Willis Eschenbach wonders about Science

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is irate (archived here). He's discovered a survey conducted by Pew Research Center that sampled the views of AAAS members as well as the general public.

The survey itself was of people living in the USA. It included questions on a range of topics relevant to science. For example:

• genetically modified foods, 
• safety of foods grown using pesticides
• vaccination of children
• evolution of humans
• human influence on climate
• humans straining the supply of natural resources

and various other topics including astronauts, bioengineered fuel, fracking and investment in space stations.

How Wondering Willis Eschenbach's religious background prevents him from understanding a scientific framework

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has been getting annoyed at science lately. I suppose it's because it's not showing what he wants to believe.

In his latest missive he loses the plot once again (archived here). He has read, but not understood the half of, a new paper just published in the early edition of science.

The Planetary Boundaries Framework

The new paper is discussing a framework, a planetary boundaries framework, by which society can be guided about what are biophysical safe limits, beyond which we should not go. That is, we should take care if we want civilisation and humans to flourish and try to stay within the safe limits.

Yes, it is a human-centric framework, devised to help decision-makers. Yet it is not a social framework. It's not about intergovernmental relations or human indices of well-being. It's a physical sciences framework. The framework is described in terms of the biophysical boundaries that are safe. Boundaries that we humans, through our actions, are pushing up against and in some cases have well and truly crossed.

The boundaries framework builds on the one proposed in a 2009 paper on the same topic. It updates the numbers and adds some discussion of regional boundaries, among other things. The planetary boundaries are illustrated in Figure 3 of the paper:

Figure 3: The current status of the control variables for seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Green zone is the safe operating space (below the boundary), yellow represents the zone of uncertainty (increasing risk), and red is the high-risk zone. The planetary boundary itself lies at the inner heavy circle. The control variables have been normalized for the zone of uncertainty (between the two heavy circles); the center of the figure therefore does not represent values of 0 for the control variables. The control variable shown for climate change is atmospheric CO2 concentration. Processes for which global-level boundaries cannot yet be quantified are represented by gray wedges; these are atmospheric aerosol loading, novel entities and the functional role of biosphere integrity. Modified from (1). Source: Steffen15

Wondering Willis Eschenbach makes more mischief with volcanoes

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a well-earned reputation for wandering off on a tangent and avoiding scientific research. He's done the same today at WUWT (archived here, latest here). He decided that two recent papers relating to volcanic forcing are "wrong". Not because he took any notice of the content of the papers - he didn't. Not because he took any notice of the observations reported. He didn't. He decided to reject the months of hard work by multiple scientists, on the basis of his own five minutes of "research".

Climate models and volcanic forcing

The two papers found evidence of volcanic forcing, coming from two different perspectives:

• Observed increase in Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth (SAOD) since 2005 (Ridley14)
• Multiple signals of volcanic forcing in sea surface temperature, atmospheric water vapour,  net clear-sky short-wave radiation, and elsewhere (Santer14)

One of the main points the scientists emphasised was that the CMIP5 models mostly assumed there was zero change in stratospheric volcanic forcing after 2000. They show that this assumption is not valid. Since 2005 in particular, there has been significant volcanic forcing, based on observations.

The relevance of (climate) models - increasing understanding

Climate science deniers in the main, do not understand why models are used in science. Nor do they typically understand how they are used, or how they are constructed.

Today Wondering Willis Eschenbach demonstrated this quite well (archived here). He wrote about a recent article in Science, by Professor Alex Hall. The article was discussing the merits and limitations of using General Circulation Models (GCMs) to model regional climate change, through a process known as down-scaling.

In his article, Dr Hall describes downscaling as follows:

The concept behind downscaling is to take a coarsely resolved climate field and determine what the finer-scale structures in that field ought to be. In dynamical downscaling, GCM data are fed directly to regional models. Apart from their finer grids and regional domain, these models are similar to GCMs in that they solve Earth system equations directly with numerical techniques. Downscaling techniques also include statistical downscaling, in which empirical relationships are established between the GCM grid scale and finer scales of interest using some training data set. The relationships are then used to derive finerscale fields from the GCM data.

Why aren't all the fish dead? Willis Eschenbach on marine biology

See also Update 2 below.

Deniers at WUWT are busy protesting ocean acidification right now. Since 23 December there have now been five protest articles, four of which were arguably defamatory.  That's not including the silly WUWT articles on OCO-2, some of which are of peripheral relevance to the subject.

I've written a couple of articles about this latest spate of protests already (here and here), and at the risk of overloading on one topic, I couldn't resist another. Wondering Willis Eschenbach is so full of it.

Today Willis goes berserk. He's written one of the silliest articles I've read in a while at WUWT. He's pretending to be an expert on marine biology. His qualifications? He goes fishing sometimes. Well one thing is for sure, he might be able to catch and kill fish, but he certainly knows nothing about the biology and chemistry of the oceans.

Know your data - ocean acidification again

There's been another article (archived here) on the World Ocean Database (WOD) pH data, which was previously the subject of a wrong and malicious article alleging fraud. (Levitis et al (2013) provides an introduction and background to the database.)

It's kept some of the deniers at WUWT busy examining the data - and some who aren't deniers, too. While others just transferred via keyboard whatever random thought popped into their head.

My apologies in advance. This is another too long article - I got carried away playing with a new toy I found. Click read more if you want.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach looks for sunlight in the Arctic winter - yeah, really!

Anthony Watts posted a press release from AGU14. That's all the "scientific" reporting he's capable of I'd say. The articles he's written himself are science-free, but he has managed a couple of press releases (he didn't have to go to any AGU meeting to copy and paste a press release).

Anyway, one of the press releases was from NASA, which you can read in full here. Or if you prefer, you can read it on the archive of Anthony's blog here. Here's an extract (my emphasis):

NASA satellite instruments have observed a marked increase in solar radiation absorbed in the Arctic since the year 2000 – a trend that aligns with the steady decrease in Arctic sea ice during the same period.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has gone nuts about volcanoes at WUWT

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a new article at WUWT (archived here). It's not at all clear what he is wondering about this time. He's ostensibly writing about an icelandic volcano that began erupting on June 8, 1783 and continued until Feb. 1784. His article is full of contradictions and false claims. It's more evidence that Willis has gone around the twist. He says of the volcano:

It is claimed to have caused a very cold winter in 1783-1784

No, Willis - the scientists you cite say the complete opposite

The problem is that he doesn't say who claims that. The only scientific paper he cites is D’Arrigo et al (2011), which doesn't make any such claim. In fact, that team is arguing that the very cold winter of 1783-84 was not connected to the Laki eruption. From the abstract:

Data sources and model simulations support our hypothesis that a combined negative NAO‐ENSO warm phase was the dominant cause of the anomalous winter of 1783–1784, and that these events likely resulted from natural variability unconnected to Laki. 

