Posts Made By: Robert Provin

In my experience, those who publish under a pseudonym are, more often than not, producing fiction.

http://www.desmogblog.com/steven-goddard

Dave Snope said:

My local L.A. CBS News radio station said the following two interesting things within 15 minutes of each other:

1) This has been the coolest August in LA since 1919.

2) Lyme disease cases are way up this summer. This could be due to global warming, according to an expert.

You can't make this stuff up.

Dave, you're right about August being cooler than normal. However, when one looks at the longer picture (January through August 18), things look much different. See maps below: Left is Aug. 1 to Aug. 18, right shows Jan. 1 to Aug. 18. These maps show departure from normal temperatures. It appears as though the Lyme disease problem is solved as well.

Please see this from "Scientific American".
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kevin-trenberth-on-climate-change-and-tornadoes

Dave Snope said:

Good news if you are happy with more ice, or sad about less ice:

Antarctic sea ice extent for August 19 is 18.70 million square kilometers (7.22 million square miles), a record or near-record high level (August 19, 2010 was similarly high), led by unusually extensive ice in the Bellingshausen, Amundsen, and Ross seas, and in the western Indian Ocean sector.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Hi Dave,
This was predicted by climate models back in the early 1990s.
_____________________________________________________________
"NSIDC Reports That Antarctica is Cooling and Sea Ice is Increasing trumpets
the observation that Antarctic sea ice is increasing. This is expected
from climate modeling. Nice to see someone else is picking up on this
interesting confirmation of our scientific expectation.

The prediction is old. In 1992 Manabe and coworkers, in running a changing
CO2 experiment, noticed that the Antarctic sea ice cover increased with
increasing CO2. They traced this to increased fresh water on the Antarctic
ocean, which derived from increased precipitation -- snow. They also
observed in their model that the Arctic ocean sea ice experienced a marked
decline in thickness, and major loss of extent in the summer, but not so
large a decrease in the winter. At the time they wrote, it was still being
debated whether there were trends in the Arctic or Antarctic sea ice covers."
____________________________________________________________________
For more, including a link to the original paper, see:
http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2010/03/wuwt-trumpets-result-supporting-climate.html

Most interesting! But really, this is not a peer reviewed paper; it's actually
the fourth rejoinder to a paper originally published in the same journal by
Daniel Bedford. An opinion if you will, especially when one considers the
inclusion of Christopher Monckton* as a co-author! One has to wonder what was
going through David Legates' mind when he decided to include the likes of
Monckton as a co-author of this "paper". Legates couldn't do much worse by
including Bozo the Clown!

Regarding the the claim that the consensus is .3% because of mathematical errors
(rather than 97%), I will note that Legates et. al. don't seem to address the
fact that Cook et. al. actually polled climate scientists (in addition to rating
abstracts) and came up with essentually the same statistic (97%). From the Cook
paper: "Among self-rated papers [by climate scientists] expressing a position on
AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus."

Finally, I must mention that in academics, journals are given an impact factor
as a measure of citations of the journal's articles. This measure serves as a
proxy for a journal's relative importance. The higher the number, the better.
Some representative samples follow:

The New England Journal of Medicine: 19.95
Science: 31.03
Nature: 33.95

And finally the "respected" Science and Education: 0.71

Could it be that Anthony Watts' boast of "A major peer-reviewed paper..." is
somewhat exaggerated?




* Monckton has claimed that he has developed a cure for Graves Disease, AIDS,
Multiple Schlerosis, the flu, and the common cold. Could this be true?

He claims to be a member of the U.K. House of Lords. He isn't.

He claims to be a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Not true.

He claims to be a climate scientist. He has an M.A. in "Classics".

There's much more, but don't take my word for it:
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/lord-moncktons-rap-sheet/

For a thorough debunking of the David Rose piece:
http://skepticalscience.com/neverending-daily-mail-nonsense.html

As for the rest, see definitions below:

weather
noun: weather
1.
the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness,
sunshine, wind, rain, etc..


climate
noun: climate; plural noun: climates
1.
the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.

Well, Fox News, paragon of objective and balanced reporting, strikes again! Let's
just look at the Fox News title. First, the study wasn't about climate models, it
was about one climate model. Second, the "study" wasn't a study at all, it was
an opinion/comment. Third, the errors were not "wildly overestimated", but
rather they were well within 95% confidence limits (statistically, that means
it's not too bad).

Some background. All climate models get it wrong somewhere. Climate scientists
will be the last to claim their models are perfect. The model in question (CMIP5
which projects a number of climate variables) overestimates surface air
temperatures, this has been known for at least a few years. The "study" touted
by Fox, was submitted by Canadian climate scientists and was mainly concerned
with defining the error and suggesting causes. Interestingly, other scientists
have questioned the statistical methods, suggesting the errors are not as large
as the "study" in question suggests. I might add that even if all error is
corrected, the model projection will still show a warming world.

Another climate model that has even larger errors will most likely never appear
in Fox News. And that is the IPCC sea level projection model. This model, shall
I dare say, wildly underestimates sea level rise. Looking at the graph, one can
see that observations (the red and black lines) are pushing the upper limits of
the IPCC projections (the orange-tan area). Of course, this does not rule out a
Fox News feature on how the observations have been "cooked"!

Mr. Gore was wrong. So I guess everything is OK.

The Arctic ice continues to shrink and even though ice extent this year is
greater than last year, ice volume (extent and thickness) is almost at record
low values. When looking at thickness and extent (volume), the trend is very
clear.

The first chart shows ice extent right up to Aug. 2013. It's pretty apparent
that the "recovery" is pretty minimal.

The second chart shows ice volume to Aug. 2013. Here the "recovery" simply does
not exist, as ice volume remains below the trend line.