Did we say more secrecy? We meant more openness!

A.G. Foster Jr: LOD and sea level

I Picked this comment up on a recent WUWT sea level thread. LOD is Length of Day, a measurement of the Earth’s speed of rotation, which varies for several reasons. For some reason yet to be fully explained, its variation seems to correlate well with the changing disposition of mass in the solar system above and below the solar equatorial plane (SSBz), and detrended global average temperature.

agfosterjr says:

May 16, 2012 at 9:06 am

Jens Bagh says:
May 16, 2012 at 1:03 am
Were sea levels to be rising this would slow down the rotation of the earth. Has any change been noted in the rate of change of rotation and if so how does this compare to the present study?
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Oddly enough, LOD responds to sea level rise differently depending on whether the source is thermal expansion or melting ice. Of course thermal expansion adds no mass, but it does move it further from the center of gravity so that it flows toward expanding shallow coasts. It just so happens that shallow coasts are concentrated nearer to the poles than would be expected at random, much reducing the rate at which thermal expansion increases LOD or even reversing it, whereas rise due to melted ice should increase LOD by about .1ms per cm. So to determine the overall effect we have to know what fraction of rise is due to which source, when in fact the rise is so miniscule that neither satellites nor gauges can measure the combined effect accurately.

WordPress thread auto-subscription options

There is now a way to stop your inbox getting filled if you forget to untick the subscribe box when you respond to a thread which becomes busy. There is now a global setting in your control panel. If you don’t have a wordpress account just use the link at the bottom of the next mail. Full details on options below. 

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/follow-comments/

It’s now much easier for you and your commenters to keep track of the conversations you’re involved in across WordPress.com. Some recent tests have shown that by subscribing commenters to new comments by default, they are more likely to stay engaged and come back and comment more on your blog. With that knowledge, we’ve changed the default comment following behavior to help you get more conversations going on your blog.

We made the initial changes last week and after great feedback from you we just launched an update. Here’s how it works:

Hey! Whassup Ya-mal-feasant pseudo-scientists?

Reposted from WUWT, this article by Talkshop contributor Lucy Skywalker is excellent background to the latest episodes in the hockey stick wars between Realclimate.org and ClimateAudit.org, where Steve McIntyre has just delivered two more blows to the ‘Team’ treering chronology-temperature reconstructions. These have been used to support the ‘Hockey Stick’ graph drawn by Michael Mann using statistical techniques whixh have since been heavily criticised by expert statisticians. Mann was also selective in which tree ring chronologies he used, favouring ones which supported his conclusion, and excluding ones which didn’t. This kind of selection bias is frowned on in all scientific disciplines; except paleo-dendro-climatology apparently, where they have been known to cheerfully admit to it.

However as we mentioned earlier on the subject of biological growth populations, this does not mean that one could not improve a chronology by reducing the number of series used if the purpose of removing samples is to enhance a desired signal. The ability to pick and choose which samples to use is an advantage unique to dendroclimatology.

- Esper et al 2003-

Or more succinctly

 you had to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie

Rosanne D’Arrigo

They really need to read Lucia’s post on cherry picking.

Guest post by Lucy Skywalker

Let’s look closely and compare local thermometer records (GISS) with the Twelve Trees, upon whose treerings depend all the IPCC claims of “unprecedented recent temperature rise”.
For my earlier Yamal work, see here and here. For the original Hockey Stick story, see here and here.

Half the Hockey Stick graphs depend on bristlecone pine temperature proxies, whose worthlessness has already been exposed. They were kept because the other HS graphs, which depend on Briffa’s Yamal larch treering series, could not be disproved. We now find that Briffa calibrated centuries of temperature records on the strength of 12 trees and one rogue outlier in particular. Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous. And not properly comparing treering evidence with local thermometers is the mother of all scandals.

