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Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Skeptical Science: Not a cite for Soare eyes

Not a cite for Soare eyes

by MarkR, Skeptical Science, January 16, 2011

A recent paper in an obscure journal (Soares, 2010) used correlations between temperatures and CO2 concentrations to conclude that;
"The absence of immediate relation between CO2 and temperature is evidence that rising its mix ratio in the atmosphere will not imply more absorption and time residence of energy over the Earth surface. This is explained because band absorption is nearly all done with historic CO2 values."
Soares looks at correlations between change in CO2 and change in temperature for a month to a few years. He doesn't find a correlation between short term CO2 changes and temperature changes in the following months. His Figure 8 shows the change in temperature or CO2 from one year to the next.

Do we live in Soares’ world where CO2 isn’t causing warming, or in the world of mainstream physics where theory and measurements show increased CO2  heating? What does mainstream physics expect to see in the above graph? 
Firstly it expects atmospheric temperatures to change regularly: natural cycles like El Nino transfer heat from the oceans and can change atmospheric temperature by up to 0.4 °C in a year causing the big vertical spread. 
The graph below is based on Meehl et al. (2004) and shows a climate model estimate of how much global warming was expected from greenhouse gases for the past century: always less than 0.02 °C/year -- so small that the noise effectively hides the incline if you only look at year to yearchanges. Fortunately, very simple statistical techniques work around this.
Some rough calculations using the NASA global data shows that to detect the expected CO2 global warming for the past 40 years at 95% confidence would require about 160 years of measurements -- and hundreds more measurements to detect the CO2 signal when it is smaller. 
 
We have some more expectations for the graph: low CO2 emissions should mean slow warming and vice versa. On the left of the graph we expect average warming of under 0.01 °C/yr and on the right hand side we expect just under 0.02 °C/yr. So if you plot a slope you expect it to be positive – going from 0.01 on the left up to 0.02 on the right but practically impossible to find amongst so much noise (although Soares does plot it).
The next trick is to implicitly assume that nothing else shows a warming or cooling pattern: but we know that there is. From the 1940s to the 1970s we pumped enough reflective aerosols into the atmosphere to temporarily halt global warming by 'global dimming' (Ramanathan et al., 2001).  
This is like putting a pan of water over a lit gas stove and then dropping in an icepack big enough to cool the water. Soares would say the cooling shows that burning gas can’t heat water, but mainstream science says that a big pack of ice temporarily masks the heating and that burning gas does, in fact, make water warmer than it would otherwise be. Importantly, you can account for the ice and determine whether the heat is on and other scientists would do this.
Soares’ method is like searching for a needle in a huge haystack by picking a handful of hay rather than using a magnet. You almost certainly wouldn’t find the needle even if it was there, so to claim you’ve disproved its existence when other scientists have found it with their magnets is simply stunning.
UPDATE: This blog post has been used as a rebuttal to the skeptic argument 'Soares finds a lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature'.

Comments

Comments 1 to 32:
  1. Please let me know if anyone here has understood how his conclusions come from his analysis.

    From my understanding I'm absolutely stunned that any journal, even an obscure one, would publish this. My biggest problem was forcing myself to ignore most of the mistakes in it to concentrate on the main point which made this article very difficult to write!
  2. MarkR
    it's the same old trick, use changes in something (i.e. derivatives) to mask the long term trend and amplify short term noise. Indeed, he fails to do the simple direct correlation between the two quantities. Really no surprise that noise (variability) in CO2 concentration and noise in temperature are not correlated.
    Statistics is a useful tool but, quoting from Berliner's comment on McShane and Wyner paper,

    The problem of anthropogenic climate change cannot be settled by a purely statistical argument. [...] Rather, the issue involves the combination of statistical analyses and, rather than versus, climate science. 
  3. MarkR,
    Love your last paragraph! Very nice image, a guy walking around with a handful of hay saying, 'See? There's no such thing as needles!'

    Perhaps this author doesn't realize that it would be stunning indeed if the noise actually correlated with the signal. Perhaps this 'journal' is so desperate to produce more fodder for their cattle-in-denial to ruminate over. With this kind of research in their hands, the anti-needle crowd will next conclude that magnets are a part of another science scam. 'You can't trust 'em -- sometimes they attract, sometimes they repel. W@tts up with that?'

    We touched on the Soares paper in Zombie graphs, starting with this comment. An actual statistical analysis by G.T. Wilson is worth another plug here. He reaches the exact opposite of Soares' conclusion.

