Centuries-old whaling logs are filling gaps in our climate knowledge
grist.org
grist.org
Quickly found an online source here [1]:
> The Paris region was mostly planted with white, particularly with a variety known then under the name of Fromenteau or Fromentot, which is known today as the Pinot Gris.
I had personally gotten that info from reading this very interesting book on the history of rural France during the last 2000 years [2]
[1] https://www.wineterroirs.com/2012/12/wine_in_the_middle_ages...
[2] https://www.amazon.fr/Histoire-France-rurale-origines-1340/d...
> The Romans introduced winemaking to the UK, in a period with a relatively warm climate. Their vineyards were as far north as Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire, with others in Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire, and probably many other sites. The wines were most likely fruity and sweet, fermented with added honey, and drunk within six months.[15] Winemaking continued at least down to the time of the Normans, with over 40 vineyards in England mentioned in the Domesday Book; much of it was communion wine for the Eucharist.
> ... When Henry VIII was crowned in 1509, 139 vineyards were recorded, 11 of which produced wine for the royal household ...
> The twilight of British winemaking tradition was brought to an end with the onset of the First World War, as the need for crops and food, and the rationing of sugar, took priority over wine production. For the first time in 2000 years, English wines were no longer being produced in Britain. ...
> Viticulture was revived in the 1970s onwards ...
The Roman Warm Period (coming around Caesar era to 400s, explaining the Migration Age) The Medieval Warm Period And the inverse, the Modern Cooling Period (between 1600-1800, if I'm not mistaken).
All three explain macro population movements. Yes, the Germanic tribesmen were climate refugees. So were maybe the European colonists of the New World and other settler colonies.
Remember that the 1700s was so cold relatively, the soldiers march even in summer with thick jackets and smokepipes.
Though, there was also the introduction of potato, which led to massive demographic explosion in the Protestant Northern Europe.
But I do see your point. Still, the Germanic tribes were the first climate refugees that we know, maybe after the 8.2 kya event [0] that led to the first cities in Fertile Crescent
Not quite. Those germanic tribes were fleeing the huns. The crossing of the danube in 376 by the goths (as war refugees) and the crossing of the rhine in the winter 405/406 by the alans and vandals (as invaders) allowed them to escape the huns. There were extreme climate events recorded in the late antiquity, but that happened more than one century later. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536 The Justinian plague occurred 541-549, amplifying the problems of the byzantine empire. Returning to the germans, also in the late antiquity, there is an obscure and unexplained event, in the period 500-550 the vistula and elbe basins were depopulated. Germans migrated from those places or they perished there.
In blunt words: no wonder the temperature rises if it is measured at a place that is surrounded with concrete and stone today.
It’s also the strategy of science and anyone who wants reliable reproducible results.
Climate change denialists only look for inconsistencies in others' work - if they find any whatsoever they discard the entire idea of climate change (a foregone conclusion, they already discarded it). If they find none they manufacture them by wilfully misinterpreting what is being presented. If they are confronted by problems in their own work it is hand-waved away as if it were some conspiracy or stick their head in the sand.
That is, if there's any sort of pretense of science whatsoever. A more mainstream sort of climate change denial you will see is right-wing news outlets saying something along the lines of "it is snowing, so much for global warming" during a snowstorm.
That's giving academics a bit more credit than they deserve. This is a theoretical idea of how they should operate, rather than what they actually do.
The problem of urban heat distorting weather station readings over time is very real. It has affected the US weather station network in the past. The problems were completely ignored for decades until climate "denialists" (actually: people outside academia who care about science) physically visited many of the stations, took photos and then wrote a big report which caught the attention of Republicans in Congress. They documented thermometers that had once been in open fields but were now next to air conditioner exhausts, transformers, mobile phone towers, main roads etc. An especially big problem is weather stations that were once in farmland and are now at airports, the biggest heat sources you can imagine! In fact over time there has been a lot of dropout of stations and now many of the remaining stations that report reliably are sited at airports.
They also did some work where they found stations that were still properly sited (the US has far more weather stations than needed, so this was possible), and looked at what happened when you used readings only from them. A huge amount of the warming trend simply vanished.
In the wake of that a couple of things happened:
1. Some of the stations the report highlighted were shut down.
2. Congress can't agree on much but, spending money is an exception. They funded a brand new weather station network with ideal siting, the latest sensors etc. Really state of the art, and so well done that even the non-academics who wrote the "denialist" report were satisfied with it. This is called the US Climate Reference Network (CRN).
