The Curry corner

Copying hand picked articles you like into this thread is NOT why this thread exists.

You need to get back to using this board as it was intended.

 

I started the Curry corner. Will you please take care of you and your posts and refrain from trying to boss a man who is 79?

 

More climate explained A few posts earlier, you will locate the link to Curry reports.

Figure 105. Warming and cooling periods of the past 1500 years, fitted to known climate cyclic behavior. Moberg et al., 2005, reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomaly for the period 500-1978 AD (grey curve), and its low frequency component (black curve). The 980-year Eddy cycle is shown in red, with a declining Neoglacial trend of –0.2 °C/millennium. As Moberg’s reconstruction ends in 1978, the dotted line represents the 1975-2000 warming, that is similar in magnitude to the 1910-1945 warming. DACP, Dark Ages Cold Period. MWP, Medieval Warm Period. LIA, Little Ice Age. MGW, Modern Global Warming. Peak natural warming is expected in 2050-2100 AD.

There might be an anthropogenic contribution in the MGW, but it is clear that warming at this time is not unusual, and in fact, it is about what should be expected. The most logical conclusion is that natural warming is contributing to the observed warming. If models are not capable of simulating this natural warming, of millennial cyclic origin, then the models must be wrong, and our knowledge of climate change insufficient.

Modern Global Warming is within Holocene variability

How unusual is the warming observed during MGW?. This is a very difficult question to answer. Temperature is an intrinsic intensive property that is changing during the course of a day at any point on the surface of the planet in an unpredictable direction and rate. If there is a global average temperature, we have no way of measuring it. However, we have devised methods of measuring temperature (or radiation) at different points on the surface (with huge areas unsampled) or in the atmosphere. A consistent mathematical treatment of this data gives a consistent value that we term average temperature, although it is not a temperature, but a conversion of intrinsic intensive measurements into an extrinsic extensive value using multiple assumptions.

However, the global average temperature concept is useful as the calculated value shows much less change over time than the measured values, and we term that change “anomaly,” wrongly implying that it should be constant over time. The change in the global anomaly over the years shows a correlation to real physical and biological phenomena, like length of the growing season, extent of the cryosphere, and sea level rise, among others, and thus it is useful. However, two dangers should be avoided when dealing with the global temperature anomaly. The first is using the same units for temperature as for the temperature anomaly. The degrees in the temperature anomaly are different than the degrees in temperature, since the connection to physical degrees is lost in the conversion from intrinsic to extrinsic. Many authors are unaware of this problem and attempt to compare proxy derived local temperatures to an instrumental calculated global anomaly. Also, the precision given in a temperature anomaly is not a precision in measurement, but a precision in calculation. This is also important as the real uncertainty cannot be calculated, due to multiple assumptions in the process that are no properly evaluated. Another danger is that averaging changes in temperature ignores differences in enthalpy (internal energy and the product of temperature and pressure or, more simply the “heat content”). Due to its low humidity, especially in winter, big changes in Arctic air temperature can take place with small changes in heat content. The weight that Arctic air temperatures should have in a global average is an unresolved question that is biasing instrumental temperature anomalies, relative to temperature proxies.

So, going back to our problem we are now calculating a global temperature with our chosen method, but with no way to relate it to anything similar from the past. Even our calculated anomaly becomes pure fiction (if it wasn’t already) when moving into the 19th century. The way we estimate climate change from the past is through proxies. The relationship of proxies to temperature is convoluted. Some proxies respond to summer temperature changes, while others to winter or spring temperatures. Other factors, like rate of deposition, rate of upwelling, precipitation, cloud cover, storm frequency, or wind, might affect a proxy often without a clear possibility of correction, as the researcher might be unaware of the bias. The resolution of proxies cannot match the resolution of our measurements. The 2014-16 El Niño that increased our global anomaly by 0.4°C for a short period would not be resolved by most proxies. And proxies are always local in nature. That’s why most serious scientists abstain from attempting to calculate past global temperature averages from collections of proxies, and avoid linking them to modern instrumental temperature anomalies. They are two very different things.

