The Economist has a balanced word on the freakout kids:
With “Freakonomics”, the authors made pop economists of everyone, to the general good. To give the sequel’s readers this distorted lens through which to view climate change and its solution is to do readers a grave disservice.
Tim Lambert sees the Freakonomics crew digging themselves into a deeper hole. Their supporters seem to be mainly climate change deniers. John Quiggin has more to say on the particular denialist claim the authors themselves make that ‘warming stopped 10 years ago’. Its a foolish claim from economists who claim to be data-driven explorers of the world – more Delusionism 101.
When evaluating temperature trends from a time series, as by John Quiggin (cited here by hc) in his rebuttal of Superfreakonomics, and the Garnaut Review did (via Breusch & Varig), surely it is incumbent on one to check the provenance of the data. Breusch and pal were specifically told not to do that or to evaluate the satellite data, and all those citing GCHN, NOAA, Gistemp, CRUT, and our own BoM have also failed to do that, or have deliberately ignored the immense changes in coverage of the USA, UK, Canada, Russia and Australia by surface-based instrumental measurements. Have the respective averages since 1900 been weighted by the CURRENT distribution of Met stations, or are they just simple means of station data as was for each year? It appears the latter is the case.
Quiggin’s graph shows anomalies since 1980 from the “global” mean for 1900 to 2000 – but Africa, and especially its hottest places were wholly absent from the 1900 data (see NOAA maps for % global coverage by surface stations since 1880). Those hot places only came in from the 1950s – and then in the 1990s cold Siberia dropped out. Did JQ verify that the Mean he cites from 1900-2000 was adjusted to reflect the changes in coverage?
Australia is little different, or so it would appear, with the ever-increasing percentage of total reporting stations in the north (Lat. above 30 oS). Strictly, the means since 1900 should be weighted by the present coverage. Are they? BoM is silent.
In JQ’s link “Unsurprisingly, real statisticians (the group to which Levitt formerly belonged) are crying foul.” But there we find John Daly’s comments based on the satellite record being quoted but ignored, because they contradict the main thrust of the AP article, which is that “in all (sic) data sets, 10-year moving averages have been higher in the last five years than in any previous years”. But Daly was using the satellite data that are ignored by JQ and the rest of the AP article: he “said in an e-mail [to AP] that looking back 31 years, temperatures have gone up nearly three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit (four-tenths of a degree Celsius). The last dozen years have been flat, and temperatures over the last eight years have declined a bit, he wrote”. Satellite data do largely get over the problems inherent in averaging over an ever-changing set of land data – but AP, Garnaut-Breusch, JQ & co ignore them. I wonder why?
Gratifying to see that my previous post here has been tacitly accepted even by the usual suspects!
What is seriously upsetting is that not a single one of those suspects or their fellow travellers has upheld the right of CSIRO’s Dr Spash to publish a paper arguing the merits of carbon taxes above ETS against CSIRO’s determination to have his paper suppressed. How different when at the height of the 2007 election campaign CSIRO itself on 23 October 2007 trumpeted a paper in PNAS by its Canadell & Raupach that seriously undermined the perceived lukewarm approach of the Howard government to alleged climate change – this paper made the completely false claim “carbon sink slowdown contributing to rapid growth in atmospheric CO2″. The paper’s authors’ showed complete inability either to distinguish between first and second derivatives or to compute them correctly, let alone to realise that their own data actually showed steady increase in the ability of the biosphere to absorb increasing CO2 emissions, such that the average rate of growth of atmospheric CO2 since 1958 remains only 0.41% p.a. despite emissions growth of above 3% pa. since 2000. Needless to say we will have to wait from here to eternity for C&R and their bosses CSIRO to admit that the increases in [CO2] over the last 3 years have been less than 4 GtC p.a., despite emissions of over 10 GtC and their brilliant paper with its claimed “reducing efficiency of natural sinks”.
Meantime I have to report my continuing inability to find a single location on this planet where there is a demonstrable correlation between rising (sic) temperature and rising [CO2]. Above all, despite the best efforts of BOM and NOAA in kindly supplying the data, I can find no such correlation at either Cape Grim’s BAPS or Mauna Loa’s Slope Observatory (2 of the main sites for [CO2] data).