As we enjoy another weekend here in the iBC domain, I thought I’d take some time to indulge in a slightly off-topic exercise. I say “slightly” because what I will present is tangentially related to stocks, graphs, backtesting, statistics, and data.
As some of you have likely realized, I stay engaged in the anthropogenic global warming debate, partly because of how politically charged it has become and mainly because I find the physics and the data and statistics to be fascinating.
But there is another reason why I enjoy following the climate change research, and that is because the climate change industry seems to me to be very similar to the finance/econometrics industry. Let’s look at the similarities:
- Both industries create models to predict future prices or temperatures.
- Both industries use long datasets consisting of time series to create the models.
- Both industries use the models to alternatively fear-monger or allay fears.
- These models are used to redistribute $$$ from one group to another via profits or losses and/or taxation.
- Both industries are dependent on government support (in terms of both legislation and financial support) in order to continue their current practices.
- Both industries have celebrity-type practitioners who have become the face for the predictions and analysis.
- There are few ramifications for the celebrities when their predictions fail.
I could go on, and would enjoy hearing other similarities in the comments section, but I think the thrust is clear – the industries are very similar.
And so I’m always surprised, since we have yet to produce a reliable model to predict future stock market performance, that we would think we could accurately predict future temperatures. In fact, the processes used to generate the climate models seem very similar to how we backtest and create strategies for the stock market. Substitute CO2 for Earnings and Temperature for Price. Just as an increase in earnings may not mean an increase in price, an increase in CO2 may not mean an increase in temperature. But I digress… The point is that the factors that drive both the capital markets and climate change are numerous, and they interact with each other in a way that is extremely complex. Simple models are not complex enough and complex models are likely curve-fit as the researcher attempts to mimic the myriad interactions between the variables.
Anyway, all that is really neither here nor there. What I want to do is introduce a site that I really like as it allows the layperson to graph temperature time-series and perform basic analysis of the data. Much like finance 50 years ago, the public has surprisingly little ability to check the actual temperature data against the many predictions and narratives about climate being presented in the media.
The site is Wood For Trees.
The site uses temperature data sets from various sources and makes available free software to graph the results.
Let’s look at some examples of graphs I’ve generated. I’m going to do my best to cherry-pick the data to show climate alarmism, from the perspective of the coming Ice Age.
Above is the HADCRUT3 variance-adjusted global mean. Looks like the globe is cooling, no?
Here is the CRUTEM3 variance-adjusted land global mean. Still looks like cooling, no?
Alright, enough with the cherry picking. Let’s look at a longer time frame and add a linear trend line. The site makes it easy to do so.
Okay, so I did a little cherry-picking with the trend line to show that the last 14 years have seen a down-trend in the global annual mean.
To be fair to my climate alarmist friends, we’ll finish with a look at the big picture.
Above is the global annual mean temperature from 1850.
It must be mentioned that some of the data has been manipulated, fudged, back-adjusted, etc., and the sources for some of the data were/are famously lost. A favorite tool of some of the climate scientists is the back-adjustment of older temps to make them cooler, therefore making current temps appear to be warmer. Curiously, older temperatures are seldom back-adjusted to be warmer. Also, one can imagine the nightmare that must be the management of the thermometers themselves, on land and sea, and the careful adjustments that must be made to account for effects such as the urban heat island.
So there you have it. Graph and analyze temperature until your heart’s content. I’m sure some of you will be tempted to apply standard stock market technical analysis to the graphs. Don’t worry, I do it, too. My prediction is global climate is consolidating after a huge run-up. I’m looking for temperature to breakdown through 15 years of support, sometime over the next few years 😉
Further evidence of a sophisticated mind. Thanks WS.
Well, I don’t know about that! Thanks though.
Bankers compete for government support, just like climate scientists compete for research grants. How’s that for another similarity>
Yep, agreud, although I think I said as much, or maybe I didn’t?
Well said as always Wood.
Got a little anecdotal evidence for you. I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the proposed Enbridge pipeline running to the west coast of Canada. Mainly because I’m Canadian and I really don’t want to see my country, who has no viable alternative, get strong-armed by a bunch of environmentalists who’s solution is doing nothing and investing in “clean energy,” whatever that means.
