Michael Kundu, Board President of Marysville (Washington State, USA) District #25 has written to colleagues to urge them to trash a free science resource that discusses logic, reason and evidence, and the core of science. The Skeptics Handbook has arrived at school board presidents’ desks around the US.
“I would encourage all of you to stuff that junk mail directly into the recycle basket.”
In a spot of unwitting self-parody he states:
“…we need to have the ability to tell fact from fiction. This last mailing is an excellent example of ‘fiction’.”
Thus Michael Kundu, whale photographer, pronounces the data from NASA, Hadley, UAH, CSSP, IPPC, as fiction.
Michael Kundu has no evidence or logical reason to back his claim. He exhorts everyone to use good sources (then uses Wikipedia), and make intelligent decisions to spot the propaganda, and gives nothing except logical errors. All he can offer is the typical, low base ad hominem attack. So on a science topic, he reasons by ‘smear’.
“I am sure that history will file your names alongside such ‘credentialed luminaries’ as Hwang Woo-suk, Luk Van Parijs, Jon Sudbo, and William Summerlin.”
“if you want to continue spreading your propaganda, I am sure the oil industry (I understand that they had another year of record profits) can provide you with significant funding,”
Thus proving to be rude, ignorant, and unable to reason. He is at least up front about it. It was honest of him to CC Bob Carter in at the start. Though it appears to be more unfounded arrogance than an attempt to communicate.
Professor Bob Carter writes:
“As the president of a school district board, you have a particular responsibility to encourage informed discussion on controversial matters of the day, rather than to denigrate in ignorant fashion one aspect of a complex, multi-sided argument of which you happen to disapprove.
The Skeptics Handbook is a carefully and accurately written account of matters to do with contemporary climate change. Every statement in it is founded in data contained in numerous research papers in refereed scientific journals.”
Joseph Bast agrees:
“…none of our work is “propaganda.” More than 100 academics and 150 elected officials participate in our research and education programs.”
Kundu is up for reelection this year.
So people, email your friends in Marysville, Washington: pass the word around. Even if you don’t agree with sceptics on climate, do you really want someone so rude and ignorant involved in your child’s education?
It’s a shame that a man brave enough to enter Siberia covertly to film slaughtered whales and expose Russian censorship is hypocritically censoring views in US schools on something as important as climate science. Is he really a fighter to get out the whole story? Not if he’s been fooled by the propaganda himself.
My reply to Kundu
Dear Michael,
Thanks for your thoughts. Like you, I’m passionate that our educators use accurate scientific information and be able to help our students tell fact from fiction. That’s exactly why I wrote The Skeptics Handbook. The climate, the fauna, our kids; it’s too important to get wrong.
That’s why I know you will be as concerned as I am that your recent emails failed to pass the test of basic reasoning and thus qualify as Junk-emails. Unfortunately you were not only unable to come up with any logical reason to back up your exhortation to censor a free scientific resource, but it appears you didn’t even read the booklet you call ‘propaganda’. If you had, you’d see I’ve already described most of rules you break.
Michel Kundu’s Scorecard for Logic and Reason
| ……………………………. | Argument from Authority | 1 | |
| Ad Hominem Attack | 3 | ||
| Conflating irrelevant issues | 1 | ||
| Baseless assertions | 3 | ||
| Selection bias in survey | 1 | ||
| Argument from Ignorance | 1 | ||
| Bonus point for breaking the first amendment | 1 | ||
| Total | -11 |
The ‘ad hom’. Your method for analyzing Earth’s climate by looking at the history of a particular think tank is doomed to fail. There has never been a single instance of a think-tank induced climate change. For a better way to analyze the climate, scientists use thermometers and weather balloons. Fraudsters use bluff, bluster and censorship. Is it not fraud to act as an authority on science education if you are unable to reason?
You have no evidence. You mistakenly believe that the hypothesis of the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect is proven unless you notice a compelling paper against it published in Nature or another esteemed journal. As attractive as it sounds, this is argument from ignorance. In science, theories are vindicated by evidence, not by a lack of it.
There are over 115 scientific journals on earth and atmospheric sciences. So it’s no wonder you’ve missed so many papers that don’t support your unresearched position. My links and sources are here.
Bob Carter provided these links:
You will find my listed scientific research papers here.
In addition, many useful articles on global warming are listed here (articles 92, 95 and 115 being particularly suitable for persons who manifest scientifically erroneous views such as those that you appear to espouse).
Joseph Bast provided these links:
1.More Peer-Reviewed Studies Contradict Global Warming Alarmism – by …
2.Still More Peer-Reviewed Studies Contradict Global Warming …
3.Scores of Peer-Reviewed Studies Contradict Global Warming Alarmism …
On Tuesday, Heartland is releasing an 880-page book on climate change that cites thousands of peer-reviewed articles while arriving at the conclusion that global warming is not a crisis. The entire book will be available at www.nipccreport.org.
Furthermore: you claim most educational decision makers agree with you and are able to “see through the fog of propaganda” because only 1 in 50 responses disagreed with your email. However your study suffers from a crippling flaw. You assume that those who disagree with your loaded inaccurate letter would bother to reply. All you have proved is that most people who disagree with you will ignore you.
Likewise you claim that you can see through propaganda yourself, but have not given a single example of how the booklet is wrong, misleading, or incorrect. If you could provide any examples I would be most happy to issue an immediate correction. I await your response keenly.
Based on your reasoning so far, the fog of propaganda you speak of not only does not exist, but you could not spot a real fog if you were surrounded by it, which indeed you are. I sympathize.
As for your libelous insinuations that I must be paid by oil companies – that’s not only a meaningless Ad hom attack, it’s also wrong. I wrote the entire Handbook pro bono with no financial assistance from anyone. It was finished before I had any contact at all with The Heartland Institute (and as Joe Bast points out, 95% of their funding comes from non-energy sources anyway).
It is a remarkable un-coincidence that Heartland approaches people who independently hold similar views.
To rectify the unwarranted censorship and libelous claims – all you need to do is send this email around to your mailing list. If I am as fringe and junky as you make out, they will all recognize your skill, and my flaws immediately. Right?
That’s free speech.
Most sincerely,
Joanne Nova
Click here for the full email exchange including Bob Carter and Joseph Bast’s responses.
Nice cartoon. I hope I don’t get on your bad side, Joanne.
(The hopefully former) Board President Mike Kundu is yet another good example of reasons to worry about the future of science (and civilisation for that matter).
I don’t expect the next generation of scientists to be worth very much if people like Mike Kundu have anything to do with public education.
Let’s face it. Lysenko didn’t do the Soviet Union much of a service to help the Soviets advance their lot in life
40
Very interesting post. Mr. Kundu certainly hits many of the fine points that any self-respecting devout global warming alarmist would spout. It’s almost as though he had a script. As I read his e-mail, I actually wondered if this might not be some kind of parody on the propaganda.
30
If only Kundu could really hear himself, I think he would be shocked. A book burning, School Board President.
Professor Bob Carter, Mr. Joseph Bast, and JoNova give me hope.
50
Joanne,
Whereas this is a very important and distressing eventuality, I’m afraid I have to agree with Mr Kundu on one point – you must have too much time on your hands.
What on earth were you, and Bob Carter and Joe Bast, thinking of when you expended all that time and energy in bothering to respond to this guy? What did you hope to achieve? Did you have the impression that he was an open-minded logical person who you could have a reasonable discussion with? Sheesh, now all you have done is give him the satisfaction of knowing that he hurt you, plus produce further consolidation of his stance.
Note, however, that the other side of the coin is also true… whether he would ever admit it or not, for him to circularise his schools with his “warning”, it shows people like Kundu are worried, and I hope it is a sign they are losing ground.
30
Steve, my friend, all we have is the “other side of the coin”. Thank god that Mr. Carter, Mr. Bast and JoNova didn’t let Kundu go unchallenged. Reason must be heralded! Science our champion! As were Mr. Carter, Mr. Bast and the beautiful and wickedly smart JoNova!
60
This is episode #1,657 in the sad saga of close-mindedness among AGWers. Have you seen what happened at RC, where they hurriedly closed down discussion on Steig’s paper? And have you noticed how surprised Chris Mooney was when Marc Morano put a link to his blog, as if no self-respecting warmist would even contemplate linking, let alone reading anything not complying to their prejudices?
Just remember…in every scientific field but one, scientists are constantly seeking debate (instead of cutting it off), are not scared of debating non-scientists holding different views, and win those debates hands down (think Velikovsky, think UFOs, think evolution). And people that are on the “science’s side” do just as well.
Why would things be different in that one scientific field, is anybody’s guess. Including the possibility that it’s not that “scientific” after all
30
Blake,
Sadly, I disagree with you. I totally understand your sentiments, and I also understand that it is difficult to not try and defend what you feel is the truth. But I was serious in my earlier comment. What good (apart from providing a meaty nucleus for a discussion on this blog) has been achieved by not “letting Kundu go unchallenged”. Has it helped Kundu (apart from providing him with a bit of entertaining sport)? Has it helped Joanne (apart from letting her get a bit of bile off her chest)? Has it helped Kundu’s schools or the students therein? No. Has “reason been heralded”? No I don’t think so.
In the meantime, while the leaders of the rationalists are having their energies distracted into petty spats with idiots, the fanatics are developing some very powerful resources, and getting themselves real organised. See…
http://www.youtube.com/user/homeproject?blend=1&ob=4
See…
http://www.signon.org.nz
… a Greenpeace lobbying site where you can see blatantly false statements such as “There has been dramatic loss of ice in both the Arctic and in Antarctica. The Arctic icecap has entered what’s been called a ‘death spiral’ and for the first time in human history, you can take a ship around the North Pole.”
Wow, these guys are making some serious headway. Hundreds of dedicated people on the city streets with fancy brochures and well-organised petitions, vigorously proselytising.
Somehow, we have to find a way to forget the Mike Kundus, and taking a broader perspective on the fight.
31
Good point, Mike Goad. Kundu was making a joke all along.
Kundu has a pretty good sense of humour, then.
Children need to hear the truth of the matter, and certainly not the idea there is some sort of “debate” about the whole thing:
The Earth is not warming, and CO2 in the air has nothing to do with making the air temperature go up or go down.
Nothing at all.
30
People like Kundu have to be challenged. Even if they don’t open their own minds, the replies to him are there for others to read and I expect, in his own mind, he may have second thoughts about what he has written and how he expressed himself. The Kundu’s of this world need to be exposed for their narrow-minded attitude. Well done Joanne and the Heartland Institute.
40
we have the same sad mentality in our school system here in British Columbia. sadly Mike Kundus does not understand that one of the most important differences between education and propaganda is how they deal with great controversies.
In education, students are taught about the controversies.In propaganda,they are shielded from them.
In education, students are taught both sides of the important debates. In propaganda, they are taught only one.In education, students are taught both the strengths and the weaknesses of the officially favored theory. In propaganda, they are taught only its strengths.
In short, education is the training of minds, while propaganda is the training of prejudices. In a democracy, the public schools should not propagandize, but educate.
http://www.bcscience.com/bc10/pgs/links_u1.html
youtube is well used by the alarmist as Steve stated
another series of videos on you tube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFGU6qvkmTI&feature=email
remember in that world two plus two makes 6.
Blake you said thank God..you could have said thank Obama since the two names are interchangeable.
10
Mister Polar Bear, and Mister Penguin have the following message:
“Stop worrying about CO2 in the air and get on with your lives!”
20
The point of this is the expose of arrogant ignorance. When Kundu CC’d Bob Carter he was up for a fight, and presumably one he was utterly confident he could win.
Before I publicly shame him, don’t you think it’s polite of me to give him a chance to reply?
AGW believers pay too much attention to Science Theatre. But sceptics pay too little.
50
Steve,
I like your reasoning, except I think you’re wrong on letting Kundu go unchallenged. A lack of response implies contrition, or even worse, acknowledgement and acceptance of the offender’s points and/or propaganda. This is exactly why the mainstream media does not show anything on the other side of the debate. Unfortunately most people take it at face value and walk away believing they heard the truth, since the other side “must not have anything to say about it”. I call it implied concensus through omission, and they do it very well.
Keep up the good fight though – I’m with you all the way, and the rest of you too.
30
Sceptics need to howl about it to make themselves heard.
I’m not necessarily advocating the harsh yelling sometimes heard out of me, either.
10
Here’s an idea: Send Joanne on US media tour.
Why? Because the media will be more apt to give time to an attractive, smart, confrontational, Ozzy accented, realist with a message.
Put her up against Henry Waxman… Debate over.
30
Assuming viewers could stand the sight of the buck-toothed, nickering righteousness of Waxman at all.
10
Fisrt, I need to apologize for my english.
Interesting debate (or maybe pointless mail war), at least viewed from outside.
It’s the kind of mails that I never see on my country (Mexico), The science community here, its speechless in criticizing the AGW, no word, no paper, no mails with a contrary point of view. Badly for me, I’m feel alone in the anti-AGW side.
I hope a Spanish version of the Skeptics Handbook its planning, its an amazing tool for education.
Thanks for your amazing work Joanne.
40
Joanne
Excellent rebuttal. Mr Kundu is a prime example of what is wrong with our educational system in this country. How much do I need to donate to your web site to get a copy of your book “A Skeptics Handbook”? Please use my email address to let me know. Thnaks.
Bill
20
Joanne,
“The point of this is the expose of arrogant ignorance.”
Yes. A good and important idea.
“When Kundu CC’d Bob Carter he was up for a fight”
Yes, and poor old Bob suffered the indignity of taking the bait, much to Mr Kundu’s presumed delight.
“Before I publicly shame him, don’t you think it’s polite of me to give him a chance to reply?”
Nope. Very nice of you, but… nope, in my opinion he is entitled to no courtesies from you.
“AGW believers pay too much attention to Science Theatre. But sceptics pay too little.”
Theatre works best with a receptive audience.
21
Steve,
Why do you feel the need to reply? Do you have too much time on your hands? 🙂 Just trying to prove a point.
30
Perhaps Mr Kundu could host a book burning party and invite all his colleagues over.
J
30
Hi Joanne,
Mr Kundu’s response to the easy to understand scientific facts of “Skeptic’s Handbook”, just goes to prove how much these people have to lose if AGW is proven to be a scam of immense proportions. Loss of face,loss of credibility, loss of power and loss of their latter day “religious beliefs” in Man Made Global Warming.
I know I won’t be inflating your ego by comparing you with Galileo Galilei, but the comparison is there, particularly with calls for jail(US) or execution by some sections of the AGW sect, for heresy against “Gore’s Law”
Galileo’s charge by the Inquisition was “false and contrary to the Scripture”
20
It may be a possibility that Mr Kundu’s vehment reaction to Joanne’s “Skeptic’s Handbook” may be a blessing in disguise.
As the handbook is also available on line, and people being what they are – ie. curious, could result in more people accessing the publication.
Can you really see the parents of 11,000 students discarding the handbook en masse? Probably most of them think Mr Kundu sux.
People are funny critters.
10
Mr Kundu was actually sending messages to whales.
I’ll bet they are about the only audience he ever gets.
10
Todd,
I will take your questions at face value.
Like most folks here, I post comments to the blog in the hope that they will make a positive contribution, and someone will find some value in them.
In this case, apparently you are not one who found value in what I said. Fair enough.
I am not sure about “prove a point”, but I was certainly trying to make a point. In this, I am primarily motivated by a great distress about the way that science, truth, logic, common sense, etc have been so easily and tenaciously subverted around the world, as evidenced by the behaviour of Mr Kundu. I am deeply disturbed by the way human populations can be swayed and controlled by fear. I am very worried about where this global warming hoo-ha is leading us to, because I do not perceive the action taken by the rational to be all that effective in countering the forces of fear.
It is therefore my fond (though perhaps deluded) hope that out of forums such as this, there may emerge some kind of direction, some kind of plan, some kind of cohesive action, that will be effective in making some headway. Maybe somebody can show where there is in fact effective action being taken. Or maybe somebody will feed in some good ideas in response to my comments.
So that’s why I bother to reply.
30
Steve, it’s all good. I liked you points… Full of concern, starved for more concrete action.
As far as us Realists making more impact, you’re thinking beyond blogs. Any ideas?
I’ll say again, JoNova US tour. They’ll attack her like they do Coulter and Palin and that’s why she’ll get media time. Take advantage of that time to educate, plant seeds of reason. The silent majority will lover her, the rabid left will hate her, but beyond the soap opera, she’ll roll. Teaching, planting nagging questions in the backs of minds, building reason. The truth is with her.
(oh boy, I have no idea what she thinks of this) Of course this would require funding, planing, media support, but I would love to see it. How about it?
40
G’day Steve Schapel,
“I am primarily motivated by a great distress about the way that science, truth, logic, common sense, etc have been so easily and tenaciously subverted around the world, as evidenced by the behaviour of Mr Kundu. I am deeply disturbed by the way human populations can be swayed and controlled by fear. I am very worried about where this global warming hoo-ha is leading us to, because I do not perceive the action taken by the rational to be all that effective in countering the forces of fear.”
I too am distressed by the ‘dumb down of science’ that has occurred over the last 20 or so years. Example, my granddaughter entered university, courses first semester:- mathematics, chemistry and civil engineering.
First assignment- watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”.
She was horrified, and when I was told about some weeks later, I was livid.
I also have taken students in an Adult Educ courses on basic electronics, a subject that requires some basic physics knowledge. Problem I found that this basic science is not there. I feel those that have an agenda to push ie. Global Warming know that basic science is lacking in the general population, so can influence the average person with pseudo science and statements such as the ‘science is set’ or there is ‘consensus science’ – definitely an oxymoron.
Add to that, the media has no qualms about using recycled photos of collapsing ice shelves (Wilkins)to add to the scare, with our own Environment minister using a trash consensus science statement about the sea levels are going to rise 20m due to the Antarctic ice melting.
I feel Joanne, as an educator, would have found similar.
In the previous century there has been numerous attempts to alarm the populace – eg. the Great Freeze of the early ’70’s, led by the same old offenders, Stephen Schneider, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Obama’s present science advisor John Holdren, amongst others.
What’s the answer? I don’t know, that’s why I keep blogging.
10
Blake,
Yes, I am “thinking beyond blogs”. Blogs are a fantastic resource. But in my experience the rationalist blogs are most useful in keeping the existing rationalists informed and connected, and don’t have a lot of impact on the great unwashed.
Media exposure of sceptic spokespeople is always good, I suppose. Though I have often been saddened to see interviewers peddling their own warmist agenda under the guise of interviewing someone vaguely open-minded.
Still, there is no doubt that Joanne is a brilliant person, highly skilled at keeping the focus on what’s relevant. I certainly support any attempts to persuade her to take an active leadership role. From my perspective, I would say a trip to New Zealand would be more important than a trip to the US! 😉
But somehow we need more than media interviews and written statements. See, the alarmists’ case has the advantage of appealing to powerful emotions such as guilt, fear, sentimentality, self-righteousness, authoritarian subservience. So they can make gut-wrenching movies and promotional material. By comparison, the sceptics’ dry appeal to logic and factual observations and scientific rectitude just doesn’t cut the mustard.
Also, the alarmists seem to have the rallying power to get teams of pimpled idealists out campaigning. Thus Greenpeace claim their project to get a petition to the New Zealand government currently carrries over 52,000 signatures. I don’t see anything so energetic being done by sceptics.
Again, I have more questions than answers. But… the heat is on.
20
Steve, I share your frustration with disparity between “action” levels of alarmists and realists (your apt description of the “pimpled idealists” made me laugh).
I don’t know what the answer is either; perhaps we have to take to the streets with t-shirts, pamphlets and petitions as they do. But we’d need some planning and coordination first … It would be great to meet up with like-minded people in our local areas for some brainstorming.
Does anyone else here apart from Joanne and myself live in Perth? You are welcome to email me on annekit@live.com.au if you are interested in getting together.
10
Meanwhile, here is some light entertainment:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2009/6/the-aztec-solution
Tomas E Rivas Salcedo (#17): !Este articulo te divertira!
The writer is apparently a Perth playwright … I shall look out for his name in local productions.
After you’ve finished reading, click on “Home” and see a 4 part report from the 3rd Heartland Climate Change conference by Bob Carter.
I love Quadrant.
20
I live about 30 fossil-fuel-burning minutes from Marysville, WA. I had this recent email exchange with school board president Michael Kundu:
Dear Mr Kundu:
I, and increasingly more local citizens are following with interest your recent exchange with Australian scientists.
Could you or a science teacher from your district please provide me with one specific study which conclusively shows that CO2 is the CAUSE of climate changes? Remember that correlation is not causality and connection is not causality. For example, the Vostock Ice core samples showed a clear correlation between temperatures and CO2. That is, CO2 rises AFTER temperature rises. It is EFFECT, not cause.
Even the IPCC’s chapter 9, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change” Executive Summary ends with “Incomplete global data sets and remaining model uncertainties still restrict understanding of changes in extremes and attribution of changes to causes…” (pg 666) In other words, even the IPCC has not firmly established the cause of climate changes. And yet all prescribed changes in public policy and lifestyle are predicated upon CO2 being the culprit.
In order to justify Anthropogenic Global Warming being taught to our children, with no dissenting voice allowed, at least this one thing must be scientifically proven. Where is the proof of cause?
I look forward to receiving this information.
Kay Buccola
Woodinville, WA
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Michael Kundu
<projseawolf@earthlink.net > wrote:
Kay, you sound like you’re reciting the talking points out of
the Heartland/Australian marketer’s propaganda.
If you’re looking for something to spend your time on, why not
apply your causality logic to investigate what proof there is
that God actually exists. Consistency is the key here, Kay – a
point lost on so many of the extremist, right-wing followers of
the Heartland cult.
If you’re concerned about what our students are learning, run
for school board.
Goodbye.
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Kay Buccola wrote:
You did not answer the scientific question I posed. Please answer.
Thank you for your kind words and your assumptions about my views and person. Quite tolerant.
Mrs. Buccola
20
I think that if a school was to teach whatever religious or political pressure groups mail out to them as “science” it would be very irresponsible.
New science should start by approaching the scientific journals and conferences, and once established, tested and confirmed it would be appropriate to look to include it in the school curriculum.
Whatever your personal views of climate change, (or intelligent design), it is wrong to try to do an end-run around the scientific process, and jump straight into the classroom.
30
Mrs Buccola didn’t ask about intelligent design, Robin. Kundu was the one who brought up God in his unbelievably crass reply to her reasonable request.
He didn’t answer her question.
20
Kay,
Mr Kundu has already revealed what calibre of person he is, so the almost surreal tone of his reply to you would come as no surprise.
But if you have any contact with parents or teachers in schools in Mr Kundu’s territory, I hope you can take any opportunity to inform them.
Thank you.
10
[…] This post was Twitted by Cybernuke – Real-url.org […]
10
The problem is, Mr Kundu isn’t paying attention because no one influential to him is speaking to him.
So I asked someone who Mr Kundu might listen to to speak to him. Thus:
“Hey, Mike Kundu of the Left-Liberal/Al Gore/zero growth/Sierra Club establishment: You’ve got your CO2/climate story back-asswards!”
– Signed, Walter the Hump-Backed Whale
10
Anne-Kit Littler wrote:
I wasn’t bringing up ID because that someone mentioned it. I brought it up because like this, people are trying to inject it straight into schools without going through the scientific process.
And my point is that it doesn’t really matter how sure you are that greenhouse gasses don’t increase the greenhouse effect, that’s not the way to do it. You show the scientific community first. Then you get your findings repeated, reproduced, and the correct theory built up.
If you let people do an end-run around the scientific process, there will be homoeopathy, voodoo, levitation, time cube, and dianetics taught in high schools.
People here almost certainly disagree with Kundu’s beliefs and demeanour, but his response to speculative and unverified science appearing on his desk is entirely appropriate for a member of a school board, and he seems like a asset to the board and to the children for that reason.
10
stone-cold discussion thread killa
10
Technical issues aside – as I’m not trained in any aspect of climatology – but as someone who did go to school before the dumbing down began and learned what the scientific method is as well as some things about logic – there is absolutely no way to judge Mr. Kundu’s communications as possessing any degree of intelligence or knowledge.
Absolutely appalling.
Brian Valentine – nice to see you here – just discovered the site.
Haven’t checked yet, but understand the booklet is downloadable – I’ll try to find it.
Have a good day in this insane parallel world, everyone.
10
Oh – Hi Kendra with the pretty name
Write to me sometime, bgvalentine@verizon.net
Joanne has done a wonderful service here, you you think?
30
Thank you Brian, I’d love to!
At work, just wanted to add one more remark: I’m going to send the link to the booklet to someone who had taken for granted the idea of consensus science (as well as the petition sites, etc – not to use “authority” but simply to show their is disagreement).
Anyway – wondering if the word “Skeptic” in the title is creating kneejerk reactions?
10
Yes, I think “Skeptic” probably works against it. Probably like when I hear the words: “Global Warming” … Makes me cringe.
10
Robin said (#37),
“…but his response to speculative and unverified science appearing on his desk is entirely appropriate for a member of a school board…”
If that were his true motivation, Robin, then Mr. Kundu would equally have dismissed the theory of AGW from discussion in his school district as it is purely speculative and unverified science. Unfortunately, the tenor of Mr. Kundu’s note shows that his motivation is not about education, but indoctrination. He has chosen sides in a very contentious, unresolved debate and shows he will censor anything that does not conform to his prejudiced, personal view. This is simply history repeating itself in the guise of enviro-McCarthyism.
Note to self: keep kids away from Marysville District #25.
30
I am not unhappy with the position of Mr.Kundu. He writes as someone who has discovered he is wrong and is waiting for an appropriate time to acknowledge it. I have sympathy for him. It will not be easy.
20
Robin,
You obviously haven’t read “The Skeptics Handbook”, have you? Or if you have, and you think it is about “speculative and unverified science” you must have a different edition than mine!
Oh, and by the way, on a technical note, I have yet to meet anyone who is trying to prove that “greenhouse gasses don’t increase the greenhouse effect”.
20
Anne-Kit,
Thank you for pointing to (#30) the Quandrant article, which I enjoyed very much, and also Bob Carter’s series. To be honest, I had not seen Quadrant before, but it sure looks great.
By the way, if I was in Perth (which I’m not, I’m in Wellington, New Zealand) I would certainly accept your invitation to get together.
10
We need to constantly challenge folks like Michael Kundu.
I had taught high school science in California for 39 years before retiring seven years ago. I am appalled that a publicly elected school board member could show such disdain for the National Science Teachers Position Statement on Environmental Education. I think that the residents in Marysville might be interested in the NSTA Position Statement and act accordingly in the upcoming election. I also list the NSTA Declarations for Michael Kundu to ponder.
“NSTA strongly supports environmental education as a way to instill environmental literacy in our nation’s pre-K–16 students. It should be a part of the school curriculum because student knowledge of environmental concepts establishes a foundation for their future understandings and actions as citizens. Central to environmental literacy is the ability of students to master critical-thinking skills that will prepare them to evaluate issues and make informed decisions regarding stewardship of the planet. The environment also offers a relevant context for the learning and integration of core content knowledge, making it an essential component of a comprehensive science education program.”
Declarations
* Environmental education programs should foster observation, investigation, experimentation, and innovation. Programs should be developed with grade-appropriate materials and should use a range of hands-on, minds-on instructional strategies that encourage active learning.
* Environmental education programs and curricula should address student outcomes as specified in the National Science Education Standards, be grounded in sound research, and reflect the most current information and understandings in the field.
* All learners are expected to achieve environmental literacy and an appreciation for and knowledge of a range of environmental issues, perspectives, and positions.
* All learners should be taught how to think through an issue using critical-thinking skills, while avoiding instructor or media bias regarding what to think about the issue.
* Environmental education should provide interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multi-perspective viewpoints to promote awareness and understanding of global environmental issues, potential solutions, and ways to prevent emerging environmental crises.
* Developers of environmental education programs should strive to present a balance of environmental, economic, and social perspectives.
* Appropriate technologies should be used to enhance environmental education learning experiences and investigations.
* Environmental education programs and activities should be fostered through both formal and informal learning experiences.
* Collaborations among schools, museums, zoos, aquaria, nature centers, government agencies, associations, foundations, and private industry should be encouraged to broaden the availability of educational resources, engage the community, provide diverse points of view about the management of natural resources, and offer a variety of learning experiences and career education opportunities.
—Adopted by the NSTA Board of Directors
February 2003
http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/environmental.aspx
I think that the next step might be to get the National Science Teachers Association involved in the process!
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Oops, embarrassing typo (their) – corr: … there is disagreement.
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me too typos
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A couple of days ago I bemoaned, in a comment here, the lack of organised sketics public action. Since then, I have learned of this campaign… http://www.hotairtour.org/
It is in the US, politically aligned, and focussed on opposing the legislation. But still, I had no idea anything on that scale was being done, and I was encouraged to know about it.
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Here’s some real “fiction” for Board President Kundu:
I said, “Why did you do it? The Lessons. You taught us exactly what we needed to know to use our powers. I thought we were these wolf cubs, growing up into giants that would eat the sun and moon —why teach the cubs how to hunt?”
“Poetically asked, Miss Windrose. I admire your turn of phrase.”
“Thank you. Now answer the question.”
He looked away from me and out the window. Maybe he watched the lights of distant vessels on the sea. Maybe he looked at the stars. “I was an educator before I was a soldier, miss. I taught mankind how to break and ride horses, for example. Educators know there are only two types of schooling: indoctrination and education.
“Indoctrination teaches a student how to cleave to a party line, and to recite the slogans and bromides of the accepted conformity. He is taught only how to swallow lies, and there is no assurance he will not swallow the propaganda of foes as easily as that of friends. Such folk are hopelessly provincial to their time and place. Unable to distinguish truth from fable, they swallow both or spit both out, and become zealots, or, worse yet, cynics. The zealot holds that truth can be won with no effort; the cynic, that no effort will suffice.
“Education teaches the art of skeptical inquiry. The student learns the thoughts of all the great minds of the past, so that the implications and mistakes of philosophy of various schools are not unknown to him. And he learns, first, current scientific theories and, second, how frail and temporary such theories can be. He learns to be undeceived by those who claim to know a last and final truth.
“How else was I to deal with a dangerous race of world-destroying monsters? If I taught them to reason, maybe they could be reasoned with.”
— John C. Wright, “Titans of Chaos”, p. 372, Tor paperback edition.
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Steve wrote:
Well, your opinion there is out of sync with the established and reproducable beliefs of the scientific commmunity.
Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses does increase the greenhouse effect. If you think that that is “purely speculative and unverified”, then you need to take that view to the scientific community, not to schools.
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Steve Schapel wrote:
Meet Brian Valentine, Petroleum technologies engineer by profession, and perveyor of the view that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist by hobby. (And therefore can’t be made to increase by any change in atmosphere.)
But, if you accept that greenhouse gasses increase the greenhouse effect, then the rest is pretty clear.
Human activity has increased the concentration of greenhouse gasses. What am I missing?
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No kidding, Robin, at some point you really are going to have to stop with the tricky little word games.
For a start, what on earth is the meaning of “the established and reproducable beliefs of the scientific commmunity”? That’s just gobbledegook.
And then you bring up greenhouse gasses (sic) and the greenhouse effect. Steve did not mention anything about that. He made reference to the “theory of AGW”. Well, to be pedantic, by definition it is not a “theory”. But you know as well as I do what he was talking about – the idea that increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing or will cause dangerous climate change. Calling that idea “speculative and unverified” is an understatement.
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Robin, aren’t you supposed to be over at the gin mill downing a few pints and berating your cohorts for what they don’t know?
Oops – forgot – its 10:43 in the morning where you are –
but well – you can get an early start
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Since there’s talk here about education, I feel this would be an appropiate time to post the “Tactics used by Alarmists”. Here they are as follows:
1. Information laundering through ignoring or misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific findings.
2. Cherry Picking Facts.
3. Shifting the focus away to something other than research based on Observation.
4. Their trademark effort to stifle legitimate debate and silence those who won’t accept their dogma.
I feel these are very accurate. Have you also heard about “The Three Stages of Truth” by Authur Schopenhauer- German Philosopher 1788-1860??
1. First, it is Ridiculed.
2. It is violently opposed.
3. It is accepted as being self-evident.
I pray the 3rd stage happens soon…
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Robin: “What am I missing?”
At a guess, I’d say about 95%.
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A little too generous, Steve
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Hi Denny, I totally agree! “I pray the 3rd stage happens soon… 3. It is accepted as being self-evident.”
“1. Information laundering through ignoring or misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific findings.”
You mean like Al Gore using an out-of-date ice core graph that misleads us?
Like ‘adjusting’ satellite data, ARGO bouys, urban sensors next to air conditioners, and increasing error margins to include ‘every outcome’?
“2. Cherry Picking Facts.”
Oh, like ignoring all the studies that show the Medieval warm period was … warm.
Or only looking at warming from 1979-2001?
“3. Shifting the focus away to something other than research based on Observation.”
Yes. Like looking at models and not radiosondes? Like refuting the cooling in Antarctica by ‘estimating’ temperature from stations that don’t exist?
“4. Their trademark effort to stifle legitimate debate and silence those who won’t accept their dogma.”
You mean like calling us ‘deniers’, launching websites like DeSmo and SourceWatch to promote the illogical ad hominem attacks on scientists?
“I feel these are very accurate. Have you also heard about “The Three Stages of Truth” by Authur Schopenhauer- German Philosopher 1788-1860??”
Yes, once again. Spot on.
“1. First, it is Ridiculed.”
Oil funded dinosaurs
“2. It is violently opposed.”
‘they should be jailed!’
“3. It is accepted as being self-evident.”
The polls show the public are seeing through the tactics.
Whatever you say Denny, assessing ‘Tactics’ as a way of deciding who is right is destined to dump you in a fog of bad reasoning, but keep going if you like. We get a free kick every time. 🙂
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Denny, you’re not dumb enough to believe that “man-made global warming” nonsense, are you?
Tell me you’re not.
I thought only but a handful believed that story anymore.
(The rest who say they do, actually have an ulterior motive for saying they do. Like Al Gore. Tell me his behaviour evem remotely suggests that he believes a word of it. Of course he doesn’t believe in AGW, and as far as I am concerned, no one in their right mind would.)
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Brian,
I suppose we should leave Denny to speak for himself. But I have read his post multiple times, trying in vain to see what got you thinking he is a warmist?
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My impression I suppose.
Denny are you a global warmer?
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Steve Schapel wrote:
Could you be more specific about what you are accusing me of?
I mean that global warming is established by multiple lines of evidence.
Why isn’t it a theory?
That’s clearly your opinion, but it is not backed up by scientific organisations of international standing. Nor any peer reviewed research. So the question is, under what circumstances should we let an idea do an end run around the scientific community and be injected straight into the school curriculum?
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Steve Schapel qrote:
At some point you really are going to have to stop with the tricky little word games. Because that comment doesn’t mean anything specific.
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Hi all,
Looks like Denny is well aware of the parody in his post… Cheers Denny!
http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?515.last
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Am I the only one here who thought Denny was on your team??? He says “Tactics used by Alarmists”
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[…] of JoNova: Michael Kundu, Board President of Marysville (Washington State, USA) District #25 has written to […]
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The statement
1. Information laundering through ignoring or misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific findings.
gave it away.
Denny you aren’t dumb enough to mock Joanne, are you?
How trite.
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Ha! Matt. You’re right. I’ve read ‘Denier Tactics’ to many times. I misread it, but still suspected Denny was a supporter, it was just that having fired off the responses to the familiar tactics lines I slipped into Mock-mode right on the last line. (That’ll teach me for commenting at a quarter to two in the morning. Or, maybe it won’t. 1am now 🙂 )
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Robin,
I thought you were being deliberately obstructive, but it now appears you may just be simple. If so, I apologise for my sarcastic remark.
Nevertheless, you have frequently used terminology that appears to be deceptive. As just one example, “global warming is established by multiple lines of evidence”. At face value, this is pretty much meaningless. However, if by “global warming” you mean the idea that increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing or will cause dangerous climate change, then the statement is simply false, i.e. not true.
You have also frequently twisted the argument to answer something that was not stated and implied. As just one example, you imply that a person who questions the AGW speculation is automatically against the Greenhouse Effect theory. This is a very simplistic leap of logic, and misses 95% of what’s relevant to the question.
I do not mean to imply that the Greenhouse Effect is not valid. That is not what I think. I think it is a very useful theory.
As you are no doubt aware, the contribution of CO2 to the Greenhouse Effect is logarithmic. So the first 50 ppm has a significant effect. The next 50ppm considerably less so, et cetera. By the time we get to existing atmospheric concentrations, the Greenhouse Effect contribution of an additional 50ppm is very small. So I was not saying the contribution of atmospheric CO2 as a whole is insignificant, just that further increases will be. See?
In addition, the significance of CO2’s Greenhouse Effect contribution has to be assessed in comparison to other factors affecting climate. Empirically, it appears that many other factors are much more important. If you don’t take these other factors into account, you’re missing 95% of what’s relevant. At least 95%.
With a considerable stretch of the imagination, you can say that there is a correlation between increasing average global temperatures, and increasing atmospheric CO2 conentrations, over the last 30 years. This is not consistent with other periods in the recent past. In order to suspect causality, I don’t think you can say the period 1979-2009 is a special case, that is somehow different from other recent periods where the temperatures appear to have increased at a similar rate, but CO2 was not similarly increasing. Yes, that period is exceptional in terms of the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. But it is certainly not exceptional in terms of global temperature fluctuations. So there’s that hypothesis out the window. If you don’t take account of these facts, you are missing 95% of what’s relevant.
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And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, we wait for Robin’s summary of information gathering on Steve.
“Steve Schapel CLAIMS to be a …
And Steve Schapel SAYS he is a …
and Steve Schapel’s mamager says Steve Schapel is a …
and I’m going to write to Steve Schapel’s manager to find out if it is true that Steve Schapel is a … and how could Steve Schapel CLAIM to be a … and then he … and did you know that Steve Schapel …”
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I wish we could stop using the (GE) greenhouse effect as an analogy since the earth is not like a greenhouse. The GE was invented by the alarmist and as long as we keep using these words we validate the EcoChondriacs poor understanding of the atmosphere. There as to be a better description..maybe some climatologists have a better terminology?
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I do have some better terminology that isn’t printable here.
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Wilbert,
In my opinion, it would be a waste of time trying to change this. It is a well-established terminology to describe a certain phenomenon. Our language abounds with examples of such terminology, and the reasonable person understands the words’ intended meaning without getting confused by literal interpretation. Otherwise, you will have to campaign to no longer refer to the “Saturn’s rings” because they are not rings, and stop referring to the “Big Bang”, and “survival of ther fittest” is also out, and we can’t call a toothbrush a toothbrush because it is not made of teeth. I predict if we manage to find a substitute for the term “Greenhouse Effect”, and successfully have the new term magically substituted throughout all literature and discourse, the “EcoChondriacs’ poor understanding of the atmosphere” will be improved by approximately zero. No, I think I will keep using the term, within it’s correct and valid meaning.
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[…] Read the rest here […]
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I know what you are saying But the Earth is not like a greenhouse… open space versus closed space. A Greenhouse let the heat in and traps it inside without any way to escape,unless you open a door or vent. I know I am getting away from the post but we must come up with something that would counter this fiction with a name that would open the mind and give the mindless a deer in headlight look.
” “EcoChondriacs’ poor understanding of the atmosphere” will be improved by approximately zero.” .Now! now! do not give up. 🙂 it is the public majority who need to be reached and they are waiting for some common sense approach for something they can relate to ..( too?.. this one always get me). and use in their favor. Right now “we” the voters have 3 or 4 different political groups all advocating the absurdity that 2 plus 2 makes six and we are suppose to vote for the less stupid? No wonder Voters turn out is so low at election time. If these alarmist can come up with terminologies that are wrong surely there must be some proper ones out there…maybe I should get on this and see what I can come up with(hey)? 🙂
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We’re waiting for a hero. Someone to rally around. I know there are many great scientists that are close to fitting the bill, but for whatever reason they’re not breaking through (are they?). We need a charismatic, entertaining, smart, anti-Gore.
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Robin,
Please checkout http://www.petitionproject.org to see that over 31,000 scientists, 9,000 of whom have PhD’s have staked their professional reputations on signing the petition which reads
“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.”
Click on “Summary of peer-review research” and read the 12 page study by 3 PhD’s. It is far and away the most concise and comprehensive piece showing the true status of current climate science.
An intellectually honest person will be quite amazed.
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Mrs Buccola, that would have all the influence on Robin as it would on a duck-billed platypus
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Blake,
How about Lord Christopher Monckton?
He’d fit the bill – charismatic, eloquently spoken, very sharp wit, a very avid climate dissenter – and he has got to catch up with Al Gore after the rude dismissal from speaking at the Democrat led Waxman-Markey hearing in the US Congress, where Al Gore was given a hearing to push his agenda. The Republicans had invited Monckton to the hearing.
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Regarding a hero… …Perhaps a whole bunch of them.
We really need a National Reason Campaign.
To start: A 30 sec spot with sensible everyday people questioning AGW.
We flood the air waves.
Then, two weeks later…
Then we follow up with another 30 sec. spot. A well written theme, where one “science hero” after another picks up a sentence where the last left off. These heros might represent a large spectrum of nationalities, (in english).
Our world-wide hero’s would be taken from highest standings in our world wide science community.
Then we wait for George Soros to fund something for Al Gore, and we respond, by exposing their theme. Cleverly nailing
their dramatic scare tactics as a super fund for their new world order.
In the mean time we develop a series of hard hitting, entertaining of Youtube videos. Flood it.
Cost: A cool 10 million
Result: Huge and lasting impact. Could save us all billions.
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Steve Schapel wrote:
Well “dangerous” is a awkward and ill defined adjective. You will be aware of the recent estimates that climate change is responsible for about 325 million people are seriously affected by climate change per year, (and the guess was about 300,000 deaths) worldwide. (The Economist
You should also be aware of WHO estimates of 160,000 deaths per year attributable to climate change as at 2000. (Nature)
So those that have had a serious epidemiological look at the numbers seem to be saying that it is considerably more dangerous than terrorism or Swine Flu or running with scissors.
What scientific basis do you have for claiming that climate change being dangerous is “not true”?
That’s right. The climate sensitivity to CO2 in stated in degrees per doubling of CO2, because this is more approximately constant than per given increase (say 50ppm).
And it is about 3°C per doubling.
And we can be a bit more specific than “very small”. The pre industrial CO2 level was about 270ppm. 50ppm on that is about 0.29 doublings, or about 0.9°C.
Current levels are about 390ppm (globally averaged, but not seasonally corrected). 50ppm on that is about 0.17 doublings, which is about 0.5°C.
Neither 0.9°C nor 0.5°C is insignificant. Both would be more than half of the observed warming of the last century.
Perhaps you would be kind enough to mention what these “other factors affecting the climate” are, and what peer reviewed papers have established their existence and shown that they have 20 times the effect of the CO2 greenhouse effect on climate.
Two points:
1) We don’t need to suspect causality. We know the mechanism of the causality. It is the greenhouse effect.
2) Current climate change is very rapid. When was there another period of climate change this fast? (When CO2 was not increasing?)
That’s an interesting argument if it’s true. When are these other global temperature fluctuations?
____
All this discussion of the scientific basis of the CO2 greenhouse effect is amusing enough, but the point with respect to this thread isn’t if you believe it or not. It is, given that the scientific consensus (right or wrong) is that global warming is real and anthropogenic. So on what basis should counter-scientific speculation be allowed access to the classroom without going through the the scientific process?
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Jeff – I pray every day that Monckton will remain the key spokesman for the sceptical movement.
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Wilbert: “Now! now! do not give up.”
Absolutely agree. No way I’m giving up. That’s not what I meant. It’s just that I really don’t think that coming up with another name for the Greenhouse Effect is likely to make a lot of difference. Better to persistently and clearly explain what the Greenhouse Effect *is*. I know it involves quite different principles and processes from a physical glasshouse. Same as I know that a camel train isn’t pulled by a locomotive, and the mouth of a river is not where the food goes in. I also know that a lot of people do not understand what you and I know about global warming / climate change. But in my opinion, the potential confusion produced by the name of the greenhouse effect is a very minor factor. After all, most people don’t know the physics of a horticultural glasshouse either. No, they are confused because of the biased, emotionally-charged information they have been fed by the mass media.
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
A glasshouse slows heat loss by blocking loss by convection. The greenhouse effect slows heat loss by blocking radiation. They are similar in that the warming comes from slower heat loss.
This, I think, is the origin of the terminology.
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There is no scientific consensus on AGW. There is a political consensus for an predetermined cause.
Even if there were a consensus, it’d be of little value if the underlying basis of the consensus is faulty:
The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming and the predictions of future temperature rise are heavily dependent upon computer models that do not incorporate many of the significant complexities of Earth’s climate.
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The greenhouse effect is the heating of the surface of a planet or moon due to the presence of an atmosphere containing gases that absorb and emit infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases, which include water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane, are almost transparent to solar radiation but strongly absorb and emit infrared radiation. Thus, greenhouse gases trap heat within the surface-troposphere system. This mechanism is fundamentally different from that of an actual greenhouse, which works by isolating warm air inside the structure so that heat is not lost by convection.
Greenhouse effect – wikipedia
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Kay Buccola wrote:
There a number of reasons why the infamous Oregon petition is an unreliable judge of scientific opinion.
The dishonesty of making the covering article look as if it had been submitted it PNAS aside, there were no checks of the identity of the signatories, and many were impenetrable to attempts to verify them (and some that were verifiable, when contacted had no recollection of such a petition). (see: SKEPTICISM ABOUT SKEPTICS – Scientific American)
Yes they would.
____
A fair attempt to get around the self-selection bias, (and packing by some extremists in the climate change skeptical community who seemed to have signed the Oregon petition on behalf both of people who didn’t exist, and who didn’t agree with the petition), was done by Doran and Zimmerman.
They sent questionnaires to people, rather than let them self-select: “An invitation to participate in the survey was sent to 10,257 Earth scientists.
The database was built from Keane and Martinez [2007], which lists all geosciences faculty at reporting academic institutions, along with researchers at state geologic surveys associated with local universities, and researchers at U.S. federal research facilities (e.g., U.S. Geological
Survey, NASA, and NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) facilities; U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories; and so forth).”
The results are probably a bit more reasonable than the Oregon petition.
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Robin scores a spectacular own goal (#82), in quoting “The Economist’s” coverage of the Kofi Annan report of 300,000 “climate deaths”! Here is the entire text:
(Headline): Go on, guess
May 29th 2009
(Sub-headline): Seat-of-the-pants estimates won’t be enough to cool the world
THE human impact of climate change “IS DIFFICULT TO ASSESS RELIABLY”, say the authors of a new report from the Global Humanitarian Forum, a think-tank run by Kofi Annan, a former United Nations secretary-general, aided by a raft of eminent folk. But they MAKE A STAB, reaching the conclusion that 325m people around the world are seriously affected by climate change every year and that this number COULD more than double, to around 660m, by 2030.
As in so many reports of this kind, the trend looks plausible, but there seems LITTLE BASIS for the exact numbers. For example, the authors attribute two-fifths of an expected increase in weather-related disasters to climate change and use this as a basis for all their other sums. But they offer NO CONVINCING RATIONALE for this approach, and admit with refreshing candour that “the real numbers may be significantly lower or higher.”
On slightly firmer ground, the authors elaborate on the familiar point that most of the damage from a changing climate will be felt in poor countries. Warmer temperatures are actually leading to increased crop yields in some parts of North America and Russia. But areas where yields are falling because of climate change include sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the victims are small farmers eking out an already meagre living. And the countries seen as most vulnerable to climate change are all poor: they include Somalia, Burundi, Niger, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Chad.
Nor are people in those countries well placed to adapt to change. As their livelihood vanishes, they are more likely to fuel the ranks of the temporarily or permanently displaced. The eminent writers duly propose a huge (nay, hundredfold) boost in funding to help the poor cope with a shifting climate—through drought-resistant crops, for example.
In another HAPHAZARD estimate, the authors of “Human Impact Report: Climate Change—Anatomy of a Silent Crisis” say 26m people have already been displaced by climate change. But here again, ACCURACY IS IMPOSSIBLE. Should Cyclone Aila, which hit Bangladesh and India on May 25th and affected hundreds of thousands of people, be classified as a climate-change event? Even if scientists could agree on the contribution of global warming to the rising frequency of such disasters, it would still be hard to classify the causes of any given catastrophe. Nor is it easy to disentangle the effects of climate change from those of avoidable failures in policy.
In South Asia, for example, climate change is likely to bring more water to a perennially thirsty region. A blessing in disguise, then? No, because so little progress has been made on ways to trap and use this water when it cascades down in a short space of time. Given that governments have missed so many obvious tricks, is there any reason to assume that more money thrown at the problem will be spent wisely? Coping with climate change will certainly cost money—it is anyone’s guess how much—but plenty of wisdom will be needed too.” (emphasis mine – and I got tired of emphasising ’cause the article is so full of emphasis-worthy quotes)
This “report” is based on nothing but guesswork and has been thoroughly discredited since its publication, not only by The Economist (and no, I couldn’t be bothered looking up the other discreditors but will if Robin challenges me!)
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Well, of those climatologists who are currently publishing papers most of which are on climate change, about 97% believe that anthropogenic activity has a signficant influcence on changing global mean temperatures.
So that’s a near consensus about a particular aspect of AGW. Particularly the “A” bit.
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Anne-Kit Littler wrote:
The 300,000 is a guess. It could be much higher or much lower. Neither of which affects the conclusion that climate change is dangerous in the sense that it is killing people.
Which is what “dangerous” means.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that my point was that these numbers are accurate. It was not. The point is that people are dying.
I am dissappointed that all you have to offer is a straw man fallacy, and more dissappointed that your approach is to consider a free exchange of ideas as a playing field in which people try to score goals.
Deaths due to climate are up. If you make the WAG that 40% of these are attributable to the anthropogenic influence, you get 300,000 such deaths. The 40% could be wrong. That there are some deaths couldn’t. That’s all.
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Mike Goad wrote:
Yes.
A different mechanism.
But both reduce heat loss, causing warming.
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Robin,
by only reading things Team AGW produce you put yourself at a big disadvantage. The Oregon Project is not the same as the Petition Project (notice – it’s got a different name?). The newer project redid everything, with checks, all via donations, and I have a feeling they don’t accept donations from corporates either. Why don’t you read the story of the people and project you attack instead of lazily repeating old outdated criticms?
Ask yourself why volunteers should have to go to all this trouble in the first place? Could it be because no one funds the ‘other side’. Your research is sloppy, one sided and out of date. Are you looking for the answer to the climate or just trying to defend your unshakeable belief in authority? The only evidence you quote is The Mass Of Agencies, Associations, and Organisations and the supposed Mainstream Consensus. In scientific logical terms this is like tugging a forelock to the King, the Pope, or Leonardo di Caprio. It proves nothing.
We’ll take your opinions seriously if you show you are looking at both sides, AND recognise that opinions of international committees are not scientific evidence.
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Joanne Nova wrote:
The name has always been the Petition Project. It’s called the Oregon petition to differentiate it from other petitions, because it was organised by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
It is not a newer project, and it did not redo everything. There are checks on the new signatures, but the original ones that were not checked are still there.
Jo, it’s the same petition.
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Excuse me while I roll around the floor laughing, Robin, buy YOU brought up the straw man when you referred to the article about 300,000 “climate deaths” in response to Steve’s assertion that there is no proof of anthropogenic warming. Your article, if you read it carefully, actually mentions nothing about “human caused climate change”, rather “human EFFECTS of climate change” (i.e. effects ON humans, not BY humans)which incidentally are equally hard to quantify. So in effect you are saying something like this: “Yes, global warming and climate change IS caused by humans, because 300,00 people have already died from it!” Absurd and illogical.
Robin: “Deaths due to climate are up. If you make the WAG that 40% of these are attributable to the anthropogenic influence, you get 300,000 such deaths. The 40% could be wrong. That there are some deaths couldn’t. That’s all.”
Really. Deaths due to climate are up, says Robin of Sydney. Well, that should convince even the toughest sceptic that climate change is caused by burning of fossil fuels! I have no idea what a “WAG” means – apart from a rather derogatory term used by British tabloids for “Wives and Girlfriends” of famous footballers – but I’m guessing it’s some kind of guess. You are making an awful lot of assumptions and wild guesses, Robin, and basically, as you admit, they could all be wrong. Are some deaths caused by climatic factors? Why, yes. Point is, that is nothing new, and it’s not what your side and mine are arguing about. So don’t accuse me of introducing straw man arguments.
And that you are “dissappointed that [my] approach is to consider a free exchange of ideas as a playing field in which people try to score goals” is hysterical, given your recent attempt to comprehensively discredit Brian Valentine through attacking his professional credentials and even writing to his boss.
“Free exchange of ideas” … Pompous and preposterou coming from you.
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“Preposterous” – (preposterou sounds like a Greek surname 😉
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The glass of a green house prevents the exchange of heat by contact and convection with outside air.
The greenhouse gas molecules absorb infrared radiation, preventing that radiation from escaping from earth. As I understand it, and I’m NOT a scientist, at current concentrations of CO2, virtually all of energy of three or so wavelengths of infrared radiation gets absorbed within a short distance of their source, say about 30 feet. If CO2 is doubled, then it just means essentially ALL of the infrared radiation in those wavelengths gets absorbed in a shorter distance, say 20 feet.
So, since essentially All energy from these three wavelengths is absorbed by current levels of CO2 and more CO2 is supposed to be more effective, then I guess that doubling CO2 is going to stop more of ALL of these infrared wavelengths from escaping the atmosphere. And since more of ALL is not escaping, global temperatures are rising.
Sounds like proof to me. 😉
There you have it, Joanne. What more proof do you need?
Again, I’m not a scientist, and, since I don’t have the credentials, I probably shouldn’t be writing about this stuff. However, my thermodynamics and fluid flow common sense tells me that the science of AGW makes as little sense as tying global temperature change to something like US postal rate changes.
10
Wow! Talk about Kung Fu Alarmism!
Robin is taking on a dozen sceptics at once!
Go Robin!
Who is Robin trying to convince with all of this?
Why, Robin, of course.
This is Robin’s method of ridding himself of the nagging voice that repeats in his ear, “Robin, the CO2 in the air really isn’t doing anything to the climate, and the CO2 is necessary for plant life, and all this yelling is meaningless …”
20
Art Robinson Responds to Petition Slander
http://www.sitewave.net/news/s49p1834.htm
http://www.sodahead.com/blog/83587/the-global-warming-petition-project/
“Between October 2007 and March 2008, a new campaign for signatures was initiated. The majority of the current listed signatories signed or re-signed the petition after October 2007.”
OK, so only 15,000 (or more) scientists signed it and were verified in the last 18 months. O-boy. And how does that show there is A Consensus?
http://www.petitionproject.org/frequently_asked_questions.php
The Petition Project is financed by non-tax deductible donations to the Petition Project from private individuals, many of whom are signers of the petition. The project has no financing whatever from industrial sources. No funds or resources of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine are used for the Petition Project. Donations to the project are primarily used for printing and postage. Most of the labor for the project has been provided by scientist volunteers.
Whatever – it wouldn’t make one bit of difference to the scientific debate for which there is no evidence. Even if 90% of the signatories were faked (and no one is claiming that). There would still be more independent scientists than the IPCC has.
I guess those who believe in authority need to debunk this despite the facts about it AND the fact that it doesn’t make any difference to the evidence. “There IS A Consensus! (I need my consensus) (Please God, don’t confuse me!) “I have to believe scientists have one mind and group think works”.
10
Robin how about the report”AGW causes more kidney stones”? making up numbers out of thin air is an easy task by the WHO.
Tim Ball regarding the greenhouse effect.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS_Greenhouse%20Effect.pdf
why not call it the earth climate system? ECS..mistakenly known as the greenhouse effect??
like we keep hearing about Carbon. carbon “diamond” or graphite should also be corrected whenever possible.last election during the Q&A period I asked all 3 party candidates “why should i vote for someone who keep calling a gas… Carbon?” and proceeded to explain the difference. Their entire speeches after that when it come to talk about cap and trade or ” carbon tax ” was mass confusion and they lost face and votes. people were asking after the meeting, why don’t we hear about this on the news?
10
Many of the people listed on the Petition are working toward modification of AGW Policy statements of the scientific Societies of which they are members.
By and large, these Policy staements do not reflect member’s views of AGW – the statements were decided upon by a few of the staff and elected management of the Societies and few members were actually polled to for an accurate representation of member views.
Reason: Many of these Societies seek to have their imprimatur on Government recommendations, standards, etc and Society management believed it not to be in the Society interest to appear as “outliers” – once a few did it, the remainder of Societies felt compelled to avoid Black Sheep syndrome.
In time, the AGW statements from Societies will be modified or discarded entirely.
10
Regarding deaths due to global warming… cold snaps kill more people than heat waves, so has anyone calculated how many people we have saved in the last 200 years?
10
That’s my understanding as well, but the distance would have to be quite a bit longer than 30 feet. I mean, CO2 is only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere.
I’d like some reference to the formula concerned and the rolloff curve, sadly, I don’t have the ability (at this stage) to do those calculations from scratch. Also, the “chunk” of air that absorbs the infra red gets hot, so it moves upward. Some other “chunk” of air moves into the original place. In the process, that energy from the infra red gets spread around, so the difference between it being absorbed at high altitudes and low altitudes is going to be a very messy. I’m totally suspicious of the presumption of linearity in the AGW results.
10
You forgot the bit about how after a decade of cooling they will all lose their nerve and panic. It is soooo important to keep up with the latest fashion statement, and warming was last year, cooling is this year. We are scientists so we know this stuff.
10
I am not a climate scientist either. But I heed the words of people like Richard Lindzen and Vincent Gray, who appeal to sceptics not to lose credibility by throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Atmospheric CO2 *does* contribute to the greenhouse effect, and increasing CO2 *will* strengthen the greenhouse effect. There is no benefit in trying to pretend otherwise. I don’t think this should be in question. I think what should be in question are things like:
To what degree (no pun intended) is this a factor in the overall climate change?
Is this a good or a bad thing? Why?
Is this greenhouse effect impact of increasing CO2 balanced/over-ridden by other much more powerful influences on the climate, such that it pales into insignificance?
To what degree is atmospheric CO2 increase attributable to industry?
To what degree can human societies control/influence climate by manipulating atmospheric CO2?
I prefer to acknowledge that increasing atmospheric CO2, taken in isolation, does produce a tendency (albeit a very small one) to warming. And then go on to explain why this is not important or significant.
10
But if in isolation only – what meaning does it have?
Until somebody writes doen a procedure to measure the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere, AMIDST THE BACKGOUND – it remains for me an undefined quantity
Robin starts hootin’ and hollerin’: “Lot os people have measured the effect.”
Wrong. The effect is not measurable directly.
10
Anne-Kit Littler wrote:
Not interested, Anne-Kit.
No, Anne-Kit. In response to his assertion that it wasn’t dangerous.
Does it Anne-Kit? My reading is that “climate change” and “anthropogenic climate change” are not significantly different terms when discussing the present and future.
“Science is now unequivocal as to the reality of climate change. Human activities, including in particular emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are recognized as its principle cause. This report clearly shows that climate change is already causing widespread devastation and suffering around the planet today. Furthermore, even if the international community is able to contain climate change, over the next decades human society must prepare for more severe climate change and more dangerous human impacts.” (Human Impact Report.
But in either case, Anne-Kit, the other paper looking at 2000, does look at deaths and disease from human-induced climate change.
No, Anne-Kit, I am saying that climate change is dangerous, because 300,000 people per year are dying from it, and 1,000 times that are seriously affected.
No, Anne-Kit, says the World Health Organisation in the paper published in Nature, the second most respected scientific publication in the English language, and more recently says the Global Humanitarian forum in the Human impact report cited.
I find it difficult to believe that you missed my citations, given that you discussed one of them at length.
As I have said above: They could be underestimated. They could be overestimated. The margin of error is high. These are the best estimates that we have.
Then don’t make straw man arguments. My point was not, as you argued vehemently against, that the error on these estimates was low. It was that climate change is dangerous.
No, Anne-Kit, I explicitly refrained from writing to his boss, even though his CV seems to imply that he is manager in a part of the organisation two tiers above his boss.
I wrote to the reference that Brian asked me (emphatically) to write to, Prof. Ohadi. Brian said that since none of the faculty staff lists mention him, nor any of the news archives, Prof Ohadi would confirm his tenure at Maryland University. He hasn’t to date, and I still have questions about Brian’s position as a associate professor there.
Because of the discrepancies between Brian’s claims and the staff directory at Maryland, I took from my own time to e-mail exactly who Brian asked me to email.
Anne-kit, this has been a long post, and has not advanced the conversation at all, but is been spent entirely on correcting your post. I would greatly appreciate any accuracy that you can manage in your future posts to me, because I view this defense against straw men and (apparently intentional) inaccuracies as a waste of my time.
10
I view this defense against straw men and (apparently intentional) inaccuracies as a waste of my time.
Then why waste your time trying to determine if people (me) have lied about their background, you muttonhead
10
Brian G Valentine wrote:
I did that on your own good request, Brian. You were, I recall, somewhat emphatic.
Frankly, the Prof. Ohadi thing was generally the much smaller part of my posts. But you didn’t take up any aspect of the discussion about climate.
10
Mike Goad wrote:
Yes.
I can’t vouch for the 30 feet figure. (Do you know where it comes from?)
But certainly it is this full absorbance in certain parts of the spectrum (saturation) that is why increasing CO2 only increases temperature about logarithmically. The parts of the spectrum in which adding more CO2 makes a difference slowly shrinks as parts of the spectrum become saturated.
Nevertheless, a doubling of CO2 will increase the temperature about 3°C. This is a lot less than the effect of adding 390ppm CO2 from a starting point of a lot less than the current 390ppm. But neither is it negligible.
10
Hi Jo, Hi everyone! I’ve been pretty busy this weekend so no time for the internet. I would like to say great responses!
Jo is correct on Post 65! I posted this article at this Web Site; http://www.globalwarminghoax.com I hope you all checked it out. It’s one of many here in the States fighting the BS that’s going on here. I’ve been helping out there while I was unemployed! Now I found work, my time is limited! I still try to post articles at the “Latest Forum Post”. I do comment at times at the “Chat Box”. Stop by when you can..I check here when I can to bush up on the “Skeptic’s Handbook” and other articles and read the comments…
Thanks Jo, you are great! You did a great comparison at post 59.
Thanks Matt for your alert view at post 66!
Brian, I am surprised you didn’t pick up that I am a Skeptic. I would NEVER mock Jo! I have too much RESPECT for Her!! I admire Her continuity, intensity and expansion of Thought! Very few can do this and come down to the laymans level to communicate…All I can say is “God Bless those who can see thru the “Fallacy” of AGW and search for the REAL Truth! Then let it be know to others who need to be lead….
10
Well, my apologies Denny, and I am glad to count another Skeptic among us here in the US
10
G’day MattB,
Yes Lord Monckton would be a good choice as spokesperson, particularly if they would allow him to debate the Gorical (sounds better, rhymes with comical).
But MattB doesn’t like that idea,
Maybe Dr David Evans – mathematics and science
But MattB doesn’t like that idea,
Maybe Professor Ian Plimer – Professor of geology
But MattB doesn’t like that idea,
Maybe Joanne Nova – educator, climate sceptic, author
But MattB doesn’t like that either, what was the comment – she only writes kids books???
Maybe Dr Barry Brook, as your always quoting “Brave New Climate”
MattB would like that. He could go and watch the wise words of the Dr on cult of Ching Hai’s “Supreme Master TV”. Or read the write up in today’s ‘Save Our Snowy’ News, or even read the last few days on Agmates.
Oh yes, you may have to go Vegan first, so you don’t feel guilty about having such a large carbon footprint.
G’day Matt Buckels, howya going?
J.
10
Not speaking for myself, but from comments from others, the Viscount Monckton has occasionally put people off by appearing to condescend.
It’s just the man’s demeanour, he doesn’t like to fight hostility with the same.
By the same line of reasoning, I cannot fathom how Gore has ANY followers whatsoever – because he METHODICALLY condescends to people 1. to cover the lack of knowledge he is painfully aware of 2. he is another shallow entity who believes that the best weapon against anyone is ridicule
10
Brian, your apology is accepted! I do appreciate your knowledge on this subject also…just remember that at times it pays to be “Humble”, to speak yet not to speak, if you know what I mean!
10
Oh Brian, by the way, I think we both know that there are more People that are Skeptics but have not spoken…The Silent Majority?? Remember that title??? Very powerful if you think about it…I believe the Republicans used it in the 80’s with Ronald Reagan…
10
The question of whether more people die because of “Global Warming” as the Warmista’s tell us or die because of cold, is answered in WikiAnswers
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_Hot_weather_or_cold_weather_cause_more_deaths
There are estimates around on how many additional people died in the UK from cold due to the fact that electricity for heating costs have gone through the roof, due to their ETS/carbon trading.
10
Hi Brian G. Valentine,
I feel that Viscount Monckton’s demeanour would be an asset if he had to deal with an aggressor. There’s nothing more off-putting for an aggressor in an argument, than to have their opponent appear to condescend.
Al Gore is apparently easy to turn to a blubbering —–
If you watch the Debate on the Hill, for the Waxman-Markey bill before Congress, the debates with Sen.Newt Gingrich and Sen.Steven Scalise makes for interesting viewing, especially when Enron is mentioned.(on Youtube)
The debate that will never happen, will be Monckton v Gore. (Gore’s risen above that sort of thing, was reported)
10
Joanne Nova Wrote:
I have tried to discuss the particulars of several papers with you Jo, and have thus far received the information that you will address them in a pending post.
So I think this judgment of sloppy and out of date are premature.
One sided is probably justified, but I stand ready to accept any other side that is coherently presented.
I’m interested in what climate change skeptics believe.
But with respect to this thread, science does progress by consensus. It does look like sending a counter-consensus view to schools does set a worrying precedent that would allow a wide range of poorly supported pseudoscience into the classroom.
I sympathize with fact that it is difficult to get a new scientific idea into the journals, especially if it contradicts a large body of work, but my own strong opinion is that that should be done before approaching schools and politicians.
Well I have discussed papers in the past, but the point that is relevant to this thread is that about 97% of actively publishing climate researchers have the belief that human activity has a significant influence on global mean surface temperatures. And while I agree that that proves nothing of itself, it is still these people that need to be convinced before introducing a new idea into the school curriculum.
I agree that the opinions of international committees are not scientific evidence. They can, however, present scientific evidence.
I think that scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes the esteemed journal “science”), the National Academy of Science (which publishes the respected journal PNAS), the American Meteorological Society (which publishes 11 peer reviewed journals), and the American Statistical Association (which publishes 12 peer reviewed journals) are strongly influenced by the scientific evidence, and their support of the findings of the IPCC is indicative of the scientific consensus.
10
Thank you Denny for your advice to me – needed, noted, and as appreciation, heeded.
Robin, note that PNAS submissions are not reviewed if submitted by an Academy member.
Let’s face the truth. These journal articles are reviewed by people who are probably sympathetic to the AGW story.
A paper is submitted, the Editor finds 3 or 4 reviewers or referees for it (the term Referee has a somewhat different meaning in the US than it does on the Continent), these reviewers are anonymous to the author(s), and you don’t need to be too clever to guess that a Journal editor is not going to send some article off to
me
Bob Carter
Roy Spencer
Willie Soon
Fred Singer
or a lot of other people.
How many Hansen papers do you think have been reviewed by Pierrehumbert, and conversely?
10
Brian,
Let’s suppose you have a large container of water. Let’s say there is a hole in the container, and some water drips out. Suppose also that there is a big pipe through which water flows into the container, at a variable rate. And finally, suppose there is a large powerful pump, that is constantly pumping water, at a variable rate, out of the container.