So, happy ending right? Unfortunately no. There are several problems that persist:
1. The US CRN output isn't actually used by climate researchers. Instead they have kept on using the old broken network which they now adjust via models to, they claim, fix the problems. This is problematic because these are the very same people who blatantly ignored their own severe data quality issues for decades until bloggers noticed what was happening.
2. The old network was never actually fixed; the government just shut down the bad stations that were highlighted in the original report. This year the people who did that original report did another one where they once again visited weather stations, and they found that basically none of them were in compliance with the siting rules (which are objective, this isn't a matter of opinion). In other words, the claims that standards were raised were deceptive, some rules were written down but aren't being enforced.
3. The US CRN shows no warming trend whatsoever. This is for the entire USA since 2005. This data appears on its face to be incompatible with the claims of runaway warming and an impending crisis/emergency.
Take a look and see for yourself. Go here:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-tempera...
and then change the graph to plot "all months" and unselect nClimDiv leaving CRN. You'll see that the temperature trend is flat.
"A more mainstream sort of climate change denial you will see is right-wing news outlets saying something along the lines of "it is snowing, so much for global warming" during a snowstorm."
I think you've been left behind by recent changes. Attributing single weather events to climate change in either direction is indeed not supposed to be valid, but the new field of "attribution studies" does exactly that by claiming that individual events can be directly connected to climate change. The rules changed and now saying e.g. "it is snowing, that's evidence of climate change" is not only not right wing denial, it's now considered denial to object to such claims!
We're constantly being asked to trust that scientists of all stripes are trustworthy, honest, and behave as model scientists should. But when people dig into the details they constantly find non-optimal behavior along with a culture that doesn't seem to care. That's the source of the replication crisis, the source of constantly shifting claims about COVID, etc. Trust is easy to lose: when people notice that scientists aren't holding themselves to the highest standards, but demand us to act as if they do, how is trust restored?
> I think you've been left behind by recent changes
No. There may be people like you who exist outside academia, but still take an interest into networks of weather stations and the like, but the vast majority of climate change deniers takes are along the lines I described - "it's snowing, ergo suck it libs"
This may sound dismissive, but "look at this graph of this measurement you never think about but ignore this dataset, ok and only look at these years, ok now squint your eyes... does THAT look like climate change!?" feels like you're trying to dupe me, not convince me. Combined with the vaguely anti-science conspiratorial tone ("don't believe the scientists, they seem to care, believe me!" - um no?) and allusions to shenanigans over COVID... I'm afraid that I'm not on board.
"they have kept on using the old broken network which they now adjust via models"
So indeed you'd expect them to follow each other closely now.
There's no attempt to dupe you - a full treatment of the problems with temperature data is a book sized topic, that's all. The reason for the selection of years is simply because that's all the data that has been collected by the new network. By all means, treat this as a good faith attempt to provoke questions and further research. The CRN is just an example - the problem I'm getting at here is what it reveals about the methodologies and culture. Specifically, how do we know that people who claim to be scientists are actually using the scientific method? That's the topic I responded to.
For decades the US data collection system was degrading in ways that created false warming, but it wasn't the people who are paid to study climate who raised the alarm. It was volunteers. That should be a serious problem for any rational person who wants to know true things; scientists are meant to care about measurement error and take steps to minimize it. So you'd want at least some sort of post-mortem process to identify the root causes of this collective institutional failure, but, it didn't happen. Instead data accuracy became politicized and now researchers refuse to use the CRN even though it was built specifically to resolve disputes over data quality!
The problem here is actually more severe than this one case. Climatologists were well aware of other problems with temperature data! Data quality problems are common in science so that's not inherently an issue. But the scientific approach is to quantify and then communicate the flaws in data through CIs/error bars, then propagate those through any statistical derivation you do, and finally be honest about what the CIs are telling you even if that's "we can't say much". That's the point you were making originally and we agree. Climatologists don't do this. Instead they think up reasons the data must be flawed, "fix" it via post-processing and then issue new dataset versions without error bars. They don't only do this for data collected long ago. Once they opened that pandora's box they couldn't stop and now temperature readings collected even just 5 years ago are subject to large scale revisions post-hoc. These revisions don't just change individual data points. Entire trends appear or disappear due to the revisions.