Anyways, throughout all the news articles I’ve read, all of which are from Conservative government bashing liberal publications, there is one noticeable difference that wasn’t there in the recent past. Each one gets into the potential environmental consequences of said pipeline and each one touches on carbon emissions and each one tries to draw a link to global warming. But, there is no longer this broad based false appeal to generally accepted “scientific evidence” that there always used to be. In fact, they don’t even mention the scientific community. Instead they talk about how X% of Canadians feel global warming is a major issue. Or “Economists warn that unchecked global warming will mean severe economic costs.”
They’re grasping at straws Wood.
Small victories.
Leftcoast, there is a great deal evidence similar to what you are describing. Recent polling shows that most Americans care very little about climate change and are extremely worried about the economy. Of course, as/if the economy improves, this could change.
It is a very complex issue, and I do not believe we are currently capable of accurately modeling climate. There are literally hundreds of inputs/variables.
Hence, let’s draw some trendlines….lol…the trend is your friend until it bends, in the end. Unfortunately for the climate alarmists, the trend is showing signs of bending, while CO2 continues to rise.
I’m not a physicist, but given the choice between 2 degrees of global cooling vs. warming, I’d pick warming any day. There is plenty of research out there showing that cooling events kill more people than warming. A good example of this is that AC is not required in hotter climes, but heat is a life or death requirement in colder regions.
My understanding is that the long-term temperature record suggests that the globe is still in a mini-ice age, and the past 200 hundred years or so are only a blip of warming.
To bad we won’t be around 300 years from now to see who was right!
Climatologists like Gavin Schmidt (an AGW warmer) can’t even beat laymen like the late author Michael Crichton in a debate about global warming.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9082151
I’m familiar with Gavin. I’ve had the pleasure of him editing/censoring some of my comments over at Real Climate. I hadn’t seen the NPR interviews. Good stuff!
Here is something you might enjoy, Dave.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/28/burt-rutan-on-schooling-the-rogue/#more-55598
Dave!quick tip. Gavin has a Ph.D. Applied Mathematics and he is a Climate Modeler. Not a climatologist.He work for NASA/GISS with M Mann and J Hansen is their boss.
read this yet?
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz1krlpiC6i
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html
Insanity. I am still lmao that the climate alarmists have the balls to say this: “Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide.”
Who knew that CO2 was more powerful than even the sun?
Good stuff, Wood – I used this exact relicance on modeling analogy with my liberal friends back when the mortgage markets were in full melt-down. They were not amused.
Couple of things – are you familiar with Anthony Watt’s page? http://wattsupwiththat.com/
Also – check out long term data derived from the Vostok ice core data. Very clear that CO2 is a lagging indicator of temps – by about 700 years – RC even admitted such.
Lastly – always be suspicious of cherry picked starting points in time – whether financial or climate related. Run your temp graphs back to the last ice age and start from there – looks quite different, no? Or CO2 charts back to about 500 million years ago when it was a factor of ten higher. Hmmm…..all those damn Phanerozoic SUVs…..
Hi Cheese, love Watt’s stuff.
Yes, cherry picking is easy based on starting points. It is no different with system trading!
If you guys want to take on some climate alarmists-warmers in a debate thread, some of these guys are formidable debate opponents…
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=176635&page=111
Thanks Dave. Looks interesting.
One big difference between analyzing economics and analyzing the atmosphere is that the former attempts to model human behavior while the latter simply tries to understand the physics of a complex system.
Debunking of the science by people who profit from the status quo should be seen for what it is, biased and self serving.
Hmmm. Are you suggesting that the climate scientists are not attempting to model human behavior and that econometrics is not trying to understand the physics of a complex system?
Seems to me the scientific method relies on debunking, regardless of who might do the debunking. Suggesting otherwise seems a tad self-serving and seems to imply that climate scientists have been elevated to some elite status where they are no longer subject to a robust scientific method.
No, this is not how climate models are built.