However, we can answer the question of how unusual MGW is. Biology offers us a solution. The treeline represents the limit where climatic conditions allow the establishment of new trees. Every year new tree seedlings attempt to establish themselves further up the mountain and generally fail. 52% of studies show the treeline has been going up for the past century, and only 1% show a line receding, indicating that mountain trees are generally responding to global warming and increased CO2 by raising the treeline (Harsch et al., 2009). However, many studies show that at most places the present treeline is still 100-250 meters below Holocene Climatic Optimum treeline levels (figure 106; Reasoner & Tinner, 2009; Cunill et al., 2012; Pisaric et al., 2003).

 

That was a long ways around the bend to say you vote with the Democrats.

Most of the papers she presents are not political and most of them are authored by other scientists.

 

More data

 

Do you recall the day the great Albert Einstein took an axe to the science of Newton?

He created his theories of relativity.

 

More data from Curry corner

https://judithcurry.com/2018/03/04/...ift-in-sea-level-rise-attribution/#more-23893

Will advances in groundwater science force a paradigm shift in sea level rise attribution?
Posted on March 4, 2018 | 18 Comments
by Jim Steele

A better accounting of natural groundwater discharge is needed to constrain the range of contributions to sea level rise. The greater the contribution from groundwater discharge, the smaller the adjustments used to amplify contributions from meltwater and thermal expansion.


In a 2002 paper, what is frequently referred to as “Munk’s enigma”, Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s senior researcher bemoaned the fact researchers could not fully account for the causes of sea level rise. He lamented, “the historic rise started too early, has too linear a trend, and is too large.” Early IPCC analyses noted about 25% of estimated sea level rise was unaccounted for. Accordingly, in 2012, an international team of prominent sea level researchers published, Twentieth-Century Global-Mean Sea Level Rise: Is the Whole Greater than the Sum of the Parts? (henceforth Gregory 2012). They hoped to balance struggling sea level budgets by re-analyzing and adjusting estimates of the contributions from melting glaciers and ice caps, thermal expansion, and the effects of dam building and groundwater extraction. However, a natural contribution from any imbalance in groundwater re-charge vs discharge was never considered. Yet the volume of freshwater stored as groundwater, is second only to Antarctica’s frozen supply, and 3 to 8 times greater than Greenland’s.



At the risk of oversimplifying, the effects of groundwater storage can be differentiated between shallow-aquifer effects that modulate global sea level on year to year and decade to decade timeframes, versus deep aquifer effects that modulate sea level trends over centuries and millennia.

Researchers are increasingly aware of natural shallow groundwater dynamics. As noted by Reager (2016) in A Decade of Sea Level Rise Slowed by Climate-Driven Hydrology, researchers had determined the seasonal delay in the return of precipitation to the oceans causes sea levels to oscillate by 17 ± 4 mm [~0.7 inches] per year. Reager (2016) also argued decadal increases in terrestrial water storage driven by climate events such as La Nina, had reduced sea level rise by 0.71 mm/year. Likewise, Cazenave 2014 had published according to altimetry data, sea level had decelerated from 3.5 mm/yr in the 1990s to 2.5mm/yr during 2003-2011, and that deceleration could be explained by increased terrestrial water storage, and the pause in ocean warming reported by Argo data.

Improved observational data suggest during more frequent La Nina years a greater proportion of precipitation falls on the land globally and when routed through more slowly discharging aquifers, sea level rise decelerates. During periods of more frequent El Niños, more rain falls back onto the oceans, and sea level rise accelerates. In contrast to La Nina induced shallow-aquifer effects, deep aquifers have been filled with meltwater from the last Ice Age, and that water is slowly and steadily seeping back into the oceans today.

Munk’s “Too Linear Trend” Enigma and Deep Groundwater Discharge

Hydrologists concerned with sustainable groundwater supplies and drinking water contamination, have been in the forefront of analyzing the volume and ages of the world’s groundwater, providing greater insight into deep aquifer effects. Gleeson (2015) determined, “total groundwater volume in the upper 2 km of continental crust is approximately 22.6 million cubic kilometers, twice as much as earlier estimates. If all 22.6 million cubic kilometers of freshwater stored underground reached the oceans, sea level would rise 204 feet (62,430 millimeters). Via various isotope analyses and flow models, Jasechko (2017)estimated that between 42-85% of all groundwater stored in the upper 1 kilometer of the earth’s crust is water that had infiltrated the ground more than 11,000 years ago, during last Ice Age.