"Unconnected to Laki" is what they wrote. So what is Willis going on about? It's a very mixed up article by Willis. He's been getting increasingly ratty (erratic) of late. Denialism isn't good for one's mental health is my guess. Cognitive dissonance causes brain farts.

WUWT at the crossroads? Willis Eschenbach declares (again) he is nothing more than a dumb denier

A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that Willis Eschenbach is one of the smarter people at WUWT. I can tell you now, that if that's the case, then WUWT does not attract smart or educated people. It's purely for ignorant dumb deniers and that's it. Any hope that Anthony Watts might have had for getting recognition (other than for comedy or contempt) is misplaced.

There have recently been some really, really dumb articles at WUWT from Anthony's stand-by guest commenter Willis Eschenbach, including this one, where Willis Eschenbach showed he doesn't understand what causes seasons on Earth - and this one I just wrote about, in which Willis Eschenbach deliberately misrepresents sea level and provides misleading charts. Remember, Willis is the chap who penned a long article slamming his erstwhile friend Anthony Watts, saying he is not able to tell the difference between pseudo-scientific crap and meaningful science.

The reason I'm writing this is just in case anyone is under the false impression that Wondering Willis has an ounce of smart when it comes to climate science. He doesn't. Here is a comment he wrote today to the batty Duke:

Topsy turvy - Wondering Willis Eschenbach tells big whoppers about sea level.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach doesn't usually go in for straight fabrication of other people's work, but he made some exceptions today. Usually he'll just wonder and ponder and either invent stuff out of nothing or claim well-established science as his own, usually distorting it.

Today he decided to go for straight misrepresentation (archived here). Or should I say crooked misrepresentation. Almost everything he wrote in his article is contradicted by the work of the scientists he claims to be writing about.

Willis started off with a three year old email, with Kevin Trenberth replying to an "anonymous coward". The email and its response is here:

From: “Kevin Trenberth” <trenbert@XXXXX.edu>
To: “Dr XXXX” <xxx@xxx.xxx>
Sent: January XX, 2011 X:XX PM
Subject: Re: warming

Dear Kevin,
Thank you for your prompt reply. I’m 62 and now semi-retired. I’d like to  bring myself up to speed on global warming, which I read is one of the great catastrophes of our time. You describe rising sea levels as being the evidence for man caused global warming. It had been my understanding that sea levels have been rising steadily for thousands of years and now at a very slow rate. I know there’s been a huge increase in man’s CO2 in the heavy industrialisation since World War 2. How has this increase in man’s CO2 effected sea levels ? 

To which Kevin Trenberth replied:

The rates have not been steady and picked up markedly in the mid 20th century and even more since 1990 or so. CO2 has been increasing since 1750 although mainly since 1850.

Deniers are catching up with climate science - they're now only 76 years behind

Wondering Willis Eschenbach at WUWT (archived here) has just discovered Guy Stewart Callendar, 76 years after everyone else did. He sings his praises, though he is selective about the bits he quotes.

"GS Callendar 1934"
University of East Anglia Archive (provided by James R. Fleming).
Source: Spencer Weart

At this rate, by 2032, deniers will be praising the 1956 work of Gilbert Plass. Then in 2051, some science denier will discover a 1975 paper by Wallace S. Broecker, and sing his praises.

In around 2064, another random denier will claim discovery of Dr James Hansen's 1988 testimony to the US Congressional Committee and say what a brilliant scientist Jim Hansen was.

Callendar didn't anticipate the rate at which we'd burn fossil fuel, with his Table VI showing CO2 at 360 ppm in the 22nd Century instead of 1995. He figured at 360 ppm, CO2 would result in a rise in global surface temperature of 0.57 degrees Celsius, which is pretty close to the actual increase by the mid-1990s, but doesn't allow for the climate to come to equilibrium. So it's probably an underestimate.  Someone more familiar with Callendar's work might comment on this.

Ed Hawkins and Phil Jones wrote a paper last year, to celebrate 75 years since Callendar's seminal paper. They also put together a poster. I see from their paper that if deniers want to get access to a "large collection" of Callendar's notebooks, they'll have to go cap in hand to the University of East Anglia, and maybe beg forgiveness from Dr Phil Jones.

Someone needs to explain the seasons to Willis Eschenbach and Stan Robertson at WUWT

I started to write this article some time ago in response to an article by Wondering Willis Eschenbach (archived here). Today there's another article on the same topic by someone called Stan Robertson (archived here) so I figured I'd resurrect this. Stan's been featured here on a previous occasion.

The main question they are asking is: why doesn't Earth heat up more when it's closest to the sun, in January? The corollary they didn't ask is, why doesn't Earth cool down more when it's furthest from the sun, in July?

The main answer is: the tilt of the earth dominates seasonal variation, not distance from the Sun. For Earth that is. (It's different on Mars.) Plus - oceans.

This is a long and long-winded article, probably with too much repetition and a tad muddled. But I've spent enough time on it so click read on if you're up for it :)

A reality check of temperature for Wondering Willis Eschenbach

Update 2 - see below for another Reality Check with GISTemp

Update - see below for Reality Check 5

Addendum - see below for Reality Checks 3 and 4

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Wondering Willis Eschenbach has an article at WUWT today (archived here, latest here). It's a lazy article. One of those silly articles claiming that the global surface temperature datasets aren't as reliable as the tropospheric temperature sets. Willis thanks the UAH duo for providing a reality check. He finished his article with this acknowledgement:

Finally, acknowledgement is due to the originators of the method of satellite temperature measurements, Drs. Roy Spencer and John Christie. It is thanks to them that we have a satellite-based atmospheric temperature record to act as a reality check for the oft-adjusted surface temperature record. Very well done, gentlemen.

This article is to provide Willis with not one but two reality checks.

Willis penned his article to feed Anthony Watts' readers some much needed doubt. The reason they need that doubt muchly at the moment is because this year is shaping up to be another hot one. Whether it'll turn out to be the hottest on record so far or not remains to be seen.