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NCDC%20Jan1915%20and%20Jan...
That behavior is considered fraud in other fields and for good reason: the temptation to change the data to confirm your theory is too great if you allow that. Climatologists though, don't consider it fraud, they think it's normal and fine. Sure enough, there are problems like temperatures as measured by satellites and weather balloons not matching the modified temperature timeseries from ground based weather stations. This is the sort of thing you'd expect to see if the ground station data was corrupted but pointing out this divergence is considered "denialism" and verboten.
All this opens up lots of meta-scientific questions like, is the scientific method objective? Do the institutions attempt to enforce the usage of it? What even is the scientific method anyway, can you write it down in a way nobody will object to? Clearly here we have a major disconnect: if you did what climatologists do in a physics experiment, your papers would be retracted and you'd be booted out in disgrace. Yet both fields claim to be scientific.
the vast majority of climate change deniers takes are along the lines I described - "it's snowing, ergo suck it libs"
Sure, and that's indeed not a useful rebuttal to claims of long term trends. I don't know about "vast majority" because I don't know of any surveys that could be used to check that claim. But unfortunately it's also no longer particularly meaningful to check. Climatologists, governments and media are now all too happy to attribute individual forest fires, cold years, hot years etc to climate change. If they can do it then "it's snowing ergo suck it libs" is in fact a valid argument by the scientific institution's own standards. Hence my point: are they really scientific?
There are a lot of book sized (and larger) data sets and many people that study them.
More than a decade ago Richard A. Muller fell in with the climate deniers and studied the Urban Heat centre bias mythology to death hoping from the outset to find it true.
> When we began our study ( Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ), we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find.
> Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
> Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.
You seem to be fixated upon a long debunked point that never panned out under close study.
The BEST project you mentioned uses very similar methodologies as climatologists usually do, so it's not a surprise they replicated the results. As the quote you give makes clear, the BEST people took acknowledged-to-be corrupted data, assumed a priori that "correcting" that data is a legitimate thing to do, "corrected" it in largely similar ways and got largely similar results. That isn't really a surprise because replicability wasn't ever an issue under contention.
The issue under debate here is rather whether that's a scientifically legitimate approach to begin with, and whether it's the sort of thing people expect when they think of science. I don't see how editing observational data can ever be scientific. If you allow one field to do it you have to let them all do it and then what can be said with any confidence about what's true?
The problem is researchers usually start by saying "this question feels important, therefore, we will work with what we've got" and there's no incentive to stop and say "the data quality is insufficient for analysis". BEST claimed to address UHI effects but just like previously, when people dug into the details they found that large numbers of weather stations at airports and post offices had been classed as "very rural", for example, so the data here is just of garbage quality.
W.R.T. climatology specifically there probably is a slight rise in temperatures across the globe in the past decades - the satellite data suggests as such. But not much, certainly much less than predicted, and we only have such data stretching back a few decades so not much can be said about long term trends. By climatologist's own admission the surface temperature dataset is heavily corrupted, that's why they modify it so much. The modifications in the current era are relatively small but in the past e.g. first half of the 20th century they are much larger, effectively making the past colder than it was actually observed to be at the time. That's why all the papers and newspaper articles from the 60s and 70s discussing global cooling are now considered obsolete - they edited the data to remove the cooling but, once again, there was never any post-mortem into why their measurement methodologies failed so badly or why they collectively asserted a new ice age with so much confidence.
Finally, note that once we zoom out a bit from the question of SST reliability, there is still the problem of aggressive exaggeration and unscientific behavior elsewhere in the field. To quote Muller back at you:
"much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn't changed"
And the warmer temperatures could possibly be explained by more concrete and stone nearby. I'm not saying that this explanation is true, I'm just trying to see both sides of the picture.
The entire region is 13th century wine villages about the main Beaune centre .. with that modern stone 15th-century Hospices de Beaune.
There's a reason the area hit the 2015 UNESCO World Heritage List and concrete brutalist architecture wasn't it.
This new data set concerns Beaune. The paper says "Unlike Dijon, Beaune is still surrounded with vineyards situated at altitudes between 220 and 300 m (Fig. 2)."
Wikipedia says Beaune has a population of 20,551, which is about 2x that of 1800, and doesn't seem to be enough to have a significant regional heat island effect.
https://www.datagraver.com/case/kyoto-cherry-blossom-full-fl...