Clearly the earth’s groundwater has yet to reach an equilibrium with modern sea levels. With deep aquifer discharge primarily regulated by geological pore spaces (in addition to pressure heads), the slow and steady discharge of these older waters affects sea level rise on century and millennial timeframes. And, although freshwater discharge from deep aquifers may be locally insignificant relative to river runoff, deep aquifer discharge when integrated across the globe could account for the missing contribution to the sea level rise budgets.

Unfortunately, quantifying the groundwater discharge contribution to sea level rise is extremely difficult, suffering from a low signal to noise problem. That difficulty is why natural groundwater contributions are often ignored or brushed aside as insignificant. Although GRACE satellite monitoring of gravity changes offers great promise for detecting changes in terrestrial groundwater storage, GRACE cannot accurately separate the relatively small discharge of deep aquifers from large annual changes in shallow groundwater. In periods of heavy rains, groundwater increases will mask deep aquifer discharge. And during a drought, any deep groundwater discharge will likely be attributed to the lack of rain.

However, estimates of groundwater re-charge via isotope analyses can provide critical information regards rates of groundwater re-charge and discharge.

Using the abnormal levels of tritium released during nuclear testing in the 1950s, plus carbon14 dating, researchers have categorized the time since groundwater had last left the surface into 25, 50, 75 and 100-year old age classes. As expected, the youngest water is concentrated in the shallowest aquifer layers and the proportion of young water decreases with depth. The estimated volume of 25-year-old or younger groundwater suggests global groundwater is currently recharging at a rate that would reduce sea level by 21 mm/year (0.8 inches/year). Water cycle researchers (i.e. Dai and Trenberth) have made the dubious assumption that the amount of water transported via precipitation to the land from the ocean is balanced each year by river runoff. But if the tritium derived estimates are valid, balancing water cycle and sea level budgets becomes more enigmatic. Clearly a significant amount of precipitation does not return for decades and centuries.

Intriguingly, comparing the smaller volume of ground water aged 50 to 100-years-old versus the volume of water 50-years-old and younger suggests 2 possible scenarios. Either ground water recharge has increased in recent decades, or if recharge rates averaged over 50 years have remained steady, then as groundwater ages a significant portion seeps back to the ocean at rates approaching 1.7 mm/year, a rate that is very similar to 20th century IPCC estimates of sea level rise.

Groundwater discharge must balance recharge or else it directly alters global sea levels. When less than 21 mm/year seeps back to the ocean, then natural groundwater storage lowers sea level. When discharge is greater than 21 mm/year, then groundwater discharge is raising sea level. Without accounting for recharge vs discharge, the much smaller estimates of all the other factors contributing to sea level rise are simply not well constrained.

Higher rates of discharge could account for the enigmatic missing sea level contributions reported by the IPCC and other researchers (i.e. Gregory 2012). More problematic, if discharge proves to significantly exceed recharge, then estimates of contributions from other sources such as melting ice and thermal expansion may be too high. What is certain, the current estimates of contributions to sea level from melting ice and thermal expansion only range from 1.5 to 2.0 mm/year, and those factors by themselves cannot offset the tritium estimated 21 mm/year of groundwater recharge. So, what is missing in our current water cycle budgets?

 

I guess no Democrat is interested in sea level rise nor water supply in the USA. Rather odd.

 

I will bring more Curry updates as I receive them.

She has an index to her material. Some is hers but a lot is the work by other prominent scientists. Let's stop saying humans are in charge of climate. It makes no sense at all. To affect the climate, they must be in charge since we have the word of the world supposedly they want it cooler. So for them to keep heating it, keeps them in charge of climate. Sounds sort of silly but the alarmists believe it.

 

Adding to your education.

https://judithcurry.com/2018/02/11/week-in-review-science-edition-76/#more-23819

About science and scientists

Andrew Sullivan: problems with the university identity-based social justice movement [link]

Deb Mashek: Why I’m Leaving the Academy to Help Save it – Heterodox Academy [link]

Intellectual humility and openness to the opposing view. [link] …

Fixing statistics is more than a technical issue [link] …

Great piece by Australian scientist Peter Ridd detailing a serious problem: Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great Barrier Reef [link]

 

On the great barrier Reef of Australia

.........The reef is supposedly almost dead from the combined effects of a warming climate, nutrient pollution from Australian farms, and smothering sediment from offshore dredging.