Denier deception: Rising seas get the better of Wondering Willis Eschenbach at WUWT

In the past three days, WUWT has been busy denying and rewriting a lot of science. Global warming, of course. Rejecting the greenhouse effect and global warming is the bread and butter of WUWT.

This time they've gone to the extent of promoting "an ice age cometh" battiness from Bob Carter, who warns of an impending ice age starting this year and ending in 2050. It's a very little "little, little ice age".

Then WUWT took a diversion and branched out into ozone hole denial - courtesy of Tim Ball. I think it might be the first time they've outright rejected ozone science. It's another sign that Anthony is scrambling to shift the Overton Window back to where he wants it. It's been shifting too far toward reality for his liking.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach thinks seas won't rise, despite melting ice sheets

Today there's Wondering Willis Eschenbach (archived here), supporting his mate Anthony who is of the view that sea level can't possibly rise as much as projected. Willis wrote in flowery prose about something he read in an AAAS Newsletter. He quoted it as:

Virginia Panel Releases Coastal Flooding Report. A subpanel of the Secure Commonwealth Panel of Virginia released a report containing several recommendations for dealing with risks posed by coastal flooding. The report, which is largely based on data from a 2013 report by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, predicts a sea level rise of 1.5 feet within the next 20 to 50 years along the Virginia coast.

1.5 feet is 45.7 cm - so keep that number in mind when you read the rest.

I got carried away again doing research, so this article is quite long. If you're on the home page, click read more if you want to, um, read more :)

It's official: It's not Anthony's job...

WUWT is fairly quiet at the moment so I thought readers may enjoy this explanation of what Anthony Watts' job is not, by Wondering Willis Eschenbach (archived here).  It helps explain why Anthony Watts happily posts so much complete and utter rubbish. He's just not capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

I don't think Anthony's worst enemy could write such a damning indictment of WUWT.

Are you ready? Let's hear it.  The quotes are from Anthony Watts' good friend and staunch ally, Wondering Willis Eschenbach at WUWT. (My bold underline.)

Update: I see that Anthony has put a copyright notice on his blog, which is sensible, and I'm not taking it as aimed here because I'm careful about fair use of intellectual property. Just the same, I've deleted a lot of the text from Wondering Willis' article and just left sufficient to comment on the portions that I found most striking, as fits the "fair use" definition.

Sou 23 November 2014

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On the strength of WUWT

From here:

...The strength of WUWT is not that it is always right or that it publishes only the best stuff that’s guaranteed to be valid....

Willis argues that it is a strength to publish a myriad of crap, regardless of whether or not it is "guaranteed to be valid".

On educating scientists

From here:

...When Anthony publishes scientific claims from the edges of the field, generally they are quickly either confirmed or falsified. This is hugely educational for scientists of all kinds, to know how to counter some of the incorrect arguments, as well as giving room for those unusual ideas which tomorrow may be mainstream ideas....

For some very odd reason, Willis thinks that proper scientists are not only aware of, but are educated by the sort of nonsense splashed about at WUWT.

On what is not Anthony's job

From here:

...So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job. ...

My emphasis. That has to be the most scathing comment on Anthony Watts by one of his supposed allied that I've ever read. There is more, this time on the value of publishing complete and utter rubbish, again with my emphasis:

It is not Anthony’s job to decide if mine or any other ideas and expositions and claims will withstand that test of time … and indeed, it is often of value for him to publish things that will not stand the test of time, so that we can understand exactly where they are lacking.

On the beauty and value of "public peer review"

From here:

...The beauty and value of WUWT that it is the world’s premier location for public peer review of climate science. On a personal level, the public peer review afforded by WUWT is of immense use to me, because my work either gets falsified or not very quickly … or else, as in this case, there’s an interesting ongoing debate. ...

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Footnote

The quotes shown in the above damning indictment on Anthony Watts and WUWT are all verbatim from Anthony's supposed ally, Wondering Willis Eschenbach (with my headings and bold underline for emphasis). With friends like Willis, who needs enemies?

Denier weirdness: An economic interlude with Wondering Willis Eschenbach

This article has little if anything to do with climate. It's about economics. It's about ignorance of basic economics.

At WUWT, Willis Eschenbach has written an inordinately long follow-up article to his silly criticism of the Kaya Identity (archived here, further update here, latest update here). Now the Kaya Identity can be criticised for its limitations, but Willis' criticisms are so wide of the mark they fall into the ludicrous category. Here it is again:

CO2 emissions = Population x (GDP/Population) x (Energy/GDP) x (CO2/Energy)

As you'll recall, his first shot at it was because he reckoned that anything could be substituted for GDP, including the production of beer. That's dumb because beer production only accounts for a miniscule component of GDP and only a miniscule amount of CO2 emissions. Total CO2 emissions are related to more than the production from breweries.

Now Willis is claiming it's wrong because when he drives his car on the Lincoln Highway he reckons CO2 is emitted (it is) but he thinks that the fact of him driving doesn't contribute to GDP (it does). Fuel purchase is counted as part of GDP. The purchase of his car was counted as part of GDP when he bought it.

After numerous people have pointed out that he's wrong, Willis shows that he doesn't know what the "D" in GDP stands for, and reemphasises the fact that he hasn't got the first clue about GDP or its components. Willis Eschenbach says, quoting UnfrozenCavemanMD:

July 12, 2014 at 10:57 am
UnfrozenCavemanMD says: July 12, 2014 at 9:09 am
I think you need to come up with a better objection than
“I’m burning energy, and I’m emitting CO2, but I’m not part of the GDP. “
If you filled up at a gas station and paid money for your fuel, your CO2 producing activity most certainly is part of the GDP. If you stop and by a sandwich, that activity is also part of the GDP, and if the ingredients of that sandwich were farmed and transported using fossil fuel, then it contains an implicit CO2 production as well.

Thanks, Caveman, but nope. I’m buying fuel inter alia from Saudi Arabia, where it is counted correctly as part of their GDP, and thus it can’t be part of ours.
w.

Does he not know that "D" is for domestic or does Willis think that Saudi Arabia is part of the USA?

Denier weirdness: Wondering Willis takes to beer, not understanding the Kaya Identity

Update 3

Willis Eschenbach has written another article on this topic (archived here), this time showing he doesn't understand economics. He thinks that driving his car doesn't contribute to a nations gross domestic product. It does.

I'll leave it to readers to figure out the multiple ways Wondering Willis could contribute to GDP while driving his car along the Lincoln Highway.

