Saturday, June 23, 2007

McKitrick's "No Average Temperature Argument", Rehashed

...by Christopher Essex of the Financial Post, who writes:

My dark secret needs little explanation for thermodynamically minded people. For them, it is really quite simple: The Earth is not in "thermodynamic equilibrium," so there is no single temperature for the whole thing. No statistical hocus pocus can change that. However, global warming proponents and skeptics alike have been very busy averaging temperature data, unsupervised, on an industrial scale for years.

Read close and all you see is a For Dummies version of this paper by Mr. Essex and Ross McKitrick, who after Tim Ball is probably Canada's premier Climate Change Denialist.

And in the spirit of this FP article, I will rehash my earlier post on this paper entitled "Global Warming Deniers Deny Concept Of An Average Value" . Shorter version:

...the real problem with [Essex and McKitrick's] claim is that it proves too much, can in fact be employed to prove that the concept of an average anything is meaningless.

But you have to hit the link immediately above to get all the whys and wherefores. I'm feeling lazy today.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pathetic attempt at a smear job . . still stuck on the slimy denial" smear. Reads more like a warmonger's lament.

Too bad the earth is now entering, as predicted , a cooling phase. The Greeny Wennie, Sky is Falling, we're all gonna Dieeeeeeeeeee campaign was ramped up too soon and has failed to make any significant changes to human behavior.
g
Too bad, so sad.

Global warming, great grandchild of the Club of Rome, raised on hyperbole, lies and deception, not too mention really, really bad science, and stoked too high pressure with a whack PR campaign, is dead.

Time for the enviros to come up with something new. Dr Fruit Fly, Big Al, although you guys made your personal $millions on this scam, your legacy will be as carpet bagging fools that scammed and fleeced the flock.

Anonymous said...

David Suzuki says "I would say we are in a state of crisis, that it's the equivalent of a hundred Pearl Harbors going off at once in the environment."


If we don't implement Kyoto, he has said, "it will absolutely destroy the economy."

Uh huh. No hyperbole there.

Just simple plain truth from a simple, earth saving guy.

Anonymous said...

Too bad the earth is now entering, as predicted , a cooling phase.

Heh. Thank God my taxes support the "Computers for the Retarded" programme.

Masturbating douchebags. Go back to supporting Creationism. You're sounding even crazier with Global Warming denial.

Anonymous said...

Vernon said...

Well, not being the IPCC and actually looking at some of the raw data... what is your point? For example the IPCC says the sea's are rising 2.3mm per year, but the actual instrumented satellite record shows that there has been no rise in the last 10 years.

The hockey stick only exists by taking mainly tree ring proxies and tacking on the instrumented readings, but the IPCC will not show that the tree ring proxies do not match the instrumented readings for the end of the 20th centruy. If they do not match now, then how did they match before?

The Kyoto treaty does not include China, the biggest producer of CO2! Even if Kyoto had been accepted by all parties, it would have per the IPCC only changed the impact from 2100 to 2106.

There are supposedly 2500 scientist that agree on AGW but the IPCC will not name them.

Then there are the "historic" CO2 levels from the Vostok Ice cores - does anyone else see an issue with saying that a single point is representative of the world? When all the AGW proponents say that MWP and the LIA were only regional?
That MLO is the only place we can accept a record of CO2 levels, but once again it is a single point on the planet, but it can represent the whole planet when anything that does not support AGW is just regional?

Unknown said...

Scientists have abandoned science. They taught us in grade school that the following was what made climate:
1. Distance of earth from the sun
2. Tilt of the earth on its axis which affects the angle and intensity of the suns rays - this creates our seasons (Latitude determines what climatic zone one lives in)
3. Orbit of the earth around the sun
4. Rotation of the earth which makes for warming by day and cooling by night - this is what creates our winds and jet streams.

With such huge forces at work, the miniscule amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can hardly be the villain they claim it to be. Our planet is very well balanced; half is experiencing hemispheric warming (summer) while the other half experiences hemispheric cooling (winter).

That said, Essex is correct. All temps are local. An average is not a temp and averages can be very misleading. It is possible for Chicago to be at 100 degrees on the same day it is -100below in Antarctica; you can average the two and get 0. It is also possible to have 0 in Chicago on the same day it is 0 in Antarctica; the average is still 0 - and in neither case does the average tell us anything about what the reality is/was. Furnaces and air conditioners do not function according to the “average” and neither does the planet.