Apr 01 2008
April Fools, Skepticism, and Climate Change
Instead of a typical April Fools Joke, I decided yesterday to do a sort of April Fools Experiment. The goal of the post was to take something completely made up, pepper it with scientific lingo and see if anyone would bite. I decided that the post would need many hints along the way that this was not real. This post highlights what should have set off warning bells. I have disabled comments in the experiment post and posted a prominent link to this post so that future searches will hopefully not be mislead by the attempt.
The first thing that a reader should have been skeptical about was the title. There are currently 4 global climate metrics, and they all show the same thing. You’re reading on a blog that a new metric is more accurate than those that have survived much greater scrutiny.
The second thing is that this post was published under the ‘humor’ category. I debated whether to actually include this in the original publishing because it should have given the game away before even reading any of the post. Readers subscribed to the feed can be excused for missing this if their feed reader doesn’t display the category or tags (mine doesn’t).
I think my favorite red flag is the inset image of Vice President Al Gore. There’s no reason for it. I don’t actually discuss anything that he says in the post.
The first paragraph is mush. It’s an introduction to the post that sounds good but doesn’t say anything. One of the things I did to make the post seem more “scientific” was to use a thesaurus and replace some words with synonyms, much like a student in a first-year English composition class. The first instance of this is 10 words into the post - ‘degrade’. That word doesn’t fit the sentance.
Now into the guts of the post. What did I actually do? For the most part, I did exactly what I said I did! I tried to obfuscate (I like that word; means hide) the reason I was doing it, otherwise the gig would have been up. But now I can fully divulge what I did.
First off, the post started from the end. I needed to somehow find a way to make the temperature record have no trend and have it be correlated with the solar cycle. A casual look at the temperature records and the solar records reveals that this is not an easy task. Dr. James Hansen says that “several analyses have extracted empirical global temperature variations of amplitude about 0.1°C associated with the 10-11 year solar cycle” (unsourced, see original PDF). I have been unable to reproduce those finding, but I’d believe him over me.
Now that I knew my ending point, I could find a method to get there. I needed to start with some data that everyone had seen before and was relatively uncontroversial. I chose the MSU measurements of temperature from UAH. Note that I didn’t actually say this in the post.
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For no reason whatsoever, I decided to subtract the stratospheric temperature from the tropospheric temperature. The real reason to do this is that it took one temperature time series that is fairly well known and combined it with a temperature time series that is less known to result in a time series that is unknown. This is simply to confuse the readers. Now I could apply some “corrections” to the data so that I could reach my conclusions.
Even in this made-up time series, there is still a trend to “warmer” temperatures in recent years. I could have solved this by subtracting the tropospheric temperature from the stratospheric temperature, but I would still have a highly sloped line. So I applied a made-up correction to the data that would remove the slope. The simplest way would have been to find the slope of the line and subtract it. I wasn’t sure how to spin that so it would sound plausible. Instead, I applied a low-pass filter and used that as the correction. The method of correction is simple; I subtracted the correction from the made-up time series.
The reasoning for my correction was that it would correct for stratospheric aerosols and ENSO events. When looking at the graph, it is clear that the correction did not actually result in the removal of these from the time series. This should have been a big red flag.
But this still wasn’t highly correlated with the solar cycle. This is the part where the previous post doesn’t explain what I actually did. Supposedly, I applied a correction for the diurnal bias suggested in a paper by Randall and Herman. The problem is that they did not suggest a correction. So what did I actually do?
I had some data that was some measure of the solar cycle. At the time of writing I didn’t know what it was, so I had to make up some mumbo-jumbo about how it was a combination of several solar signals. I’ve since taken the time to find out that it is the Solar Flux at 10.7 cm. To get the data I used in the graph, I just rescaled it so it went from 0 to approximately 150.
The solar data needed to be correlated with temperature data. The surest way to do that was to just use the solar data as the temperature data. But I needed it to still look like the original temperature data. The solution was to add the temperature data to the solar data. There was necessarily a rescaling that needed to be done, but I just messed around until I got something that looked plausible.