Sou 13 July 2014


Update 2

Very strange goings on at WUWT. The article by Willis Eschenbach, which looked as if it was intended as a mild if misplaced "gotcha" of no particular noteworthiness, has suddenly generated a whole heap of comments - 473 as of now. Anthony has replaced one of the additions with another (archived here). This is his latest, in which Anthony has decided to straddle the fence and agree with everyone. Is his grip slipping? This is what he added:

[UPDATE: Comment from Anthony: There has been a tremendous amount of discussion and dissent on this topic, far more than I ever would have imagined. On one hand some people have said in comments that Willis has completely botched this essay, and the Kaya identity holds true, others are in agreement saying that the way the equation is written, the terms cancel and we end up with CO2=CO2. It would seem that the cancellation of terms is the sort of thing that would rate an "F" in a simple algebra test. But, I think there's room for both views to be right. It seems true that *technically* the terms cancel, but I think the relationship, while maybe not properly technically equated, holds as well. Here is another recent essay that starts with Willis' premise, where CO2=CO2 and expounds from there. See: What is Kaya's equation?

Further update: from the post readers know that Willis has been returning from ICCC9 and had travel issues. I was finally able to reach him by phone tonight about 10PM. It seems that to add insult to misery his laptop hard drive didn't survive the travel and he's been working to restore it. He'll be back online and respond when he is able. - Anthony]

I suspect this over-the-top reaction by the idiots at WUWT is not unrelated to the fracas at WUWT over David Evans' Force X from Luna Park. (Willis was a very outspoken critic of Force X and the notch, which didn't endear him to the ignorant masses.) Might bear watching to see if this is a sign that the fake sceptics are teaming up, battling with each other. Or it might just be a temporary venting of frustration that the ice age still hasn't cometh.

You can see the earliest version here (with 22 comments), then the interim version here (132 comments) and now the latest version here (473 comments).

Sou Friday 11 July 2014, 8:09 pm AEST

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Update - see below for how Willis piles stupid on incompetent


I reckon there must have been something strange in the beverage served up to deniers at their recent gabfest in Las Vegas. I've just written about some stupid from Anthony Watts. Now it's the turn of Wondering Willis Eschenbach (archived here).

Funnily enough, Wondering Willis' article was on the theme of my recent observation about Anthony Watts being a stubby short of a six pack. Willis wrote about beer.

Willis wrote about a newly-released interim report: Pathways to Deep Decarbonisation. It's put out by The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI). From the Preface:

The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) is a collaborative initiative to understand and show how individual countries can transition to a low-carbon economy and how the world can meet the internationally agreed target of limiting the increase in global mean surface temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius (°C). Achieving the 2°C limit will require that global net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) approach zero by the second half of the century. This will require a profound transformation of energy systems by mid-century through steep declines in carbon intensity in all sectors of the economy, a transition we call “deep decarbonization.”

Currently, the DDPP comprises 15 Country Research Teams composed of leading researchers and research institutions from countries representing 70% of global GHG emissions and different stages of development: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, the UK, and the USA. 

Denier weirdness: Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a touch of the sun at WUWT...

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a touch of the sun**. He is wondering if the sun can affect the temperature on Earth (archived here). He's been analysing the surface temperature to see if he can detect the effect of the solar cycle.

Now everyone here knows that the solar cycle does have a small impact on the amount of energy reaching the surface. The latest IPCC AR5 WG1 report states on page TS-21:

Satellite observations of total solar irradiance (TSI) changes since 1978 show quasi-periodic cyclical variation with a period of roughly 11 years. Longer-term forcing is typically estimated by comparison of solar minima (during which variability is least). This gives a RF change of –0.04 [–0.08 to 0.00] W m–2 between the most recent (2008) minimum and the 1986 minimum. There is some diversity in the estimated trends of the composites of various satellite data, however. Secular trends of TSI before the start of satellite observations rely on a number of indirect proxies. The best estimate of RF from TSI changes over the industrial era is 0.05 [0.00 to 0.10] W m–2 (medium confidence), which includes greater RF up to around 1980 and then a small downward trend. 

And elsewhere in section 5-8 :

Typical changes measured over an 11-year solar cycle are 0.1% for TSI and up to several percent for the ultra-violet (UV) part of SSI (see Section 8.4).

Willis can't find the signal because it's so tiny it's buried in the noise and he doesn't take out the other factors affecting surface temperature. (Nor would he read science. He prefers to try to figure things out for himself, which is why he gets into such a mess.)

Willis is a Gaia fan

Willis holds to a Gaia-style hypothesis, which he sets out as:

Which of course leads to the obvious question … why no sign of the 11-year solar cycles?

I hold that this shows that the temperature of the system is relatively insensitive to changes in forcing. This, of course, is rank heresy to the current scientific climate paradigm, which holds that ceteris paribus, changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing. I disagree. I say that the temperature of the planet is set by a dynamic thermoregulatory system composed of emergent phenomena that only appear when the surface gets hotter than a certain temperature threshold. These emergent phenomena maintain the temperature of the globe within narrow bounds (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century), despite changes in volcanoes, despite changes in aerosols, despite changes in GHGs, despite changes in forcing of all kinds. The regulatory system responds to temperature, not to forcing.

And I say that because of the existence of these thermoregulatory systems, the 11-year variations in the sun’s UV and magnetism and brightness, as well as the volcanic variations and other forcing variations … well, they make little difference.

Which is a circular argument. Willis doesn't say what causes the temperature change in the first place. In fact he's arguing that the earth is insensitive to forcing. Which would mean that there would be very little change in temperature and the earth would never get to any of his temperature thresholds.

Wild swings and roundabouts

But that's not what I'm writing about.  You may remember that Willis has often said (wrongly of course) that the surface temperature has varied by ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century and he's repeated that nonsense again today. He's never said where he's dug up that silliness from.  Here is a chart to show how wrong he is. The surface temperature just keeps on going up and up and up. It's not varying by ± 0.3°C at all:

Data source: NASA GISS

What's two degrees among friends?

Today Willis wrote the following:

The earth’s temperature swings on the order of 6°C peak to peak over the course of a year. Why would it not respond over an 11-year period?

Then he changed his mind (without admitting to it) and wrote something different:

Despite the presence of the “near-infinite heat sinks” of the ocean and outer space, the global temperature changes by 4°C or so over the course of the year. And the hemispheres swing much more than that, 6°C for the southern hemisphere and a 13°C swing for the northern hemisphere.

