Posted on 08/06/2010 9:59:02 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
A July 2009 paper by McLean, de Freitas and Carter showed that global average temperatures followed the Southern Oscillation Index (El Nino/La Nina) with a 5-8 months lag. The graph below shows that when the SOI is shifted forward by 7 months the two plots change direction together (except when volcanic eruptions caused cooling).
The chart above shows a projection of temperatures to Feb 2011. The chances are that the present warm spell will end quite suddenly before the end of this year. Over the next few months the SOI will indicate whether or not the cooling will continue beyond Feb 2011. Evidence from studies on past climate and sunspot cycle related effects gives a strong indication that the cooling will continue.
The paper is here and contains more graphs (see especially Figure 7)
Yes, but because the critics failed to understand the process (“derivative”) that was used to match the peaks and valleys in the two sets of data and derive the 7 month delay. Therefore they refused to accept that the above plot is actual temperatures and SOI. (They are). The response by the authors is here.
Jo Nova
The Response by the Authors (here) tells the story of how their paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR). Prior to publication on July 23 2009 they received glowing referee reviews, but afterwards the usual ClimateGate Team leapt into action for speedy damage control.
Within a couple of weeks Foster et al (Grant Foster, James Annan, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Jim Renwick, Jim Salinger, Gavin Schmidt and Kevin Trenberth) submitted their critique of it to the editor of JGR Atmospheres. At the same time as this, it was posted on the Internet – formatted in JGR style, as if it had already been accepted by JGR.
About then new editor was appointed at JGR (Editor-2).
The editor asks for suggestions (from Forster) for unbiased expert reviewers and Forster et al suggested six. But all six were well known to Phil Jones. Jones comments to friends that “All of them know the sorts of things to say – about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.” So much for independent impartial reviewers.
Editor-2 was advised twice of the existence of these Climategate emails but was not concerned. Nor was he concerned that the paper had been published already on the internet (on August 7), and worse, with the JGR page header, in clear breach of the JGR rules.
Editor 2 invites McLean et al to reply to the critique of them (as is the norm), but then rejects the McLean reply. There are few official guidelines that a reply has to meet, and there were no obvious problems with the science, yet McLean et al was not allowed to even reply to the criticism.
Yet the three reviews of our response that we were provided with were scientifically insubstantial. Only one reviewer mentioned the time lag that we established, despite its pivotal importance to our findings. And two reviewers focussed mainly on the derivative technique that Foster et al.’s comment falsely implied was the basis of our conclusions.
So the guys who pervert the system by suggesting friends as reviewers, and who breach the rules by falsely prepublishing, are given a free pass to the printing press, and the team who ought to be entitled to defend their own work are shut out for no clear reason.
This is the state of modern peer review: A few anonymous unpaid reviewers, whose names are suggested by the reviewees themselves; this is rigorous? Who are we kidding. We have tighter controls and better standards for peer reviewing Cab Sav.
The McLean et al response is published in full at SPPI (Appendix B is the reply to the rebuttal that was rejected – pages 21-25).
The short killer summary: The Skeptics Handbook. The most deadly point: The Missing Hot Spot.
Yes. It’s called “November.”
O MY GOD; We’re All Going To Die!
LOL!!
Cold records are already breaking in South America right now:
www.iceagenow.com
How does this impact, if at all, on the larger global warming theories that are current?
Some pretty piteous pictures were coming from down there. In normally torrid zones, folks were dying from lack of blankets.
I wish it would get here now. It’s 107 outside.
It’s close to that here, too, and humid. Ugh!
Can’t we have a happy medium? I wasn’t too keen on being snowed in for more than a week last winter, either.
(grumble, grumble, grumble)
I think I’ll blame these weather extremes on some unknown substance being emitted by the fumes produced by using ethanol in gasoline. Heh, heh, heh.
Expert Embarrassment in Climate Change
*****************************************EXCERPT******************************************
Posted on August 5, 2010 by Anthony Watts
Guest post by Thomas Fuller
The paper ‘Expert Credibility in Climate Change,’ published in PNAS by Anderegg, the late Stephen Schneider, James Prall and Jacob Harold attempts to measure the credibility of climate scientists by counting how many papers they have published and how often their work has been cited by others.
This led to the creation of a blacklist that will be used to injure the careers of those who have signed letters or petitions that do not agree with the Al Gore/James Hansen position on climate change, and to intimidate future scientists, effectively silencing dissent.
The paper is poorly done, as I’ve explained elsewhere. They used Google Scholar instead of an academic database. They searched only in English, despite the global nature of climate science. They got names wrong. They got job titles wrong. They got incorrect numbers of publications and citations.
As I’ve mentioned, the highly respected Spencer Weart dismissed the paper as rubbish, saying it should not have been published.
But the worst part of this is the violation of the rights of those they studied. Because Prall keeps lists of skeptical scientists on his weblog, obsessively trawling through online petitions and published lists of letters, and because those lists were used as part of the research, anyone now or in the future can have at their fingertips the names of those who now or in the past dared to disagree.
The Joe Romm’s of this world have already called for this list to be used to deny funding, tenure and grants to scientists. And it will be. It doesn’t matter that the nature of the letters and petitions they signed varied widely, from outright skepticism to really innocuous questioning of the state of the science.
The paper is tagged ‘Climate Deniers.’ Now, so are they.
This is an outright violation of every ethical code of conduct for research that has ever been published.
They violate several sections of the American Sociological Association Ethical Guidelines:
“Sociologists conduct research, teach, practice, and provide service only within the boundaries of their competence, based on their education, training, supervised experience, or appropriate professional experience.”
The members of the research team were operating outside their areas of professional competence.
“Sociologists refrain from undertaking an activity when their personal circumstances may interfere with their professional work or lead to harm for a student, supervisee, human subject, client, colleague, or other person to whom they have a scientific, teaching, consulting, or other professional obligation.” The subjects of their research–the scientists on the list–risk grave harm as a result of this paper.
I downloaded the paper and will make time to read it. But regardless of the outcome of this incident, my views stay firm on the Phil Jones crowd. The indited themselves via. climategate files.
a herd of very sick cats
See the link at post #2....this is all about Global Governance.
Certainly could buy that gaggles of scientists have grandiose visions along those lines. It’s not the first time that scientists have come out with B.S. that shocked and rocked the world until it knew better.
I blame the extremes on all those wind turbines. The worse thing you can do for the climate is to remove energy from the wind. It is wind that helps to minimize the extremes. If there was no wind at all, the poles would be much colder and the equator would be significantly hotter. Humans could probably only survive at mid-latitudes on an Earth with no wind.
Damn paper start giving me a headache. I am not qualified to give a definitive answer as to what side from the math point of view has the upper edge. But it looks like the global warmest crowd are just not going to admit there is a strong possibility we are in for a long stretch of gradual global cooling. And I did not miss the point that very similar results of studies done on the warmest side paralleled closely the statistical methods used by those they claim are wrong during a few of the past IPCC reports.
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