In the previous post, I wrote that “this results in a small correction to the [data after the first 'correction'], but is mostly a shift to larger values.” Even when viewed on a graph that contains a lot of curvy lines, it should be clear that the statement wasn’t true. There are large differences between the two curves.
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Finally, we get to the final graph that shows the supposed correlation between the temperature and solar cycle. It’s actually a fairly high correlation. However, it is not as high as I suggest in the post. The correlation coefficient between the two time series is actually 0.655; meaning R2 is 0.429. I did not actually compute statistical significance, I just asserted that it was statistically significant.
Other things that should have set off warning bells. The name of the supposed more acurate temperature time series is called the Global Temperature Index, or GTI. This is the name of a model of car manufactured by Volkswagen. There are way to many acronyms in the post. Everything has one, even if it’s never referred to again. The smoothing to obtain the aerosol correction is much longer than 2.5 years. The reason given why I couldn’t use a 2 year filter is bunk.
Did I miss anything?
April 1st represents a day when everyone is skeptical of most things, especially those posted on the Internet. For instance, Google announced they would be partnering with Virgin to form Virgle, a company that will form the first human colony on Mars. Wikipedia has a listing of some of the major April Fools Jokes for this year.
But why is Apri 1st the only day when people are skeptics? It didn’t take long for some (most?) people to realize that I was talking out of my butt, but even after it was revealed as a “joke” there were some comments that seem to suggest that they still didn’t “get it”.
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23 Responses to “April Fools, Skepticism, and Climate Change”
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Since I used to teach college english composition you were at a disadvantage. “degrade” really was like a first year freshman embellishment by theasurus . The other thing I loved about freshman writing was the mis-hearing of cliches.
Instead of the cliche ” for all intents and purposes” I once had a student write “for all intensive purposes” I laughed till I cried.
Yours was a very well excuted piece. One reason I like to come here ( and be nice ) is that you are good humoured and curious.
for reference I think there are 5.
Hadcru,GISS,NOAA, UAH, RSS.
ah crap do HAD,GISS,AND NOAA all use the same SST baseline?
Nobody ever uses NOAA, why’s that?
[Reply: I'm not sure why people (me) forget about the NOAA temperature, but I think this is the second time you've corrected me on that. The NOAA anomalies. I would guess that they use different SST baselines, but have no proof to justify that.]
Yes, I didn’t get it after first glance (it’s not worth explaining what I originally thought). However, a second reading showed me that the corrections themselves were the joke. But, it did start me thinking of alternate reasons for the decline in stratospheric temperatures in the last 20-30 years. This is the question (slightly modified) that I asked in the original post (which has since been closed to comments):
Would it be useful to know the impact of man-made production of aerosols and particulate matter (pm) since the fall of the Soviet Union and the recent modernization of China. I know the perception is that China is adding to the world’s pollution by building coal-fired power plants on a weekly basis, but have you ever been to rural China in the winter? They burn all sorts of ag waste to generate heat. The NOx and pm in the air is palpable. Urbanization and the construction of modern power plants is an improvement in my opinion over past rural practices with regard to pm. Thus, how much cooling of the stratosphere has occured in the past 20 years due to less pm reaching those heights. I assume that when earthly matter such as volcanic ash reach the stratosphere, it does two things: it heats the stratosphere (as it absorbs energy) and cools the troposphere (due to shielding). Conversely, less ash or other particulate matter reaching the stratosphere cools down the stratosphere, but also warms the troposphere (and the earth’s surface). And, if this is occuring, what is the time lag between less pollution on the earth’s surface and its effect on the stratosphere? Or, have climate modelers assumed that man-made production of pm has not changed (or even increased) over the past 20 years?
The best part was how you aped Basil’s butt-pomposity by 50 cent words when 5 cent ones would do (and appealing to random fancy sounding tests). Poor Anthony Watts really is a dim bulb for not seeing what a shmedrik that Basis is. I think Tony needs to get brutally mocked until he learns a lesson. Insert The Simpsons’s “haha” guy picture.