 Heck, what's two degrees Celsius between friends at WUWT :)

[I've deleted some text here because, as Arthur pointed out I did some analysis using monthly anomalies, not monthly temperatures, which of course wouldn't show up actual differences over the year. How dumb is that! The above point still stands. Sou.]

From the WUWT comments

There is an awful lot of nonsense in the comments as you can imagine.  However, the first comment is from a rational human being.  Nick Stokes is the first cab off the rank and corrects just one of Willis' errors in the quote and says:

May 24, 2014 at 1:46 pm
“I hold that this shows that the temperature of the system is relatively insensitive to changes in forcing. This, of course, is rank heresy to the current scientific climate paradigm, which holds that ceteris paribus, changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing." 

The standard climate science view is not that the climate is insensitive to changes in solar forcing, but that no significant changes have happened. That, while the sun is indeed the energy source, it is a very steady source. So no stability mechanism need be postulated.

Adding quickly:

OK, I can hear the protests – I mean no big oscillations in solar output in the period Willis is looking at.

To which Willis Eschenbach weirdly responds (extract - removed Nick's comment):

May 24, 2014 at 2:03 pm
Dear heavens, save me from pettifogging lawyers. Nick, the standard view is exactly what I said it was—that changes in temperature are a linear function of the changes in forcing. If you don’t understand that, read up on the supposed “climate sensitivity”. It has nothing to do with the sun at all. w.

What is Willis on about - does he not regard the sun as a forcing? That would be truly weird. Nick Stokes can't figure him out either, from the look of it, and says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:25 pm
Willis Eschenbach says: May 24, 2014 at 2:03 pm “Dear heavens, save me from pettifogging lawyers.”

No pettifog here. Your proposition is that a lack of sunspot cycle in the data supports a “dynamic thermoregulatory system”. I say that there was no significant change in forcing in the first place, so lack of observed response does not support thermoregulation.

Blue Sky says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:34 pm
Willis Eschenbach creates a straw man and than destroys it. Stick a feather in his hat.

You'll enjoy this comment. RoHa says, quoting Willis:

May 24, 2014 at 6:35 pm
“Unfortunately, the dang facts got in the way again”

They often do. I’ve told you before,you should leave those things alone and stick to pure speculation.

Roy Spencer doesn't bother pointing out that Willis' whole article is about chasing a phantom, but is enjoying the to and fro and says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:45 pm
Willis, I’m always happy to see someone other than myself pi$$ off a bunch of people. :-)

Because the topic is the sun, Lief Svalgaard joins in from time to time as usual. At one point he says:

May 24, 2014 at 5:25 pm
DaveR says: May 24, 2014 at 5:13 pm Put another way…. because the earth climate is not responding to the 11-year sunspot cycle (which we know is creating variable energy output) there must be some equally offsetting effect in the interface between the two systems.

No, the more likely reason is simply that the variation of the energy output is too small to have any significant effect.

Roy UK begs Willis to give him a clue as to what is causing the remarkably rapid rise in global temperature and says:

May 24, 2014 at 3:14 pm
So its not the sun. And it ain’t CO2. What in the world is it? C’mon Willis give us a clue…
Or is it just something that we should not worry about?

Louis has a bright idea to counteract nonsense like CO2 or Milankovitch forcings and says cosmic dust caused the ice ages:

May 24, 2014 at 6:36 pmIf it isn’t Sun cycles that cause changes to the climate, what other causes could there be?
Astronomers say we are currently located inside a low-density zone that is about 10 times lower in neutral atoms than the average of 0.5 atoms/cc elsewhere in the Milky Way on average. So what effect would there be if the solar system passed through a denser medium, such as an interstellar cloud? Could a higher-density zone block some sunlight from reaching Earth or have some other effect?

After a search, I found the following comment at http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q1372.html:

“When the solar system enters such a cloud, the first thing that will happen will be that the magnetic field of the Sun, which now extends perhaps 100 AU from the Sun and 2-3 times the orbit of Pluto, will be compressed back into the inner solar system depending on the density of the medium that the Sun encounters. When this happens, the Earth may be laid bare to an increased cosmic ray bombardment.”

Could passing through a cosmic dust cloud have caused ice ages in the past? If increased cosmic rays cause more clouds, couldn’t that cause cooling and possibly account for past ice ages? I have no idea one way or the other. I’m just throwing it out there because I haven’t seen any mention of such a possibility.

Our old mate, Roger Sowell talks about it being "prudent to act" (though Roger admits he knows bugger all) - and prepare for the ice age that cometh! (extracts):

May 24, 2014 at 4:12 pm
I agree that “it’s the evidence, stupid.” But, it is not the 11-year cycle that is the evidence of interest. the long-term solar cycles, of which we know very little, are the subject of interest, at least to me. They may or may not be regular cycles.

It is well-known that climate gets very cold when the sunspots disappear for decades on end. We have, as far as I know, no proven, accepted causal mechanism why the absence of sunspots causes the Earth to cool. There is the cloud and cosmic ray hypothesis, with cosmic rays modulated by the sun’s magnetic field.

Do we actually need a proven, causal mechanism before it is prudent to act?...

...In my May, 2012 speech to the chemical engineers in Southern California, I made the point that we have excellent correlations over hundreds of years that show weak sunspot cycles produce global cooling. ...

Mick draws an analogy and says:

May 24, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Willis, You can’t see the 100Hz AC if you stick a thermometer in the chicken soup coking on the hot-plate.

This doesn’t mean there is no oscillation of incoming energy, but the thermal inertia is acting as a low-pass filter…..

Also…. 0.5deg Celsius variation is significant for us humans, for our comfort. But looking at it in absolute terms, not much different between 300K or 300.5K ..about as much as in the Sun’s delta TSI ….me think.

(I hope my English is comprehensible enough…. apologize if it’s not, spell check struggle to understand my accent)

sabretruthtiger quoted Christopher Monckton (who joined the fray and opposed Willis), and sensibly, if somewhat incompletely, says that the sun (and volcanoes) would of course cause natural variation in climate (excerpt):

May 24, 2014 at 4:06 pm
...Nicely put, Mr Eschenbach put in his place somewhat.

Honestly there can surely be no other cause of natural variability other than the sun, it, along with axial tilt/proximity cycles can be the only causes of variability once electromagnetic and volcanic earth-based anomalies are discounted as the system is heat driven.

