Saturday, January 3, 2015

Blocking and warming

        Try posting a comment to Mike Bara's blog today. Chances are you'll be blocked with the message

Comments are restricted to team members.

        I wonder which team he means. Surely not his favorite sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the Manchester City football club. No, I think it just means he really doesn't want to hear any dissent from his amateur opinions. Not that he actually gets any supportive comments anyway — the last comment he allowed was from his brother Dave back in June 2014.

        I found this out because I wanted to dissent mildly from his latest attack on global warming, and specifically on the widely-reported fact that 2014 was the hottest year ever, if ocean temperature is taken into account. I'm not really qualified to argue the point — I freely admit  it — but I just wanted to offer up this link — one of many that my learned friend Prof. Google told me about. Here's another one.

credit: Dana Nuccitelli
        Why is Mike Bara the world-famous astronomer so set on claiming NO WARMING SINCE 1998? In my view, it's simple. The global warming meme is associated with Al Gore, and Al Gore is a Democrat. Mike Bara, as anyone who studies his tweets will know, is so hysterically hostile to the Democratic Party that he tweeted 'BIH Mario Cuomo' instead of 'RIP Mario Cuomo' last week.

        I think that's childish. I think blocking all dissent from a blog is childish, too. Just my opinion.

9 comments:

Dee said...

It's something one can observe more often, this tendency of some folks in the anomaly camp to side with some other opposition to a mainstream point of view, possibly to make their own obscure view look more likely to have some merit after all. Or something.

That said, there are many ways to talk about global mean temperatures and their records. But even when allowing for all possible margins, errors and different approaches on complex energy balances, the last few decades have clearly no precedent as far as the last few centuries go. And there's currently some kind of high "plateau" reached which is altogether pretty remarkable in itself.

It's beyond me why this would be dismissed as nonsense or (complete) falsehood, especially by the ones making a living from alarmist stories revolving around impending disaster or radical changes coming our way. It shouldn't be too hard for them or is it seen as competition perhaps?

And I think I'm still the skeptic here. One thing that really got the skeptic in me worrying was the often quoted study on "97% studies confirming warming". That was some really, majorly flawed piece of work but reached way too many policy desks. Luckily the scientific world still is full of careful, skeptical diversity, when one looks carefully. As it should be! But the stakes seem too high to just puzzle another couple of decades and remove all doubt and contradiction, before starting to act on the creeping suspicions and diverse models.

Anyway, I don't want to make this a climate discussion. Good for clicks though and 50+ comments...

Dee

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

"Why is Mike Bara the world-famous astronomer so set on claiming NO WARMING SINCE 1998? In my view, it's simple. The global warming meme is associated with Al Gore..."

That reflexive animosity toward Al Gore seems to be fairly common among climate change deniers. Forget the scientific evidence, if Al Gore says something is so, the opposite must be true.

Chris said...

Bara's grasp of meteorology is as poor as his grasp of astronomy. He doesn't understand the difference between global warming and seasons. He absolutely loves the old joke "xxx got several inches of global warming today" when it snows somewhere. Watch for it again soon on Twitter.

Unknown said...

I bet his team is 50% the size of the Enterprise Mission team.

Or him and his imaginary girlfriends and imaginary future ex-wife (why does he want a future ex-wife anyway? Is he planning to kill her for money?).

I'm amazed he didn't say "Blithering Idiot" or use one of his other master debating titles.

Anonymous said...

" I wonder which team he means...."

Ehhh...that would be Team America naturally :-) with its new team captain Mike "the Cartman" Bara blurring "you are either with me or a douchebag" :-)

Adrian

Anonymous said...

@ Anonymous Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost

"...among climate change deniers"

and so the phrase climate change deniers is a scientific term for what exactly...? I believe you're holding the wrong end of the hockeystick as well darling :-)

Adrian

Anonymous said...

and as for the political, economical and social engineering topic called global cooling...oeps sorry wrong decade...eeeh global warming...damn to tricky to use as a term anymore...aah got it...climate change...great marketing spoof...goes with everything..well bottom line...here it comes...

0,039%

increase in population...increase in CO2

who volunteers first for the Bill and Melinda exit program...well..anyone..? Or more to the point and as an excellent marketing slogan if I say so myself

- Are you worried about climate change as well...kill yourself and lower your carbon footprint for your family..your grandchildren will appreciate your sacrifice

and for those who really want to get scientific about so called global warming....

- global war-ming mongering and alarmism is most likely linked to a mental disorder

Adrian

Dee said...

Expat: "2014 was the hottest year ever, if ocean temperature is taken into account".

The thing is that, when restricting one self to definitions of global warming as put forward by NASA or IPCC reports, we have to stick with observed global mean surface temperature (GMST). The image you reposted shows something else entirely with almost zero historical baseline since global ocean heat content doesn't have any historical noteworthy dataset to compare anything with but some isolated recent trending. Doesn't mean it's not worrying though.

IPCC also reports that the HadCRUT4 dataset shows 0.04ÂșC per decade over 1998–2012, which is not, if at all, significant. And indeed does not promote 2014 to a record year by far.

Bara of course is too limited and/or dishonest to state why he selected that "cold bias" dataset or to defend that choice. One can of course object to all attempts to calibrate the HadCrut4 measurements by ending up with more heating at the poles than satellites or local stations could capture in the observational sense. Even those sensors operate already in a different model for calibration though: "pure" measurements do not exist in this game, just choices.

The discussion is clearly moot though, the temperature plateau of the whole 21st century so far lies high enough for some record years to occur, with or without all the supposed corrections. It's not getting significantly cooler yet either, which is what would be expected if the CO2 forcing really "paused" or would not exist to any problematic degree. The coming ten years will turn out to be very interesting in that context.

I had to laugh when seeing the term "climate change denier" popping up here as that's the last thing that's being denied by anyone in my opinion. It's mostly "high climate sensitivity to CO2" opposition in my view.

Like Expat, I'm not really qualified to argue the point further but this is my understanding so far.

GFP2216 said...

I think the most important thing to note in expat's graph is not the trend but rather that the oceans absorb and retain so much more heat than the atmosphere, and for this reason short term trends in global surface temperatures are not a reliable metric in climate science. Climatologists generally require at least 30 years of data to establish a trend.

El Nino weather patterns tend to pull heat out of the oceans while La Nina tend to push it in. This is immediately apparent if you look at a graph that colour codes yearly temperature anomalies against dominant trade winds. In 1998 we had a hell of an El Nino which led to the apparent 'plateau' effect.

However, what people like Bara seem to ignore is that nearly every single year since 1998 has been warmer than every year on record which came before. They argue that the short term variability wasn't 100 percent accurately predicted, while ignoring the complexity of the science and the longer term trends. It's like arguing about the temperature of a forest fire before it burns you alive.