Along comes Chicken Little, squawking about “stop the drip, or a polar bear will die”. Which of the following do you think is the best response?…
1. Tell CL there is no hole.
2. Tell CL there is no water coming out of the hole.
3. Tell CL you do not accept the validity of the drip because the drip rate may be affected by the pump rate.
4. Tell CL to get a life, the drip is inconsequential to the amount of water in the container.
5. Tell CL to shut up or you’ll get Monckton to call her a bed-wetter.
6. Find that polar bear and watch in case it needs resuscitation.
7. Something else.
As you no doubt realise, my own preference is 4.
10
Robin, free speech is where I get to publicly ask the question “Have you got any evidence for this?” and I can ask that question any where I like.
With free speech then, you can answer that question, if only you could find THE missing paper.
As it is, you refer to the opinions of committees, but are you too lazy to check it out yourself? Go on read Chapter Nine, and find THAT mystery paper, the one that shows that carbon will cause significant warming.
Pseudo sceptics seem to enjoy debunking anything as long as they have ‘authority’ behind them. This is not sceptiscm. It’s faith in government committees, or official associations.
Here’s Chapter Nine. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm
If we let schools censor free speech children don’t learn to think. The next generation could end up being duped by an even more vacuous claim than the climate scam.
To show Kundu (and you) can think, we need evidence. Faith in the scientific process, or in associations, or university hiring techniques, or worse, in ‘investigative journalists’ and the media; it’s not thinking.
10
Brian, to avoid confusion… my last post was in response to your comments at #106.
10
Robin,
I got it from my memory since I haven’t looked at much climate change material since before we started traveling on May 1. I can see the page from the paper in my mind, but can’t find it, and, after spend a couple of hours searching for it, I’ve got other things to do. I was obviously off by over a factor of three, though. I’m sure the paper really said 30 meters.
My understanding is that there is little of the long wave radiation spectrum that is susceptible to more CO2 that is not already saturated.
So, if I go from 200 to 400 ppm, the global temperature anomaly will be 3 degrees higher at 400 ppm than at 200 ppm. And at 800 ppm the anomaly will be 3 degrees higher than at 400 ppm. From 200 to 800 ppm, that’s 6 degrees C!
OMG!
If that’s the case, then AL Gore and the IPCC don’t need the climate models’ positive cloud feedback to get to their doomsday scenario.
As I see it, when CO2 is already removing essentially ALL of the long wave radiation energy that it can at current global concentrations, it’s really difficult to get much more energy out no matter how high the concentration is.
10
On the other hand, Steven, there might be more than one reason for the hole.
The hole has always been there
I put the hole there
Admitting the second, the first response will be, “well if you put it there then take ownership and fix it”
10
Brian,
The reason for the hole is irrelevant, if its effect is inconsequential.
On the other hand, if it was important enough, and if it would make a real difference, and if it is actually possible to fix the hole, then the hole should be fixed, regardless of who caused it.
But here’s what I neglected to tell you… Fixing the hole requires a substance only obtainable by the removal of the gonads of all males whose surname begins with ‘V’. So the price is high and we’d better make sure you’re real keen!
10
ah – we come now to an observation about human nature.
If there is some imperfection at all, which are people likely to see – the fact that the imperfection is meaningless compared with the whole thing?
Or the imperfection alone?
And if indeed the imperfection was the result of (accident, vandalism) or anything else that can be attributed to an identifiable human source –
then what is the first thing that people are going to demand?
And all the talking in the world isn’t going to change (a lot of) people’s mind’s about it
10
Brian,
I think I understand what you are saying. And I really regret having to respond like this… The logical consequence of this train of thought is to end up doing exactly the same as we accuse the AGW alarmist brigade of – twisting and filtering the truth to promote our agenda. I do not support this.
10
Robin (#82): “When are these other global temperature fluctuations?”
By some accounts, I think approximately 1906-1940 would qualify as one example.
10
Well there is no truth to be twisted or filtered: the effect of AGW cannot be measured directly, it can be inferred upon the assumptions made, and if there is no direct observation, all the hollering there is is meaningless
10
Wow, there’s been a lot of activity since I responded to Robin – great to see so many different people joining the forum!
What can I say to your latest opus in response to me (#107), Robin? It is clear to me and to anyone here with half a brain that you do not understand the definition of “straw man argument”. Either that, or you are too blinded by self-righteousness to recognise one when perpetrated by your good self.
Yes, your posts are long and do not advance any conversations at all, but are spent entirely on “correcting” other people’s posts. They are tedious, repetitive and a waste of our time. You are obviously not “interested in what skeptics think” at all, you are just here to be as much of a nuisance as you can.
You must have too much time on you hands, because I can’t imagine this is the only blog you grace with your presence.
10
Brian,
The AGW conjecture can be stated in its simplest terms like this:
“Industrial increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations is causing, or will cause, catastrophic climate change.”
Ok?
Well, there is a heap wrong with this statement, which many smart people have written whole books about.
But you don’t see those smart people saying there is no Greenhouse Effect. No. Because there *is* a Greenhouse Effect, and atmospheric CO2 *does* play a significant part. So when you say “there is no truth to be twisted or filtered”, I have to respectfully disagree. In the words of Dr Vincent Gray: “Anybody who claims that there is no greenhouse effect is plain wrong and should be ignored.”
Now for the good news… It doesn’t matter. The AGW statement that “industrial increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations is causing, or will cause, catastrophic climate change” is just as wrong as it ever was. If you truly understand what the Greenhouse Effect is and does, and the part that it plays in the grand scheme of things, you will understand that it neither strengthens nor weakens the AGW case.
I recently had the great privilege of hosting Hungarian physicist Dr Miklos Zagoni, associate of Dr Ferenc Miskolczi, when he visited New Zealand to address a parliamentary Select Committee. Wow, those guys are really stretching the understanding of how this stuff works. It’ll make you cross-eyed, but see http://hpsregi.elte.hu/zagoni/NEW/New_developments.htm
Here’s some other really cool info, somewhat related, just released today: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
So you see, there’s obviously a lot to it. But note that none of these world-class sceptical scientists is saying there is no greenhouse effect. They’re no fools.
10
Thank you, Steve, I have read a lot from both of them, and you are fortunate to have heard them first hand.
Vincent is as liable to argue with sceptics as he is with anyone else, and not all of his letters to others have I greatly admired, although I haven’t had any heated words with him.
Anne Kit, Robin comes here to “try to educate” and “to correct mistaken impressions” and he “feels he is doing a service” for “people who aren’t aware of the truth” possibly because “they haven’t heard it” and he “hopes that his education will be meaningful” for “people who don’t know what they are talking about” and we should all be very grateful that he comes here to bring this enlightenment free of charge.
If he is crossed he will devote excessive amounts of time investigating the backgounds of people on the Internet so that he can cheerfully post what he feels will be embarrassing to other people.
So – word to the wise – don’t call him a “fool” or a “muttonhead” or any other less-considered names because you’ll be sorry!
10
It’s certainly the clearest explanation I’ve seen so far. Not that I understood all of it, but the “always on the border of saturation” seems like an interesting approach and if it holds then it becomes a really good simplifying principle.
The implication of Miskolczi’s theory is that the glacial/interglacial cycle is indeed driven by fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit (Milankovic cycles) and the only amplifying “gain” factor is changing surface albedo such as snow and ice cover (which fortunately for humans, is reasonably easy to engineer). Everything else is short term fluctuations limited in time by the energy storage capacity of atmospheric H2O.
When you let a Hungarian have access to maths and physics, it’s more dangerous than giving plutonium to North Korea. If there’s a treaty the world really needs to draft right NOW, it would be something to keep those Hungarian’s under control 🙂
Come to think of it, the other implication of Miskolczi is that an open-loop model exists to give a good fit for the Vostok ice-core data with temperature driving CO2 (give or take a few time constants and transfer functions). If the Hungarians take the prize on this one, might as well get second place with a collaborating theory.
10
Everyone:
If you could select one Motion Graphic (animation) to visually explain a difficult theory (like: Greenhouse Effect is logarithmic.) Which would you choose?
10
Paint your house. The first coat covers most, successive coats have negligibe effect on permitting light through
10
Robin, in #119, says,
“I think that scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes the esteemed journal “science”), the National Academy of Science (which publishes the respected journal PNAS), the American Meteorological Society (which publishes 11 peer reviewed journals), and the American Statistical Association (which publishes 12 peer reviewed journals) are strongly influenced by the scientific evidence, and their support of the findings of the IPCC is indicative of the scientific consensus.”
The “scientific consensus” is actually, these days, more a consensus about funding. Government funding depends on marching in lockstep with governments’ drumming up the pseudo-crisis of catastrophic human-caused global warming. If you don’t march to your government’s drum, government will not pay you to do research that supports their point of view. These politically motivated scientists at AAAS, NAS, NCAR, ASA, and AMS know which side of the government bread has the butter on it, so they support that side. Absent such support, the “consensus” would not exist.
And what do governments get out of this crisis? That’s really easy to answer. They get more control over their economies. They get more control over the personal lives of their citizens. They get more cap-and-thieve tax money. “Science” has become their lapdog tool to increase their control, their income, and their Jesus-complex (“We politicians are the world’s salvation from climate apocalypse!”).
The true believers in the pseudo-scientific crisis called global warming constantly complain about their opponents being funded by “those evil and greedy energy companies.” The pot is calling the kettle black, since the global warming crisis is almost entirely funded by money extorted from taxpayers in rich countries in the Western Hemisphere.
The only chance we’ve got of being saved from the greed for power and money expressed by nearly every Western government is that some of the Eastern Hemisphere economies, both democratic and authoritarian, will stand up to the power-hungry, greedy, and rapacious Western governments, and tell them where to dump their government-spawned pseudoscience. Preferably where the sun doesn’t shine.
10
Tel,
A lot of the technical detail goes over my head too. But my understanding is that Miskolczi does not claim to have a comprehensive explanation/proof for “how” it happens that the greenhouse effect is compensated for. It’s just that the evidence (i.e. the empirical measurements, and the calculations based on them) clearly indicates that *something* does compensate.
Thanks for the amusing comment about the Hungarians’ mental predelictions. 🙂
10
By my reading, they do have a “hand waving” explanation.
In simple terms, think of a very dry atmosphere with minimal GHG and no H2O. Adding a small amount of H2O into this atmosphere has a large effect on infra-red capture so the effective “gain” of how much warming you get for how much H2O you add is a high gain. Positive feedback ensures that each bit of warming delivers more H2O providing the available supply of H2O is large enough.
On the other side of the coin, think about a very wet atmosphere. In this case the H2O in the low atmosphere casts a shadow on the higher atmosphere so you get heating in the low atmosphere and cooling in the high atmosphere. However, warm H2O at low altitude tends to rise, and cool H2O at high altitude tends to fall so under these situations, the “gain” achievable by adding more water to the atmosphere is negligible and convection carries the energy upwards.
Thus in summary:
Low H2O concentration => greenhouse effect delivers high gain,
convection is not particularly effective.
High H2O concentration => greenhouse effect delivers low gain,
and convection + latent-heat deliver highly effective heat transport.
Thus, there are forces pushing toward the middle from both of the extremes. In the long term, they must come to a balance (although we know that balance is highly dynamic in the short term).
I’ll also point out that Miskolczi implicitly makes a prediction that adding CO2 should automatically displace some H2O (proportional to their relative GHG efficiency) in order to maintain the “borderline saturated” equilibrium, so we should expect the air to get dryer as more CO2 is added (all other factors being equal).
10
Joanne Wrote:
I don’t think that those numbers can be accurately compared.
To partake in the petition, you need to go online and put your name in a box, or write it on the card and put it in the post.
To partake in the IPCC, you need to be an expert in the field, you need to be able to take a year or so away from your career, and other time commitments, and you need to be the sort of person who would take on this thankless task of reviewing the scientific literature.
Doran and Zimmerman, 2009 is a better comparison. And it attempts to control self-selection bias.
It’s not a matter of believing in authority. It’s a matter of believing in science.
The scientific process is an iterative one. If an idea can’t be confirmed then the scientific community ignores it until new evidence comes to light.
Neither do scientists have one mind. So the consensus carries considerable weight, and should be confronted with evidence, rather than circumvention.
10
Thank you very much, Tel. Yes, that is exactly my interpretation as well. I’m sorry I didn’t make my meaning clear before. I just know that Dr Zagoni has been careful, and rightly so, to emphasise that these are proposed explanations, i.e. hypotheses for the phenomena, and require further investigation. But the observed evidence for the phenomena themselves is very strong. I think it is a distinction worth making.
10
As I mentioned before to Barton, the IPCC deck was stacked from the outset by interviews with people before they were invited to participate in IPCC.
I was nominated by DOE but not chosen to participate because I had arrived at my conclusion about AGW many years earlier for DOE (1987).
Pachauri was a pretty strict “bouncer” for the IPCC party – but Ben Santer was by far the worst. He didn’t want anybody there who wasn’t RAVING about the evils of AGW.
Thanks to Ed Teller’s lead of support of the Petition, many scientists from the DOE labs followed suit. Joanne is quite accurate that the Petition is far more representative of independent thought than the IPCC is.
Interesting that Teller founded the Lawrence Livermore lab – the same institution that is home to Ben Santer.
Many still in the DOE lab system are afraid to speak out against AGW, despite my encouragement to do so.
My protection to being an outspoken sceptic resides in the Senate of the US, and James Inhofe in particular. Without him, I probably would be quietly asked not to speak out.
Robin – even before you get your opinions out about all of this please take them and SHOVE THEM
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
I think that the relationship between temperature and kidney stone incidence is well supported by data. What makes you think that the WHO is “making numbers up out of thin air”?
Tim Ball has some very non-mainstream views. Such as we should encourage AGW, because it will be good for Canada. Which is certainly true in terms of arible land, heating costs, and crop yields. Not everyone gets to be Canadian though.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
That’s highly speculative, and it hasn’t happened yet.
But in the meantime, the positions of those societies are as stated, and they do currently speak of the consensus.
10
WHO claims the numbers are fabricated? Paul Reiter, for one.
Folks, to hear Tim Ball’s opinion of CO2 and climate, please watch “the great global warming swindle,” and you’ll hear, right out of Tim Ball’s mouth,
“CO2 has nothing to do with climate. Nothing at all.”
10
Strange Twists of Fate:
While taking courses at Harvard, Gore was req’d to fulfill some “general science” electives.
One of those requirements was fulfilled in a course by Roger Revelle.
Gore was so taken by the work Revelle was pursuing at the time that he later made a career out of it, whilst floundering for an identity after he lost the 2000 election.
Now then – if Gore had taken another course to fulfill his “science” elective requirements, the World would probably never be considering this momentous nothing right now!
Kismet!
[Revelle of course recanted his earlier advice in more or less a “death bed confession.” Gore had the power at the time to attempt to supress the confession, when Gore found out through the Courts that he couldn’t, he repaid his former mentor with the label “senility.” Now THERE’S gratitude for you]
10
Joanne Nova Wrote:
Winter time has higher mortality, but cold snaps don’t kill many people. Heat waves do kill.
With respect to US cities:
An evaluation of climate/mortality relationships in large U.S. cities and the possible impacts of a climate change. L S Kalkstein and J S Greene, Environ Health Perspect. (1997)
But in any case, the highest mortality due to climate change are in Africa and South East Asia. The cold is much less deadly there than the food and clean water security.
So, overall, yes, mortality from some causes is reduced because of anthropogenic climate change, but even in the developed world it is not clear if this is greater than the increased mortality from myocardial infarction. But counting malnutrition and disease, climate change is “dangerous”.
10
Tel wrote:
I think that there is no presumption of linearity. The response is about logarithmic.
The other kind of linearity, that the effect of CO2 forcing is about the same as the effect of the total forcing less the effect of all forcing except CO2 forcing, is not presumed either; it is an interesting result from climate models.
10
Enslavement of people in developing nations by prevention of financing coal energy electricity generation is probably the worst form of abuse anyone could do to these people – keeping them peasants eeking out an existence by scratching the soil for eternity …
Oh Christ, what’s the use.
Robin you would have to live amongst them to understand what “dangerous” in terms of day to day existence is.
That’ll never happen. You’ll just sit by in the comfort of Sydney stamping your feet that the world live by your miserable ideals, damn it all
10
Tel wrote:
Where does that even come from Tel?
The climate is warming at about 0.1something °C per decade. An El Nino alone will have an effect of about twice that. So 20 years of cooling is not exceptional in the long term warming trend.
A decade of cooling (should that happen) is completely unexceptional, and wouldn’t change any educated person’s understanding of climate.
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Robin,
tricked yourself again. Would it make any difference to anything climactically if all the climate scientists were suddenly sucked into a parallel universe? If it would, then any discussion of “Ive got more scientists than you” would be meaningful. As it is, you seem to be unable to help yourself. You admit science is not done by consensus, and authority is not ‘evidence’ so why keep coming back to it?
Here’s another mind boggler – is the scientific process infallible? IS there a rule of logic that says: “Proof by Committee counts?” Can you imagine any possible way that committees and associations and peer review could be wrong? Has it ever happened in the past that large groups of humans in educated committees came to incorrect conclusions? Does the UN ever make errors on a mass scale involving hundreds of thousands of deaths? If you can admit that even one of these events can occur or has occurred, then you have to admit you need to READ THE EVIDENCE yourself. Counting PhD’s and voting on science is the mark of a disciple of bureaucracy, a faithful believer of government decree, and if so, you are not a sceptic, but a follower.
Consensus is a political construct not a scientific law. Do you think or bleat?
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Steve Schapel wrote:
About 3°C per doubling.
(About 1.6°C since preindustrial levels.)
Bad, overall.
The increased mortality amongst humans, decreased biodiversity, widespread damage to the boreal forests, widespread damage of the amazon forest, damage to the oceanic food web starting with calcifying organisms, changes to croplands, decreased fresh water security, increased range of tropical diseases … you’ve read the papers.
It’s pretty significant. Since the last half of last century its the most significant (probably).
Does land use change count as industry? If so, all of it.
That’s a social sciences question. I don’t have a clue.
10
Joanne Nova Wrote:
I was trying to keep my responses in chronological order, but I have to respond to that.
Science is done by consensus!
There’s no world science court that sits in judgement of scientific proposals, elections by which scientific ideas are accepted or rejected by democracy, and no monarch of science that decides which scientific ideas are correct (now that the Catholic Church is keeping out of science).
It’s done by consensus.
And I keep coming back to it because I think that it is important that scientific ideas get integrated into that consensus or rejected on the basis of evidence before they go to the schools.
And so I disagree with the thesis of this thread that a school president has censored science, because until an idea is part of the consensus, it is not science; it’s a proposition with not very compelling evidence yet.
10
“Polywater is a newly discovered phase of water. It is more stable than ordinary water. It might be the case that polywater could convert all ordinary water into polywater, which is undrinkable. So we need to spend X million of dollars to find out more about polywater.”
“That’s right! The scientific consensus is, polywater exists and can be specially prepared. There are loads of peer-reviewed papers describing the properties of polywater, these papers are the result of model simulations.”
3 years later
“Polywater is nothing more than ordinary water with some colliodal contaminants.”
“That’s right! We knew that all along”
10
Brian G Valentine wrote:
A journal exists on it’s reputation. If an editor thought that You or Fred Singer would be good at spotting poor research, then they would use you.
I don’t accept that all the journals have a bias against certain types of climate research. Just against poor research.
10
Brian G Valentine:
Which shows that science changes its views based on evidence. (Although polywater was always somewhat controversial.
The understanding that CO2 is a greenhouse gas has been part of optics for over a century, and has only been confirmed by experiments.
10
“Interestingly, the peer review process in most scientific journals does not use a consensus based process. Referees submit their opinions individually and there is not a strong effort to reach a group opinion.”
10
Robin, you’re a hard sell.
But I admire your tenacity.
If I write comments on global warmist web sites, I am hooted down, ridiculed, mocked so much I just don’t feel like saying any more after about 3 rounds of it.
But you plough along, still
10
Robin,
I have no intention of pursuing the bizarre claims you have made in #152. I am one of those people who want to see evidence to support such statements, but I have seen you systematically fail to provide evidence when requested. You’re not going to change your mind on the basis of anything I have to say, and I’m not going to change mine either except on the basis of evidence.
But this is interesting:
“you’ve read the papers”
Nope. Not a single one. I avoid them as much as I can. Nor do I listen to radio. Got no TV either – got rid of that one in 1971! Can’t remember the last time I actually watched something on a TV… quite a few years ago, for sure – it would have been a cricket match I think (ask Brian to explain what cricket means 😉 ).
You know why? Because I figured out that the mass media don’t give me correct information. I can usually pick someone who gets the bulk of their world view from the mass media (i.e. the entertainment industry). It seems to affect the ability to think objectively, even in intelligent people.
10
ha ha – I never owned or watched a TV in my life
Dang – Sceptics are so VASTLY more interesting people than the “consensus” lovers, their humour better, their perception better, and I am very grateful indeed to have the opportunity to know some more better
Wonderful, wonderful.
[People like Kundu, the subject of this article, seem so DULL and DIMWITTED to me, I don’t know the person personally, all I can say is, his refusal to even LOOK at sceptic literature of any variety reminds me of the Bible-brandishing sort that bohemians avoid like the plague]
10
Joanne Wrote:
I didn’t think Australia had a provision for free speech.
Haven’t I cited half a dozen papers that put the climate sensitivity to CO2 at about 3°C per doubling?
Here are the papers that I have bookmarked that talk about either the climate sensitivity or that the recent warming is mostly anthropogenic:
Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity
Robust Bayesian Uncertainty Analysis of Climate System Properties Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
Attribution of regional-scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes
Efficiently Constraining Climate Sensitivity with Ensembles of of Paleoclimate Simulations
Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate.
Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries.
Effect of climate sensitivity on the response to volcanic forcing (abstract)
The Climate Sensitivity and Its Components Diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget Data
Constraining climate forecasts: The role of prior assumptions
An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity
Probabilistic climate change projections using neural networks
Estimated PDFs of climate system properties including natural and anthropogenic forcings.
Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate.
Estimation of Natural and Anthropogenic Contributions to 20th Century Temperature Change.
Anthropogenic Warming of Earth’s Climate System.
External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings.
Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.
Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.
Of course, there are a lot more cited by the IPCC.
I’m all for teaching critical thinking in class.
I’m not for special interest groups being allowed to do an end run around the scientific process, and inject dianetics or time-cube into the classroom.
10
Joanne Wrote:
I didn’t think Australia had a provision for free speech.
Haven’t I cited half a dozen papers that put the climate sensitivity to CO2 at about 3°C per doubling?
Here are the papers that I have bookmarked that talk about either the climate sensitivity or that the recent warming is mostly anthropogenic:
10
Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity
Robust Bayesian Uncertainty Analysis of Climate System Properties Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
Attribution of regional-scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes
Efficiently Constraining Climate Sensitivity with Ensembles of of Paleoclimate Simulations
Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate.
Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries.
Effect of climate sensitivity on the response to volcanic forcing (abstract)
The Climate Sensitivity and Its Components Diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget Data
Constraining climate forecasts: The role of prior assumptions
An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity
Probabilistic climate change projections using neural networks
Estimated PDFs of climate system properties including natural and anthropogenic forcings.
Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate.
Estimation of Natural and Anthropogenic Contributions to 20th Century Temperature Change.
Anthropogenic Warming of Earth’s Climate System.
External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings.
Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.
Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.
Of course, there are a lot more cited by the IPCC.
10
Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity
Robust Bayesian Uncertainty Analysis of Climate System Properties Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
Attribution of regional-scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes
Efficiently Constraining Climate Sensitivity with Ensembles of of Paleoclimate Simulations
10
Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity
10
Robust Bayesian Uncertainty Analysis of Climate System Properties Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
10
Attribution of regional-scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes
10
Efficiently Constraining Climate Sensitivity with Ensembles of of Paleoclimate Simulations
10
Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate.
10
Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries.
10
Effect of climate sensitivity on the response to volcanic forcing (abstract)
10
The Climate Sensitivity and Its Components Diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget Data
10
Constraining climate forecasts: The role of prior assumptions
10
An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity
10
Probabilistic climate change projections using neural networks
10
Estimated PDFs of climate system properties including natural and anthropogenic forcings.
00
Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate.
00
Estimation of Natural and Anthropogenic Contributions to 20th Century Temperature Change.
00
Anthropogenic Warming of Earth’s Climate System.
00
External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings.
00
External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings. ( http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/scope/keystone2/ )
Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.
Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.
00
Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.
00
Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.
00
External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings.
00
Of course, there are a lot more cited by the IPCC.
I’m all for teaching critical thinking in class.
I’m not for special interest groups being allowed to do an end run around the scientific process, and inject dianetics or time-cube into the classroom.
00
Mike Goad wrote:
Well, the current climate sensitvity is about 3°C per doubling. If that’s “little” then it’s little.
Yes, about that.
Well, the 3°C is the total climate’s reponse. It includes feedbacks.
Well, the best estimates to date are that increasing CO2 will increase the temperature by about 3°C per doubling. Which is some more energy.
00
Re: Free Speech
Australian legislative principles are based on English common law which states, paraphrased, that “everything is permitted unless it is expressly prohibited”.
Ergo, because we have no law prohibiting free speech, we enjoy free speech.
Unless of course the proponents of an Australian Federal Charter of Rights have their way … but that’s another debate.
00
Steve Schapel wrote:
Well CO2 was increasing over that time and contributing to the temperature rise.
What scientific basis do you have for claiming that climate change being dangerous is “not true”?
00
Robin (#153)
I asked you (#45) whether you had read “The Skeptics Handbook”. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that there is a “proposition”, and that there is an attempt to push this proposition into classrooms. That is not how I understand the situation. A central tenet of “The Skeptics Handbook” is the scientific method. I understood (correct me if I’m wrong, Joanne) that the intended audience, which Mr Kundu attampts to “protect”, is science teachers, not the school students. I understood it was an attempt to help them understand some of the ways in which the widely promoted anthropogenic global warming conjecture does flout correct scientific principles. Yes, it does argue the sceptics’ case, of course. But the sceptics’ case does not primarily consist of a “proposition” at all. The proposition is the AGW proposition, and the sceptics’ case is primarily to be critical of the short-comings of the AGW proposition.
But anyway, I have the feeling I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
00
“Science is done by consensus!”
Thus, four hundred years later after this style of thinking was shown to be fallacious and the world emerged from the dark ages, Robin Grant is still stuck in feudal reasoning. If Robin had been born in 1600 he would have sided with the Pope against Galileo. Galileo clearly did not believe the consensus.
We have standards of logic and reason, and you are not meeting them.
Science is done by observation.
Re #162 -#179: You figure out if any of them are not from models, which don’t count, and try again for some observational evidence OK? Stop wasting our time.
00
The climate is warming at about 0.1something °C per decade. An El Nino alone will have an effect of about twice that. So 20 years of cooling is not exceptional in the long term warming trend.
I’m well aware of that, and equally aware that to understand the methodology of the scientific publication industry you need merely watch some 8 year olds playing soccer. I stand by my original statement — none of those guys can hold their nerve for longer than a decade.
00
Robin,
Robin Grant said:
Where is the physical evidence — the proof — that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will result in higher global temperatures?
Climate models do NOT qualify as PROOF. Climate models take climate assumptions and predict climate trends just as financial models take financial assumptions and predict financial trends — and some of us are feeling the proof of how inaccurate financial models are. I do not want to feel the financial impact of policies based on unproven climate model predictions.
00
Mike,
Robin also said that the 3°C figure “includes feedbacks”. This refers to the assumption that the small greenhouse effect contribution of increased CO2 will be multipled by other factors. This was originally a worthwhile guess. Let’s give credit where credit’s due – this was an idea that was worth exploring. Now, however, there is enough water under the bridge to reject this idea. For one thing, the empirical evidence just doesn’t confirm it. In that sense, it *is* scientific… come up with an idea, make a prediction based on the idea, and see if the evidence supports the prediction – which in this case it doesn’t. For another thing, there are now a lot of plausible interpretations of climate processes that involve negative feedback. To be honest, it’s all up in the air. 😉
End result: Robin’s got a damn cheek trying to bamboozle us with “the best estimates to date”.
00
Robin, I’m thumbing through a few of your bookmarks (at random based on interesting sounding names).
#164 (STOTT 2003):
They took a computer model, tweaked some input weighting factors for that model and managed to get results that were somewhat consistent with measured observations. It is vague about exactly how the “Natural” input is calculated (for example, were the natural variations in the earth’s orbit included), and seems to ignore changes in surface albedo. I’d put this one into the category of, “these are the things I can think of, so it must be one of those”, plus a presumption that the model is correct when in fact it is one of many possible ways to get plausible results (needing Occam’s Razor to sort them).
#166 (von Deimling 2006):
I had a great deal of difficulty following the logic of this one because it meanders so much, but I think that climate sensitivity was an input to the computer model and that main objective seemed to be running the model a many times and noting the negative correlation between the climate sensitivity and various cooling factors (atmospheric dust, etc) as output from the model (i.e. the whole paper is a study in the properties of the computer model). I’m a little surprised that these things would be correlated at all so that is in itself a result, the paper seems to neglect any explanation of why this correlation occurs (maybe it’s obvious to everyone “in the know”). How this measures climate sensitivity I cannot fathom.
Anyhow, maybe I’ll look at some others later on.
00
Earl Allen wrote:
Yeah, the conspiracy theory isn’t really that compelling.
If you think about all the scientists and journal editor’s who’s career and reputation could be much better served by publishing those findings that would overturn the paradigm, many of whom have guaranteed incomes, most of whose income is not tied to climate science, who come from hundreds of different countries (and so different governments), it comes across as somewhat paranoid-delusional.
But it’s not falsifiable, so you could be right … for a huge multinational conspiracy controlling all the worlds academic journals, research institutions, and universities, and chooses to bring this power to bear on what climate change research becomes published.
01
I scroll don this page and see some 50 photos of Robin
: (
00
down not don
00
Brian G Valentine wrote:
Hmmm.
The “All in the Mind” podcast from ABC national radio recently had a couple of episodes on work with a group of child soldiers in Sierra Leone. At their recruitment their parents were shot and killed, which they all but one saw, (and one was forced to do it). The violence and rape perpetrated on their own countryment that followed wasn’t really theraoutic either.
And you think that it being slightly easier to get international funding for renewable power sources is “worst form of abuse anyone could do to these people”?
Think outside the box a little, mate. There’s a lot worse abuse that renewable energy.
00
Joanne Nova wrote:
1) How?
2) What were the other times?
The scientific process adjusts its understanding to match observations. So despite its fallibility, it is self-correcting (eventually).
No, that’s not a rule of logic. The importance of the position of the scientific consensus, is that that is what we know so far. If you want to know how, you have to look at the individual papers.
Sure. Optics has stood a few centuries though. Any exceptions would be ones that don’t apply in any of the situations in which we’ve studied optics to date.
Sure. Warren and Marshall had a bit of a struggle for a while. Their struggle was getting people to reproduce their work though. Once people tried it was confirmed. So it’s not like climate science which is being continuously tested.
Not to my recollection.
I dare say you’ve got something in mind though?
Well, as you will know from other posts, that I have read evidence myself, and in particular the 2000 science paper by Stott et al. was the one that I first found compelling.
I don’t have the time or training to keep at the forefront of every field of human investigation. As a skeptic, I ecourage the view that peer reviewed science, observations, and tests guides people above superstition and speculation.
And what the scientific community believes is a good guide of that. Also, when there is a consensus, it is also science as we know it.
Consensus in science is our understanding. It is the end of the scientific process for an idea/hypothesis/theory/consensys. It is certainly open to review if new evidence comes to light, but it is not a political construct, it is a stage of scientific understanding.
Everyone bleats, but I claim that I am more susceptible to evidence and less to superstition and pseudoscience than most. Certainly I am aware of the issue.
00
Mike Goad wrote:
Sure.
Writing a paper does not achieve consensus, it presents an idea. Most papers are eventually refuted. The value of the scientific journals is more to get the wide range of ideas into the scientific community. Consensus come much later. (But not for most papers).
00
Steve Schapel wrote:
Well, they are part of the consensus, so technically, it is the refutation of these claims that are bizarre.
Pardon me. I do try to answer questions.
Could you please point out the systematic requests for evidence that I have unintentionally missed?
I’m very susceptible to evidence.
By papers I mean scholarly papers as published in academic journals. Not papers as in newspapers.
…
00
Steve Schapel wrote:
00
Joanne Nova wrote:
Joanne, ideas become integrated into our understanding by consensus. That’s the process. You might have a problem with that process, but it is very contrived to claim that that is not the process.
Well, that doesn’t actually change how science works, Joanne.
And one of the problems with using common mythology instead of history in your arguments by analogy, is that your points might not stand analysis.
There was a strong consensus of the heliocentric solar system outside Italy in Galileo’s time. (And probably inside Italy, but less openly written about, due to the position of the Church).
Sorry? You think that I am being illogical by stating the plain truth that science progresses by consensus?
Yes. And when those observations separate a hypothesis from a theory, the theory becomes part of the consensus, and science progresses.
Which models don’t count, would you say?
Ok … how about “An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity” for starters?
00
Tel wrote:
For example?
The climate sensitivity has been at about 3°C per doubling for over 3 decades now.
00
Mike Goad wrote:
The proof is in the physics of optics, from which the greenhouse effect is derived.
CO2 is more opaque to frequencies of EMR that the earth radiates than those that the sun radiates. So increasing the concentration of CO2 increases the global mean surface temperature by decreasing the rate at which heat is dissipated to space.
As for the 3°C figure, there are multiple lines of evidence. In the list of papers above, I would point you to the two Earth radiation budget papers, the volcanic forcing paper, the analysis of the past 7 centuries, and the past 520 million years, the multiple observationally based constraints paper (which also includes some climate modelling), and the Monte Carlo methods paper (which analyses a wide range of papers, again many of them include modelling), if you want some that have additional evidence to climate models.
No, they are evidence. For some things they provide strong evidence.
The effects of the assumptions is measured by choosing extreme values of the parameters and then running the model to see how different the outcomes are.
So you can use the model to produce both the climatic response and the robustness of that response to getting the assumptions wrong.
I think the recession is a result of bundling high risk investments with other investments, and them trading them as a secure investment, rather than a particular failure of modelling.
And neither is a financial model based on physics in the way a General Circulation Model is.
Are you happy to feel the financial impact of failing to enact policies based on unproven climate model predictions? Because our best estimates to date are that they’ll be 10 to 20 times the cost of the former.
(Of course the bulk of that cost will be paid by our grandchildren and the Bangladeshis.)
00
Errata: And the neural net paper. (And 420 million not 520 million)
00
Steve Schapel wrote:
Scientists who have looked at past climate have shown that there is postive feedback. Over the past 420 million years the climate senstivity has been probably robustly over 1.5, which is positive feedback (the direct effect of CO2 is only about 1.0)
The analysis of the earth’s radiation budget shows positive feedback.
In fact I’ve posted 17 papers and 1 abstract from which postitive feedback can be inferred.
Can you provide such a wide range of methodologies that show that there is no such feedback?
What then are you rejecting the peer reviewed scientific evidence?
Look, I’m only presenting some of the science. These are just papers that I had bookmarked for various reasons. I would be delighted to read any and all papers that you find that claim that the climate sensitivity is less than 1°C per doubling.
But if you can’t even present one, I’d have to say I’ve got an opposite opinion about who’s got a damn cheek.
00
Tel wrote:
Thank you Tel!
And respect to you for considering evidence!
This was a significant paper because it was one of a watershed in between the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports in which modelling sophistication and computing power became available to distinguish between anthropogenic and natural warming on a regional scale (albeit large regions … continents).
Models are tuned to observations. Because the field of observational data is so much larger than the number of unknown parameters, there is sound mathematical reason to believe that the resulting accuracy is partly genuine. It has been noticed that models do a better job of predicting temperature than they should given their estimated error, so their is also sound mathematical reason to suspect that the accuracy is partly an artifact of the process (or the state of the climate). (see: <a href=”http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL034932.shtml”Why are climate models reproducing the observed global surface warming so well?).
I think that HadCM3 uses a solar irradiance forcing that includes the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, and it certainly includes ice albedo, but not as a forcing. The ice cover is modelled, and the resulting surface albedo is used in the radiative transfer calculations of each step. (I assume sea ice affects the ocean model’s dynamics too).
I don’t think that there are many ways to get plausible results. The unknown parameters are overdetermined.
This paper one of the ones cited in the 2007 IPCC report in the chapter on attribution. (Is it chapter 9?).
No model has climate sensitivity as an input. They varied other parameters, and used a range of models and that produced the range of climate sensitivities that they are talking about.
Yes, this paper uses models.
Climate sensitivity is poorly known because it is affected strongly by everything else. If you consider the model as a way to calculate the transfer of a climatic forcing to a mean global temperature then climate sensitivity can only be calculated at the end of all the feed-backs and interactions. So it is affected by everything.
I look forward to it, and thank you for your open mindedness, and preparedness to read some science.
00
Robin in #190 says,
“But it’s not falsifiable, so you could be right … for a huge multinational conspiracy controlling all the worlds academic journals, research institutions, and universities, and chooses to bring this power to bear on what climate change research becomes published.”
Falsifiable. And it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just self-interested greed on the part of those who do governmental “science.” When science is done sans government funding and the government-control bias is removed, the evidence tells us that increasing the concentration of atmospheric C02 has a vanishingly (nearly unmeasurable) small effect on the planet’s temperature. Furthermore, the evidence for any human contribution to the rise in C02 concentration is either missing or unmeasurable. CO2 has been absorbed and outgassed by the vastness of the oceans for far longer than humans have even existed on the face of the planet. Adding a piddly 10-20 GTonnes of CO2 to the 150 GTonnes or so that circulate through the oceans each year is unlikely to produce any measurable concentration increase. The circulation of CO2 through plant respiration (and consequent O2 outgassing) might double the circulation number to, let’s say 300 GTonnes of C02. Of course, all these are ballpark estimates, but try to find any paper in your set that even addresses this absorption/outgassing.
Let’s be evidential, and admit that the “science” on your side of the equation is done for the greedy benefit of those scientists who receive literally billions of US$ to prop up a claim that government solutions alone are capable of handling a government-created “crisis.” These governmentally-biased propagandists (let’s not demean the word “scientist”) use GIGO computer models to prognosticate a “climate forecast” 10 to 100 years in the future that is only marginally better than visiting your local psychic.
I admit that there is a difference between weather and climate, but the evidence shows us that weather forecasters are incapable of forecasting the local weather (a far more quantifiable, model-able, and measurable phenomenon) more than a few hours into the future. As a flight instructor, I deal with these inaccurate forecasts every day of my life. Why is it that government-bribed scientists always seem to come up with a (currently falsified) prediction that the “climate” will continue to get hotter in the future?
Joanne’s Handbook requests that you provide evidence. So far, you have provided non-abstracted links to papers that follow the “consensus” of government-financed research. Can you find just ONE paper that doesn’t have that governmentally biased taint of dirty coerced money, and that gives us evidence of your “consensus” that is not based on a computer-psychic prediction? Just one, Robin, just one. That’s all we ask.
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Can you find just ONE paper that doesn’t have that governmentally biased taint of dirty coerced money, and that gives us evidence of your “consensus” that is not based on a computer-psychic prediction?
Oh, sure.
Any paper at all by Jim Hansen.
BWAHAAAHAAAHAAAAHAAAHAA
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Robin,
It’s obvious that you are not convincing anyone here. (rhetorical statement – no response required or desired)
It’s also obvious that you have a lot of time on your hands, since you are responding to almost everything that is posted here. I wasn’t going to say “too much time on your hands” as that is judgmentally just saying that you’re wasting your time doing something worthless since it obviously is of some value to you. I just know that, as a retiree, I have a lot more free time than most and I feel it would be a waste of MY time to TRY to change the opinions of others without demonstrating proof that I am right and they are wrong.
I don’t think you are impressing anyone here — quite the contrary –, so why bother?
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Robin,
Lets do Science By Consensus:
1/ Who votes? Did I miss it? Do we only allow climate scientists to vote, and how do we know if they are a climate scientist? Only paid up union members maybe? Or do we allow a free for all for anyone with a science degree, and is a climate scientist worth 10 points compared to say, 1 point for a genetic engineer? Can we get double points for a nobel prize winner?)
2/ Who counts the votes? Can I vote for the people who count the votes?
3/ Who arbitrates on the call? (Does 31,000 in a mail out beat the IPCC-my-junket-is-better-than-your-junket crowd?)
4/ What (Shock) happens if the theory is wrong? Who can speak against it? ANS: No one, because science is done by consensus and the consensus is never wrong, see point 1 and start again.
It’s good to know that science is finished now. We can save lots of time….
It won’t matter if the planet cools more either. Someone will figure out how to plug in a model to help the atmosphere correct that.
And poor Galileo – so he almost died for something that was a consensus after all. All that struggle for nothing. He must be p….
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[name calling removed]
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Junket? What “junket” are you talking about
Do you have any idea how much it cost the DOE to send Ben Santer to Paris, Barcelona, Bali …
I know how much it cost but I can’t tell you how much it cost because that is not something I have the right to reveal
ALL OF THAT TO HAVE HIM COME BACK AND TRY TO TEAR THE COUNTRY DOWN
NOW I’M THE ONE GETTING OFF INTO TEMPER
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Robin (#197):
“And it is the claims that it flouts correct scientific principles should be taken to the scientific community and not the schools.”
Oh, there are very many members of the scientific community who have considered this question, and agree with the claim.
“Because it’s not mainstream thought that it does ‘flout correct scientific principles’.”
For one thing, I do not support that teachers should only be exposed to “mainstream thought”. But in any case, I am not sure what “mainstream thought” means here. I am in no position to survey this, but my impression is that a very large proportion of people, both scientists and non-scientists, who have had a *genuine independent opportunity* to assess and decide on this question, end up being in doubt about the alleged “mainstream thought”.
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Robin said (#52)
“Well, your opinion there is out of sync with the established and reproducable beliefs of the scientific commmunity.”
Well, Robin, I can’t argue with that comment. The AGW scientific community is most assuredly sustained by a belief. It has to be because there is no definitive observational data to back up AGW theory (and I’ve been waiting for it for almost 3 years now). I am not sure what a “reproducable belief” looks like but I’m pretty sure it has a strong correlation to the amount of grant money received.
“Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses does increase the greenhouse effect.”
On that point, I think we all agree. The pertinent issue is the sensitivity of the biosphere to said greenhouse gasses. And that is where the scientific opinion diverges greatly. And if you not respect that divergence, then you are not looking at ALL of the data.
“If you think that [the greenhouse effect] is “purely speculative and unverified”, then you need to take that view to the scientific community, not to schools.”
The only thing speculative and unverified in this debate are the computer models. Over just the past few years, the creators of those models have themselves changed the name of their output from predictions to projections to scenarios. As we all know (or at least should know), a scenario is something that COULD happen if all the assumptions are correct. And the observational data has, at least to date, shown that the assumptions within those models need some unbiased review.
Lastly, I do not think that theories, even in their infancy, should be banned from schools. What I DO think, is that any presentation of those theories should be prefaced with a balanced, unbiased, and always updated statement of what is known and what is not known. That is NOT what Mr. Kundu stated. And that is why I took him (and you) to task on this particular issue.
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Well put, Steve (#211).
It is clear that some people, including Robin apparently, equate “the scientific community” with “the AGW scientific community”. Whereas we really have to count Lindzen, Carter, Plimer, Watts, Spencer, Monckton, Soon, Miskolczi, Peden, Evans, Gray, Archibald, Kininmonth, Kemm, Ball, de Freitas, etc, etc, etc, etc, as part of the scientific community. I don’t know why I started that list, because the full list is huge.
(Oh, and by the way, don’t anyone please waste their keyboard trying to discredit any of these people based on what sort of degree they have, or what clubs they belong to, or what media they use to publish their work. Ok?)
I know I am skating pretty close to the edge of an argument by authority, and that’s not my intention here. But to say that we have to refer/defer to “the scientific community”, when people of the above calibre have been pulling it to pieces for years, is just silly.
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You have said yourself that this is a better site than many others, I’d like to make a polite request that we keep the tone up.
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Of course they are tuned to observations, but this merely means that someone has spend enough time twiddling with various input parameters until they get the output to fit some table of values. This proves nothing about predictive capability. Given enough fiddle-factors, any model can reproduce any table of values.
Consider that I may be given a table of trigonometric results: theta, sin(theta) and I come up with the theory that trigonometry is really just polynomials. So I model the table of results with a polynomial until I get a good fit, and this works really well for interpolation within that span of the trig function. It is, however, completely useless for extrapolation to new regions of the trig function because of the underlaying mathematics that says trig functions are not polynomials.
For someone who does understand the fundamentals of trig, they can use carefully selected polynomial expansions to calculate that function, provided they suitably pre-process the inputs, and providing they understand that each expansion only works over a certain region.
Then there’s also the complexity of the model, if a simpler model comes along that also fits observable data then by Occam’s Razor we should favour the simpler model. Current climate models attempt to reconstruct the entire atmosphere from small component physics, akin to reconstructing biology by mass simulation of atomic interactions. High complexity models must always be treated with high levels of caution.
No other sphere of scientific study has achieved the sort of modeling breakthrough that climate study is claiming, including those where arbitrarily large amounts of experimental data are available, and where experiments can be tailored to exactly the conditions that need to be studied. Probably the electronics industry is furthest ahead, but I’ll tell you right now that if you just get a circuit that is more than a moderately trivial circuit and punch it into a simulator then you are very likely to get artifacts from that simulation that don’t exist in the real world, and you are almost guaranteed to find peculiarities of the real world that don’t exist in the simulation. There’s a whole industry of people who tweak these simulations to make them useful for particular problems in narrow areas of study. Generally, some circuit design will evolve while the simulation of that circuit design also evolves.
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“Can you find just ONE paper that doesn’t have that governmentally biased taint of dirty coerced money”
only one? Peer-Review Papers Skeptic of “Man-Made” Global Warming.
180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods (PDF)(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 2, pp. 259-282(24), March 2007) Beck, Ernst-Georg.
Industrial CO2 emissions as a proxy for anthropogenic influence on lower tropospheric temperature trends
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L05204, 2004)
A. T. J. de Laat, A. N. Maurellis.
Oceanic influences on recent continental warming (PDF)
(Climate Dynamics, 2008)G.P. Compo, P.D. Sardeshmukh.
just to name a few.
On the other hand here is a list of some experts in the Alarmist camp.
Al Gore, B.A. Government, Divinity and Law School Dropout (no science degree)
Bill Maher, B.A. English (no science degree)
Bill McKibben, B.A. (no science degree)
Daryl Hanna, B.F.A. Theater (no science degree)
Edward Norton, B.A. History (no science degree)
Oprah Winfrey, B.A. Speech and Drama (no science degree)
Prince Charles of Wales, B.A. (no science degree)
Sheryl Crow, B.A. Music Education (no science degree)
ABC Bob Woodruff, J.D. Law (no science degree)
ABC Sam Champion, B.A. Broadcast News (no science degree, not a meteorologist)
CBS Harry Smith, B.A. Communications and Theater (no science degree)
CBS Katie Couric, B.A. English (no science degree)
CBS Scott Pelley, College Dropout
CNN Miles O’Brien, College Dropout
NBC Ann Curry, B.A. Journalism (no science degree)
NBC Anne Thompson, B.A. American studies (no science degree)
NBC Matt Lauer. B.A. Communications (no science degree)
NBC- Meredith Vieira, B.A. English (no science degree)
FOX Shepard Smith, College Dropout.
John McCain, B.S. (graduated 894th out of 899 in his class)
Newt Gingrich, Ph.D. Modern European History (no science degree).
Pat Robertson, M.A. Divinity (no science degree)
Meghan McCain, B.A. Art History (no science degree).
The same Meghan McCain who said to have voted for Al Gore in 2000…When She Was Too Young to Vote.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, J.D. Law (no science degree)arrested in 1984 and charged with heroin possession.
Bill Nye, B.S. Mechanical Engineering (Bill Nye the Science Guy)
Gavin Schmidt, Ph.D. Applied Mathematics (RealClimate.org)
James Hansen, Ph.D. Physics (NASA)
James Lovelock, Ph.D. Medicine, D.Sc. Biophysics
Joe Romm, Ph.D. Physics
John P. Holden, Ph.D. Theoretical Plasma Physics
Lonnie Thompson, Ph.D. Geological Science
Michael Mann, Ph.D. Geology (RealClimate.org)
Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D. Chemical Physics
Michael Tobis, Ph.D. Atmospheric and Oceanic Science
Rajendra K. Pachauri, Ph.D. Industrial Engineering (IPCC Chairman)
Richard C. J. Somerville, Ph.D. Meteorology
Robert T. Watson, Ph.D. Chemistry
Steven Schneider, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering and Plasma Physics.
Tom J. Chalko, Ph.D. Laser Holography
Alden Meyer, B.A. Political Science, M.A. Human Resources
Lord Nicholas Stern, Ph.D. Economics
Ronald Bailey, B.A. Philosophy and Economics (Science Correspondent, Reason Magazine)
Steve Rayner, Ph.D. Anthropology…etc.
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Earl Allen wrote:
Really.
I wasn’t aware that research from universities, nor publications in peer reviewed journals showed that.
Do you have a few examples?
Really.
Well 1751 to 2006 saw fossil fuel combustion and cement production release 329 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. (Source: CDIAC). That converts to about 1200 billion tonnes of CO2. (since CO2 weighs about 44/12 what C weighs).
Over that time we saw CO2 go from 270 to 380ppm by volume, which is 110ppm(v). Now CO2 has an atomic mass of about 44 and and air is about 29, so that’s about 165ppm by weight.
The atmosphere weighs about 5.1 x 10^(18) kg, so that’s about 840 billion tonnes of CO2.
So human activity explains all of the increase in the atmosphere, plus about 350 billion tonnes of CO2 dissolved in the oceans, and that’s without considering land use change.
Which of these numbers is vastly different if you use non-government figures?
Let it not be said that I refused to be evidential. What is your evidence?
(Although I’m unlikely to find claims that the scientists are all comitting fraud compelling, so feel welcome to look for strong evidence).
Essentially because the models show an energy imbalance. (As do measurements of the earth’s rediation budget, although the error in these measurements is still an order of magnitude worse than that from models.)
So although the models are not crash hot at showing where the warming will be on a given day, there is a necessity from conservation of energy that it will be somewhere. This is why models are remarkably good at predicting global mean surface temperature, but not regional temperature nor which year the El-Nino falls on.
Well, i claim that it is also, non governement-financed research. (And I also claim that the bias of democratic governments is towards global warming denial, because no democracy wants to spend money on projects which pay off only outside their term – and the changes made to the IPCC reports by the government delegations of USA, China, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait support this view, as does the conflict between NASA and the Bush administration).
Of the consensus?
Well, Naomi Oreskes is employed (a Professor of History and Science Studies) by the University of California San Diego, not a government research body.
This essay, which showed that of the 928 scholarly papers with the ISI keywords “global climate change” (The linked article erroneously says “climate change”) published 1993 to 2003, not one found against the basic consensus that most of the warming of the last half of the 20th century was probably attributable to human activity.
The essay was published in Science, the journal of the AAAS, which is also not a government body.
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Earl Allen wrote:
Really.
I wasn’t aware that research from universities, nor publications in peer reviewed journals showed that.
Do you have a few examples?
Really.
Well 1751 to 2006 saw fossil fuel combustion and cement production release 329 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. (Source: CDIAC). That converts to about 1200 billion tonnes of CO2. (since CO2 weighs about 44/12 what C weighs).
Over that time we saw CO2 go from 270 to 380ppm by volume, which is 110ppm(v). Now CO2 has an atomic mass of about 44 and and air is about 29, so that’s about 165ppm by weight.
The atmosphere weighs about 5.1 x 10^(18) kg, so that’s about 840 billion tonnes of CO2.
So human activity explains all of the increase in the atmosphere, plus about 350 billion tonnes of CO2 dissolved in the oceans, and that’s without considering land use change.
Which of these numbers is vastly different if you use non-government figures?
Let it not be said that I refused to be evidential. What is your evidence?
(Although I’m unlikely to find claims that the scientists are all comitting fraud compelling, so feel welcome to look for strong evidence).
Essentially because the models show an energy imbalance. (As do measurements of the earth’s rediation budget, although the error in these measurements is still an order of magnitude worse than that from models.)
So although the models are not crash hot at showing where the warming will be on a given day, there is a necessity from conservation of energy that it will be somewhere. This is why models are remarkably good at predicting global mean surface temperature, but not regional temperature nor which year the El-Nino falls on.
Well, i claim that it is also, non governement-financed research. (And I also claim that the bias of democratic governments is towards global warming denial, because no democracy wants to spend money on projects which pay off only outside their term – and the changes made to the IPCC reports by the government delegations of USA, China, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait support this view, as does the conflict between NASA and the Bush administration).
Of the consensus?
Well, Naomi Oreskes is employed (a Professor of History and Science Studies) by the University of California San Diego, not a government research body.
This essay, which showed that of the 928 scholarly papers with the ISI keywords “global climate change” (The linked article erroneously says “climate change”) published 1993 to 2003, not one found against the basic consensus that most of the warming of the last half of the 20th century was probably attributable to human activity.
The essay was published in Science, the journal of the AAAS, which is also not a government body.
____
Posts that link to Oreskes’ Essay end up in the spam folder for some reason. (Joanne Nova had to intervene when I tried to link in another thread … I am sure it is not deliberate censorship on her part.)
Anyway the first hit on this search is the paper I am trying to link.
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because of the underlaying mathematics that says trig functions are not polynomials.
Well they are, to order (epsilon), epsilon arbirary, if we agree that a truncated power series is a “polynomial”
but I’ll tell you right now that if you just get a circuit that is more than a moderately trivial circuit and punch it into a simulator then you are very likely to get artifacts from that simulation that don’t exist in the real world, and you are almost guaranteed to find peculiarities of the real world that don’t exist in the simulation
True, iff the circuit elements are nonlinear over the (i,v) range of interest. If “constants” defining the circuit elements are actually functions of i or v then the circuit may have more than one (or a time dependent) output, which may be found in the simulation, the circuit, both, or neither.
Brings up a good point of the climate simulations. I believe that parameters such as “climate sensitivity” are actually coupled to other parameters, the coupling unaccounted for, and stabilising in all cases.
In general, such parameters are considered independent
[to which Robin graciously adds his t’pence about my “abilities” to decide any such thing. I am a marvelous mind reader, aren’t I]
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by-the-by I thought M Tobis was PhD of comp sci
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“The fact remains that Oreskes deliberately and deceptively called a paper “The scientific consensus on climate change” while using the search term “global climate change” thus leaving out 11,000 papers! Oreskes cleary cherry picked papers. This alone debunks her study. Even still as a direct criticism, every part of Peiser’s study stands except that when you criticize only Oreskes’ cherry picked papers (928 not 12,000) the 34 papers Peiser found doubting AGW may not have been included in Oreskes’ paper. No kidding! So he withdrew only this as a direct criticism of her paper. The rest of his criticism remains such as only 13 (1%) explicitly endorse the ‘consensus view’. Removing the 34 papers is irrelevant as Peiser’s study cleary shows that no consensus exists and Oreskes was not looking at all the papers (928 out of 12,000). Conclusion: Oreske’s paper is debunked and worthless.”
“I have stressed repeatedly, Oreskes entire argument is flawed as the whole ISI data set includes just 13 abstracts (less than 2%) that explicitly endorse what she has called the ‘consensus view’. In fact, the vast majority of abstracts do not mention anthropogenic climate change.” Benny Peiser.
Benny Peiser’s paper has NOT been refuted. Propaganda sites continue to intentionally distort Dr. Peiser’s clear position on this.
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Thank you, Wilbert, for clarifying Dr Peiser’s position on this.
I hope many will understand the meaning of what Peiser has concluded – that people cannot, of their own volition, define what constitutes a “consensus”
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Joanne Nova wrote:
I don’t think that a consensus is a democracy. Certainly there are no votes, but a theory becomes the accepted theory when there are no longer any competing ideas coming through.
When new evidence is presented, current theories are reconsidered. Science is an iterative process.
I’ve heard this discussion between young earth creationists and biologists.
“Science is not decided by consensus.” – Intelligent design proponent.
“Well, yes it is” – Biologist.
And it is.
But certainly not, as you correctly point out, by vote.
Being called to the Vatican that last time could have killed him. Especially with the Plague in Italy at the time. But he misjudged that it would be okay to publish, partly because there was a consensus. (And Italian science was falling behind the Germans, who thought that the geocentric system demanded by the church was irrelevant and backwards.)
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Steve Schapel wrote:
Such people exist, but my perception is that “very many” is pushing things a bit. Do you find the Doran and Zimmermann survey credible?
The consensus is fairly overwhelming amongst scientific organisations and universities.
Only if by “a very large proportion” you mean about 20% of scientists, about 10% of climatologists, and about 3% of climatologists who are currently actively publishing in the field of climate change.
When I hear “a very large proportion” I think of something considerably over 50%.
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Steve wrote:
Did you notice any of the papers that I bookmarked during your three year wait?
Well, Brian disagrees. But I take your point.
It diverges from about 1.6°C to about 6°C per doubling. Since the industrial revolution there has been a movement from 270 to 390ppm, which is log(390/270)/log(2) = 0.53 doublings. Which gives us 0.8°C to 3.2°C of warming due to anthropogenic CO2 alone. Which is most or all of the warming no matter what point in the divergence that you pick.
The amount of CO2 that will be released into the atmosphere in the future is a function of technology, the economy, and mitigation strategy. Different choices provide different scenarios.
How has it shown that?
I see good correlation between modelled and measured mean global surface temperatures.
I’m wary of that language because it is very similar to the language used by the creationists to get ID into the science classroom.
Of course the discussion of every scientific theory is not hurt by a balanced, unbiased statement of what is known and unknown. (Nor a discussion of critical thinking). Singling out what is known about global warming for particular analysis could easily give a biased impression.
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Steve Schapel wrote:
I’m not saying Lindzen and Carter don’t exist. I’m saying that they are a very small minority. About 3% of climate change climatologists.
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Tel wrote:
Sure, but there are not that many fiddle-factors. Only about half a dozen.
Sure, and models are more accurate at picking the mean global surface temperature than than the estimated implies. So it is likely that if the climate flicks to a different state, we will find that the parameters are only this good for the current region, and that we will be able to make a better estimate of the parameters for the general case.
Well, in this case complexity is simply accuracy by another name. Occam’s Razor doesn’t apply. (Which is for use when you have multiple theories that explain the same data, not when you have multiple approaches to produce the data.)
Modelling of buildings and bridges and vehicles is pretty sophisticated. There’s less error because construction choices are made that are unambiguous to model, but you can say which screw will need to be replaced before the others and when.
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Sorry, how is the titling of the paper “deliberately deceptive?”
Cherry picking would be looking through the papers and choosing the ones that meet your requried criteria. Oreskes chose all 928 papers that met the search term in the decade that she looked at. That’s not cherry picking.
Peiser’s study hasn’t even been published.
He also withdrew his criticism of Oreskes’ paper, and admitted that he only found one that rejected AGW (and that wasn’t peer reviewed). (see ABC, mediawatch)
Is this not the case?
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Robin,
I just found this blog yesterday (from WUWT, and have watched with much amusement as you buttress your beliefs in AGW by attempting to overwhelm everyone who argues against you with citations. I am an elementary particle physicist by training and in my research days have learned a thing or two about the scientific method, models, simulations and the like.
WIth all the respect in my heart, I’d like to suggest to you that there are two things about science that have been universal throughout history. First, data drives good science, NOT consensus. Secondly, for a hypothesis to make it to be a theory, it MUST be falsifiable. Theories cannot be proved, but they can be falsified, to paraphrase Einstein.
So I (and I suspect many of those who are labeled sceptics or deniers) don’t really care about consensus as being an indication that AGW is correct. Or that model predictions agree with each other. As Joanne has repeatedly and eloquently asked, where is the evidence?
I have seen much evidence that is not consistent with AGW, especially over the last 10 years. I still have an open mind on this – its too early to conclude anyhing. I’d rather wait another 10 years and see if the ocean heat content continues to stay flat, and if the troposphere temperature around the tropics continues to not increase, before I’ll be sure. I definitely haven’t seen anything conclusive from AGW proponents – mostly playing with AOGCM models or arcane statistics – with real data analysis being relegated to a secondary pastime, pursued only by some of the more diligent ones.
The science is definitely not settled – and having 97% of any group of people believing in that means nothing. Nature will tell us what is right, not the IPCC. I have seen more signals disappear with more data than get stronger – much as I wished that the data would support my pet signal. Humbling but true.
I am still looking for an AGW proponent to tell me what will falsify AGW. Ocean heat content? Tropospheric temperatures? A few threads ago you posted a citation claiming that global cooling was a consequence of AGW! To me thats a set of models with too many tunable parameters, if any outcome can be generated! If global temperatures stayed the same in 2100, that would interpreted as consistent with AGW, given the enormous variance in AOGCMs and the deep uncertainties in modelling clouds and cloud cover.
So, Robin, tell us what will falsify AGW. I know you believe in it. And I admire your tenacity in defending it, even if it just repeating a lot of the state of the art in AGW propaganda. You have been convinced by it – and if I convinced you that you too should be a sceptic, I would be doing you a great disservice. The data should make or break you as a believer, not the IPCC or Joanna or Brian or myself. So what does Nature have to do to falsify the AGW hypothesis?
You point to the paucity of journal publications that disprove AGW… how do you disprove a model? Sceptics aren’t claiming that they have a better model. They are saying that the data doesn’t show the cause for alarm. All that we can do is wait for more years of data. So I do not expect the volume of publications from sceptics that I do from AGW proponents – all I expect is diligent careful measurements from all experimental climate scientists, chemists, physicists, geologists, oceanographers, and the like – ones that don’t take sides.
And as far as consensus goes, I’m happy it works for you, as it does for a bunch of politicians, industrialists, policy makers an other vested interests, all for their own reasons. Scientists use other ways to determine what reality is – data.
Cheers.
P.S> Great blog, Joanne! Keep up the good work!
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Dear player,
A big thankyou for that clear and level headed exposition! How refreshing.
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Thank you, Anne-Kit! Thats a nice welcome for a first post!
Cheers.
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Hey Joanne, we just this minute received in the office the “Skeptics Handbook” with great cover letter from the Australian Climate Science Coalition – thanks! And fantastic to actually see it in print.
I shall bring it with me tomorrow when I meet with my employer at Parliament House.
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player wrote:
Not at all. If I was trying to do that I would start at the papers cited by chapter 9 of the IPCC reports, and put down several hundred citations.
These are merely papers that I have bookmarked because of some personal interest that show that the current warming is anthropogenic.
Hello.
Consensus lets you know when it’s right.
Each of the papers that I have cited describe evidence.
What?
Can you be more specific? What papers use arcane statistics? Why are they arcane?
Can you give some backing for this claim?
Who is providing a counter argument?
What aspect of the science is not settled?
Are we talking climate or particle physics here?
I don’t recall that. Can you point out the post?
I don’t think that global cooling can be a consequence of AGW.
Lots of things could have falsified it. If CO2 were not a greenhouse gas. If the warming were not accompanied by a cooling of the stratosphere. If the warming were not accompanied by a reduction in diurnal temperature range would all point to a mechanism different from the greenhouse effect.
If the proportion of carbon-14 or carbon-13 in the air had not decreased it would point to a different source of CO2 than the combustion of fossil fuels.
If global mean surface temperatures returned to 1900 levels without some obvious cooling cause such as an extraterrestrial impact of supervolcano, that would be a problem for AGW.
If it were shown that CO2 didn’t have the absorbtion spectrum in the IR that it has, that too would falsify AGW.
Most of these are pretty unlikely. Just by way of calibration, can you tell me what would falsify gravity?
I guess the main thing that would falsify AGW is if there was no warming. If temperatures drop to the mean value of the 70s or even 80s it would raise some questions. (As it is they are a good 0.1°C warmer than the 90s.) Or if CO2 and CH4 were not greenhouse gasses – which would take evidence so strong it is difficult to concieve of.
Make up your mind. Either I’m flooding the forum with scientific citiations or I’m repeating propaganda. Or do you claim that the scientific evidence is propaganda in this case?
I asked this question of Joanna on the other thread. I should ask it of you to. What does Nature have to do to falsify AGW denial?
By showing that it doesn’t describe the system to the assumed accuracy. By coming up with the mechanism that is happening in reality that is not being correctly modelled.
But you make the common mistake of claiming that the evidence requires models. Several of the papers that I have cited above do not use GCMs. So even without models there are several lines of evidence that show that the climate sensitivity is about 3°C per doubling. Or (or therefore) that the recent warming is anthropogenic.
What is the basis for that?
Why do you think that the climate sensitivity is less than 0.5 or so?
How do you answer evidence from the earth radiation budget, from past climate, from paleoclimatic reconstructions, and from a plethora of observational evidence to the contrary?
It seems to me that you’re missing a lot of evidence.
We can estimate climate sensitivity now to within a margin. The case was clear in 2001. It is much stronger now.
Can you make it clearer why the only thing we can do is wait? It seems to me that we have more than enough evidence now.
Ignoring clear findings in the data is not “not taking sides”. It is strongly taking a side.
And they argue about the interpretation of that data. And when the arguments stop they know that they agree … consensus!
Then it can go to the textbooks, the schools and the politicians.
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Western Australia’s Curtin University Research:
“Ice Shelves stable over six years”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25648336-11949,00.html
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I used to accept that the Earth was warming because of rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, although I was a little troubled by some of the media buzz around it. The electric power company I worked for had committed to limiting its carbon emissions at or below its 2000 levels, so there had to be substance behind global warming theory.
I’m not sure at what point I stopped simply accepting anthropogenic (human caused) global warming. I can say that for well over a year I’ve been reading a lot of climate change related material and have a much better understanding of the topic than I once had.
Below is some of what I’ve come to believe and understand related to the Earth’s climate.
…… Anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis.
…… Even though anthropogenic global warming is an unproven hypothesis, it is likely that some warming may be occurring due to human activities such as land usage and urbanization.
…… There is no proof that continued rise in CO2 will result in continued rise in global temperatures.
…… Carbon dioxide acts as a greenhouse gas by absorbing infrared radiation in three narrow bands of frequencies, (2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µM)), meaning that most of the heat producing infrared radiation frequencies escapes absorption by CO2. The main peak, 15 µM, is absorbed completely within about 10 meters of the ground meaning that there is no more to absorb. Doubling the human contribution of CO2 would reduce this distance. Reducing the distance for absorption would not result in an increase in temperature.
…… Earth is a water world. It is also a very complex — and chaotic — heat transfer mechanism. Changing one minor parameter, such as carbon dioxide, will likely result in compensation in some other aspect of the global heat transfer process.
…… Q = mc∆T;
…… The science of climate change is not settled. Science is never settled. There is always more to learn, more to add.
…… Consensus on climate change is not science. It’s politics. Science isn’t done by consensus, as I understand it.
…… For a scientist to be a skeptic on climate change is not a bad thing. Skepticism and questioning are important aspects of science.
…… The Earth appears to have been cooling overall for most of this young century.
…… The reports of the danger to polar bears are premature. They are also recycled over and over again.
…… Predictions of catastrophes caused by global warming are premature. Many are recycled over and over. Predictions based on unproven hypotheses is irresponsible and dangerous when they are used to make policy.
…… The prediction of an Arctic free of ice is premature. AMSRE-A Sea Ice Extent has 6 1/2 years of history. The sea arctic sea ice extent currently higher than most of the other years at this point in the annual cycle. AMSRE-A = Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observing System.
…… Antarctic sea ice extent is getting larger.
…… A recent survey found Arctic ice to be thicker than expected. (radiobremen)
© 2009 M. Goad, Arkansas, USA
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Mike Goad wrote:
That’s not right, Mike. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Increasing it’s atmospheric concentration increases the greenhouse effect.