But what do I know, I’m not a climate scientist, Mr Eschenbach it would be extremely helpful if you could respond to Monckton’s assertions and give us an alternative to what drives natural variability.
Cheers

There is a lot of nonsense in the comments, which you can read here, if you've nothing better to do.

---

** I couldn't find this on the internet, but in my part of the world having a "touch of the sun" means that a person has temporarily lost his marbles :D

Wondering Willis Eschenbach's hilarious hilarity - auto-correlation of deniers

Wondering Willis Eschenbach thinks he has made a startling discovery (archived here).  His penny dropped, his light switched on and he found it all too, too hilarious.  This is what he wrote today at WUWT:

I read a curious statement on the web yesterday, and I don’t remember where. If the author wishes to claim priority, here’s your chance. The author said (paraphrasing):

If you’re looking at any given time window on an autocorrelated time series, the extreme values are more likely to be at the beginning and the end of the time window.

“Autocorrelation” is a way of measuring how likely it is that tomorrow will be like today. For example, daily mean temperatures are highly auto-correlated. If it’s below freezing today, it’s much more likely to be below freezing tomorrow than it is to be sweltering hot tomorrow, and vice-versa. 

So far so good. I gather that what Willis is saying is that in red noise, the pattern of frequency of extremes is sinusoidal. Willis went ahead to test it with a "large number of pseudo-random datasets".  He wrote:

The easiest way to test such a statement is to do what’s called a “Monte Carlo” analysis. You make up a large number of pseudo-random datasets which have an autocorrelation structure similar to some natural autocorrelated dataset. This highly autocorrelated pseudo-random data is often called “red noise”. Because it was handy, I used the HadCRUT global surface air temperature dataset as my autocorrelation template. 

He put up some results in the following chart.

Figure 1. HadCRUT3 monthly global mean surface air temperature anomalies (black), after removal of seasonal (annual) swings. Cyan and red show two “red noise” (autocorrelated) random datasets. Source: WUWT

He found one "pseudo-random" data set that more or less followed HadCRUT and another that was completely different.  Willis didn't say how many sets he chose from or how many of these sets were similar to his blue and red "red noise" sets.  For example, how many of his chopped data sets followed HadCRUT as closely as the red one in his chart above? What are the chances? Willis didn't say.

He did some more analysis, chopping two large sets of data into sets that contained 2000 data points. What he found that there were more extremes in what he called his pseudo-random data at the beginning and end of the series. In other words, a sinusoidal pattern as he mooted above.

Figure 2. Histogram of the location (from 1 to 2000) of the extreme values in the 2,000 datapoint chunks of “red noise” pseudodata. Source: WUWT

These "extremes" at both ends included both high and low extremes, not high extremes at one end and low extremes at the other end (based on Willis' comment here).

Willis was full of mirth, writing:

If you take a random window on a highly autocorrelated “red noise” dataset, the extreme values (minimums and maximums) are indeed more likely, in fact twice as likely, to be at the start and the end of your window rather than anywhere in the middle.

I’m sure you can see where this is going … you know all of those claims about how eight out of the last ten years have been extremely warm? And about how we’re having extreme numbers of storms and extreme weather of all kinds?

That’s why I busted out laughing. If you say “we are living today in extreme, unprecedented times”, mathematically you are likely to be right, even if there is no trend at all, purely because the data is autocorrelated and “today” is at one end of our time window!

How hilarious is that? We are indeed living in extreme times, and we have the data to prove it!

Now it's true what he says. In a short time series like ten years, one doesn't expect to see the coldest year in the last century as well as the hottest year in the last century. Just the same, Willis comes across as being really disingenuous or dumb or doesn't understand what is causing global warming, this is what he wrote further down:

Typically, we consider the odds of being in extreme times to be equal across the time window. But as Fig. 2 shows, that’s not true. As a result, we incorrectly consider the occurrence of recent extremes as evidence that the bounds of natural variation have recently been overstepped (e.g. “eight of the ten hottest years”, etc.).

This finding shows that we need to raise the threshold for what we are considering to be “recent extreme weather” … because even if there are no trends at all we are living in extreme times, so we should expect extreme weather.

That first sentence isn't true in regard to expectations of climate extremes. Although I expect it depends on who the "we" are.  In regard to extreme weather, it depends on what weather you are talking about.  Extreme heat waves of the same parameters are not likely to be equal across a long time window.  It is expected that heat waves will continue to become more extreme as time goes by relative to a static baseline.  Extreme cold waves on the other hand, will continue to be less likely as time goes by relative to the same static baseline.

His last sentence to my mind doesn't follow. He wrote: "...because even if there are no trends at all we are living in extreme times, so we should expect extreme weather." If there were no trend (that is, a signal of zero trend), then the auto-correlation would also not have any trend. There would not be extreme weather at any particular time. The weather is tending to be more extreme as climate change kicks in. But it's not because of auto-correlation. (It could be that Willis is assuming that no matter where on the time series one is, there will be more extremes and maybe he thinks all those extremes will be hot. That auto-correlation isn't just noise - that it's the signal.)

One question is: how does he equate his "extremes" expectation with the "pause" that deniers go on about? Did the extremes stop being "extreme" 16, 18, 20 or 30 years ago or whenever it is that deniers reckon the "pause" started?

I have another question. What about if you go back to 1969 and look backwards from there? Up to the mid-1940s there was a period of increasing extremes, but then the temperatures stopped rising for a while. What happened to the extreme times and extreme weather?

Data Source: NASA GISTemp

Sure there is some auto-correlation in temperature data. However the increasing extremes has less to do with auto-correlation than to the the build up of energy on Earth because of all the greenhouse gases we continue to pour into the air.

What is auto-correlation?

I'll let Tamino tell you about auto-correlation and how to allow for it in climate data. He discusses auto-correlation as nearby (in time) noise values - not the signal:

Lots of time series, especially in geophysics, exhibit the phenomenon of autocorrelation. This means that not just the signal (if nontrivial signal is present), even the noise is more complicated than the simple kind in which each noise value is independent of the others. Specifically, nearby (in time) noise values tend to be correlated, hence the term “autocorrelation.”

There are other articles by Tamino on the subject, such as this one. Science of Doom has also written an article on auto-correlation. David Appell found references in a pdf file here (that talks about how to allow for it) and here when he was working through what autocorrelation means as far as surface temperature trends go.