I also find it incredible that there were several outlier years before, that were quite close to the early blossoms we're seeing in recent years, so the earliest one in 2011 was actually not completely unprecedented... but of course, the pattern is very clear that something is way off since the 1980's and the end line is unequivocaly going down, fast.
And as a curiosity, what happened in the late 2000s to cause belief in climate change to drop off a cliff, and then slowly creep back up?
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/am...
The good news is that even the most staunchly anti-climate-change group, conservative republicans, are nearly at 50/50 when it comes to whether it's happening at all.
Probably not because I just spotted something from that link that I find even more interesting: On the radios in the upper-right, switch to "policy support". There was a very sudden shift in 2013, from consistently down to consistently up.
...and now that I think about it, I think that might actually explain it: The sudden drop in the late 2000s might be due to the great recession. They may have accidentally measured "why do I care?" instead of "is it happening?", and maybe it took until 2013 for peoples' lives to stabilize enough to care again.
Post-Al Gore, it was “don’t believe your lying eyes”. That gradually pivoted to “climate change is happening, but it’s a natural cycle”. Eventually it will pivot to “meh” or “it’s gods will”.
It’s a pattern applied to lots of issues by the reactionary elements. It works because it’s easy to deny and subsequently concede small points. We’ve trained a generation to be adept at this online.
When the hyperbolic claims about Global Warming with runaway climate forcing failed, it was swiftly rebranded Climate Change.
At which point, the critics became accurate, since climatic periods are measured in 30 year intervals, and weather != climate. Solar Radiance being the keymost driver of earth's temperature of course, varies due to the natural cycle and supercycles of the Sun [1]
The longterm trend of deglaciation and CO2 levels rising back to nearer Earth's historical norms continues unabated.
How would you define those two terms?
The other gets grant money in perpetuity no matter what the data says.
When I was in my youth, that was the buzz at the time. My, how the winds have changed.
Solar forcing is completely accounted for in the models, in all areas (albedo, bouncing in the galactic plane, distance from the Sun).
The repeated cries of "but you didn't account for this or that, which I know as a layman, but surely PhDs in climate science didn't think about!" is inane. It's in the models. Every single variable you can name and then some are in the models.
Climactic periods are not "measured" in any kind of arbitrary 3 decade cycle. Even if you want to pretend that they are, and we are returning to some kind of baseline (which every bit of science says we are not -- we are going to dramatically overshoot it), humanity did not evolve under those "historical norms". Our society and agriculture and population patterns did not emerge under those "historical norms".
Returning to those "historical norms" will mean the largest population migration in human history, with a large amount of it from nuclear states which already have shooting skirmishes in their borderlands facing an existential crisis over water (India, Pakistan, China). Those "historical norms" are not necessarily compatible with civilization.
Before you talk about how much farmland it is going to "open", ask yourself how well the supply chain did during COVID. Then ask yourself what will happen to it during a population migration. Ask yourself what happens when deep water ports at low sea level start having problems, and how we would get crude to refineries to get bitumen to even make asphalt to create infrastructure in the new "open" land, how we'd transport concrete and steel there if there are interruptions in the supply chain which impact diesel production. Ask yourself how long it will take to transform old-growth forest and granite-filled glacial retreat zones in Canada into arable land, how easily we'll be able to get chemical fertilizers, etc.
Even if you want to talk about how this is some kind of "historical norm", the question ultimately becomes not "is this anthropogenic?" (it is, but it doesn't matter), but "how do we intend to survive this as a species?"
You made an extraordinary claim "It's in the models. Every single variable you can name and then some are in the models."
I am calling your bluff.
Please provide evidence of six variable things
(1) The change from Whitewash to semi-latex in the painting of Stevenson screens (the old paint vs the new paint) which is a feed into GHCN
(2) The change in the sizes of some Stevenson screens in some countries records (230L to 60L)
(3) Analysis of the greater accuracy of space based temperature measurement which deviate substantially from in-situ measurements
(4) The removal of corrupted data sources like ASOS from the Climate Record, as ASOS as placed on hot airfields and is hit by prop blast and jetwash
(5) Fixes to the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) readings to account for ship altitude, height, deviation from marine surface temperature, etc.
(6) Weather Station gaps used in location where urbanized city centers are extrapolated for all nearby landscape (e.g. Africa) and the large gaps in the surface temps (Antarctica, Greenland, Siberia, Sahara, Amazon, Northern Canada)
You didn't respond to a single request.
