the new NOAA adjustments are proper."

I wonder if the editorial board at the Tribune-Review even reads the news found in its own paper.

I'm guessing not but we'll see the next time they discuss the spurious global warming "hiatus."

1 comment:

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

SCIENCE!!!!!1!!
http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/08/global-warming-the-theory-that-predicts-nothing-and-explains-everything/
So what to do if your theory doesn’t fit the data? Why, change the data, of course!
Incredible: NOAA Gets Rid of 15 Year Hiatus In Global Warming Simply By Re-Weighting and "Adjusting" the Numbers
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/357139.php