Recent extremes and natural variation

As far as Willis' claim that "we incorrectly consider the occurrence of recent extremes as evidence that the bounds of natural variation have been overstepped" - he's wrong on that score, too. The way the evidence is interpreted is not incorrect (or not necessarily incorrect).  Proper attribution studies do allow for auto-correlation when trying to extract the signal from the noise. In any case, it is through studies of what is causing the earth to get hotter that we know whether extremes are caused by natural variation.

It is a fact that some studies to determine the likelihood of an extreme consider it in terms of probabilities but they are also based in science. Otherwise, the scientists would be saying - "Nothing has changed yet we had a year that on the balance of probabilities, should only occur once in every 13,000 years. We can't explain it (except for auto-correlation)."

Instead they say "Earth is warming. Australia last year had an average temperature that should only occur once in every 13,000 years if only natural factors were in play. We can explain it. It's because of the build up of greenhouse gases."

We need to raise the threshold

When Willis wrote: "we need to raise the threshold" he was spot on, but not for the reason he claims.  It's because the "new normal" is higher than it was before, because of global warming. It's got nothing to do with auto-correlation.

Willis has a point in that in some of the public's mind, extremes are compared to the weather of the twentieth century.  However climate is changing at such a rapid pace (in geological terms) and energy is building up so quickly that another way of looking at extremes is to consider the extent to which they can be considered extreme in the light of rapidly *increasing* energy and global surface temperature.  That is, the baseline isn't a flat line, it's an upward sloping line. The signal line is an upward trend.

Perhaps a reader who is well-versed in statistics can comment.  Willis seems to me to be confusing the noise and the signal with his article on auto-correlation.  Even to this lay person it's not conceivable that Earth could continue to get hotter just because it got hotter last decade. There has to be a physical reason. Noise is noise, the chance of red noise going forever in the same direction is remote.

All of which makes Willis' hilarity hilarious.

The dog is the weather

Which brings us to climate vs weather.

.

Incorrect Assumption

Willis ended up with this (my bold italics):

In any case, I propose that we call this the “Extreme Times Effect”, the tendency of extremes to cluster in recent times simply because the data is autocorrelated and “today” is at one end of our time window … and the corresponding tendency for people to look at those recent extremes and incorrectly assume that we are living in extreme times.

In my view it's Willis who is making incorrect assumptions. We are heading toward more and more extremes as climate change kicks in. That's not statistics, that's physics, chemistry, biology and climate science.

Footnote: I am not claiming any expertise in statistics here. I am simply pointing to other reasons for Willis' jumping to wrong conclusions. If anyone wants to weigh in from a stats perspective, feel free.

From the WUWT comments

The auto-correlation in the comments section is more apparent at WUWT than in the sample I've selected below.

bobbyv says (did Richard really say that?):

April 24, 2014 at 4:14 pm
I think this goes to what Lindzen says – one would expect our times to be warmest in a warming climate.

John Phillips talks about the most recent string of the past fifty years or so and says:

April 24, 2014 at 4:24 pm
Making much ado about many of the years within the most recent string of years being near the recent extremes was one of the first disingenuous tactics of the CAGW alarmists. Even when warming stops, they can continue that scam for many years to come. 

Theo Goodwin got his second sentence right when he says:

April 24, 2014 at 5:04 pmWonderful explanation of a wonderful insight, Willis. Just what we expect from you.

Willis Eschenbach repeats his erroneous erroneous claim and says:

April 24, 2014 at 5:21 pm
Steve from Rockwood says: April 24, 2014 at 5:12 pm My gut feeling is you have only proved your time series is band-limited both in low and high frequencies.

Thanks, Steve, and you may be right about the cause. However, I wasn’t speculating on or trying to prove the underlying causes of the phenomenon.

Instead, I was commenting on the practical effects of the phenomenon, one of which is that we erroneously think we are living in extreme times.
w.

RobL asks not a bad question and says:

April 24, 2014 at 5:41 pm
Is the effect stronger for shorter series? Eg what about a 160 point long series (to reflect the hottest year on record claims), or 16 point long series (to reflect hottest decade)

Frederick Michael talks about proximity of data points and says:

April 24, 2014 at 5:59 pm
The “red noise” or “Brownian motion” assumption is essential to finding a closed form solution. In my example of adding the N+1th point, knowing the value of the Nth point needs to be complete knowledge. (This is sometimes called “memoryless.”) If there are longer autocorrelations (trends, periodicity, etc.) the problem gets harder, and all bets are off on the endpoint effect — it could grow or disappear.

And adds more, Frederick Michael says:

April 24, 2014 at 6:57 pm
I think the term “red noise” is throwing folks off here. Willis is talking about pure Brownian motion. That is known as red noise but thinking about this in terms of spectrum is a rabbit trail. Willis is speaking of a series with no periodicity. 

gymnosperm seems to have concluded that global warming is real and we're not going to be heading for an ice age any time soon, except she or he is wrong about the last 17 years (1995, 19 years ago, was warmer than 1999 and 2000):

April 24, 2014 at 8:18 pm
There is another reason for ” it was the n hottest of the instrumental record”. The instrumental record is an S form with the hottest years at the top. Any year in the last 17 is guaranteed to be one of the top 17.

Humans have a natural tendency to “autocorrelate”. It is a perennial search for portents. 

Mike Jonas says:

April 24, 2014 at 9:08 pm
Willis – Good thinking, nice work! Following on from your post, I thought I would investigate the notion that nine of the last 10 years being the warmest “ever” was unprecedented. Answer : NO. It also happened back in 1945 and 1946. 

Quote of the Day at WUWT: Beginner's Mind or Fools Rush In

From Wondering Willis Eschenbach today at WUWT (archived here):

Now most folks would likely do a search of the literature first, to find out what is currently known about the subject.

I don’t like doing that. Oh, the literature search is important, don’t get me wrong … but I postpone it as long as I possibly can. You see, I don’t want to be mesmerized by what is claimed to be already known. I want to look whatever it is with a fresh eye, what the Buddhists call “Beginner’s Mind”, unencumbered by decades of claims and counter-claims. 

That short passage sums up why Willis Eschenbach gets into strife so often. He claims to "postpone it" but is there evidence that Willis ever reads the literature? (I'm not talking about a random paper here or there that he might try to pull to bits, I'm talking about a proper literature review on a subject of interest.)