There is plenty of the absorbance spectrum of CO2 that is not saturated. Optics is a very well understood science, and this point is not controversial.
Is the science settled about the world not being flat?
It is scientists, not politicians that that are in consensus.
Yes. But skepticism is only useful when it is informed skepticism. A discussion of why the climate sensitivity might be nearer 1.5 than 4 is good if it is informed. A discussion of whether or not CO2 is fully saturated is not, because the answer is well known.
The mean temperature for this decade is much warmer than the mean temperature for last decade. Trends of half a sunspot cycle are awkward to spot statistical significance.
The northern summer sea ice extent is trending downwards.
This year, ice older than two years accounted for less than 10% of the ice cover at the end of February. From 1981 through 2000, such older ice made up an average of 30% of the total sea ice cover at this time of the year. (NSIDC)
Young ice is thinner, warmer, and has a lower melting point than perennial ice.
Polar bears are not going to be extinct in the wild in the first half of this century, but most populations will be adversely affected by the reduction in sea ice that we are seeing.
Models have long predicted that Antarctica will be more robust to warming than the Arctic. (The peninsular, however, is seeing rapid warming.) The increased precipitation due to warming is increasing the glacier flow rates which is pushes out more ice.
The Antarctic has nearly no multi year sea ice, so you can’t use it to track climate trends like you can with the northern sea ice.
Good. But that doesn’t reverse climate change. Expectations have been pretty low since the northern summer sea ice extent dropped 25% in one year in 2006.
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Robin said: “Is the science settled about the world not being flat?”
That’s not science. That the earth is a globe is well a proven fact.
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Robin,
at 237 you stated “Consensus lets you know when it’s right”
Leaving out the dubious IPCC, Herd mentality proves nothing. I have more respect for the few brave souls who are prepared to stand up for what they believe in AGAINST the herd – right or wrong! History is littered with examples of the consensus getting it wrong.
Personally I agree with Socrates “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
One example of herd thought that might interest you- http://www.suppressedscience.net/inertiaofscientificthought.html
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I like the list of scientific institutions by Robin.
They all agreed with the IPCC!!! .. must have been a mind boggling task to achieve that consensus. They have their own members on the IPCC review board.. like other IPCC members such as Hansen Gavin S. Stephen Schneider M Mann Connolly the WWF, sierra club, greenpeace ..etc
It should not be no surprise if they all agreed with their own reports.
and then we get the good old “5.1 × 1018 kilograms..wow! without a mention that CO2 is still only .036% of the atmosphere and .018% is attributed to mankind.
Then we get this…”270 to 390ppm, which is log(390/270)/log(2) = 0.53 doublings. Which gives us 0.8°C to 3.2°C of warming due to anthropogenic CO2 alone.”
satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded.The only way to get 3.2C is to add the “heat Islands” from urban areas or the old IPCC assumption. humans are the cause of the recent increase of CO2 doesn’t tell anything about the influence of increased CO2 on temperature!
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When one steps back and looks at it, the thought of burning 0.0000000000002% by weight of the Earth’s crust to conrribute a 0.0003% by weight to the Earth’s atmosphere each year will cause some kind of carastrophic damage –
The idea is nuts. It’s just plain nuts.
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By the way Mike Goad, your Power Company just did that as a PR stunt.
They knew they could buy the excess off the grid (for a while, anyway) to make up the difference.
That stunt can’t be kept up in perpetuity, however
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Brian – Actually, they did it by buying nuclear power plants that were struggling to go it alone. The company is now the second largest nuclear utility in the United States. As well, through life extensions, power uprates, reduced outage time, and improved efficiency, they’ve increased actual power produced. They’ve also started working towards at least 2 new nuclear power plants, but haven’t yet committed as there is still a lot of uncertainty in the prospects for new nuclear.
The prettiest blue in the world, in my view, is Cherenkov blue, when all the other lights are out.
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I love Čerenkov blue, too. I’m from DOE, sure enough!
I knew about the cooperative agreements with the nuclear facilities. That’s what I meant by “buying it off the grid”
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The US needs to build up base load capacity or we’re headed for trouble
We need COAL COAL COAL
We need NUCLEAR NUCLEAR NUCLEAR
We need to UPGRADE UPGRADE UPGRADE transmission and distribution
And we need to start drilling our own oil and increase refinery capacity like mad.
As I see it, the Obama Administration will throw a few tens of billions dollars down the toilet on solar and wind projects and so on –
but only for 3½ more years, then someone with some COMMON SENSE will take over and clean up the mess.
He can only ruin just so much, and waste just so much, in so short a time span
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Hey – want to see a “Game Changer*”?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/16/obama-climate-change-impacts
EVERYTHING about the HISTORICAL climate in this thing is wrong.
What an embarrassment!
*US Science Advisor John Holdren
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“The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable. The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7C (about 1.2F) during the twentieth century.” Watts Up With That
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The “game changers” can’t even seem to get their corrections corrected.
• This article was amended on Wednesday 17 June 2009. We confused the absolute with the incremental in reporting that a rise in temperature of 1.5F corresponds to an decrease of 17C. It is a rise of 0.8C. This has been corrected.
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Robin said (#153)
“Science is done by consensus!”
Well, that’s a wrap for me for me on this thread. I’ve got better ways to spend my time than reading the thoughts of someone hopelessly lost in groupthink, incapable of looking further back in time than the last 100 years.
To my fellow skeptics, cheers!
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I agree with Steve.
The comments have degenerated to a debate between Robin and everyone else.
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Hello Robin,
My day job interferes with me making too many posts a day, so sorry for the delay in responding.
Firstly, let me clarify my stance. I am not quite a “denier” of AGW in the sense of claiming that a) the global temperature does not show a rising trend and b) That CO2 cannot induce climate forcing.
Rather, I’m more of an AGW sceptic, i.e.
– The data to date is unconvincing that GW is all AGW. Pure CO2 forcing has been augmented by positive feedback mechanisms that are poorly understood to create alarming predictions of temperature increases, but the results have been portrayed as final and binding.
– There are serious doubts in my mind about the accuracy of the surface temperature measurement, especially in the US.
– The entire body of evidence and data to date is not consistent with AOGCMs being accurate. Joanne’s post on “Missing Climate Headlines” does a great job in highlighting some of these deficiencies. Ocean heat content, satellite temperature in the tropics, Antarctic ice growth, lack of warming over the last decade – among others, are not consistent with GW being AGW.
– The accuracy of past temperature records through proxies is questionable at best, sloppy inaccurate analysis at its worst.
– Natural causes for temperature rise such as solar effects, PDO, ENSO appear to be capable of explaining some of the variation in temperature, but are hardly acknowledged by the AGW party line.
Bottom line: If I study the totality of evidence today, I’d accept a 1 – 1.5 degree/century increase, and see no compelling evidence that its 3 degrees or 5 degrees/century. Over a 100 year period that is hardly what I would call catastrophic, especially one that warrants spending trillions of dollars.
Now to some of your questions:
Arcane statistics? Lets start with Mann et al 1998. The Wegman report details why the statistics are arcane an in fact incorrect.
Q: Can you give some backing for this claim?
A: See above
Q: Who is providing a counter argument?
A: Nature.
Q: What aspect of the science is not settled?
A: See above.
(sorry I haven’t mastered block quotes)
Q: Are we talking climate or particle physics here?
First hand, in particle physics. Although this is by no means unique to any field where statistical inferences have to be derived.
Q: I don’t recall that. Can you point out the post?
A: In the post about Postage stamps and AGW. I’ll dig out the paper once I get some time.
I don’t think that global cooling can be a consequence of AGW.
A: My bad – I should have written “is consistent with” instead of ” a consequence of”. You are right.
Q: Just by way of calibration, can you tell me what would falsify gravity?
A: Newtonian gravity was falsified early in the 20th century, and was superseded by General Relativity. General Relativity is likely to be falsified by something else. Observation of repulsion – i.e. the gravitino not being a spin 2 object, would be a pretty serious problem for quantum gravity theories, and all preceeding theories. I took one single observation to overturn Newtonian Gravity being universal, the precession of Mercury’s orbit – despite the spectacular successes of Newtonian Gravity. And so it is with all theories, one piece of data can falsify them.
What you did not specify in your falsification criteria was, how long should no temperature rise continue before we say AGW is not viable? I am not disputing that CO2 can cause forcing (there is physics there), I am only disputing that we understand all the feedback mechanisms to derive the true climate sensitivity to CO2 concentration increase. So it appears to me that to falsify AGW we will have to wait for more data. To shut sceptics like myself up, I’d like Nature to be consistent with AOGCM projectons today and in the near future before I take predictions a 100 years from now seriously.
Q:Make up your mind. Either I’m flooding the forum with scientific citiations or I’m repeating propaganda. Or do you claim that the scientific evidence is propaganda in this case?
A: You seem to be under the impression that just because a result is published in a peer reviewed journal, it is scientific fact. It is not. It only becomes fact when other attempts to reproduce the result are successful as well, and there are not outstanding results or data that contradicts it.
The classic example of “Correlation is not causation” – the study that apparently demonstrated that children who sleep with lights on develop myopia more frequently was peer reviewed and published, and widely reported in the press. The study was overturned when people realized that the parents left lights on were also myopic, and so the real cause was genetics, and had nothing to do with lights. So yes, I have made up my mind, uncorroborated controversial citations are in fact propaganda.
And once again, consensus does not define science. The Yang-Lee parity violation assumption that Brian uses illustrates that pretty well.
Cheers.
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I’ll go along with most of what Player says – excepting the following:
Suppose at the outside we have see a 1.5 deg. C rise in temp over a century.
OK. That is in the range of natural climate variability! Show me how to disentangle the CO2 contribution of that.
You can’t! I KNOW that if CO2 is neglected, that I can show pretty much the whole 1.5 was geothermal of origin – IF I NEGLECT EVERYTHING ELSE.
Similarly, I can show the whole effect was Solar of orgin.
Or anything else you like – the sum and substance of which is, that’s what you mean by natural variability!
Putting the CO2 thing in there as a quantity that has a quantitative interpretation HAS NO MEANING if it comes within the range of everything else that could have or did have an influence on the climate.
Some days I think that I’m the only blockhead there is who thinks that what I have said makes any sense
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Mike Goad wrote:
So science doesn’t include any facts?
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Plonk wrote:
As Einstein is paraphrased as saying above, theories are not proved, but disproved.
Semantics aside, I wasn’t saying that herd mentality is sufficient evidence, I was saying that sufficient evidence eventually aligns scientists behind a theory.
And this is how it progresses. The mechanism by which ideas get into the school curriculum is that first they are judged true, not by vote or by act of committee or by decree of a monarch (or pope) but by consensus.
That’s what the word consensus means … a general agreement. Science, being the cat herd that it is (conspiracy theories about global warming research fraud aside), has no more formal mechanism by which theories become accepted truth.
There’s just consensus.
Many people posting here have tried to construct a false dichotomy, because the idea that science progresses by consensus is abhorrent to their politics, and saying science progresses not by consensus, but by experimentation, interpretation and tests. (One gentleman even suggested “data”, which is a bit contrived, but he wanted to make the point that the only thing to do is wait … for more data).
There is no dichotomy. Science progresses by these things too.
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wilbert Robichaud (post :
Hi!
I still find the conspiracy theory that scientific organisations only agree because of the IPCC highly unlikely. There must be the better part of 100 organisations on that list. They are from different cultures both academically and socially. They are from different language groups, and from countries with different governments and different economies. Surely some professional or scientific society, or university would stand up for truth, (and take the kudos of overturning the paradigm).
But I repeat myself. If you don’t think the conspiracy theory is nuts, know that I find in uncompelling.
The CO2 calculation was to show that the increase is due to human activity. It seems to be that it is. (There is also first order evidence of this from the change in isotope ratios of Carbon in the atmosphere).
Yes, it is also only 390ppm(v). I’m sorry you feel I was being dishonest by not metioning it. I thought it was fairly well known, and I don’t see how it affects the fact that there is multiple lines of evidence that show that human activity is responsible for the meansured increase in atmospheric CO2.
I’m not sure what your point is about the rate of temperature increase. You seem to be saying that CO2 warming can be tested by measuring this rate. Do you have a citation for the details of what is expected under CO2 warming compared to other warming?
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player wrote:
Not at all.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I don’t think it is fair to say that the positive feedback mechanisms are poorly understood, given that they are reproduced in models.
The mechanisms are generally very well understood. (Clouds and cloud feedback do remain a large source of error)
I don’t see these results that are portrayed as final and binding. I see estimates of a range of climate sensitivities, and the confidence interval stated in every case. (Well, the denialist literature has a tendency to not include estimates of accuracy nor treatment of errors, and will occasionally just make absolute statements. But the scientific literature is not like this.) Do you have an example of the sort of portrayal that you are talking about?
Well, the US has a good history of measurement. And comparison of still to windy days and urban to rural trends show that the UHI effect is undetectable. So I’m not sure of what might be the basis of these serious doubts. Nevertheless, 70% of the world is ocean, so that is the part that needs to be accurate to detect global effects. And only 2% of the world is the US.
They’re not perfect with regional climate. They’re fairly spectacular with global mean temperature.
Ocean heat content seems to be increasing. I suspect that you are considering out of date data when you say that it is not in line with AGW.
Satellite temperatures are non-trivial to isolate, and a poorer judge of lower troposphere temperature than land/ocean based measurements. They do confirm warming though.
Antarctic ice growth is perfectly in line with predictions under AGW.
There has been warming over the last decade. The lack of warming over the past 7 years is not out of line with AGW. (There was a similar period in the 70s and 80s at the end of the sunspot cycle).
The IPCC 2007 report had 12 recent northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions. (And there has been one high profile one since).
Do you claim that they are all “questionable or sloppy”?
Is there some common procedure that was sloppy, or do you have different objections to each paper?
I’m not aware of this lack of acknowledgement. Meehl et al. (linked above) is one of a couple of papers that separates the warming into that attributable to any forcing. (PDO and ENSO not being forcings, but certainly their effect on temperature is noted, if imperfectly modelled).
How much is a life worth? The (approximately) 300,000 deaths per year we are seeing today is only from 0.8°C of warming. (Approximately) 300 million significantly adversely affected has a dollar cost too. Another 1-1.5°C takes us to high cost/high casualty tipping points such as the loss of the northern summer sea ice.
And the warming doesn’t stop until you stop burning fossil fuels.
… My real life is pressing, but I’ll respond you the rest of your post presently. Thanks again for your response to my questions.
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Learn to “Shadowbox” – in your spare time, in the comfort of your home!
Send $5 and self-addressed stamped envelope to:
Time-Waster Productions
PO Box 600
Chicago, Illinois 60616
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300,000 deaths per year.
The problem I have with this is the implication that the only way to prevent these deaths is to do something about global warming. This isn’t so.
These people aren’t dying from the heat; they are dying from malaria, diarrhea, and other diseases that afflict the poorer parts of the world. And 300,000 is only a fraction of the total number of people who die from these diseases each year. All of these lives could be saved by relatively simple and inexpensive actions that have nothing to do with the warming. And these same actions would save thousands of others who are dying from these same diseases, but whose deaths aren’t being blamed on the use of fossil fuels.
Climate change mitigation would be the most difficult and least effective way to save these lives.
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yeah like water treatment plants that use more electricity than can provided with a solar panel or two
and lots of mechanical power to drill or dredge or dam for water where it is needed
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OK Robin, answer this.
The IPCC uses a heuristic to estimate forcing power, which for doubling CO2 is about 3.7 W/m^2. I’ll concede that this is a reasonably conservative upper limit if you ignore the effects of water vapor and clouds. However, the heuristic called the climate sensitivity, whose ‘consensually’ agreed value is 0.8, multiplies this 3.7 W/m^2 into 3 degrees of change. The difference in solar forcing energy between perihelion and aphelion is about 80 watts/m^2. Dividing by 4 gives us an average forcing of about 20 watts/m^2. Multiplying by 0.8 tells us that the average global temperature between June and January should be about 16C which is clearly not evident and in fact, the temperature difference is 4C in the opposite direction, owing to the northern hemisphere winter snow that is close to maximum at perihelion. The sensitivity metric is not CO2 dependent and even if CO2 was at fault, any other temperature increase will have the same effect. You might try and claim that the system responds too slowly, but seasonal change indicates otherwise. The change in energy between perihelion and aphelion varies at the same rate as the seasonal solar energy so a response can’t be fudged away.
The IPCC heuristic unambiguously implies that as a consequence of feedbacks (CO2, ice and other), any increase in surface energy will have an ultimate effect on the surface temperature equivalent to more than 4 times that of the original forcing energy. This effect is not present in any of the data. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it had to be done.
George
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The IPCC 2007 report had 12 recent northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions. (And there has been one high profile one since).http://www.realclimate.org/images/ipcc_6_1_large.jpg.
again the IPCC? and realclimate to boot. M Mann who happens to work for the IPCC and owner of realclimate with his famous broken hockey stick graph.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
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player wrote:
That’s a fairly controversial example, and it only reflects upon past climate, not the current one.
Pus the Wegman report is a bit dubious, in that it wasn’t peer reviewed itself. The National Academies Report gave Mann et al a near total vindication, and I think that it was the more scientific and less political of the two reports.
Do you have a better example of a paper that looks at an aspect key to the anthropogenic or natural cause of the current warming that uses “arcane statistics”? Such as an estimation of the climate sensitivity or a decomposition of the warming into responses to natural and anthropogenic forcing? With a less controversial example of “arcane statistics”?
I was looking for something a bit more specific. You see your claims that “The science is not settled” don’t have any backing on its own. What papers in the peer-reviewed literature are countering the basic consensus?
I think you know that “Nature” is providing a counter argument is not answering the question. In order to believe you, I need to know what aspect of nature, who measured it, and why it contradicts the consensus. Do you understand my position? I’ve been keeping an eye on the research, and it seems to me that Nature supports AGW. You need to give me an example of where it doesn’t to answer the question.
As for
Do you mean that the temperature reconstructions over the last 1000 years or so are the part of the science that is yet to be settled?.
Sure there’s some error there. Proxies have a way of measuring local and not global temperature variation.
If that’s all then I take it you fully accept that the climate sensitivity is about 3°C? Because that’s where there is a consensus. Past temperature reconstructions by proxy don’t enjoy a consensus, and I am happy to agree that there are some significant unknowns.
I don’t think global cooling is consistent with AGW either.
Are you sure that post was by me?
Well unlike particle physics where the theories are discrete in the sense that finding a graviton will define this result as right or wrong, the climate sensitivity is something to be measured, it could sit in a continuous range, and the laws of physics don’t step from one set to another as it is pinned down to a more and more accurate value.
I have seen a list of 60 peer-reviewed estimations of climate sensitivity, and that stopped about a decade ago, so most of the 17 papers I cite above are not amongst them. So there are probably 70 or 80 such papers now. And as we both accept CO2 does increase the temperature. So the question is how much?
I could be convinced by only a few papers using a range of evidence that the climate sensitivity is less that 6, 5, 4 or even 3.
To convince me that it is less than 1.5 would take a vast amount of evidence … either 50 odd papers confirming this low value, or several papers, and a decent credible explanation of why existing techniques have been so much in error.
In terms of how long a period would have to pass without significant warming, again, it would be whether or not such a period is statistically explicable or not. 7 years of during a decline is solar irradiance in the absence of a strong El-Nino is completely expected. At a guess I would say that three sunspot cycles, about 33 years would start to look statistically awkward – but I’d still do the statistics. A bit El Nino at the start of the 33 years and a big La Nina at the end combined with certain configurations of volcanic, aerosol and solar forcing might be perfectly explicable. Something outside the 95% confidence interval given current understanding would make me sit up, and something outside the 99% confidence interval would make me very seriously question.
Well they’re disturbingly spot on already with respect to global mean surface temperature.
And you don’t need AOGCMs to establish that the climate sensitivity is over 1.5. Several of the papers that I have linked above provide independent evidence of that. (Which establishes AGW, unless you don’t accept that the increase in greenhouse gasses is anthropogenic, and there is strong direct evidence of that).
Not at all. As I have said above science is an iterative process. But you seem to be under the impression that peer reviewed scientific research is propaganda if it doesn’t deny AGW. It is not. If there is some political or financial conflict of interest that is undeclared then the paper is withdrawn and the author’s career in respectable science ends.
None of those papers are particularly controversial. And the suggestion that they are uncorroborated is difficult to understand. At the least the corroborate each other, but the scientific literature has about 70 papers that estimate climate sensitivity, and only half a dozen end up with a interval that doesn’t include about 3°C. Surely 60 peer reviewed papers using a wide range of evidence that all fall in agreement counts as corroboration?
But, apparently sexism does define science. It was Wu who established the violation.
And, as pointed out, this is very different to the climate situation. The climate sensitivity is much studied. Parity non-conservation was discovered as soon at it was looked for. (And confirmed independently before Wu’s paper hit the Journals).
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Robin,
Before I respond to your most recent post in more detail, as there is so much discussion of “consensus is science” on this thread, I’d like to add my $0.02.
The minimum bar for any theory to be accepted as valid is a) 100 % of the data should be consistent with it b) It should make predictions that are falsifiable and c) there should be sufficient data to validate that it is not falsified.
The number of publications in favor of a theory has nothing to do with its validity. A great example is supersymmetry in particle physics. Since it was introduced in the early 70’s, there have probably been more papers with SUSY in it that any other topic in particle physics for the last 30 years. It is an elegant, brilliant formalism and solves many of the very serious problems with the Standard Model.
Some of the best known physicists of the world have researched and written about it, 100s of millions have been spend by international collaborations, looking for SUSY particles, but there has been one persistent problem with SUSY. Not a single supersymmetric particle has been observed.
The status of SUSY – not yet a physical theory, even though the vast majority believe that it has to be true, or at least, will be reincarnated in superstring formalisms. Superstrings of course suffer from the same issues too.
SUSY satisfies a) and b) but not c). The consensus as you describe it is far stronger than AGW. But the jury is still out. Perhaps the LHC will show a signal. Till then SUSY is wishful thinking.
AGW does not satisfy a) – there are still outstanding issues with data. I know you assert otherwise – I don’t agree.
Satellite measurements are a serious problem that isn’t going away. While still not inconsistent with AGW, the 7 year lack of rise in temperature is dangerously near excluding OAGCMs at 95% CL – more data will tell, but it certainly implies that unless that rights itself, that bit of science isn’t settled – both sides are waiting with bated breath to see what happens. 2009 is not looking too warm either, so far….
AGW may be able to satisfy b) (tell me how many years I need to wait for temperature to be flat or falling) and c)only after more data is collected over the next several years.
Transalation: The jury is out. I remain, yours truly, a sceptic.
And by the way, your curious statistic about 97% of climatologists agreeing with AGW, and thereby establishing consensus in your eyes – where do you get this statistic? Who you define as a climatologist? And do they agree with runaway AGW as per the IPCC? And what is the time period that you consider? And do only climatologists have a say on whether AGW consensus exists?
I will address your comments in the previous post in more detail as time allows.
Cheers.
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Brian,
You said –
“OK. That is in the range of natural climate variability! Show me how to disentangle the CO2 contribution of that.”
Fair enough – given the current uncertainty on forcings, its not clear how to do this today. The hope is that in the future decades, we will have much better high resolution accurate data over a longer period of time, and we will better understand the dynamics of climate, and have more computing power, and be able to resolve this. But, I could be wrong – climate systems may turn out to be chaotic in some sense and we may never be able to tell.
Point taken.
Cheers.
00
Wu conducted an experiment suggested to her by Chen-Ning Yang to prove parity breadown in beta decay
Ladies and Gentlemen, Left and Right have an ABSOLUTE meaning in this Universe!
Surprise, surprise. I think I know why this is but I’m not going to describe it here
And as East and West on all flat maps
(as I am one)
are One,
So Death shall touch the resurrection
00
” Pus the Wegman report is a bit dubious, in that it wasn’t peer reviewed itself. ” the same goes with the MBH98/99 is was not peer reviewed why we needed M&M. in 2002 …maybe PUS is the right word to use here.
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Gee, Wilbert, give him a break, will ya?
Today’s winner of the Trou du (Q) award goes to …
none other than …
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last week’s winner …
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If you examine the credentials of most of the scientists who are on the AGW side, They tend to be environmental scientists, oceanographers, meteorologists, anthropologists and those from other ‘soft’ sciences who tend to be more interested in the ‘what if’ part of science. The kinds of scientists who are more often skeptics are from the ‘hard’ sciences like physics, chemistry, biology and the engineering disciplines who are more interested in the ‘why’ part of science. The skeptics either understand how to quantify the underlying physical mechanisms, or are skeptics because so many AGW arguments contain the obvious markers of junk science (http://www.palisad.com/co2/junk_sci.html). I know that there are exceptions in both directions, but I’m just pointing out an observed trend.
The consensus among all scientists is that greenhouse gases have some effect on the climate. The tipping point in the debate is whether or not this effect is big enough to worry about. Those on the AGW side are blind to the many other important factors and insist that theirs is the only one that matters and falsely extend the consensus to embrace their false ideology. That so many have been suckered in to this illustrates a basic failure of all educational systems to instill the basic rigors of objective scientific debate into the curriculum. As scientists, we should be embarrassed that the AGW hoax has been able to achieve as much traction as it has.
George
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Michael Collard wrote:
I don’t disagree with that. And even the most hopeful of amelioration advocates are now talking adaptation as well, because it looks simply too late.
My understanding is that reducing fossil fuel use is cheaper than much of the life saving international aid that we engage in. But not certainly not all. In many areas drinking water can be provided by digging a relatively cheap well, and mortality can be dramatically reduced. (Of course it’s not generally being done, but the world’s like that).
I don’t think that that’s completely fair.
And oil won’t go forever, so we’ll have to change that technology at some point. Do you want a controlled change now, or a sudden exponential growth in cost then, accompanied by the environmental destruction, abandonment of coastal infrastructure and changes to the location of arable land?
Encouraging clean technologies now is a win-win outcome. Or a “no-brainer” as we call them down here.
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co2isnotevil:
The IPCC uses a heuristic to estimate forcing power, which for doubling CO2 is about 3.7 W/m^2. I’ll concede that this is a reasonably conservative upper limit if you ignore the effects of water vapor and clouds. However, the heuristic called the climate sensitivity, whose ‘consensually’ agreed value is 0.8, multiplies this 3.7 W/m^2 into 3 degrees of change. The difference in solar forcing energy between perihelion and aphelion is about 80 watts/m^2. Dividing by 4 gives us an average forcing of about 20 watts/m^2. Multiplying by 0.8 tells us that the average global temperature between June and January should be about 16C which is clearly not evident and in fact, the temperature difference is 4C in the opposite direction, owing to the northern hemisphere winter snow that is close to maximum at perihelion. The sensitivity metric is not CO2 dependent and even if CO2 was at fault, any other temperature increase will have the same effect. You might try and claim that the system responds too slowly, but seasonal change indicates otherwise.
I’m taking your figures on faith, but given that, yes, that’s exactly what I would claim.
The time for the climate to reach 60% of its response to an increase in forcing is something in the range 25-50 years. (Depending on what the climate sensitivity is, (see Hansen et al.))
The response to harmonic forcing on an annual frequency would be powerfully damped.
Needless to say, (given my response above), I’m not understanding this. Seasons occur because the sun is shining more directly on a part of the globe. The mean global surface temperature is not affected much, and the processes that have to complete before it is affected don’t have to have completed.
I thought that the middle value of about 3°C was about 3 times. But ballpark, I agree.
Well, it’s present in the temperature/CO2 concentrations of the last 700 years, and the last 420,000,000 years. It is present in earth radiation budget data. It is present in volcanic forcing – global temperature data. In fact it is present in all the 17 papers I cite above.
In what data is it not present?
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Robin,
Isn’t it though? You asked for an example. That one is the grand daddy. Amazingly, no one in the community of “climatologists” even bothered to try to reproduce it – one of hallmarks for a result to be scientifically valid, until an unknown geologist and a professor in Canada took the paper to task 5 years later. This is the quality of peer reviewed climatology research?
Wegman had no axe to grind with anyone, nor any political agenda. His analysis of the social relationships between the tight cabal of so-called climatologists who were co-authoring and reviewing Mann was actually very telling as well, and helped me understand why so many papers were rubber stamped in the review process, an why no one bothers to cross check results.
But, if you want a more recent example of this, try Steig et al 2008 on Antarctic temperature rise. The PCA technique with only 3 PCs surfaces again. No peer-reviewed publications to refute it yet – but Ryan O. is trying to get funds together to submit the refutation for publication.
You seem to believe that peer review is the only way to have a scientifically result. The wonderful thing about science is that it does not care what degrees or credentials the investigator has. If the logic and methods are clear and reproducible, I don’t care if its written on a napkin or a journal, if the author is a Nobel Laureate or an administrative assistant – its a valid scientific result. You may disagree but thats not the way science works.
And, it doesn’t matter if there are 10,000 peer reviewed articles supporting AGW, one single data based result against it can and will overturn it.
Cheers.
PS. I am trying to keep response to one topic at a time. Answering 50 questions in one response is too tedious.
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“Encouraging clean technologies now is a win-win outcome. Or a “no-brainer” as we call them down here.”
Clean Energy? what is Clean Energy? what is it built with?
we need oil to built them and we need the industrial complex with it’s evil CO2 emmission.
We will need more mines to produce these raw materials. We will need more Chemical plants for the acid for the batteries for electric cars and more ..gasp! Lead. the plastic needed will have to come form oil meaning more drilling. Add all the trucks and machinery’s needed to haul.all the landscape destruction. is that not exactly what the Environmentalist are all against?
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Is that an argument?
If the IPCC left out any important northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions, please point me to them, and I’ll consider them.
Those are the 12 that I know about, that were prior to the 2007 IPCC report.
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Player wrote:
Okay, I think that that’s not even nearly right. 7 years is not even exceptional, certainly not during a period of declining solar irradiance.
Do you have a scientific source that backs this claim?
00
Robin M Grant: “… as we call them down here”
Down, but not out, eh?
Any relation to Ulysses S Grant?
00
Player,
I thank you for your very clear and pertinent comments.
I hope you won’t now think me impertinent. One of the things that raises the tone of this blog is that most of the key commenters identify themselves by name. If you have a good reason to not do so, then so be it.
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Kevin Trenberth, an advisor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made some startling admissions regarding the IPCC’s use of computer General Circulation Modules (GCMs)
Nature magazine.. Trenberth concedes GCMs cannot predict future climate and claims the IPCC is not in the business of climate prediction. Among other things, Trenberth asserts “. . . there are no (climate) predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been”. Instead, there are only “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. This might be news to some people.
IPCC and realclimate ..Gavin S. “GCMs modeler” is running RC owner: M Mann..IPCC reviewers Gavin S. and M Mann.
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Robin,
Maybe you could consider using another word than “consensus”. If you use a word to mean something different from what most other people understand it to mean, you run the risk of the type of confusion we have experienced here over the last day or two.
I think some dictionaries allow a meaning similar to what Joanne was referring to when she talked about votes and stuff, i.e. a majority opinion. But I think the more common understanding is that it is a common understanding, i.e. a viewpoint that has been arrived at by taking account of the perspective of everyone involved, to the extent that it is acceptable to all. Borders on unanimity.
I think I know what you are getting at. You mean that a theory gains greater acceptance as a result of gaining greater acceptance. Right?
Why some of the sceptics are so sensitive to this type of approach is because such a profound tautology can in practice so easily be confused with a statement about whether the idea is correct. I know you wouldn’t do this yourself, but I have seen instances of where AGW advocates have implied that the AGW conjecture is demonstably true because it has gained greater acceptance. And you know what, they sometimes use the word “consensus” in this context. It is allied to the famous “the debate is over” gobbledegook.
So you see, I am not sure what is a better word for what you are trying to express, but “consensus” is possibly ill-advised.
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Robin:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/ipcc-projections-overpredict-recent-warming/
I like Lucia – she is fair – looks at the data and doesn’t reach any unwarranted conclusions. Like I said, it doesn’t invalidate IPCC AR4, but raises a lot of eyebrows. Now, as you say, if we have to wait 33 years of this before AGW can be falsified definitively, well, lets wait instead of spending trillions. We got a 7 year start!
Cheers.
00
Hey there Player
Chaotic or not, the stochastic noise of the climate backgound is probably pretty close to white
Makes you wonder what could be discerned from that
although the 3 deg. K radiation of the cosmic background (that is the cosmic background) was discerned
but it was known, that whatever temperature it corresponded to, would be a complete Planck spectrum of a black body (and was the only thing in the Universe that could be so)
in this case we have no such formal distribution, but we have
(I gave a talk on this at Heartland in March in NY)
00
Robin, Re 274,
I’m aware of the Hansen paper and don’t put much stock in it. His arguments have been widely disputed, so I won’t waste my time disputing them individually or disparaging him, so I’ll only complement him on his achievements. I think it was brilliant in the way that he brought his pet cause to the forefront despite an utter lack of unambiguous evidence. Manipulating politicians like Gore is not an easy thing to do. Making this a political issue was a stroke of genius. Right or wrong, he could get his way. The way that the error in the data was pushed in favor of his theory, or more likely, small corrections that go against AGW are the first things cut from budgets, was so well obscured and justified that he felt comfortable in citing this data anomaly as support of his claims. He happens to be wrong, but I’m sure he would have a difficult time letting go of this as his career is defined by his position on AGW. Wasn’t he the first to raise the alarm?
More to the point, there’s no evidence to support the kind of time constants required for your hypothesis to be true. Contrary to your claim, the global average temperature does change by quite a lot. Local averages have monthly variability far in excess of this, even over oceans. More importantly, the combination of the various latitudinal slices of the Earth as small as 2.5 degrees exhibit the precise response of the climate system to incident energy variability. Here are some temperature plots. The first is a plot of the global average monthly temperature and the second has plots of the average temperatures for each of 3 60 degree slices of the planet. BTW, this data is directly from the isccp.giss.nasa.gov web site which is under Hansen’s control. You can see the little post 9/11 bias in the data very clearly as a discontinuity. This was caused by a change in the way the data was processed, but was apparently not propagated to all of the data. It’s a mini version of the hockey stick flaw which has also been cited as evidence of warming.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/avg_temp.gif
http://www.palisad.com/co2/avg_temp_3.gif
The mean climate system thermal lag is about 45 days, which is the typical lag between minimum/maximum seasonal solar input and the seasonal minimum/maximum temperatures. This can be extracted from the daily satellite data, also supplied by Hansen. Again I give him credit for collecting all of the data needed to support his case. It just happens that the data shows otherwise. But this is just as good of a result, if not better, since we don’t need to needlessly suffer the economic harm from a carbon regulatory regime.
What possible mechanism can store up such a huge deficit of missing warming? What mechanism can manifest such a delay? I’m giving you an opportunity to explain, in your own words. Don’t just cite some incestuously reviewed, paper. If you can’t unambiguously answer these in a few sentences, then you probably don’t understand yourself and are relying on a faith based argument.
Perform the exercise of calculating how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of the ocean from 0C to the temperature profile of today. It’s only the order of a few weeks of incident solar energy, How can such a small energy pool manifest a response delay of decades? The *ONLY* effect with long time constants is the ebb and flow of surface, the magnitude of which can also be inferred from Hansen’s satellite data based on the measured seasonal variability over time and space. This time constant can be inferred from the ice core data.
George
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Steve Schapel:
Sure.
I am Subramanian Kartik (Kartik to most who know me), living in Chicago, Illinois. Post-doc at DESY/HERA while at LSU, doctoral work at Fermilab while at Indiana University, Masters from IU, MS from Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India. Now in the private sector (computing) for the last 13 years. Currently a Distinguished Engineer at EMC Corp.
Hope that helps! BTW, I will still use player as my handle.
Cheers.
00
But Subramanian is such a hallowed name, I couldn’t see why you wouldn’t prefer that to the very questionable, “player”
00
BrianL
Long story… some other time…;^)
00
Robin,
Perhaps the piece of information you don’t see yet is that the data shows how the climate responds very quickly to changes in forcing. Seasonal solar variability, seasonal ebb and flow of surface snow, CO2 levels anything that can be measured and that has an effect, does so very quickly, except biology and the ebb and flow of surface ice. Even the difference between night and day requires fast response times.
Most of this can be inferred directly from the satellite data and no measurable effect operates over time periods longer than the order of months. There’s enough satellite data that even multi-decade trends would be obvious and none are present. The data is all publicly available and you can examine it for yourself if you don’t trust my analysis.
Please try and cite a specific exception. CO2 solubility is virtually instantaneous. Consider how long it takes carbonated water to go flat. The thermal lag of the Earth’s thermal mass is well quantified and only on the order of weeks. What else is there?
George
00
Kartic,
Thank you very much.
I am interested in your idea that it will help us to know “the truth” if we wait a little longer.
If we measure atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperatures over the next 20 years, I am not sure what that will give us that we don’t already have. The CO2 will either increase or decrease (my money is on increase) and the temperatures will trend warmer or cooler (my money at this stage is on cooler).
But then what? Don’t we have historical examples of whichever way it goes? Warming while CO2 increases. Warming while CO2 decreases. Cooling while CO2 increases. Cooling while CO2 decreases. We’ve seen them all. So how will it help to have one more example of one or the other of these scenarios? Don’t we already have enough information to make an informed assessment?
00
Which suggests that a spoof paper might be interesting to try. Just knock up a spectacular AGW result (but not so very spectacular as to raise suspicions) and get it published (maybe under a nome de plume). If anyone emails asking for further details or wants your raw data sets then send back a polite email stating that these are not available for strict national security reasons. If they email a second time then send back a polite reply, “OK, you caught me, it really is a spoof but please don’t blow my cover, I’m trying to spin this as long as possible.”
I can see potential.
Might require cooperation from a few well placed university officials, they probably check new names with more caution. Could require a slow buildup of a promising fictitious career.
This is of course a fully legitimate line of scientific inquiry, admittedly on the topic of sociology, not physics.
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Tel:
A sting operation? Great idea. I’d suggest holding a press conference before even submission of the paper to a journal, and absolutely refusing to show the data to anyone else! That would be the norm these days in publishing Climate related research.
Cheers.
00
It wouldn’t even raise eyebrows to submit a study that doubled the result of already published claims:
“Sea levels to rise 6 meters, not 3, in 50 years”
“Ice shelf to disintegrate in 25 years, not 50”
“Ice-free summer Arctic in 15 years, not 30”
“No rain in western Australia for 100 years”
If asked for data, simply refer to the original authors, saying they have made a mis interpretation of their own data.
“Tel” is short for – “Telephone”? Just jokin’ with an as yet ANONYMOUS blogger
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Robin: “Science progresses by these things too…. (referring to consensus and evidence)”
No science doesn’t progress by consensus. In a true consensus science remains stuck, not open to new ideas or revolutionary thinking. As the saying goes… Science progresses funeral by funeral.
00
If you believe that the relevant thermal mass makes a low pass filter (seems reasonable) and you have some way to justify that a first order filter is a good approximation (less reasonable), then knowing the phase shift of a sinusoidal drive signal allows you to calculate the time constant of that filter. For a phase shift close to 90 degrees (one quarter wave) you can’t get a meaningful answer.
Doing a bit of searching for coldest days of the year and warmest days of the year, there seems to be a big variation
depending on region, so local features dominate. Not sure how sensible it is to average across regions here, because the local region becomes the dominant defining filter for that measurement point.
Here’s a rough table (all numbers in days) of the equivalent first order filter time-constant. This can be used to estimate the filtering effect for any particular region.
MIDWINTER TO COLDEST DAY / 1ST-ORD TIME CONSTANT
0 / 0
2 / 13
4 / 25.5
6 / 38
8 / 50.5
10 / 63.5
15 / 96.5
20 / 131
25 / 167.5
30 / 207.5
40 / 300.5
50 / 425
Once the time constant is known, we also know the percentage of amplitude attenuation for a sinusoidal signal of known frequency going through this filter. Here’s another table (left hand column in days, small attenuation implies big output signal):
1ST-ORD TIME CONSTANT / ATTENUATION (365 DAY PERIOD SINUS)
0 / 0.0%
13 / 0.1%
25.5 / 0.2%
38 / 0.5%
50.5 / 0.9%
63.5 / 1.5%
96.5 / 3.3%
131 / 5.9%
167.5 / 9.1%
207.5 / 13.1%
300.5 / 22.8%
425 / 34.8%
Thus, you apply the inverse attenuation factor to each region (thus undoing the filter damping), if you have enough time series data for each region to calculate the necessary phase shift.
Hmmm, anything near the equator won’t work by this method because of the extra harmonic (two peaks per year) but should be pretty good for places with a strong yearly seasonal variation. You could get better results by fitting the real harmonics of the input wave to the filter but that’s a much bigger calculation, then you can cover the equator too.
I could easily accept that the larger thermal mass of the deeper rock (and deep ocean) would take a long time to change temperature, and thus result in long delays. I could NOT accept that slow changes of the core temperature could happen by any external energy balance without being measurable first at the surface (on a much shorter time constant). Since we are arguing about how much the damping filter will distort the measurement, the deeper core is irrelevant. Some local regions are strongly influenced by ocean currents moving energy from elsewhere (e.g. Sydney gets additional phase lag at the onset of winter because warm water comes South down the coast in Autumn). Seasonal ocean currents are basically impossible to model, maybe you could take measurements and subtract them out. Come to think of it, seasonal rainfall also represents large scale energy transport, adding further phase error.
The other things I can think of are chemical changes, biological changes and surface feature changes, all of which will swing the radiation balance one way or another to some greater or lesser extent. Some of these can be happening during the year (like trees losing leaves or snowfall) but they also change year to year (new trees growing or old trees dying, buildings being constructed, roads, etc) which interferes with mapping against any trend in CO2.
Plus of course there are long-term time constants in the sun and in Earth’s orbit, which would also need to be independently measured and subtracted out somehow (subtracted out of a non-linear system, impossible by definition).
Probably it’s valid for temperate, inland, desert regions without seasonal rainfall.
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Mr Telephone,
A first order lumped parameter approximation is probably not very good, second order better
use fft to resolve harmonics (but you really don’t have enough data here)
00
You can clicky thru to my website, and no one asked my opinion on what name I should have to live with. I’m sure I’ve posted my website links more explicitly in earlier chapters round here (I can’t hold everyone’s hand all the time).
I’ll admit that I’m on the amateur side of climate research, I make money on computing, not the physical sciences. I can at least check equations for balanced units which puts me ahead of most science students 🙂 and I did quite a bit of military contract work (tech work & maintenance, not shooting people) which teaches you how to quickly detect inconsistencies.
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Ah, thank you for the clarification, Mr Linux.
00
Second order filters have two time constants so you can’t reconstruct the filter from a single sinusoidal probe. With enough harmonics in the probe it would work, but higher order models often create more errors than they eliminate unless your available data is very clean (and weather data certainly is not that).
Is there a physical basis for believing that a chunk of rock with the sun shining on it is second order? There’s only one energy storage element — the rock. I’d be much more worried about long distance energy transport messing it up.
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yes there is
Div (k(T)GRAD(T)) = 0
-k(T)(partial T/ partial r)|(boudary) = specified
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Steve:
I believe that temperature is not a good way to establish (or refute) AGW. The core tenet of AGW is that as we add 1 molecule per 100,000 of CO2 every 5 years, due to the way CO2 absorbs and re-radiates energy back to the earth, the CO2 (and associated feedback mechanisms) effectively trap heat on Earth and prevent it from radiating it back into space.
So the true fingerprint of AGW is the heat content of the earth increasing as CO2 increases. However, as Roger Peilke. and others ave argues, this anomaly of excess heat is cumulative, so regardless of whether temperature fluctuates due to heat redistribution (PDO, ENSO, AMO,…), the heat has to go somewhere. This is an inescapable prediction of AGW. So we have been accumulating this anomaly over the last 7 years or so. I reproduce Peilke Sr.s summary
This is a serious issue. While we may have to wait for 33 years like Robin says to falsify AGWs temperature projections, I don’t believe AGW will last 33 years of heat deficit. Certainly, he temperature must go up with this much heat, but may be masked by other local phenomena.
So CO2 going up and down, or Temperature going up or down – I agree, we’ll have to wait a while. But the heat measurements are different, as they add up. To make up the deficit over the last 7 years is quite a task. In my mind, this already falsifies AGW. At some point, the general population will catch on.
Again from Pielke Sr.
Cheers, K.
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Subramin,
I believe the Devils of the Earth, who have given us this Coal and Oil in the first place, have Hidden Away this Heat for their mysterious and nefarious Purposes, and they will Release this deadly Heat, at the time, of their choosing
00
In #300, I would like to write the Neumann boundary condition as
-k(T) (partial(T) / partial(n))|(boundary) = 0
where n is the outward directed normal to the surface
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DANG
The heat flux at the boundary is not zero – I mean, specified in advance
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Tel, Re 295.
Another way to look at the problem is the following equation.
Pi(t) = Po(t) + dE(t)/dt
Pi is the energy entering the system (Sun), Po is the energy leaving (reflected and radiated) and E is the energy stored in the system (the Earth’s thermal mass). dE(t)/dt is the instantaneous rate of energy entering or leaving the thermal mass. This equation is simply a statement of COE and must always be true, whether or not the planets temperature is constant (dE/dt = 0), increasing (dE/dt > 0) or decreasing (dE/dt < 0) and independent of any energy imbalance.
If dE/dt is positive, as Hansen suggests, than E and the subsequent surface temperature, and hence Po, will be increasing. As the temperature increases, Po increases and necessarily, dE/dt must be reduced. Eventually, E(s) increase Po to the point where it is equal to Pi and dE/dt drops to zero. In practice, dE/dt varies widely around zero and has an average value since the equilibrium Es, and thus temperature, is *DEFINED* to be the point where dE/dt is equal to 0. Claims that dE/dt is always positive, or that it even has a non zero average value are wrong and would only be the case if you redefine the average temperature!
Relative to the lag, as Pi in increasing, dE/dt is positive and energy goes into storage. When Po is decreasing, dE/dt flips sign and becomes negative as the thermal mass releases heat energy. Relatively speaking, temperatures are less than they would be relative to a static equilibrium as solar energy increases and more than at static equilibrium as the temperatures decreases (owing to the relative sign of dE/dt).
George
00
for P you mean power
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brian,
Yes, Pi and Po are in units of power, which is energy per unit time. dE/dt also has units of energy per unit time and is closer to the formal definition of power. Another typo is that ‘is zero’ is missing between ‘has an average value’ and ‘since the equilibrium’ in the second paragraph.
George
00
Brian (#293): “Ice-free summer Arctic in 15 years, not 30”
Hey, wasn’t that already supposed to be by 2012?
00
Georgie,
Insolation is normally expressed as power per unit of area anyway (a the best units of irradiance, but that’s all we are usually given)
and for “equilibrium” you definitely mean “steady state”. Equilibrium is defined nowhere, for this
Stevie,
The feckless trio of Arctic explorers, egged on by Prince Chucklehead of Dopesville, didn’t determine a whole lot except that the Arctic is pretty cold and pretty icy, and given the severity of their misery, they would probably NOT subscribe to the year, 2012 if asked. (Before their journey, they may have concurred with that value.)
In interviews, reporters seemed to steer away from disturbing questions like “you don’t feel like anybody “used” you or “played” you for fools to do this, do you?”
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Kartic (#301),
I have been avidly following and participating in this global warming debate for over 10 years. The information you have provided here is a whole angle on it that I was not aware of, and it has helped me a great deal in my understanding. So you have my deep gratitude.
I am not sure what an “observed best estimate” is. To me, it’s either observed or it’s an estimate, it’s hard to be both. I am not a scientist, though, so have to be guided by respect for people like Dr Pielke.
00
Is there a reason a paper based on this concept wouldn’t get published?
A new type of battery is being developed where for each 10 watts of energy stored, you get 55 watts of energy back out. This battery is based on the revolutionary physics developed by scientists to explain how greenhouse gas forcing is important to the climate. Scientists caution that we really only know that this works at the planetary scale and there are still significant obstacles in the way of scaling this effect to usable levels. Scientists are cautiously optimistic that they can get it to work, since even if the practical limit is only 11 watts of output per 10 watts input, batteries can be stacked together to produce larger net efficiencies.
George
00
Oh for Heaven’s sake, Georgie, I patented that a long time ago.
I also patented an oven, which requires no external power source, which cooks raw chickens based on the water “feedback” principle, so long as a little CO2 is added continuously to speed up the cooking process
(roughly 2x the ave CO2 content of the surrounding air)
00
I figure with my Eco-battery, I can sell a can of carbonated water with a few electrodes on it for 19.99 + SH. When customers complain, I can say that they didn’t read the fine print and must wait 50 years for the amplified power to come back out. Then I can sell them a 50 year warranty for only 1.99 per year. Why does this sound familiar?
George
00
You really ought to get with Nick Stern to sell carbon trading – right now, he’s having a rough go of it convincing people they won’t lose money.
One additional note about the Yang-Lee discovery:
The important point was not that parity isn’t conserved in weak interactions, because if parity was not conserved AT ALL, one could easily envision situations for which momentum couldn’t be conserved, either.
For weak interactions it may be said that parity conservation takes a different form: replacing a particle by its antiparticle in a weak interaction for which parity is not conserved, then the weak interaction corresponding to the antiparticle preserves parity with the original weak process.
That does not contradict anything.
Enough of my blathering blithering for one day
00
player wrote:
Doran and Zimmerman (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf)
those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who
also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed
papers on the subject of climate change
Runaway global warming? The IPCC puts the climate senstivity at 3°C per doubling.
“runaway AGW” sounds like an infinite warming per doubling of CO2. Which is more than the 3°C that is stated as most likely by the IPCC.
What do you mean by runaway warming?
Current warming.
They’re the best informed to judge the evidence.
00
Robin:
So paleontologists have no say? Chemists don’t? Physicists don’t? Geologists don’t? Oceanographers don’t? Statisticians don’t?
So the climatologists you are promoting are effectively saying that the rest of the world is incapable of judging whether their work has substance? Isn’t that really convenient – trust us, the IPCC Clmatologists, because the rest of you are obviously idiots. We won’t let you see the data, we don’t have to reproduce the result, and don’t you dare question our results because only we are qualified to judge it.
I guess by the same token, I sholdn’t take a single word on statistics as true by any of Mann, Stieg, Santer, Hansen, etc papers, as they are not statisticians! Thanks for giving us the grounds to reject all their work!
Sheesh! You have taken the definition of science to a new abyss.
Cheers, Kartik.
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Robin:
Fascinating read! Some pertinent information was left out of your 97% number, that I found most interesting.
There were two questions
1. When compared with pre-1800s
levels,
do you think that mean global temperatures
have generally risen, fallen, or
remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant
contributing factor in changing
mean global temperatures?
Over 10,000 people in some geosciences program or the other were polled, about 30% responded. 90% said yes to Q1 and 82% to Q2.
That means about 1 in 5 did not believe that AGW was real, this with over 90% of the respondents in geosciences having PhDs! Also, more that 90% of the respondents were in the US. Wonder where the international geosciences research is done these days.
Of the 10,000 or so polled, and the 3000+ who responded, only 79 were considered “real climatologists” actively publishing. They had 97% affirmative responses to Q2. I’d love to know where their grant funding comes from, but thats not one of the questions…..
In contrast, 600 of the 3000 geosciences people polled said no to Q2. And the silent 7000 ones who didn’t vote – guess we’ll never know.
This sound like overwhelming consensus, anyone?
Cheers, K.
00
Player,
Don’t forget that by peer reviewed, it means reviewed by other climatologists who are all part of this same consensus of belief. But it’s clearly too complicated for the climatologists. The rational for using heuristic based models is because a first principles models are to complex to think about. The heuristics all *ASSUME* AGW, so of course they will agree with the hypothesis. But as anyone should know, building a case on an assumption to prove the assumption is not rigorous science.
George
00
George:
Excellent point! AGW supporters write papers supporting AGW with co-authors supporting AGW who get reviewed by AGW supporters and publish results cited by AGW supporters, spurring more publications supporting AGW – ths starting the cycle all over again. And of course, how dare someone who isn’t a climatologist question this! This is what the Wegman report detailed in mathematical terms.
Hmmmmm….
Cheers, K.
00
More accurately, Mr Wannabe Linux, but we’re all doing what we can. I probably make more money repairing Mr Telephone these days, but Mr Telephone has Mr Linux inside of him. Skillset convergence and all that. I think it’s probably unfair to condemn the readers to any more boredom so I’ll change the topic.
http://www.solarsailor.com/
If you check out that boat, I built the prototypes of the motor controllers (someone else did the circuit design) and I wrote the first working version of the controller code (earlier versions did not actually spin the motor, a lot of professional coders spend their lives with a broom in hand), and I put together a nice mini-rig out of a laser print engine to allow desktop-level test runs.
The boat works, it runs as a ferry somewhere near Sydney, and I think it has popped up doing runs at various places along the East coast of Australia.
I still think that what these guys are doing is a good idea, but uptake on the idea has been very slow. Diesel is cheap, reliable, easy to use and and easy to maintain. Hybrids have more parts and inevitably that means more cost and more things that are going wrong. But we have to move technology forward and the only way to do that is to have a go. There will never be a generation 2 without a generation 1.
Having said that, I have not bought a hybrid car myself because they cost more, they are harder to repair and petrol is still reasonably cheap. Hybrid boats have a bunch of advantages over hybrid cars because weight isn’t as much of a big deal and wind is more applicable.
I really do think that the world is going to need to move forward with alternative energy but I just don’t see Greenie alarmism as useful in promoting that progress. Certainly having Greenies bashing everyone over the head is nothing more that a recipe for resentment and a waste of resources fed into infighting that could be spent doing real world tech.
I’ve run into a lot of Greenies over the years, and into Greenie/Bureaucrats too. I once asked a Greenie/Bureaucrats if he could calculate how many joules went into ironing and pressing his pristine shirt and suit. He gave some response about making sacrifices for what we believe in which resonated with strong undertones that he was not about to sacrifice anything he ever did for anyone and that was a bit of a moment of understanding for me — these guys are expert BS artists and nothing more. I guess I met Mr Wannabe Al Gore (probably one of many).
Anyhow, I’ve actually done at least one real-world thing to move the green cause forward, and not by over-regulating someone else’s life either.
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player wrote:
That’s not what I said.
Nice rant though.
00
Brian #309,
The equilibrium state and the steady state are driven by the same condition, that is, dE/dt == 0, so I sometimes interchange them. This can be seen if we consider what happens to the system if Pi is held constant. If Pi stops moving when dE/dt is positive, the surface energy and hence Po will increase, reducing dE/dt until dE/dt is zero and Pi=Po. The opposite happens if dE/dt was negative, but leads to the same result. For this equation, dE/dt can be non zero at equilibrium if incident energy is doing work other than heating up the thermal mass of the planet or if there was some internal source of heat, both of which are finite, but small effects.
In the real climate system, this is a little trickier because Po is dependent on Es, but the bottom line is that if Pi stops changing, dE/dt must still must become zero. The way that my model works is to start by calculating Po as a function of surface and cloud temperatures, filtered by atmospheric absorption and weighted by the percentage of cloud cover. Other equations define the energy flux entering and leaving the surface and clouds. The result is a set of simultaneous differential equations whose coefficients are determined directly from satellite measurements and which contains no assumptions about the behavior. This set of equations is then synthesized into a large hierarchy pf interacting model instances representing each of the 280 km on a side pieces of real estate in the aggregated satellite data and generates all of the inter relationships between the slices.
The system always strives to achieve equilibrium, where the system is modeled as a pool of hot and a pool of cold, separated by an isothermal surface roughly intersecting the jet streams and bisecting the thermocline, whose temperature is related to Es and the instantaneous average global surface temperature. The jet streams are free to wiggle around to change the ratio of heat to cold presented to space in order to meet the desired equilibrium condition which in the process determines whether energy is added to or removed from the respective pools on either side of the jet stream, thus determining dE/dt and ultimately, the new surface temperature.
George
00
I’m more of a Solaris fan, than a Linux fan, but both are better than Windos. I admire Bill Gates for the same reason I admire Jim Hansen. Both were able to turn junk into multi-billion dollar endeavors.
George
00
player wrote:
That’s your grand daddy example?
An equivocal criticism of just one of a dozen northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions, which has no direct implcation for the causes of the current warming?
It’s been reproduced a dozen times.
On the other hand, the only reason that the report was comissioned was that there were politicians who didn’t like the National Academy’s vindication of Mann (et al)’s work.
I think you’re being paranoid. Cutting edge northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions over a 1000 year or so time period is a small world.
Yeah. Little conspiracy theories are more credible than grand ones, and there may be some small effect. The work’s been reproduced a dozen times though.
Do you this one?
There’s an especially low signal to noise ratio in climate change writing. (Due to special interest groups such as ExxonMobil offering the $10,000 bounty to any op-ed piece refuting the IPCC). Peer review filters out some of the more blatant rubbish.
If it explains why the 10,000 papers were erroneous, and if it is reproduced. Much more likely, it will be found to be wrong.
I have only asked questions where your own good claims need justification.
00
Robin,
I’m still waiting for an answer to where the missing heat is and what physical mechanism can cause a multi-decade delay. If you claim the ocean again, then you didn’t perform the calculation I suggested earlier. Look at the satellite data, there are 10’s of thousands of data samples which clearly show relatively rapid adaptation to changes in incident energy. While water, ice, desert and vegetation all respond a little differently, they all respond in days, not decades, to changes in forcing. What evidence supports longer response times? You can try and claim that AGW requires longer response times, but that’s not evidence that longer response times actually exist. This only means that if you can’t support longer response times, AGW is invalid.
George
00
player wrote:
This doesn’t account for the La Nina, nor the sunspot cycle. The IPCC trend is a long term trend, not a 7 year trend.
Prediction models such as the hadley centre’s DePreSys showed an expected cooling over a short time period.
Do you have a scientific source that would get past a curtsory peer review? (This is sort of what I meant by “scientific”).
We don’t have to wait. We’ve got the last 33 years. You get about 0.16°C per decade of warming. (From the Hadley Centre’s data set).
00
Kartic (#301),
Ok, I have now had a chance to look through the Pielke information more closely. And it seems that it does not address itself to the question of causality… Is that right?
In other words, there is a proposal for a test for nett warming (or otherwise). But there is nothing to assess the part played by atmospheric CO2 in any warming or lack thereof.
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Co2isnotevil wrote:
The other observations that should be made are the the skeptics are very much fewer, don’t tend to be more revoved from the speciality of Climate Science, tend to be older, retired, have a background in science denial for Phillip Morris, and are more often fictitious than pro AGW scientists.
I know that there are exceptions in both directions, but I’m just pointing out an observed trend.
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
Thank you, co2isnotevil. I too am still waiting for you to give some examples of what data the feedback is not present in.
What missing heat is this, CO2? Oceaninic heat content continues to rise.
(ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/PUBLICATIONS/grlheat08.pdf)
Feedback invloves warming the top of the ocean, which increases evapouration rate, and increases the atmospheric water content, and with it the greenhouse effect; iterate. It is slow because of the specific heat of the oceans, and because the process needs to iterate.
Another process is the melting of ice, and the increase in albedo, which warms the surrounding land or ocean, which melts more ice; iterate. This is slow because of the latent heat of fusion of ice, and because the process needs to iterate.
I get my 25-50 years from Hansen et al, linked above. Feel free to cite a paper that makes a different calculation.
No it means that I can’t support longer response times. If you think that you’ve found a paradigm shifting discovery, I encourage you to write it up, and send it to Nature.
00
Robin.
The data that this is not present in is found here: http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov (Hansen’s data!). If you look through the corresponding ftp site, there are files called Bxxxmyyyp.dat as derived from the D2 data set, where xxx is a number (i.e. 116 is surface temperature) and yyy is a region (i.e. glb -> global, wat -> over water, etc.). B116m3060p.dat is particularly revealing. This is the 30 degree slice between Antarctica and the bottom of Africa and S America. This is mostly water and shows 6-8C of seasonal variability whose min/max occurs in the month following perihelion/aphelion. This represents an average flux deficit of of about 10 w/m^2 per month for half of the year and -10 w/m^2 per month for the other half of the year. Yes, the Earth is always out of balance one way or another, it just averages out to be zero. The very definition of the average temperature is when the this average flux is zero. Variability of more than 1C in year to year averages also requires smaller average flux imbalances, but none the less, some years the net is positive and some years it’s negative. Claiming that there is an accumulating deficit that is otherwise unobservable as a temperature change makes no sense.
BTW, models iterate, but nature doesn’t. Again I refer you to the concept of time constants and exponential decay. The specific heat of water is 1 kcal to increase the temperature of 1 kg 1C. This is not so much that it provides decades of inertia, just weeks. The ebb and flow of surface ice is important, and is the only thing with a time constant long enough to see in the ice core data. However, the fraction of a degree in average temperature increase that doubling CO2 does is not going to melt enough ice to have a 4 times bigger effect than the original surface energy increase. Besides, ice feedback that enhances warming requires acting against a built up reserve of ice. We are currently close to minimum ice, so there’s not a lot of extra reflectivity to give up that can cause any additional warming. Ice feednack saturates at minimum/maximum ice. If the Earth was transitioning out of an ice age it would be a different story and in fact, climate sensitivity quantifications *ASSUME* that this is the case which is one of it’s many flaws.
Examine how quickly the surface temperature changes (i.e. ocean temperature) relative to changes in the incident energy. I suggest you look at time constants and first order LTI equations to understand the basic behaviors of differential equations. While wikipedia climate related articles are generally poor, the section on time constants is relatively accurate. The climate is a nonlinear system, but many of the same rules apply, specifically with regard to stability and convergence.
Citing Hansen et-all doesn’t answer my question. It just tells me that you blindly accept what Hansen says. Do you pay attention to the abstracts? Most say something to the effect of ‘Our model which assumes AGW …’. This is an immediate disqualification of any results presented by any paper. I also don’t see the need to cite a paper when something is so obvious. To me first principles are far more important than anything anyone might hypothesize in a paper, incestuously reviewed or otherwise. Do I really need to cite a paper to describe the behavior of LTI and NLTI systems? I can reference some text books …
Again, I ask the same question. What possible mechanism can account for the multi-decade time constants required for AGW arguments to be reconciled against the data. I know you can’t answer this because there is no answer, but please try anyway, as it will help you see the light. Take your time, I’ll be out glacier hiking/skiing in the Sierra’s for the next few days. It’s been unusually cool and the snow pack is still very good, especially above 10K feet, although the lifts stopped running a few trips ago.
George
00
Excuse my ignorance … how do I do that?
The continuity correction you would have to make between a half hour step and continuous exponential decay wouldn’t make that much difference would it?
How deep is your ocean? Just 1 metre?
Radiative forcing from CO2 is 1.7 W/m²
Sea water has a density of about 1030 kg/m³, and a specific heat capacity of about 3993 J/kg/K.
In round numbers, the ocean is about 3800m deep, so raising it’s temperature 1.5 K (from climate sensitivity of about 2.8 K per doubling, and increase in CO2 of 0.54 doublings) would take about:
1.5*(1030*3800*3993)/1.7 = 14 billion seconds or 440 years.
Of course correct handling would have the 1.7 slowly reduce by exponential decay, (but the time constant would be unknown without modelling the evaporation and greenhouse effect of the water vapour), so the 440 years would be a considerable underestimate.
Obviously the climate responds faster than this, because the ocean doesn’t heat to it’s full depth quickly enough to make a difference. But the oceans are plenty big enough to take decades to finish responding to an increase in radiative forcing, even without considering melting ice.
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Robin:
Not true – not lately. You reference just one of the publications, which still shows almost no heat increase from around 2003 onwards. More recently, a well written review can be found at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/06/the-global-warming-hypothesis-and-ocean-heat/
which discusses in depth, more recent measurements, notably Loehle 2009, which demonstrate quite well that we have a considerable deficit of heat content compared to IPCC projections. If the claim is that that the science is “settled” on the ocean heat issue, I beg to differ. This continues to be a major battleground with data favoring flat heat content, albiet for only several years. The evidence mounting is enough for me to continue be a sceptic.
Cheers, Kartik.
00
Steve:
Far as I can tell, yes. IPCC claims that the ocean heat content should increase monotonically – the test is to (in)validate this.
Cheers, K.
00
Robin,
Before I hit the road, here’s one more thing to consider.
The Earth system closed loop gain is easily calculated as the ratio of the incoming energy (255K/240W/m^2) to the surface energy (289K/396W/m^2) which works out to a gain of 1.65. Most of the energy captured by GHG is in the lower atmosphere, where most of this is retained near the surface. Spectral analysis shows that about 33% of the surface energy (130 W/m^2) is absorbed by GHG, which by itself supports a gain of only 1.50, however; this only applies for clear sky and on average, 65% of the sky is covered in clouds.
The remaining gain component comes from clouds. This can be calculated as the ratio of cloud energy seen from space (262K/267W/m^2 reduced by 13% atmospheric absorption) to the surface energy, which results in a cloud gain of 1.7. If you calculate the cloud percentage weighted gain,
.35*1.5 + .65*1.7 = 1.63
which is within 1.5% of the measured gain of 1.65 and well within the measurement error. The atmospheric absorption above clouds is less because of the relatively low water vapor.
Increasing absorption by 2.3% (3 W/m^2 ) only increases the surface component of the gain to 1.52 and the cloud component to 1.78 for a net gain @ 65% cloud coverage of 1.69, which is an increase of 2.4%. A 2.5% increase in surface energy is 406 W/m^2 or 290.9K, which is a 0.9K increase.
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Robin:
When, Robin, when? Not until a much maligned petroleum geologist took Mann et al to task 5 years after it was published! Why would any sane scientist in any discipline believe anything produced by the IPCC climatologists, when the basic protocols to ensure integrity of a result are not enforced in the entire community of practitioners? The unverified result was the headline in the IPCC 2001 report and disseminated all over the world as established science.
In physics, as soon as an intriguing result is produced, there is a mad scramble to validate it by multiple groups, and the result is not considered valid until it is independently verified. Without this, its garbage. AS I said, I am beginning to suspect that climate science is an oxymoron.
Cheers, K.
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Robin:
Yep. My bad. Steig et al 2009 in Nature – front cover picture.
Cheers. K.
00
Robin:
Last I checked, 0.16 deg/decade is 1.6 deg/century, which is right about what I believe the sensitivity is (maybe a little higher that the 1-1.5 deg/century I think may be right). What I disagree with is 3-5 degrees/century. So lets wait till we can establish the 3-5 deg/century before spending trillions! If AGW is right, then as proponents claim, the world will set global temperature records successively in the next 5-10 years anyway, and the IPCC predictions will be well on track, right? Lets wait!
Cheers, K.
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robin:
This does not mean all 10,000 are erroneous – they may be solid results that have been incorrectly interpreted. Any new superceding theory must also agree with any data in these 10,000. A contrary result based on data invalidates the theory, not other experimental results, unless they were model dependent.
00
player wrote:
No, you’ve got it the wrong way around. My linked article has the up to date data (Which does not show no heat increase). Watts Up With that is using Willis’ data before the well publicised retraction and correction. (There’s a well written write up about that here: Correcting Ocean Cooling. Page three is the gutsy bit.)
Not really a battleground. Loehle 2009 is not a paper of any scientific significance (And Energy and the Environment isn’t a peer reviewed journal.) Most scientists in the field wouldn’t have heard of it, and it is further out of line with other measurements than Willis’ original data prior to the discovery of the errors of measurement. Willis’ data has been corrected, and now ocean heat content is in line with the thermal expansion of the oceans, and with energy flux at the top of the atmosphere measurements.
00
Robin, re 331,
Try this,
ftp://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/pub/data/D2BASICS/
There is a readme file there as well.
