First, Einstein was right. Then he was wrong. Then he was right due to a loose wire. Now he may have been wrong due to an oscillator. Many of us would just throw up our hands and say everything is relative with Einstein, but scientists at OPERA say that a second equipment problem may have led to a too conservative reading of the 730-kilometer journey of the neutrinos reported by the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN.
The oscillator is used to provide time stamps to synchronize the GPS systems which measure the travel time. The scientists believe that the oscillator problem may have canceled out the cable problem . . . and that the little neutrinos did move faster than the speed of light — beyond the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second). That would contradict Einstein’s theory. So I guess we have to treat Einstein like a big dummy again . . . absent another loose cable or spilled coffee cup.
I am just waiting for a finding that neutrinos are sentient with a wicked sense of humor . . . and hovering around 299,791 kilometers per second just to mess with us.
Source: CBC
I didn’t use anything from Watts because you would simply try and negate anything linked to his sight with articles that attack him personally instead of looking at facts. Just like how you feel about Judith Curry. You probably didn’t even read but instead said pffft Judith Curry she’s a denier who doesn’t understand the scientific process.
Anyways how about the link to the BBC quoting Phil Jones Ms. Elaine
No statistical warming for at least the last 15 years.
How bout Sea Level rise does it continue to trend up or is it going down?
Observations from a global network of buoys showed some warming in the upper ocean, but not enough to account for the global build-up of heat. Although scientists suspected the deep oceans were playing a role, few measurements were available to confirm that hypothesis.To track where the heat was going, Meehl and colleagues used a powerful software tool known as the Community Climate System Model
Scientists suggested that some of the energy might be found in the ocean, which is an enormous repository for the world’s energy. The oceans have long accounted for about 90 percent of the energy added to the climate system, storing some of this energy in its deepest waters. Some of the energy, says Trenberth, also likely went toward melting of sea ice and glaciers, however the energy requirements for this would be minimal as compared to the missing 1 Watt/m2.
Trenberth and Fasullo’s work has also suggested that there may be other trouble spots in knowing the global energy balance at the surface of the earth. New estimates of downwelling radiation from the greenhouse effect by the NASA Langley group are much larger than Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl suggested but if correct would imply that the global precipitation estimates are too low by 20 percent. Because the same calculations are performed in climate models, the possibility exists that there is an incorrect energy accounting by global climate models.
“It might be that the climate models are wrong,” says Trenberth. “The models may be overestimating radiative energy transfers within the atmosphere most likely associated with the properties and distribution of clouds and aerosols – however, the Langley group used the latest CloudSat data. Nevertheless, the complex three-dimensional shape of clouds are approximated in models, which appreciably affect the amount of energy scattered and absorbed, and thus the long-wave energy re-radiated back to the surface.”
https://nar.ucar.edu/2011/lar/page/finding-missing-energy-global-energy-budget
But Ms. Elaine new research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, argues that what Trenberth and Fasullo dubbed “missing heat” isn’t missing, after all — that the amount of radiation trapped in Earth’s atmosphere, as measured by satellite sensors, is consistent with measurements of heat absorbed by the ocean.Any discrepancy falls within the margin of error on those measurements, say the study’s authors, led by NASA climate scientist Norman Loeb.“Given that there’s a lot of uncertainty in the ocean measurements, given that there was this transition from XBT to Argo right around the time that satellite data and ocean data deviated, it raises a lot questions in my mind about whether you can say there is missing energy,” Loeb said.His analysis examining the amount of solar radiation entering and leaving the atmosphere estimates the heat content of the upper ocean using three different data sets.
“We have a limited view of climate change over the last few billion years, ”
False.
Paleoclimatology obtains data from a wide variety of sets including rocks, sediments, ice sheets, tree rings, corals, shells and microfossils to obtain data for modeling Earth’s climate past. Proxy measurement may not be preferred to direct measurement but that doesn’t invalidate the utility or veracity of the proxy measurements themselves.
Tony C:
If you dont know what is causing the symptoms you cannot treat the disease, only the symptoms as they arise.
We have a limited view of climate change over the last few billion years, all we can do is take some data and come to a conclusion on a limited number of data points. And we have to either interpolate or extrapolate the data we do have without knowing what comes before or after.
The idea that we know with any certainty is ludicrous.
There are many reasons to control pollution and be good stewards of our environment, climate change isnt one of them.
Nice find, Elaine. Thanks for the relay.
Bdaman,
No Anthony Watts? How disappointing! Oh, well, Judith Curry is a good substitute.
*****
Speaking of Kevin Trenberth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=868nr1Pgxw0
Has the Earth’s Missing Heat Been Found?
Posted: 02/10/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/has-the-earths-missing-he_b_1268673.html
*****
MIT scientist Kerry Emanuel said that debate is essential to science. Scientists pose questions and they and others will try to find the answers to them.
