World Climate Report » Global Greening Continues: Did We Cause It? You know the story.
Humans are burning fossil fuels and because of their actions, the world is now warming at an unprecedented pace. This warming is stressing ecosystems throughout the world with devastating consequences to vegetation from one end of the earth to the other. If we do not act fast, we will destroy the planet and have a tough time facing our grandchildren. We can all hear it now—why didn’t you do something when there was still time to save the Earth? Two articles have appeared recently in the scientific literature with results that may make us reconsider this entire affair.
Three Chinese scientists (all with the last name of Liu) used satellite data to detect changes occurring in vegetation throughout the world. As seen in their figure below (Figure1), the red colors absolutely dominate indicating an increase in vegetation status! “Results show that, over the past 26 years, LAI has generally increased at a rate of 0.0013 per year around the globe. Figure 1. OK. References.
Hide the Decline – the Other Deletion « Climate Audit. I recently re-visited an article in Science (Briffa and Osborn 1999), that, together with Jones et al 1999 (Rev Geophys), were the first bites of the poison apple of hide-the-decline.
I observed that key conclusions in Briffa and Osborn 1999 depended on the rhetorical effect of deleting the decline from their spaghetti graph. I’ve been looking at the subsequent development of this graphic and, in the process, noticed another curious feature of the figure in Briffa and Osborn 1999 – shown below. As noted previously, Briffa data was deleted after 1960. (Smoothing was done after the deletion further accentuating the impact of the deletion of post-1960 data.) In addition, and this point has not been previously discussed, Briffa and Osborn did not show data prior to 1550 for the Briffa MXD reconstruction.
In the graphic below, I’ve shown (in magenta) not just the hide-the-decline extension, but the deleted data prior to 1550. Figure 1. Figure 2. Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth - O'Reilly Radar. Back in August The New York Times reported that the word ‘statistics’ had replaced the word ‘plastics’ in the famous career guidance given in the film The Graduate.
And more recently the same paper reported that data and its analysis are the future of science. And it’s not just in business and ivory towers that statistical analysis of masses of data is becoming important: just understanding the wealth of percentages, risk factors and charts that confront us all requires a form of ‘data literacy’. As a recent blog post by John Udell points out, even understanding your electricity bill requires everyday analytical thinking. For those of us who can code (whatever the language) raw data presents a rich target for analysis, and some plain fun crunching numbers to understand them better.
A case in point is the recent release of climate change data which is accessible to anyone with some basic mathematical and computing skills. What happened to global warming? This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on? Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming. They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is.
During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly. Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences. Academic Earth - The World is Flat 3.0. Twittervision. Technology Review: Global Warming Bombshell. Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries.
But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place. In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. But it wasnt so.
Now comes the real shocker.