Discussion > A single repository of scientific scepticism
EM, what about the changes in sea level that led to logistical problems with the original 11th century Cinque Ports (subsequently 2 more were added)?
Harlech Castle was also built with access to the sea, but sea level experts ignore that aswell.
Perhaps you ought to learn some history and geology that predates computer adjustment technology.
golf charlie
Martin, if you were to mix the coffee at 33C and the water at 2C, what temperature would the resulting have? Only the simple arithmetic mean of the two temperatures gives the correct answer, so whatever math Essex does to give some theoretical "averages", which you and other skeptics seem to accept as valid, is physical unreality. For people who claim to value science that is decidedly odd.
Raff
Golf Charlie
What does the silting of harbours to do with sea level rise?
Entropic man
Raff - I think you may not have grasped the point - that different averages give different results and that there is no one average - even an arithmetic mean with uniform weights - for which there is any theoretical reason to prefer it over any other.
You could come up with other examples where a different average would give "the correct answer". (For example if you were to calculate the total IR radiation from the two vessels.)
I don't know what you are on about mixing water and coffee. Did you read what it said? The illustration was not about mixing anything. They are talking about averaging two different temperatures, not about mixing two liquids and finding the temperature of the resulting mixture.
3.1.2 A Physical Example of Contradictory TrendsLet’s consider a specific example involving temperature. A glass of ice water at 2◦C is sitting beside a cup of coffee at 33◦C. The two remain isolated,but are allowed to relax to room temperature, which is 20◦C, according to Newtonian cooling (heating). To complete the example, a plausible relaxation time of eight minutes for each container was set for the sake of this illustration, but the phenomenon we will find is not unique to this value. In this manner the ice water is allowed to warm, while the coffee cools accordingly.
For this example, the two independent temperatures were averaged in four different ways.
Martin A
Ocean heat content is therefore your proper measure of climate change.
PS Before you go off half cocked about the non-existance of average ocean temperatures, remember that you can measure changes in ocean heat content by deriving volume change from sea level rise.
Feb 19, 2016 at 9:00 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
Sorry EM, I don't buy it.
"Ocean heat content is therefore your proper measure of climate change."
If someone really believes that, they cannot be in touch with reality. The relation between 'ocean heat content' and 'climate' is essentially unknown but in any case it has to be tenuous in the extreme.
And the relation between sea level and ocean heat content is itself a pretty vague thing, notwithstanding your pointing to a graph in some paper somewhere.
Martin A
“Figure 2a shows the known contributing factors affecting sea level between 1960 and 2008.”
There, fixed it for you.
Radical Rodent
Martin A
You disappoint me. You link to the Essex paper. You then cherrypick only the bits which fit your delusions., while rejecting the rest.
How did you ever run a telephone network when it was theoretically impossible to collate data? How did you set a budget, or estimate the electricity bill?
Radical Rodent
Show me the gaps in the energy budget where your unknowns fit.
TheBigYinJames
Methinks you have fallen into a regular sceptic's logical error.
You can say
"You cannot trust the data. There are systematic errors which need adjusting."
Or you can say
"You cannot trust the data. They keep adjusting it"
You cannot complain about both at once.
Entropic man
Martin A
You disappoint me. You link to the Essex paper. You then cherrypick only the bits which fit your delusions., while rejecting the rest.
How did you ever run a telephone network when it was theoretically impossible to collate data? How did you set a budget, or estimate the electricity bill?
EM if I disappoint you perhaps it is because you did not read what I wrote?
BTW I have never "run a telphone network". I have done research into modelling some aspects of the performance of some subsystems, in particular in deriving new methods of solving non-Markovian and cyclostationary queueing network models. But I am not sure what you are on about in any case. Telephone networks have always been adequately instrumented if only for billing and for traffic planning purposes.
Essex paper. I did not "cherrypick" any part of it. I pointed the paper to somebody who had asked whether the idea of a global temperature made any sense. Then along came good old Raff implying that the paper was invalid because one graph in it uses Celsius temperatures rather than Kelvin. I imagine he found that on SkS or a similar source of reliable information.