@Bron: Yes, of course it is. If I were ever to tell a client something is indisputable, that would mean I have evidence for it I personally cannot dispute and have never heard any plausible disputation of it. I never tell a client I am infallible, or I have reviewed every possible piece of evidence, both are physically impossible, the world is not understood to 100% certainty, or we would have a grand unified theory of physics that is never wrong.
As I said, in real science we show our work to sufficient detail it can be plausibly replicated, we show our data, we describe the logic that led us to our conclusions, and you make up your own damn mind. My mind is made up (always provisionally, but made up).
You do not have to have all of the data related to climate change, you do not have to know the mechanisms involved in the creation of weather patterns. I do not have to know the detailed path of a disease to diagnose a disease. We can measure the outcomes and determine the climate is changing rapidly, and much more rapidly than it has in the last several thousands of years. We can diagnose a disease without identifying the virus, bacteria, mutation or toxin that is causing it, and we can diagnose climate change without full certainty of the mechanisms causing it.
However, the evidence that it is strongly influenced by human industrial, farming, and other such activity (forest cutting, mining, river diversion) is compelling to me as well.
As to what “qualifies me”: Again, you miss the point of science. It is the scientist’s job to make their case for their conclusion and provide the evidence and argument, not mine. It is the scientist’s peers that review his work and determine whether he followed the rules of mathematics and statistics and produced a valid argument. I am but the final reviewer, and if it is not explained in terms I can understand with my own training, then I do not buy it. It is the scientist’s job to present their work in a form accessible to me, and enough climate scientists have done that for me to accept their conclusions.
You can contend that the science is unsettled, that is your right, but nobody is going to buy that if you do not produce a compelling argument for why you believe that, and your argument isn’t compelling if it does not provide a plausible alternative explanation for the observations of thousands of scientists on hundreds of points.
Not all science demands an explanation for observations; Darwin did not know how physical traits and behaviors were inherited but still produced overwhelming proof that they were and that was the basis for evolution and adaptation. Climate change is real, human activity is the cause. I think that is indisputable. You can believe in magic if you want.
Tony C:
“Indisputable is a personal assessment in science”
It is? That is news to me, but then I am not a scientist, just an engineer. But if I ever told a client that something was indisputable, I better have overwhelming proof it is and I know from many years of engineering that a good deal of what I do is opinion and that the PhD’s who do the science, which is the base of engineering, sometimes have conflicting views/opinions as to what is the best science. This is especially true in dealing with foundations and soils.
What is your PhD subject and what is your dissertation about? What qualifies you to have an expert opinion on climate change? I have courses in chemistry, physics, fluid dynamics, & thermodynamics to name a few that would have relevance to climate change. Although I dont put myself out there as someone who knows much about the weather, all I am saying is that the science is far from settled.
There is no indisputable data because we dont even know if we have all the data related to climate change. We dont even know all the mechanisms involved in the creation of weather patterns so how could there be indisputable evidence for climate change?
The shape of things to come if we don’t act now.
Many households in Germany are no longer able to pay their electricity bills. As a result, around half a million households are sitting in the dark.
The sharp price increases for electricity and gas is leading to serious payment problems for more and more consumers – even to dark apartments. Because of unpaid bills an estimated 600,000 households in Germany had their power cut off in 2010, said the consumer watch dog Verbraucherzentrale Nordrhein-Westfalen which is based in Düsseldorf. This estimate is based on a survey of local energy providers in Germany’s most populous state.
“Price increases of around 15 percent for electricity and gas in the past two years have made energy for many households unaffordable”, said CEO Klaus Mueller. The increasing fuel poverty is alarming. What is more, ever tighter household budgets and regularly lacking competence in keeping personal finances in check are turning claims arising from unpaid energy bills quickly into an insurmountable cost trap.
Translation Philipp Mueller
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/energie/article13879599/Hunderttausenden-Haushalten-wird-der-Strom-gesperrt.html
Ms. Elaine what about sea level rise.
Do you believe the seas are still rising?
I know the answer do you?
I may be a denier that doesn’t understand the scientific process but I do know how to look at a graph.
@Bron: So there is indisputable data showing man made temperature increase? Please show me where you found the data.
I assume you have seen the same data as I have, or you wouldn’t be arguing so vehemently. I also assume you did not understand it, or you wouldn’t be arguing so vehemently.
Indisputable is a personal assessment in science, it is not a prescriptive assessment we can force on others. That is much of the point of science, we do not make decrees or tolerate them, we look for ourselves and choose to agree or to disagree or perhaps to ask for clarification and withhold judgment until it is shown.
I find the evidence compelling. The question is not whether I can dispute one experiment or another. The question is whether there is some overarching alternative that explains why all of the measurements are off in a way that does not indicate global warming, and I do not think there is any idea that qualifies; it would have to influence satellite data, tree cores, ice cores, chemistry, geology, ice caps at the poles and on mountains, animal and plant migrations both on land and at sea, and the actual temperature and CO2 and methane measurements that are all organized into coherency by this one compelling conclusion.