The ocean temperature does not uniformly increase. The temperature profile is that the top few hundred meters or so is relatively close to the surface temperature, this drops at a rate of about 3C per 100m through the thermocline and there’s a sharp transition at about 4C, where the temperature starts to decrease at a rate of about 1C per 2K feet until it asymptotically reaches 0C at the bottom. At the poles, there is no thermocline and the polar ice caps are thermally connected to each other through the deep water pool of cold. The temperature profile of the thermocline is consistent with it acting as an insulating layer between the cold deep ocean and warm surface waters.
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Water/images/temperature_depth_jpg_image.html&edu=high
Only the top few hundred meters of the ocean around the equatorial zones needs it’s temperature increased, not the entire volume of the oceans. The bottom will be OC (max density of salt water at deep ocean pressures), independent of what is happening on the surface. If we count only the top 200 meters of half of the ocean (the factor of 0.7 is for 70% surface water), we get,
0.7*0.5*200*1030*3993 = 2.9E8 joules/K
The total energy from the Sun is 350 W/m^2 (excluding reflection). 2.9E8/350 = 8.3E5 seconds = 9.6 days of Solar energy for a 1C increase, or about 150 days for energy to raise the average ocean surface temp from OC to 22C. My point here is the ratio of the in/out flux to the stored energy is relatively large and that this is what determines the time constant, not the time it takes for just the incremental effect of the increase to exhaust the energy in the pool.
George
00
Robin:
Willis retraction is discussed in the WUWT link I pointed you to – his correction to ARGO warm and cold bias turned his decreasing trent to a flat trend after around 2003. Consistent with Cazenave 2009 and Levitus 2008 (your reference)which seem to show slight warming but not at the level of what IPCC/Hansen predict.
I can see why you don’t like Loefle 2009. Attacking the Journal as unimportant is a not a very novel tactic to supress results that don’t agree with AGW – seen that a lot. I am sure attacks on his personal integrity and affiliations will start soon. Thats why I am the sceptic and you are the believer.
Climate Science is done by the chosen 76 (from the survey), as far as I can tell – everyone else is either an oil or tobacco lobbyist, or should be ignored because they publish in places that won’t allow the influence of the 76.
Which only makes me even more entrenched as a sceptic. The entire fate of the world is being controlled by a group of 100 or so self-proclaimed experts in climatology. Everyone else does not belong to the club.
Cheers. K.
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
Yeah, that’s all you get directly from a doubling of CO2. The other 2K comes from water vapour feedback and albedo change from melting sea ice.
(I’m assuming that’s what your 3 W/m^2 is from about a CO2 doubling … if not, what is that from?)
00
The problem is, this group of 76 believe that everything they have claimed is completely true – and more!
In an interview on FORAtv on global climate change, Jim Hansen told the interviewer that his climate models were “sluggish” representations of the real world,
meaning that his computer modelling has been a SLOWER respresentation of what is happening than has actually happened!
I nearly fell out of my chair. He couldn’t possibly be aware of what he is saying.
His job and his claims appear to be entrenched, thanks to his association with Gore
00
player:
Jones et al., 1998;
Mann et al., 1999
Briffa et al., 2001
Esper et al., 2002;
recalibrated by Cook et al., 2004a
Briffa, 2000; (calibrated by Briffa et al.,2004)
Mann and Jones, 2003
Rutherford et al., 2005
Moberg et al., 2005
D’Arrigo et al., 2006
Hegerl et al., 2006
Pollack and Smerdon, 2004; (reference level adjusted following Moberg et al.,2005)
Oerlemans, 2005
Mann et al., 2008
00
… models are not evidence. Evidence are observations by someone at some time and place, independent of theory. Models are humungous numbers of calculations, each of which individually could be performed on a handheld calculator. So models are theory, not evidence. Yes, the climate models do contain some well-established science that has been verified by empirical observations, but they also contain a myriad of assumptions, omissions, guesses, and gross approximations, a mistake in any of which can invalidate the climate models. Model Temperature Projections Are Not Evidence
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co2isnotevil wrote:
Cheers. I’ll try to have a look at it over the weekend.
You can have the 0.7 and the 200 instead of 3500. That’s still 2 decades. (Well, one and a half, but the forcing will decrease over that time too).
You can’t have that the anthropogenic part of the greenhouse effect is the entire solar flux at the top of atmosphere. We’re calculating the time for the climate system to respond to anthropogenic CO2 forcing, not to having the sun switched on.
My point here is that decades is credible and weeks isn’t.
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player wrote:
It’s a function of greenhouse emissions as well as a fuction of time.
Greenhouse emissions were accelerating until the credit crisis, and China’s economy is already growing again.
The point of acting is that it is much cheaper the earlier that you start cutting emissions. (Becuase the CO2 lasts centuries) and that the cost of reducing emissions is about 10% of the cost of adaptation. (If you value your grandchildren nearly as much as yourself).
So you should act now, and then if the temperature follows the low end of predictions, then wind the carbon tax back a little. (Or sell more credits or whatever). It’s not like the clean technologies will be a loss to the economy even in that case, because the oil won’t last forever.
Right? Lets act before it costs tens of trillions! It’s a no brainer.
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player wrote:
What do the IPCC predict should happen to the ocean heat content over the falling forcing of a sunspot cycle? I didn’t notice where they did short term predictions in the 2007 report. Can you remind me where it is?
It’s not a journal.
There’s a low signal to noise ratio in the popular press on global warming.
You can see that the trend is different from that in the scientific literature. The trend in the scientific literature also now agrees with the radiation budget measurements, and with sea level rise. Which even without the fact that Loefle 2009 is a popular press article, would suggest that Willis is correct and Loefle is wrong.
But peer review does raise the signal to noise ratio. I’m not particularly inclined to read an article from the popular press that contradicts scientific research, because I have a finite amount of time, and one can be fairly confident that it is the science that is correct.
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Mike Goad wrote:
Can you please give some examples of the myriad of omissions and some examples of the myriad of gross approximations?
Thanks.
00
Try reading There Is No Evidence for starters.
00
Mind if I play?
Omissions
What must be a number of interactions amongst forcings, because when feedback are adjusted so has to make the simulations of the historical climate match the historical temperature records, the rainfall patterns are (mostly all) wrong. That means that heat transfer, within and external of the atmosphere, must be incorrect.
The interaction of the Sun’s magnetic field with the Earth’s, which, at certain field strengths, influences cosmic rays attributed to cloud seeding and formation
Heat patterns geothermal of origin, that account for sub-sea volcanism and accasional aberrant behaviour of heat extraction from geothermal wells
The origin and infuelce of sulphate aerosol, which appear in the models for no other purpose than to mitigate the influence of GHG. The suilphate influence cannot be as represented in the models, because satellite temperature measurements in the IR are not adjusted for the same sulphate temperature correction as the models are
Atmospheric dynamics of the lowere stratosphere -upper troposphere, because wind circulation patterns in these regions are reversed by the models from what is known to be the true direction of the winds through which jets travel
Stabilising influences of nocturnal water evaporation
The influences of pollution on cloud formation
Gross Approximations
It is known that the CGM must be periodically stopped and then restarted at the conditions of blow-up of solutions from mesh elements to mesh elements. This is done by means of flux correlations – wherein new initial conditions are generated by (some other) models for the calculations to begin again. Thus the model simulation at any given time is no better than the errors introduced by resetting the initial conditions, which, at any given time, are unknown (if future) or interpolated (from incomplete data of the past)
Thermal conductivities of air are not corrected for ionization in the upper atmosphere
Isotherms of ocean temperatures are grossly approximated and, in isolation, do not even account for such phenomena as trade winds
there are more, I’m getting bored
00
Thanks to Dr David Evans and my new friend, Mike Goad for that.
I sent it to a number of friends of mine
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robin:
Are you saying now that the IPCC models predict reality accurately for 100 years EXCEPT when other natural phenomenon muck it up, like solar activity, ENSO, PDO, AMO, Volcanic activity, and a host of other natural causes that haven’t been modeled in the AOGCMS?
If yes, thank you very much for making my main point – that the AOGCMs do not account for what really happens, and therefore cannot be trusted even in the present time, leave alone in a century!
If the answer is no, then I expect the AOGCMs to be able to accurate model this decade. And they don’t. Ergo – junk science.
Cheers, K.
This is why AGW is a crock.
00
Robin bewails the fact that he feels “lonely” here
00
player wrote:
No, I’m saying I can’t find the predictions that you are talking about. Where are they?
Note that the IPCC does not do research, they report on the reasearch that has been done. So there is no such think as “an IPCC model”, much less “IPCC models”.
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Mike Goad wrote:
No thanks. Can you say which pages I should look at to find some examples of the myriad of omissions and some examples of the myriad of gross approximations?
00
The IPCC most certainly has approved which GCM predictions are taken as evidence for the AR.
Guess what – to a small degree of variation, the predictions look like GISS predictions.
I wonder how that happened, a mystery
00
To find that info in David Evans’s essay, Robin, all you need to do is scroll down the pages until you find what you are looking for.
You’ll be all right, I promise! Nothing will happen to you.
[Global warmers must think this is something akin to “pornography”]
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
The IPCC looks at all the published research.
Which GCMs do you claim are left out?
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This is incorrect logic because economic activity universally results in improved technology, which provides options in future that do not exist now. As I pointed out above with the hybrid boat, the technology that we have now for alternative energy isn’t very good, compared with the established fuel-burning technology. Throttling economic activity merely draws it out longer making it slower for us to develop better technology.
Think of the CO2 generated by those massive computer models calculating climate change… there’s an example of positive feedback for you. I wonder if the climate modelers bother to include the effects of more government grants being handed out for more climate modeling?
There’s a worse problem with the Central Planners and the way government operates. If a Carbon Tax is introduced and then we see some cooling, that will be used as justification for more Carbon Tax (because hey it must be working), then we see some warming and that also will be used as justification for more Carbon Tax (because hey we need it to stop the warming). The middle-men who profit from their position as Carbon gatekeepers set themselves up to ensure their position of power is eternal. If you check the history of the USA, the Federal income tax was introduced as a “special measure” for wartime and it was promised never to rise, and guaranteed to be removed again (starting with the Civil War, then same thing happened again with the Sixteenth Amendment in the buildup to the First World War). Of course, none of those promises were worth diddly squat, government grows and grows, tax is virtually impossible to repeal.
Thus, before we bring in a Carbon Tax, we need to be completely sure there is a good reason for it. Not maybe a little bit sure, guess so kind of sure but we need to be sure enough to make a commitment that we can never step back from.
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You don’t burn the money when you tax it. It’s income for the government. You can lower other taxes in response.
There’s no loss to the economic activity.
If emitting carbon is expensive, the uptake of improved technology will be quicker. (As probably will its development).
Neither does economic activity always result in improved technology, there also needs to be an economic incentive.
Microsoft has had 90% of the operating system economic activity on the planet for a couple of decades, and improvement has been greatly retarded because with a monopoly, there was no reason to waste funds on development. Ergo economic activity does not imply improved technology.
Similarly with fossil fuel technologies. Increasing the financial incentive to use clean technologies will increase the development of clean technologies, and also the uptake of green technologies … which will generally improve the cost of implementing green technologies because of the economies of scale kicking in earlier.
It’s easy to step back from. You reduce the carbon tax again. (and increase income or sales tax to compensate). Because the costs of this are so much lower than the costs of adaptation, it’s also the sensible thing to do if you’re not sure.
(Of course, I think that we’re pretty sure, but at 10 to one, you’d want to be 90% sure that it’s not the case for it to be a bad decision not to buy the insurance.)
How It All Ends.
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… for it to be a bad decision to buy the insurance, I mean.
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
If you’re prepared to have people respond to your post.
What is the signal that is getting this feedback, given that you don’t believe in the greenhouse effect?
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Yes. Clean Energy.
Low CO2 emission Energy.
Nuclear, Wind, Geothermal … Hydro only if the lake doesn’t flood vegetation. Possibly some of the emerging concentration solar technologies. Possibly tide. Some people think photoelectric.
The technologies are becoming more cost competitive by the month.
Optimally fly ash concrete and battery electric or fuel cell or biofuel equipment. But there are dramatic savings to be made by going wind/nuclear over coal/gas in terms of greenhouse emissions even if emissions during construction and fuel mining and delivery are not ameliorated.
Getting wind to your plant is lower emission than getting Uranium to it. Disposing of used wind is also lower emission. But Nuclear can be better controlled to meet daily peak demand.
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I guess I didn’t make myself clear, before, that I certainly don’t deny that CO2 is a “greenhouse” gas, but what I do doubt very much, is that the influence of that can be discerned amidst the backgound of other influences that are known or have the potential to influence the climate.
I don’t think there would be a sceptic in the World if there were significant temperature or climate changes over the past 100 years that lie outside of statistical and known variations of climate changes;
I suppose that a lot of this has to do with one’s interpretation of “significant,” but compared with other measureable quantities that have given rise to the observation or discovery of new phenomena, this statistical variation is not something that falls within the range of “new influences” outside of the known.
There are numerous “forcing,” surely. [To me “forcing” and “feedback” are their own plural.] One remarkable property of climate over the ages is the remarkable stability to perturbation – there must certainly be interaction among all the possible forcing that are not yet accounted for this to happen, the result of which must be “forcing in the other direction,” better known as damping.
I think too much time has been spent (or maybe wasted) trying to find negative “feedback” that reverses the effects of the “positive.”
To me, this is the wrong approach.
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As a thought experiment, let’s make a rule that all supercomputers running climate simulations must run on solar power and (because we want to avoid a displaced “footprint”) the photo voltaic cells driving that supercomputer must be on the roof of the building that houses it (no grid connect). This includes monitors, hard drives, backup systems, network routers, the lot. All must be solar power, that’s my rule to test whether these guys want to eat their own gravy.
Let that run for a few years and maybe we take a look at how their simulations are going?
What I’m saying here is that technology requires energy input.
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Looking at renewable energy [neglecting for the moment breeder reactors] the cost is so high, the efficiency so low, the land use such a waste, the difficulty in maintianing any sort of reliablility in systems that rely on weather and are thus inherently chaotic
– this boils down to waste, just waste waste waste pure waste.
Modern civilisation IS reliable energy including reliable electric power, incliding a National grid, including an infastructure to support it.
The return to some midieval feudal states just to make some energy scheme workable –
is right off the reservation.
Maybe one day somebody can use this approach to colonize Mars, but this won’t work here in the West
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People used to come into former CEO Jack Welch’s office all day with “new ideas for GE to get involved with.”
When asked, “how do you decide which ideas have merit, and which do not?”
– Welch pointed to his nose.
That is the overall problem with AGW. The whole thing just doesn’t “smell right”
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
This is why I think that it is a good idea to teach critical thinking in schools.
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Absolute agreement
: )
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Robin:
“You don’t burn the money when you tax it. It’s income for the government. You can lower other taxes in response.
There’s no loss to the economic activity.”
Utopianism, how sweet. Wait, wait, I know, Robin Grant runs for Prime Minister, we all vote for him and he will single handedly fight the bureaucracies and the opposition and lower taxes for us when he sees fit.
Any takers?
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Critical thinking in schools and taking on bureaucracies: Margaret Thatcher tried but failed to take on the Education Department in the UK in the 80’s and that’s why the education system there is in shambles. I can just imagine any government, once carbon taxes are in place, trying to take on the Climate Change Department and try to reduce their funding and raison d’etre!
If anyone is interested in the education debate, read Melanie Phillips’ excellent “All Must Have Prizes” and the Australian “Dumbed Down” by Kevin Donnelly. School children in US, UK and Australia are taught WHAT to think, not HOW to think, thanks to Outcomes Based Education and political correctness.
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Taxes are well-known incentive for business!
Industries are continually clamouring, “More taxes for us! Please! Carbon taxes will boost our bottom line dramatically!”
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Quoting part of post #88 Robin wrote:
“There a number of reasons why the infamous Oregon petition is an unreliable judge of scientific opinion.
The dishonesty of making the covering article look as if it had been submitted it PNAS aside, there were no checks of the identity of the signatories, and many were impenetrable to attempts to verify them (and some that were verifiable, when contacted had no recollection of such a petition). (see: SKEPTICISM ABOUT SKEPTICS – Scientific American)”
I obligingly looked in the link and was amazed that another worthless criticism of the Petition Project was so easily swallowed!
Here is the ENTIRE witten content I quote from the link concerning the Petition Project:
“SKEPTICISM ABOUT SKEPTICS
Many conservatives regard the “scientific consensus” about global warming as a media concoction. After all, didn’t 17,100 skeptical scientists sign a petition circulated in 1998 by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine? (See http://www.oism.org/pproject and http://www.prwatch.org/improp/oism.html on the World Wide Web.)
Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers‐a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community.”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
All from a sample base of 30 names!
Where are the details of this highly scientific study?
The Robin goes on with more silly effort to attack the Petition Project:
“A fair attempt to get around the self-selection bias, (and packing by some extremists in the climate change skeptical community who seemed to have signed the Oregon petition on behalf both of people who didn’t exist, and who didn’t agree with the petition), was done by Doran and Zimmerman.”
I once again looked at the link Robin privided.Once again NO credible attack was made against the Petition Project itself,BECAUSE IT WAS NEVER MENTIONED AT ALL!
It is obvious that you fail see why attacking the Petition Project in this manner only makes you seem irrational.Here is the actual petition that people were asked to consider signing after reading a science papers in the UPDATED version:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/GWPetition.pdf
I have dealt with many feeble objections against the petition over the years.Yours spectaculary failed as well since your two links did not support your claim,quoting you again:
“There a number of reasons why the infamous Oregon petition is an unreliable judge of scientific opinion”
If there were evidence of fraud such as packing names onto the petition signee list of people who never signed.It would be easy to prove it.But it never happens does it?
He he…..
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Well, I signed it.
Now Robin knows that 1 of 31,700 signatures is authentic.
only 31,699 left to verify
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
Humans are superstitious by nature.
If you think that “smell” is a judge of logic and reason isn’t. You’re going to get it wrong much more often that you’re going to get it right.
Critical thinking is the knowledge of these frailties of human reasoning, and the ability to recognise them in oneself, and thereby avoid them. (As much as possible).
Smell is not evidence, it is the sum of your preconceived notions. Considering it as evidence is yet another way to avoid evidence and maintain your current beliefs, whether they are right or wrong.
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Anne-Kit Littler wrote:
How is a change to taxation “Utopianism”?
Was the GST “Utopianism” too, simply because other taxes were lowered?
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sunsettommy (Thomas Pearson) wrote:
30 samples gives you a maximum standard margin of error of about 5%. ((p)(1-p))/√n. It’s not that bad for a cheap glace to see if a survey is good or not. The Oregon Petition was poor enough that it’s shortcomings show up on this resolution.
The point is that there were signatories there who had not signed the petition and other signatories that didn’t exist. (And some who had died).
There are much better surveys of scientific opinion than the Oregon Petition.
sunsettommy (Thomas Pearson) wrote:
The reporter at the Scientific American, took a sample of names on the petition, and tried to contact the people.
It’s not especially rigorous, but you don’t need much rigour to find that some of the signatories never heard of the petition, some have since changed their minds, some have since died, and some never existed. Therefore the claims of 31,000 scientists does not relate to 31,000 existent scientists who still hold that belief.
I’m slightly amused by this criticism of Scientific American by you. You do know that the details of the petition have not been released. They don’t want you knowing how many survey cards were sent out to date.
sunsettommy (Thomas Pearson) wrote:
You have mistaken my meaning. Doran and Zimmermann is an example of a reasonable survey or scientific opinion, not a critique of a highly questionable one. And neither would it be. It’s a scientifically based survey published in a peer-reviewed journal. The Oregon Petition isn’t really of an academic standing in which it would warrant any attention in such a forum.
A pop-science magazine such as Scientific American might have a go though.
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If you think that “smell” is a judge of logic and reason isn’t. You’re going to get it wrong much more often that you’re going to get it right.
Nah. And the older you get, the better your intuition gets – because you have seen so much in the past.
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Robin writes:
“30 samples gives you a maximum standard margin of error of about 5%. ((p)(1-p))/√n. It’s not that bad for a cheap glace to see if a survey is good or not. The Oregon Petition was poor enough that it’s shortcomings show up on this resolution.
The point is that there were signatories there who had not signed the petition and other signatories that didn’t exist. (And some who had died).
There are much better surveys of scientific opinion than the Oregon Petition.”
The survey in that link was bereft of any compelling details.That is why it is not worth anything.It could be designed to achieve a biased purpose.WHO are those 30 names they did not tell us about?
That is the second time you have made a claim that people’s names are on the petition who never signed it.How about the idea of proving it beyond mere statements? Otherwise you are blowing smoke and I am immune to it, since I have been dealing with these lame claims for 10 years now.
If they happened at the rate you seem to imply why no lawsuits for fraud? It should be easy since the names are prominently displayed at the Petition Project website.
The Scientific American did not discredit anything since it was a contrived survey with the purpose of trying to cast doubts against names that are apparently real.Even S.American thinks they are real.Despite that they failed to provide details past the 30 names for the rest of us to check.How about telling us who those 30 names were?
Robin writes:
“The reporter at the Scientific American, took a sample of names on the petition, and tried to contact the people.”
But of course they could not tell us who those 30 names they came up with.They also did not tell in any detail how often they tried to contact people.
“It’s not especially rigorous, but you don’t need much rigour to find that some of the signatories never heard of the petition, some have since changed their minds, some have since died, and some never existed. Therefore the claims of 31,000 scientists does not relate to 31,000 existent scientists who still hold that belief.”
It is not difficult to actually to make two dots and have a line go from one to the other.You keep claiming that some signatories never heard of the petition.If this was true why not those alleged victims demand to have the names taken off the list of file a class action lawsuit? You do know what Fraud is,do you?
But it never seems to happen.The names are listed at the Petition website and the signed papers are supposed to be on file.All explained at the OSM website.Why does the obvious point of attack elude you and the alleged victims?
If some of the people who earlier signed the petitions changed their minds,all they have to do is request that their be removed.After all they do know where to have it done,as they have no excuse for not knowing where the website is.
“I’m slightly amused by this criticism of Scientific American by you. You do know that the details of the petition have not been released. They don’t want you knowing how many survey cards were sent out to date.”
I was a subscriber of that magazine for a while,I am aware of their reputation.I am aware that the only details of the Petition is what we see at the website.We both know that they have not posted actual paper ballots on the website,but they did publish the NAMES there.As I have written several times now,that it is fraud to add peoples names to a petition without SIGNED approval.But I never see these easy to prove lawsuits of alleged wrongdoing.When will that ever sink in you people?
They only published how many people signed the paper ballots that were mailed in.The total number of ballots they sent out is not relevant,because they only showed evidence that there are no “scientific consensus” existing that you alarmists commonly lyingly claim exist and that a lot of people who signed thought the Kyoto Treaty was bad.That was the main purpose of the petitions.
Quoting from your first link:
“Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science.”
Did they tall us who those 30 people were?
How do we know that,
“Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.”
is true since Scientific American did not tell us who those 30 people were.I suppose that you are going to just accept their unsupported claims.
He he…..
“You have mistaken my meaning. Doran and Zimmermann is an example of a reasonable survey or scientific opinion, not a critique of a highly questionable one. And neither would it be. It’s a scientifically based survey published in a peer-reviewed journal. The Oregon Petition isn’t really of an academic standing in which it would warrant any attention in such a forum.”
I am aware of what you are trying to do.But it still does not prove your claims against the Petition Project.That is because you are unhappy that your cherished consensus is proven false and that a lot of signatories thought the Kyoto Treaty was a bad idea.
The meaning of the words Petition and Survey are not the same.
The Oregon Petition Project told us what they did to get people to sign the paper ballots.They then posted the results of the balloting on the website.It is all spelled out clearly what they did,right in their website.Too bad you are being irrational about it.
“A pop-science magazine such as Scientific American might have a go though.”
ROFLMAO!
If they just provide more details such as actual names of just 30 people,then I might take them more seriously.
Scientific American has been declining for years and a reason why I left that increasinly ragged magazine.They were incredibly unfair with Bjorn Lomborg a while back.
Robin you apparently fail to see how feeble the claims are against the Petition list really is.If they really had a compelling case against it,they would have done far better than they have.
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“Brian G Valentine:
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:26 am
Well, I signed it.
Now Robin knows that 1 of 31,700 signatures is authentic.
only 31,699 left to verify.”
I think you meant for Robin to disprove.
I know of a few more who signed it too,and even a few who stated the REFUSED to sign it!
I know since they told me.
LOL
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Sounds like a good enough sample to me, Tommy.
So, we can conclude that all signatures to the Oregon Petition are authentic and credentials are accurately represented.
To at least 99% certainty.
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
Poor critical thinking is poor critical thinking at any age.
I’m yet to see a study that shows the intuition improves with age. I’ve seen ones that show that intuition’s correctness is not related to how sure the person is. And you sound pretty sure your nose is better than your brain.
I recommend using the brain in all cases.
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They were a random sample.
Because its difficult and expensive to prove that you have suffered financial loss by being on the petition.
They’re a pop science magazine, not the high court.
Crikey, if your standards of record keeping are that high, why doesn’t it offend you that the Oregon Petition won’t say how many cards it sent out? Or how any verification was done?
Scientific American are not known for their fraud. And neither are they the only one who noticed that the Oregon petition was dodgy.
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?fded5949-97a0-41e8-ad66-bba0fa15e61f
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19980501&slug=2748308
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s04201998
Because no verifiable financial damage has been done.
Do they?
When I change my mind about something, I’ve never thought to wrack my brain to see if it affects any of the petitions that I’ve signed over the years, and then write to them all asking them what the wording of the petition was so I can decide if my new position is counter to the wording and get my name removed if warranted.
Do you? Do you also go through all the petitions that you’ve had your name removed from, to check if you should unremove your name from them?
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
Well, no, I can’t even verify that one. There doesn’t appear to be a Brian Valentine amongst the signatories.
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Robin,
Regarding #342, it’s good that you can concede that the effect of doubling CO2 is limited to 0.9C, excluding the hypothetical feedback. Many of your
fellow AGW believers can’t even get this far. According to radiative transfer codes, CO2 reflects about 40 W/m^2 (a better characterization than
absorb or capture), or about 10% of the total surface energy @ 289K, and a third of all greenhouse gas reflection. While increasing CO2 reflection by
nearly 10% (3.7 W/m^2) by doubling the CO2 concentration is a bit of a stretch, it’s only off by a factor of 2 and hardly worth arguing about.
The bogus energy amplification of 5.5 implied by the IPCC sensitivity heuristic is so far out of bounds that it deserves serious argument and my
reasons for rejecting it haven’t changed.
Now, lets move on to how CO2 operates, starting with what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t create energy, retain energy permanently or hide energy in any way. It’s only climate related action is to defer the release of surface energy whose original source was the Sun. Quantifiably and qualifiedly, the reflection of red light, while letting the other colors pass is a simple, yet accurate way to describe the effect of CO2 if you consider the radiation of the Earth to be the visible spectrum.
The radiative transfer codes tell us that about 11% of the Earth’s emitted energy spectrum is reflected by CO2, about 21% is reflected by water vapor and another percent or so is reflected by other gases. The remaining 2/3 of the surface energy passes through a relatively transparent atmospheric window bounded by the CH4 absorption line on one side (about 7.5u) and the CO2 line on the other (about 15u). It’s not completely transparent owing to relatively weak water vapor continuum absorption and the weak ozone line at about 10u.
After capturing a 15u photon, the temperature of a CO2 molecule is increased by hundreds of degrees C. This energy is rapidly transferred to the other gases in the atmosphere per the Kinetic Theory of Gases and is either sent into space, or sent back to the surface. This energy transfer has the property of transforming the original narrow band energy into broad band energy, 10% of which will also be absorbed and reflected by other CO2, possibly after a subsequent absorption and emission by the surface, and so on and so forth. After a short time, all of the energy in the captured 15u photon will find it’s way into space. For perspective on the time constant, consider radiative cooling on a dry, clear winter night. When there is little atmospheric water vapor, more of the energy reflection is via CO2, which clearly isn’t enough to keep the temperature from falling
rapidly. For all intents and purposes, the greenhouse effect of CO2 is a dinural effect, whose influence extends the escape of energy accumulated during the day into the night.
A significant difference between GHG reflected energy and incident energy is that incident energy from the Sun is ‘new’, while GHG reflected energy is ‘old’. If you count the forcing of this energy as it came from the Sun, you can’t count it again when it’s bounced back to the surface by GHG. Technically speaking, forcing is something that drives the system. GHG ‘forcing’ simply reorganizes existing energy by modifying the setpoint between the surface energy and the energy leaving the planet. Treating GHG reflected energy as if it was new forcing energy is why many models fail to converge and predict nonsense runaway effects.
A feedback you may not appreciate is that the emission spectrum moves away from the CO2 line as it warms, proportionally reducing energy reflected by CO2 by more than the CH4 reflected energy increases. If you look at the absorption spectrum it’s a band pass filter for energy with wavelengths between about 8u and 14u. The climate works as a sweet spot amplifier, where the sweet spot is the energy spectrum between 8u and 14u. The climate system operates by maximizing the amount of energy passing through this sweet spot, which just happens to coincide with a temperature range consistent with liquid water and ideal for biology.
Regarding post #386. The time constant relative to the forcing component alone is meaningless. The time constant is a system level attribute which can be related to the ratio of the stored energy to the total energy flux. For example, in an RC circuit, the time constant is given by R times C. R is inversely proportional to flux (current increases with smaller R) and C is proportional to the amount of energy that can be stored. All it means when we can detect changes in the heat content of the oceans is that the oceans respond faster than you think to changes in energy.
Another point about the oceans is that cold water sinks and warm water rises. There is no where for heat to hide, except on the surface, where it immediately contributes to the global average surface temperature. There is also little energy flux between the deep oceans and the surface. The evidence of this is dT/dx through the thermocline. The magnitude of this is small and on the order of the energy flux from the Earth’s surface, except opposite in sign. The thermal connection between the deep ocean and surface waters at the equator goes through the poles.
Incremental GHG reflection, or for that matter, energy from any source, can’t accumulate as you say without resulting in immediate warming. The idea that energy gets stored in the thermal mass and that the warming it produces is deferred by decades violates COE. As the thermal mass warms, it radiates more energy which causes it to cool. It doesn’t matter what caused it to warm, this very strong negative feedback from thermodynamics keeps heat from accumulating without bounds.
George
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Robin that’s crazy
http://www.petitionproject.org/signers_by_last_name.php?run=V
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Intuition IS the brain, Robin – it’s the brain working in gestalt mode
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Robin, Re #328
Yes, I have noticed that many of the skeptics are among those who have been able to take time time necessary to go out and actually understand the science. I don’t consider that a negative. While not retired myself, I don’t need to work all the time and can dedicate time to this. I do this because I recognize that the consensus is absolutely and irreconcilably wrong and if we allow the agendas underlying this false consensus to proceed, I will never be able to retire.
George
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Robin, again Re #328.
BTW, the only correlation involving those who deny the cigarette and cancer link is with those who smoke, which is a factor unrelated to the actual science. Ad hominem attacks aside, it’s very common that AGW proponents fail to discern the difference between correlation and coincidence.
George
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co2isnotevil:
I don’t understand – please clarify the first sentence in your post no. 390!
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Kendra,
This was in response to another post which denigrated a skeptic because of a history of denial of the cigarette to cancer link where I simply pointed out that the motivation for such denial is addiction which has nothing to do with climate and CO2. The correlation is from my experiences, where the only people I have ever met who deny the cigarette to cancer link were smokers themselves.
George
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Thanks co2: However, I have studied the cigarette to cancer link in depth and while, yes, there is a correlation – but not causation – this is only one of many other correlations, indeed I think Post Offices have even played a role.
I will take your intent for the meaning of the word link simply to be a contributary factor (correlation) among many, many others. I do have the problem with your assumption that those few who might deny ANY link are only smokers (actually some are authentic scientists – heretics, I guess!), as I’ve come across many non-smokers who simply question the “science.” However, I know of no one who does not deny smoking might play a role, to some extent, and in some circumstances. Thank you for at least not calling them “shills of big tobacco.”
Actually, in my intensive study of smoking and health, I do believe that for certain at risk people, smoking taken together with other “confounders” plays a contributory role in some cases. So I am glad you said link, rather than causation.
Anecdotes:
1. One of the studies to “prove smoking causes cancer” has various information that can be compared aside from what was touted in press releases. For instance: comparing non-smokers who didn’t eat vegetables with smokers who ate vegetables showed a better outcome for the veggie smokers.
2. Women in Hong Kong who stir fry a lot have a high risk of lung cancer.
3. Japanese smoke like chimneys and have a lower risk.
4. Comparisons between rural and urban areas show a much stronger link to developing cancer in the urban (exhaust, other pollution) areas.
I could go on infinitum – and then there’s the whole secondary smoke scam.
I can get links for everything, but this is “off-topic” so I only want to make one point. Pseudo/politicized science is taking many forms and for many reasons (have you noticed the obesity crisis?) Although we must choose our battles, we must acknowledge that junk science must be fought on every level, we are all truthseekers.
The Tobacco Control movement is a forerunner, amicrocosm of everything that’s going on, based on totally corrupt, biased, cherry-picked studies, etc., etc., and everyone seems to confuse the word Unpleasant with the word Harmful. Lives have already been destroyed, people have been stigmatized, cultures have been vandalized, property and civil rights usurped, businesses and jobs lost, onerous taxes without representation imposed. The consequences we fear for schemes such as cap and trade has already been imposed on a significant percentage of adults, who are suffering from draconian meansures everyday. It’s all already happened, in the interests of special lobby groups using junk science and those who are zealots/tyrants. And no one gives a damn – after all they’re only lowlife smokers.
Interestingly, all of my colleagues who have discovered the fraud and lies in that area have gone on to look at other so-called science, notably climate change. Without exception, they get it. Whereas they, the lowly smokers who “smell like an ashtray” are considered quantité negligable – because you don’t approve.
To sum up, we all have to pick our battles, but when it comes to fraudulent science to push through totalitarian measures, we must stand together against the use of it for social and economic control in whatever context it appears. We choose our areas of expertise, mine is tobacco control but now educating myself in climate change as well. I originally started with FDA / pharma bogus science and corruption.
Joanne, forgive me for the off-topic but this is something that must be brought up. The same forces are driving and corrupting a number of areas. Thanks for your patience.
I love your site (looking forward to more).
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I smoke tobacco – so big deal – Al Gore says smoking causes global warming!
Al Gore’s family became rich enough as tobacco growers and merchants for Albert and his father Albert to run for political office – and get fat – instead of working for a living
Now THAT shows the evils of tobacco very clearly, if you ask me
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
Do you have a citation for this?
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co2isnotevil wrote:
AGW proponents are about 80% of the scientific community and about 97% of actively publishing scientists in the field of climate change. So I suspect that your generalisations about mistaking correlation with causation are unsupportable.
I didn’t say that it wasn’t co-incidence. Whether or not institutions such as the Heartland Institute and Junkscience take on both issues from the less mainstream scientific perspective because of a collaboration of science denial managed from the industry end, with a view to better obfuscating their industry ties than by being a one issue group, the fact remains that many of the high profile denialists are vociferous on both issues.
Lindzen, (the late) Singer and Seitz, are probably the highest profile deniers outside the blogosphere, and they have all also spoken about the smoking/cancer link.
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co2isnotevil wrote:
The Doran and Zimmerman survey shows that to be exactly wrong. The more someone knows about science, and the more a scientist knows about climate science, and the more a climate scientist knows about climate change all lead to a greater acceptance that the warming is significantly anthropogenic.
So you think that climate science is absolutely and irreconcilably wrong eh?
Which is your main point of contention?
a) human activity has increased the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses.
b) increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses increases the greenhouse effect.
or
c) the resulting warming is the same order of magnitude as can be found from a wide range of evidence (some of which I cite above)
Because you seem to accept b and c, to within an order of magnitude. (Even to within a factor of 3). But point (a) can be shown from observational evidence, so it appears that this misunderstanding can be rapidly resolved. (And you can peacefully retire).
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
I’m not aware of such refutations. Do you have a citation for some of them? Were the refutations also published in Science? I couldn’t find them.
You seem to have got sidetracked into an ad-hominem against Hansen. There US has a few hundred scientists who are regularly publishing papers on climate change counting earth scientists alone. Climate change doesn’t hinge on Hansen, he’s just one of hundreds. And ad hominem is a logical fallacy. If you want be to believe he is wrong, you’ll have to show me why.
Your figures have a much more significant annual periodicity than any global temperature data I have seen, including the NASA set, from where you seem to be claiming you sourced your data.
Why the difference?
00
Tel wrote:
Less so than transportation or construction.
And Wind is very competitive economically. (Figures for the US were wind power cost about 5% more than gas power … hardly an economic collapse even without the economies of scale that a carbon tax would facilitate.)
00
Robin, re #398
My point of contention is with c). The effect predicted by the IPCC of 3C for doubling CO2 is way off. The maximum supportable by the physics is less than 1C, including feedbacks, and even that uses the inflated forcing power predicted by the IPCC heuristic. The most significant warming seen in the nearly 25 year weather satellite data history is a documented change in the way that the data was processed, shortly after 9/11, which ended up biasing the surface temperatures by as much as 1C, but still within the margin of error. Over this same 25 year period, almost 1C of the suspected warming should have occurred and it hasn’t. Unless you recognize this discontinuity in the data, you can be misled to see a small temperature increase when examining only yearly averages. I’ve seen oblique references to Hanson using this in his papers as evidence of warming, which is particularly disconcerting, as he is the gatekeeper of the satellite data.
Here are plots of Hanson’s data.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/avg_temp.gif
http://www.palisad.com/co2/avg_temp_3.gif
George
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
The calculations above show that the physics gives about 1°C, excluding feedbacks, not, as you claim, including feedbacks.
Do you accept that it is physically possible for the feedbacks to be positive?
co2isnotevil wrote:
Where is that documented?
Why wasn’t the new processing technique backdated to the past data?
co2isnotevil wrote:
Yes, so you said above. The periodicity looks strange compared to other temperature data sets, including NASA’s (which would be Hansen’s). What is the cause of the 12 month periodicity in this data, when such a peridicity doesn’t occur in other global temperature data?
00
Robin,
At 3.7 W/m*2, the open loop increase in surface temperature from Stefan-Boltzman is 0.67 C. This can be calculated as follows:
P = oT^4, where o=5.6704E-8 W/m^2K^4.
289K -> 395.55 W/m^2
395.55 + 3.7 = 399.25
399.25 W/m^2 -> 289.67K
dT = 289.67 – 289 = 0.67C
The net feedback has many components, The most important relative to long term climate change is that of surface ice, which is highly positive during transitions between ice ages and interglacials. At minimum and maximum extents, the feedback is still positive, but it’s magnitude is greatly reduced and approac. The reason is that the system is at one end or the other of the dynamic range of the ebb and flow of surface ice. Consider the limits. If there is no ice whatsoever, there is no ice feedback. Similarily, if the Earth is 100% covered in ice, there is no ice feedback.
The next most important long term feedback component is biology. As energy drops and biomass shrinks, energy is shifted from constructing biomass to heating the planet and as more incident energy drives biomass increases, energy is shifted from heating the planet to constructing biomass. This is a moderate negative feedback with time constants on the order of centuries, as ecosystems adapt.
Other effects, like outgasing and the effect CO2 has on surface temperature act so quickly that they’re not apparent in the ice core data.
The long term average feedback seems close to 0. It seems more positive during transitions between ice ages and interglacials and is closer to zero, or even negative, at the climate limits. The fact that it’s different between transitions and at the limits is another reason why the IPCC estimate of climate sensitivity is bogus.
You also seem to be confusing feedback with gain. Both must be considered before understanding the response. In fact, the real effect of CO2 is not to force the system, but to change the response of the system to changes in incident energy.
The 1C value comes from observations, where even with the various biases and inaccuracies in the data, the CO2 has increased by enough since weather satellite data has been accumulated that if the no feedback effect of doubling CO2 was greater than 0.67C, should be discernible in the data and it’s not, which means that even the 3.7 W/m^2 number is an over estimation.
The data in the plots I sent is directly from the GISS ftp site. It’s extracted from the D2 data set which aggregates samples from many satellites into 280 Km on a side regions of surface and reports monthly averages for each 3 hour portion of the day. The data reported is surface temperature, cloud temperature, cloud reflectivity/emissivity (optical depth), surface reflectivity and the percentage clouds, all of which are relatively trivially connected to the measured radiance values from the satellites. Pressure and atmospheric vertical temperature profiles and over 100 other derived cloud type and subtype classification variables are also in the data set.
Did you notice that the global average is lower in January and higher in June? The Sun is closer in January and about 80 W/m^2 more energy arrives than in June. This is also highly obscured in the Nasa data as most of their incident energy data is AU normalized, which cancels out the variability between perihelion and aphelion.
The data documentation is here:
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/errors.html
I also have email confirmation from Rossow that this is a calibration issue with no plans to fix it. The error labeled, “Systematic Decrease in Surface Temperatures Due to Changes in NOAA Operational Sounder Analysis” is the one he said was responsible when I pointed out the error, although the timing isn’t exactly right. There are several other changes that would seem to be related in the 10/2001 time frame, but they were only applied to other data sets and not the D2 data set.
This error is present in many of the NASA data sets. It can be obscured by reporting a running average of 3-12 months. Then it just appears as a slow temperature increase.
The reason it’s not fixed is most likely because of discretionary budgeting. Why should Hansen budget money to fix something when it doesn’t help his case. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the data processing changes were put in place because it made his case appear better by pushing error in a favorable direction.
George
00
Is there an ignore the idiot button? I tried to follow the thread, but the idiot Robin …
I am sorry, but he/she is like a sociologist in a physics lab.
Is there a button, seriously?
00
… it is like trying to pick up a turd from the clean end.
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
You are there.
The link above takes you to here though:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p435.htm
Where you aren’t.
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EJ wrote:
You don’t log in to view the page, so I think that all comers are being served the same HTML.
So your choices seem to be skip over the comments you don’t like yourself, or make an ad hominem post, to try to drag the person down to your level, where you can beat them with experience.
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Than you for this insightful comment.
It doesn’t answer all the points that you have left dangling above though.
1) I think that the relationship between temperature and kidney stone incidence is well supported by data. What makes you think that the WHO is “making numbers up out of thin air”?
2) You claimed that Oreskes’ essay was deliberately deceptively titled, and cherry picked.
How is the titling of the paper “deliberately deceptive?”
Cherry picking would be looking through the papers and choosing the ones that meet your requried criteria. Oreskes chose all 928 papers that met the search term in the decade that she looked at. That’s not cherry picking.
3) you claim that “Benny Peiser’s paper has NOT been refuted.
How do you explain his coresspondence with mediawatch (linked above) in which he withdrew his criticism of Oreskes?
And his acceptance that only 1 of his 34 papers was correctly classified as refuting the consensus. (And that one was not peer reviewed).
4) You claimed that the information I posted about 12 recent northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions was biased because these papers were mentioned in the IPCC report.
Can you provide some citiations to other reconstructions that were not represented? Or provide some reason for suspecting that these papers are erroneous?
Thanks!
00
Tell it to the Marines
00
Robin,
When you were on the oism site, did you look at this?
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm
George
00
I caution Robin that, once shown wrong, then forever after suspect. Just like a witness in a trial.
Real world professionals don’t get a second chance, nor do real world witnesses. Why should you or the myriad of the scientists you lean on get a second chance?
Robin, go to Wiki, they have a great description of the ‘Scientific Method’. There is a word in there, empirical, that is inherent for a theory to be scientific.
History shows again and again, … the folly of men.
95% of all GCM’s are currently falsified, let alone unvalidated.
00
EJ wrote:
So you would agree that because of the dishonesty and poor verification of the Oregon Petition in the past, we are correct to be suspect of them now.
Good.
They produce some things better than others, and global mean temperatures better than regional temperatures.
But “falsified” means forged or tainted. The suggestion that the world’s climate scientists are all committing fraud is the conspiracy theory that I find so poor an argument, both for its logical weakness (show me what aspect of the models is non-physical, rather use what is essentially an ad hominem against climate modellers), and for its highly speculative and frankly unlikely conclusions (explain why 97% everyone is comitting this fraud, no matter how young, from what country, whether they work for a private, government or educational research organisation).
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
No I didn’t George.
Do you think using the 0.1% of the worlds surface that is the Sargasso sea to imply that temperatures were warmer in the MWP than now is disingenuous, when all the northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions have shown the opposite?
And do you think that claiming the shortening of glaciers that began before the use of hydrocarbon fuels is disingenuous because CO2 had been rising from land use change since a couple of centuries before that?
And do you think that looking for a correlation between CO2 levels and temperature is naieve, considering we know that there is a 25-50 year lag?
And don’t you think arguments that it is solar activity that is causing the current warming are clearly wrong because there has been a cooling of the stratosphere, showing that it is something keeping the heat trapped in the troposphere, not extra irradiance from above that is causing the warming. And that most of the warming has occurred in winter and at night, also eliminating the sun as a cause?
And do you think that the claims that the temperature change is small because, it is small compared to day night difference, (of the 110°C range that is not much short of the full range from the coldest to the hottest temperatures measured on earth), is disingenuous because many species exist only in an annual mean temperature range of less than 0.5°C, so it is significant for biodiversity? (In a way that 110°C is not, since no species exists comfortably at both extremes of this.)
This is the sort of writing that demonstrates the need for peer review, because there is such a low signal to noise ratio on the subject of climate change. (And perhaps this is why these people put out their paper that they included with the first petition formatted to look as if it was a submission to PNAS; so that people would give it some respect that it clearly doesn’t deserve).
I would be embarrassed to be associated with a group that was involved in such blatant misrepresentation. I don’t think that OISM do denial any credit, and am genuinely surprised that people such as Thomas would defend them over Scientific American, who can be a bit sensationalist, but don’t had a history of reporting outright lies.
I personally think that climate change scepticism would be best served by admitting that the OISM are and have been disingenuous, and that their approach is not representative of the sceptical community in general, rather than tainting yourselves with association with such purposeful misinformation. Don’t you?
00
Robin,
You say, “But “falsified” means forged or tainted.”
That’s a misunderstanding of the concept of scientific falsifiability.
00
He withdrew only this as a direct criticism of her paper. The rest of his criticism remains such as only 13 (1%) explicitly endorse the ‘consensus view’. Removing the 34 papers is irrelevant as Peiser’s study cleary shows that no consensus exists and Oreskes was not looking at all the papers (928 out of 12,000). Conclusion: Oreske’s paper is debunked and worthless.
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Mike Goad wrote:
I suppose he could have meant scientific falsifiability. But a climate model isn’t a theory or assertion, to which the term scientific term “falsifiable” would apply. It’s a tool for understanding how each individual physical process takes part in the climate system. They can certainly be inaccurate, but I don’t think that that’s the scientific concept that you are talking about.
00
Re #413
Robin, with all you like to plaster on these pages as your “knowledge” – I cannot believe you’re that naïve
Wow that one was a shock to me
00
How is the titling of the paper “deliberately deceptive?”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/full/nature07669.html
00
hahaha
makes my day
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Only what?
Why would a paper explicitly endorse an accepted truth?
I don’t think you would find many papers in the last 20 years explicitly endorsing that the world is not flat either.
It is that most papers simply implicitly endorse the scientific view, and go on to study impacts, or methods of study, or mitigation proposals that shows how strong the consensus is in the scientific community. (That and the complete lack of peer reviewed papers refuting the consensus).
I don’t think that it does. To do that I claim it would have to show that there are papers that either explicitly or implicitly reject the consensus. Which, once the 34 papers are removed, it doesn’t.
(Also note that from EJ’s logic above: “once shown wrong, then forever after suspect.” So given that he misclassified the not one, but thirty four papers, his remaining conclusions are suspect).
She was looking at all the peer reviewed journal articles. Once you leave that realm, you get a lot of noise in with the signal. Her choice was probably the correct one for judging the opinion of the scientific community.
No. Oreskes’ essay was accurate and valid.
Peiser’s was wrong on at least one point that we agree on. (That he misclassified 34 papers as rejecting the consensus position), and I would also say that he was wrong in his conclusion that a low number of explicit endorsements is a sign that the consensus is not universal. Quite the opposite.
Whether or not this is the case, the Oreskes sample of papers was not debunked or worthless. Her finding, that there are no papers rejecting the consensus either implicitly or explicitly was confirmed by Peiser. (Once he got around to admitting it).
00
wilbert Robichaud wrote:
I’m not sure I understand the symbolism.
The question was how is the title: “BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” deliberately deceptive?
Your answer is a link to a paper published in a different journal, by different authors, looking at temperature trends of the surface of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
I don’t doubt that you are exactly right, give or take the surrealism, but could you be more plain?
00
Jones et al., 1998;
Mann et al., 1999
Briffa et al., 2001
Esper et al., 2002;
recalibrated by Cook et al., 2004a
Briffa, 2000; (calibrated by Briffa et al.,2004)
Mann and Jones, 2003
Rutherford et al., 2005
Moberg et al., 2005
D’Arrigo et al., 2006
Hegerl et al., 2006
Pollack and Smerdon, 2004; (reference level adjusted following Moberg et al.,2005)
Oerlemans, 2005
Mann et al., 2008
M Mann?? well we know how accurate and Honest that one is.
Jones?? how do you know it is a valid study since he has refused to release the data under FOI?
D’Arrigo et al?… bristlecones as a proxy? no sense going any further.
00
Being a scientist by training, I too put a lot of weight on peer reviewed literature, as long as there s transparency in the process.
When Phil Jones is on record making the following statement:
These publications are no longer considered scientific works. This violates some of the deepest ethical guidelines in science – full transparency of data and code.
I believe McIntyre and Lucia and Watts and a host of other people who have not published their work in a so-called “peer-reviewed” journal more than Chosen 76 because everything they present is backed by both data and code, so anyone can check and reproduce their work. And they are absolutely open about it as well.
Mann 1998 started that trend of refusing to give data and it persists till today. They are a blot to all science, not to mention their results based on “secret” data and “secret” analysis have been shown to be blatant manipulations of the truth.
Cheers. Kartik.
00
The deception of Gore and the IPCC has succeeded here in the states. Congress just passed the largest Tax on our nation, disguised as a rescue for the environment. Vote: 219 to 212
We can only hope the Senate stops this madness.
This bill will crush jobs and send the rest to china.
And so this will do no measurable good for Global Warming.
This is really an assault… Hell it’s war on our freedoms, that will help feed the Socialist agenda for a generation with the biggest tax increase in our countries history, which will drive up the cost of everything. Raise taxes & kill jobs.
Thanks Robin, you and yours have sold the crap that after billions of year of warming and cooling, I am currently to blame. Brilliant.
And don’t giver me some shit about Green Jobs. This Cap N Trade legislation will lead to massive corruption, and do nothing for the environment. Our government can run crap efficiently: Post office? Rail Roads? Health care? What?
It’s all subsidized, never pullin’ it’s own weight. You Friggin’ Idiot. G*dDa*nitM*th**F**kers!!
Good job to all you brilliant Skeptic Scientist too, Co2% this – HydroCarbon that… If you all so friggin smart why can you get the truth out?!!
OK, thanks for letting me rant. I’m calming down Dang it.
00
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html
00
the article is an example of ” deliberately deceptive “
00
wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Ah. This begs at least two questions:
1) How does that explain how the title of Oreskes’ essay (published in Science) is deliberately deceptive?
and
2) In what way is the peer reviewed paper, published in Nature (no less), deliberately deceptive?
00
Blake wrote:
Again, Congress is acting on the accepted science.
If you think that the IPCC is deceptive, you need to show the scientific community. In the meantime it would be (continued) madness to continue to pursue a high carbon emission economy, when the cost of adaptation are so many more times the cost of reduction of emissions.
Policy should not ignore science. You think your particular pet conspiracy theory deserves an end run around the scientific process, but this is the logical fallacy of special pleading.
Unfortunately the bill was so weakened to get support from coal and oil producing states, that it is nearly useless, and will retard international negotiations by not keeping up with Europe. On the other hand, it is a start.
00
player wrote:
Good.
On the other hand Jones is only one scientist.
And he as been co-author on a couple of papers with about 500 citations, so some of his work has received more scrutiny than most.
I believe that what they do isn’t really research, but commentary. And being, as it is, counter to the findings of the research, is difficult to undervalue in terms of its scientific merit or in what it adds to scientific knowledge.
00
wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Well it’s accuracy isn’t really disputed in the scientific community since the national academies report vindicating his findings.
I haven’t heard about this. But the great Newton wrote in Latin to cut down on the correspondence from the undereducated; and I think a lot of good scientists don’t consider the popularisation of science as part of their job.
There are lots of metrics used as a temperature proxy, and none of them are especially compelling to the intuition.
But if you combine many that are affected by climate you increase the accuracy of the estimate.
Why not?
__________
Extracting a temperature from a proxy is often non-trivial, and local. But these dozen times that it has been done, it shows that current temperatures are warmer than any time in the last 1000 (or 2000) years. So whatever ad hominems you have for Mann or Jones, their work has been reproduced.
00
claiming that all or practically all scientific papers backed the “consensus” view on global warming.
“In what way is the peer reviewed paper, published in Nature (no less), deliberately deceptive?” a 1957 dug up out of the snow station …let me guess you have not read about that one? when one limit his reading to a small narrow world of misinformation’s the result will always be ” I haven’t heard about this.” back to Newton.
00
wilbert Robichaud wrote:
You keep repeating that, but your evidence is not that clear to me.
It is not deceptive. That’s exactly what a consensus looks like, there is no refutation.
There are few papers in the last decade (to my knowledge) that explicitly endorse the spheroidal shape of the earth. And this is because there is a consensus.
Similarly with climate change, scientists are studying the impacts, amelioration possibilities and vulnerabilities because the basic reality of the warming is considered known.
And one paper about Antarctica cooling doesn’t alter the simple reality that there are nearly no papers that refute that it is anthropogenic warming that is probably responsible for most of the warming since the middle of last century.
Again you don’t make your point very clear. You have claimed that the paper is deceptive, and you seem to be citing common knowledge as the evidence. The details seems to be Perhaps you have a citation for a refutation from the peer reviewed scientific literature that I could read. (Or an errata).
Thanks!
00
Robin, re #413
I expected you would find fault in a peer reviewed paper against AGW. So it seems that things you disagree with have passed through the peer review process. Welcome to my world.
Your comment about a 25 year delay is not a statement of fact. It’s a presumption, fabricated in order to make AGW viable in spite of the data. First of all, the only delay in any data set is the delay from temperature change to CO2 change seen in the ice cores. The idea that the Earth is absorbing energy that will not affect the surface temperature for 25 years is easily falsified by the laws of thermodynamics. Any energy that is not going into heating the planet is doing work. For example, the work of biology and the work of weather. While a portion of the work of biology can be considered storage in the form of fossil fuels and forest fire fuel, most of it never returns to heat the planet and is effectively lost.
Consider an isothermal surface, whose temperature is equal to the average surface temperature. This divides the planet into a pool of cold and a pool of hot. The only way to add energy, without changing the temperature is to add to both pools. For example, if you make the cold pool colder and the hot pool warmer by offsetting amounts, the net surface temperature change would be zero, however; this will not manifest a future temperature change.
It’s also important to recognize that for any point on the surface of the Earth, half the time more energy is arriving than is leaving and the other half, more energy is leaving than is arriving. There are many overlapping cycles of this behavior, where the first 2 are day to night and day to day. As incident energy is increasing, the radiation from the Earth’s temperature is below what it’s receiving and the energy difference goes to heat up the thermal mass. As energy is decreasing, the radiation from the Earth’s temperature is higher than it should be and it will be radiating more energy than it’s receiving. The idea that averages of this will be non zero is expected. For example, the day to day response as the days are getting longer puts energy into the thermal mass and the day to day response as the days are getting shorter removes energy from the thermal mass. Year to year changes in average temperature will also manifest a net gain or loss of energy in the Earth’s thermal mass.
George
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
Certainly a single paper carries interest but not weight until reproduced.
But some journals have a better peer review process, and therefore reputation than others. And the reputation of the “Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons” has been waging a war on science since its first issue in 2003.
They publish anti-homosexual and anti immigrant rants.
They publish anti-vaccination rants.
They have provided a platform for an utterly unqualified commentator who argues that autism is a consequence of social, emotional and parental oppression.
They advocate a return to the use of asbestos in construction.
(See: <a href=”http://neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/91/strange-bedfellows”Neurodiversity blog; Strange bedfellows)
And they are also very non-central politically:
The AAPS (which publishes the “journal”) is explicitly opposed to any form of government regulation of health care (except abortion, which it explicitly opposes); considers the FDA and Health Care Financing Administration to be unconstitutional; is utterly opposed to Medicare; urges physicians not to participate in Medicare; and describes public health programs as “tyranny”.
(See: Science-Based Medicine blog: The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons: Ideology trumps science-based medicine)
So these guys publish lots of rubbish, and dangerous rubbish at that. Their peer review process is trivial to discard, and publication in this journal does not add any esteem to a paper. Unusually for a journal, quite the opposite: The editorial policy encourages pseudo-science.
I hope you are not suggesting that publication in this journal is similar to the hundreds of papers in Science, Nature, PNAS, or any of the journals of the American Meteorological Society?
The standards are dissimilar.
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
See our calculations above. To warm the oceans homogeneously it would take about 440 years. And only a little less than 20 if you only warm the top 200m with no temperature loss to the depths.
Its not a fabrication, its the specific heat of sea water.
It’s not that it doesn’t affect it, it’s that it takes time to finish.
I don’t know how thermodynamics works where you are, but in Sydney, if you put a pot of water on the gas, it doesn’t instantaneously boil. (Because the power in is not infinite, so the temperature changes less than instantaneously).
The climate is the same, an increase of the power in of about 2 Watts per square metre does immediately cause a warming, but final temperature of that warming isn’t reached for some decades.
I think that any energy not escaping into space is heating the planet … whether or not it’s doing work. The work of biology ends up as heat. As does the work of weather.
What happens to the energy then?
Fine. But I don’t think that scientists have forgotten about the night time. The overall heating or cooling of the planet is due to it’s net energy balance, including the radiation from both the day and the night sides of the planet.
Possibly if you are talking regional climate change, but if we focus on global mean surface temperature, that effect makes no difference. The sun heats half the planet, irrespective of time of year.
00
“claiming that all or practically all scientific papers backed the “consensus” view on global warming.
You keep repeating that, but your evidence is not that clear to me.
It is not deceptive. That’s exactly what a consensus looks like, there is no refutation.”
What the?? what you got a single digit IQ ?
00
Robin,
When solar energy is converted into chemical energy by photosynthesis, it’s not all returned as heat. Biology is continuously sequestering biomass, where dead organisms that aren’t otherwise eaten, fall to the bottom of the ocean to be buried forever under layers of sediment. Weather can be considered the result of a network of Carnot engines, which convert heat into work. In any event, these represent only a small fraction of the total energy, but are equal in magnitude to the effects attributed to increasing CO2. You asked where the energy goes which for biology is chemical bonds and for weather, it’s the movement of masses of air and water from one place to another.
Part of the problem is focusing on global means. This tends to obscure dynamic considerations like the asymmetric response of the Earth to incident energy, which in and of itself is sufficient to account for most, if not all, of the required amplification. From my detailed analysis of the GISS data, it’s very clear that global means hide a lot of pertinent detail. This is evident when considering that the mean is coincident with the maximally chaotic parts of the system, i.e. weather fronts. My point on illustrating local changes is that this is a more useful indication of the thermal response of the components in the system. The system appears slow from a global mean perspective only because the more rapid warming/cooling of the thermal mass is largely offset by opposite warming/cooling somewhere else. Consider that the N polar region average temperature (top 30 degrees of the planet) drops from a summer high of about 280K to a winter low of 250K, a drop of 30C in 6 months, which is mostly over water. If the Sun stopped shining, the entire world would cool down at an even faster rate.
George
00
I’m thinking that the bottom of oceans still have saprophytes. There’s some energy retained in peat bogs, but we’re talking insignificant compared to incoming solar irradiance aren’t we?
A couple of watts per square metre? I find that hard to believe. Do you have a source?
Chemical bonds, as in peat? Not much of the planet is peat bog. And they do release a lot of methane.
The movement of masses of air ends up as heat.
What? Are you saying that seasons make it warmer? How?
Sorry? Are you claiming that weather fronts have a temperature equal to the global mean temperature … independent of where the front is?
That doesn’t sound very creditable. Surely a front in Antarctica would be cold, while one in northern Sudan would be warm?
00
wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts, Wilbert.
00
Robin,
Weather fronts are boundaries between cold and warm. In most cases, the cold side is below the global average temperature and the hot side is above the average temperature. It’s along weather fronts that the active process of thermodynamic equilibrium with incident solar energy occurs.
Consider an isotherm whose temperature is the average temperature of the Earth. On one side is a pool of cold energy and on the other is a pool of warm energy. The Earth’s weather systems are Carnot engines driven by the temperature difference between these pools whose action occurs primarily along the boundary between them. If you examine this isotherm, the jet streams are roughly coincident with it and it roughly bisects the oceans thermocline. Trading off the fraction of the Earth on the warm side relative to the cold side by migrating the jet streams and adjusting cloud coverage controls the energy leaving the Earth such that it is equal to the energy arriving from the Sun. Both effects adjust the relative proportions of the cold pool and warm pool exposed to space and the goal of all the weather related feedbacks, including water vapor, is to balance incoming energy with outgoing energy through the actions across the boundary between these energy pools. We can see the speed of this in action as the jet streams migrate north and south with the seasons and with the rapid formation of thunderstorms.
Carefully examining this isotherm shows that the cold pool completely encloses the warm pool. The cool pool starts at the poles which are thermally connected through the deep ocean (there is no thermocline in polar waters) and through the upper atmosphere. This shows how both wiggling the jet stream, associated weather fronts, thunderstorms and tropical cyclones are all active elements between the pool of cold and the pool of warm.
By concentrating on global means, the effects of the Earth’s asymmetry are obscured. As the GISS data shows, 80 W/m^2 more energy arrives in January than in June, yet the average global temperature is about 4C colder in January when it should be nearly 4C warmer. The data also shows unambiguously that the reason for this is the seasonally high reflectivity of the northern hemisphere caused by the accumulation of surface snow. This is less important in the southern hemisphere since most of the seasonal snow falls on the water and never gets the change to accumulate.
George
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” A couple of watts per square metre? I find that hard to believe. Do you have a source?”
..But he has no problem believing in CO2 cause catastrophic warming.
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
How do you define “catastrophic”?
Almost certainly CO2 has caused most of the warming of the last 50 years, and that is killing some hundreds of thousands of people annually, and putting extinction pressure on some tens of percentiles of the world’s species.
I certainly think it is bad, and that passing a tipping point such as the loss of the Northern Summer Sea ice will be worse. But I didn’t use the word “catastrophic”.
The reason I believe that is I have seen many scientific sources. (And properly peer-reviewed scientific sources, not “Energy and the Environment” or “Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons”. Actual science based Journals with some scientific standing.)
00
Really. I’m having trouble believing that the temperature change across a front is more than a few degrees.
How is that materially different from the thermodynamic process that occurs with other parts of the atmosphere?
Mate, that didn’t sound right, so I calculated the mean temperature difference of the monthly global mean surface temperatures over the last 50 years from the Hadley centre temperature data. (Data and format linked from this page.)
June was warmer than January, but only by a little less than 0.015°C
So I think that you’re wrong, and also I don’t see the relevance to your claim that there is no physical way that feedbacks can be positive.
Perhaps we can shorten this somewhat meandering path: What do you think is wrong with the science?
1 )Do you agree that warmer air can hold more water vapour?
2) Do you agree that a warmer sea surface will result in more evaporation of water vapour?
3) Do you agree that water vapour is a greenhouse gas, more powerful than CO2? (In fact is is responsible for about 60% of the globally averaged total greenhouse effect).
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Robin,
The temperature data you pointed to is a running 12-month average and does not reflect the actual average temperatures. As I’ve tried to tell you several times, this obscures important details. Please look at the data on the GISS web site, or you can look at the plots I pointed to earlier which shows the monthly averages which vary quite widely. The expected increase due to perihelion is calculated based on the temperature change predicted by stefan-boltzmann as the result of measured solar input to the system. Here is a list of the monthly average temperatures,
surface reflectivities and incident solar energy accumulated over 28 years of weather satellite data and derived directly from the latest GISS data. If you have any problems with this data, complain to Hansen, as this is his data.
avg T avg ref input
Jan 287.06 0.1826 355.95
Feb 287.47 0.1801 349.83
Mar 288.25 0.1766 341.44
Apr 289.17 0.1765 335.65
May 289.97 0.1710 333.93
Jun 290.63 0.1621 333.94
Jul 290.91 0.1589 333.63
Aug 290.79 0.1579 333.12
Sep 289.96 0.1568 334.47
Oct 288.88 0.1649 340.25
Nov 287.70 0.1798 349.03
Dec 287.13 0.1838 355.63
You wanted to know what i think is wrong with the AGW science. It’s very simple. The enhanced greenhouse effect has no basis in physics and no support from the data. While the effect of CO2 on the climate is finite, it’s no where near as large as the ‘consensus’ seems to believe and small enough that it’s certainly not worth spending trillions on an experiment to find out.
Of the three points you mentioned, I agree with all of them. Where we differ is that you insist that the net water vapor feedback is positive. If your enhanced greenhouse effect is from subsequent water vapor feedback, then your delay argument is bogus as water feedback effects act at the speed of weather.
George
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Lets see if this gets formatted better. This also includes the average cloud coverage and calculated deltas.
George
Ts -> surface temperature
Ps -> surface power
Sr -> surface reflectivity
Pi -> incident solar power
Cp -> percentage of cloud coverage
Ts Ps Sr Pi Cp
Jan 287.06 385.04 0.1826 355.95 0.6710
Feb 287.47 387.24 0.1801 349.83 0.6672
Mar 288.25 391.46 0.1766 341.44 0.6716
Apr 289.17 396.48 0.1765 335.65 0.6657
May 289.97 400.89 0.1710 333.93 0.6610
Jun 290.63 404.55 0.1621 333.94 0.6545
Jul 290.91 406.11 0.1589 333.63 0.6545
Aug 290.79 405.44 0.1579 333.12 0.6578
Sep 289.96 400.84 0.1568 334.47 0.6584
Oct 288.88 394.90 0.1649 340.25 0.6657
Nov 287.70 388.48 0.1798 349.03 0.6698
Dec 287.13 385.41 0.1838 355.63 0.6726
delta 21.07 0.027 22.83 0.0181
percentage 5.33% 15.85% 6.63% 2.73%
00
The list is better formatted at this link.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/sum.html
George
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“Almost certainly CO2 has caused most of the warming of the last 50 years”
wow! with hard scientific evidences like “almost certainly” how can one question the Dogma.
“I certainly think it is bad, and that passing a tipping point such as the loss of the Northern Summer Sea ice will be worse.” LOL ..hint ! ..it is called SUMMER sea ice because it melts in….. Yes you guest it SUMMER! God how can someone be so gullible?
I can’t wait for the explanation about “the second years sea ice is too thin and will not last the 2009 melt. Should be a hoot!
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co2isnotevil wrote:
If you scroll down, the monthly temperatures are there. This is how I calculated the mean June-January difference.
Okay, I’m looking at the data, and I’m not understanding it.
Which satellites are aggregated for this data set? Is is just NOAA 12 and NOAA 14? Or is there geostationary satellite information included?
What do the headings (CNT_MON_AVG PHYS_MON_AVG PHYS_WRMANOM PHYS_MSCANOM PHYS_SEASCYC
) mean?
And, importantly: Why are these data so seasonal when the NASA and Hadley Centre and even satellite temperature (RSS Temperatures) are not?
Are the other data all seasonally adjusted?
Is there some hemisphere or orbital bias in this data?
Are we talking about the surface temperature of the earth, independent of cloud cover?
Then increasing the CO2 forcing will result in an increased H2O forcing. That’s a positive feedback that’s physically possible.
Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses does increase the greenhouse effect.
The forcing increases when it increases. The temperature doesn’t rise until things heat up. The heat capacity of sea water is not zero. Water vapour concentration keeps increasing while the sea surface (and most land surface) temperature increases. So the water vapour feedback increases slowly … approximately decades as per the calculations above on the top 200m of sea for a few watts increase in forcing.
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“The reason I believe that is I have seen many scientific sources. (And properly peer-reviewed scientific sources, not “Energy and the Environment” or “Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons”. Actual science based Journals with some scientific standing.”
a few more peer review to read.
Dangerous Assumptions (PDF)
(Nature,April 3, 2008)
Roger Pielke Jr., Tom Wigley, Christopher Green.
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ackerman/Other_stuff/Pielke_Jr_Nature_452531a.pdf
Documentation of uncertainties and biases associated with surface temperature measurement sites for climate change assessment (PDF)
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2007
Roger A. Pielke Sr. et al.
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
(International Journal of Modern Physics B, Volume 23, Issue 03, pp. 275-364, January 30, 2009)
– Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.1161
Some examples of negative feedback in the Earth climate system (PDF)
(Central European Journal of Physics, Volume 3, Number 2, June 2005)
Olavi Kärner.
http://www.aai.ee/~olavi/cejpokfin.pdf
Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data (PDF)
(Theoretical and Applied Climatology, February 2009)
Garth Paltridge, Albert Arking, Michael Pook.
http://www.theclimatescam.se/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/paltridgearkingpook.pdf
Cyclic Variation and Solar Forcing of Holocene Climate in the Alaskan Subarctic
(Science, Vol. 301. no. 5641, pp. 1890 – 1893, 26 September 2003).Feng Sheng Hu, Darrell Kaufman, Sumiko Yoneji, David Nelson, Aldo Shemesh, Yongsong Huang, Jian Tian, Gerard Bond, Benjamin Clegg, Thomas Brown.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/301/5641/1890
So Now you are an expert on “properly peer-reviewed” papers?.. how pompous!
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Robin,
The data set aggregates from many more than just 2 satellites. Here’s the list.
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/docs/response.html
The first field represent the number of ‘counts’ in the average, which is a value between 0 and 255 which is the average of captured, 8 bit values. The second field is the count value converted into a real physical value. Unfortunately, only a 256 entry lookup table is used for data with a non linear relationship to the measured metric (i.e. Temperature is non linearly related to radiance by T^4), so the precision of the second column related to temperature and optical depth is poor. My plots uses their lookup tables and interpolates between entries. The remaining fields are monthly anomolies and other info which is also documented somewhere on the site.
The sources you cite plot anomalies, which is the deviation from the monthly mean. Hansen likes to use anomalies because it obscures the real implications of the data, so they are seasonally adjusted. He claims that absolute temperatures are less meaningful owing to the error margins. This shows up everywhere and is just another part of the misdirection. For example, I couldn’t even find unprocessed solar radiance values on the NASA site as all that was available was 1 AU normalized data. I found unnormalized data on the Univ of Colorado site.
Yes, the heat capacity of the oceans is not zero, but the time it takes for the oceans to warm or cool to achieve a new equilibrium after a change in conditions, for example solar forcing or CO2 increases, is on the order of weeks and not decades. Again, I point you to Hansen’s raw data.
George
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
You’ll find that most good science includes an estimate of confidence.
It’s only really the non-scientific end of the denialist movement that talks in absolutes, without treating errors scientifically and including an estimate of confidence.
Ice does melt in summer, but the extent at the end of each melt has been decreasing.
Also the thickness is decreasing, and the mean age of the ice, which adds to the fragility of the system that allowed the shocking 25% drop in minimum sea ice extent in 2007. (Deeper sea ice takes longer to melt, and older sea ice is colder in the middle, so takes longer to reach melting point, and it slowly drains salt, so older ice also has a higher melting point, so is doubly stable).
The absence of ice at the north pole will make dramatic changes to the entire climate system, because of the changes in convection currents in both the ocean and atmosphere, and is anticipated to be the first high cost and high casualty tipping point.
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Robin,
Let me refer you again to Hansen’s data. This shows the month by month percentage of surface ice for each 15 degree slice of the planet.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/ice.html
As you can see, the amount of surface ice never drops to 0 for the top 60 degrees of the planet! N polar ice varies a little in the summer, but by no means drops to zero. When processed at a finer resolution, the top 5 degrees of the planet has only not been 100% covered in ice for a short time a few years ago. Although after looking at the data, there seem to be some more funny anomalies associated with changes in processing and the addition of new satellites and retiring of old ones at the time when the ice coverage dropped below 100% (to as low as 92%).
George
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co2isnotevil wrote:
Wow. Thanks. I’d been completely misunderstanding that data.
Why do the Hadley Centre and RSS like to use them? Is this another unlikely conspiracy theory?
____
Okay, so we have global temperature peaking every July, and hitting a minimum in January or December, about 3.8K cooler.
And your claim is this is because of Perihelion in January, lagging only 6 months, not decades … is that right?
I don’t think that makes sense. The warmest part is slap bang at aphelion. I think what is causing this effect must be the northern summer, and the fact that land responds much more quickly to an increase in forcing than water (As only the very skin of the land warms, so has nearly no heat capacity). And that there’s so much more land in the northern hemisphere.
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co2isnotevil wrote:
Also showing a decrease in minimum northern ice extent, especially rapid over the last decade.
The worrisome bit is the decrease in age and depth of the ice. This leaves it vulnerable to rapid loss by changes in ocean currents that would in the past have only decreased it’s thickness … such as occurred in 2007.
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co2isnotevil:
On re-reading your posts, I see that your claim is not that perihelion/aphelion is causing the nearly 4°C swing in temperature from (northern) winter to summer, but that the 4°C swing is evidence that the earth’s temperature will respond rapidly to a change in forcing.
I claim that the temperature swing will be only on the land, and that the oceans will respond much more slowly.
And looking at the ‘wat’ data set, indeed we see that March is warmest, and November is coolest … arguably the effect of the sun on the larger amount of water over the southern summer. (Although we could also be seeing the effect of the perihelion in January … of course I claim that we’re not). But the temperature difference is only 0.74°C.
The Atlantic should be able to differentiate between the southern summer and aphelion affects, because it is most approximately equally distributed in both hemispheres of any of the three oceans used … but it looks like the globe … warm July/August, cool December/January … nearly 4°C amplitude on the annual periodicity signal.
That’s strange and unexpected. Now I need to look at the other oceans, but not now … It’s after midnight, and I need my bed.
00
Someone needs to tell the hurricanes that depend on the warming of the waters to develop and grow — only during the warm months, of course.
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Robin,
Any organization that suports AGW will use anomaly data, rather than actual data because you can’t make a case using actual data. The short term variability of nearly 4C washes out potential trends of a tenth of a degree of so, plus the real data raises all sorts of questions that AGW can’t answer. I don’t consider this an active conspiracy, but a passive conspiracy brought upon by group think and a fear of being wrong.
My claim is that it’s the N hemisphere winter snow pack reflecting energy is the cause if the nearly 8C effective temperature change (it should be 4C warmer not 4C colder). Perihelion is in January, by which time most of the N is covered in snow. This can also be seen in the ice coverage and reflectivity data.
My claim is that this is also indicative of the effect an ice age will have when what are now seasonal reflectivity increases becomes permanent and further seasonal increases result from snow coverage in latitudes closer to the equator.
George
00
Robin,
Please study the subject a bit more before spouting the consensus talking points.
1) Mann was not vindicated by NAS. His challengers (McIntyre and McKitrick) were vindicated in 100 percent of their complaints by Wegman, the foremost statistician in NAS. And before you jump in with “but he’s not a climate scientist” please note that the arguments are all about statistics, not climate. One of the major problems with this arena of science is that non-statisticians are playing with statistical methods they do not understand.
2) Jones truly has not released his data. As a result, his work is completely unreproducible and unverifiable. Thus, it is not science. This has nothing to do with popularizing. It has everything to do with science.
3) Strip-Bark Bristlecones (and the similar Fox-Tails) are far more influential than you imagine. They contain the only identifiable “signal” in the cited proxy studies. Remove them, and the signal disappears. More to the point, Strip-Bark BCP (BristleCone Pine) data is notoriously useless as a climate proxy. Too complex to go into in a simple blog reply, but in one simple test case, two samples only a few inches apart on the same tree produced 300 percent difference in the data. The serious dendroclimatologists are humbly beginning to recognize that much of the past work needs a second look. The papers that use this kind of data are all birds of a feather…and all of them go against the explicit strong recommendation of NAS that such data should be avoided.
(PS If you really want to learn more, search for Almagre or for BCP at climateaudit.org)
Blessings,
Pete
(PS: while looking at ice data is a fun hobby, it is useless for answering real climate questions. Why? Because climate scientists require 30 years of data to seed a climate (vs weather) trend. Thus, 2009 gives us our first real sea ice climate data point. We can’t say anything with confidence about climate based on 1979-2009. More data needed over the next several decades.)
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“Ice does melt in summer, but the extent at the end of each melt has been decreasing.”
Only because the wind had push the ice further south and a an error with the satellites confusing blue ice,the snow swept by the wind exposed the ice, and the satellites data was showing open water instead of ice ” your SHOCKING! 25% drop”…but let me guess you did not read about that also.
Let me guess also never read about the “sensor drift error” of 500,000 square kilometers of ice not entered in the data.
“Also the thickness is decreasing”
it was predicted to decrease in 2008 below 2007. Instead we have in 2009 another scary scenario that the second year ice is to thin…really??? how can we have second year ice if we had no first year ice? my last coppermine/ Porcupine River Paddling trip was in 2007 and i read later that it was suppose to be 80 degrees in the arctic?? Hogwash! I was in the middle of a snow storm in August stuck in a tent . That’s reality ..not the crap we hear daily from the media and the alarmists. I wish i could take some of them with me on one of those trips. Bet it would sink some common sense into them.
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co2isnotevil wrote
I find that very difficult to believe, considering the diversity of primary evidence for AGW looking at climate sensitivity calculations alone.
It is perfectly possible to take out the short term variability if it is cyclic. (Or use the anomalies, which takes it out automatically.)
Such as what?
I think that, given the thousands of peer reviewed papers on global climate change, a passive conspiracy doesn’t really explain the absence of any papers claiming AGW is not responsible for most of the current warming.
Well, that leads you to conclude that ice-albedo feedback is very significant, and that takes longer than heating 200m of water. (For ice much more than a couple of metres thick).
Isn’t is physically possible that ice albedo would be a positive feedback?
Which is the positive feedback that you get from ice-albedo for temperature changes in the other direction.
I’m not sure how you can be convinced that freezing ice will cause a positive feedback to a cooling temperature, but that nothing, including melting ice will cause a positive feedback to a warming temperature. Can you make that point any clearer?
Cheers!
00
Yes, it is clear that water temperature is cooler in winter, especially away from the equator.
Above the Arctic circle you in some ways get the situation that was discussed above, if you turn off solar forcing entirely, which causes a very rapid cooling. Certainly enough to notice inside one year.
The Atlantic ocean is in both hemispheres though. I am surprised that it shows such a strong seasonal temperature variation. (And I don’t yet understand why this is almost in phase with the northern hemisphere.)
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Mrpete wrote:
I’ll try to take that on board, Mrpete.
Really. The scientific press seemed to think that he was.
Academy affirms hockey-stick graph; Nature, 28 June 2006
As did the popular press:
Backing for ‘hockey stick’ graph, BBC News, 23 June 2006
The Earth was hotter in the late 20th Century than it had been in the last 400 or possibly 1,000 years, a report requested by the US Congress concludes.
As did the scientific blogosphere:
Quick Reaction to the NRC Hockey Stick Report, Pielke Jr., R; June 22, 2006
My reading of the summary of the report and parts of the text is that the NAS has rendered a near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al.
Those were the sorts of comments that I found when studying the subject a bit. (Which admittedly was some time ago). My reading of the report is that it is a generaly vindication of Mann’s work.
Perhaps you can point me to some more centrist links, that I should have located before posting?
I got the impression that they go a bit of a slap on the wrist. “Our committee believes that web blogs are not an appropriate way to conduct science and thus the blogs give credence to the fact that these global warming issues are have migrated from the realm of rational scientific discourse.” – pp 49 of the Wegman report.
He has served on committees of the NAS, but his CV doesn’t mention membership of the NAS. Who decides who is the “foremost statistician” in the NAS? Shouldn’t that requires someone to actually be in the NAS?
Sure. And the NSA report did say that there were faults in the statistical methodology. The significant point was that this made only negligible difference to the temperature reconstruction.
Right. Is it all of the Jones’ temperature reconstructions that he has never released data for?
Do you have a source with a few more details about this?
In any case, there are over a dozen temperature reconstructions of the past 1 to 2 thousand years in the scientific literature. They all show that current temperatures are warmer than any time during that period.
Thanks for that update. Do you have a scientific source backing that up?
… And if you really want to learn more, read the National Academies report on the Hockey Stick … unlike the Wegman report it was independently peer reivewed. (Also unlike climateaudit).
What does it mean to “seed a climate (vs weather) trend”. Where did you get the information that it requires 30 years of data, and that it is necessary for answering every real climate question?
Have you read Meehl et al. (2004)? It gives a decomposition of the climate signal into parts attributable to the various forcing components.
Then if we’ve got no idea at all what we are doing to the sea ice, we should certainly be very cautious with greenhouse emissions. Sea ice dropped 25% in 2007. If we get three years like that for the same reason at any time, it will be gone! Until we understand the reason caution is imperative!
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Robin,
A suggestion: learn to think like a skeptic. Don’t assume that the surface stuff has any meaning. (All good scientists should be skeptical!) Your response indicates a lack of careful skepticism in your reading…
For the Hockey Stick: read more deeply than the press summaries, and read more deeply than Roger Pielke’s initial take. Look at the comments, and his own responses in the page you linked to. Here are some key facts, agreed to by Dr Pielke:
* The HS was only called “plausible”, which is exceedingly faint praise
* The 1000 year HS is only considered “plausible” for the last 400 years. 400 years is a Very Important Number that should have made alarm bells go off for you. That eliminates it providing any understanding for the key MWP (the warm period almost 1000 years ago), and instead telling us only that the earth has warmed since the little ice age 400 years ago.
Bottom line: the HS proves nothing of value. (The key question today is not “is it warm?” but “is today’s climate unusual?” The HS doesn’t help answer that question.)
Wegman: again, please read more carefully. Not a member of NAS in his CV? Try this from your own link:
“Appointed Chair of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, National Academy of
Science, 2004”
Jones and temp reconstructions: you missed my point. Certain proxies massively dominate ALL of those reconstructions that you have seen. It’s no surprise they all show the same thing: they are not independent studies. The same data is used over and over again. So much so that Steve McIntyre at CA (ClimateAudit.org) has demonstrated an uncanny ability to predict which data sets are used to construct a temp reconstruction just by looking at the merged data…if they were using independent data sources, that wouldn’t happen, of course! Dig in at ClimateAudit for details, including on the Jones issue.
BCP data: you ask for a “scientific source”. This is more basic than journal articles, believe it or not. The data collection and processing has itself been flawed. The original Almagre data was collected without recording provenance, and the responsible scientist died without his notes being archived. The data has not been updated in more than 25 years. We did a simple experiment to see whether new data *could* be collected in reasonable time (the “Starbucks Hypothesis”). What we learned, and the results of our work, are all online. One of the many vigorous discussions was over whether a simple data collection would ever be worthy of journal publication… it’s “not interesting” from the mainstream perspective. Our goal was simply to see if data could be collected in a reasonable timeframe (vs “The Community” argument that a data-update expedition would be prohibitively costly and painful.) You’re welcome to examine the data yourself. (The experts have been very grateful for the data and metadata we provided.)
National Academies report: what gives you the sense it was peer reviewed, and what gives you the sense that peer review in climate science is an indicator of good science? I would normally assume the same thing, but experience has shown that in this case, peer review does not mean data or methods have been validated, nor are the statistical methods properly characterised.
“Seed” — my term. When generating a trend line, the ends require special processing since (for example) a 30 year average can’t be properly generated less than 30 years from the end of the data sequence. The 30 year number is found in many places. Based on your inability to understand your own sources (see “Wegman” and “Pielke” above), I’m not confident that you’d be able to parse any source I provide, even if I took the time to do so.
Sea Ice: we should be cautious with all kinds of things. You make a huge assumption in your statement: “what WE are doing to the sea ice.” You assume WE are doing something to sea ice. We have little or no evidence that WE are affecting sea ice in any way. Here are a few facts that might give you pause:
* In the last few thousand years, tree lines were much further north than today. A very strong indicator of past warmth beyond anything we’ve seen.
* The 1930’s were also a time of very low Arctic ice, with older-technology ships able to traverse the NW passage etc. We also have photos and documentary evidence of surfaced-submarines at/near the North Pole.
Again, my point: sure, it’s warm. But we have little if any evidence that today’s warmth is all that unusual. Look around a bit more and you’ll find the embarassing calculations showing that reality is close to falsifying all of the warming models. Last I checked it wasn’t quite at 95% (publishable) but it is getting close: too cold for any of them to be correct. (cf RankExploits)
[Note: I’m not taking time to cite sources etc other than websites, because this is a quick interlude in my Real Life. JoNova provides much better info in her publications, etc…which is one reason I appreciate this site. And with that, I must move on. Sorry, a cat with a urinary infection takes precedence 🙂 ]
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Thanks, a second time, for your thoughts.
00
Oh, missed one: Meehl. For a discussion in context, see http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=975
Bottom line: the computer models are broken. A model already tuned to “work” with CO2 will of course break if CO2 is removed. And they don’t “work” in any case. They make unphysical assumptions in order to produce “stable” outcomes. Very senior folk at NOAA make these accusations, with much backing. Sorry, no time to research links for you.
Enjoy!
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MrPete wrote:
I think that a healthy resistance to the denialist claims that the scientists are all wrong or all lying is the basis of good sceptical thinking. Scepticism is about science based belief.
Nevertheless, they found that Mann’s paper was accurate materially, and that although some inappropriate statistics were applied, this made no material difference to the HS graph.
This is why everyone called it a vindication. The graph was found to be accurate.
Right. And also there are a dozen other studies that look at the northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions, and they all show that the WMP was cooler than current temperatures.
So the claims against the HS made no difference to the HS, even if the HS were to be discarded, there are plenty of studies that have the same results, and as you point out, that wouldn’t make any difference to the cause of the current temperature rise.
It does, however, show that as the current warmth is unprecedented, probably since the last glaciation, which gives us a possible mechanism for the destruction of ecological systems that are tens of thousands of years old that ecologists are observing.
Yes, I did read that. He is a member of a couple of other committees of the NAS too. My questions to you were:
1) is he a member of the NAS itself?
2) What evidence do you have that he is “the foremost statistician in NAS”?
You missed my point. What peer reviewed, scientific, or otherwise reliable source do you have to back you your claims against Jones?
Because I am a good sceptic, I prefer peer reviewed scientific sources or reputable scientific journalism. As hinted in the Wegman report, ClimateAudit is subtracting from the informed and informative aspects of the debate.
Also when a blog contains only points that are counter to the opinions of 97% of those most expert in the field, I suspect that there is some bias in its reporting. ClimateAudit has an editorial position, and that’s not science.
Then surely the journal that published the paper would publish a refutation of the methods, or an errata?
I’ll have a look at it if you like. What’s the link? (And who are you?)
Because that was the criticism of the Wegman report, and because that’s the method that scholarly journals have found to be the way to cut out poor methodology, biased approaches, and inconsistent results.
Then I would encourage you to think more like a sceptic. Your special pleading shows that you have a emotive bias. Special pleading is a logical fallacy. If your pet subject can’t muster peer review, the likely explanation is that, as with everything else that can’t muster peer review, it is poor science.
Humour me.
Perhaps if you gave a source, your over generalisations wouldn’t affect your point.
In the meantime I note that regional climate change doesn’t follow global trends. I also note that tree lines further north around here would be a indicator of past lack of warmth.
Yes. And Hansen predicted the re-opening of the NW passage back in 1988, based on the rudimentary climate models back then. In 2007 it did, in fact, open again.
Well, the peer reviewed scholarly articles, such as the dozen temperature reconstructions, show that it is.
What is a “warming model”?
I did indeed notice that.
I also noticed, that you were fairly pointed when you asked me to “please study the subject a bit more before spouting the consensus talking points.”
Which is why I took some of my time to acquaint you with the source of the subject that I had studied a bit.
I humbly request that you please study the subject a bit more before spouting that “Mann was not vindicated by NAS.” And scientific support for your other claims would go a long way to engendering some credibility.
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“I got the impression that they go a bit of a slap on the wrist. “Our committee believes that web blogs are not an appropriate way to conduct science and thus the blogs give credence to the fact that these global warming issues are have migrated from the realm of rational scientific discourse.” – pp 49 of the Wegman report.”
No such comment on the report pp 49 .
http://archives.energycommerce.house.gov/reparchives/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
Recommendation 1. Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human
lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and
review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC
report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as
those that constructed the academic papers.
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1. unjustified truncation of three time series
2. copying 1980 values from one series onto another
3. displacement of 18 series to one year earlier than apparently intended
4. Statistically unjustified extrapolations or interpolations to cover missing
entries in 19 series
5. geographical mislocations and missing identifiers of location
6. inconsistent use of seasonal temperature data where annual data is
available
7. obsolete data in at least 24 series, some of which may have been obsolete
at the time of the MBH98 study
8. listing of unused proxies
9. incorrect calculation on all 28 tree ring principal components.
only in the cult of environmentalism would this be considered vindication “
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I should add that I have not closely read the NAS report, but I do have confidence in Nature Magazine’s assessment that they affirmed the hockey stick graph.
I probably won’t ever read it because I’m only peripherally interested in Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions, because the have little relevance to the rapid warming that we are seeing today.
I think that according to the Hadley Centre data, the 00s so far are 0.19°C warmer than the 90s. This is the strongest decade to decade warming on record, and being an order of magnitude faster than the end of glacial period warming that stands out as very rapid on the ice core record, really shows, from current measurements, that what we are seeing is unusual.
So we don’t need any temperature reconstructions to affirm this. Of course there are a dozen temperature reconstructions, and they do affirm this.
That aside, we don’t need Mann et al. (1998) to affirm other temperature reconstructions, because there are a dozen others, each more recent than 1998. Of course it does.
And that aside too, there is certainly no need for the NAS to affirm Mann et al. (1998), because we have many other temperature reconstructions, and we already know that the current warming is unusual from its magnitude alone. However, for what it’s worth, the opinion of those scientists who read the report seems to be that they did.
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Thanks a third time for your thoughts, Wilbert.
(The quote is from the second sentence in the first full paragraph on page 49. The paragraph is labelled “5”.)
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“a healthy resistance to the denialist claims that the scientists are all wrong or all lying is the basis of good sceptical thinking. Scepticism is about science based belief.”
“Denialist” is an interesting term. This site is about good science. That’s why healthy debate is allowed. So is CA, and that’s one reason it was voted science blog of the year. (At the least, as one with climate science family relationships, that would be painful in more ways than one 🙂 )
Mann’s graph: you’re very much reading into their “vindication.” If the graph had accurate confidence intervals, we’d perhaps not be discussing this further. The graph tells us nothing about climate beyond 400 years ago, and nothing new from 400 ybp to now. With floor to ceiling uncertainty, the line they drew is meaningless. That’s why those little statistical flaws are more important than you think.
Jones: look up what HE says; he’s unwilling to be falsified. That’s not science. One of his unscientific quotes is becoming rather famous:
CA: CA’s editorial position is that supporting data and methods should be published concurrent with paper publication. And that all data should be accounted for, not just the data that fits the hypothesis. Yes, that’s advocacy…for science. Either you’ve not read enough to understand CA’s position, or you disagree with it.
Either you’re new to this game, or (again) have not immersed. Surely what you say is reasonable. Unfortunately, in the face of massive politicization, this arena of science will likely not see such proper corrective action for a long time. It is a bit similar to geology in the transition toward plate tectonics. The new perspective could not get a proper hearing for a LONG time.
Obtaining publication of the data itself, let alone errata, has required intense effort over many years. More and more scientists are peeking in on the mess that is climate science, and are horrified by what they find. All of science is being given a bad name.
You have an interesting sense about special pleading…you’re looking at the gatekeepers (journal peer review) rather than the material being published. You want special pleading? How about another famous quote, this one from Esper:
Simply put: Dendrochronology is a fully validated science. Dendroclimatology, which aims to be dendrothermometry is not.
Tree lines: I was referring to arctic tree lines. Sorry that I didn’t make that obvious. Some work done by Finnish scientists.
Studies: you’ll note that the reconstructions lack error bars…and if they have error bars, they are invalid (this requires SERIOUS statistical chops, which I lack entirely. But there’s plenty of material out there on this.)
Robin, all of your points are standard talking points of those who love science, and have done some reading. But you’ve not dug in on this nearly enough. I honestly don’t have time to do your reading for you, nor to go retrieve links. If that makes me less credible right now, so be it. At least you have JoNova here who has done the work. And I pointed you to CA… they are doing the heavy lifting as well.
Oh… who am I? I’m MrPete here and at CA. In the real world, I’m Pete Holzmann. Jack of all trades when it comes to technology, with a lot of science background. I don’t know why my face doesn’t show in my comments here; it ought to. If you really want to see my ugly face :-), google MrPete Almagre. (I’ve been around the ‘net so long there is no way I could hide. You can easily find everything about me, both ‘normal’ and controversial. On this blog, as at CA, you’d better stick to the science though. There are a lot of us from a *wide* variety of “real world” views who are able to come together on the science.)
You get the last say, because I’m out of time… probably for another week or month or ??? Enjoy.
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MrPete wrote:
Which bit refutes Meehl?
Come now, MrPete; surely you wouldn’t “spout the talking points” without “studying the subject a bit”. We both know how disparaging you are of people who do that! The links you used when studying the subject will be fine.
Thanks!
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MrPete wrote:
Not at all. See post 469.
I’d be happy to. Where would I look for that quote?
I’ve read very little “CA”. Why would I? There’s plenty of peer reviewed science that I haven’t read on the subject.
On the page you linked, which you claimed refuted Meehl, it appears (if this sample of one is representative) that I have not been missing much. The main argument is: “The simple GHG-induced temperature projection goes right through the middle of the pack of GCM simulations, and closely tracks the GCM average. As the average of GCM projections is typically accounted to more accurately follow measured climate trends, the same criterion indicates that the simple GHG projection is more accurate than any of the GCM projections.”
This is not a good refutation of climate models. There are any number of lines that could be plotted, and some of them will go through the middle of the pack of GCM simulations. That doesn’t make them better than the GCM.
Neither is there any justification nor confidence given to the assumption that the climate will warm exactly in line with the middle of the GCM simulations. (And this shouldn’t be assumed if the accuracy of GCM simulations is being queried, as it is circular logic).
To test that, you would see how they do in hindcasts against real data.
This doesn’t appear to be the quality of argument that one would find in the peer reviewed scholarly literature.
The author goes on:”One other thing of serious note: It is now obvious that GCM modelers assume that the only element driving net climate change is the level of GHG gasses in the atmosphere. This seems extraordinarily naïve, physically.”
This is simply wrong. (And considering that this appears to be claimed as a consequence of the GHG line amongst the modelled lines is also an example of the logical fallacy ‘cum hoc ergo propter hoc’). Meehl explicitly runs the model with and without various elements driving net climate change, including GHGs, and a great many other things – explicitly showing the GHG level is not the only one.
But we don’t need Meehl to show that; anyone who knows anything about a modern climate model knows that they include solar, volcanic, aerosol, and GHG forcings at least. Which in turn raises telling questions as to what sort of audience the post was targeting.
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Robin,
Yes, ice feedback is important, in fact it’s the only thing that matters, relative to feedback effects seen in the ice cores. It has the only time constant long enough to be seen in the ice cores. It’s a positive feedback effect, but it’s a non linear positive feedback effect. It has it’s maximum influence during climate transitions. Today, we are close to minimum ice, so the magnitude of the feedback, relative to warming is smaller than it is for cooling. At the depths of an ice age, the magnitude of the feedback is greater relative to warming than it is to cooling.
The IPCC **ASSUMES** that the magnitude of the positive feedback from ice seen during the last transition is the same today as it was then, which it’s not. Of course, the current AGW line is that it’s water vapor feedback, not ice feedback that amplifies change.
If the upper limit from doubling CO2 causes an immediate .67 C increase (please stop rounding this up to 1C), the feedback from additional melted ice will not add an additional 3C of warming. It takes the melting of half of the winter snow pack to create this much warming!
Another consideration regarding anomaly analysis is that it can’t distinguish between actual trends and anomalies in the data. For example, the huge anomaly in the data around 10/2001 I pointed out earlier. The temperature data has many discontinuities from changing satellites and changing analysis methods, all of which appear as small anomalies. Data discontinuities get even larger when for example, satellite and tree ring data appear in the same graph. Anomaly analysis is highly misleading and predicting trends of .1C in data with yearly variability of many degrees C, where the accuracy of the data is not even within 1C is based on a seriously flawed statistical analysis. Anomaly analysis is more suited for identifying flaws in the data than it is for identifying trends, hence the name.
You also aren’t paying attention as there are many, many peer reviewed papers which exonerate CO2 as a primary cause of climate change. You can start with the NIPCC report.
You are also underestimating human behavior relative to interpreting data. Most people, want AGW to be true. The reason is that it provides a scapegoat and a mitigation path. This way, you no longer feel helpless against the power of nature. Of course, you’re only fooling yourself. Climate change is natural, expected and there’s nothing we can do about it. Wasting precious resources on personal agendas is recklessly irresponsible and what we should be working on instead is preparation and adaption.
George
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“The peer review process assumes honesty and so was not designed to spot fraud” (Nature)
Extreme changes in the Arctic Oscillation in the early 1990s — and not warmer temperatures of recent years — are largely responsible for declines in how much sea ice covers the Arctic Ocean, with near record lows having been observed during the last three years, University of Washington researchers say.”It may have happened more than a decade ago, but the sea ice appears to still “remember” those Arctic Oscillation conditions, according to Ignatius Rigor, a mathematician with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory and a presenter at the American Geophysical Union’s annual fall meeting this week in San Francisco.
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1905 Son of the Vikings Navigates the Northwest Passage (The New York Times, December 10, 1905)
1946 Northwest Passage May Be Navigable for Ordinary Ships (Berkshire Eagle, October 16, 1946)
1954 U.S. Ships Sail Northwest Passage (The New York Times, August 28, 1954)
1957 U.S. Cutters Conquer Northwest Passage (The New York Times, September 25, 1957)
1969 Northwest Passage Opened (The New York Times, September 15, 1969)
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Found a minute to stop by. Robin, you never fail to disappoint.
I didn’t suggest the linked article refutes Meehl. I said it was a discussion in-context.
Go back, search for Meehl on that page. You’ll find a link to your article, and a money-quote from it, presented by “bender” who happens to be a highly qualified statistician in his own right. You’ll also see a number of comments by other highly qualified scientists, interacting with some of the more vociferous PR AGW-advocates out there. (If you’ve been in this a while, you would, for example, recognize Mr Bloom from the Sierra Club.) Now, sit back, read the WHOLE THING, and read some more of the discussion before and after on the same topic. Use google, etc.
Get involved. Educate yourself. Don’t just pick off bits from here and there. Don’t find the *weakest* quote, find the *strongest* quote that disagrees with your perspective, and deal with it.
(Honestly, I am not a “denialist” other than denying that we know as much as many think we know! My perspective, now with several years of following this and even getting out there to do some Real Work, is that advocacy has overtaken science…that science has a LOT of work to do before it learns anything helpful about the climate…that we have little or no evidence that today’s climate is special in any way…and we have even less evidence that mankind is capable of taking effective action to manage the environment in any way. Mostly, we get it wrong and cause things like Everglades destruction, New Orleans disaster (accurately predicted in the 1980’s by environmental experts), etc etc etc.)
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Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aIe9swvOqwIY
http://www.csp.navy.mil/asl/ScrapBook/Boats/NorthPole1987.jpg
Arctic Sea ice loss – “it’s the wind” says NASA.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/10/03/nh-sea-ice-loss-its-the-wind-says-nasa/
” Only because the wind had push the ice further south and a an error with the satellites confusing blue ice,the snow swept by the wind exposed the ice, and the satellites data was showing open water instead of ice.
Thanks, a second time, for your thoughts.”
Welcome.
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“You’ll find that most good science includes an estimate of confidence.It’s only really the non-scientific end of the denialist movement that talks in absolutes.”
Is that a Consensus?
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““You’ll find that most good science includes an estimate of confidence.It’s only really the non-scientific end of the denialist movement that talks in absolutes.”
or like?
“The debate on global warming is over.” Al Gore, 2006
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A Treaty Built on Hot Air, Not Scientific Consensus.
http://www.sepp.org/key%20issues/glwarm/hotair.html
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MrPete wrote:
Really. I took your (undemonstrated) comments about models being broken as a suggestion that the linked blog post refuted Meehl. On what do you base those comments, if not the blog post?
Oh, you didn’t just want me to read the post. (Which I take it you agree is unscientific?). You only wanted me to read all the comments too … Thanks; I’ve read enough for now.
Please refrain from misrepresenting what I did. I did not find the *weakest* quote; I found the argument from the article. I did not read the comments.
I doubt that I will have time to read all the comments, but I thank you for the link; I have not read CA before, so it is comforting to know how unscientific the posts are.
I personally find that peer reivew does cut down some of the more appalling rubbish. You do seem genuinely interested in the subject. I would encourage you to extend your reading to include peer reviewed literature on the subject … It leans away from advocacy and towards science.
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“I personally find that peer reivew does cut down some of the more appalling rubbish. You do seem genuinely interested in the subject. I would encourage you to extend your reading to include peer reviewed literature on the subject … It leans away from advocacy and towards science.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vfSk-6tIvo
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Robin, you asked about Meehl, so I gave you a discussion in context. I didn’t have time to do your homework on challenges to the models.
That post, BTW, was written by an multiply-published chemist (appropriate, don’t you think, for digging into atmospheric chemistry impacts?)…and is certainly on target. And it references appropriate peer-reviewed publications.
Of course it does not disprove the models. One article could hardly do that.
If you want to get a pretty solid earful on exactly why the models are bogus, and how badly, look for commentary from Dr Gerald Browning. As a top NOAA mathematician, he is quite well qualified to comment. Very few people can stay up with him on the math. I’ll link a good example for you (am waiting for a print job to finish so I can go home…) In this case, Browning wrote the top post, which generated quite a bit of discussion at CA and across the blogosphere: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=674
BTW, I noticed at the top of that page, a link to an extensive tree line discussion (again with many cited sources of the kind you most appreciate): http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=675
Enjoy. Now I’m outtahere…
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The printer got stuck, so you get another freebie. 🙂
The following link is to a discussion, again largely led by Dr Browning, on Exponential Growth in Physical Systems. This goes to the heart of the problem with the GCM’s. This particular discussion went on for a LONG time, staying nicely on-topic for most of its life. Embedded in the comments is an amazing public back-and-forth between two NOAA people…
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1124
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I needed a break… and have stopped by very briefly to give today’s take on the value of peer-reviewed process.
Background: Rahmstorf 2007 takes advantage of a supposed new advance in statistical analysis (again developed and used by non-statisticians) to demonstrate that warming is greater than previously predicted. Published in Nature. Coauthors include some heavyweights: Stefan Rahmstorf, Anny Cazenave, John A. Church, James E. Hansen, Ralph F. Keeling, David E. Parker, and Richard C.J. Somerville.
In reality, their “novel” technique is bunk. But because they wouldn’t reveal their code to anyone, and nobody actually could or did check… the peer review process flowed on. Steve McIntyre again has a coup: The Secret of the Rahmstorf “Non-Linear Trend Line”. Enjoy!
(Robin, I am very sad to say that this type of thing is unfortunately typical rather than exceptional. This is the kind of thing that forced my own eyes wide open.)
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(Correction. Published in Science.)
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MrPete,
Well, one thing I have to say about most of these AGW papers. They’re up front about who the reviewers are by listing them all as coauthors.
George
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Another fly-by. This time, something that can help all skeptics learn to look at statistical graphs with a bit more insight.
In response to (and in support of) Steve McIntyre’s finding, statistician William Briggs explains why more smoothing always helps “prove” the data matches your prediction.
(Robin, you asked for links. I’ve given you current links for the last few days. As you can see, if I were to attempt to keep a complete link-list, it would be humongous. The rock-solid information is easily available. Just ignore the spin and look for people who care more about good science than a particular outcome.)
Time to re-enter the Real World…
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Robin,
Have you had a chance to think about post #474? You’ve been conspicuously quiet about it.
I’d really like to know what you think causes the delayed by decades amplification from 0.67C to 3C.
It can’t be water vapor, as water vapor feedback responds almost immediately to changes in temperature.
It can’t be ice feedback, since it takes melting nearly half of the winter snow pack to affect a 3C change.
It can’t be the thermal mass of the oceans (that would only delay the original 0.67C). Besides, satellite data show that ocean responds relatively quickly to changes in the incident energy. This is a result of diurnal variability creating relative large positive and negative fluxes in and out of the oceans, whose *AVERAGE* is what determines longer term change.
George
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Kudos to the many who has been patiently replying to Robin.
It would be nice if people scientist or not stop making it seem that CO2 is an incredible forcing agent,when it is obviously not.Too little gas by volume,with a tiny spot in the IR spectrum.
Empirically CO2 is beneficial and with more of it in the atmosphere,even more so.An essential gas that is at this time at a historic low level by volume in the atmosphere.Therefore the slow increase should be a cause for celebration.
I for one wish people relegate CO2 to where it belongs,and instead figure out why we have various climatic oscillations that are apparent in the data.What causes them and what is the sign of an impending end of the old interglacial period we now enjoy?
The absurd infatuation over a trace gas has reduced truly needed science research in various NON co2 fields,slowed down good science research.It could come back to bite us if we go dumb and spend away the money to fight the invented bogeyman,while the next ice age surge pour in on us.
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Mr Pete,
Thanks for the Science article.
I explained why I am loathe to spend my time reading CA, and the first article you linked did reassure me that this is a valid decision. I see you’ve ignored this.
I will be happy to read any other links that you have to peer reviewed literature.
Reviewing the ground that we have covered so far, and wondering what progress we have made:
Your first point was that the Nationl Academies Report did not vindicate Mann et al. 1998. I have provided three links in descending order of scientific esteem that interperet that they have, and so, I think it is pretty clear that I think that you’re wrong about that.
I wonder if you were confusing the (more criticised) Wegman report with the National Academies Report.
Was this the case?
If not, do you consider that opinion of the most esteemed general scientific journal in the world, the press, or the scientific blogosphere valid?
In the continued absense of any information from you regarding this, I feel that my point is confirmed, and by extension your suggestion that I hadn’t reasearched it a little is premature. (And, frankly, an unnecessary attempt to lower the discourse to an exchange of ad-hominem).
Do we have any progress on this first point?
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Robin, stopped by again. (I really need to stop doing this, since I don’t have time to properly consider and respond. And thus, you’ll see a lot of “absence of information” from me on much of what is said. I’m sorry, but my time constraints are huge. Interpret that however you want, but that’s the truth. I’m picking and choosing what to respond to, I just stopped by, noticed one or two things you said, and am responding.)
1) Validity
I try hard not to base my perspective about science on others’ opinions. Instead, I try to understand the facts. So, appeals to authority, whether to experts or journals of great esteem or whatever, don’t tell me which of them, if any, are “valid.”
I started looking at AGW when I sensed a bunch of hype similar to what happened with Y2K. (I happen to have done a lot of primary research on Y2K and found the prevailing consensus was bunk. I never had to retract what I wrote…)
2) Wegman and National Academies
It is clear that you have not availed yourself on the *informed* (i.e. setting aside shrill extremes) evaluations of NAS or Wegman.
My assessment: while both (NAS, Wegman) were seen as approving of some aspects of the hockey stick work, both ALSO completely affirmed M&M’s issues, and as a result gave very faint praise indeed to the remaining value of the Hockey stick.
Yes, I tend to conflate the two as they are historically quite intertwined. Sorry about that. It is immaterial to the issue.
No, I don’t think we have any progress on this first point. Clearly you have not read the reports, but are basing your own opinion on a few words in some press articles. As such, you have given no facts with which to entertain a scientific discussion. This is, after all, a scientific not a political question.
Some simple factual questions:
* Did the analyses conclude that all of M&M’s criticisms were valid?
* Did the analyses conclude that the hockey stick was incorrectly made 1000 years long and instead should be only 400 years long?
* Did the analyses conclude the confidence interval on the hockey stick were too narrow and should be much larger?
* Did the analyses affirm the hockey stick as anything better than “plausible”?
Your own links confirm that all of the above are true.
If you read up on this further, you’ll find that bullets #2-4 above are the BEST that can be said for the hockey stick.
If you want to trumpet a fuzzy graph that shows the climate has warmed while rebounding from the Little Ice Age… then go right ahead. I have no argument with that.
But you claimed the hockey stick has been vindicated…as if their original work were correct as continues to be trumpeted.
That’s simply untrue.
2) CA’s value
Sad that you use your misreading of my CA link-recommendation, and your misunderstanding of what you read over there, as an excuse to avoid further educating yourself.
I didn’t ignore what you said. I explained myself, gave a bit of explanation of what you were looking at, then gave you further links to other material of even greater value. (I only gave you that first link because you wanted to bring up Meehl.)
My further links, like the first one, were quite informative, fully based on (and incorporating) a variety of well-respected peer-review papers.
Frankly, the reason I gave you them rather than direct pointers to the underlying literature (particularly in the case of Browning), is that unless you have a VERY strong math background, it is unlikely you can actually read, let alone reflect on, his work. (Same for me…it’s no shame to not be a world class expert on NS!)
If you want the direct paper, his posting related to the climate model impact of the work found in this paper:
Browning, G. and H.O. Kreiss: Numerical problems connected with weather prediction. Progress and Supercomputing in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Birkhauser.
(Later in the discussion he refers to this paper… and more…)
Likewise, giving you links to Rahmstorf’s work is not going to be helpful. The peer reviewers at Science were bamboozled, and it seems you accept their authority. I gave you a link with far more insight…especially now a few days later with senior people weighing in to complete the unraveling of this new mini-fiasco.
Robin, I’m not going to try to argue you into changing your mind. Not worth my time. I am honestly not interested in people’s opinions about science. I’m interested in science.
I’ve given you plenty of links to authoritative material, including peer reviewed papers. You do what you want with it.
I just ask that you have the integrity to refrain from claims to having a scientific perspective, when that perspective is actually informed by little more than the headlines or head posts of blogs.
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oops, typo: I’m *not* picking and choosing what to respond to.
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Robin wrote (85):
“A glasshouse slows heat loss by blocking loss by convection. The greenhouse effect slows heat loss by blocking radiation. They are similar in that the warming comes from slower heat loss. This, I think, is the origin of the terminology.”
Robin’s statement that “…warming comes from slower heat loss” can’t be correct. It is correct to say an object stays warm longer (i.e. takes longer to experience a specified temperature decrease) if its average heat loss per unit time is reduced, but to say that “warming comes from reduced heat loss” is nonsense. A “system” warms either because (a) heat flows into the system or (b) work is performed on the system, not from the retardation/prevention of heat loss.
Take for example an earth that is in thermal equilibrium with its environment (space)–i.e., as much heat leaves the earth as (a) enters the earth from space and/or (b) is created within the earth. If heat is being added to the earth at a constant rate, then for an earth in thermal equilibrium the rate of heat leaving the earth is constant and equal to the rate of heat being added to the earth. The rate of heat leaving the earth will be a function of the earth’s temperature at least in the sense that the higher the earth’s temperature, the greater the rate of heat loss (i.e., transfer to space). This implies that a warmer earth in equilibrium must have a higher rate of “heat loss” than a cooler earth in equilibrium, which implies that a warmer earth has “faster heat loss”, not “slower heat loss”.
Robin may think the origin of the term “greenhouse” comes from “slower heat loss”, but as discussed above, such reasoning is nonsensical. A much more likely origin of the term “greenhouse” is that most humans perceive a greenhouse (aka a hothouse) to be uncomfortably warm and thus not a place they would want to live. As such, by using the term greenhouse to describe the effect CO2 has on the earth’s atmospheric temperature, AGW alarmists are trying to paint a picture of discomfort not one of sweetness and light. Since flora flourish in greenhouses, if AGW alarmists were trying to convince flora that AGW CO2 is bad, they wouldn’t use the word greenhouse–they’d use the word “igloo”. After all, according to Robin’s reasoning, an “igloo” also slows heat loss. I guess this means that in the minds of AGW alarmists, “igloo effect” and “greenhouse effect” are equivalent. I won’t hold my breath waiting for the phrase “igloo effect” to come out of Al Gore’s mouth.
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Robin did what is a common practise with the AGW crowd. When real science does not agree …move the goal post and make it fit the mold. The good old re inventing the wheel scenario.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS_Greenhouse%20Effect.pdf
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On further reflection, instead of using the descriptor “greenhouse gas” to characterize gases that “slow heat loss”, we should use the descriptor “igloo gas” (See Robin #85, Reed Coray #495). As far as CO2 is concerned, and thus as far as gases emitted from the front end of animals, Robin’s reasoning implies the two phrases are equivalent. However, relative to gases emitted from the back end of animials, “igloo gas” is the better descriptor.
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Agree and we could have our friend from Inuvialuit (the Inu peeping tom)”takealuk” to keep and eye open for Igloo gas.:-)
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Mr Pete,
$300,000,000,000 was spent testing and debugging systems prior to Y2K. Many bugs were found and corrected. Leaving these uncorrected would have resulted in mistakes or crashes in many systems, some of which are critical for modern society.
Pete wrote:
I’m not repeating myself a third time, Mr Pete. I have availed myself of scientific evaluations of NAS, including Nature (no less).
I have asked what evaluations you are referring to, and you have supplied none.
There’s no more to be said, except to note that unlike your approach, the scientific approach is to alter views to fit observation. You have been shown that the National Academies report vindicated Mann. You have offered no evidence to the contrary.
I posted some of the more blaring scientific errors in the article at CA at which you first linked. If you wish to take the (unlikely) line that CA is a good scientific source, then you should address my concerns that I raised in that post.
Ignoring those concerns and simply repeating the claim that it is “authoritative material” is a further example of your unscientific approach of ignoring evidence so that you don’t have to change your view.
Thanks for the citation for the 20 year old paper on numerical problems with short term weather prediction … before I download a copy, what is the relevance to this thread?
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
The truth is I haven’t been here as often. When the thread becomes glutted with posters like “MrPete” who respond to evidence with dogma, there’s not a lot of value to be seen in making further posts.
We have calculated the response for the top 200m is a couple of decades, and for full warming of the oceans, over four centuries.
We have also discussed melting of ice, which when melts through to the ocean or land causes a large positive feedback; and that would be something in between the four centuries and two decades.
Right, but the temperature change takes decades, as we calculated above.
Well, 3°C will probably lose the whole northern summer sea ice; which is a job of some decades. (One hopes). The water vapour feedback is the more dominant effect though.
No, it would delay all the warming.
Not in the case of a mere couple of watts per square metre.
Sure the diurnal variability is relatively large, but total solar irradiance is about 1370 Watts per square metre at the height of a blazing noon and nothing at night. Which is about 1000 times the increase in radiative forcing since 1750, and about 2000 times the increased forcing due to CO2 over the two last decades.
So you would expect it to have a stronger effect.
I guess that a daily temperature change is not loosing as much heat by conduction down into the ocean, which is why the response to the increased greenhouse effect over a decade is slower than 2000 times slower than the daily change … a much thinner layer of ocean is being warmed.
For my part, I am interested in part of your post 386:
When a photon his the ocean, how does the ocean know if the photon came from the sun, in which case it should warm up, or if the photon was reflected from the clouds, it which case it shouldn’t warm up?
In the latter case, how is conservation of energy maintained?
00
Reed Coray wrote:
The heat coming in from the sun is about the same. The heat loss is slowed. Therefore the globe warms.
If you put on a Jacket, you get warmer, not because of more heat flowing in, nor because of work done. You warm up because the rate of heat loss is slowed.
Yes, the temperature will rise only until the heat loss reaches the heat in again. Then it will stop warming, and stay at that new temperature. (For a given concentration of greenhouse gasses).
No.
1) A greenhouse is a gardening tool, used to grow lush plants. It does not have negative connotations.
2) The term goes back to the late 1930s. Even the most desperate of conspiracy theorists only date the conspiracy back to about 1990.
…
I think “greenhouse” was more familiar than “igloo” to more English speakers 1930.
Increased CO2 concentration is bad. Even without warming, it threatens the Amazon rainforest, by dropping rainfall in the west by dropping transpiration, by reducing stomata size and/or number in many plants.
And even without warming it increasing CO2 threatens the oceanic food web by killing calcifying planktons, and by damaging coral reefs.
Of course the warming is also a threat.
00
wilbert Robichaud wrote:
Sorry, what was my previous position, and what is the new position of my goalposts?
Thanks.
00
Sunsettommy (Thomas pearson) wrote:
And to those of them who have been responding to my questions, and citing an occasional scientific source, Kudos from me too.
I guess you mean credible?
Do you think the extra 2kg of CO2 above every square metre of the earth’s surface, land or sea, cannot cause the 1.6 W/m² of forcing that it has been calculated (using well understood optics) to cause? (And is accepted by the people you just gave Kudos to?)
Because … I think you might be mistaken about that.
Well oceanic acidification and climate change are contributing to the very elevated extinction rate that we have been seeing over the last 30 years.
Perhaps you could provide some scientific evidence of this empirical finding?
Over the ice core record the highest concentration reached was perhaps a little over 300ppm (That’s the last million or so years). During most interglacials only about 270ppm was reached.
It now stands at 390ppm. This is not a historic low. It is a historic high.
…
01
Robin, I’m not sure if this is worth my time either, but I will try once again to communicate clearly:
You’re right that it was a huge problem. And that the problems were solved. Unfortunately, the prevailing hype was that the problems would NOT be solved. It was amazing how many people believed, and wrote, material without solid evidence. I wrote a balanced report explaining the real risks, debunking the hype, and encouraging people to take only appropriate actions.
Just because something is *called* “vindicated” does not make it so. I gave you an entire list of contrary evidence from the references you provided. Please deal with the evidence rather than the hype.
Same as Y2k. Saying “the sky is falling” without evidence is no help. Just because Nature says “vindicated” does not make it so. Same as the recent cover article (in Nature) from Steig et al, saying Antarctica has warmed. That paper has been falsified. Publication of that falsification is on the way; you can read the latest here.
You did no such thing. You raised a strawman (“refutes climate models”) then tore it down. Have fun whacking at strawmen, Robin. They have nothing to do with the real world.
Uhhh… I explained. I’ll repeat: “his posting related to the climate model impact of the work found in this paper…”
Browning is a world class expert on the mathematics of these models. His paper on numerical problems was written with respect to short term issues… and his extensive online posting and conversation with other scientists demonstrates its application to the current models. To use his key terms: ill-posed, unphysical, unstable. (I.e. they are only forced into stability via unphysical constraints)
Robin, I know where you are getting your responses from. I’ve been to those blogs in the past, and occasionally stop in to see if they’re willing to deal with science yet. Stop pulling in junk arguments from others. Read the meaty skeptics for yourself, evaluate them for yourself. Don’t stop when you find a weak point, keep going and find their best points.
Same as you would do for the people you already agree with.
00
I just noticed your “dogma” dig 😉 … perhaps I need to simplify to the questions you have failed to respond to. These are not “dogma” issues. They derive directly from published scientific work.
The simple factual questions:
* Did the analyses conclude that all of M&M’s criticisms were valid?
* Did the analyses conclude that the hockey stick was incorrectly made 1000 years long and instead should be only 400 years long?
* Did the analyses conclude the confidence interval on the hockey stick were too narrow and should be much larger?
Unless you can show all of these to be false, you have no leg to stand on in defending the original hockey stick. All you’ve got is a fuzzy, 60% shorter hockey stick, whose handle is stuck in a Little Ice Age bucket.
BTW, these questions are answerable from your own Roger Pielke link. Roger’s was the most substantial written evaluation of the report (in the links you gave.) The important thing from his perspective was this: sure, the scientific criticisms were correct, but who cares. It’s only the policy implications that matter.
For Roger (surprisingly to me!) if it is now the warmest time since the little ice age, that’s significant for policy.
Bottom line: Robin, you seem inclined to align yourself with Roger Pielke’s evaluation. As I said before, if that’s what you want to sign up for, go right ahead. A “plausible” argument that it is warmer today than any time since the Little Ice Age 400 years ago.
I think that’s plausible too! So I guess we are in agreement after all 😀
NONE of this, by the way, refutes the premise of this blog.
00
Fine.
It looked like you were claiming you knew different from conventional wisdom or analysis.
That must have been some report, if you claim that therefore on your word I should discard peer reviewed science as fraudulent, and seek truth on an non-peer reviewed blog that runs an editorial policy counter to the scientific consensus.
But, alas, I haven’t read this wonderfully balanced report of yours, so my trust still tends towards what is published in the scientific literature.
Is that what you think you did?
Well, well, well.
Do you refer to this:
I think that you might be over-characterising it. The, answers, for your piece of mind are:
1) No.
M&M are only mentioned in three pages of the 146 page report, outside the references. pp90 and pp112-3. In neither place are their list of claims mentioned or analysed.
2) No, I don’t believe that they did say that.
The introduction does say: “The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years.”
3) No, I didn’t notice such a comment in the report. Do you know what page that comes from?
4) Yes, reconstructions in general are called “an important contribution to climate research”, and that Mann’s main conclusion had “subsequently been supported by an array of evidence”. Among other things.
Also, they don’t actually use the word “plausible” with respect to Mann et. al. So you’ve misread the report about that. (Too).
They use the word to refer to our understanding that “the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium,” but this is based on a wide array of evidence. Perhaps you read this and then your memory got garbled, and you mis-recalled they were referring to Mann’s paper.
Not really.
Money was spent. Lots of it. It was enough. Nnon of those things really hold for dealing with climate change.
Also less nationally and internationally directed action was required, because the economic motivation to correct the problem naturally fell on the correct people.
Whereas Australia and the USA have the largest greenhouse footprint per capita, but the highest cost is born in Africa and South East Asia.
Which is why I provided evidence. And which is why I think that you should provide some if you wish to claim that my evidence is wrong. (Although you’ll have to have a strong case to beat Nature’s analysis.)
No, but it’s a much better indication than if CA says “not vindicated”. And there was agreement in the popular press, and the scientific blogosphere.
And you have not provided any analysis at all that says “not vindicated”. All you’ve got is ad hominem about my research. That’s not scientific.
Who vindicated that?
One of the signs of dodgy scientific research: They release to the press before publication in the journals. Your link is broken from here. Perhaps the falsification is being retracted.
I explained why I found the link unscientific. Your claim at the time was that I’d cherry picked the weakest argument. I hadn’t, I’d picked the one from the main post. Now your trying they didn’t make that argument at all.
You’ll go to a lot of effort to twist and squirm out of addressing my arguments, but none into addressing them. Not the behaviour of someone who is interested in science.
It was not a straw man. The quotes I took from your link were by copy and paste. The reasons I think they are unscientific are the ones that I gave. (But they’re also pretty obvious).
Ahh, no you see, you need to find the recent peer reviewed paper about climate models then. (Which I’m guessing doesn’t exist).
The blog is unscientific. (I’m open to you addressing my points about that, but it seems you’d rather not, so the point stands.) I will read a peer reviewed paper though.
Weather prediction is not climate modelling. 20 years ago they were very different. (These days I believe that the Hadley centre uses one model for both.) But in any case the resolution is different, and climate models are known and understood to be poor over the short term.
Where?
This is a bit rich from the guy who wants me to read a blog, and claims that Nature is inaccurate.
My arguments, with respect to this thread are; the greenhouse effect increases if you increase greenhouse gas concentration. There is a scientific consensus about this. Therefore, it is a disservice to society to try to do an end run around science and inject poorly backed ideas into policy or schools.
Show me a peer reviewed skeptic. I’ll read it.
Of course they’re already published in peer reviewed journals. Also they calculate their error bars. Thirdly they adjust their understanding to fit observations. If a climate sceptic did that, I’d already have evaluated them.
_____
The questions that you have been asked and continue to attempt to avoid:
from 462:
Perhaps you can point me to some more centrist links, that I should have located before posting?
Who decides who is the “foremost statistician” in the NAS?
Do you have a scientific source backing [what you say about bristle cones] up?
Where did you get the information that it requires 30 years of data, and that it is necessary for answering every real climate question?
From 466:
What evidence do you have that [Wegman] is “the foremost statistician in NAS”?
What peer reviewed, scientific, or otherwise reliable source do you have to back you your claims against Jones?
What is a “warming model”?
473
Where would I look for that [Jones] quote?
I should also put out there that I am not convinced by your source for your belief that “models are broken”. CA is not a journal.
00
MrPete wrote:
Or perhaps you need to come up with a science based response to my questions.
Can you see the logical error you’ve made here. You claim that if I can’t show that all of those are false, then they are all true. Please try to improve your thinking. I am not impressed by people who make logical errors only in their own favour.
(However, your points are all wrong; But you should know that your logic is too, so that you can improve it.)
I’ve answered them from the report itself. Above.
No, I’m refuting your claim that I didn’t do any research on the Hockey Stick thing.
So far you’ve produced no sources, and are trying to misunderstand mine.
If you want to show that you’ve done more research, you really need to come up with your own source … perhaps one that supports your position more than Pielke’s, who after all, calls the report a near total vindication of Mann. Which is exactly my position.
00
Robin, re#500
The ocean don’t know or care where a photon comes from. However, the system itself does, To satisfy COE, energy leaving the surface, which is subsequently reflected back down by clouds or GHG must be subtracted from the surface before it can be added back. The fact that the models generally don’t do this is why they predict nonsense like runaway warming and temperature increases which are far too large.
You don’t seem to appreciate the fact that the system is dynamic. The flux in and out of the Earth’s thermal mass is not constant or monotonic. The top level equation can be easily stated as,
Pi = Po + dE(t)/dt
Pi is the power entering the Earth, Po is the power leaving the Earth and E(t) is the energy stored in the Earth’s thermal mass. This equation is exact, as required by COE.
dE/dt is positive when the Earth is warming and negative when the Earth is cooling. If Pi instantaneously increases, Po is slow to respond, but dE/dt makes up the difference, adding energy to the Earth until Pi = Po and dE/dt is 0. Po is directly related to the surface temperature, although in the case of the climate, cloud temperatures and the percentage of cloud coverage also affects Po.
A key fact is that any instant of time, dE(t)/dt is positive for about half of the Earth and negative for the rest. For example, at night, when Pi is 0 and dE/dt = -Pi. In general, as Po is increasing dE/dt is positive and while Po is decreasing is negative. We see this in the lag between min/max da or seasonal energy and min/max day or seasonal temperatures. This also tells us that twice a day, all points on the surface of the Earth are in equilibrium with it’s surroundings, i.e. dE/dt is 0.
A huge flaw in the AGW analysis is a failure to understand the dynamics of the system and instead just use averages, as if nothing was ever changing. The fact that dE/dt is locally very high and very low means that the couple of watts of excess ‘forcing’ is responded to as if it were a change of many hundreds of watts.
George
00
Robin, Re #506
Even if it were true that recent change is larger than it’s been in 1K years, it would make little difference. In fact, the last 12K years has been the most stable interglacial period on record. Even so, if you go to the ice cores and measure the maximum rate of change in surface temperature per century over the last 12K years, it’s nearly +/- 2C per century. Ice cores measure a change in the 100+ year *AVERAGE* temperature and if we calculate the running change in the current 100 year average temperature, the current ‘warming’ (that for the moment at least seems to have reversed) is well within expectations. Even the absolute year to year change over the last century is well within the maximum rate of change of 100 year averages. Why is this unusual, except that it’s unusually small?
Another question, again related to the ice cores, is why were the last 3 interglacial periods shorter (1000’s of years) and warmer (by 2-3C) than the current one, even though CO2 levels were far lower than today? Clearly something else has at least a 3C effect which is not related to CO2. I’ll give you a hint, it’s that big bright yellow orb in the sky.
George
00
Robin,
Just in case you still don’t believe me about the oceans responding faster to change in energy than you think, examine the following table:
http://www.palisad.com/co2/ocean.html
This shows the average daily incident power (W/m^2) for each 10 degree slice of latitude and for each month, adjusted for the solar angle and day lengths. It also shows the average ocean surface temperature (degrees K), for the same time and space intervals. All of the data is averaged from satellite data accumulated over the last 25 years. The ocean surface temperature data originates from GISS (Hansen et all) and the solar irradiation is from the University of Colorado. A surface temperature of 0 means that there were no samples for ocean not covered in ice for that interval of time and space.
What I want you to notice is the delay from the minimum/maximum energy incident on that slice and the maximum/minimum temperature of that slice. It’s always between 1 and 2 months. The seasonal perihelion alignment is also apparent in the data. As an exercise, try and determine the sign of dE/dt is for a slice in a selected month. Pi is the irradiance and Po is proportional to the surface temperature raised to the 4’th power (forget about clouds for now since the percentage of cloud coverage is relatively constant on a month to month basis). Notice how dE/dt is both positive and negative for months at a time?
George
00
re: 508
co2isnotevil wrote:
But the energy leaving the surface would be leaving it whether or not it is reflected back, so the energy has already been subtracted once. I don’t understand why you need to subtract the energy again for those photons being reflected back.
The consequence of reflecting it back is to increase the energy in at the surface. (If you consider the surface of the planet), or to reduce the energy out (If you consider the top of the atmosphere). In either case it seems to me that COE requires that such a photon would cause just as much warming as one of the same frequency arriving from the sun.
Well if you’re looking a the TOA (which you are, because that’s the one that is affected by clouds), then Po is also strongly reduced by the greenhouse effect.
Very strongly. The surface radiates about 390 W/m², and only about 40 W/m² passes straight through the atmospheric window.
I find that difficult to believe. Certainly a climate model runs on a grid a few tens of kilometres across, and with something like a half hour time step, so the effects of something like “day” and “night” are certainly modelled.
What aspect of AGW analysis uses just daily averages?
Sorry, I don’t understand this. Do you mean that it is erroneously calculated to respond several hundred times more?
Are we talking in terms of in climate models?
How does the treatment of local instantaneous temperature change so strongly bias the global sum of those?
Why hasn’t anybody noticed this in the past 100 years?
_____
re: 509
Certainly temperatures aren’t dropping as they usually have. Ruddiman would say that the anthropogenic influence is detectable in this.
I don’t think that that’s right, George.
On the ice core records, by far the steepest part on a century to century time scale is the warming at the beginning of an interglacial (Which you need to go back all of the last 12K years to catch), is an order of magnitude slower than what you have stated. It’s about 0.2°C per century. (About 10°C of warming over about 5000 years).
In what century do you claim that there was warming ten times this fast? (Except, of course, the current one, in which there is warming that fast.)
Certainly there were other effects, be they solar irradiance, cosmic rays influenced cloud albedo (pffft!), ice albedo, other greenhouse gasses … I can accept that, as you suggest solar irradiance was part of the cause. (I don’t accept that the interglacial two interglacial periods ago was necessarily warmer than the current one at the location of the ice cores, nor that ice cores cover a large enough sample of the globe’s surface to necessarily conclude that global mean surface temperatures were 2° warmer on the interglacial on either side of that one. But certainly it seems that those two were a couple of degrees warmer in Antarctica.)
The thing that makes a difference is the current warming is not caused by solar irradiance. We know this from information that we don’t have from ice cores:
1) The diurnal temperature range has dropped.
When the warming is mostly at night, the sun is not causing it.
2) The annual temperature range has dropped.
When winters are warmed more than summers, again the sun is not the cause. The sun warms things when it is shining.
3) The temperature of the stratosphere has cooled.
This shows that there is less energy reaching the upper atmosphere. This can only be because there is less heat reaching it from below. If there were more heat reaching it from above, it would warm too.
4) The poles have warmed more than the average. (Well, the North Pole and the Antarctic peninsular have warmed at about 3 times the global average. Antarctica proper is warming slowly because of thermal isolation, as predicted by climate models).
The sun would have a greater effect where the sunlight is more direct … in the tropics. However the CO2 greenhouse effect has a greater effect where there is less humidity, because of the overlap between CO2 and H2O absorption.
So, yes; certainly – previous warm periods were a combination of greenhouse and other forcing. The warming of the last 100 years (and especially the last 50 years) is different. It is dominated by the enhanced greenhouse effect.
00
Robin,
Only the energy leaving the surface that is in the transparent portion of the atmospheric window and not covered in clouds contributes to the 255K temperature of the Earth, as seen from space. In other words, the energy reflected by clouds or GHG is not counted towards the output of the system by the radiative transfer codes. The physics of what GHG do is to delay energy from leaving the surface not to add energy to the surface. Part of that process is transforming the energy from 15u photons into a broadband energy distribution.
Any time step less than a month or so would be too fast. In order to accurately perform calculations at that level of time precision, storm systems and very low level weather forecasting would need to be modeled. It’s very difficult to model accurately more than a few days to a week ahead of time at that level of precision.
The dE/dt changes between negative several hundreds of W/m^2 and positive several hundreds of W/m^2 locally across the planet. A tiny change of a few W/m^2 will be adapted to very quickly.
Ruddiman is wrong. The lack of a drop was evident long before the start of the Industrial Revolution. See what adequate peer review misses?
Regarding dT/dt in the ice cores, the average century to century change is never more than about 2C. During epoch transitions, there are just more back to back 2C centuries or -2C centuries. The average is about +/-0.67C per century. Let me know if you want links to the original data and you can perform the analysis yourself. I have all of this at my fingertips because I have analysis tools which read raw ice core and satellite data and filter, process and display it in a variety of useful formats.
The Vostok and DomeC cores independently confirm that the last 4 interglacials were 2-3C warmer on average and up to 5C warmer at peak than the current state. Only the forth one back was comparable in length to the current one and delineated the change from a 40K from 100K major glaciation period. All of this data is plotted in my slide set,
http://www.palisad.com/co2/slides/siframes.html
Regarding most of your points, energy, not temperature matters. So even if the annual temperature range has dropped, if the mean has increased, the delta energy between min and max average temperatures has not decreased (E is proportional to T^4) and has likely even increased. I don’t see the annual range dropping anyway (see slides), in fact it increased after the 10/01 ‘adjustments’ made by Hansen to the satellite data. I also don’t see any significant change to the polar temperatures, except for a small bias after the 10/01 ‘adjustments’. How many times are you going to use this blatant data corruption to support your case?
George
00
Robin (#506): “One of the signs of dodgy scientific research: They release to the press before publication in the journals.”
Oh yes, you mean just like the two Mann associates, Caspar Amman and Eugene Wahl, when they ISSUED A PRESS RELEASE in which they claimed that they had submitted two manuscripts for publication, which together would show that they had replicated the hockey stick exactly, confirmed its statistical underpinnings and demonstrated that McIntyre’s criticisms were baseless. Manuscripts which were subsequently both rejected by the journals they had been submitted to?
Is that the kind of dodgy scientific research you are referring to, Robin?
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
I don’t think that if the oceans warm in the very surface in response to sunlight on them, that that means that the heat capacity of the oceans is less than we have calculated.
20 years of warming for the top 200m or 400 years of warming for the full depth. That’s how long it would take.
It is perfectly clear that the oceans have not yet warmed as much as the land:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A4.lrg.gif
Crudely extrapolating, (ie, visually), it will take about 40 years at the current rate of warming for the oceans to have warmed as much as the land has since the early 70s.
Which is perfectly credible in terms of what we know about the heat capacity of the oceans.