Except that, as I have said publicly as a research scientist who has studied the reef for the past 30 years, all this most likely isn’t true.


And just for saying that – and calling into question the kind of published science that has led to the gloomy predictions – I have been served with a gag order by my university. I am now having to sue for my right to have an ordinary scientific opinion.

My emails have been searched. I was not allowed even to speak to my wife about the issue. I have been harangued by lawyers. And now I’m fighting back to assert my right to academic freedom and bring attention to the crisis of scientific truth.

The problems I am facing are part of a “replication crisis” that is sweeping through science and is now a serious topic in major science journals. In major scientific trials that attempt to reproduce the results of scientific observations and measurements, it seems that around 50 percent of recently published science is wrong, because the results can’t be replicated by others.

And if observations and measurements can’t be replicated, it isn’t really science – it is still, at best, hypothesis, or even just opinion. This is not a controversial topic anymore – science, or at least the system of checking the science we are using, is failing us.

The crisis started in biomedical areas, where pharmaceutical companies in the past decade found that up to 80 percent of university and institutional science results that they tested were wrong. It is now recognized that the problem is much more widespread than the biomedical sciences. And that is where I got into big trouble.

I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.

Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.

These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.

By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.

The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.

Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.

The conflicting realities of the Great Barrier Reef point to a deeper problem. In science, consensus is not the same thing as truth. But consensus has come to play a controlling role in many areas of modern science. And if you go against the consensus you can suffer unpleasant consequences.

The main system of science quality control is called peer review. Nowadays, it usually takes the form of a couple of anonymous reviewing scientists having a quick check over the work of a colleague in the field.

Peer review is commonly understood as painstaking re-examination by highly qualified experts in academia that acts as a real check on mistaken work. It isn’t. In the real world, peer review is often cursory and not always even knowledgeable. It might take reviewers only a morning to do.

Scientific results are rarely reanalyzed and experiments are not replicated. The types of checks that would be routine in private industry are just not done.

I have asked the question: Is this good enough quality control to make environmental decisions worth billions of dollars that are now adversely affecting every major industry in northeast Australia?

Our sugar industry has been told to make dramatic reductions in fertilizer application, potentially reducing productivity; our ports have dredging restrictions that threaten their productivity; scientists demand that coal mines be closed; and tourists are scared away because the reef is supposedly almost dead – not worth seeing anymore.

Last August I made this point on Sky News in Australia in promotion of a chapter I wrote in “Climate Change: The Facts 2017,” published by the Australian free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs.

“The basic problem is that we can no longer trust the scientific organizations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, even things like the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies … the science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated and this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions and the fact is I do not think we can any more,” I said.

The response to these comments by my employer, James Cook University, was extraordinary.

Rather than measured argument, I was hit with a charge of academic serious misconduct for not being “collegial.”

University authorities told me in August I was not allowed to mention the case or the charges to anybody – not even my wife.

Then things got worse. With assistance from the Institute of Public Affairs, I have been pushing back against the charges and the gag order – leading the university to search my official emails for examples of where I had mentioned the case to other scientists, old friends, past students and my wife.

I was then hit with 25 new allegations, mostly for just mentioning the case against me. The email search turned up nothing for which I feel ashamed. You can see for yourself.

We filed in court in November. At that point the university backed away from firing me. But university officials issued a “Final Censure” in my employment file and told me to be silent about the allegations, and not to repeat my comments about the unreliability of institutional research.

But they agreed that I could mention it to my wife, which was nice of them.

I would rather be fired than accept these conditions. We are still pursuing the matter in court.

This case may be about a single instance of alleged misconduct, but underlying it is an issue even bigger than our oceans. Ultimately, I am fighting for academic and scientific freedom, and the responsibility of universities to nurture the debate of difficult subjects without threat or intimidation.

We may indeed have a Great Barrier Reef crisis, but the science is so flawed that it is impossible to tell its actual dimensions. What we do know for certain is that we have an academic freedom crisis that threatens the true life of science and threatens to smother our failing university system.

Professor Peter Ridd leads the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia and has authored over 100 scientific papers.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018...tion-doomsayers-about-great-barrier-reef.html

 

It sounds like that guy is getting the shaft. I hope he wins his case.