As always, as a scientist, I reserve the right to change my mind if somebody invents a new disputation I find more compelling, as unlikely as that seems, and I reserve the right to reject the conclusions without any alternative if the implications and predictions of the current theory turn out to be grossly mistaken, but until then, I buy the conclusions: In my book the planet is definitely warming and the cause is indisputably human activity.
Bdaman:
that tire reef story is about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Same with GW, who knows what will happen if we try to cool the earth and we dont really know for sure if the climate is changing due to man made activity or because of natural cycles which may need to occur to prevent some real catastrophe from happening.
People who think this is settled science are ignorant at best and stupid at worst. They would be the same ones thinking it was a great idea to increase reefs using tires.
Sometimes it is better to do nothing. Sometimes doing nothing takes a lot more knowledge than doing something. Anyone can do something.
“Just last September, Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) over that organization’s climate change orthodoxy. In his resignation letter to APS, Giaever lambasted the society’s public stance that global warming is an incontrovertible fact: ‘In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”
Just to prove Trenberth wasn’t taken out of context.
“One answer to the puzzle came from climate scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who coined the term “missing heat” — and later suggested it may be stored in the deep ocean,”
Those measurements are at the heart of a puzzle climate scientists have been trying hard to crack: why, as greenhouse gas emissions rose and satellite data showed an increasing amount of energy trapped in the planet’s atmosphere, the amount of heat absorbed by the world’s oceans — a major heat sink — wasn’t rising as quickly.One answer to the puzzle came from climate scientists Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who coined the term “missing heat” — and later suggested it may be stored in the deep ocean, where there are few measurements to track the energy’s path.But new research, published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience, argues that what Trenberth and Fasullo dubbed “missing heat” isn’t missing, after all — that the amount of radiation trapped in Earth’s atmosphere, as measured by satellite sensors, is consistent with measurements of heat absorbed by the ocean.Any discrepancy falls within the margin of error on those measurements, say the study’s authors, led by NASA climate scientist Norman Loeb.“Given that there’s a lot of uncertainty in the ocean measurements, given that there was this transition from XBT to Argo right around the time that satellite data and ocean data deviated, it raises a lot questions in my mind about whether you can say there is missing energy,” Loeb said.His analysis examining the amount of solar radiation entering and leaving the atmosphere estimates the heat content of the upper ocean using three different data sets.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/01/24/missing-heat-isnt-missing-after-all/
For the record Judith Curry is a scientist who is also a denier. Because of this she does not understand the scientific process. But Trenberth does by scratching his head to try and find where all the MISSING HEAT went because it was a travesty he could not account for the lack of warming. He eventually did. At the bottom of the ocean twenty leagues under the sea.
How bout the leaked 2009 email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Maybe it was taken out of context or it was his denier moment and he forgot the scientific process.
How about the BBC?
Who are they owned by and do you believe that they are deniers who just don’t understand the scientific process.
Q&A: Professor Phil Jones
Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the centre of the row over hacked e-mails.
The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the co-operation of UEA’s press office.
B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
Bdaman,
P.S. My answer is “yes.”
What’s your answer–as if I didn’t already know…but choose to ask anyway.
Maybe you should check with Anthony Watts. Isn’t he one of your “go to” climate experts?
2009: Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/
Excerpt:
2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.
Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade, due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 — as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.
*****
Daily Mail Fabricates Claim That There’s Been 15 Years Of No Global Warming, Despite Hottest Decade In History
By Brad Johnson on Jan 30, 2012
http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/01/30/414836/daily-mail-fabricates-claim-that-theres-been-15-years-of-no-global-warming-despite-hottest-decade-in-history/
Climate denial is now in a decadent phase of absurdity.
“Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again),” the Daily Mail says. “Global warming trend ended in 1997, new data shows,” the Washington Times promotes.
This is strange, since temperature data and NASA scientists show the 2000s to be the warmest decade in recorded history, significantly hotter than the 1990s.
As it turns out, the Daily Mail’s David Rose concocted the “entirely misleading” story by cherry-picking from two different press releases from the UK Met Office. The first press release said that low solar activity would not counteract global warming from greenhouse gases — the second that 2012 will be much warmer than the 20th century average because of global warming.
Rose deliberately ignored the science, cherrypicked data, and quoted scientists on the fringe of reality. By excluding as many actual facts as possible, Rose came to the conclusion that global warming stopped years before the warmest decade in recorded history.
The Daily Mail is controlled by right-wing British billionaire Jonathan Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere.
Oh forgot. When I was a kid I belonged to an offshore fishing club. At the time the banding of used tires and dumping them in the ocean in huge piles was an attempt to make artificial reefs. It was an accepted practice. What were we thinking.
Tire reef off Florida proves a disaster
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-17-florida-reef_x.htm