I 've been in the industry for decades now too.
That these things jumps out so readily is proof that the science around this field is truly in its infancy. Science is a process that is self-correcting over time. And I am happy for it.
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> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
More measured approaches on shorter timescales -- actually going after the big fish and not ignoring their excess because they are more "important" than the little people -- is taken more seriously.
Is this yet another allusion on Al Gore and his infamous private jet? Last year, 506,769 airplanes either took off or landed in LAX only. That's 1388 per day in one airport. All packed to the gill by "little people" like you and me.
Al Gore could fly his jet across the Pacific every day and it would be literally a drop in the bucket-full of little guys, in the grand scheme of things.
I'm tired of these talks of "big guys ruining the environment," which is conveniently only brought up when these big guys talk about the environment. This is plain simple "hate the message, shoot the messenger" strategy.
By "big fish" I actually meant companies (who are a prime shake-down target for carbon credits), but if for the rich, celebs, and politicians the shoe fits... They are supposed to have noblesse oblige.
Fucking yes! We need stringent government regulations, not individual moralizing.
Stop whining and moaning and vote for politicians who will put in place the taxes and regulations needed.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/climate-activists-embrace-d...
There’s also not much of attempt on the left to understand climate change better.
Every weather disaster is directly attributed to climate change, even if it scientifically can’t be directly linked.
This convinces deniers that there isn’t a problem and people are being “alarmists”.
Most people understand this. In life casual chains are rarely clear cut. "Caused A" and "made A significantly more likely" are interchangeable outside of academic debates.
One has to be severely climate change denialist to focus on such a detail. It's a strategy of sowing uncertainty.
Some of these other predictions aren't necessarily falsified.
Peak oil may have already occurred. The fact that we have to resort to offshore drilling shows the low hanging fruit have already been taken.
Another example of a debatable prediction is "Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020" - this is something that environmental groups claim is a correct prediction as they attribute certain current wars (e.g. Syrian Civil War) to have been caused by droughts caused by climate change.
Some of these predictions were not made by scientists or were clearly just meant as a slogan to galvanise action - e.g.
2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
There's the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
And Breitbart: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/06/01/media-fail-no...
And a bunch of other nonsense. Every one of these "predictions" is either a journalist trying to sell copy by exaggerating a story, or conservative media outlets clapping themselves on the back for pointing out that journalists who exaggerated were wrong.
None of these "predictions" are in any way science, and all of the climate modeling in the past 30 years has made predictions which are *more conservative than reality*.
> Every one of these "predictions" is either a journalist trying to sell copy by exaggerating a story
> None of these "predictions" are in any way science
That doesn't matter at all because this conversation is about public perception, and guess what makes it to the public?
We knew there were incorrectly sited weather sensors that fed data into the climate record, just like ASOS, receiving prop blast and jetwash. Some HCN sensors that had been correctly sited became incorrect over time due to urbanization and industrialization. The discongruence between space based observations and in-situ flawed sensors are the clearest indication of this.
This is also why we saw the rise of the HCN-Reference. We also saw a better understanding of the medieval warm period which, although potentially regionalized, is not without precedents.
The process of fixing of these flaws, we call that science. However, this has not stopped the religious cult from a rearguard action defending by whatever name they choose to call it these days.
CRU leak?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus
IIRC it was the most repeated counter-argument back then.
Of course the 2010s showed that there was no counter-argument to begin with.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700
Of course trust falls when that happens. It's correct for trust to fall. They'd been making hyper-confident assertions about the future of climate and temperature for many people's entire lives and then one day, whoops, actually, it's "we've not been measuring temperature right for the entire history of our field and it fundamentally changes the entire shape of the data".
The change in course where it slowly creeped up is two fold. First, the warming became completely obvious. People could see in their own living memory very dramatic changes between their childhood and modern day. That just took time. Second, as the left became more and more radicalized toward actions to fight the threat, the right wing could take a less radical position and still claim to be holding the line against radicals. The left shifted the Overton Window left enough that the right could have a politically viable platform that included climate change.
But climate is much harder to pin down, the perfect red-herring, keeping us arguing minutia distracts us from acting to realize that unifying list.
Unlimited universally-available energy, far less pollution, the end of energy colonialism, lowering costs, more wealth for all, better health. And less CO2 to boot. Hell we might even make it to Type 1.