Yes, I agree that annual and daily temperature trends seem to be affecting what I personally find a surprisingly thin layer of the ocean. And from your graphs, you could calculate how thin that layer is for daily and annual warming, on average. (Which might be a fun and informative exercise).
That calculation does not change the fact that the oceans are warming, have warmed slower than the land, that heat flow is from the land to the ocean, that that will continue until they have warmed by the same amount, and that their heat capacity is such that this will take decades. (And on that time scale, you do need to consider a couple or more hundred metres of ocean.)
00
Hello Anne-Kit Littler:
You missed the questions that I posed in post 377.
If you answer those, please, I’ll be able to better understand what you think utopianism is.
As to your post 513, yes that would be the sort of thing.
I would say that there is a positive correlation between releasing to the popular press first, and failing to be published in a (respectable) journal.
I hope that you find it comforting in terms of the scientific neutrality of journals that the journals did not pass this paper by peer review.
I must, however, admit that I was not aware of this paper. Do you have a link to the press release?
Kind Regards,
Rob.
00
Robin,
Yes, your calculations of the heat capacity of the oceans are incorrect. Also, there’s no significant trend, let alone a difference in this trend for either the land or ocean temperatures. Stop relying on anomaly analysis. This is too easily skewed by things like the 10/01 bias added to the reported satellite data. The graph you linked to is based on that skewed data. If you remove the 10/01 bias, the temperatures have been relatively stable since 2001 with a slight, statistically insignificant cooling. It looks like 2009 will be cooler yet.
My main point has been any thermal inertia will affect the initial impact of doubling CO2 (i.e. 0.67C as determined by Stefan-Boltzman). Any subsequent effect must be feedback, whose effect will also be subject to thermal inertia. However, the thermal inertia required for centuries of delay is far larger than the system exhibits. The only identifiable feedback with the possibility for centuries of delay is ice, which the satellite data tells us would require melting 1/3 of the winter snow pack to affect that much change. Clearly, 0.67C is not enough to do this. You’ve tried to hand wave a water feedback effect, but the system should have already responded by now.
You have not demonstrated with any degree of precision or certainty that how this 0.67C gets amplified to 3C. Feel free to try again.
George
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
Only if you consider the top of atmosphere. The 255K from space is 287K at the surface. That’s 32K genuinely warmer, because of this greenhouse effect. Genuinely warmer is more energy.
And this is also required by COE. If a photon that, in the absence of the greenhouse effect, would just shoot off into space, is instead trapped in the atmosphere, then that energy has to go somewhere instead of space. And this is why it is warmer.
That’s not my understanding. The energy doesn’t just stay in the atmosphere. Much of it is reflected back to the surface. (This back radiation is significant … about 324 W/m²). Where, according to my understanding, it will add energy to the surface.
Do you think that there is no back-radiation?
I’m not understanding the advantage of a time step of months over one of half an hour. Surely the effect of day and night, and changing seasons, and cloud cover, and Hadley cells, and oceanic currents, interaction with weather systems, and even interaction with the biosphere would all be better handled on a shorter time scale than that?
But an energy imbalance of a couple of W/m² would cause a slow warming. (after of COE applies). Yes this would be small compared to the diurnal temperature range for the first millennium (by which time, one would hope that the increase in temperature has corrected the energy imbalance), but it is still a warming.
And we know from studies of distribution of species against mean temperature that adaptation to day and night does not imply that a movement in annual mean temperature can be adapted to. In fact what we are seeing is species migration (and extinction) in response to the temperature change. (see A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems, Camille Parmesan & Gary Yohe, NATURE (2003) )
George, George, George, George, George.
Yes, the lack of the drop was long before the start of the industrial revolution. That is why his paper is entitled “THE ANTHROPOGENIC GREENHOUSE ERA BEGAN THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO”, and in the abstract he writes: A wide array of archeological, cultural, historical and geologic evidence points to viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes resulting from early agriculture in Eurasia, including the start of forest clearance by 8000 years ago and of rice irrigation by 5000 years ago. In recent millennia, the estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of ∼0.8°C and roughly 2°C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models.
I’m going to stick my neck out and say I suspect you didn’t follow the link I provided?
No, less than that. 10°C in 5000 years is back to back 0.2°C per century, not 2°C per century.
Current climate change is ten times that.
Not very independently in terms of global mean surface temperature. They’re both in Antarctica. It might have been (relatively) bollocksing cold in Kenya at the time.
It’s only 0.8°C warmer, mate.
(((286.8 K)^4) – (((286 K)^4) – ((275 K)^4)))^.25 = 275.899254 kelvin
So that explains about 0.1°C of the discrepancy over the observed 0.8°C warming.
So how come the daily minimum is increasing globally at about twice the rate of the daily maximum? You need another 0.4°C from somewhere.
I claim that it is because it is not the sun. But this is also obvious because the stratosphere has cooled. And the winter has warmed more than the summer. And the poles have warmed more than the tropics.
Okay, I’m sceptical of this data corruption.
What data did it affect?
Is it documented in the scientific literature somewhere?
00
Yes, Robin Grant (you really don’t have to refer to me by my full name, but if you prefer this form of address, by all means, let’s) – I’ll be happy to oblige:
My use of “utopianism” to describe your view that any government of the day will lower one tax just because they create another, refers to a particularly naïve, socialist belief in a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system that would create a supposedly ideal society where everything is “fair and equal” and everybody is happy. The left flank of politics is historically particularly unlikely to ever lower or remove taxes, and this is unfortunately the flank we are saddled with in Australia for now.
Forgive me for thinking that, once we have some form of carbon taxation in place it will be difficult to remove it, even when nature (not the scientific publication, the real world) persists in non-compliance with the doomsday predictions of your beloved “peer reviewed, scientific consensus”.
And no, I don’t have a link to the said press release. I’m sure you can google for it, though, it’s a well-enough known sequence of events.
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co2isnotevil wrote:
Heat capacity of sea water: 3993 J kg⁻¹ K⁻¹ (@ 20°C and 1 atmosphere)
Mass of oceans: 1.37 × 10²¹ kg
Heat capacity of the oceans: 5.47041 × 10²⁴ J / K
What did I get wrong?
Really. Is this true over any time period?
I reckon that if I got the last three whole sunspot cycles of data (33 years) and hit it with a least squares linear regression, there would be a significant (95 CI) trend.
Do you reckon that there wouldn’t?
Anomaly analysis is a way of removing the annual cycle, and for allowing different data sets to be combined, no matter what time of day or elevation, or urbanisation that the station has.
This is a separate issue from your allegations of “10/01 bias”.
I don’t think so. Wasn’t that bias on the satellite data?
8 years of relatively stable temperatures? Just like 1977-1985 and 1981-1989?
I’m not convinced that such a short trend covering the decline of solar activity, dominated by La Nina is sufficient to establish that the warming trend has stopped. It wasn’t stopped in 1989.
Assuming the earth is a perfect black body.
Well the estimate is a 25-50 year time to reach 60% of the effect, not centuries.
No, there’s water vapour, which will increase with increasing sea surface temperature.
No, 3.7 W/m² × 510072000 km² / (5.47041 × 10²⁴ J / K) = 91.85 years per K
Well, the reality is that there’s not a lot of precision to be had from that number yet. It’s likely to be in the range 2°C to 4.5°C, with a most likely value of around 3°C.
HadGEM1 gets 2.8°C. I’d personally put my money about there if I had to bet.
If you think that that is way too high, could you more clearly outline your objections to each of the peer reviewed papers I have cited about this so far?
Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity
Robust Bayesian Uncertainty Analysis of Climate System Properties Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods
Attribution of regional-scale temperature changes to anthropogenic and natural causes
Efficiently Constraining Climate Sensitivity with Ensembles of of Paleoclimate Simulations
Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate.
Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries.
Effect of climate sensitivity on the response to volcanic forcing (abstract)
The Climate Sensitivity and Its Components Diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget Data
Constraining climate forecasts: The role of prior assumptions
An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity
Probabilistic climate change projections using neural networks
Estimated PDFs of climate system properties including natural and anthropogenic forcings.
Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate.
Estimation of Natural and Anthropogenic Contributions to 20th Century Temperature Change.
Anthropogenic Warming of Earth’s Climate System.
External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings.
Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.
Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.
(Links in post 161).
Any scholarly papers that you have that the Climate Sensitivity is significantly less than that would also be interesting.
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Anne-Kit Littler wrote:
Okay. The relevance of “utopia” to changes in taxation is still not that obvious.
Is it your opinion that governments only increase taxes? No matter how that will affect their chances of re-election?
My perception is that governments try to get re-elected and will use taxation policy, as well as every other policy to affect that end. Often that means returning money to the voter either by lowering tax of enacting middle class welfare.
Certainly the GST came with the elimination of other sales taxes. (Barring protectionist ones). Does this relate to your “utopia” comment? Would you say Australia was in Utopia in 2000 because of this?
I think your claim that the Government will just use a Carbon tax to increase the surplus (Or decrease the deficit, in the current economic climate), is not very well based in reality. History doesn’t show a monotonically increasing taxation rate.
Well, yes, economically left governments tend to tax higher than economically right ones, because they need to support more welfare. But I don’t think it necessarily follows that extra income would not be returned to the taxpayer, especially with the current need to stimulate the economy.
But you will be aware that, unlike the New Zealand or even British Labour parties, Australian labour has long been divided into Labour Left and Labour Right … and Rudd is very far right even for Labour Right. While Gillard is the opposite, Rudd does seem to be in tight control.
I’ll certainly have a go, thank you.
I am more familiar with the culture in which the obligation to back up a claim lies with the person who made it. It works better because I, not really being compelled to believe that there was such a press release, have little motivation and less persistence to apply to the task of googling it … Whereas if you were the one doing your own homework, you would have more motivation because it is your claim, and because you believe that it exists would have more persistence if the first few search terms you try fail to turn up the said press release.
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Robin, Re 517
The delay is as the energy is absorbed, re-radiated to the surface and re-radiated back, etc. The overall delay is only on the order of hours and the primary function of GHG is to defer the release of energy from day into night. You still don’t seem to get the difference changes to the stimulus (i,e, changes in solar energy) and changes to how the system responds (changes in GHG levels).
Short time steps are required to model very low level processes. But in order to accurately forecast climate centuries or even days in the future, all of the effects must be modeled and clearly the AGW crowd is oblivious to many of the details. Longer time steps allows the use of aggregate properties which improves long term predictability.
You’re getting hung up on the concept of an energy imbalance (stop taking Hansen at his word). Every point on the Earth is in a state of energy imbalance (i.e. dE/dt != 0) most of the time and is only in balance twice per day. Why do you continue to ignore the data that shows unambiguously that the temperature adapts very, very quickly to changes in conditions and not the decades to centuries the AGW hypothesis requires. I suggest you spend some time researching the behavior of systems described by differential equations and how they respond to stimulus.
Regarding ice core dT/dt, the RMS change per century is 0.67C and the peak change is about +/- 2C per century. The current climate is well within these limits.
You are right that I didn’t follow the link. The premise was so unfounded that it didn’t merit additional investigation. Any effect man had on CO2 levels, surface reflectivity and other factors that could affect the climate were insignificant.
Regarding the data corruption, examine this graph of the raw, unprocessed GISS satellite data.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/avg_temp.gif
The processing used to build the anomaly plot is to average seasonal variability out of the data, determine a long term average and plot the year to year deviations from this average. If you can’t see how the 10/01 bias will produce a flawed anomaly report, there’s little hope for you to see the truth, as your inability to comprehend the ramifications of data errors will blind you from it. I realize that Hansen pulled off a sophisticated tweak to the data to bolster his case, but it can’t fool me and shouldn’t fool you.
George
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Robin, re 519
Your error in calculating the oceans heat capacity is that you fail to account for the fact that the ocean temperature gradient is a function of density. Surface temperature is all that matters, relative to energy entering and leaving the thermal mass of the oceans. At a specific surface temperature, the overall temperature gradient is more or less fixed and anchored at the bottom of the ocean to about 0C.
By your logic, the heat capacity of the surface should be the heat capacity of all the rock between the surface and the center of the core. Clearly, only the very thin surface layer of the crust is storing solar energy. The same is true for the oceans and the data confirms this.
There are anomalies in the data related to Sunspot activity and other natural fluctuations, but none of this comprises a trend. And yes, anomaly analysis does remove seasonal variability, but it absolutely does not permit you to merge data from different data sets. This can only be done when the data sets represent averages of the same time periods and have the same relative margins of error and contributes to why the hockey stick is so flawed. Another property of anomaly analysis is that it can’t be used to identify anomalous trends as anomalies in the data collection and processing flows (i.e. the 10/01 bias) are indistinguishable from anomalous trends.
The Earth becomes a gray body when you look at it from space, but at the surface, it’s very close to an ideal black body. It really doesn’t matter as it’s grayness can be completely accounted for in the analysis.
Regarding the papers, the ones which calculate the climate sensitivity are seriously flawed. They assume non saturating feedback and assume CO2 is the major driver and lump anything that they don’t understand into ‘it must be CO2’. I don’t expect to find a paper with a correct quantification of the climate sensitivity in anything reviewed by AGW proponents. A correct quantification undermines the case and would never get past the incestuous peer review process.
George
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Robin, I’ll try to find time to read through and respond to what appears to be some substantial material you wrote, before your most recent posting (which I just read). I’m out of time to do more than this right now:
You said
Show me where I said that, Robin. That is NOT what I said.
I said that those are three key factual points, highlighted in the reports (NAS and Wegman — yes, I combine them, since they BOTH deal with the hockey stick and that’s what we’re actually discussing! ANd note that the NAS report doesn’t “count” by your yardstick — not peer reviewed in any way) and agreed to by Pielke (and others), each of which demonstrates that the original hockey stick is has been invalidated in its original expression.
All three points ARE true. Others admit as much; these are facts published in the analysis reports and admitted by Pielke and others. You seem to have a hard time with such an admission.
Bottom line about my logic: the original hockey stick would only be “true” if all three of these are false. To the extent any of these are false, that portion of the hockey stick is falsified. It’s been falsified from 400-1000 years ago. Falsified in its CI (confidence interval). And falsified in its “highly likely probability” (a fuzzy non-scientific attribute if there ever was one, but there it is: they were only willing to say that what remains is “plausible”…)
So, you believe that discussions of published papers, by professional scientists, addressing what to those scientists is pertinent material, is “unscientific” because it is in blog form?
What is a “scientific” conversation? ONLY the peer-reviewed papers? So lab work doesn’t count? Classroom discussion doesn’t count? The peer review process doesn’t count? What do you think “peer review” consists of?
Robin, what, to you, is the difference between “scientific” and “unscientific”? Where do YOU draw the line?
[More later… sorry for this short response]
00
OK, Robin, I’ve now read your earlier response. I’m sorry, it appears you are playing word games. Why are you wasting your time playing games instead of examining science?
To the question about M&M’s criticisms (which I agree requires a bit more thought than the other three, which is why I removed it from my latter list), you wrote:
I’ll give you 25 percent on this answer:
1) Yes, those are the three places M&M are mentioned by name.
2) No, those are NOT a complete list of places where M&M’s concerns are discussed. M&M opined on several other important topics that are also addressed in the report, e.g. BCP’s, etc.
2) Your expectation (hope?) for a direct response to any of the testimony is false. The report doesn’t provide a concise response to ANY complaint source. However, you could have gotten the info yourself, for example by looking up the M&M submission to NAS which is easily googleable, and discovered what M&M actually said.
3) You failed to read either M&M’s criticism, OR the report. Nor did you read M&M’s commentary on the report. You only looked at the pages where M&M are cited (“in neither of those places…”), and didn’t see a headline saying “We Agree With M&M Criticism”? Is that how you do science, Robin? You came to a conclusion without understanding any of this. Sad.
4) You say their claims were not analyzed. To the extent ANYTHING was analyzed in the report, this is false. (Scientifically speaking, the whole report is of minimal value. Do you realize North said they “just winged it” for their analysis!)
They agreed with all of the M&M critiques, incorporating them into the report with or sometimes without citation. I’ll give you references below, for the benefit of other readers. You seem unable to do this yourself.
Robin, every M&M critique was cited agreeably, not with criticism and certainly not invalidated:
p90: M&M complaints about spurious PCA (“spurious trend[s] in the proxy-based reconstruction” and later, normalization issues. This is the hockey-stick mining issue, in simple terms.)
p112: M&M criticism of long-term trend CI (“century-to-century climate variations are underestimated…”)
p112-113: M&M criticism of biased statistical methods (“tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions”)
p113: M&M criticism of validation stats (“uncertainties have been underestimated”)
p113: M&M criticism of bristlecone pine data mentioned here but dealt with in an entire earlier chapter….
Those were the M&M criticisms where M&M are mentioned. Here are some more, where they didn’t bother mentioning M&M but these are ongoing M&M criticisms:
p22: M&M criticism of data availability (“all research benefits from full and open access to published datasets and that a clear explanation of analytical methods is mandatory…”)
p51: M&M criticism of confounding effects (note here that NAS cites Naurzbaev 2004 but fails to note that this “especially suitable” study showed highly elevated MWP temperature?!!)
p52: M&M criticism of BCP (““strip-bark” samples should be avoided for temperature reconstructions”)
p111: M&M criticism of validation stats (“Reconstructions that have poor validation statistics (i.e., low CE) will have correspondingly wide uncertainty bounds, and so can be seen to be unreliable in an objective way”)
p117: M&M criticism of non-robustness to removal of local BCP/foxtail data (“Temperature reconstructions for periods before about A.D. 1600 are based on proxies from a limited number of geographic regions, and some reconstructions are not robust with respect to the removal of proxy records from individual regions”
p117: M&M criticism that the reconstructions are not independent but based on the same data sets (“different large-scale reconstructions are sometimes based on the same datasets and thus cannot be considered as completely independent.”)
To the question of valid hockey-stick length (1000 years or 400 years), you wrote:
I’ll help you. Page 4:
* “The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium”…”
Summarizing their conclusion:
* High confidence in warming since the Little Ice Age
* Less confidence (“substantial uncertainties”) in hockey stick assessment of pre-1600 temperature
* Even less confidence that 1990’s are warmest
That’s the context of their “it is plausible” statement.
You are correct that they also said the conclusion has been supported.
Interesting how schizophrenic these political reports can be, isn’t it! M&M’s criticisms completely vindicated by NAS. And then NAS ignored their own advice (don’t use BCP’s, do use correct stats, don’t use the same data for all reconstructions, do reject hockey-stick-mining methods, etc etc) in analyzing the various available material. The details say one thing, the summary hedges. Just like the IPCC report, where the details had the vast majority of scientific arenas reporting least-possible-confidence in AGW, which became good-confidence in AGW in the summary (that’s another interesting topic, but of course the IPCC report is unscientific as it has not undergone peer review…)
To the question of too-narrow confidence intervals, you wrote:
By now, if you’ve been reading this tome of mine, you know the answer. But here it is again:
p111: M&M criticism of validation stats (without citing M&M) (“Reconstructions that have poor validation statistics (i.e., low CE) will have correspondingly wide uncertainty bounds, and so can be seen to be unreliable in an objective way”)
p112: M&M criticism of long-term trend CI (“century-to-century climate variations are underestimated…”)
p113: M&M criticism of validation stats (“uncertainties have been underestimated”)
All of these apply specifically to the Hockey Stick.
To the question of whether they support the Hockey Stick claims as being better than “plausible” you wrote:
Scientifically, a falsified hypothesis is also an important contribution. So how does this help?
Supported by… yet at the same time, they damned with the faint praise that you’re unable to see. So let’s see the whole “plausible” statement in context.
You say:
Here’s the paragraph from the report:
Ummm, Robin. That is one paragraph. Topic sentence is about Mann. Concluding sentence is about Mann. Less confidence. Plausible. It’s all about how bad Mann’s work is. Damned with faint praise.
Robin, I will let other readers draw their own conclusions about your goals here. It is clear you have failed to support your own hypetheses with your own cited reports.
The hockey stick is busted. The critics vindicated. And you sir refuse to admit any errors in your handling of the data.
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Robin Grant: “… Rudd is very far right even for Labour Right …”
Really? Ah, Kevin Rudd the political chameleon! Would that be when he’s being “Kev –I’m-a-Fiscal-Conservative-your-money-is-safe-in-my-hands” or when he’s being “Kev –I’m-the-Keynsian-spendthrift-throwing-money-around-like-Paris-Hilton-on-a-Bender”?
Robin Grant: “ … I, not really being compelled to believe that there was such a press release …”
No of course you’re reluctant to believe such a thing, Robin, that would taint some of your heroes! 😉
00
… but given that a mere press release wouldn’t constitute evidence in the Grantian Scientific Universe anyway because it wouldn’t be properly scientifically peer-reviewed, why do you bother asking for it?
00
Robin, I’ve now read the rest of your responses. I’m going to continue stick to factual issues and ignore the rest. I’ve responded with the facts on those four factual elements from the NAS report. You got them all 100% wrong.
I’ll respond to one more bit of what you said, since it is related to those four factual issues. You say, with respect to Browning:
What you fail to understand is that Browning is a mathematician. “Old” math doesn’t somehow fall out of favor or become less useful. Just as “old” stats doesn’t fade away. (The Shannon paper from 1945 for example is still a primary reference.)
Browning’s 20 year old paper is still useful. You can’t just ignore it by a wave of the hand. He’s peer reviewed. His commentary is valid.
M&M’s published papers are peer reviewed and valid. You can’t just wave them away.
M&M’s congressional testimony was validated by top-level statisticians, and confirmed by Wegman and NAS. Can’t just wave them away.
You wave all these away, yet accept without question the incorrect (yet peer reviewed) papers that they devastatingly critiqued.
Robin, the evidence shows your views are not based on science. They’re not based on truth. They’re based on preference. Please don’t represent yourself as loving science. If you did, you would have eaten up the critiques of Mann et all and understood what is wrong with the Hockey Stick.
A growing number of scientists are discovering just how murky is this sub-arena of science. It is an embarassment to real scientists everywhere.
What other science allows:
* Treating direct raw measurements of natural growth as “signal” plus “noise”, as if growth rates automagically contain a “desired signal”? (Their term, not mine)
* Literally throwing away direct data from nature (not invalid measurements) because it does not fit their hypothesis… rather than retaining and explaining all data?
* Changing the data to fit the model, rather than modifying the model to better fit the data?
Is that the kind of science we want to teach our children?
00
Sorry, I thought that that was pretty clear.
It is the existance of the press realease that it would verify, not the veracity of its content.
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MrPete, for someone with no time at all to find any sources for any of your claims, you seem to have a lot of time for posting.
I begin to suspect that it isn’t lack of time but scientific support that causes your repeated refusals to bacl yourself up.
MrPete wrote:
This is what you said, it is quoted quite clearly in the post to which you are responding.
Your first claim was M&M’s criticisms were valid, which include the global conincidence of the little ice age, your second is that it should be 60% shorter, and your third is that it should be fuzzier. Your false logic is that “Unless I can show all of those to be false, then all of them apply”.
This is fallacious because it is logically possible for some to be true and some to be false.
Clear?
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
When it is re-radiated to the surface, the surface responds in exactly the same way as it would if that photon were from the sun, right? By getting warmer?
How do you explain the greater temperature increase in Winter than Summer then … Is this mostly due to lower water vapour levels in winter?
I think it depends on whether you’re analysing the top of the atmosphere. (GHGs are part of the system, the emissivity is about 0.7 or 0.75, and so the apparent temperature is about 255K), or the surface (GHG’s are part of the stimulus, the emissivity is about 0.97, and the apparent temperature is about 287K, and the difference is the greenhouse effect.)
They point is that at the surface there is more incoming energy that there would be without greenhouse gasses. This is the cause of the 32K difference between the surface temperature and the apparent temperature from space.
Really.
I would have thought that more precisely modelling the processes that produce those aggregate properties and then aggregating them would be the way to improve long term predictability.
That’s how it works with models of engines and structures.
And, with a six month time step, it’s not really a model. Because it’s not starting with known physical processes and building up the macroscopic behaviour from those. It’s more a calculation based on macroscopic behaviour. As such it couldn’t describe the response to a less than 6 month El-Nino, which as we have seen, can be very significant. But also it couldn’t calculate the response to things that haven’t happened before, such as the loss of the northern summer sea ice, or the start of the collapse of the western Amazon rainforest.
Well, you’re vastly understating the number of scientists and scientific and academic organisations that have been involved in oceanic heat content measurements, sea level measurements, radiation budget measurements, climatic modelling and atmospheric temperature measurements if you think that they’re all called “Hansen”.
And neither to I buy the line that all these experts are lying.
But if there is no energy imbalance, how do you explain the cooling of the stratosphere?
That is perfectly consistent with there being a net average imbalance of a couple of watts per square metre.
1) It’s not unambiguous. The oceans are heating much more slowly than the land. Their heat capacity is what is slowing the warming.
2) The processes that happen in a day are not the same processes that happen in a decade in terms of heat penetration into the oceans. It is unconvincing that diurnal surface temperature changes are exposed to the same heat capacity as decadal ones, just from considering thermal conduction alone. But oceanic (and atmospheric) currents change behaviour with warming, so you get a plethora of different effects that don’t affect daily temperature much.
To say nothing of currents which take surface waters to the deep ocean at several points on the globe, taking heat with them … that is significant warming of the depths over a decade but not over a day.
Okay, you don’t trust my mathematics, and I don’t trust yours. Why don’t you point me to a peer reviewed scholarly paper that makes the points that you are making, and I’ll read it?
Really? The mean change per century looks a lot smaller than that. The recovery from an ice age looks like a steeper than average part of the graph, and that is only 0.2°C per century.
Even if these statistics are true, there are three points to be made:
1) Local temperature will vary a lot more than global temperature, so comparing temperature change from an ice core to current global temperature change is invalid. You should compare it to current local temperature change. (Of course, then it doesn’t help in a discussion of global climate change).
2) Peak temperature change includes after meteor impacts.
There are events of very rapid climate change in the ice core record, such as the end of the younger dryas. This event probably isn’t natural. There is evidence that the younger dryas was caused by a comet exploding in the atmosphere, somewhere near Canada.
I agree that current climate change is less than what you get during significant extraterrestrial impacts. However, these too, are associated with extinction events.
3) The current climate is not even well within those limits … it is very close to the maximum climate change, even though that is local, and includes non-terrestrial causes.
The warming of the mean of the 90s (1991-2000, inclusive) and the mean of the 00s (2001-2010, inclusive) so far is very close to 2°C per century. About 1.9°C.
I thought I could stick my neck out on that one.
Not via the arguments you presented. Deforestation and some other land use changes increase atmospheric CO2. It doesn’t seem that unfounded to me.
Wood has carbon in it. If you burn the wood, you get carbon in the atmosphere. Kind of like conservation of matter.
Ruddiman argues otherwise.
Sorry, that link looks björked.
But without looking at it, I suspect that whatever it shows a couple of hundred of climate scientists will be aware of it. Why do you think that they don’t think it shows corruption?
00
That was poorly worded. I’m not suggesting that an energy imbalance causes a cooling of the stratosphere, but given that the stratosphere has cooled, there must be less energy being radiated from there to space, creating an energy imbalance.
So I shouldn’t have said “how do you explain”, but “how do you account for the effect of”.
00
Robin,
There’s a difference between the energy coming from the Sun and the energy coming from the atmosphere, whether it be reflected by clouds or GHG. Energy from the Sun is added to the system while reflected energy is circulating in the system. This is the dynamic characteristic of the system of differential equations that you don’t get yet. The reflected energy increases the surface temperature, but is not new energy being added to the system.
I don’t know what you’re talking about regarding differences in the increase between summer and winter. When I examine the data, there’s no statistically significant difference. The 10/01 anomaly occurs in the winter which would give a false indication of a difference starting in about 2002 which would fade away by about 2007 when using 5-year averaging.
More precise modeling will produce better results, but if the time step is too small, the exact nature of the chaotic interface between hot and cold (i.e. weather) would need to be accuratel modeled, which is not possible today. Shorter time steps with less accurate modeling will result in a faster divergence of the model.
You should also notice that meteor and volcanic events have little effect on the temperatures measured in the ice cores and at most are a short lived transient effect. Some have tried to correlate a volcanic event about 50K years ago to changes that are more closely correlated with Milankovitch forcings, but that’s another story.
The URL should be,
http://www.palisad.com/co2/avg_temp.gif
The data corruption is due to decommissioning NOAA-14, concurrent with commissioning NOAA-16 and introducing a variety of calibration changes. The shift is documented here,
http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/JPEG/calib_be4after.jpg
Many people use averaged D2 data (instead of the lower level D2 data) and averaging makes this more or less fade away into a presumed temperature increase. My point is that this bias in the calibration affects the anomaly analysis. I posted a more detailed description of how this works on the Goldilocks thread (post 121), along with a few more plots, but it seems to have disappeared.
The anomaly has sometimes been attributed to the lack of contrails after 9/11, but that effect only lasted a few days and would not bias up the next 7 years of data.
George
00
Robin,
The Goldilocks post is back and was somehow blocked by the spam filter. Here are links to the pictures in that post.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/temp.gif
http://www.palisad.com/co2/temp_fb.gif
http://www.palisad.com/co2/temp_5.gif
http://www.palisad.com/co2/temp_5fb.gif
These plots also show the monthly anomaly, plotted to the same scale and along with the average temperature (the only way that the context of the anomaly can be seen relative to natural variability). The ‘fb’ versions have the bias fixed and the ‘5’ versions have 5-year averaging applied, which is the standard Hansen likes to use to present data (it tends to hide data anomalies by spreading them out. The important thing to notice is how the anomaly is affected by the bias. Look at the Goldilocks post #121 for more info.
George
00
Robin,
It’s true that I had very little time. I’ve been away traveling, intense meetings, etc etc etc. It is silly that you’re suggesting I refuse to back myself up. My extensive posting is the result of having some early-AM time available; I took the time to do the research you did not do. My posting ought to be evidence enough.
Robin, not only do you have no answer to the three or four key factual questions, you continue to hold to an invalid logic.
You are arguing that the hockey stick is 100% correct, that nothing has invalidated it. You’re wasting both of our time on word-parsing.
Show me that one of my statements is incorrect, and of course I will gladly retract it.
I have shown, from your own sources, that all four statements are correct. Yet you do not retract your support for the hockey stick. That’s sad.
Don’t read too much into my words. I said:
Restating using proper logic: If any of my statements are true, the original hockey stick is indefensible. Yes, a MODIFIED hockey stick could still be true. But the original hockey stick has been invalidated to the extent any of the statements are true.
This statement is really an expansion of a single one of my claims: the hockey stick should be 400 years long, not 1000.
You wrote this:
Where did you get that? M&M don’t make any claims about what the hockey stick should look like. They make claims invalidating the hockey stick. They offer no alternative model. There’s no need. Science is not a game of “find the best model.” Each model is either correct or incorrect.
How is this different from Little Ice Age?
It’s already fuzzy. And yes, (see my citations above) NAS and Wegman both agree that uncertainty levels need to be greatly increased, particularly for pre-1600 data.
That’s a straw man. I never said that, never implied that, and do not believe that. YOU are saying that.
Robin, you are wasting other’s time. If you truly are interested in the science, I recommend you start reading up on this with a bit more rigor. Begin with the NAS citations I provided above. The M&M criticisms, which were all validated, are pretty serious stuff.
Honestly, I am beginning to have a hard time believing you actually care about learning anything. I’ve shown directly and specifically how wrong you are about the NAS report. I’ve seen no admission of this from you.
As before, I’m going to stick to the four key factual statements, and wait for you to respond to those. We obviously can go no further if you are unable to address these with some integrity.
Four factual claims about the original (Mann) hockey stick:
1) Were M&M’s criticisms validated by Wegman and NAS? I have shown above, with citations, the answer is YES. Yet you say NO.
2) Is the validated length 1000 years or 400 years? I have shown above, with citations, the answer is 400 years. Yet you say 1000 years.
3) Were the confidence intervals described too narrowly? I have shown above, with citations, the answer is YES. Yet you say NO.
4) Did NAS describe it as being no better than “plausible”? I have shown above, with citations, the answer is YES. Yet you say NO.
BTW, if you re-read that intro paragraph again, you’ll find what they said was actually even worse. Parsing it briefly:
a) Based on the Mann analysis…”plausible” that NH is warmer in 20th century than in the last 1000 years
b) Substantial uncertainties give lower (than this “plausible” conclusion) confidence for pre-1600 period, compared to high confidence in LIA cool/20th century warm.
c) EVEN LESS confidence in Mann’s original conclusions that 1990’s/1998 are “likely” warmest in 1000 years.
Isn’t that interesting.
Was the 20th century the warmest? (This is NOT the hockey stick…) Answer: “plausible”
Do we know much about pre-1600 temp? Answer: less than “plausible”
Was Mann’s hockey-stick correct, with 1990’s the warmest? Answer: even less confident than that.
That’s very faint praise indeed. Here’s what Zorita said… he is most likely correct:
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co2isnotevil wrote:
You need to be clearer about what you are considering as the system, because you swap between the surface of the earth and the top of the atmosphere.
The above is true for TOA as the boundary to the system.
But energy added to the system, and energy not subtracted are both sources of radiative forcing.
No, it’s energy not escaping from the system. Which has the same effect. (And considering the surface of the earth as the system, it is identical … it gets hit by a photon and warmed).
And I’m probably okay with systems of DEs, btw. I’m certainly a bit rusty, but Mathematics is my field. And having said that, I don’t see the relevance of a system of DE’s to distinguishing between photons from the clouds or from the sun. Could you make that any clearer? (Don’t be too afraid of getting technical, I’ve got some of my old textbooks handy).
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Robin,
The system is the combination of the surface, ocean and atmosphere with energy entering from the Sun and exiting through the transparent window in the atmosphere. This window is modulated, primarily with water vapor in the form of clouds, such that a combination of surface energy (temperature) and cloud energy (temperature), proportionally weighted by cloud coverage, sets the energy flux entering the system to be equal to the energy flux exiting the system. I always talk in the context of this system, so whatever I talk about should be considered in the context of such a system. The surface often comes up because it’s temperature is associated with the state of the system, which is more or less true. The actual state has 3 components, the surface temperature, cloud top temperature and the percentage of clouds.
Consider the properties of the top level DE,
Pi = Po + dE/dt
Pi is the total power from the Sun, Po is the total power emitted by the planet, including reflected energy and E is the energy stored in the Earth’s thermal mass and dE/dt is the energy flux in and out of the thermal mass. In the steady state, dE/dt wants to be zero. Of course, it oscillates around zero instead and is the sum of many, wildly varying, dE/dt’s across the planets surface. A simple manifestion of a dynamic response is found in the autopilot in an airplane. When it’s engaged, you can often feel a gentle rocking and periodic wobble around the intended direction. This is the nature of the dynamic response, as opposed to the static response, which just sets the heading, or the center of the jiggly range (how’s that for technospeak). BTW, the same equation can be applied to an UPS, where Pi is the power from the wall, Po is the power to the computer and E is the energy stored in the battery of the UPS.
The amount that Po decreases due to increased GHG reflection is less than 1%, even after doubling CO2. dE/dt is positive, increasing E and the average temperature of the Earth, which subsequently increases Po until a new steady state is reached and dE/dt is again zero. Since this increase in GHG reflection is happening slowly, relative to the response of the system, it never gets a chance to build up. The idea that the ocean is somehow retaining energy that isn’t increasing Po now, but will later, is ludicrous. Only biology has the power to do this by converting more energy into biomass, which is a longer term storage of energy than the energy circulating between the atmosphere and surface as a result of GHG’s.
George
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Well if the atmosphere is included in the system then energy exiting through the window is a smaller amount of the energy exiting.
Energy radiated by the atmosphere and incoming energy reflected from clouds and the atmosphere both represent more energy than is lost through the window, and combined make up about 6 times the energy than passes through the atmospheric window.
Well, I see what you mean, but point of accuracy: Clouds aren’t water vapour. They’re liquid water or ice.
Sure … once the steady state is reached.
Of course at the moment there is more energy flux entering that system.
Okay. I’ll try to understand your posts with that interpretation.
Is that all?
If you wanted to write that precisely using a volume integral, I’d probably be able to keep up:
∫∫Pi.dθ.dφ = ∫∫∫(Po + dE/dt) dr.dθ.dφ
Perhaps … not being able to use subscripts, but now Pi is the incoming power at a given latitude and longitude, and Po is the net power out at an element of a certain latitude and longitude and height, and E is the energy of that same element.
The extra precision doesn’t hurt, because stating it with words you said that “Of course, it oscillates around zero instead and is the sum of many, wildly varying, dE/dt’s across the planets surface.” which isn’t correct for the system that you claim you are always considering, (ie, including the atmosphere), and the reader could easily again make the mistake that you are only considering the earth’s surface, and not the full depth of the atmosphere.
That’s right.
That’s also right.
I don’t understand what you are saying here. The response of the system to what? Why doesn’t it build up. Surely COE requires the energy to build up, and keep building until a new steady state is reached?
That’s not exactly the idea.
What the ocean is doing is taking time to warm up. This is because of its heat capacity.
Po increases with temperature to the four, so there will be more later when the warming has finished.
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“Tropical cirrus and water vapor: an effective Earth infrared iris feedback?” (PDF)
(Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2002
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/208_Re_to_Fu_etal.pdf
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/83/9/pdf/i1520-0477-83-9-1345.pdf
Validation of the cloud property retrievals from the MTSAT-1R imagery using MODIS observations (PDF)
(International Journal of Remote Sensing, 2009)
http://www.mit.edu/~ysc/index.files/Choi2009IJRS.pdf
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Mr Pete:
I am unimpressed by your analysis.
*You ask about M&M’s claims without stating what they are.
*You say that the error was larger prior to 400 years ago, as if this contradicts Mann et al, which it does not.
*You have moved the goalposts on the errors. Initially you claimed “Did the analyses conclude the confidence interval on the hockey stick were too narrow and should be much larger?”, now you have reduced that to “Were the confidence intervals described too narrowly?”.
* Your quote about plausibility is not even talking about Mann et al. 1998, but the entire evidence at that time. I repeat, the report does not even use the word “plausible” with respect to Mann et al.
So, all you have offered so far is inaccuracies and logical errors.
All of which is a red herring that you are trying to use to get out of backing up your inital claim:
You have said “Mann was not vindicated by NAS.”
I have provided links to the Nature article, the press, and the scientific blogosphere that you are wrong.
Unimpressed, as I am, by M&M’s blog, nor your own personal analysis, do you have a respectable scientific source that backs up your unlikely-seeming view of the report?
-Robin
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Robin,
No. The input flux and output flux are on average, equal. A few watts of extra GHG reflection isn’t going to keep the system from achieving equilibrium. The climate system is far more robust, dynamic and adaptable than you seem to believe. I know AGW requires the system to be very sluggish, but this is just not the case. The Sun varies by 80 W/m^2 between perihelion and aphelion and the Earth system has no trouble keeping up. Another important concept is that equilibrium is a steady state oscillation around the mean steady state value. The Earth system can not have a non zero average dE/dt for very long, but in general, dE/dt is positive when the Earth is warming and is negative when the Earth is cooling. Over the last few years, the Earth has been cooling, so dE/dt must be negative.
You are also incorrect about the ocean needing to warm up. It’s already cooling, QED.
George
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That’s logically identical to saying that there is no warming.
You can’t make your case assuming that, you have to show it.
That’s true. And that equilibrium will be a few degrees warmer at the surface.
Robust? Adaptable? It’s not an animal; it’s a climate system. I agree it is dynamic. I don’t see the relevance of any of these claims to your claim that a photon re emitted from the greenhouse layer cannot provide a forcing, but one from the sun can.
How do you know that you’re not just looking at the effect of summer on the land (which responds quickly) compared to summer on the ocean (which responds slowly)?
What is to stop it having an non zero dE/dt for a century?
You could state that a little stronger and still be correct. Overcoming that latent heat of fusion of ice sheets is warming of a sort, and I can’t believe that net biological storage of energy is significant.
When you say that “the Earth has been cooling”, to what CI would you say that that it true?
What is your (peer reviewed, scientific) source?
If the earth is cooling, why has the thermal expansion of the oceans not reversed? (Inverted barometer applied, Seasonal signal removed.)
If the earth is cooling, why is the stratosphere still cooler than it was?
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Robin,
The source of the cooling is the ISCCP satellite data.
The Earth can not have a zero dE/dt for very long either. The point is that dE/dt is either positive or negative and can change from one to another locally in a matter of hours and as a global average can change in a matter of days.
Again, I refer you to the data I showed you previously that illustrated the rapid response of the ocean temperature to changes in incident energy.
George
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Hmmm. Only if you believe that they fraudulent, which seems to be starkly unlikely.
But even if it were true, why would that trump met station and ship measurements as per the Hadley Centre, surface based measurements from NASA, sea level measurement, and oceanic heat content measurements.
Can the global average change in a matter of days?
How do you know that?
What’s to make sure that it does?
Weren’t the oceans overall fairly steady?
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Sorry, I’d lost track of the thread. This is supposed to be an answer to why the oceans are holding less heat. The satellite data doesn’t measure the heat content of the ocean, they measure the temperature of the lower troposphere over the ocean, and that so indirectly that different analysis groups get different amounts of warming from the same data.
What makes you think satellite data shows oceanic cooling?
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Robin,
The global average surface temperature varies on average by 0.67C per month, in a sinusoidal manner over a year (4C p-p), 70% of which is over ocean. For 6 months of the year dE/dt is positive and for the other 6 months dE/dt is negative. The net per year is the difference between 2 relatively large numbers.
Satellites measure the average daily temperature which is approximately the same as the temperature of the lower troposphere. Relative to met measurements, which measure the temperature of the air near the surface, satellite measurements are a more accurate indication of the surface temperature. Satellite measurements also have much better coverage over the surface.
The true average temperature of the planet is what we are most interested in relative to thermodynamic considerations and surface temps and lower troposphere temps are all reasonable approximations.
The top layer of the ocean is always the warmest (i.e. cold water sinks). The temperature of the oceans surface is representative of the energy stored within as long as there is sufficient mixing in the thin layer above the thermocline. This is then the temperature presented to the top of the thermocline and the bottom of the thermocline is anchored to a about 4C because of density considerations. We can quantify the energy stored in the planet as representative of the temperature difference across the thermocline.
The average temperature of the Earth is equal to the temperature in the middle of the thermocline.
George
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Robin,
I am confused by your statements. I provided facts from the primary sources, giving you direct references. And you are unable to agree with those facts even though they are there in plain English.
I didn’t provide analysis. No interpretation needed. I provided direct citations of the sources, by page. What more do you need?
Let’s go down your list:
I see no value in copying the text of M&M’s submission to NAS, and NAS’s report, into this blog. I gave you the NAS page numbers where their claims are confirmed. You can look in the M&M submission to NAS to see it yourself. I told you how to find that as well. If you cannot follow extremely simple instructions, you are wasting our time.
I suggested it was easily googleable. Must I spoon-feed this? I said “for example by looking up the M&M submission to NAS which is easily googleable”
I just googled: M&M submission to NAS
And got, as the #1 link, the PDF of their submission. This is ridiculous.
LOL!!!! So, you are saying Mann only claims 400 years of warming? That is tooooo funny, Robin! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Oh c’mon. You’re saying “too narrow” vs “too narrowly” is moving the goalposts? Or are you saying that I’m wrong to conclude that something that’s “too narrow” ought to be “much larger”? What do you prefer, “less narrow?” This is silly. The real nuts and bolts of this is not in word-parsing but in the details of the statistics.
Robin, you claim to be a math guy. Why are you wasting your time parsing “narrow” and “wide”? Why are you not digging in on the (statistical) science? The Durbin-Watson stats, the RE, the autocorrelation, and more? Mann got it wrong, pure and simple. His work was bad science, pure and simple. We don’t even need to look at his results, since the answer doesn’t matter if you didn’t do the work properly. As Wegman said, “Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.”
Robin, I quoted the entire paragraph. Yes, the paragraph is not ONLY about Mann et al.–it includes other evidence as well. But Mann is primary, yet say it is “not even talking about Mann”??!! Please explain how you remove “Mann” from the paragraph? I trust I do not need to repeat the paragraph again.
Robin, each one of your statements above is incorrect.
* You claim I didn’t provide M&M’s criticisms, yet I provided the exact page number in NAS where M&M’s criticisms were vindicated. You seem unable to read this.
* You say reducing the hockey stick to 400 years doesn’t contradict Mann, when NAS says it does.
* You say I somehow “moved the goalposts”… an illogical nitpick somehow inferring that “too narrow” vs “too narrowly” is a goal change?
* You say the NAS summary paragraph about “Mann”, together with newer evidence…which also concludes with a severe criticism of “Mann”…is not talking about Mann at all.
Robing, that’s the third (?) time you have provided a set of claims ALL of which are wrong. And not once have you admitted that even a portion of your logic is incorrect.
To save time from here out, I am going to simplify my responses, until you are capable of saying something that is actually correct in response. I will simply say:
Robin, you provided commentary from the peanut gallery. There are “pro” peanut galleries and “anti” peanut galleries. Doesn’t matter what they say. That’s belief. That’s religion. What matters are the facts.
That’s why I provided direct citations of NAS.
Robin, science is about falsification.
“Vindication” of Mann is falsified by refutation of Mann.
And so, I provided three primary (and one secondary) claims, each of which refutes Mann. Only one of my claims needs to be correct to falsify Mann. You have not invalidated ANY of my claims, let alone ALL of them.
Robin, if you want to support the “vindication” of the hockey stick by NAS, you need to prove that one or more of my claims is incorrect. To fully refute my claims requires that all of my claims be refuted. Each of them stands alone.
Sadly, it is clear that nobody will be able to convince you…because ALL of your responses have been based on impeccably absurd…
These are your current claims, Robin. You have not admitted ANY of them to be false.
I suggest that other posters to this thread read and add to the above set of “Robin Logic” claims.
Robin, it is a waste of time to discuss any real-world topic with you, as long as you continue to hold to Robin Logic.
Robin, I care not a whit about Robin’s Logic. I care about science.
Your logic is not scientific. Nor is it logical. Nor is it mathematically correct.
So, until you admit that Robin Logic is incorrect, I have no way to respond to you logically.
That’s why I must say:
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The sinusoid changes phase when they change satellite. It seems to be a function of the orbit of the satellite, not the temperature of the earth.
Even the above aside, that’s not true unless you can show that Energy doesn’t move around on the ground … and we know that there is energy flow from the land to the ocean, because the land has warmed faster.
I don’t think you calculate a integral by taking the difference of the extremes.
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Largely, yes. The Arctic Ocean and the Southern Ocean might be different near the ice.
But there is also mixing along isopycnal surfaces.
Probably largely. But the temperature of the land is representative of less energy than the same temperature of the water. And since the Northern Hemisphere has more land, the cause of your annual variation cannot be attributed to the perihelion without further investigation.
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MrPete:
I thought they were pretty clear:
1) The National Academies report almost completely vindicated Mann et al.
2) I have provided sources to back this up
3) If you would argue with this you should provide sources that counter this.
4) I think your personal analysis shows poor understanding of both Mann et al and the National Academies report, for the reasons given above. Therefore I do not rate them as a source.
There is no evidence that those pages addressed any or all of M&M’s claims.
The reason that it is best for you to support your arguments and me to support mine, is that that way around there is motivation.
I am not your mother. If you can’t do your own homework, your claims will be questioned.
Yes it is.
Thank you. I see why you tried to avoid this document. M&M raise 38 questions, and you have claimed that they are all addressed in the NAS, and confirmed.
The first is:
Is the MBH98 PC method biased towards yielding a hockey stick shaped PC1?
Where in the NAS report do you claim that this bias is confirmed?
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Robin, just noticed your reply.
Only time to read and respond to the bottom right now. More later.
Nature’s response was an editorial response. Any editorial response is opinion and not facts, and therefore “peanut gallery” in my book. What they said is not factual and does not need refuting.
Your Robin Logic assertion remains: you claim opinion about facts trumps facts. That is an extreme form of argument from authority. A waste of time.
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MrPete wrote:
It was news, not an opinion piece.
It was news, not editorial.
They were reporting on the National Academies report on temperature reconstructions.
That’s stretching it a bit.
No, I claim a true version of the facts trump your version of the facts. I’m not really a relativist, and you’re simply wrong about what was said in MBH98, and I suspect that you can’t talk about the facts, because they now threaten your ego.
MBH were quite explicit about their errors. And anyone who has seen the hockey stick with the errors on it knows that their conclusions for up to 400 years are much stronger than their conclusions for times before that.
I am particularly unimpressed by your answer to that. “LOL!!!! So, you are saying Mann only claims 400 years of warming? That is tooooo funny, Robin! 🙂 🙂 :)”. If you can’t address the content of a post, then you should concede the point. It seems you can’t do that, so I don’t see any value in taking the time to respond to any more of your posts.
There are enough people here with a scientific mindset such as co2isnotevil who are discussing actual points of science.
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Robin,
Thank you for at least attempting to address two of my factual statements.
(Note: My comment about 400 vs 1000 was in response to what you said. I gave you specific references in the NAS report to what THEY concluded about Mann and CI’s. THEY say Mann’s CI’s were too narrow.
Not my opinion. Their statement. Not what someone else says about NAS. What NAS says.
I don’t care if you call the article “news” or “editorial” or whatever. It was not the primary (NAS) reference. You are claiming that what Nature says about the NAS report trumps what the NAS report itself says.
You are claiming Nature is a “true version of the facts” in the NAS report.
You are claiming that the NAS report (which is all I am quoting) is “my” version of the facts, and is trumped by Nature. Very bad logic, Robin. That is the essense of appeal to authority. “He said she said.”
Yes, a waste of all our time.
I am addressing the content of NAS. You are unable to.
I will now address the meat of your prior comment, briefly:
1) On M&M’s claims
I provided pages, cited which ones specifically cited M&M, and which ones specifically referenced other M&M claims. And you say “no evidence” that these address “any” of their claims? (I agree, they did not take time to address ALL of M&M’s claims. That’s why I reworded the question more carefully in my updated restatement above. A more complete (nitpicky) statement of fact, with which you still clearly disagree:
a) They did not invalidate ANY M&M claims;
b) They did address MANY M&M claims (11! See citations above);
c) They did concur with every single one that they addressed.
You ask about M&M’s first claim:
It is listed above in the nice catalog I gave you.
2,3) On 400 vs 1000 years and CI
NAS specifically says MBH made their CI’s too narrow.
Nobody disputes MBH had increasing earlier CI. But they still made them way too small. I gave you the references.
Show me that NAS says MBH made their CI’s correctly, that they are NOT too narrow.
I’ve already responded to your illogic about “narrow” and “large.” It is covered nicely in the Robin Logic summary below.
4) On “plausibility” you claim:
“not primary” eh? Good one! Even though Mann:
* comes first,
* and last,
* and is the only named evidence,
* and is first referenced as “Based on…the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible…”
* and worse, is alone held to the fire of “Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al…”
…you feel that the article is not at all about Mann.
I’ll incorporate that into the Robin Logic summary.
I’ll also note again for other readers (Robin isn’t interested in such facts): the “other evidence” was shown to be interrelated to MBH. You only get Hockey Sticks if you include certain invalid subsets of tree-ring data. But that fact is immaterial here. My only claim for this part: NAS says MBH is only “plausible.”
Finally, I am truly sorry you were unable to appreciate my LOL response. I honestly do not know an appropriate response to Robin Logic. Joanne Nova’s doing one good bit for it: providing better factual material. My wife, an acclaimed science teacher, is writing a book on Good Science so that a new generation will be equipped to recognize and avoid Robin Logic.
Still, you do continue to provide some funny interludes. I certainly appreciate the laugh you provided when you claimed that a news article in Nature is
??!! Perhaps I should not be laughing. Robin, it is truly sad that you appear unable to see the difference between commentary and science. I’ll just add this to Robin Logic.
OK, here’s where we are now. Here are my three primary/one secondary questions of FACT for Robin, and an augmented Robin Logic list. None of these have been answered logically. None of his misstatements retracted.
And,
Conclusion:
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Robin, I agree that you are not discussing points of science.
I had hoped to conduct such a discussion with you. That’s why I went to the trouble of citing specific NAS report sections for you. Yet you seem unable to reference them, continuing to go back to news reports and such.
My general observation: your arguments ignore substantial content and instead focus on (invalid and illogical) dissection of grammar or sentence construction.
Please review the Robin Logic list. Compare it to my factual questions. Which one looks more like points of science and which looks more like mush?
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Just remembered, I missed a new Robin Logic entry. Will add to the main list next time:
I think I’m beginning to understand Robin Logic. Robin, is this about right?
a) If Robin makes a statement, that statement is true, factual, logical.
b) If Robin disagrees with a statement, that statement is inaccurate, logical error, unimpressive, and avoiding the real “content” of the argument.
What matters is whether you agree with it or not–the content of the statement does not matter.
Finally… I think I am understanding you correctly.
If not, perhaps you could begin by admitting that Robin Logic (a) is actually illogical. It is the logic you first used on me.
Honestly, I’ve put some significant effort into clarifying the logic of your statements. If we could eliminate the illogical statements, it would reduce the effort on both of our parts.
I do want to thank you for inspiring me to go to this effort. Next, I’m going to refresh my understanding of the formal elements of Logic and Reason. I’m inspired to transform the Robin Logic list into something more akin to JoNova’s Logic/Reason scorecard. So, I think you!
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Well, that was an interesting exercise! Studying Robin’s Logic provided good fodder for a review of fallacious argument.
From just the tenets of Robin Logic (ignoring the actual postings), I counted
There are others that I couldn’t easily categorize. Is there a formal logic name for never admitting mistaken arguments? In normal human relationships there’s a word for it, but this is science, not politics.
With a reasoning score of -21, IMHO Robin has earned the right to hold his opinions without rebuttal.
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MrPete,
Masterful experiment demonstrating my hypothesis that using logic and reason against a true believer in AWG is without effect upon the true believer. The reason being is that logic and reason are not the tools they used to formulate their beliefs.
They have faith that their faith selected significant others expresses the one true position. The said significant others use a similar process. You have a process of infinite regression of mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors without a single mirror reflecting anything real. Since all nothing but a floating and self sustaining shimmering of re-reflected verbal excretions, it cannot be impacted by anything as real as logic and reason.
Your final conclusion says it all.
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The guy reminds me of a James Bond villian. LOL!
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ROFLMAO!
I gave up on him a while ago,when he never did show that the Oregon Petition was bad.He brought up stuff that did not actually prove that the Petition project itself was bad.Just a bunch of peripheral stuff that can convince a school kid,but not for one who keeps asking him for solid evidence of wrongdoing.He had nothing and that is why I left.
I even asked him if there were fraud being committed,and he never answers it.Surely if as HE Robin claims that some of the people never signed the petition,but be on the list anyway,that would be easy to prove fraud? But not a single legal claim as been brought up by the scientists,who state they never signed the petition and yet their name is on it.
I knew then that I was dealing with a person who is not being honest with his claims.Just decided that the Petition was bad and stuck with it,despite having no credible reason to do so.
He had nothing against the petition ITSELF.and that is why I left.He was running on nothing,a sorry way to go in my opinion.
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Joanne:
My travels (travails?) are coming to an end, so I can spend some time back at your in-site-ful site.
For Matt: “As a GEOLOGIST” I have had a restful few months dealing with rocks, developing a numerical simulation (model) of fluid flow in natural geologic systems and otherwise neglecting my duty “As a GEOLOGIST” to provide some perspective on Earth’s climate history to those who know there is an alternative to AGW propaganda.
Joanne: I had written to you once before on the topic of this thread regarding a former student of mine at the college where I am an adjunct geology professor. In my 101 class, I include a lecture on palaeoclimatology with a focus on how our current climate and the recent (past 12,000 yr) climate changes compare with both past climate and climate distributions.
The student came back to me a year later (last sptring term) asking for some resources because she was going to do her senior project on the politicization of the climate change issue. After about three weeks of preparation for her initial presentation, her faculty advisor refused to allow her to proceed and forced her to change her topic.
I was labeled as ‘dangerous’ and I won’t be surprised if there are ‘Beware’ posters outside my office when I return to the hallowed halls in three weeks.
Of the three professors on my graduate school advisory committee, one of them was an arrogant New Englander who began his first course with us by telling us that, in that particular class, he was going to teach us how to think. Such impudence!!!!. He was not my principle advisor, but he became my greatest mentor, because he did what he promised. That is what I now bring to my classes – I don’t so much teach them facts, as how to look at the world and think about it, and what other people say about it.
And for that, I suppose maybe I AM dnagerous 😉 All my students want is what the character of Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) noted in the excellent play Inherit the Wind, when he told the court tht his client wants the same rights and privileges as a sponge – he wants the right to think.
Talk about deniers – the dangerous ones are not so-called climate deniers (there are none), but those who deny the flow and discussion of scientific information.
Glad to be back,
Tom
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The op-Ed of the local newspaper is talking about Kundu and The Skeptics Handbook
http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/north_sound/arl/opinion/52450477.html
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“I too am still waiting for you to give some examples of what data the feedback is not present in. What missing heat is this, CO2? Oceaninic heat content continues to rise.”–Robin Grant
A good example of what data the feedback is not present in would be the atmospheric data. Note that the AGW crowd has moved the goal post to the oceans. Apparently the atmospheric data just wasn’t proving their hypothesis. The recent ocean data shows a slight cooling trend as well.
That adds up if you take into consideration the laws of thermodynamics. If the atmosphere cools, then the oceans transfer their heat to the atmosphere. If there is a warming trend, then both oceans and atmosphere would be warming with thermal exchange between them.
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CO2isnotevil:
Thanks for the graphs #533 with satellite anomaly adjustments, and for the perseverance with civil exchange of ideas and evidence fundamental to the science. Would you kindly allow some Q’s: ?
1. Graphs
#533 The ‘fb’ versions have the bias fixed and the ‘5′ versions have 5-year averaging applied
Q: what has happened to 1998 El Nino and 2005 peaks, both of which have been tagged at times the “warmest year on record” ?
2. Systems approach
#536 (and others): Pi = Po + dE/dt
#540 The Earth system can not have a non-zero average dE/dt for very long
Qs: If I understand #540 correctly you are saying that (i) 3.7W/m2 (@ 2xCO2) is relatively trivial in terms of diurnal dE/dt and because dE/dt=0 twice per day on all points of Earth surface the system is constantly re-equilibrating? . If so then I would agree this is true in terms of flow. But might not the stock (E) increase/decrease with t ? eg even if over scales of a century? In fact isn’t this a necessary condition for ice ages, MWP and LIA etc? This would happen if as Robin G #541, #547 says, the integrals do not sum to zero and the new equilibrium involves surface warming.
As I understand it you are also saying that despite 80W/m2 irradiance difference between perihelion and aphelion, there are thermal surface and ocean temperature lags of only ~45 days, and thus that response times are days not decades, and this rapid response means that a year-round +3.7 W/m2 (@ 2xCO2) can just as easily and more rapidly exit from the system (presumably by night radiation, not ocean heat absorbtion ?). (integral sum dE/dt =0 within a period of days for all Po) If this is so, it appears that you would also be saying that a variation of Pi (ie solar fluctuation) is the sole mechanism for changing the stock of E (ie mean global temp); corollary Po constantly brought to equilibrium in short time, and thus anything that effects it is more or less irrelevant.
Even when dE/dt=0 twice day, is not a period of increased duration of warmer night temperatures (assuming non-declining day temps) the same thing as a rising mean temperature?
Are you able to answer Robins points in #511?
“The thing that makes a difference is the current warming is not caused by solar irradiance. We know this from information that we don’t have from ice cores:
1) The diurnal temperature range has dropped.
When the warming is mostly at night, the sun is not causing it.
2) The annual temperature range has dropped.
When winters are warmed more than summers, again the sun is not the cause. The sun warms things when it is shining.
3) The temperature of the stratosphere has cooled.
This shows that there is less energy reaching the upper atmosphere. This can only be because there is less heat reaching it from below. If there were more heat reaching it from above, it would warm too.
4) The poles have warmed more than the average. (Well, the North Pole and the Antarctic peninsular have warmed at about 3 times the global average. Antarctica proper is warming slowly because of thermal isolation, as predicted by climate models).
The sun would have a greater effect where the sunlight is more direct … in the tropics. However the CO2 greenhouse effect has a greater effect where there is less humidity, because of the overlap between CO2 and H2O absorption.”
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“) The temperature of the stratosphere has cooled.
This shows that there is less energy reaching the upper atmosphere. This can only be because there is less heat reaching it from below. If there were more heat reaching it from above, it would warm too.”–Alex
Or, there might be a general cooling trend. As a result, everything, including the stratosphere, would cool. The mere fact that the stratosphere is cooling is not evidence that the troposphere is warming. The lack of evidence of warming has prompted some in the AGW camp to suggest that the oceans are warming. Of course, there is no evidence to support that assumption either. If the oceans are absorbing the heat, then the troposphere would cool along with the stratosphere.
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Alex,
I’m not exactly sure why the El Nino event isn’t there. I could be a more local effect, where the locally warmer part of the ocean is offset by other ocean water that is a little cooler. The satellite data is presented as global averages, so this may wash out. Also, when you apply averaging, short term peaks like this will disappear.
Yes, E changes over time because Pi changes over time. When Pi increases, dE/dt is positive for more than it is negative until E increases so that the surface temperature rises until in the steady state Po has increased and the net dE/dt is again zero. The main point here is that GHG reflected energy is not a component of Pi, only the Sun contributes to Pi. GHG’s simply require that the surface temperature must be higher than Stefan-Boltzmann would indicate (i.e. the 255K temp of the Earth). This is because to squeeze enough energy through the transparent window in the atmosphere such that Po = Pi, the surface temperaure must be a higher.
Relative to Robin’s questions in #511, none of them seem backed up by the data. I see no statistically significant trends in the diurnal temperature range or the annual temperature range. Any presumed trends are most likely the result of a failure to compensate for the 10/2001 data anomaly.
It’s expected that the polar regions will exhibit larger changes than at lower latitudes. The N pole specifically since the N polar ice pack is floating on water and can be melted from both above and below.
George
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One more aspect on solar influence vs various thermal effects: AFAIK nobody is arguing that the solar impact is direct. The major element appears to be changes in cosmic rays… and the overall impact on clouds.
Once we get into clouds, the picture gets murky, so to speak :)– and none of the models has good cloud modeling.
Just for grins: more cloud cover can account for three of the four #511 impacts:
* nighttime surface temps could remain higher due to the “blanket” insulation effect;
* upper atmosphere could become cooler due to the same effect;
* winter lack of cooling at the surface could be the same thing
My bottom line on this: it is not so easy to assume we know the answer to such questions.
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co2isnotevil wrote:
The decrease in diurnal temperature range was very marked to about 1980, with daily minimum temperatures increasing at about twice the rate of daily maximum temperatures.
Since then they have increased at about the same rate. (see MAXIMUM AND MINIMUM TEMPERATURE TRENDS FOR THE GLOBE: AN UPDATE THROUGH 2004)
At least in Europe, this can be attributed largely to global brightening (being a reduction in sulphate aerosols due to the various clean air acts. (see:Diurnal temperature range over Europe between 1950 and 2005.)
In either case the warming during the day, which would be a necessary signal for solar forcing is starkly absent. And in any case the warming to 1980 at least is exactly the wrong time of day to attribute to solar forcing.
The summer to winter situation is similar, in that the signal is variable (and weaker than the 2 to 1 warming one sees in the diurnal temperatures at times), but the winter is warming faster than the summer, overall. (see:Analysis of winter and summer warming rates in gridded temperature time series and look at table 1.)
I agree the signal is not strong but it is present and it discounts solar irradiance as the cause of the warming.
The stratosphere has cooled, and it is significant. -0.329 K/decade since 1979. At the time of typing the RSS site is down, but the link is usually this one.
It is expected that the polar regions would warm faster than the low latitudes, but this is because the warming is from the greenhouse effect, and not from changes in solar irradiance. Solar irradiance would have the most effect where it is strongest … in the tropics.
… But of course the actual numbers tell the same story. Since the start of the industrial revolution, solar irradiance as inferred from sunspot observations has provided about 0.12 W/m² of forcing, whereas the increase in atmospheric CO2 has provided about 1.66 W/m². graph.
So we know which is having the stronger effect. CO2 is an order of magnitude stronger.
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Did I not?
The Oregon petition has false names (as found by Scientific American), was accompanied by a paper fraudulently formatted to look as if it were peer reviewed (as stated by the NAS), has never shown what verification procedures they use, and has never shown how many people it sampled.
I’m not really sure why you want to be associated with the fraud that some people are prepared to commit, but I personally am surprised that you don’t have the dignity to quietly ignore a petition of scientists that included “Perry S. Mason” (the fictitious lawyer?), “Michael J. Fox” (the actor?), “Robert C. Byrd” (the senator?), “John C. Grisham” (the lawyer-author?). And then there’s the Spice Girl, “Dr. Geri Halliwell”, who the petition claimed had a degree in microbiology and was living in Boston.
It certainly seems an embarrassment to me.
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At the risk of wasting my time pointing out what is obvious to everyone except MrPete, increased cloud cover causes a cooling, not a warming, so the warming cannot be attributed to it.
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At the risk of wasting my time point out what is obvious to everyone except Robin, increased cloud cover traps heat radiation from the surface of the earth and reflects heat coming from the sun. Hence, night time temperatures will not decrease as much with clouds as with a clear sky. Day time temperatures will not increase as much with clouds as with a clear sky.
One does not need to be a scientist with a PhD to know this. Any farmer knows the temperature effects of cloud cover by direct experience. More importantly, he need not know the mechanism nor the details of thermodynamics nor be able to simulate climate on a multi-million dollar computer to know it. All he has to do is be outside and pay attention to his surroundings. In other words, to do what comes naturally to a farmer because his livelihood depends upon it.
Perhaps Robin needs to get outside more often and pay attention to what is actually happening rather than reading the mythology of AGW written by power and control obsessed political hacks.
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I am perfectly aware that overcast nights are warmer Lionell, but nice straw man.
The fact remains that the net effect of increased cloud coverage is a cooling.
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Robin it is pitiful that you have not read the petition,over and over I have to refer to it correct you from that source.Here is the relevant quote:
“5. Does the petition list contain names other than those of scientist signers?
Opponents of the petition project sometimes submit forged signatures in efforts to discredit the project. Usually, these efforts are eliminated by our verification procedures. On one occasion, a forged signature appeared briefly on the signatory list. It was removed as soon as discovered.
In a group of more than 30,000 people, there are many individuals with names similar or identical to other signatories, or to non-signatories – real or fictional. Opponents of the petition project sometimes use this statistical fact in efforts to discredit the project. For examples, Perry Mason and Michael Fox are scientists who have signed the petition – who happen also to have names identical to fictional or real non-scientists.”
http://www.petitionproject.org/frequently_asked_questions.php
It is hypocrites like you who expect a perfect list before you might consider it being valid.With over 31,000 signatories,it would not be surprising to have several names on it that does not belong,but they get weeded out soon anyway when attention are brought to it.
99.99999% accuracy is not good enough for you.LOLOLOL…
Once again you do not read about the “peer reviewed” paper set up.I refer to the OMSI again on this:
“9. Why was the review article published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons?
The authors chose to submit this article for peer-review and publication by the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons because that journal was willing to waive its copyright and permit extensive reproduction and distribution of the article by the Petition Project.”
I have SEEN the original format back in 1998,and if you have functioning eyeballs,it is obvious that it was NOT part of NAS,since there were no such words on it specifying it to be part of NAS in anyway.
Scientific American did no such thing as I showed by using their own words,that they failed to show any alleged fraud in any way.It is amazing that you take their no evidence as being evidence.
It is telling that you have NOT answered the obvious question about FRAUD.If there were names added on the list WITHOUT permission,and you make it seem that a fair number of alleged victims claim this happened,why no lawsuits to force their hands to prove that they do have the mailed in ballots with the required signatures?
