Maggie's Farm

indyjonesouthere: Russia, Russia, Russia, takes it in the shorts once again.

Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, passed polling data directly to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian-Russian with close ties to Russian intelligence, traveling to a third country to do so. Campaigns spend millions of dollars to gather extensive voter profiles, especially in election battlegrounds. The obvious question and equally obvious answer is why Manafort would pass proprietary election information on to someone he knew had ties to Russian intelligence after Russia had been engaged in election interference in the U.S.

MissT: Manafort is a sleaze. We also found out he was trying to make big bucks off his connection to Trump. If Manafort did anything wrong, it is Manafort who is the criminal.

There is evidence the sleaze is international in scope, which could very well represent Russian collusion at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. It seems a lot of people in the Trump campaign have lied about their contacts with the Russians. Trump has repeatedly attempted to undermine the investigation into connection between his campaign and Russia.

MissT: Where was the warning from the FBI that Manafort was a mess?

Manafort worked for pro-Russian oligarchs in the Ukraine. It was obvious.

mudbug: Also Manafort was fired from the campaign. Why, if he's doing all that great Russian collusion work?

Um, there was public pressure over reports of Manafort's dealings with pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs, millions of dollars in cash payments, and Trump's own cozy relationship to Putin.

jimg: There's a pony in there somewhere.

Sorry. We should have provided citations for those unaware.

{Manafort then} came under fire following a New York Times article over the weekend claimed handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to him from ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian party between 2007 and 2012.

{Manafort now} was found guilty of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud. He faces a maximum of 80 years in prison.

Christopher B: The New York Times was forced Wednesday to correct a bombshell report that accused Paul Manafort of attempting to pass internal Trump campaign data to a Russia oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin during the 2016 presidential race.

You shouldn't rely on secondary sources. In fact, the unredacted documents make clear that Manafort provided the information to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian with ties to Russian intelligence. The New York Times piece only concerned to whom Manafort says he directed Kilimnik to provide the data. Nor does the unredacted portions specify when the meeting occurred.

Now why Manafort would provide such information to a Russian agent?

Anon: Tell me again what law was broken. I really want to know.

At this point, the allegation is that Manafort lied. (He's already been convicted of other felonies.) However, that he was providing election data to a Russian agent may indicate a conspiracy against the United States. Keep in mind that we would be in the dark about this if Manafort's defence hadn't screwed up the paperwork.

Anon: He gave public information to someone he knew to pass on to someone else. Is that illegal?

It was presumably not public information, but proprietary data, otherwise, it would not have been necessary to "pass it on" or to lie about it to the FBI.

Anon: It is public I can find it on the net and the NYTimes can as well.

What exactly did you find on the net? The nature of the polling data is not part of the improperly redacted document, but Manafort, a convicted criminal try to wheedle out of a harsh sentence, is alleged to have lied to the FBI about it.

The one graph provided clearly shows a warming trend.


No.


Surface temperatures can decline because greenhouse gas emissions are not the only factor affecting the Earth's surface temperature. Significant other factors include ENSO and similar natural oscillations. Natural and artificial aerosols can also affect surface temperature.


Because ENSO is cyclical and cannot increase the overall heat content of the Earth's climate system. It simply cycles heat in and out of the oceans depths.


There are a lot of measures of the Earth's warming, including surface temperature, ocean temperature, energy budget observations, and ice mass. It's the consilience of evidence that leads to the conclusion of a warming Earth. It would take a similar consilience of evidence to reach a conclusion that the Earth is cooling.

Anon: A warming trend all depends on when you start the graph and when you end it.

Sure. If you start four-and-a-half billion years ago, the Earth has cooled overall. The time at issue is the industrial period. The evidence indicates that most of the recent warming is artificial.

Anon: Start the graph in 1934 and end it today and there will be a cooling trend

That is incorrect.

1934-present
GISTEMP: +0.106°C/decade
HadCRUT4: +0.087°C/decade

Anon: But if your intent is to deceive start the graph in the 60's and end it in the early 2000's and there will indeed be a warming trend.

That is correct.

1960-2000
GISTEMP: +0.141°C/decade
HadCRUT4: +0.113°C/decade

1960-present
GISTEMP: +0.162°C/decade
HadCRUT4: +0.144°C/decade

Anon: That is the effort to change historical data to create the impression that there is a smooth and provable warming trend.

The trend is hardly smooth, but there is clearly a global warming trend.

Anon: In fact if you use the honest data 1934 was the warmest period worldwide in the last 100 years and the 1950's was the coldest period in the last 100 years.

And Lincoln was king of the Romanians. Do you have the data to back up your assertion?