To reply to Raff,I did nothing more than quote the paper itself which said that other temperature scales could equally well have been used. In any case the graph simply illustrated a principle (that different forms of average can give qualitatively different results). I did not "cherrypick" any part of it.
EM - I notice that you did not comment on my saying:
Sorry EM, I don't buy it."Ocean heat content is therefore your proper measure of climate change."
If someone really believes that, they cannot be in touch with reality. The relation between 'ocean heat content' and 'climate' is essentially unknown but in any case it has to be tenuous in the extreme.
And the relation between sea level and ocean heat content is itself a pretty vague thing, notwithstanding your pointing to a graph in some paper somewhere.
Feb 20, 2016 at 9:31 AM Martin A
Can I take the lack of response from you (with irrelevant stuff instead) as a tacit admission that my comment about ocean energy and its relation to 'climate' is valid?
Martin A
Martin A
Patience, some of us have lives.
You may have noticed a large El Nio recently. That is not a "tenuous" relationship between ocean heat content and temperature.
When you drift so far from reality that you are, in the words of one scientist, "Not even wrong" I see very little point in further discussion. In law "qui tacet consentire videtur", but in our conversations my silence usually indicates that I have given up trying to fire bullets of reality through your iron denial.
Entropic man
I think you may not have grasped the point - that different averages give different results and that there is no one average - even an arithmetic mean with uniform weights - for which there is any theoretical reason to prefer it over any other.
I know they talk about keeping the liquids separate, but if (note very well, "if") at any point during the cooling of the two liquids the two are mixed, the temperature of the resulting mixture matches that of the arithmetic mean curve and not that of the other curves they plotted. Whether this qualifies as a "theoretical reason" to prefer arithmetic averages, I don't know, but it most certainly is a practical and physical reason.
Raff
You may have noticed a large El Nio recently. That is not a "tenuous" relationship between ocean heat content and temperature.
Well, I read about it. I can't say that I noticed it myself.
But I thought that your thesis is that ocean heat content is increasing steadily - not rising and falling El Nino fashion from year to year. My own limited understanding of El Nino was that it is a sort of sloshing of water of differing temperatures, not the entire ocean rising and falling in temperature from one year to another.
If we were to accept "Ocean heat content is therefore your proper measure of climate change" would you be willing to divulge the actual formula that related the two?
Assuming a linear approximation, presumably it's something like:
Climate Change = C₀ + C₁. Ocean Heat content
Not sure what are the units of climate change. Degrees celsius? Have you worked out the coefficients C₀, C₁ yet?
(assuming we can neglect higher order terms).
Martin A
Entropic man, regarding Church et al:
We review the sea-level and energy budgets together from 1961, using recent and updated estimates of all terms.[My bold] So, no hard data, then, just estimates. Now, where do you want me to put my unknowable estimates of the unknowns into these estimates (ignoring, of course, the simple fact that, being unknown, there can be no knowing what they are, never mind whether or not they exist, but – hey! – never let the possibility that there could be so much that we have yet to discover stop you leaping to conclusions)?
Closing the sea-level budget requires accurate estimates…I may not be the most respected reviewers of scientific literature, but this paper strikes me as filled with the shonkiest of shonky science, filled with estimates, assumptions and presumptions, all most probably designed to lead to a conclusion that was already reached before study commenced.
Radical Rodent
EM what does silting of harbours have to do with the decline in the Cinque Ports?
golf charlie
Martin A
Taking a thermodynamic approach to climate change the correct unit is Joules/year. The energy content of the climate system is increasing by an average of 3*10^22 J/year. 1% of that warms the surface and atmosphere, 4% melts 500 cubic kilometres of ice and the remaining 95% drives warming and thermal expansion of the oceans.
Golf Charlie
From the Wikipedia entry on the Cinque ports.