You are being profoundly unfair to nitpick over less than 10 names out of 31,000 + names,most that are still legitimate anyway.
You failed to show actual fraud as YOU allege.
You failed to answer my obvious question about alleged victims of fraud,who never seem willing to sue OMSI on it.
Your complaints about verification procedure is silly because it was dealt with in the link,the one you never read.
Try this wild idea of reading through the link and see why many of us who LONG AGO read it know why you are looking foolish against it:
http://www.petitionproject.org/
You oppose it because it effectively undercuts the climate change “consensus” claptrap.Please drop these hypocritical claims,you have NOTHING! and I think even you know it,Because not once have you shown fraud being committed.
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Robin @ 569,
As any farmer knows, if the cloud cover at night is more complete than the cloud cover during the day, both the night time and day time temperatures will tend to increase. Also, as any farmer knows, the cloud cover changes both in coverage and character all the time – especially between day and night. Hence, just about anything can happen with respect to the amount of heat gain or loss over a 24 hour period. Add to that the effects of moving air masses of passing weather fronts and you have the usual situation: “if you don’t like the weather we are having, just wait, it will change.”
I suggest be more complete in your statements and use cherry picking less frequently. Do that and you might actually say something both interesting and meaningful some day.
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Lionell Griffith:
What’s your point?
The albedo of the earth is about .97. The albedo of the earth and atmosphere is about 0.7, primarily due to clouds.
I repeat: the net effect of clouds is a cooling. Are we really on different pages here?
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Sunsettommy (Thomas pearson):
I think your claim that it is pitiful is a value judgement and has no place in a sceptical discussion. It is essentially an ad-hominem.
You also say that I have not read the petition, and I have read the petition. So that is a straw man.
Your argument that they are not fraudulent because they say that they are not fraudulent is circular. It is fallacious. You need to independently show that they are not fraudulent.
I am not a hypocrite, but even if I was it wouldn’t affect the fact that the Oregon Petition is not valid.
This is another ad hominem.
I do not expect a perfect list, that is another straw man.
In the small sample investigated by Scientific American, 4/30 couldn’t be found to exist, 6/30 said they signed, but no longer agreed with it, 3/30 hadn’t signed (or at least had no recollection of the petition), and six could not be contacted (on because they were dead). That’s only 70% valid, and 35% of the remainder no longer agreed with it.
Which is a very long way from perfect.
They have refused to reveal what their weeding procedures are, so it is impossible to establish that they are not very flawed. Given that they know that it is also difficult to understand why they refuse to reveal their methodologies unless they are very flawed.
This is a straw man followed by an appeal to ridicule. 70% accuracy at any time with 50% accuracy against current views is not good enough for me. And Neither is accompanying a petition with a paper formatted to look as if it was submitted to PNAS for publication.
99.99999% accuracy in a survey would certainly be good enough for me, in the absence of other confounding factors. (Such as the fraudulent paper). However the Oregon Petition does not have that.
Whatever the reason, the publication in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons adds nothing at all to the esteem in which a paper is held. If you are a sceptic you will be well aware of the war on science (and decency) that they have been waging.
If you’re not a sceptic, I refer you to this blog about them in the Science Based Medicine Blog, founded by the well recognised (in the sceptical community) Dr. Steven Novella.
If you don’t follow links, suffice to say that they support HIV/AIDS denial, global warming denial, anti vaccination, and have published some really nasty work by a fully unqualified gentleman that says that Autism is a consequence of social, emotional and parental oppression. Their editorials have attacked evidence-based medicine in general and the peer review process in general.
No, there were no such words on it. It was however formatted to look like a PNAS submission, even including a date of publication (“October 26”) and volume number (“Vol. 13: 149-164 1999”).
From the wiki page: ‘F. Sherwood Rowland, who was at the time foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, said that the Academy received numerous inquiries from researchers who “are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.”‘
So I would claim that many people with functioning eyeballs were fooled.
They took a sample of the signatories that claimed that they had a PhD, looked them up, and contacted them. They found that some couldn’t be found, and some had no recollection of the petition.
Because a lawsuit would have to demonstrate financial loss. There has been none.
There have been good scientific surveys of current informed opinion. This is not one of them.
Putting a publication data and a volume number on a paper that was never submitted is fraudulent. It implies that it had been peer reviewed. It was not.
Who are these alleged victims of fraud that you are talking about?
If you can show me a link to their verification procedure, I’d be interested to read it. My understanding is that you can’t because they keep it secret, but nevertheless claim to have one. This is not a way to gain respect for a project.
Thanks, but while an independent audit would add credibility, these people talking about it themselves does not. It is simply circular.
No, I oppose it because there were no verifications on the names of signatories, was accompanied by a letter and paper designed to mislead people into thinking it had more credibility than it did, and has collected names for a decade now, without any consideration that people may have changed their minds, or died.
The Oregon petition is appalling to most people, and you should be ashamed to be holding it up as evidence of anything.
About 97% of active research climatologists accept that the warming is significantly anthropogenic. This decreases as people’s field and active participation become removed. (As shown in Doran and Zimmerman, linked last time we did this).
So there absolutely is a consensus.
And giving a publication date and a volume number for a PNAS journal article that wasn’t submitted for publication is disingenuous. If you could explain to be how that can be honest, it might help your case a little.
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Robin,
You are assuming clouds are constant in coverage and type. They are not. In fact, they are significantly affected by events on the sun. The sun changes and the cloud cover changes in response. Those changes are sufficient to explain nearly all of the observed effects attributed to AGW. Even the AGW wankers admit they do not adequately account for clouds.
My point is that any common farmer knows that clouds change in type and coverage over time and are different in the day and night. However, you do not appear to know that. I suggest you go outside once and a while and actually look at the world about you for your evidence rather than relying on the words of your significant others.
Reality is the primary reference point for knowledge and not reviewed articles published in journals who’s editors may or may not have a point of view they are pushing. TRUTH equals correspondence with Reality and not who or how many believed or say they believe. Hence it is quite possible for one individual to know the truth while the rest of the population are either ignorant or believe a falsehood. However, that can be possible only if that individual is connected to reality in as full context as possible. I suggest you make that connection.
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Sunsettommy (Thomas pearson):
I think your claim that it is pitiful is a value judgement and has no place in a sceptical discussion. It is essentially an ad-hominem.
You also say that I have not read the petition, and I have read the petition. So that is a straw man.
Your argument that they are not fraudulent because they say that they are not fraudulent is circular. It is fallacious. You need to independently show that they are not fraudulent.
I am not a hypocrite, but even if I was it wouldn’t affect the fact that the Oregon Petition is not valid.
This is another ad hominem.
I do not expect a perfect list, that is another straw man.
In the small sample investigated by Scientific American, 4/30 couldn’t be found to exist, 6/30 said they signed, but no longer agreed with it, 3/30 hadn’t signed (or at least had no recollection of the petition), and six could not be contacted (on because they were dead). That’s only 70% valid, and 35% of the remainder no longer agreed with it.
Which is a very long way from perfect.
They have refused to reveal what their weeding procedures are, so it is impossible to establish that they are not very flawed. Given that they know that it is also difficult to understand why they refuse to reveal their methodologies unless they are very flawed.
This is a straw man followed by an appeal to ridicule. 70% accuracy at any time with 50% accuracy against current views is not good enough for me. And Neither is accompanying a petition with a paper formatted to look as if it was submitted to PNAS for publication.
99.99999% accuracy in a survey would certainly be good enough for me, in the absence of other confounding factors. (Such as the fraudulent paper). However the Oregon Petition does not have that.
Whatever the reason, the publication in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons adds nothing at all to the esteem in which a paper is held. If you are a sceptic you will be well aware of the war on science (and decency) that they have been waging.
If you’re not a sceptic, I refer you to this blog about them in the Science Based Medicine Blog, founded by the well recognised (in the sceptical community) Dr. Steven Novella.
If you don’t follow links, suffice to say that they support HIV/AIDS denial, global warming denial, anti vaccination, and have published some really nasty work by a fully unqualified gentleman that says that Autism is a consequence of social, emotional and parental oppression. Their editorials have attacked evidence-based medicine in general and the peer review process in general.
No, there were no such words on it. It was however formatted to look like a PNAS submission, even including a date of publication (“October 26”) and volume number (“Vol. 13: 149-164 1999”).
From the wiki page: ‘F. Sherwood Rowland, who was at the time foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, said that the Academy received numerous inquiries from researchers who “are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.”‘
So I would claim that many people with functioning eyeballs were fooled.
They took a sample of the signatories that claimed that they had a PhD, looked them up, and contacted them. They found that some couldn’t be found, and some had no recollection of the petition.
Because a lawsuit would have to demonstrate financial loss. There has been none.
There have been good scientific surveys of current informed opinion. This is not one of them.
Putting a publication data and a volume number on a paper that was never submitted is fraudulent. It implies that it had been peer reviewed. It was not.
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Lionell,
No, I’m not.
If you can explain why increased solar activity will increase the cloud cover only, or more substantially, at night, please provide a link to the paper.
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Who are these alleged victims of fraud that you are talking about?
If you can show me a link to their verification procedure, I’d be interested to read it. My understanding is that you can’t because they keep it secret, but nevertheless claim to have one. This is not a way to gain respect for a project.
Thanks, but while an independent audit would add credibility, these people talking about it themselves does not. It is simply circular.
No, I oppose it because there were no verifications on the names of signatories, was accompanied by a letter and paper designed to mislead people into thinking it had more credibility than it did, and has collected names for a decade now, without any consideration that people may have changed their minds, or died.
The Oregon petition is appalling to most people, and you should be ashamed to be holding it up as evidence of anything.
About 97% of active research climatologists accept that the warming is significantly anthropogenic. This decreases as people’s field and active participation become removed. (As shown in Doran and Zimmerman, linked last time we did this).
So there absolutely is a consensus.
And giving a publication date and a volume number for a PNAS journal article that wasn’t submitted for publication is disingenuous. If you could explain to be how that can be honest, it might help your case a little.
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Robin @ 574,
I do not have access to the original paper but I do have access to an extensive review of it.
See page http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/co2_report_july_09.pdf Pages 22 and 23
“Svensmark et al., in a recent paper, analyzed the consequences of
eruptions on the Sun that screen the Earth from
cosmic rays – energetic particles that reach the Earth
from exploding stars.”
“After five days, the growing aerosols would be capable of
affecting sunlight, but would not yet be large enough to collect
water droplets. The full impact on clouds only becomes evident
two or three days later.”
The impact of variation in solar screening effects has a five to eight day lag. Such a lag means that the sun can have a significant impact upon BOTH day and night cloud cover.
I suggest you study the behavior of leads and lags in complicated feedback and feed-forward complex systems. Noting happens in isolation, any change causes a cascade of changes. In a chaotic system such as the weather, that cascade of changes is critically dependent upon countless initial conditions. Most of which are unknown or poorly known. Hence real world observations are necessary that take into account as many factors as possible. CO2 level is not the only factor nor is it found to be a very significant one.
However, again from the perspective of the farmer, that the sun has far more to do with weather and climate than man farting or barbecuing a stake is not at all surprising. Especially since he succeeds or fails depending upon what the sun and weather does to his land. His activities and their timing is secondary to his success. I grew up as the son of a farmer and helped to farm his land. I knew these simple facts by the time I was 10 years old by personal experience. I did not need a scientific article in a journal with a long et.al. and citation list to teach me. I simply paid attention to my environment.
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Right, but where’s the suggestion that they would be markedly different at day compared to night, with the night time having more cloud cover?
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That’s not the scientific view.
CO2 is not the only factor, but it is the major one with respect to the current warming.
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Robin,
Like I say, you need to get out and meet the real world.
Cloud cover:
1. If the change in the sun causes an increasing cloud cover over a period of a few days, the night will have less cloud cover than the following day.
2. If the change in the sun causes a decreasing cloud cover over a period of a few days, the night will have more cloud cover than the following day.
3. That you represent the clouds by a SINGLE number indicates you pretend they are always the same, day, night, and in between when it is patently obvious they are NOT constant – EVER!
CO2 Level:
AGW assumes what must be proven.
1. That CO2 is the major cause of current warming
2. That there is in fact a current warming
3. That man is causing it
4. That there will be catastrophic consequences if man continues using energy sufficient to maintain and advance modern technological civilization
There is no evidence, in full context, that any of the assumptions are true. There is massive and growing evidence, again in full context, that each of the above assumptions is the exact opposite of what is true. There is overwhelming evidence in this blog that you, along with your fellow travelers, ignore, evade, and distort any interpretation of any evidence that does not support AGW.
Your position is nothing but dropping context, begging the question, argument from authority, switching contexts, equivocations, and countless other logical fallacies. Any one of which is sufficient to invalidate your entire argument.
I am done with you. You have nothing positive to contribute to the discussion. Even your questions are boring. Come back when you are ready to discuss what is real and understand that what you think/feel/fantasize is absolutely, completely, and irrevocably irrelevant to what actually is.
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Robin, I stopped by and discovered you are asking a potentially good question–the kind my daughters used to ask before they learned to observe the world around them. At the risk of wasting my time on a guy who has proven he’s able to ask but usually unwilling to learn…
You ask how the sun can affect cloud cover differently day vs night… I’d say just go observe, but perhaps you live somewhere (like the eastern USA) where clouds don’t change much…
I live in one of the sunniest parts of the USA (Colorado). Where I live, a typical summer 24 hr period goes like this. Let’s break it into eight three-hour periods, starting with sunrise (I’m generalizing, horribly… clouds are NOT this predictable…but here is a general flavor).
D1-D5 are daytime (6am-9pm), N1-N3 are night (9pm-6am)
D1 6am) The sun quickly burns away any early morning clouds. Cloud-free morning.
D2 9am) Sunny day, progressively warmer
D3 12) Sunny day, progressively warmer
D4 3pm) The typical afternoon sees clouds forming — often thunderheads — for an afternoon storm that will blow off a lot of daytime heat. Note that it is heat from the sun that leads to these every-afternoon storms. Not the same as a storm front.
D5 6pm) Either clouds dissipate and we have a clear evening/night, or they remain and we will have a nice sunset. All kinds of things impact this, inversion layers, wind, etc etc etc…
N6, N7, N8) clouds might stay, or they may be gone…but typically it will be pretty consistent most of the night.
Now, look at the pattern:
– Might be cloudless for D1-D8 (that’s actually rare here)
– During D1-D3, the sun typically burns away cloud cover
– D4 is often cloudy due to the sun’s impact
– D5, N6-N8 may or may not be cloudy, but if cloudy it is often because of the heat-induced afternoon storm
Thus, our typical 24hr cloud pattern has the sun eliminating clouds during the majority of the day, but introducing clouds in the late day with impact all night.
Daytime: clouds reduced due to sun
Nighttime: clouds increased due to prior sun
QED
That’s just one 24hr pattern but is typical here and also along the US west coast. The eastern US has more stable 24hr cloud patterns. (That’s one reason I prefer to live in the west 😉 )
Note that none of this has anything to do with cosmic rays, AFAIK.
Note too that this is a completely different argument from what Lionel is saying. His posting above is discussing multi-day patterns. My explanation above is about the impact of the sun in a single 24 hour period.
And with that, I bid you adieu 🙂
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Robin,
Clouds do cause warming, in fact, clouds are as important than GHG, if not more, when it comes to asnwering why the surface is warmer than the equilibrium temperature of 255K! While the albedo of clouds is smaller than the surface and clouds will reflect solar energy, that only occurs for half of the day. During the entire day, clouds block nearly all of the surface energy from escaping. If you are so bent out of shape about the minor retention/delay of surface energy due to incremental GHG, why do you choose to ignore the much more powerful energy trapping effects of clouds?
George
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co2isnotevil @ 581: why do you [Robin] choose to ignore the much more powerful energy trapping effects of clouds?
Because by doing so, he advances his pet theory? After all, if you ignore enough, distort enough, misrepresent enough, and project enough, you can prove anything you want to prove without really trying.
However, it is not important to know his motivation. It is sufficient to identify that he uses a perversion of reason to support his preconceived notions. By so identifying, we know that reason, reality, and logic are irrelevant to his mental processes and will have no impact upon his beliefs.
We are left with identifying that he is irrational, verifying that the identification is correct, and then minimizing contact with any of his confabulations. We have clearly done the first two. It is way past time to do the last.
con·fab·u·late (kn-fby-lt) from: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/confabulation
intr.v. con·fab·u·lat·ed, con·fab·u·lat·ing, con·fab·u·lates
1. To talk casually; chat.
2. Psychology To fill in gaps in one’s memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts.
00
Pete, you’re trying to be offensive.
Why?
00
Lionell Griffith wrote
I’m not sure what changes to the sun you are talking about. The sunspot cycle is about 11 / 22 years.
What changes to the sun are you talking about?
…
I don’t represent them by a number at all.
The albedo of clouds varies from abou 0.1 to 0.9 depending on how thick they are, and how high in the atmosphere.
But clouds come up quite a lot in climate modelling, because they are one of the aspects that is difficult to predict what a warming climate will do to them, and different models have quite different feedbacks from them.
However those that show an increasing cloud cover with increasing temperature show a negative feedback, and those that show a decreasing cloud cover with increasing temperature show a positive feedback.
So there is agreement on the point that overall, clouds produce cooling.
There are many ways to do this. The climate sensitivity to CO2 has been estimated in about 70 peer reviewed papers, and I can rapidly post links to over a dozen of them. (But I have done so before.)
Also CO2 is also the source of the largest change in radiative forcing since the start of the industrial revolution, and that is known by calculating the magnitudes of all the things that have caused a change in the radiative forcing at the surface of the earth.
So that is where the science sits at the moment.
The Hadley Centre and NASA both put out a mean global surface temperature anomaly dataset going back over 100 years.
The current warming is very apparent, and the difference between the last decade and the previous one is the strongest on that record.
Human emissions of CO2 are sufficient to explain the atmospheric increase by about two times.
The oceans have been a sink for CO2, and there have been many papers attempting to track it’s movement into the oceans by it’s isotope signature. (Anthropogenic CO2, being from fossil fuels, is depleted in C14, and also C13.)
The changes in C14 and C13 is the atmospheric CO2 have also been measured, tying the increase to fossil fuels. (A small anti-parallel decrease in atmospheric O2 has also been measured, tying the increase to the combustion of something as well).
“Catastrophic” is not well defined in the literature. It’s pretty clear that most of the consequences are pretty horrible for much of south east Asia, the Subcontinent and Africa in terms of people, and everywhere in terms of biodiversity.
Australia’s not taking it well so far either.
I certainly don’t advocate using insufficient energy to maintain and advance modern technological civilisation. Nuclear power and wind power are, under current technology, comparable in cost to fossil fuel power, and efficiencies will increase as low CO2 emission sources of power become the focus of global energy production and research.
I would say that there is reams of evidence for 1, 2 and 3. Would you like me to post some of the papers again?
Really?
Do you have any examples of this massive and growing evidence from the peer reviewed scientific literature?
Or only from blogs?
I am happy to discuss any well reference evidence that you think is relevant.
And, as a sceptic, I am proud to change my position in the face of good evidence.
I try not to include logical fallacies in my position.
Do you have a specific example of any or all of these? It might be interesting for my personal development.
Well, I am ready to discuss what is real.
00
The climate sensitivity to CO2 has been estimated in about 70 peer reviewed papers, and I can rapidly post links to over a dozen of them. (But I have done so before.)
and there are …Peer-Review Papers Supporting Skeptism of “Man-Made” Global Warming:
just a few to start with.
180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 2, pp. 259-282(24), March 2007)
– Ernst-Georg Beck
50 Years of Continuous Measurement of CO2 on Mauna Loa (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 19, pp. 1017-1028(12), Number 7, 2008)
– Ernst-Georg Beck
A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 1049-1058, December 2007)
– Craig Loehle
A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions (PDF)
(International Journal of Climatology, 5 Dec 2007)
– David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer
A critical review of the hypothesis that climate change is caused by carbon dioxide
(Energy & Environment, Volume 11, Number 6, pp. 631-638(8), November 1, 2000)
– Heinz Hug
A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 34, L13705, 2007)
– Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle Swanson, Sergey Kravtsov
A test of corrections for extraneous signals in gridded surface temperature data (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 26, No 2, 159-173, May 25, 2004)
– Ross McKitrick, Patrick J. Michaels
– Are temperature trends affected by economic activity? Reply to Benestad (2004) (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 27, No. 2, 175–176, October 7, 2004)
– Ross McKitrick, Patrick J. Michaels
– A test of corrections for extraneous signals in gridded surface temperature data: Erratum (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, 265-268, December 8, 2004)
– Ross McKitrick, Patrick J. Michaels
Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L13208, 2004)
– David H. Douglass, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer
An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre
(Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999)
– Richard S. Courtney
Analysis of trends in the variability of daily and monthly historical temperature measurements (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 10: 27-33, 1998)
– Patrick J. Michaels, Robert C. Balling Jr, Russell S. Vose, Paul C. Knappenberger
Ancient atmosphere- Validity of ice records
(Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Volume 1, Number 3, September 1994)
– Zbigniew Jaworowski
Are Climate Model Projections Reliable Enough For Climate Policy?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 15, Number 3, pp. 521-525, July 1, 2004)
– Madhav L. Khandekar
Are observed changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really dangerous? (PDF)
(Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, v. 50, no. 2, p. 297-327, June 2002)
– C. R. de Freitas
Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate? (PDF)
(Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 253, Issues 3-4, Pages 328-339, January 30 2007)
– Vincent Courtillota, Yves Galleta, Jean-Louis Le Mouëla, Frédéric Fluteaua, Agnès Genevey
– Response to comment on “Are there connections between Earth’s magnetic field and climate?, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 253, 328–339, 2007” by Bard, E., and Delaygue, M., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., in press, 2007 (PDF)
(Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 265, Issues 1-2, Pages 308-311, January 15, 2008)
– Vincent Courtillota, Yves Galleta, Jean-Louis Le Mouëla, Frédéric Fluteaua, Agnès Genevey
Atmospheric CO2 and global warming: a critical review (PDF)
(Norwegian Polar Institute Letters, Vol. 119, 1992)
– Zbigniew Jaworowski, Tom V. Segalstad, V. Hisdal
Biased Policy Advice from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 929-936(8), December 2007)
– Richard S.J. Tol
Best practices in prediction for decision-making: Lessons from the atmospheric and earth sciences (PDF)
(Ecology, Volume 84, Issue 6, June 2003)
– Roger A. Pielke Jr., Richard T. Conant
Calling the Carbon Bluff: Why Not Tie Carbon Taxes to Actual Levels of Warming? Both Skeptics and Alarmists Should Expect Their Wishes to Be Answered (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 19, Number 5, pp. 707-711(5), September 2008)
– Ross McKitrick
Can increasing carbon dioxide cause climate change? (PDF)
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 94, pp. 8335-8342, August 1997)
– Richard S. Lindzen
Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warming
(Nature Geoscience, July 13, 2009)
– Richard E. Zeebe, James C. Zachos, Gerald R. Dickens
Climate as a Result of the Earth Heat Reflection (PDF)
(Latvian Journal of Physics and Technical Sciences, Volume 46, Number 2, 2009)
– J. Barkāns, D. Žalostība
Climate Change – A Natural Hazard
(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 215-232(18), May 1, 2003)
– William Kininmonth
Climate Change and the Earth’s Magnetic Poles, A Possible Connection
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2, pp. 75-83(9), January 2009)
– Adrian K. Kerton
Climate change and the world bank: Opportunity for global governance?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 1, pp. 27-50(24), January 1, 1999)
– Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
Climate change: Conflict of observational science, theory, and politics
(AAPG Bulletin, Vol. 88, no9, pp. 1211-1220, 2004)
– Lee C. Gerhard
– Climate change: Conflict of observational science, theory, and politics: Reply
(AAPG Bulletin, v. 90, no. 3, p. 409-412, March 2006)
– Lee C. Gerhard
Climate Change: Dangers of a Singular Approach and Consideration of a Sensible Strategy
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2 , pp. 201-205, January 2009)
– Tim F. Ball
Climate change in the Arctic and its empirical diagnostics
(Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 469-482, September 1999)
– V.V. Adamenko, K.Y. Kondratyev, C.A. Varotsos
Climate Change is Nothing New! (PDF)
(New Concepts In Global Tectonics, No. 42, March 2007)
– Lance Endersbee
Climate change projections lack reality check
(Weather, Volume 61, Issue 7, Page 212, December 29, 2006)
– Madhav L. Khandekar
Climate Change Re-examined (PDF)
(Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 723–749, 2007)
– Joel M. Kauffman
Climate Chaotic Instability: Statistical Determination and Theoretical Background
(Environmetrics, Volume 8, Issue 5, Pages 517-532, December 4, 1998)
– Raymond Sneyers
Climate Dynamics and Global Change
(Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 26, pg 353-378, January 1994)
– Richard S. Lindzen
Climate outlook to 2030 (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 5, pp. 615-619(5), September 2007)
– David C. Archibald
Climate Policy : Quo Vadis?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2, pp. 207-213, January 2009)
– Hans Labohm
Climate Prediction as an Initial Value Problem (PDF)
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 79, No. 12, pp. 2743-2746, 1998)
– Roger A. Pielke Sr.
Climate projections: Past performance no guarantee of future skill? (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 36, L13704, July 7, 2009)
– Catherine Reifen, Ralf Toumi
Climate science and the phlogiston theory: weighing the evidence (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 3-4, pp. 441-447(7), July 2007)
– Arthur Rörsch
CO2-induced global warming: a skeptic’s view of potential climate change (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 10: 69–82, 1998)
– Sherwood B. Idso
Cooling of Atmosphere Due to CO2 Emission
(Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, Volume 30, Issue 1, pages 1 – 9, January 2008)
– G. V. Chilingar, L. F. Khilyuk, O. G. Sorokhtin
Comment on “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (PDF)
(Eos, Vol. 90, No. 27, July 7, 2009)
– Roland Granqvist
Cooling of the Global Ocean Since 2003
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2, pp. 101-104(4), January 2009)
– Craig Loehle
Crystal balls, virtual realities and ‘storylines’
(Energy & Environment, Volume 12, Number 4, pp. 343-349, July 2001)
– Richard S. Courtney
Dangerous Assumptions (PDF)
(Nature, 452, 531-532, April 3, 2008)
– Roger Pielke Jr., Tom Wigley, Christopher Green
Dangerous global warming remains unproven
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 1, pp. 167-169, January 2007)
– Robert M. Carter
Disparity of tropospheric and surface temperature trends: New evidence (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 31, L13207, 2004)
– David H. Douglass, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer, Paul C. Knappenberger, Patrick J. Michaels
Do deep ocean temperature records verify models? (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 29, Issue 8, pp. 95-1, April, 2002)
– Richard S. Lindzen
Do Facts Matter Anymore?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 323-326(4), May 1, 2003)
– Patrick J. Michaels
Do glaciers tell a true atmospheric CO2 story? (PDF)
(Science of the Total Environment, vol. 114, pp. 227-284, 1992)
– Zbigniew Jaworowski, Tom V. Segalstad, N. Ono
Documentation of uncertainties and biases associated with surface temperature measurement sites for climate change assessment (PDF)
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 88, No. 6, pp. 913-928, 2007)
– Roger A. Pielke Sr. et al.
Does a Global Temperature Exist? (PDF)
(Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, June 2006)
– Christopher Essex, Ross McKitrick, Bjarne Andresen
Does CO2 really drive global warming? (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 12, Number 4, pp. 351-355, July 2001)
– Robert H. Essenhigh
Earth’s rising atmospheric CO2 concentration: Impacts on the biosphere
(Energy & Environment, Volume 12, Number 4, pp. 287-310, July 2001)
– Craig D. Idso
Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (PDF)
(Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Volume 12, Number 3, 2007)
– Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, Willie H. Soon
Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 13, Pg. 149–164, October 26 1999)
– Arthur B. Robinson, Zachary W. Robinson, Willie H. Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas
Estimation and representation of long-term (>40 year) trends of Northern-Hemisphere-gridded surface temperature: A note of caution (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L03209, 2004)
– Willie H. Soon, David R. Legates, Sallie L. Baliunas
Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon
(Nature 408, 698-701, December 7, 2000)
– Ján Veizer, Yves Godderis, Louis M. François
Evidence for “publication Bias” Concerning Global Warming in Science and Nature
(Energy & Environment, Volume 19, Number 2, pp. 287-301, March 2008)
– Patrick J. Michaels
Extreme Weather Trends Vs. Dangerous Climate Change: A Need for Critical Reassessment
(Energy & Environment, Volume 16, Number 2,pp. 327-332, March 2005)
– Madhav L. Khandekar
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics (PDF)
(International Journal of Modern Physics B, Volume 23, Issue 03, pp. 275-364, January 30, 2009)
– Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner
Free speech about climate change
(Society, Volume 44, Number 4, May, 2007)
– Christopher Monckton
Global Climate Models Violate Scaling of the Observed Atmospheric Variability (PDF)
(Physical Review Letters, Vol. 89, No. 2, July 8, 2002)
– R. B. Govindan, Dmitry Vyushin, Armin Bunde, Stephen Brenner, Shlomo Havlin, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber
Global Warming (PDF)
(Progress in Physical Geography, 27, 448-455, 2003)
– Willie H. Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas
Global Warming: A Reduced Threat? (PDF)
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 73, Issue 10, pp. 1563–1577, October 1992)
– Patrick J. Michaels, David E. Stooksbury
Global Warming and the Accumulation of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere
(Energy & Environment, Volume 16, Number 1, pp. 101-126(26), January 2005)
– Arthur Rörsch, Richard S. Courtney, Dick Thoenes
Global warming and the mining of oceanic methane hydrate
(Topics in Catalysis, Volume 32, Numbers 3-4, pp. 95-99, March 2005)
– Chung-Chieng Lai, David Dietrich, Malcolm Bowman
Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists Versus Scientific Forecasts (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 997-1021, December 2007)
– Keston C. Green, J. Scott Armstrong
Global Warming: Myth or Reality? The Actual Evolution of the Weather Dynamics
(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 297-322, May 2003)
– Marcel Leroux
Global Warming, the Politicization of Science, and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (PDF)
(Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 247-256, 2005)
– David Deming
Global Warming: The Social Construction of A Quasi-Reality?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 6, pp. 805-813, November 2007)
– Dennis Ambler
Governments and Climate Change Issues: The case for a new approach
(Energy & Environment, Volume 17, Number 4, July 2006)
– David R. Henderson
Governments and Climate Change Issues: The case for rethinking
(World Economics Journal, Volume 8, Number 2, 2007)
– David R. Henderson
Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres (PDF)
(Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, vol. 111, no 1, pp. 1-40, 2007)
– Ferenc M. Miskolczi
Greenhouse gases and greenhouse effect
(Environmental Geology, November 14, 2008)
– G. V. Chilingar, O. G. Sorokhtin, L. Khilyuk, M. V. Gorfunkel
Greenhouse molecules, their spectra and function in the atmosphere (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 16, Number 6, pp. 1037-1045(9), November 2005)
– Jack Barrett
Has the IPCC exaggerated adverse impact of Global Warming on human societies? (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 19, Number 5, September 2008)
– Madhav L. Khandekar
Human effect on global climate?
(Nature, Volume 384, Issue 6609, pp. 522-523, December 12, 1996)
– Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger
Human Contribution to Climate Change Remains Questionable
(Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, Volume 80, Issue 16, p. 183-183, April 20, 1999)
– S. Fred Singer
Implications of the Secondary Role of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Forcing in Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future (PDF)
(Physical Geography, Volume 28, Number 2, pp. 97-125(29), March 2007)
– Willie H. Soon
In defense of Milankovitch (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L24703, December 21, 2006)
– Gerard Roe
Industrial CO2 emissions as a proxy for anthropogenic influence on lower tropospheric temperature trends (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 31, L05204, 2004)
– A. T. J. de Laat, A. N. Maurellis
Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature
(Journal of Geophysical Research, 114, D14104, July 23, 2009)
– John D. McLean, Chris de Freitas, Robert M. Carter
Irreproducible Results in Thompson et al., “Abrupt Tropical Climate Change: Past and Present” (PNAS 2006)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Number 3 , pp. 367-373(7), July 2009)
– J. Huston McCulloch
Is a Richer-but-warmer World Better than Poorer-but-cooler Worlds?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 1023-1048, December 2007)
– Indur M. Goklany
Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Number 3, pp. 279-302, July 2009)
– Indur M. Goklany
Is Stern Review on climate change alarmist?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 5, pp. 521-532(12), September 2007)
– S. Niggol Seo
Is the enhancement of global warming important?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 12, Number 4, 1 July 2001 , pp. 335-341(7)
– M.C.R. Symons, J. Barrett
Key Aspects of Global Climate Change
(Energy & Environment, Volume 15, Number 3, pp. 469-503(35), July 1, 2004)
– Ya. K. Kondratyev
Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2, pp. 177-189, January 2009)
– David H. Douglass, John R. Christy
Methodology and Results of Calculating Central California Surface Temperature Trends: Evidence of Human-Induced Climate Change?
(Journal of Climate, Volume: 19 Issue: 4, February 2006)
– John R. Christy, W.B. Norris, K. Redmond, K. Gallo
Microclimate Exposures of Surface-Based Weather Stations: Implications For The Assessment of Long-Term Temperature Trends (PDF)
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 86, Issue 4, April 2005)
– Christopher A. Davey, Roger A. Pielke Sr.
Misdefining ‘”climate change’”: consequences for science and action (PDF)
(Environmental Science & Policy, Volume 8, Issue 6, Pages 548-561, December 2005)
– Roger A. Pielke Jr.
Mitigation versus compensation in global warming policy (PDF)
(Economics Bulletin, Volume 17, 1-6, 2001)
– Ross McKitrick
Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 18: 259–275, 2001)
– Willie H. Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Eric S. Posmentier
– Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties. Reply to Risbey (2002) (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 22: 187–188, 2002)
– Willie H. Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Eric S. Posmentier
– Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties. Reply to Karoly et al. (2003) (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 24: 93–94, 2003)
– Willie H. Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas, Sherwood B. Idso, Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Eric S. Posmentier
Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years
(Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, Volume 95, January, 2007)
– Lin Zhen-Shan, Sun Xian
Nature of observed temperature changes across the United States during the 20th century (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 17: 45–53, 2001)
– Paul C. Knappenberger, Patrick J. Michaels, Robert E. Davis
Natural signals in the MSU lower tropospheric temperature record
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 27, No. 18, pp. 2905–2908, 2000)
– Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger
New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 327-350, 1 May 2003)
– Landscheidt T.
Oceanic influences on recent continental warming (PDF)
(Climate Dynamics, 2008)
– G.P. Compo, P.D. Sardeshmukh
On a possibility of estimating the feedback sign of the Earth climate system (PDF)
(Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences: Engineering. Vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 260-268. Sept. 2007)
– Olavi Kamer
On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved? (PDF)
(Environmental Geology, Volume 50, Number 6, August 2006)
– L. F. Khilyuk, G. V. Chilingar
On nonstationarity and antipersistency in global temperature series (PDF)
(Journal of Geophysical Research, Volume 107, Issue D20, October 2002)
– Olavi Kamer
On the credibility of climate predictions (PDF)
(Hydrological Sciences Journal, 53 (4), 671-684, 2008)
– D. Koutsoyiannis, A. Efstratiadis, N. Mamassis, and A. Christofides
On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data (PDF)
(Geophysical Research Letters, July 14, 2009)
– Richard S. Lindzen, Yong-Sang Choi
On the sensitivity of the atmosphere to the doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration and on water vapour feedback
(Energy & Environment, Volume 17, Number 4, pp. 603-607(5), July 2006)
– Jack Barrett, David Bellamy, Heinz Hug
Overlooked scientific issues in assessing hypothesized greenhouse gas warming (PDF)
(Environmental Software, Vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 100-107, 1991)
– Roger A. Pielke Sr.
Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration (PDF)
(Journal of Climate, Volume 21, Issue 21, November 2008)
– Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell
Potential Dependence of Global Warming on the Residence Time (RT) in the Atmosphere of Anthropogenically Sourced Carbon Dioxide
(Energy Fuels, 23 (5), pp 2773–2784, April 1, 2009)
– Robert H. Essenhigh
Problems in evaluating regional and local trends in temperature: an example from eastern Colorado, USA (PDF)
(International Journal of Climatology, Volume 22, Issue 4, pp.421-434, April 18, 2002)
– Roger A. Pielke Sr. et al.
– Response to W. Aeschbach-Hertig rebuttal of “On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved?” by L. F. Khilyuk and G. V. Chilingar
(Environmental Geology, Volume 54, Number 7, June, 2008)
– L. F. Khilyuk, G. V. Chilingar
Phanerozoic Climatic Zones and Paleogeography with a Consideration of Atmospheric CO2 Levels
(Paleontological Journal, 2: 3-11, 2003)
– A. J. Boucot, Chen Xu, C. R. Scotese
Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 23, 89–110, January 2003)
– Willie H. Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas
Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data (PDF)
(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, D24S09, 2007)
– Ross R. McKitrick, Patrick J. Michaels
Rate of Increasing Concentrations of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Controlled by Natural Temperature Variations (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 19, Number 7, pp. 995-1011, December 2008)
– Fred Goldberg
Recent climate observations disagreement with projections (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Number 4, 2009)
– David R. B. Stockwell
Review and impacts of climate change uncertainties
(Futures, Vol. 25, no. 8, pp. 850-863. 1993)
– M.E. Fernau, W.J. Makofske, D.W. South
Revised 21st century temperature projections (PDF)
(Climate Research, Vol. 23: 1–9, 2002)
– Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Oliver W. Frauenfeld, Robert E. Davis
Science and Environmental Policy-Making: Bias-Proofing the Assessment Process (PDF)
(Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 53, Number 4, pp. 275-290(16), December 2005)
– Ross McKitrick
Scientific Consensus on Climate Change? (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 19, Number 2, pp. 281-286, March 2008)
– Klaus-Martin Schulte
Seductive Simulations? Uncertainty Distribution Around Climate Models (PDF)
(Social Studies of Science, Vol. 35, No. 6, 895-922, 2005)
– Myanna Lahsen
Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming (PDF)
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 71, Issue 3, pp. 288–299, March 1990)
– Richard S. Lindzen
Some examples of negative feedback in the Earth climate system (PDF)
(Central European Journal of Physics, Volume 3, Number 2, June 2005)
– Olavi Kärner
Sources and Sinks of Carbon Dioxide (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2 , pp. 105-121(17), January 2009)
– Tom Quirk
Statistical analysis does not support a human influence on climate
(Energy & Environment, Volume 13, Number 3, pp. 329-331, July 2002)
– S. Fred Singer
Taking GreenHouse Warming Seriously (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 937-950, December 2007)
– Richard S. Lindzen
Temperature trends in the lower atmosphere
(Energy & Environment, Volume 17, Number 5, pp. 707-714, September 2006)
– Vincent Gray
Temporal Variability in Local Air Temperature Series Shows Negative Feedback (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 1059-1072, December 2007)
– Olavi Kärner
The carbon dioxide thermometer and the cause of global warming
(Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 1, pp. 1-18(18), January 1, 1999)
– N. Calder
The cause of global warming (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 11, Number 6, pp. 613-629, November 1, 2000)
– Vincent Gray
The continuing search for an anthropogenic climate change signal: Limitations of correlation-based approaches
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– David R. Legates, Robert E. Davis
The Eco-Industrial Complex in USA – Global Warming and Rent-Seeking Coalitions
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– Ivan Jankovic
The evolution of an energy contrarian
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– Henry R. Linden
The Fraud Allegation Against Some Climatic Research of Wei-Chyung Wang (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 985-995, December 2007)
– Douglas J. Keenan
The Global Warming Debate: A Review of the State of Science (PDF)
(Pure and Applied Geophysics, Volume 162, Issue 8-9, pp. 1557-1586, August 2005)
Madhav L. Khandekar, TS Murty, P Chittibabu
The Government Grant System: Inhibitor of Truth and Innovation? (PDF)
(Journal of Information Ethics, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2007)
– Donald W. Miller
The greenhouse effect and global change: review and reappraisal
(International Journal of Environmental Studies, Vol. 36, no. 1-2, pp. 55-71, 1990)
– Patrick J. Michaels
The “Greenhouse Effect” as a Function of Atmospheric Mass
(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 351-356, 1 May 2003)
– Hans Jelbring
The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle
(Energy & Environment, Volume 16, Number 2, pp. 217-238, March 2005)
– Arthur Rörsch, Richard S. Courtney, Dick Thoenes
The IPCC Emission Scenarios: An Economic-Statistical Critique
(Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, pp. 159-185(27), May 1, 2003)
– Ian Castles, David R. Henderson
The IPCC future projections: are they plausible? (PDF)
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– William J.R. Alexander
The Letter Science Magazine Rejected
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Benny Peiser
The Politicised Science of Greenhouse Climate Change
(Energy & Environment, Volume 15, Number 5, pp. 853-860(8), September 2004)
– Garth Paltridge
The UN IPCC’s Artful Bias: Summary of Findings: Glaring Omissions, False Confidence and Misleading Statistics in the Summary for Policymakers
(Energy & Environment, Volume 13, Number 3, pp. 311-328, July 2002)
– Wojick D. E.
The value of climate forecasting
(Surveys in Geophysics, Volume 7, Number 3, June, 1985)
– Garth W. Paltridge
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(Environmental Geosciences, v. 3, no. 4, p. 204-210, December 1996)
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(Theoretical and Applied Climatology, February 2009)
– Garth Paltridge, Albert Arking, Michael Pook
Uncertainties in assessing global warming during the 20th century: disagreement between key data sources
(Energy & Environment, Volume 17, Number 5, pp. 685-706, September 2006)
– Maxim Ogurtsov, Markus Lindholm
Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends (PDF)
(Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 112, 2007)
– Roger A. Pielke Sr. et al.
Useless Arithmetic: Ten Points to Ponder When Using Mathematical Models in Environmental Decision Making (PDF)
(Public Administration Review, Volume 68 Issue 3, Pages 470-479, March 24, 2008)
– Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Orrin H. Pilkey
When scientists politicize science: making sense of controversy over The Skeptical Environmentalist (PDF)
(Environmental Science & Policy, Volume 7, Issue 5, Pages 405-417 October 2004)
– Roger A. Pielke Jr.
1,500-Year Climate Cycle:
A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates
(Science, Vol. 278. no. 5341, pp. 1257 – 1266, 14 November 1997)
– Gerard Bond, William Showers, Maziet Cheseby, Rusty Lotti, Peter Almasi, Peter deMenocal, Paul Priore, Heidi Cullen, Irka Hajdas, Georges Bonani
A Variable Sun Paces Millennial Climate
(Science, Vol. 294. no. 5546, pp. 1431 – 1433, 16 November 2001)
– Richard A. Kerr
Cyclic Variation and Solar Forcing of Holocene Climate in the Alaskan Subarctic
(Science, Vol. 301. no. 5641, pp. 1890 – 1893, 26 September 2003)
– Feng Sheng Hu, Darrell Kaufman, Sumiko Yoneji, David Nelson, Aldo Shemesh, Yongsong Huang, Jian Tian, Gerard Bond, Benjamin Clegg, Thomas Brown
Decadal to millennial cyclicity in varves and turbidites from the Arabian Sea: hypothesis of tidal origin
(Global and Planetary Change, Volume 34, Issues 3-4, Pages 313-325, November 2002)
– W. H. Bergera, U. von Rad
Late Holocene approximately 1500 yr climatic periodicities and their implications
(Geology, v. 26; no. 5; p. 471-473, May 1998)
– Ian D. Campbell, Celina Campbell, Michael J. Apps, Nathaniel W. Rutter, Andrew B. G. Bush
Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model
(Nature 438, 208-211, 10 November 2005)
– Holger Braun, Marcus Christl, Stefan Rahmstorf, Andrey Ganopolski, Augusto Mangini, Claudia Kubatzki, Kurt Roth, Bernd Kromet
The 1,800-year oceanic tidal cycle: A possible cause of rapid climate change
(PNAS, vol. 97, no. 8, 3814-3819, April 11, 2000)
– Charles D. Keeling, Timothy P. Whorf
The origin of the 1500-year climate cycles in Holocene North-Atlantic records
(Climate of the Past Discussions, Volume 3, Issue 2, pp.679-692, 2007)
– M. Debret, V. Bout-Roumazeilles, F. Grousset, M. Desmet, J. F. McManus, N. Massei, D. Sebag, J.-R. Petit, Y. Copard, A. Trentesaux
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock
(Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 30, No. 10, 2003)
– Stefan Rahmstorf
Timing of Millennial-Scale Climate Change in Antarctica and Greenland During the Last Glacial Period
(Science, Volume 291, Issue 5501, pp. 109-112, 2001)
– Thomas Blunier, Edward J. Brook
Widespread evidence of 1500 yr climate variability in North America during the past 14 000 yr
(Geology, v. 30, no. 5, p. 455-458, May 2002)
– André E. Viau, Konrad Gajewski, Philippe Fines, David E. Atkinson, Michael C. Sawada
An Inconvenient Truth:
An Inconvenient Truth : a focus on its portrayal of the hydrologic cycle
(GeoJournal, Volume 70, Number 1, September, 2007)
– David R. Legates
An Inconvenient Truth : blurring the lines between science and science fiction
(GeoJournal, Volume 70, Number 1, September 2007)
– Roy W. Spencer
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co2isnotevil wrote:
I agree that clouds trap heat as well as reflect it.
I understood that it was only a few tens of watts per square metre, putting it at an order of magnitude less that greenhouse gasses.
I am happy to be corrected on this.
I also understood that the net effect of clouds was cooling. (There are high thin clouds that this is not the case for). I would need stronger evidence to move my position on that, because it is in my more recent memory from the discussion of the science paper showing that low level clouds are a positive feedback.
Can you point me to a reliable source for either of these two claims?
Cheers.
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Robin,
The effect of clouds is far more than 10 W/m^2. If you ignore clouds, GHG reflects about 128 W/m^2. If you consider clouds, the atmospheric CO2 between the surface and the clouds has no net effect as the clouds are already trapping all of the surface energy. Since the Earth is about 65% covered by clouds, the incremental effect of CO2 is less than half of the unadjusted value used by the GCM’s. This is a fundamental error that has yet to be acknowledged because to do so invalidates the AGW case.
George
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Robin,
Getting clouds right is absolutely crucial for accurate climate modeling. If you get it wrong by a tiny amount, the results will be way off. Consider that the power density leaving Earth (temperature == 255K) is approximately, Po = Ps*(1-p) + Pc*p, where p is the fraction of cloud coverage, Pc is the power radiating from cloud tops and Ps is the power radiating from the surface (all properly adjusted for absorption). Ps is warmer than Po and Pc is colder. The fraction of cloud coverage, p, acts as the control valve to match the power leaving the Earth to the power coming in by either selecting more cold (clouds) or more warm (surface) as needed.
Predicting cloud coverage is tricky since the basic thermodynamic equations that describe the climate are valid for all values of p. That is, for each value of p and input power, there exists a combination of surface temperature and cloud temperature that satisfies COE, but the climate system only converges to a single value of p. The final equation required to solve for p is Pi = Po + dEs/dt, where Pi is the input power and Es is the energy stored in the Earth’s thermal mass. This also requires that the energy stored in the Earth is considered as hot and cold pools of energy which fight with each other along weather fronts. In practical terms, clouds tops are in the cold pool and much of the surface is in the warm pool.
George
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
The reason why peer reviewed literature is worth reading, whereas non-peer reviewed literature is not, is the implied respect that that paper has from the scientific community at large.
As such “Energy and Environment” papers don’t really count. And “peer reviewed” is a bit of a stretch to describe a publication that is not listed as an ISI journal.
I hope you don’t mind if I dismiss those as lower priority to read.
The first of the remainder is:
You say “.pdf”, but there is no link. Did you intend to include one?
I found that paper here.
And while I agree that models can be poor in the tropics, I think that they observation data used in this paper is a little cherry picked to exaggerate the clustering of the observations compared to the clustering of the models.
Since this paper there has been work showing that the radiosconde data contains an error: Toward Elimination of the Warm Bias in Historic Radiosonde Temperature Records—Some New Results from a Comprehensive Intercomparison of Upper-Air Data
And temperature inferred from wind speed does agree with the models: Warming maximum in the tropical upper troposphere deduced from thermal winds.
Furthermore, the RAOBCORE data used by Douglass et al, was not the most up to date at the time, and the dataset discussed in this paper, does fall amongst the models. (graph).
So while this paper is interesting, I think that it does exaggerate the difference between observations and models in the tropical troposphere. Certainly a broader view of the literature, although certainly does not show perfect consistency between various methods of measuring the temperature, much less between that and models, does not have this start gap between models and measurements.
I certainly agree that there is some evidence that models are poorer than expected in the tropical troposphere, and this paper correctly points to that.
But perhaps you can agree that the scientific literature overall does cannot discount that the models could be correct?
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” Pete, you’re trying to be offensive.
Why?” >>> ” I hope you don’t mind if I dismiss those as lower priority to read.”
now you know.
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co2isnotevil wrote:
Sure, I agree with that.
Hmmm. Do you have a source for this one that I could read?
I find it impossible to believe that.
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Robin,
The 128 W/m^2 comes from my own radiation transfer codes based on measured atmospheric absorption data. About 1/3 is CO2, 2/3 is water vapor and there is are minor components from CH4 and O3. The graphs under ‘atmospheric absorption spectrum’ in my slide set were produced by that code.
What don’t you believe. That clouds override GHG underneath them (but not above them), that the models don’t account for it or that to account for it significantly reduces the models sensitivity to atmospheric absorption in conflict with AGW pseudo science?
GHG absorption above clouds is significantly less due to the absence of water vapor. The peak of the colder energy distribution moves closer to the CO2 peak, but not by enough to matter. The CO2 concentrations are slightly lower above clouds, but that really doesn’t matter either. What matters is that the atmosphere is far more transparent to cloud energy than to surface energy and since GCM’s can’t model cloud coverage well, they can’t possibly model this well either.
The simple fact that the energy emitted by the Earth is the cloud percentage weighted sum of surface energy and cloud energy and that cloud percentages are poorly understood and modeled means that there’s no hope of determining the energy balance with enough precision to predict the energy in and out of the Earth’s thermal mass (dE/dt) and any possible future temperature trends that would result from it.
What I’ve found with my models is that you can make them do just about whatever you want by forcing the cloud coverage percentage.
George
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Robin humors us with this:
“The reason why peer reviewed literature is worth reading, whereas non-peer reviewed literature is not, is the implied respect that that paper has from the scientific community at large.
As such “Energy and Environment” papers don’t really count. And “peer reviewed” is a bit of a stretch to describe a publication that is not listed as an ISI journal.
I hope you don’t mind if I dismiss those as lower priority to read.”
But of course try telling Alfred Wegener,J. Harland Bretz,Hannes Alfven,Dr. Glassman,Dr. Spenser and many more that their papers are not worth publishing,or considered valuable addition to science.
I doubt that you have read a SINGLE presentation Wilbert listed,just your irrational rationalization that if it is not listed as “peer reviewed” then it is no good.
Meanwhile what “peer reviewed” publication accepted the terrible “hockey stick” paper?
LOL
00
By the way Robin,does this mean the following organizations are not worth publishing in?
NATURE
SCIENCE
AAPG Bulletin
Hydrological Sciences Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Journal of Climate
International Journal of Climatology
Environmental Geology
Paleontological Journal
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Environmental Geosciences
Geology
PNAS
Journal of Geophysical Research
These following were published in SCIENCE:
1,500-Year Climate Cycle:
A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates
(Science, Vol. 278. no. 5341, pp. 1257 – 1266, 14 November 1997)
– Gerard Bond, William Showers, Maziet Cheseby, Rusty Lotti, Peter Almasi, Peter deMenocal, Paul Priore, Heidi Cullen, Irka Hajdas, Georges Bonani
A Variable Sun Paces Millennial Climate
(Science, Vol. 294. no. 5546, pp. 1431 – 1433, 16 November 2001)
– Richard A. Kerr
Cyclic Variation and Solar Forcing of Holocene Climate in the Alaskan Subarctic
(Science, Vol. 301. no. 5641, pp. 1890 – 1893, 26 September 2003)
– Feng Sheng Hu, Darrell Kaufman, Sumiko Yoneji, David Nelson, Aldo Shemesh, Yongsong Huang, Jian Tian, Gerard Bond, Benjamin Clegg, Thomas Brown
Timing of Millennial-Scale Climate Change in Antarctica and Greenland During the Last Glacial Period
(Science, Volume 291, Issue 5501, pp. 109-112, 2001)
– Thomas Blunier, Edward J. Brook
These were published in NATURE:
Human effect on global climate?
(Nature, Volume 384, Issue 6609, pp. 522-523, December 12, 1996)
– Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger
Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon
(Nature 408, 698-701, December 7, 2000)
– Ján Veizer, Yves Godderis, Louis M. François
I got all this from Wilbert Robichaud’s list.
It is obvious that you are so anti science research,that you will post absurd rationalizations against long running science organization,for the purpose of defending the AGW pseudoscience.That you will attempt to smear any organization that dares to publish science research,that does not agree with the AGW hypothesis.
It is plain that you are hostile to open science inquiries on any topic.Your feeble argument that it must be “peer reviewed” before anyone should be allowed to challenge it afterwards,is in my opinion stupid.
Dr Mann’s terrible Hockey Stick paper was passed by YOUR “peer review” standard.It is TERRIBLE!
ROFMAO!
00
I’m back, having been given a correction by my wife (a biologist with extensive marine experience, particularly on the US west coast.)
The cloud pattern on the west coast of the US, especially in Southern California, is different from what I described. At the coastline (again dependent on winds and many other factors), the typical pattern involves morning “fog” soon after sunrise, due to differential temperatures at the air/ocean interface. This then burns off as the day goes on.
Yet another example demonstrating that cloud/sun interactions are not easily parameterized.
Anyone who has “the answer” to cloud modeling will likely win a Nobel prize or something. It is a very very hard problem.
George has summarized the situation very well:
PS: Robin, you interpreted my statement as purposeful offense.
I never intend to offend (really!), however sometimes I state the truth without my usual level of grace. As I have inadvertently proven in this thread through interaction with you, you’ve made it a habit to ask questions and then refuse to accept the truth as an answer, while using amazing illogic and fallacy as your form of argument. As a result, I’m learning to more carefully state my assumptions up front about what I am about to say. I could step back from that if I saw that you were willing to switch to more logical interaction.
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MrPete:
Truth like beauty is its own excuse for existence. They can never be insulting to those who seek them. Truth and beauty will be seen as offensive to those who trade in lies, distortions, half truths, and logical fallacies.
00
” I could step back from that if I saw that you were willing to switch to more logical interaction.”
Do not hold your CO2!.
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Gosh I can no longer post here?
00
My postings are no longer showing up.
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Hi All,
If your postings stop showing email me joanne AT joannenova.com.au. The spam checker picks up 800 spam a month, so sometimes it gets it wrong (and sometimes I can’t check for a week). Apologies, Thomas.
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Sunsettommy (Thomas pearson) wrote:
No, it means that Energy and the Environment are not worth publishing in.
And I am more than happy to read and discuss those papers when we get to them.
Now I did quite some for my response to the first one, “A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions”, in my post 592.
If anyone would like to acknowledge the points I raised then we can go on to the next one.
But lets discuss the papers that are genuinely peer reviewed one at a time. And I think that by cherry picking the Douglass paper is made to look stronger than the data actually supports. In reality the modelled and measured data sets are indeed within each other’s range.
If we agree on that point the next paper to discuss is “A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts”
00
That’s not intending to offend?
00
Robin writes this silly line,because he provides absolutely nothing behind it:
“No, it means that Energy and the Environment are not worth publishing in.”
Then we get this howler from post 592,where Robin writes:
“The reason why peer reviewed literature is worth reading, whereas non-peer reviewed literature is not, is the implied respect that that paper has from the scientific community at large.
As such “Energy and Environment” papers don’t really count. And “peer reviewed” is a bit of a stretch to describe a publication that is not listed as an ISI journal.
I hope you don’t mind if I dismiss those as lower priority to read.”
Still does not explain what makes a paper a viable one,since being published in certain publishing houses,does not validate them.
You have yet to tell us what makes a paper be considered a peer reviewed,and what is not.By YOUR definition or by someone else?
Since you have by your own admission decided to be ignorant by enforcing YOUR deliberate bias against certain publication centers,you are against science in general.Thank you for making it clear why you are so gosh darn slow to understand what several people have been trying to tell you what you obviously do not understand.
I hope you don’t mind if I dismiss those unsupported opinions of yours,since that is all you supply are opinions,nothing more.
00
Whose definition would you like to use?
If I publish a few of my ideas with my own printer, and do a copy for my local second hand book shop, have I published in a peer reviewed journal?
Energy and the Environment is not a journal, not because of my personal definition, but because it’s not a ISI journal, and it doesn’t appear in the Thompson Reuters Master Journal list.
The list does change all the time, but it is very comprehensive. In the mid-1930’s S. C. Bradford realized that the core literature for any given scientific discipline was composed of fewer than 1,000 journals. The Master Journal list includes over 10,000 journals.
Not even one of them is “Energy and the Environment”. It does not appear in university libraries, and as such is unknown to most scientists. Also it is not peer reviewed.
I think it’s pretty clear that it is not a scholarly journal.
I am not at all against science. When Energy and the Environment is considered a scientific journal I will consider the papers in it part of the scientific literature. This could be some time.
If you have another standard for what constitutes a journal, please provide it.
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Robin writes:
“Energy and the Environment is not a journal, not because of my personal definition, but because it’s not a ISI journal, and it doesn’t appear in the Thompson Reuters Master Journal list.”
By your contrived explanation,Dr. Pasteur,Albert Einstein,or anyone else before the 1930’s did not post anything of value, since it was not posted in some approved publication list.They were simply published and that was all it mattered.Your way is to CENSOR papers,to have some controlling effect due to some undefined parameters,based on unknown referee’s who have biase’s,to deal with when they see papers that does not conform to what they believe.
McIntire,Dr. Spenser,J. Harland Bretz among others were rejected in one of your precious publications,only to be approved in another publication,that would overturn a paper that was earlier published in one of your “approved” publications.Such as the “Hockey Stick” paper that was not only “peer reviewed”,but published in one of your approved publishing places,was also quickly lauded by the IPCC,as proof of AGW that was going to endanger us all,never mind that it was never validated at all by the time it was included in the IPCC report,by none other than Dr. Mann himself.In effect Dr. Mann TWICE published the same paper in 3 years time,that was NEVER reproduced/validated and thus proven worthy to be included in the 2001 IPCC report.
The IPPC report is one of those listed in your ISI journal list,or in the Thompson Reuters Master Journal list?
Do you approve of META ANALYSIS setting,that the IPCC reports are composed of?
Were they “peer reviewed” by certain people who make up the tiny list of specifically chosen scientists(by the governments officials),in the IPCC group?
How come you approve of such a paper being included in the 2001 IPCC report?
ROFLMAO!
You are so irrational that I wonder if you realize that a lot of good research is not dependent on where it is published,but that it is verifiable AFTERWARDS,by others who by READING it(because it was published),who try to replicate it using the information in it.
You are indeed anti science because you want to deliberately ignore science papers,posted by reputable scientists,simply because they do not publish in a certain place.The very same scientists who did publish in Nature and Science publications earlier,now suddenly a paper they publish someplace else is not worthy,simply because it is was NOT in the right place.It is insane.
I personally know of a lot of science papers not being allowed to publish because they contradict some cherished belief system such as the Big Bang,the Nuclear Sun model,and many more.
YOU are for controlling science research and therefore anti science in general,since you want to control what is acceptable to you and others who demand it must pass their desk first,a neat way to squelch papers that does not meet your prejudiced standards.
It is no wonder why you have so much trouble understanding people,because you have created arbitrary and irrelevant rules to what you WANT to believe.
00
Thomas Pearson @608,
I would go a bit more deeply and conclude that Robin cannot perceive reality first hand. The reason is that reality for him is the consciousness of others – ie he perceives reality second hand. He even has to have others tell him who’s consciousness are the correct ones to use to perceive reality. Meaning, he doesn’t even perceive reality second hand, its third hand. As a consequence, the contents of his mind, such that it is a shimmering confluence of shimmering confluences of reflections of .
Its as if one were to build a picture of reality out of random snippets of film taken from countless cutting room floors, assembling them in random order so they give a picture that feels good. Any first hand observation is to be immediately omitted because it did not come from a cutting room floor.
The result is a mind incapable of comprehension or coherent communication of anything that might have been comprehended at one time. You might as well quote random paragraphs from Alice in Wonderland as quote well done research. Robin cannot perceive anything as real unless it first passes through his (formerly Alice’s) looking glass.
Welcome to the Postmodern hall of mirrors in which nothing is real, nor true, nor false, nor existent, nor non-existent. Any cause can have any effect. Any effect can have any cause. Words create reality. Wishes bring about fact. Wants creates rights. Needs are an absolute claim on the lives of others. No one is responsible for what they do. That is except for the innovative, productive few who are able to create the ideas and material values that sustain human life. This latter group are to be slaves of all those who can’t/won’t/don’t but only wish/want/need.
Its time to SMASH the looking glass!
00
Sunsettommy:
Energy and the Environment is not an ISI journal.
If you have some other standard for what constitutes please suggest it.
If a paper has been refused publication in a journal, and then is published in a publication that is not a journal, is not peer reviewed, and is not read by scientists, then it does not follow that we should consider this publication to be of the same standard of a scholarly journal. The correct conclusion is that the paper didn’t pass peer review.
Not at all.
Einstein’s great 1905 papers appeared in “ANNALEN DER PHYSIK”, which is in the Master Journal list.
Louis Pasteur’s work was often published in “Les Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des sciences”, which has since broken into different publications by subject matter, but these are also in the Master Journal list.
00
Lionell Griffith wrote:
Stuff we know first hand:
1)CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
2)Water vapour is a greenhouse gas.
3)Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses increases the greenhouse effect.
4)Compared to 1750, the increase in radiative forcing at the surface of earth is predominantly increases in greenhouse gasses.
Are you with me so far?
00
Robin,
Do you know it? If so, how?
00
Robin ” 3)Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses increases the greenhouse effect.”
Oh No your not!
The AGW theory is base on CO2 is the cause of warming. Not water Vapor or other atmospheric gases. … I guess the goal posts need to be moved again at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
00
Robin writes,
“Energy and the Environment is not an ISI journal.
If you have some other standard for what constitutes please suggest it.”
Sigh,
I never stated that it was and never tried to create a Standard for it.The problem YOU have is that you completely bypass my point that you decided that some papers should be ignored or censored,simply because it is not published in a certain science publication.
By the way Einsteins paper was published in 1905 in a journal that was NOT then listed in the ISI directory,because it did not exist until 1960.Here is the link that will expose your deception:
Institute for Scientific Information
EXCERPT:
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, became known as Thomson ISI and now is part of the Healthcare & Science business of the multi-billion dollar Thomson Reuters Corporation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Scientific_Information
When Dr. Pasteur published his papers in the mid 1850’s,the Master Journal List did not yet exist.
The master Journal list DID NOT EXIST in the 1850’s or 1905!
What in the hell are you trying to pull? Did you think that I would be stupid to think that 104 years ago the world of science publication was that sophisticated?
You disgust me.
00
Robin Writes,
“If a paper has been refused publication in a journal, and then is published in a publication that is not a journal, is not peer reviewed, and is not read by scientists, then it does not follow that we should consider this publication to be of the same standard of a scholarly journal. The correct conclusion is that the paper didn’t pass peer review.”
Two science papers published in your favorite ISI listed journals and passed the overrated “peer review” process,only later to be found that were terrible science papers.
The “Hockey Stick” paper and the Oreske’s “Consensus” paper.
Two people tried to publish their dissenting papers to expose the obvious fatal errors,were not allowed to publish in the same journals that the flawed reviewed papers were published in.McIntire went elsewhere to get it published that eventually discredited the H.S. paper,that sailed through your much loved “peer reviewed” process in a journal that YOU approve.
The Oreskes paper flaw would have been discovered by a “peer reviewer”,if he actually looked into the paper using the search title she included.Since he never did more than rubber stamp approval on it,it is obvious that he never tried to review the paper,since the error was right at the beginning of the paper!
Last year a paper was finally published showing the flaws of Oreskes paper that basically invalidated her main claim of near or total consensus based on published papers.Her sample size was very small.
Still going to continue to overrate the “peer review” process?
00
Robin,
Regarding ‘stuff we know first hand’, 1), 2) and 3) are known. 4) is an assumption. Please cite a peer reviewed paper (for what it’s worth) that quantifies and/or derives the physics connecting most of any climate change since 1750 to mans CO2 emissions without assuming a priori that this is the case.
I would also like to add to the things we know first hand (I omitted your item 4) because it’s not known first hand).
4) The end of the mini ice age coincided with the start of mans CO2 emissions
5) Surface temperature and surface power are related by P = oT^4, where o is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (5.6704E-8 WK^4/m^2)
6) The Sun is the primary driver of the climate
7) The hemispheres are so asymmetric that assuming seasonal differences average out over a year is incorrect
8) Increased CO2 increases total biomass (and visa-versa)
9) The science of global warming has been subverted by radical environmental agendas and guilt driven liberal politics
10) Fear mongering is an effective, albeit temporary, way to push an agenda
11) Natural variability swamps out any presumed effects of increased GHG’s
12) The incident solar energy varies by about 80 W/m^2 between perihelion and aphelion
13) The global average temperature is about 4C colder when the Sun is closet to the Earth than when the Sun is farthest away
14) First principles physics contradicts the IPCC claim of an extraordinarily high climate sensitivity to changes in forcing power
15) The incremental effects of additional GHG’s decreases as the concentrations increase
George
00
Lionell Griffith wrote:
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This is known because its absorption spectrum is known, and the energy spectral density of both the radiation from above and the radiation from below can be quite accurately calculated for a given section of atmosphere, and a given state of the atmosphere.
Is that what you were asking?
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wilbert Robichaud wrote:
AGW theory is based on the physics of optics, and the observations that human activity has increased the concentration of greenhouse gasses.
The most significant of the long lived greenhouse gasses is CO2, which has contributed about 1.66 W/m² more than 1750. The other long lived anthropogenic greenhouse gasses combined have contributed about 0.98 W/m². CH4 and N2O are large players there, having contributed about 0.48 W/m² and 0.16 W/m² respectively. Even changes in solar irradience has contributed some warming over that time – having supplied about 0.12W/m² more than in 1750.
Water vapour is not a long lived greenhouse gas. Its atmospheric residency time is about 10 days. It’s concentration is dependent on temperature, with a global mean dependency of about 6% per K (see Soden et al, SCIENCE (2007)). The upshot is that water vapour provides a positive feedback to any long term warming.
But CH4 and N2O, as well as many halocarbons are also long lived anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. Certainly CO2 is the largest player, but the others are not insignificant.
None of this is new in the last ten years, mate.
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Sunsettommy (Thomas pearson) wrote:
Well, I disagree that they were published in a science publication. Certainly they were not published in a journal.
We should be able to agree that there are some publications that aren’t sufficiently scientific to be considered. The Huffington Post is one clear example. The Australian light porn rag “Zoo” would be another.
So the question is where do we draw the line?
I think that the journals listed in the Master Journal Index, and therefore cross referenced by the ISI web of knowledge is a good place to draw the line.
What do you think?
Sure.
My point was that it is listed there now.
You’re over-reacting. The journals are listed by the ISI now. It was not my intention to imply that the ISI history went back to the 17th century, and I don’t know what you think I meant to gain by this alleged “deception”.
The point is that Energy and the Environment is not an ISI journal, has very little reputation amongst scientists, is not peer reviewed, relishes the publication of contrarian articles that have failed peer review for scientific journals, is not read by many scientists, does not appear in most university libraries, and is not an avenue for getting research to the scientific community.
Over 10,000 journals are in the master journal index. About 9000 of those are minor scholarly publications. This is a very inclusive list. Energy and the Environment is not missing because of some oversight.