JLawson: The amazing thing to me is that they can take all the disparate measurements from across the planet, taken by hand in the early days, then with systems that had about a half-degree of 'precision' in their measuring, and after amazing amounts of manipulation, adjustment, folding, spindling, mutilating and massaging, and get a result that's good to a thousandth of a friggin' degree.

Here's your error bars:

1934-present
HadCRUT4: +0.087 ±0.015 °C/decade (2σ)

Thermometers with a precision of ±0.1°C have been in common use since the 19th century. If you use such a thermometer and take a hundred measurements, what is the precision of the mean result?

JLawson: Where it's hard as all hell to get a hundredth of a degree accuracy in a PMEL calibration lab, and the temperature of a room will likely have a two to five degree range from floor to ceiling

Determining mean global temperature has high error bars due to the lack of coverage, as you point out. However, temperature anomaly has much lower error bars, and climate scientists have access to hundreds of thousands of data-points.

mudbug: If I understand you correctly, +/- 0.1 deg. C. Making more measurements with the same degree of precision does not increase your precision.

That is incorrect. The standard deviation of multiple measurements is proportional to 1/√(N), where N is the number of measurements. Think of it as a standard curve that gets narrower over the mean value as more and more measurements are likely to center on a certain value, with a few outliers. For a hundred measurements, the standard deviation would be proportional to 1/√(100) = 1/10, so the precision would be ±0.01°C. (This does not eliminate bias, however, which relates to a closely allied concept, accuracy.)

Now consider if we have a thousand thermometers scattered across the globe. If we try to get a mean temperature for the globe, we are going to notice a problem with coverage. Some areas, such as the Antarctic, may be underrepresented. That doesn't mean we can't come up with an estimate. We may be able to make some extrapolations from known thermometers, but our error bars will be high.

But what if we only consider the temperature anomaly? If 950 of our thousand thermometers show a significant positive trend over a period of years, and the remainder show no trend, what is the likelihood that this is due to random fluctuations? We'll answer. It's virtually certain the trend is not due to random fluctuations in readings or temperature.

With complex data, such as hundreds of thousands of data points, stretching over decades of time, statistical techniques, such as the Monte Carlo method, are used to determine the error bars for the temperature anomaly.

Rusty: A more honest assessment of the evidence would go more like:

"We don't really know, and we can't accurately model extremely complex dynamical systems yet."

That is correct. Climate change is difficult to model and is subject to high error bars. On the other hand, global warming is much more tractable.

Rusty: Most of? What percentage is artificial? What percentage is natural?

Here's a graphic representation (from Huber and Knutti, 2012).

Rusty: Bear in mind that recently published science has shown that models exaggerate the effect of CO2 by as much as 45%.

?? The radiative effect of CO2 has been directly observed. See Feldman et al., Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010, Nature 2015: "These results confirm theoretical predictions of the atmospheric greenhouse effect due to anthropogenic emissions".

Perhaps you mean climate sensitivity, which depends on feedbacks, such as water vapor. Most studies still put equilibrium climate sensitivity in the range of 2-4°C per doubling of CO2.

Rusty: You claim to know exactly how much it should affect temperature

No. They are estimates with margins of error based on a variety of empirical and theoretical studies.

Rusty: yet when we compare predictions to actual results, the models exaggerate by as much as 45%.

Not sure where you get that. Observations are within the predicted margins.

Rusty: Nice 2017 graph from the EPA with no corresponding references.

Um, we provided the citation, Huber and Knutti, 2012, in direct response to you above.

Rusty: My figure comes from 2018 peer reviewed science.

Except you forgot to provide a citation. On the other hand, we provided dozens of citations (from Knutti et al., Beyond equilibrium climate sensitivity, Nature Geoscience 2017).

Rusty: Your information is old. My information is from 2018 and it proves that you are wrong.

You never provided a citation. A single study is not necessarily definitive. When you find the citation, you might consider looking at it skeptically to avoid the problem of cherry-picking.

Rusty: It's not hard to find, if you have even a tiny little bit of intellectual curiosity.

Actually, we'd be happy to review your information, but you have failed several times now to provide a citation.

Did you bother to look at the citations we provided for your perusal?

Cheng et al., How fast are the oceans warming?, Science 2019: "About 93% of the energy imbalance accumulates in the ocean as increased ocean heat content (OHC). The ocean record of this imbalance is much less affected by internal variability and is thus better suited for detecting and attributing human influences than more commonly used surface temperature records. Recent observation-based estimates show rapid warming of Earth's oceans over the past few decades."

Scientists deploy an Argo float.