If you want to understand how climate models actually *are* built, you could do worse than begin by studying the documentation, underlying papers, and (though I doubt you have the skills) source code for GISS Model E:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modele/
There’s really no excuse for such a basic misunderstanding of GCMs when everything you need to actually understand how they are developed and work has been available online for many, many years …
They explicitly do not. Projections that fall out of models are based on clearly-stated assumptions about future CO2 emissions, usually given as a range of various possibilities, typically unweighted precisely because climate scientists have no way to predict whether or not anything will be done to limit CO2 emissions.
Let’s play Stock Market here: if you have evidence that climate scientists are modeling human behavior – buy in. With evidence.
And this is humorous, as the Daily Mail article cited is directly contradicted by Met Office’s PR that the Daily Mail claims to be reporting on. Typical of the Daily Mail. I know that none of you wankers would be dumb enough to invest based on anything you’d read in the Daily Mail. Why trust it for coverage of science?
More flunking of basic physics on display:
Missed by the Daily Mail, and you, is the fact that we’re just entering Solar Cycle 24. Solar Cycle 25, discussed in the article, is a couple of decades away so isn’t likely to affect near-term temperature.
No. Physics and reading comprehension fail.
The increased forcing from increased CO2 over the next few decades will be much greater than the VERY SLIGHTLY DECREASED output of the sun in solar cycle 25 even if the prediction turns out to be true. That’s what’s being missed by you and the Mail, the weak solar cycle won’t lead to a massive reduction in the output of the sun.
Of course, predictions of solar output decades in the future has a shitty track record in the first place, because – unlike with climate – there’s no solid physical model that explains why the cycles exist and vary. In the case of solar cycles, predictions very much *are* like those made for the stock market. Which is why I find it hilarious you place much faith in predictions that solar output might drop a bit two-three decades in the future …
It is the sun, of course, that provides the energy that warms the earth. It’s CO2 and other GHGs (but mostly CO2) that causes temps on earth to be much more uniform and considerably warmer than, say, the moon.
dhogaza, the models are failing. The CO2 sensitivities are too high. Else, temps would have continued to climb these past 15 years as CO2 has continued to climb.
To believe that a CO2 forcing is stronger than the influence of the sun is still laughable. What were temps when CO2 was at 800+ ppm? What were temps during the MWP? What was CO2 during the MWP? These models are built entirely as a one-trick pony, and the trick is CO2.
Let’s not even talk about the fact that the oceans can hold much more heat than the land or atmosphere. Let’s not mention that GISS data is consistently manipulated to make it warmer. Let’s not mention that Gavin Schmidt, the contact for Model E, is bought and sold by the AGW movement. Indeed, his entire livelihood depends on the earth continuing to warm. As soon as those models break out of their error bars, Schmidt will be run out of NASA on a rail, assuming that in the meantime Schmidt, Willis, Hansen, et. al. haven’t manipulated the data to buy themselves another decade or so.
Dhozaga, have you bothered to read any of what these “scientists” are writing to each other when they think no one else will read it? Many times, they are practically praying that the earth will continue to warm, as they know that if it doesn’t they will have no jobs, no grant money, and very likely will be sued for fraud. They are not the great protectors of the environment.
Dhozaga, new research uses length of a sunspot cycle to predict temperature change in the next cycle. Check it out –
Abstract
Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature
in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological
stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend
is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the
same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a
cycle and the temperature in the next cycle. This provides a tool to predict
an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 ?C from solar cycle 23 to 24
for the stations and areas analyzed. We find for the Norwegian local stations
investigated that 25–56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may
be attributed to the Sun. For 3 North Atlantic stations we get 63–72%
solar contribution. This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar
signal.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.1954v1.pdf
Bye, then.
If you take the time to learn some basic physics, and learn how climate models really are built, I might consider returning.
But fighting willful ignorance isn’t much fun, actually, and I suspect you fall into the willfully ignorant camp when it comes to climate science.
Too bad. There’s actually money to be made by backing the right horses in the upcoming race to adapt to climate change (I’ve given up on our doing anything to mitigate future change).