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Robin @ 618: Is that what you were asking?
No. I asked “How do YOU know it?” YOU as a separate individual and not as a part of a collective “we”. What is YOUR process of knowing?
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co2isnotevil wrote:
Turning physics into climate change is an exercise in modelling. The most famous to this matter is the Keystone paper: External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings, Stott et al. SCIENCE, 11 September 2000.
But of course there have been much better examples since. I particularly enjoyed: Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate, Meehl et al. JOURNAL OF CLIMATE, 1 OCTOBER 2004 because of the way it shows that the effects of the different forcings are approximately additive in the response of the climate.
Which is kind of cute.
Well mans emissions are detectable for thousands of years, and the mini ice age is poorly defined in time:
“Climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions. Some confine the Little Ice Age to approximately the 16th century to the mid 19th century.[2] It is generally agreed that there were three minima, beginning about 1650, about 1770, and 1850, each separated by slight warming intervals.” – wiki.
So I would disagree with this unless you can better define what you mean by “end of the LIA”, “start of man’s CO2 emissions”, and give justify some reasonable acceptable error in the term “coincides”.
If you leave this as loose as you have, anything that happened since 1650 “coincides with the end of the LIA” – not a convincing point.
Yep.
Not for the current warming.
Since 1750 CO2 has provided about an extra 1.66 W/m². Solar irradiance has only provided about 0.12 W/m².
Also not for ice ages. Those seem to be caused by CO2 too.
I would be nervous about trying to isolate climate change on a time scale less than a few decades. But seasonal differences themselves should average out over a year even on a hemisphere, because you get all the seasons in a year.
That doesn’t sound right to me. Increasing CO2 increases acidification. That probably decreases ocean productivity, which would decrease net biomass.
And forest fires would increase CO2 and reduce total biomass wouldn’t they? (Not that terrestrial biomass is significant in this equation, but you claim that this is known. I cite a counterexample: burning a tree.
You’ll need to prove that one too.
In some cases. There are such things as demagogues. We relatively recently got rid of one here in Australia. Interestingly, unlike most disaster stories, which are generally loved by the press, it is the scientific community, and not the public that are more pessimistic about climate change. So I think that it is pretty clear that if someone is fear mongering about climate change, they’re rubbish at it.
Quite wrong. The current warming is due to increased GHGs. If you weaken this statement to the current warming is mostly due to increased GHGs, you get the statement that Oreskes found uncontradicted in the 928 papers 1993-2003 that had the ISI keywords “global climate change”.
So the converse of this statement is the true one, and moreover has been well understood to be true for over a decade and a half, with no significant contrary voices. (In the scientific commmunity).
Fine.
I’m not convinced that you’re not looking at the slow beat of a nearly geosynchronous orbit against the time of day hitting parts of the world with different albedos.
Well, that’s rubbish isn’t it?
Climate sensitivity is well published about.
If if violated simple physics, someone would mention.
That’s right. Climate sensitivity is given as a temperature change per doubling of CO2, rather than per increase in CO2, because the climate’s response is more nearly logarithm than linear.
About 3 per doubling. 4 could easily be a better guess, including the recently found positive feedback from low cloud.
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Lionell Griffith wrote:
Various mechanisms at the moment.
By taking an interest in some scientific papers on the subject, mostly as part of forum posts such as these.
By keeping up with science news in general by listening to science podcasts, including well respected ones such as Nature and Science. But also many pop science podcasts such as the Scientific American, several ABC ones, a few naked Scientists ones, and many Sceptical movement ones.
By talking with friends in ecology.
And by occasionally visiting informed climate reporting sites such as Nature reports: Climate change.
Is that what you are asking?
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Sunsettommy (Thomas pearson) wrote:
I think that you would find that your opinion of either of those as “terrible science papers” doesn’t exist in the scientific community.
I think you’ll find that the non-publication of those dissenting papers is consistent with standards rather than some editorial bias.
Where are you getting this from?
Certainly the article by Oreskes was an essay and not a paper, so it wouldn’t have been sent out to the same number of reviewers as it would if it included new research.
But I had not heard that it was at all flawed.
Citation?
928 abstracts isn’t very small.
I don’t think that I do overrate it.
But it does define the scientific literature. Are you still going to say that unscientific literature should be given as much weight?
It shouldn’t.
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Robin @ 622,
I asked “What is YOUR process of knowing?”
Robin replied:
By taking an interest in some scientific papers on the subject, mostly as part of forum posts such as these.
[seeing reality through the consciences of others]
By keeping up with science news in general by listening to science podcasts, including well respected ones such as Nature and Science. But also many pop science podcasts such as the Scientific American, several ABC ones, a few naked Scientists ones, and many Sceptical movement ones.
[seeing reality through the consciences of others]
By talking with friends in ecology.
[seeing reality through the consciences of others]
And by occasionally visiting informed climate reporting sites such as Nature reports: Climate change.
[seeing reality through the consciences of others]
Me: Thank you for making my point that you are incapable of knowing reality. This is because reality for you is what other people know. You have no concern how they know it even though they mostly know only what other people know as well.
Is there ANYTHING you know without having to go through the mind of someone else?
00
Lionell Griffith wrote:
I don’t apologise for standing on the shoulders of Giants.
What is your process of knowing?
00
Robin, re 621
your 4) The climate system is so non linear, that any report that predicts a linear response from orthogonal forcings is clearly wrong. What’s cute is how you think it isn’t. Didn’t you say you were a math guy?
my 4) Coincides is relative to the time frame over which climate change is measureable, i.e. decades to a century
6) You’re assuming again …
7) Seasonal change averages for each hemisphere independently. Each hemisphere responds differently to energy changes and seasonal variability can only be averaged over about a 23K year interval, which is the approximate period of the precession of perihelion.
8) Ocean acidification is another red herring and any effect is due to acid rain from burning high sulfur coal and not from higher CO2 levels. Acid rain and not CO2 is the problem with coal and this is a lot cheaper to fix. The CO2 and CH4 in the ice cores are a clear indication of the total amount of biomass on the planet.
9) On this one, you need to prove to me that it’s not. The evidence is how this issue is divided between the guilt driven politics of the left and the greed driven politics of the right. Interestingly enough, the guilt politics of the left is a result of feeling guilty about their own greed.
10) Relative to fear of climate change, the AGW crowd has extended this fear to a fear of being wrong about why it’s occurring. As evidence are the continuing claims that the science is a done deal despite the preponderance of contrawise data and physics.
11) The recent cooling over the last few years has canceled out the presumed warming that was thought to have been seen which has led to the ludicrous claims of hidden heat and deferred warming.
13) You’re grasping at straws again. Most of the satellites are geosynchronous and monitor the surface continuously. The raw data has 4 hour resolution and the change I talk of is a change in monthly averages of the raw data. If there’s an 8C error (the temperature is 4C colder when it should be 4C warmer), Hansen’s use of obfuscation through anomaly analysis is subject to even more error than I claim.
14) It’s rubbish that the IPCC uses a linear approximation for a relationship where forcing power is proportional to temperature raised to the forth power. It’s rubbish that the IPCC misrepresents ice feedback as CO2 feedback. It’s rubbish that models which predict a high climate sensitivity assume it in the first place. It’s rubbish that legitimate scientific dissent is systematically ignored. It’s rubbish that the peer review process has been seriously compromised in order to prop up a false consensus. It’s rubbish that AWG modelers ignore physics and instead rely on assumptions about what causes climate change. It’s rubbish that AGW proponents grasp at straws rather than accept the truth of these massive, irreconcilable errors.
00
Robin @ 625: I don’t apologise for standing on the shoulders of Giants.
This is too easy. How do you know they are Giants? Because other people have said so?
That cheap shot aside, thank you for being honest in saying that you only know what you think other people know. As suggested, that presents you with a problem: how do you know that what other people know is correct? You thereby fall into the swamp of infinite regression unless and until you discover how to know all by yourself. You rely on experts to tell you who the experts are who can tell you who the experts are who…. A summation of zeros is zero no matter how many zeros are summed.
My process of knowing? I am not your intellectual therapist not am I willing to do such work for free. I therefor won’t give the details without your paying me a substantial sum for the information. Even then, it would do you no good. The process neither can be comprehended nor used without a first hand mental process. Which, by the way, you have so clearly and repeatedly demonstrated you do not have.
For anyone else who is watching, Robin offers us a textbook example of a second hander in spirit and mind: one who believes and acts upon the belief that the individual knows only what the his collective knows and that his collective is always right without question. How do they know it? Blank out. There is no how. They just know. He simply does not exist in any meaningful way apart from his collective.
00
Yes. I am a math guy.
This paper is evidence that the climate system is not strongly non-linear in its current state.
What is your evidence that it is “so non linear, that any report that predicts a linear response from orthogonal forcings is clearly wrong.”?
The point is still too weak. Explain why you choose the most recent LIA, and why you don’t count the thousand of years old anthropogenic CO2 increase.
There are errors on those numbers, but they are small compared to their values.
So I suspect you’re wrong.
And you must know that saying “you’re assuming again” is a very weak argument.
How do you claim that our knowledge of the magnitude of these figures is faulty?
Why haven’t you published a paper saying so?
I don’t get why a seasonal change can’t be averaged out over 1 year. I can see why a change due to precession would need to be averaged out over the time it takes the precession to cycle once.
But I don’t see the consequences of this point, so I am also happy to let it go, until you use it to make a mistake.
Yes. Well. As far as I can tell you’re on your own on this point. Do you have a basis for this belief? Why haven’t you published a paper on this?
No. You’re the one who is stating that it is known. If you can’t back it up, it is not known.
Where is this preponderance of contrawise data and physics? Why is it not published in scientific journals?
This must be some new meaning of “cancelled out”. Please refer me to a paper discussing these “hidden heat” and “deferred warming” concepts.
Which means a big bright area such as the Sahara would be passed over at night for half the year, and at day for the other half of the year.
That’s not a straw, it’s in the literature about the satellite data.
You’re grasping at straws. It’s close enough. A 4th power curve is well approximated by a straight line away from the stationary value. The slope of T^4 is 4T^3. At 287K, that’s 94.6 million. At 290K that’s 97.6 million. The 3% is less than the error due to the changes in the feedbacks.
That’s a new one on me. What is CO2 feedback?
Yeah, you keep saying that, and you’ve never offered one iota of evidence. Or a plausible explanation of how a climate model would be able to assume that.
Plus you ignore half a dozen other methods of estimating the CS.
For example?
No, mate. The peer review process has not been compromised. And neither could it be in 200 different countries, and 200 different journal editors. That conspiracy is way too large.
The consensus is real.
A model does not ignore physics. Physics is the inputs. There is no way to force it to make assumptions about what causes climate change.
For example?
00
Lionell Griffith wrote:
Because that’s how science progresses. If knowledge extracted on one’s own was in some way superior, we would all have to personally invent fire and the wheel, metal smelting, and never get to the point where we could use build, much less use a computer.
Human science is the sharing and pooling of knowledge. And this is why we need the peer review system, and not to take on board rubbish such as is printed in Energy and the Environment.
Peer review, and confirmation by other groups.
So you don’t accept any scientific knowledge?
Pffft!
00
Robin,
My evidence that it’s nonlinear comes from physics. You have already agreed that forcing power is proportional to temperature raised to the forth power, which is definitely non linear.
There is no evidence for thousands of years of anthropogenic CO2 increase. In the 10K years prior to the industrial revolution, the CO2 increased by only about 20 ppm, which is consistent with the rise seen during other interglacial periods.
OK, change cancelled out to offset. The point is that in the last few years, average global temperatures have been relatively flat to falling. The hidden heat argument is that according to AGW theory, the average temperature should have risen by far more than it has recently, so to ‘explain’ this, the argument is that temperature increase is set in motion, but hasn’t really occurred yet. This led to stratospheric cooling (which hasn’t been observed) and hidden ocean heat (which also has not been observed).
Again I repeat, seasonal changes can be averaged out across a hemisphere because the periodicity of change is 12 months. You can’t average the 2 hemispheres together because the periodicity of relative change between hemispehers coincides with the precession of perihelion, which has about a 23K year period.
The preponderance of data is summarized in my slide set, http://www.palisad.com/co2/siframes.html. Interestingly enough, much of this data comes from Hansen’s organization.
Geosynchronous means that the satellite is stationary relative to the surface, so there will be 3 4 hour measurements during every day and 3 every night. Polar orbiters have orbital periods on the order of a hour, so multiple day and night measurements are also made for each point. It’s also my understanding that each 4 hour sample is the average of many more shorter period samples. The 4 hour standard is just to keep the size of the data sets manageable.
To illustrate the failure of linearization, lets compare surface energy over the 12C range seen in the ice cores. The T^4 number is power density based on Stefan-Boltzmann and the T^1 is power density based on 3C per 3.7 W/m^2 starting from a 288K baseline. The error is relative to the delta energy from the 390 w/m^2 baseline at 288K. The absolute error is smaller, but since we are dealing with incremental effects, the incremental error is what’s important.
temp T^4 T^1 error
274K 367 372 287%
288K 390 390
290K 401 392.5 440%
BTW, The GCM’s are not based on first principles physics, but on heuristics which are tuned to the data based on a set of assumptions. It’s the assumptions that are ‘thought’ to be consistent with physics. The argument I keep hearing is that a first principles models are too complex, so are not done.
The evidence that contrary evidence is suppressed is that whenever I’ve tried to point out a flaw in some argument on realclimate.org, my post is either highly edited or suppressed entirely and always subject to a day or so of delay. Notice how your posts are not delayed, truncated or suppressed in this forum?
George
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co2isnotevil:
Small perturbations near 290K are approximately linear. As shown above. (The curvature of T^4 only creates about a 3% difference in slope over 3°C. Total temperature change in Meehl is 0.8°C.)
So you’ve still got a very long way to go to justify “The climate system is so non linear, that any report that predicts a linear response from orthogonal forcings is clearly wrong.” What you’ve got so far is the transfer function is approximately linear. (This physical plausibility could have contributed to how Meehl et al. passed peer review).
“Near 8000 years ago, however, the CO2 trend began an anomalous increase that has no counterpart in any of the three preceding interglaciations, with values rising in recent millennia to 280–285 ppm, some 15 ppm above the late-deglacial peak.” Ruddiman, Climatic Change 61: 261–293, 2003.
Surely that isn’t no evidence? Even that sentence alone is some circumstantial evidence, without Ruddiman’s case that the cause is anthropogenic.
Still not really true. The past 90s to 00s decade so far has seen the strongest round decade to round decade warming on record. So if you look at even a half decent time slice, you don’t get any evidence at all for an offset. You get evidence of a strong onset.
How is this different from 1992 or 1985?
See, I don’t see any need for a hidden heat argument. Do you have an example of someone discussing hidden heat in the peer reviewed literature?
Or is this one of the straw men circulating on the denalist blogosphere?
Stratospheric cooling has certainly been observed. It is one of the fingerprints of greenhouse warming. See?? Stratosphere temperature trend is -0.329 K per decade since satellite measurements began.
Ocean warming has also been observed. I haven’t heard of hidden warming. But there was in the recent past some anomalous cooling reported because of errors in the instruments. This has since been corrected. (As much discussed on this forum.) Perhaps you refer to warming that was hidden by these errors?
The periodicity of the relative change between hemispheres is 23,000 years, coinciding with the precession of perihelion? And so you can’t average them together, over 1 year?
I don’t understand. What creates this periodicity over that long a time, and how does a change over that long time influence data from a single year?
Have you shown any of that to a scientist? I suspect that there are people that could rapidly clear up some of your queries about the satellite data. And I’m pretty sure you should not be smoothing before looking at cross or auto correlations.
Yeah, good point.
These must be the ones that cause the beat against deserts and day vs deserts at night, discussed in the literature.
It’s certainly less linear over that range. Meehl et al. deals with warming since industrialisation, and finds the forcings approximately additive.
There are a few unkowns that are tuned. About 6 I believe. The time step is usually half an hour, and HadGM3 has 73 x 96 x 19 grid points. So these 6 factors rapidly become over-determined. Any hindcasting ensures their objectivity. And they have to fall within a possible range as determined by their error from physics.
But by far the majority of the processes are known much better than those 6, and are based on first principles.
What do you mean by “set of assumptions?”
If you mean that there is a given water vapour feedback, you are very wrong.
Largely. But not entirely.
Suggesting Jo should read a paper before commenting on it will get your post deleted, and links to the Oreskes essay or some keystone Science papers will send your post to the spam … but Jo will generally fetch them, and post them within about a week.
Do yours always go through each time?
00
Robin,
Regarding the ‘anomalous’ increase that began 8K years ago, this was preceded by by a decrease from 11K to 8K years. In both cases, the CO2 changes follow temperature changes, which started to decrease 11K years ago and then started to increase again 8K years ago. This is just another example of the classic cherry picking of the starting point which appears in most AGW papers. This is less clear in the Vostok cores, but very apparent in the DomeC cores, which are at a significantly smaller resolution. The plots for this are in the first dozen slides or so of my slide set. There is no anomaly and the CO2 is just following temperature as it has for millions of years. There is a small continued rise that occurs as the temperature has been more or less stable for the last few thousand years, but this is not unusual. CO2 levels in the ice cores reflect the total planetary biomass, which when the temperature is constant, slowly builds as evolutionary biology adapts to the relatively constant temperatures. There are other examples of this, but not as large as over the last few thousand years, as the temperature has never been this stable for this long before. This only means that biology is settling into a local optimum coincident with the local climate optimum and when it starts to cool, biology will crash faster than it has in the past.
One major issue with the GCM’s is the time step. A step size of 1/2 hour is far too small. For this to eork, the chaos of weather must be accurately modeled. Even the best weather forecast models start to diverge after a day or so and by a few weeks, the predictions are useless. This is a consequence of errors accumulating from tic to tic. I use time steps on the order of weeks which means my model diverges much more slowly, moreover; I surround the chaos with an isotherm (Gaussian surface) which allows me to simulate aggregate behavior instead of having to precisely model the chaos.
Second, error must be symmetric. If error is even a tiny bit asymmetric, the results of any convergence algorithm will become skewed.
You didn’t like my 12C range, how about a 0.1 and 1C range. Notice how the error increases as delta T gets smaller. Also notice how the error is asymmetric.
temp T^4 T^1 error
287K 384.7 388.9 350%
287.9K 389.56 389.98 439%
288K 390.1
288.1K 390.65 390.22 447%
289K 395.6 391.3 358%
The error I stated earlier was simply the ratio of the T^1 delta to the T^2 delta. The error calculated above is given by the ratio of the difference between the T^1 result and the T^4 results divided by the T^1 result. An error of 350% means that the actual power difference required for a given delta T is 350% larger than the power difference predicted from the linear estimate.
Not only is the linear approximation completely inappropriate, the error is asymmetric, which will push the results of an iterative convergence algorithm in the direction of much larger delta T’s than are real.
Relative to satellite measurements, the only day/night issues are that certain measurements can be made only during the day, which means at the poles, when it’s dark for several months, some measurements can not be made. Note that while surface temperature is measureable at night, the visual measurements related to cloud detection are not, so there is no way to tell the difference between clouds and surface.
My posts generally get through, although the occasional one gets stuck in the spam filter.
George
00
Are you trying to argue that the rise wasn’t anomalous because it was preceeded by a fall?
It was anomalous because it didn’t occur in either of the two previous interglacials … the fall continued.
No, dude. You’ve just missed his point.
It didn’t follow in the younger dryas and it didn’t follow for the current warming either.
That sounds difficult to believe. What possible mechanism can you propose for that?
You think current biomass is at a maximum?
Crikey mate, you need to be introduced to some Krill and some Whales.
And some general ocean productivity realities.
The chaos only has to be accurate to the extent that you get the right sort of chaos. Since you aren’t using this model to predict windspeed on a certain day the average behaviour aggregates perfectly well.
hmm, 447% error. You’re not looking at differences from linearity are you?
Okay, what does your little table mean? You’ve got T^4 384.7 and T^1 388.9 From my maths background I can tell that your T^4 is not the fourth power of your T^1. Then you’ve got 287K. I would call that T=T^1. But you don’t.
Umm … Do I have to slog through this, or could you make it a bit more plain?
I got 3% error for a 3°C change near 14°C. What the bejeebus are you calculating?
Then you’re not using the best linear estimate. Try multiplying by a constant of 3.5.
Oh, for crying out loud, mate!
The approximation isn’t used in the model. Accurate radiative physics is used in the model. The approximation is used when you say “The climate sensitivity is about 3°C per doubling”, and we know it will move a bit if it gets are few degrees warmer.
It turns out that the responses are about additive. (See Meehl et al. The response to each forcing is calculated both by the response to the forcing alone, and the response to the total forcing, less the response to all the forcings except the one concerned. The two are close.
I’ll try to find the discussion about the annual beat in the satellite literature.
Have to go for now.
00
Robin,
I’m arguing that the so called anomaly isn’t an anomaly at all and just the expected response to a change in temperature. The temperature dropped, followed by a CO2 drop (from 11K to 8K years ago) and from 8K to about 4K years ago, the temperature was rising and a CO2 rise followed. Over the last 4K years, the temperature has been relatively constant and the CO2 rise that started 8K years ago continued. Some of the continued rise over the last 4K years could be related to anthropogenic CO2, but it’s a moot point as the temperature has been steady and we are only talking about a 10 ppm rise anyway. Recently, the CO2 has clearly spiked, but the temperature hasn’t followed suit. This is expected because in the absence of anthropogenic CO2, the CO2 levels have always followed temperature changes and not the other way around.
Actually, the Younger-Dryas drop in temp was followed by a CO2 drop, which once it recovered, the CO2 increased again. If you go by the Vostok cores, this is hard to see because the resolution is so poor. You need to look at newer data like the DomeC ice cores.
The current planetary biomass is relatively close to maximum. While deforestation certainly has an effect, the agriculture required to feed billions of people plus the many billions of livestock more than makes up the difference. We have been in the longest and most stable interglacial period in the record which has given evolutionary biology an opportunity to establish a local optimum.
At smaller time steps, you must accurately predict wind speeds and weather fronts, otherwise, errors will accumulate. You can’t aggregate the behavior unless you use a time step which is large enough that the aggregate behavior is meaningful.
For the error between Stefan-Boltzmann (T^4) and a linear 3.7 W/m^2 per 3K (T^1), I’m calculating how wrong the linear estimate is relative to the actual power to temp relationship as described by first principles physics. Sure there are other ways to express the error that will give smaller numbers, but the simple fact is that the linear relationship is wrong at any scale. Not only does the absolute change matter, the first and second derivatives matter as well.
George
00
Then you need to explain what caused the change in temperature.
What?
You do know that temperatures have been increasing over the last 100 and especially 50 years, right?
I understand that you don’t accept that water has any specific heat nor that ice takes any energy or time to melt, so the scientific view that there is a 25-50 year lag between the increase in atmospheric CO2 and 60% of its effect to have manifest on the climate, so you underestimate the response of the climate to current CO2 levels … but this claim that the world has not warmed at all does not line up with measurements, be they from met stations, from ocean surface measurement from ships, from meteorological buoys, from mean sea level rise measurements, or radiosonde measurements.
I haven’t heard that. Do you have a citation?
In any case there are other examples of the CO2 preceding the temperature change, and none where the CO2 change came after the temperature rise had finished.
The groups that the estimated climate sensitivity from the ice core reconstructions get results in line with other methods.
No, they don’t accumulate. And it is counter to very basic information theory that you can bet a more accurate answer with less information. The average behaviour is more accurately estimated by the average behaviour of the model.
Aggregate metrics such as mean global surface temperature become more accurate with finer resolution modelling both in time and in space.
I have raised lots of points in the last few posts, and asked many questions that you seem to be ignoring. You are belligerent about having your questions answered. Please extend the same courtesy that you demand.
00
Robin,
The temperature change was in response to the changing pattern of solar input as the Earth’s orbit and axis has changed. If you examine the relative phases of the 22K forcing (precession of perihelion), the 42K forcing (change in the Earth’s tilt) and the 90-120K forcing effects (change in the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit), you can see what’s happening.
The effect precession of perihelion has on the climate is that maximum cooling occurs when the planets reflectivity, weighted by incident energy, is the highest (early April). The maximum heating occurs when perihelion occurs in late October when the planets reflectivity is the lowest, again weighted by incident energy. Currently, perihelion is in early Jan, which is closer to max warmth than max cold, but we can expect max cold in about 8K years. Can you see why the asymmetry matters?
Currently, perihelion is Jan 3 and it shifts forward at a rate of about 1 day per 60 years, or about 1 month per 1833 years. Max cold last occurred about 15K years ago at the depth of the last ice age. Max warmth occurred about 11K years ago, at the first peak warmth of the current interglacial. Considering this by itself is the flaw in the science magazine article that says we should be in a cooling phase.
The effect of the Earth’s tilt is best considered as a shift in the Arctic circle. As this gets closer to the equator, more of the N hemisphere has a permanent ice pack and at the poles, less winter solar energy allows ice to build. This last happened about 10K years ago. This coincided with max warmth from the precession effect, which partially canceled it. This is currently decreasing, which partially offsets the cooling effect the perihelion shift should be causing.
The final effect is the change in the orbits eccentricity. The effect of this is to vary the difference between perihelion and aphelion. This reached a local maximum about 15K years ago. Notice how all 3 effects hit a maximum cooling effect which was coincident with the deepest part of the last ice age? This is also currently decreasing and contributes it’s part to extend the current interglacial period by offsetting the peak cooling that should be occurring.
The alignment of a local maximum eccentricity, peak precession of perihelion related cooling and peak obliquity related cooling, all about 15K years ago, set the timing of the deepest part of the last ice age. The relative phase of these 3 effects has contributed to the relative long and cool interglacial we have been lucky enough to have experienced, coincident with the rise of civilization. This is really no coincidence and many anthropologists believe that the rise of civilization was the direct result of this unusually stable climate.
There are many references to this, which you can google to find. Most reference the effect of Northern hemisphere insolation, which while there is a high correspondence to temperature changes, is an overly simplistic view.
While the temperature has been rising over the last 150 years or so, most of this is rebound warming from the little ice age. This is thought to be more of an effect of solar activity, which is orthogonal to Milankovitch forcings, and in the grand scheme of things has been a relatively small effect. The last 20 years has seen some warming, but nothing that is out of the ordinary based on any prior rate of change. Over the last 30 years, sunspot and flare activity has been higher than it’s ever been measured (since about 1700), but recently has dropped to a level not seen in about a century. While it doesn’t seem that this has a very large effect on total solar radiance, there’s a lot more high energy particles interacting with the planet, which aren’t included in typical solar radiance measurements and will have some effect.
When I say that there has been a huge spike in CO2, but the temperature hasn;t followed suit. I mean that any temperature changes are not unusual based on the rate of change seen in the ice cores, even considering that the rate of change in the ice cores is a change in long term (100+ year) averages. Your a math guy, so you should know that the rate of change in a 100 year average will be much slower than changes in absolute yearly temperatures, yet contemporary absolute change is still within the limits of the maximum rate of change in 100 year averages.
To see the Y-G temp drop and subsequent CO2 drop, look at my slides. Look at the DomeC record as this has better precision. Pay attention to the 1500 year smoothed data as this shows it quite well.
Relative to your 60 year delay of the response to increased CO2, this is conjecture, not fact. Even if the CO2 doubled instantaneously, there would be no more than a few year delay before the system equalizes. This is a result of the change, as large as it is, is not that large relative to the total fluxes. Because the CO2 change has been rather slow, it’s incremental effect is a small fraction of the total flux and gets washed out by ordinary variability. The 0.67C increase that occurs by CO2 doubling would occur almost immediately even if the doubling occurred as a step function.
Many of the points you have raised have been answered before and are just rehashing the pedantic AGW talking points. I don’t have the time to answer all of them, many of which I or others have already answered, so I address only the more important top level concepts that once you can wrap your head around, will point you in the right direction.
Relative to model behavior, averages do compare better to other averages, even with less precise data, however; the problem here is divergence. Once the model starts to diverge, all bets are off and it’s the divergence that accumulates. While wiggles may still correlate, a divergence problem will add biases. This is especially true when the feedbacks are improperly accounted for. The fact that none of the GCM’s seem particularly good at predicting cloud cover, and this is one of the most important variables, is another source of problems.
George
00
Robin –
Stuff we know first hand:
1)CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
2)Water vapour is a greenhouse gas.
3)Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses increases the greenhouse effect.
4)Compared to 1750, the increase in radiative forcing at the surface of earth is predominantly increases in greenhouse gasses.
Are you with me so far?
Yep, very much so, since it is simply impossible for CO2 NOT to be the cause of most of the observed warming.
For CO2 NOT to be the cause, all of science developed over the last 200 years would have to be completely wrong.
CO2 enhanced warming is the necessary result of Spectroscopy and thermodynamics, both of which are the basis of all modern science.
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CO2ISEvil – 4) is an assumption.
Really? That is really odd because CO2 reflects heat back to the earth’s surface, and obviously that will heat the earth’s surface.
Tell us Evil, how do you manage to direct additional heat at the earth’s surface without warming it? Are Space Aliens involved? Tin Foil Caps? Deamons?
00
Sunsettommy (Thomas pearson)- Meanwhile what “peer reviewed” publication accepted the terrible “hockey stick” paper?
Your 10 years out of date. You don’t appear to be aware that the so called Hockey Stick has been reproduced by multiple studies which appear in the last IPCC meta-analysis of the worlds peer reviewed scientific press, where each rely on different data sets and are produced by different teams of scientists.
00
CO2ISEVIL – If you examine the relative phases of the 22K forcing (precession of perihelion), the 42K forcing (change in the Earth’s tilt) and the 90-120K forcing effects (change in the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit), you can see what’s happening.
I examine it and note that the current warming that is observed is in opposition to the cooling that should be occurring as a result of the processional change in the earth’s axis relative to the perihelion position in the Earth’s orbit.
So your argument is a complete failure from the very start.
Currently we are exiting a period of higher than normal insolation in the Northern Hemisphere, and as a result the planet has been cooling up until the advent of industrialization.
With industrialization CO2 levels have increased, and at this point have warmed the planet by an average of 074’C – and due to thermal enertia, another 0.74’C (approx) is guaranteed in the near future, even if CO2 levels were capped at their current value.
00
CO2ISEVIL – While the temperature has been rising over the last 150 years or so, most of this is rebound warming from the little ice age.
You’re a funny man Mr Evil.
00
CO2ISEVIL – The last 20 years has seen some warming, but nothing that is out of the ordinary based on any prior rate of change.
You’re a funny man Mr Evil.
CO2ISEVIL – Over the last 30 years, sunspot and flare activity has been higher than it’s ever been measured (since about 1700), but recently has dropped to a level not seen in about a century.
The science is pretty clear on this. Through attribution studies it has been concluded that the sun can not account for any more than 20% of the observed rise since industralization, Man made attributions from land use changes, CO2 emissions, Methane emissions and other greenhouse gases – Chloroflurocarbons etc, account for at least 70% or more. It is interesting to note that the hottest years on record and the hottest decades on record (the last 2 decades) have occurred while the observed output of the sun has declined.
00
Mr Evil, I read your posts and I find it amusing how you run a Marathon to avoid having to put 1 and 1 together. Simple observation should suffice. After all, observations are the only facts in Science. The rest is theory, and we observe that gaseous CO2 backscatters Infrared light. We observe that the earth’s surface has a non-zero temperature. It logically follows then that covering the earth’s surface in gasious CO2 will backscatter the infrared radiation from the earth’s surface and hence keep the surface warmer than it would otherwise be. Blather all you like, but I’m afraid every aspect of modern science is dependent on the established laws of radiative physics, and those laws necessitate that since CO2 absorbs Infrared Radaition and reflects part of it back to the surface of the earth, that surface must warm.
00
ROBIN – if you accept that greenhouse gasses increase the greenhouse effect, then the rest is pretty clear. Human activity has increased the concentration of greenhouse gasses. What am I missing?
You’re missing that CO2 enhanced warming is a threat to Conservative political religion. If CO2 is to blame then that invites Govt interference into the Free market and taxes might go up to pay for the necessary social change that nature has imposed.
Therefore…
Global warming is caused by anything but CO2. Chicken droppings, faries from mars, Alien flap jacks, rabid farting cockroaches, the phases of Venus, or invisible volcanoes… But by God, it’s to to be anything, just anything, just so long as it’s NOT CO2.
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Daemon,
Your close mindedness (post 637, 641 and 642) is at the root of your obstinate denial of the truth. You complain that I can’t add 1 plus 1 (post 643). I assure you that 1+1 is equal to 2 and not 7 as you seem to think. You assume the second 1 is a 6 so you can obtain the answer you want. This is not science. BTW, this is the approximate scale of your mistake.
For example, you consider the precession of the equinoxes out of context with the other effects and falsely conclude that the climate should be cooling (post 640). I really don’t blame you personally for this mistake, as this error was made by others and you just accept the results because you lack the background to understand it for yourself. Apparently, you haven’t examined the relative phases of the forcing influences and/or you fail to grasp what it means. If you had, you would have noticed that the Earth’s tilt is getting smaller (enhances warming) and that the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit is getting smaller (also enhances warming). These effects cancel the cooling that would result from precession and is why the current interglacial has been both longer and cooler than prior ones.
As far as CO2 causing warming, I’ve never said that this is not the case. I’ve only said that doubling CO2 causes less than 1C of warming and not the 3-4C you’ve been deluded into believing. At most, the first 0.67C of warming is caused by increased absorption and the subsequent redirection of this energy to the surface, the remaining few tenths of a degree are from the net climate feedback mechanisms. It’s the 3-4C increase that’s a speculative conjecture and which has no support from first principles physics or the data. This the only place where I deviate from the AGW pseudo science, of course the consequences of this truth ripples down to give the appearance of a larger disconnect.
George
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Daemon/Robin,
I know what your predictable response will be, so let me nip this in the bud. Your response will be that there are numerous ‘peer reviewed’ papers that support an excessively large climate sensitivity.
These all suffer from one of 2 problems. First is that they assume the climate sensitivity is constant for all time and second is that anything that isn’t otherwise understood and quantified is lumped into a GHG effect.
The first point is that the climate sensitivity is not constant. Most of the amplification is from the ebb and flow of surface ice. When we are at maximum ice, the feedback term for enhanced cooling drops to zero and the feedback term for enhanced warming is at it’s maximum. Similarly, when we are at minimum ice, the feedback term for enhanced warming becomes zero and the feedback term for enhanced cooling is at it’s maximum. The planet is at maximum ice at the depths of an ice age and at minimum ice during interglacial periods, which is where we are today. Any attempt to infer the current climate sensitivity for enhanced warming based on the transition between glacial and interglacial epochs is fundamentally flawed. None of the papers which infer the climate sensitivity from ice core records takes this crucial factor into account.
Whether or not ice grows or shrinks depends on the relative ratio of winter to summer. Currently, there are 4 more days of summer than winter in the Northern hemisphere, so the fact that ice is decreasing in the Northern hemisphere should come as no surprise. A simple minded analysis would conclude that the effects in the hemispheres cancel. Four more days of summer in the North means 4 more days of winter in the South. This assumes that the 2 hemispheres respond the same to the relative difference between winter and summer. This is not the case for three easy to understand reasons. First, the northern polar ice cap can melt from both the top and bottom, while the southern ice cap can melt only from the top. Second, the southern polar ice cap is at a substantially higher elevation than the northern polar ice cap. It should be indisputable that it’s colder at higher elevations and the data supports this as the average temperature at the South pole is substantially colder than the average temperature at the North pole. Third, the southern polar ice cap is land locked by the continent of Antarctica. In the North, this is only true for the portion of the ice cap over Greenland, which unlike Antarctica, is not centered on the pole.
My second point is that the climate sensitivity ‘conclusions’ frequently assume that anything not otherwise understood and quantified is lumped into an effect of CO2. Consider the calculations of the climate sensitivity based on the temperature increases seen since the start of the IR. This suffers from 2 flaws. First is that solar variability and the aforementioned ebb and flow of surface ice is not accounted for and assumed to be the result of anthropogenic CO2. Second is that the presumed rise in temperature is smaller than the error margin of the data, furthermore; data from different sets are merged with little consideration given to matching data across data set boundaries. This is the basic flaw in the hockey stick.
If this isn’t enough, consider that a climate sensitivity of 3C requires that the initial 3.7 W/m^2 becomes amplified to 16.6 W/m^2. Any effect that more than doubles the initial 3.7 W/m^2 will result in an intrinsically unstable system. If the climate was really this unstable, it would have latched up billions of years ago and we would have never evolved to know the difference. Another consideration is that the basic gain of the system, that is the ratio between incident power and surface power is only about 1.16. To the extent that all energy/power is treated equally, this sets the upper limit of a post feedback 3.7 W/m^2 increase to about 4.3 W/m^2, which results in a temperature increase of only 0.79C.
George
00
I forgot to mention the fourth easy understand reason why the 2 hemispheres respond differently. In the North, the snow belt is over land, where snow and ice has a chance to accumulate. In the South, the snow belt is over water, which makes the accumulation of ice and snow next to impossible.
George
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
Would you like to think about this for a bit?
I could post a small sample of the 60 or 70 papers in the literature that have done independent estimates of climate sensitivity, if you like, and you could try to point out where each assumes that the climate sensitivity is constant for all time.
I’ll think you’ll find, given that it is known that the climate sensitivity is not constant for all time, and is only approximately logarithmic with increasing CO2 that very few indeed will make this assumption.
Do you really stand by this so obviously fallacious criticism?
00
George:
I’ve been following the established wisdom that smaller time steps are more accurate, but I’m interested if you have a workable demonstration example of a simulation where larger steps maintain energy balance.
http://lnx-bsp.net/gnucap/r30.pdf
That’s my dabblings on the subject, using a circuit simulation. The standard approach to circuit simulation is to solve the equations for voltage and current (i.e. maintain charge balance) which effectively offloads any error into energy. Most circuit designs involve a substantial proportion of resistivity, thus they throw away plenty of energy anyhow, and no one cares about energy balance.
When simulating switch-mode power supplies, nonlinear chokes and filters, you get a situation where the transfer of energy between components is much larger than the energy lost to resistivity in each transfer cycle — energy balance becomes important or otherwise your simulation turns into perpetual motion.
It has indeed been my experience that in order to prevent errors from accumulating it is necessary to grind down to the finest timescale and simulate the exact details of what is going on. Even relatively simple circuit simulations can be made to defy thermodynamics when the step size is of the same order as local event time constants.
00
Tell,
Lets take your example of a switching power supply. Yes, in order to simulate it’s exact behavior, you must know all of the component values and the precise connectivity and simulate with small time steps. However, for the case of climate simulations, the component values and even how they are connected is largely unknown. If you’re simulating a switching supply and using incorrect component values or the voltage divider in the feedback path is incorrect, it doesn’t matter how small the time step is, it will still not simulate correctly.
If you consider the power supply as a black box, with an input and output, you can measure how it behaves and generate a transfer function describing it’s behavior, independent of the actual implemetation inside the box. Now, to simulate it from the transfer function, your time steps only need to be small, relative to how fast the inputs and/or outputs are changing and not small, relative to the requirements of the internal implementation.
Another example is a computer program. You can specify an incredibly complex function with a few lines of code, and simulate it at a high level, independent of the processor running it. To simulate the program by modeling the computer itself at the Spice circuit level, much smaller time tics and far more detail is required, all of which must be exactly correct. One wrong connection out of millions can make it behave incredibly wrong. The bottom line is that unless the model is accurate, the timestep is moot, moreover; as the time step gets smaller, the model must be even more accurate.
George
00
Yes, but some components have more influence than others… only you generally wouldn’t know that unless you have done the fine-grained simulation. Once the general properties of a power supply are well-known you could switch over to a black-box model and just use a transfer function of power-in vs power-out and efficiency. Note that the transfer function used in this way does presume a certain energy balance (say 10% loss or whatever) but the fine-grained model was necessary to actually discover what that efficiency value really is (or take careful measurements of a real circuit).
Interesting example, but that’s a very special property of computer design, that allows the high level program to operate in a manner that is abstracted from the circuit underneath. If you think about all the random ways you could assemble a billion transistors, only a small fraction of those have the ability to run any high level program (regardless of programming language issues).
If you believe that the atmosphere of the earth shares a similar property of layering high level abstractions in a manner that is isolated from the fine grain details underneath, then I’m not in a position to prove you wrong, but it does seem unlikely that such a thing would happen by accident.
Consider an example like evaporation at ground level and condensation in the high atmosphere. Clearly heat is moving upwards (and perhaps sideways as well) so you need a transfer function for heat in that situation. However, we know that clouds form structured cells (of various types), I mean you can look up and see cloud formations are not random. You would need to either prove that those structures have no influence on the overall transfer function, or find a way to model the structure without requiring fine grain detail to do it. Either way, there’s a leap involved.
00
There is one fundamental fact: no matter how complex the simulation, a simulation is NOT the real thing. As a consequence, a simulation CANNOT act identically with the real thing. At best, simulations are good enough for strictly delimited purposes. They are NOT and never will be capable of generating all the fine detailed behavior of the real thing.
Ultimately the questions “How good is good enough?” and “How do we know when it is good enough?” must be answered. That takes a clear specification of purpose AND a set of sufficiently accurate and detailed measurements of the real thing. If you can do that, why simulate? Especially when the question you need answering is “How is the thing currently behaving?” Anything else is simply a concatenation of what if, maybe, and could it be without a stain of will be.
I suggest the purpose behind the AGW simulations is not to determine any degree of will be. Its to give an excuse for one group to grab power and control over another group in order to change behavior and extract tribute. The current simulations looked like they were good enough for that purpose until reality stopped behaving like the simulations. Its still not certain that they were not good enough for that purpose.
00
Tel,
The efficiency of a specific instance of a power supply can be determined precisely, and with far less information, by measuring the input and output power, then it can be by simulating the circuit inside. The reason is that the component values need to be known exactly, not just as nominal values with a tolerance. I’m not arguing that a detailed simulation will not be more precise, just that to get meaningful precision, you need to know far, far more information.
The climate has the added complication of chaos (for example at the boundaries between cold air and warm air), which makes detailed simulations even more difficult. Just consider how much information is required to precisely model the butterfly effect. The only way to get around this is to use time steps (and even grid sizes) that are large enough that the chaos can be modeled with averages. This is largely why weather models, which are based on the same GCM’s as climate models, start to diverge after just a few days. While the model is still simulating a climate, it’s no longer simulating the climate.
Considering your cloud example, if you want to simulate at that level of detail, you need to know precisely what types of clouds are over what parts of the surface at what times, This means accurately modeling cloud formation, which is another chaotic process. If instead, you can say something like X% of the surface will be covered with clouds which on average, have an optical thickness of tau, you can accurately simulate with averages. But to do this, you need to use time steps over which such averages are meaningful.
George
00
Lionell Griffith wrote:
For prediction mostly. But in climate, also to understand the mechanisms by which the macroscopic effects arise.
Take the modelling of aircraft which produces the maintenance and part replacement schedules. The physics of vibration are understood, and the stresses are understood, but the calculation of when are particular bolt or panel will accumulate enough damage to fail is too complicated to solve without modelling.
And so we simulate.
00
co2isnotevil:
Do you stand by your claim that every ‘peer reviewed’ paper assumes that the climate sensitivity is constant for all time?
Because I claim that I can produce some that don’t.
00
Robin,
I’m sure that there must be some that don’t, but the ones most often cited, for example, those which ‘derive’ it from ice core data, certainly do. The claim I’m most comfortable with is that any paper, peer reviewed or not, which claims anything more than about 1C for doubling CO2 must have a flaw. If you want to cite one that you think doesn’t, I will find the flaw for you. Pick the paper that you think is the most solid, as I don’t have the time to debunk a long list. Any paper that claims ‘the model says so’, is automatically disqualified from consideration, as the errors are obscured/obfuscated by the model. Try and find something that makes a claim based on an actual physical mechanism.
George
00
OK, I accept that if your model uses empirical constants to represent aggregate activity, then it will only make sense when operating on a scale (in both time and space) that does match the aggregation that generated your empirical constants in the first place.
I have trouble with things like hurricanes (or cyclones) that are:
* Physically large
* Long lived (a week or two typically)
* Move large amounts of energy
Admittedly, I don’t have the statistics, and I’m pushing an extreme example here… but once we accept that hurricanes / cyclones do exist, we have to also consider the possibility of a whole range of smaller and briefer structures right down to the local scale. Chaotic systems *typically* deliver some sort of power-law distribution so for want of better data I’ll presume that until I see otherwise.
Where do you slip the knife in? However you slice the fractal fruit-jelly you end up with half a fruit on either side (and that applies to slices in both time and space). The bigger you slice it, the more empirical data you are going to need. The smaller you slice it the more you attempt to fill in missing empirical data with simulation. I don’t see any evident layer where a neat separation between micro and macro exists.
Do you have some real measured statistics on frequency / lifetime of atmospheric structure vs size of structure? Does the histogram have any gaps?
Going back to the electronics for a moment, it should be noted that black-box separation of things like power supplies is a design feature. It is enforced by convenience of packaging, marketing, manufacture, maintenance, etc. The reason the power supply has a neat input and output is because someone wanted it to be that way.
I would want exceptionally good physical evidence in order to believe that weather patterns showed evidence of similar design principles 🙂
00
Tel,
Weather patterns don’t have an easily discerned black box boundary, but the Earth’s climate system certainly does. For example, the top level black box for the climate has the Sun as it’s input (if you’re picky you can add cosmic rays and internal heat) and several interdependent state variables, or outputs. These are the surface temperature, cloud top temperature, percentage of clouds and the percentage of surface ice. The last 2 affect the albedo, which in turn, sets the fraction of the incident energy, other than that which is reflected, that must exit the system in order to achieve an energy balance.
The percentage of cloud coverage is an interesting attribute, as an energy balance can be maintained, independent of the fraction of cloud coverage, that is, for all values of cloud coverage and incident energy, there exists a single combination of surface temperature and cloud top temperature, which satisfies the energy balance. What makes this more interesting, is that the average percentage of cloud coverage for the Earth is remarkably constant.
Hurricanes tend to develop as a response to the surface being warmer than it wants to be, relative to the energy balance. This provides a mechanism for the Earth to quickly dissipate large chunks of energy in order to maintain it’s energy balance. The idea that the Earth is in a constant state of energy imbalance is pure and simple junk. The system oscillates between being over and under on a diurnal basis at the fine scale, on a weekly basis at the medium scale of weather and on a seasonal basis at a coarse scale. A net change in stored energy, i.e. a net surface temperature change, results when there is more over than under, or more under than over, when integrated over days to months.
The time tic I’ve been using is 1 month. This is large enough to be able to treat weather systems as the result of an aggregate behavior and small enough to account for the asymmetries of the Earth’s response to orbit induced energy variability. It’s also convenient because I have weather satellite data, aggregated to 1 month periods, which I can validate my model against.
In principle, the way to slice the system is to draw a Gaussian surface around the chaos. You can do this by considering the Earth’s stored energy as half being in a pool of hot and the other half in a pool of cold and to draw isotherms for the average temperatures of these 2 pools. Most of the chaos exists between these 2 isotherms, as the hot fights the cold in an effort to achieve an energy balance (thermal equilibrium).
Interestingly enough, the average temperature of the cold pool coincides with the ocean temperature at the inflection point separating the deep cold ocean (part of the cold pool of energy) and the thermocline, while the average temperature of the warm pool coincides with the inflection point separating the top of the thermocline from the warm surface waters (part of the hot pool of energy). This is no coincidence, as the thermocline acts as a layer of insulation between these 2 pools of energy.
George
00
Tell,
Let me put the modeling issue in more relevant terms. Consider a Carnot Engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine), which is the model I use for weather. We can tell everything about the energy behavior of this from knowing the temperature of the hot and cold pools driving it. In principle, you can also model the chaos inside the engine, for example, the combustion cylinder of an internal combustion engine and arrive at the same results, but why do this unless you’re trying to design an optimum combustion chamber. In the case of weather, the combustion chamber is the atmosphere and isn’t even tunable, moreover; it’s physical properties are dynamic. The temperatures of the hot and cold pools are easily determined, which tells us the efficiency and how much work is performed (energy not otherwise heating the planet) based on the amount of incident energy. This is all we need to know in order to establish the energy balance of the climate system.
George
00
co2isnotevil wrote:
Okay.
One problem I have with that is that I’m only aware of one paper that derives CS from ice core data, so I’m not sure what these “most often cited ones” that you talk about are.
Can you point me to some of them?
I’ll have a read of them, and see if I agree with your claim that they assume constant CS for all time.
00
Okay.
I’m certainly not qualified to guess which of the 97% of papers estimating climate sensitivity that put it at greater than 1°C would be the most sound, but have a go at this one.
Using multiple observationally-based constraints to
estimate climate sensitivity
I think that it is a good choice because it is a meta-analysis combining the findings of many independent observationally based estimates using Bayesian Analysis. In this way it brings the strongest argument for a > 1°C CS to the fore: That there are multiple lines of independent evidence showing that this is the case.
00
Robin,
OK, I know you’re a math guy, which is probably why you like this one, but consider what happens when you add my 3 sigma estimate of a sensitivity of 0.75C +/- 0.5C for doubling CO2 from 280ppm to 560ppm, and the many other lower estimates done by others who don’t buy in to the AGW hype. When you do this, a Bayesian analysis will produce far different results. This is a garbage in, garbage out kind of statistical analysis. It can only be properly applied when the statistical limits of the estimates are well defined and accurately determined, which of course, they are not. Most, if not all, of the limits are based on sets of assumptions, at least one of which is wrong if it’s projecting the center of a climate sensitivity greater than about 1C.
FYI, my estimate comes from running a model which establishes a post feedback, thermodynamic equilibrium and which uses the 2008 HITRAN data to establish the effects of GHG concentration changes. I use my own version of MODTRAN and backend analysis tools, all written in C. It’s very fast and utilizes logarithmicly scaled wavelength/wavenumber buckets with a programmable nominal resolution of between 10nm @1u to >.001nm @ 1u (default .1nm @ 1u, 1nm @ 10u etc.), Lorentz integration limits are programmable from 25% to less than 1ppm (default 5ppm), programmable vertical atmospheric slices (default 4, lower trop, middle trop, upper trop and stratosphere) and the wavelength range defaults to 4 decades (.1u to 1000u), which is also programmable. The total error, relative to convergence, is less than .01% at the default settings.
This produces a sensitivity of about 0.75C for doubling CO2. The limits I applied for 3 sigma are an over estimate. If I dial in the uncertainties in the absorption line data, most of which are well under 1%, the 3 sigma limits are quite a bit smaller. I should point out that the sensitivity is almost insensitive to the various programming options, although the absolute value of the surface temperature is over estimated using ‘fast’ programming options and converges to a single answer as more compute intensive limits are applied.
I realize that this is a model, and in general, I distrust models, hence the increase in uncertainty. However, the model does produce results that are entirely consistent with my estimates based on the top level gain of the system, i.e., the measured ratio of input power to surface power. Technically, this provides 2 lower estimates of the climate sensitivity to add to the Bayesian Analysis, the centers of which are well within 1 sigma of each other.
George
00
Okay, I know that you have your opinions about what climate sensitivity is, but not including your estimate isn’t a flaw in the paper, because it hasn’t been published, so there is no way they could have included it.
If you have some examples from the peer reviewed literature of these “many other lower estimates” that should have been included, I’d be interested in having a look at them.
To justify that you’d need to show why the papers analysed are garbage. I don’t think that you’ve done that.
Again, I’m not convinced. Your argument is circular. “Estimates of climate sensitivity greater than 1K are wrong because they are greater than 1K.”
Similarly “everyone else’s model is wrong because they don’t agree with my model” is also circular, and especially unconvincing in the light of your belief that a model is only accurate if its time step is large.
How are you treating water vapour feedback?
You were saying before that a photon reflected from the atmosphere doesn’t warm the surface, whereas one direct from the sun does. I suspect that you’re not handling the greenhouse effect correctly.
Again this is not a shortcoming in the paper. You haven’t published either of these.
Also they are not independent estimates, since they are both based on your personal physics, which seems to be different from the objective one out there in reality … at least with respect to the greenhouse effect. But to back that up I’d have to look at your code. Are you happy to upload it to a file sharing site?
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Lionell – There is one fundamental fact: no matter how complex the simulation, a simulation is NOT the real thing. As a consequence, a simulation CANNOT act identically with the real thing. At best, simulations are good enough for strictly delimited purposes. They are NOT and never will be capable of generating all the fine detailed behavior of the real thing.
Not true. Quantum mechanical models for example can give solutions exact to 7 decimal places. Mechanical models for structures like bridges and buildings can give accuracies to several decimal places. For complex chaotic systems like the climate, the precise results of the model are always wrong in an absolute sense, but like the quantum mechanical model, they provide valuable statistical data, and can be used to see how regional variances in climate patterns change over time among other things.
Lionell – Ultimately the questions “How good is good enough?” and “How do we know when it is good enough?” must be answered.
In the case of climate models, accuracy of the model can be verified by running the model backward in time and seeing how it matches historical data. A model that predicts well 100 years into the past, can be expected to predict well 100 years into the future.
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co2isworsethanevil – What results do you get when you run your model backward in time.
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Daemon,
Running the model backwards in time is a meaningless exercise. Unlike Quantum Mechanics, there’s no anticlimate and no time reversal symmetry, although a lot of the junk coming from the AGW’ers seems like anticlimate. Instead, you set a starting point and run the model forward. A well designed climate model will eventually converge, independent of the initial conditions. In fact, a very good test for any climate model is to run the model forward from a point in the past using different initial conditions, and if it doesn’t converge to the same future climate, the model is broken. In this respect, my model is very good.
George
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Robin,
I didn’t say that a photon re-emitted from the atmosphere and directed to the surface doesn’t heat it, I just said that such a photon can’t be considered an input to the system, as those from the Sun are. The photon coming from the atmosphere was originally surface energy, which was incident solar energy before that. Forcing is an attribute you can’t assign to GHG reflected energy. If you take the Sun away, it doesn’t matter how much GHG is in the atmosphere, it will still get cold. GHG reflected energy is simply energy that’s been slightly delayed from leaving the planet, but ultimately it will leave. Yes, it has an effect on the surface temperature, but surface energy is not driving the climate, solar energy is driving the climate. Surface energy and the resulting surface temperature are just dependent variables of the system.
The net feedback from water vapor is close to neutral. Yes, warmer surface temperatures evaporates more water, but other than a slight increase in the atmospheres capacity to hold water near the surface, there’s not the huge effect you seem to assume. Besides, evaporating water transports significant heat *AWAY* from the surface, moreover; when it falls back to the surface as rain, it further cools the surface.
George
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This sort of initial condition sensitivity analysis has been omitted from all of the AGW papers that I have read. Are they doing it but not bothering to mention it, or just skipping the analysis?
The result should be some statistical profile as a function of time to show the decay of initial transients, but I’ve yet to see one of these published.
George, you mentioned elsewhere that you are not modelling the full chaos but you presume some empirical averages. In which case your model is virtually guaranteed to converge under every circumstance. Doing the analysis on a full chaos model is much more interesting.
BTW: “Anticlimate” is when a group of people gather together to watch the world come to an end… then nothing happens!
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Tel,
Based on the weak arguments used to justify the assumptions in many of these models, I doubt that they even understand that an initial condition sensitivity analysis is part of what *must* be done to validate any model.
Yes, modeling the chaos is a more interesting intellectual pursuit, it’s just that it’s only useful for short term weather forecasting and is more of an impediment for long term climate modeling.
So, based on Obama’s speech at the UN today, is he the anticlimatrist?
George
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This may be somewhat off-topic, but:
1. I would make the observation that forecasting climate change while using as input only surface temperatures is, in the opinion of myself (and others), absurd. I have yet to see much in the way of assurance that this practice is accurate, logical, reliable, or useful “science.” You are entitled to your opinion, but that is mine.
2. As an ‘ancient’ sounding guy I might point out what everybody seems to avoid mentioning is that the atmosphere, in which weather and climate exists, is three dimensional. Observations slice it at a fourth dimension, time.
3. Vertical observations continuously record temperature, moisture, pressure, height, plus wind speed and direction They accurately locate the tropopause. Several other useful values are calculated. Investigate a Skew-T chart and you will see what these values are. Very little has changed in soundings over the last half century except for upgrading the equipment sensors and automating data reduction.
4. Vast amounts of money are spent by my (US) government to fund studies, but we still don’t have three dimensional models of any note. I am sure this is due mostly to the unimaginable complexity of even analyzing, let alone modeling so many variables, or for that matter knowing how everything really interacts.
5. So I think we need to fund basic atmospheric research based on what our atmosphere actually looks like. To that end I would suggest money spent on enhanced sounding equipment to include, for example, continuous measurement during upper air runs of CO2 plus at least some aerosol types/quantity/size at a minimum. Maybe the “system” should be designed for easy add-ons. Maybe there is no need to even report these “extra” values in standard observations, but to batch process them into auxiliary reports for basic science at least until we learn more.
Until real physicists and atmospheric scientists have good, open, non-biased studies supported with high quality data, and pure basic science about how all these things act, react, and influence weather/climate, we are probably doomed to what I believe is mostly guesswork climate forecasts based primarily on doctored ‘junk’ surface temperature observations.
I agree that it will take time to gather enough data to get started, but if we don’t begin now, when should we start? I just don’t think funding more models and studies without basic research, and the data to support it, will be very productive or cost effective.
In my view complexity is conquered by nibbling off small pieces for research and analysis. But however it is done, it requires extensive and reliable data. We might not even get much of value out of this investment, but how can we afford not to try?
A little “history” of weather forecasting: Back in sixties the U.S. Weather Bureau (I think that was what it was called in those days), using an IBM 7030 Stretch Computer, a horse for its day, decided to run their “primitive equations” through the system to make a 24 hour weather forecast. They gathered the data and kicked it off. The forecast was completed after 48 hours. I don’t know how accurate it was, but it was a start, even if too late for operational use.
Yeah, I now — that was a ‘weather’ forecast. So what? Don’t the Chinese maintain that the longest journey begins with the first step?
That’s my two cents worth.
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If you are looking at the earth’s energy balance at the top of the atmosphere, sure, radiation from the atmosphere is internal to the system.
But when looking at the global mean surface temperature, then a photon from the sun is no different from one from the atmosphere.
In climate science is the change in net irradiance at the tropopause. GHG reflected energy doesn’t cross the tropopause, so it is a positive forcing. In climate models only the long lived GHGs are called forcing, because water vapour is better handled as a feedback.
As you know, over the industrial era, the long lived greenhouse gasses have increased the radiative forcing by over 1.6 W/m², whereas changes in solar irradiance have resulted in changes in forcing of less than 10% of that.
It is not true to say that solar energy is “driving the climate”. Long lived greenhouse gasses are currently having a far greater effect. (And that’s independent of what you think the climate sensitivity is.)
Water vapour increases between 6 and 7.5% for each degree of warming. Is this what you call a “slight increase”, or do you have your own numbers on this?
Sure. Fairly small numbers in terms of net energy when compared to greenhouse forcing though.
Falling rain does not destroy energy.
Do you mean that once fallen, rain often evaporates, by which mechanism the latent energy of vaporisation is absorbed?
That doesn’t make any difference on the 70% of the planet that is already water.
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co2isnotevil:
Do you really think you’ve found a flaw in the climate sensitivity estimates of “Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity”, with the claim that your personal estimates were not included in the analysis?
Can you see why I don’t think that that is a reasonable flaw?
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Robin,
Consider that the world wide yearly water flux in and out of the atmosphere is about 1m (average annual rainfall). This requires evaporating 31.7nm of water per second, which is about .0317 cc/sec over a square meter, which is about 31.7 mg per second per m^2. To raise 31.7mg of water from 16C (average surface temperature) up to 100C (equivalent temperature of energy to vaporize) requires 2.66 Kcal/sec, which is 11.12 J/sec per m^2 -> 11.12 W/m^2. In other words, it takes 3% of the incident solar energy to transport 11.12 W/m^2 into the atmosphere to drive the weather. The peak rate is twice this since evaporation primarily occurs during the day. The energy to drive the weather comes from the heat which is extracted from evaporated water as it condenses into clouds and rain (look at how hurricanes work). The net result is a loss of 11.12 W/m^2 from the surface, which is otherwise not contributing to increasing surface temperatures.
You are correct that falling rain doesn’t destroy energy, but the rain that falls is far cooler than the water that originally evaporated. This results in a net loss of heat from the planet. BTW, as water evaporates from the ocean, the temperature of the ocean drops.
The flaw in the paper you pointed me to was the selection of climate sensitivity estimates subject to the analysis. Remember, it only takes one experiment to invalidate a hypothesis and mine is not the only one that shows a far lower climate sensitivity.
George
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You don’t need to boil water to get it to evaporate. The latent heat of vaporisation of water at 16°C is a little less that 44,000 J/mol. (source)
44,000 J/mol / (18 g/mol) * 31.7mg in kilocalories is only 0.0185 kilocalories. Not 2.66.
A drop in temperature is not a loss in heat. Rainfall does not destroy heat, nor any other form of energy. And neither does it remove it from the planet.
My point was that this is not faster after (or during) rain, because the ocean is already wet on the surface.
Then you need to show what was wrong with their selection methodology, because you certainly haven’t shown that their selection methodology was flawed yet.
Under that logic your hypothesis was invalidated by every paper analysed by the paper. And these are not the only ones that show a far higher climate sensitivity.
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Suppose snow was falling (which is only water after all). Are you going to tell me that falling snow does not cool the ground? That is hard to believe.
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If it melts, then it takes heat from the ground to overcome the latent heat of fusion of the water.
If it doesn’t melt and the ground is warmer than the snow, the surface of the ground will change temperature towards than of the temperature of the snow and vice-versa by conduction.
In the latter case heat is not lost. All the heat in the ground and all the heat in the snow are still there, just redistributed between the ground and snow.
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Robin,
Yes, you’re right, the heat of vaporizing water is different than the energy to boil water, it’s actually higher. If you think about it, you must add a lot more energy to a pot of boiling water to evaporate all of the water. A gram calorie is equal to about 4.18 Joules, which is the conversion factor I used. I said Kcal in the previous post, but I meant gram-cal. There are 4180 joules per Kcal.
At 18 grams of H20 per mole, it takes 18*100 gram-calories to raise one mole of water from 0C to 100C. 18*100*4.19 = 7542 Joules/mole, as compared to the latent heat of evaporation of 44000 Joules/mole. So in fact, starting from OC, it takes 5.8 times more energy to evaporate water than it does to boil it.
To clarify again, it’s not so much the rain that cools the planet, but the complete cycle of evaporation and condensation. Rain amplifies the effect on land. As you pointed out earlier, rain falling on a hot surface quickly evaporates to start the cycle over again.
To clarify yet again, oceans always cool as water evaporates from them. Oceans will cool when rain falls only if the temperature of the rain is lower than the temperature of the ocean, which is often the case. Boiling water effectively cools as steam evaporates from it, which is why the temperature of boiling water never exceeds 100C at 1 ATM. The rate of heat going in is exactly equal to the energy required to produce the steam boiling off.
A final point is that what I presented is not a hypothesis, but a test. There’s a big difference. You also need to understand that AGW as a substantial driver of climate change is not even a hypothesis, but simply a speculation reinforced by the Tinkerbell effect.
George
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Nope. It’s intending to communicate the truth, with some grace.
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I can’t admire your people management skills then.
Do you have any friends?
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co2isnotevil:
Okay, I didn’t do any numbers after I spotted your slip.
The numbers are:
Heat transfer to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration: 80 Watts/m²
Greenhouse gas back radiation: 333 Watts/m²
Earth’s global energy budget.
It’s measurable, but it doesn’t dominate. And it is understood and included in climate analysis including modelling.
And water vapour feedback is strongly postitive.
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MrPete, your first sentence to me: “Please study the subject a bit more before spouting the consensus talking points.”
Please explain what you mean by “spouting”, and give some examples of how the word is used in this meaning without trying to offend.
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Robin,
Did you read the paper you cited? In the same paragraph where 333 W/m^2 was mentioned, it stated:
” …note that considerable uncertainties exist, and especially that there were problems in accurate simulation of thermal emission from a cold, dry, cloud-free atmosphere, and a dependence on water vapor content. The latter may relate to the formulation of the water vapor continuum.”
It went on to say that there is some evidence that this is overestimated.
George
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co2isnotevil:
Not all of it.
Sure. It’s still a lot more than 80W.
Is that your reading of the following paragraph:
“It has been argued that downward LW radiation is more likely to be underestimated owing to the
view from satellites which will miss underlying low clouds and make the cloud base too high. Wild
and Roeckner (2006) have argued that the longwave fluxes should typically be rather higher than
lower in climate models, which, in turn, are higher than the best estimate given here. Nevertheless,
as they discuss, uncertainties are substantial. Zhang et al (2006) found that the surface LW flux was
very sensitive to assumptions about tropospheric water vapor and temperatures, but did not analyze
the dependence on clouds. Yet the characteristics of clouds on which the back radiation is most
dependent, such as cloud base, are not well determined from space-based measurements (Gupta et
al. 1999), and hence the need for missions such as CloudSat (e.g., Stephens et al. 2002; Haynes and
Stephens 2007). There are also sources of error in how cloud overlap is treated and there is no
unique way to treat the effects of overlap on the downward flux, which introduces uncertainties.
For mid and upper level clouds the cloud emissivity assumptions will also affect the estimated
downward flux. Another source of error is the amount of water vapor between the surface and the
cloud base. In the tropics, the effect of continuum absorption strongly affects the impact of cloud
emission on surface longwave fluxes.”
Because they seem to me to be talking more about a likely underestimation than an overestimation.
In any case 333 is their best estimate as at last year. And that it a lot more than 80W. (And of that 80W, not all is lost to space … it looks like half to two thirds is back-radiated; So the figure for heat lost to the atmosphere/earth system by convection is nearer 30W).
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Robin.
My point it that this paper is full of hedges, assumptions, over and under estimations. If you want to quantify the energy absorbed by GHG, you need to break it up into 2 pieces. The fraction where the surface is not covered by clouds and the fraction covered by clouds. Where the surface is cloudless, the Plank distribution of surface energy is filtered by the absorption spectrum between the surface and space. Where there are clouds, the Plank distribution of cloud energy is filtered by the atmospheric absorption spectrum between the clouds and space. The difference is mostly the amount of water vapor, which is almost absent from clouds tops to space.
GHG absorption in the atmosphere between clouds and the surface has almost no net effect. Clouds are already mostly opaque to IR radiation. Even a very thin cloud cover will absorb nearly 80% of surface IR. The concentration of GHG between the clouds and the surface makes no difference to the amount of absorbed energy, as it’s all being absorbed by the atmosphere anyway (although in this case, by clouds). Of the energy absorbed by the atmosphere half is directed up and half down. This must be true for the atmosphere with or without clouds. You should already understand steradains and how they apply to BB radiators, perfect or otherwise.
The numbers I presented in the last post are from a properly performed analysis which even includes accounting for surface energy passing through clouds. This analysis matches the energy balance required to match satellite data within a few percent. This analysis also predicts that doubling CO2 from 280ppm to 560ppm increases the amount absorbed by CO2 by 3.6 W/m^2. This is consistent with the consensus claim of 3.7 W/m^2. The consensus value is from older absorption line data, while mine is based on the latest 2008 HITRAN data.
In any event, absorption between the surface and clouds has zero impact on the Earth’s energy balance.
George
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Hi Robin,
OK, English trivia for the day:
Webster’s: : spout (transitive verb), definition 2a: to speak or utter readily, volubly, and at length
Perhaps you would prefer “blurting” or “reciting”?
“To start the history contest, Jack recited the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. In response, John spouted back the entire Declaration Of Independence from memory, earning huge applause and an “A” for his effort.”
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An update on Mr Kundu: http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20100621/NEWS01/706219953&news01ad=1
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