I checked out the NASA GISS page for all thermometer records in the vicinity of Yamal and the Polar Urals, in “raw”, “combined”, and “homogenized” varieties. Here are their locations (white). The Siberian larch treering samples in question come from Yamal and Taimyr. Salehard and Dudinka have populations of around 20,000; Pecora around 50,000; Surgut around 100,000; all the rest are officially “rural” sites. Some are long records, some are short.

Carl Brehmer: Fact trumps theory with the greenhouse effect: A case study

I plucked this comment off the Hockey Schtick, as it ties in well with a recent post which generated a lot of comment. That post was looking at back radiation over dry areas. This one looks at the role of water vapour – claimed to be a ‘positive feedback’ by co2 driven global warming theorists.

One version of the “greenhouse effect/water vapor feedback” hypothesis that involves the mid to upper levels of the troposphere and water vapor feedback recognizes that humidity causes a slower lapse rate, which raises the altitude at which the air temperature drops to -18C—the affective radiating temperature of the atmosphere. Some people call this altitude the “top of the atmosphere” (TOA).
This version of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis then applies the standard lapse rate of 6.8C/km to both the older lower altitude and the newer higher altitude to calculate the projected ground level temperature at the bottom of these two respective atmospheric columns.

To better visualize this version of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis lets use some actual weather balloon soundings from above Las Vegas (specific humidity = 1.04 g/kg) on a particular day and compare it to weather balloon soundings over Little Rock (specific humidity of 13.83 g/kg) that particular day. These soundings are from http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html and they were both recorded at 11:00 AM, June 1, 2011.

Bass-ackwards Big Bang Brainchild: Big Bulldust Blobs Beget Black-hole’s: Blazars Boil Bright Beam’s Biddy Bits

From the Academy of Ad Hoc Apologies Heidelburg Institute of Theoretical Studies via physorg.com comes news that long standing problems with Big Bang cosmology have been solved by a supercomputer simulation model. Scientists are “surprised” by the match between their simulation of the imaginary heating effect of the emission of gamma rays from ‘black holes’ (Earth directed ones have been named ‘Blazars’)  and the observed spectra of quasars. 

Physorg takes up the story:

Every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Such black holes can emit high-energy gamma rays and are then called blazars. Whereas other radiation such as visible light and radio waves traverses the universe without problems, this is not the case for high-energy gamma rays. This particular radiation interacts with the optical light that is emitted by galaxies, transforming it into the elementary particles electrons and positrons. Initially, these elementary particles move almost at the speed of light. But as they are slowed down by the ambient diffuse gas, their energy is converted into heat, just like in other braking processes. As a result, the surrounding gas is heated efficiently. In fact, the temperature of the gas at mean density becomes ten times higher, and in underdense regions more than one hundred times higher than previously thought.  If the gas becomes hotter, weak [spectral] lines in the forest [in the spectra of quasars] are broadened. This effect represents an excellent opportunity to measure temperatures in the early Universe, while it was still growing up.

 This allows us to elegantly solve a long-standing problem with the quasar data

says Dr. Ewald Puchwein, who conducted the large simulations on the supercomputer at HITS.

Solar wind stripping atmospheres: Earth-Mars comparison

This ESA article was flagged up by Ulric Lyons and I though it was a good followup to Tim Cullen’s recent post on magnetospheres.

Earth’s magnetic field provides vital protection

8 March 2012

Propagation of a solar wind stream

A chance alignment of planets during a passing gust of the solar wind has allowed scientists to compare the protective effects of Earth’s magnetic field with that of Mars’ naked atmosphere. The result is clear: Earth’s magnetic field is vital for keeping our atmosphere in place.

The alignment took place on 6 January 2008. Using ESA’s Cluster and Mars Express missions to provide data from Earth and Mars, respectively, scientists compared the loss of oxygen from the two planets’ atmospheres as the same stream of solar wind hit them. This allowed a direct evaluation of the effectiveness of Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere.

They found that while the pressure of the solar wind increased at each planet by similar amounts, the increase in the rate of loss of martian oxygen was ten times that of Earth’s increase.