The above passage by Willis was from a lead in to an article about beryllium isotopes and solar cycles in which Willis confesses he did do a search, apparently for a data set not the literature on the subject.  He found one, for which he provided a title and abstract but not the authors or source or any other information.  A quick search shows Willis found the data at NASA.  He ignored the requested citation, which is:

Pedro, Joel and Smith, Andrew M (2012, updated 2012) Annually-resolved polar ice core 10Be records spanning the Neutron Monitor era Australian Antarctic Data Centre - CAASM Metadata (https://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/metadata_redirect.cfm?md=/AMD/AU/Neutron-Monitor-era-annual-10Be)

And Willis seems to have ignored the associated paper (available here):

Pedro, J. B., Simon, K. J., Smith, A. M., van Ommen T. D. and Curran, M. A. J. (2011), High-resolution records of beryllium-10 in ice from Law Dome, East Antarctica: measurement, reproducibility and principal trends, Climate of the Past, 7, 707-721, doi:doi:10.5194/cp-7-707-2011 

There is much more research that he could have found had he really been interested in the subject.

Fools rush in...

Once again Willis has rushed in to a field, found some data, performed a couple of simple plots and decided that all the scientists are wrong.  He expects either pats on the back from the WUWT-ers, or for someone else to do the hard work.  Mostly the former from what I gather.

Willis' did go as far as look at the notes to the data set and found that the scientists commented on the difference in solar cycle correlation between concentration and flux:

Concentrations at both DSS and Das2 are significantly correlated to the 11-yr solar cycle modulation of cosmic ray intensity, r = 0.54 with 95% CI [0.31; 0.70], and r = 0.45 with 95% CI [0.22; 0.62], respectively. For both sites, if fluxes are used instead of concentrations then correlations with solar activity decrease.

He wasn't at all happy.  He put a question to WUWT-ers (not the researchers themselves) (my bold italics):

If you use flux rates the “Correlations with solar activity decrease”??? Yeah, they do … they decrease to insignificance. And this is a big problem. It’s a good thing I didn’t read the notes first …

Now, my understanding is that using 10Be concentrations in ice cores doesn’t give valid results. This is because the 10Be is coming down from the sky … but so is the snow. As a result, the concentration is a factor of both the 10Be flux and the snow accumulation rate. So if we want to understand the production and subsequent deposition rate of 10Be, it is necessary to correct the 10Be concentrations by using the corresponding snow accumulation rate to give us the actual flux rate. So 10Be flux rates should show a better correlation with sunspots than concentrations, because they’re free of the confounding variable of snow accumulation rate.

As a result, I’ve used the flux rates and not the concentrations … and found nothing of interest. No correlation between the datasets, no 11-year periodicity, no relationship to the solar cycle.

What am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? How can they use the concentration of 10Be rather than the flux? Are we getting accurate results from the ice cores? If not, why not?

It's not that the questions themselves are unreasonable for a "beginner".  The problem I have is that Willis goes barging in without doing any reading on the subject. And his questions are like a red rag to a bull at WUWT.  It means all the science is wrong! (In fact, Willis has some fans and some who really don't like him at WUWT, so he often gets a mixed reception.)

I'm not the person to answer Willis' question.  All I can do is suggest he read the literature. As the authors of the above paper say (my bold italics):

...obtaining reliable information from the 10Be record requires proven sample processing and measurement techniques, along with a good understanding of the sequence of environmental processes controlling production in the atmosphere and ultimate storage in the ice sheet.

There's more, in a discussion of how best to "test the response of 10Be concentrations in ice to variations in the atmospheric production rate", for example:

By contrast, the sunspot record is less useful since the relation between sunspots and 10Be production is neither linear nor direct.

My question to Willis is: Why don't you read the literature?

From the WUWT comments

Quite a few people try to help Willis out.  None of them come right out and ask - "why don't you read the literature?" However a number of them did just that and quoted various papers on the topic (not all of them reliable sources, needless to say).  Plus one for WUWT commenters, FAIL for Wondering Willis Eschenbach.

Tom in Florida isn't one for reading literature - he says:

April 13, 2014 at 4:28 pm
“What am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? How can they use the concentration of 10Be rather than the flux?”
I believe you know the answer,…………. it gives them the results they were seeking.

Brad who is not an expert on beryllium in ice but a building auditor, says:

April 13, 2014 at 4:32 pm
Willis,
It is obvious what you are missing, GRANT MONEY!!!! You could have strung this out for at lest a few years and made a million or more, plus publishing rights. You also need to run it through the DIY a few times to get it thoroughly “scientificey”, so most eyes will glaze over and bow to the master. sarc/off

Your “beginners eyes” are greatly appreciated… that is a term I will remember in the future when auditing commercial buildings. I always tell operators they have blinders on when it comes to some problems. They just can’t see it, and will argue until the cows come home.
A new set of eyes can see that which others can’t.

scarletmacaw takes a wild guess but comes down on the side of the scientists, not Willis and says:

April 13, 2014 at 5:38 pm
I would think the difference between flux and concentration depends on how the Be10 is deposited. If it is captured in ice crystals and deposited in snow fall, then using concentration makes sense. I guess my question is where does the Beryllium come from?

Cynical Scientst goes a bit further and says:

April 13, 2014 at 6:07 pm
It depends strongly on how the beryllium is being deposited.

Flux is the appropriate measure only if we assume that beryllium is deposited evenly and steadily across the entire surface of the planet. But it seems much more likely to me that beryllium is transported out of the atmosphere by precipitation and hence is deposited quite unevenly and unsteadily across the planet. Areas with high precipitation would then be expected to receive a high beryllium flux while those with low precipitation will get only a small amount. In this scenario concentration is much better measure than flux of the rate of beryllium production as in a well mixed atmosphere the rate of beryllium production should determine the concentration of beryllium in precipitation.

Look to see which of flux or concentration is least strongly correlated with local rates of precipitation. That would be the best measure to use.

markx might not understand what's been written, but he likes the style. He says:

April 13, 2014 at 6:12 pm
Very interesting, and very nicely laid out.
Willis, you write very clearly.
We would all do well if scientific papers were written in a similar clear prose, instead of being immersed and obfuscated in the accepted contemporary ‘scientific’ phrasing and jargon.

bushbunny takes exception to something Willis wrote and says:

April 13, 2014 at 7:53 pm
Willis I appreciate your hard work producing these graphs. They must give you some exciting work and I commend you for that, but remember that most of us here haven’t a deep scientific understanding to comment on your graphs To stipulate whom should respond to them is a bit elitist and selective in my opinion. I say no more.We know cosmic rays are deflected from earth due to solar activities, hence less contact with water vapour in our atmosphere.