[Reply: In my experience, people tend to respond negatively when they are mocked. Related articles: Dunning-Kruger effect, Lake Wobegon effect, and overconfidence effect.]
I think we need to break him down and take the false pride away. Some extend arms with rifle will do to start.
Chris, except for REALLY huge volcanic eruptions, not much particulate matter reaches the stratosphere, and even then, most only gets into the lower strat.
If I recall correctly, most of the background stratospheric aerosols are transported through the tropopause as gases (such as OCS) where it is oxidized to form solid sulfates.
There isn’t an efficient mechanism to transport aerosols from the troposphere to the stratosphere, but there are efficient mechanism to remove them from the troposphere (rain). Thus the residence time of tropospheric aerosols is very short, on the order of a few days.
Atmoz,
What if pollution (volcanism and/or man-made) preferentially puts pm in the stratosphere and aerosols in the troposhere (notice I distinguish between the two). Then, you would have a double whammy with regard to cooling the troposphere (due to aerosols in the troposphere and pm shielding in the stratosphere). What would cause pm and aerosols to reach different heights? One can carry a charge (pm), whereas aerosols cannot (clearly, I’m making guesses at the moment).
Eli Rabbit,
I don’t doubt your word, but can you point me in a direction that confirms your statement. I would like to know how one-time events such as large volcanic eruptions affects the stratosphere whereas constant, but low-level, man-made pm does not. Thanks.
I contend that most of the observed warming of the past 30 years is due to removing pm from the stratosphere (unless proven wrong of course). If so, is it possible that the varying presence of pm in the stratosphere has confounded the link between solar cycles and the earth’s surface temperature?
Chris,
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#msu_weighting_functions
Look at the huge spikes in Stratosphere temperatures following the large eruptions of El Chichon and Pinatubo. That’s pm getting into the stratosphere and warming it as it blocks light from reaching the troposphere.
very little man made pm makes it up that high.
An aerosol is defined as a type of colloid where a solid or liquid is suspended in a gaseous medium. In practice, the term aerosol is used to describe only the suspended medium - in this case a solid particle. Thus, there is no difference between an aerosol and a particulate (PM).
I have a customer who really needs the service I provide. This morning I told him that I won the lottery and would retire tomorrow. I waited about 5 seconds before mentioning April Fools. It was worth a chuckle.
I wonder how things would have turned out if the fish that you were angling for had bitten. Just a chuckle?
[Reply: If I had caught the fish I was angling for, I would have wished I had WP Super Cache plugin already installed. As it turns out, I didn't need it. But I still caught some nice fish. I'm having the walleye tonight. Mmmm.]
Thanks for the replies. I hope to continue to look into this. For example, check out the graph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
How is it possible that the cooling contribution of sulfates is increasing? Flip the sign of the contribution from negative to positive for sulfates and volcanic eruptions, add a little more positive contribution to solar, and presto, the positive contribution of CO2 goes to 0.1 - 0.2 C. See Atmoz, I can do corrections too! Also, the graph shows the negative contribution of sulfates increasing during the Great Depression and decreasing during WW2. Huh? I am getting the distinct impression that climate models are saddled with a lot of assumptions that can’t be supported. I can play this game too. I’m going to first assert that CO2 has increased global temperatures by 0.1 - 0.2 C since 1900 and then input the assumptions to get the result that I want. Hey, I didn’t realize it was this easy to get a Nobel prize. Wahoo! (that was the mockery part)
“In my experience, people tend to respond negatively when they are mocked. ”
This remark alone will bring me back to this blog. True, and alas, such an unusual insight for people in the climate wars to have.
You should do a comical piece about people in the 21st century using tree-rings from wizened old trees in a desert in Western America to divine Global Temperatures over the last 1000 years, and 100 years into the future - that would be really funny! Oh, wait a minute, that’s not an April Fools! It’s reality!
Ok, how about a piece about using Mannian analysis to decide if Pink Noise or White Noise is best for predicting Global temperatures? My money is on Pink Noise, due to it’s superior spectral qualities - what do you think?