    The most significant and best estimated effect is the dependence of temperature on the rate of increase of CO2, i.e. the change in the current value of CO2 from its value the previous year.
  4. I remember years and years ago my lecturer telling us about the data stream from the Voyager spacecraft having a huge number of error correction bits because the signal was so weak and the noise levels were expected to be high. Also the time to request a repeat transmission is very long, so it is preferred to have it correct the first time.

    The alternative would have been to send the same data hundreds of times automatically so that the base station on Earth could work out the data from the background noise.

    However it is done, you end up using more bits of data (12 bits of real data may require 24 bits transmitted) than would be the case with a cleaner signal.

    The point being that to get to the actual signal, you need to sample more data (years in the case of climate) to filter out noise.
  5. Leland Palmer at 03:24 AM on 17 January, 2011
    This paper was published by the International Journal of Geosciences, part of the Scientific Research (scirp.org) family of journals.

    These are very strange journals, apparently, published by an organization based in China. Some of the papers in these journals have apparently been republished without acknowledging the original date of publication, implying that they are new, when in fact some of them are a decade or so old:

    World's Strangest Collection of Scientific Journals

    Nature: Two new journals copy the old

    These journals have also had people listed on their editorial boards who were there without their knowledge. Some of those on the editorial boards actively disagree with the content of the material in the journals, and gave their permission by mistake, thinking that they were agreeing to be on the boards of journals with a similar name, according to Nature.
  6. scirp About Us:

    "Scientific Research Publishing (SRP: http://www.scirp.org) is engaged in the service of academic conferences and publications. It also devotes to the promotion of professional journals. The company has an outstanding work team as well as the widespread third party relations, enables our customers to obtain great satisfactions and convenience in their publications."

    Apparently based in the US.
    However the grammar suggests a poor translation from another language.
  7. Also if you scroll to the bottom of the scirp page, there is a list of text links, including Contact Us, About Us etc, that aren't actually links.

    Anyone, starting a genuine publication would never have dead links like that.
  8. Here's a good one from SCIRP: Causality and Reversibility in Irreversible Time (coming soon...)

    It should be no surprise that this book is 'coming soon'. Or maybe it already did; how would anyone know?
  9. Has SCIRP possibly been set up to discover how gullible/deluded the so-called skeptics are, and to show up how they will cite anything in desperation, no matter how far-fetched ?
  10. JMurphy, at the least it is a useful tool to discern who is the most gullible and desperate.
  11. Leland Palmer at 06:28 AM on 17 January, 2011
    Hi muoncounter-

    It should be no surprise that this book is 'coming soon'. Or maybe it already did; how would anyone know?
    :)

    The whole episode reminds me of the Soon and Baliunas paper published by Climate Research, which led to the resignation of several members of the editorial board of Climate Research.

    Soon and Baliunas controversy - Climate Research

    Both are cases of obscure journals claiming peer reviewed status for papers that are outside the mainstream of climate science, for example.

    The obscurity of the Journal did not prevent the Soon and Baliunas paper being used in Congressional testimony, however, and having an apparently large effect on the legislative process.

    Just a thought.
  12. If I make a chart of how many calories I eat everyday and compare that to my weight change on each day, I bet I could show that it does not matter what I eat, it is not correlated to my weight gain.
  13. @mspelto:
    Hehe good comparison!
  14. Kooiti Masuda at 10:19 AM on 17 January, 2011
    The web page of the International Journal of Geosciences is http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/ . A page linked from "Editorial Board" shows that its "Editor in Chief" is "Prof. Shuanggen Jin, University of Texas, USA", but I did not find his name at the web site of Univ. of Texas. His name in the "Editorial Board" page links to his "Biography" page, which has a list of his professional publications. It seems that he is an expert of geodesy, in particular application of GPS.

    SCIRP has another journal "Positioning" (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/ ), and its "Editorial Board" lists Jin as a mamber (not the chief), and his affiliation is shown there as "Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, CAS, China". (CAS stands for Chinese Academy of Sciences.) The web site of the Observatory (http://english.shao.cas.cn/ ) list Jin as one of the scientists (http://english.shao.cas.cn/scientists/ge/ ), and http://www.shao.ac.cn/geodesy directs to a page of his laboratory.

    So Jin is a real scientist and that his current affiliation is Shanhai Astronomical Observatory. Apparently SCIRP fails to update information of his move, and it seems a significant fault in this particular case where credibility of SCIRP's journals crucially depends on their editors.
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