"New Romney, once a port of great importance at the mouth of the river Rother (until it became completely blocked by the shifting of sands during the South England flood of February 1287), ....."
"Hythe is still on the coast. However, although it is beside a broad bay, its natural harbour has been removed by centuries of silting."
"Sandwich is now 3 km (1.9 mi) from the sea and no longer a port."
Hastings harbour was destroyed by storms. Dover is the only Cinque prot still active.
Entropic man
The energy content of the climate system is increasing by an average of 3*10^22 J/year.Is it? Where do you get this information, that you quote with such confidence? Then you equally confidently proportion out the duties of this energy. You appear to have data sources that most true scientists must surely envy.
Radical Rodent
It is interesting to watch EM retreat to a measure that is not currently measured and which has only been sampled on a reasonably thorough (albeit far from complete or convincing) basis for about 10 years - ocean heat content. Once you go to the authority of unmeasured quantities, then you can claim any damned thing you want and cannot be rebutted. In the absence of any evidence, I propose that OHC rose geometrically between 1960 and 2000 and has since declined.....prove me wrong. As with most of climate science, the evidence just does not exist, which is my cardinal point.
When evidence does not exist then the only appropriate reaction to the people who quote selective, poor-quality, badly-compiled data to urge us to take action is a big fat raspberry. And the uninterested public need to be informed that these people are charlatans.
diogenes
Radical Rodent
Where did I get 3*10^22 Joules/year?
From the literature, crosschecked by calculating it myself using two different methods.
If you have the basic physics and the brains, feel free to repeat the calculation. You will get the same result.
Entropic man
Diogenes
Retreat? Just another way of measuring the same process.
Is your physics as limited as the rest of the BH denizens?
Entropic man
So, where will all those joules go, should we plunge into another ice age, which a surprising number of reputable scientists (though few of them are American or British, so you might have missed them) think we might soon be doing?
Radical Rodent
EM, if you cannot measure it, then it does not exist, except as a hypothesis. When you give me an objective measure of heat content in the deep ocean, then we can talk. Anything else is just hypothesising.
Diogenes
Is it? Where do you get this information, that you quote with such confidence? Then you equally confidently proportion out the duties of this energy. You appear to have data sources that most true scientists must surely envy.
Feb 21, 2016 at 2:59 PM | Registered CommenterRadical Rodent
RR - EM has made it clear in previous postings. The amount of energy absorbed annually by the ocean is calculated from the Earth's radiative imbalance.
How is the the Earth's radiative imbalance calculated? It is calculated from .the energy absorbed annually by the ocean.
When challenged on this ability of climate science to lift itself into the air by pulling on its own bootstraps, EM explained that this is simply iteration. As used, for example, in iteratively solving equations numerically. A common method for refining results.
I asked EM if whatever these iterations converged to had any relation to reality - but reply came there none.
EM - I'm still now and then dipping into the radiation imbalance paper you referred me to. They certainly seem to set great store by the output of climate models in giving them the information they need.
Martin A
is your physics as limited as the rest of the BH denizens?
Feb 21, 2016 at 7:56 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
EM - please do not get too cheeky or we shall have to dredge up some of the howlers you have come up with in the past.
Martin A
Martin A: I know. I just wanted to hear him explain it again, though I doubt he would have put the circular reasoning quite as obviously as you have. Silly, maybe, but this constant wriggling, ignoring data and avoiding straight answers is getting very irritating.
Radical Rodent
Martin A, speaking of dredging, following EM's belief about silting up of the "Cinque Ports", is interesting.
The physical mechanism by which "silting up", whether from rivers or the sea, can lift a town above sea level is interesting. Clearly the possibility that Land Level can rise relative to Sea Level is outside the mindset of Global Warming Alarmists.
golf charlie
Radical Rodent
Look in Church at al, 2011
Figure 2a shows the contributing factors affecting sea level between 1960 and 2008.
The most recent estimate for the contribution of thermal expansion is 41%, 1.4mm/year on average.