Walleye is a tasty fish.
Here’s the thing. Atmoz planted seeds on my blog. I was the first to see it I think because I got a Wordpress link notice. He’d never given any reason for anyone to distrust him because he’d never pulled any silly stunts like this. Now we do.
Enjoy the Walleye.
In fact I applaud and respect what Atmoz has done prior to this, and done it without the vitriol that is so common to many other web presentations.
TCO, Atmoz is right. You may be smarter than me, or Basil, lots of people are. But your way of using drive by snark doesn’t do much to earn respect for your views nor motivate others. While you often have good ideas, the wrapper you present them in cause most to just see you as a pest.
Imagine presenting a gift to somebody with wrapping that said “screw you!” printed on it. It is human nature to go with first impressions, so they would likely remember the wrapper more than the gift and be a little less trustful of the person in the future.
But despite Atmoz pulling a stunt designed to make trusting people look stupid, I’m offering a gift with no wrapper for his consideration:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-55/
Atmoz, perhaps you’d like to apply some of your analysis techniques to this one.
[Reply: April 1 of last year.]
[Reply: April 1 of last year.]
Yes but that one is screamingly obvious. You could have just used Gore. And it is labeled April 1, not March 31.
Fred,
First, I don’t think I was the intended target of the original post, as I am new to this site and others. Second, my initial inclination towards AGW and climate models has been negative from the beginning, so I don’t agree with your assertion that the Atmoz’ post sparked additional negativity (on my part). Third, I don’t disagree with Atmoz’ position on willy-nilly corrections. It’s so easy to do, as I tried to demonstrate in my post above (although there was one serious question in the post regarding the trend in sulfates - can anyone point me in a direction where the negative trend can be verified?). Was Atmoz’ post in bad form? Possibly, but it’s his site, so I am not going to waste time worrying about that. However, as you might have guessed by now, I do get perturbed by people sitting above the fray making pompous comments. Do you really think that knowing beforehand people will respond negatively to mockery is a truly unusual insight? Sheesh!
[Reply: Satellite remote sensing reveals regional tropospheric aerosol trends.]
You have walleye and wattseye confuzled here. Really Nathan, wouldn’t it have been nice to demonstrate how all them climate skeptics are only skeptical of AGW? But what really happened, even though you will be the denialist here, them skeptics were skeptical of your work that disagreed with AGW. Oh boy, how the bestest laid plans can go caputz.
I thought it was pretty good.
This part was my favorite: “The uncorrected GTI is calculated by simply subtracting the stratospheric temperature from the tropospheric temperature.”
If people couldn’t figure out it was a joke by that point, well the joke is indeed on them.
Atmoz– “I would guess that they use different SST baselines, but have no proof to justify that.”
This kept me laughing harder than the original post.
Atmoz,
Thanks for the link. I just skimmed it briefly (I’ll read more later when I have the time), but the gist of the paper is that aerosol load has been decreasing since the early 1980’s. If so, why does the graph below show aerosol load increasing (i.e., aerosols are shown to create a cooling trend)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
Seriously, are all climate models this far out of sync? Was the aerosol cooling trend made up by the modeler just to show a wildly positive role of CO2?
Next, take a look at this graph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Global_Warming_Map.jpg
Most of the positive temperature anomalies are located over large land masses. I find this consistent (without proof, mind you) with less aerosols in the air that would normally absorb/block sunlight (depending upon altitude). Can you point me in the direction of an alternate reason for the spatially inconsistent surface temperature anomoly?
Finally, while I agree with you that aerosols in the troposphere are some sort of colloid of water/sulfate/solid, I still think the particles in the stratosphere are drier particles that can hold a charge. Also, I think that large volcanic eruptions overload the microclimate to the extent that particles more easily reach the stratosphere without inteference from water vapor, etc. This may be the reason why volcanic eruptions are able to provide the peak temperatures in the stratosphere versus man-made pollution (although I think the latter plays a small, but significant role in the stratosphere).