Here’s a devout follower telling off his own kind for showing their “faith”.
“Beyond Belief” (Climate Spectator)
The “believers” have suddenly realized how uncool it is to talk about “beliefs” when it’s supposed to be about science. So the rush is on to post articles warning believers to hide their “faith” and to throw in token comments about evidence instead. Indeed the Real Deniers are scrambling to claim the “name” skeptic that they used to despise.
It’s a measure of how far this debate has come. Such was the success of the PR campaign, some skeptics gave up on the term and opted to use “realist”. But the skeptics have been proved right time after time, and the unskeptical scientists have been embarrassed by their own conniving words, mistakes, tricks and lies. The resurgence of the word “skeptic” is rising like a rocket.
As I’ve said many times, the opposite of skeptical is gullible. And an unskeptical scientist is an oxymoron.
So here’s Paul Gilding in the publication that panders to the climate industry: Climate Spectator, offering the fake guise of a skeptical soul:
It’s time for true confessions. I don’t believe in climate science.
That’s because I’m a rational person.
How do we know he’s not rational? Because he doesn’t rely on evidence, he relies on authority:
In all these areas, though, from bridges to medicine, we accept the dominant scientific conventions. When a body of qualified scientists reviews the evidence and issues their judgements we act accordingly.
What kind of skeptic accepts the dominant paradigm? A fake one.
Argument from Authority is the mark of an irrational follower.
Gilders decides which theory to follow because he has faith in the international committees, and the so-called consensus that is really an inflated marketing cover for a small coterie of 60 odd scientists. It’s a question of trust. He trusts that people with vested interests will be scrupulously honest and impartial, and will search hard for (and publicize) evidence that shows their past claims to be baseless, inaccurate and that they are now an expert in a dead end.
Gilder is really writing for the believers; he’s telling them to disguise their religious faith because it’s embarrassing:
Belief is actually a dangerous idea in relation to climate science and we should stop using the word in that context. “Belief”, because it’s based by definition on “irrational” thought, tends to lead us to resist counter arguments. In relation to interpreting science this leads to sloppy intellectual behaviour where we discount data that challenges our views and exaggerate the importance of data that supports them.
The believers are acknowledging we are right: Science is about the evidence. He wants to steal our banner, stretch it over his own team, but no banana Paul, sorry. We applaud your token nod to evidence, but deplore your attempt to confuse the issue.
There are deniers on both sides of the fence, there are probably a few on the skeptical side who would continue to disagree no matter what (assuming that some real evidence actually turned up). The difference with the pro catastrophe team is that, almost to a man, it’s hard to find anyone that will admit the bleeding obvious. Name me one person on the pro AGW team who now acknowledges that the Hockey Stick is baseless (wrong proxy, wrong stats, wrong conclusion) and disagrees with hundreds of empirical studies. Anyone who admits that would also have to admit that the climate models (which don’t “predict” a Medieval Warm Period) are inadequate, don’t understand all the forcings, and are therefore woefully inadequate for attribution studies (the ones that “tell” us what caused the latest warming).
Gilders is making a weak attempt to neutralize skeptics. He hits imaginary “deniers” he can’t name and pretends that real skeptics would agree with him, even as he exposes that he is religiously irrational.
He forgot to finish his article though, leaving off the last line, which I’ve helpfully filled in for him:
So when someone asks if you’re a climate believer, tell them no, your far too (ir)rational for that.
Instead tell them you are a committee believer, and slavishly give your brain and money over to faceless self-interested bureaucrats who feed you baseless scares and demand your tithe.
“In relation to interpreting science this leads to sloppy intellectual behaviour where we discount data that challenges our views and exaggerate the importance of data that supports them.”
So Gilding is telling us that it is sloppy to discount data that challenges our views. Unwittingly, he is making a strong argument to *be* a true skeptic.
20
But still more sand blasting required for the rusted-ons…
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/08/ipcc-report-card/
20
—
It is not at all surprising to find the devout fellahin of the catastrophic global climate change religion scuttling for cover in the wake of Climategate and the subsequent political defenestrations they’ve been suffering all over the world.
Here in America, the term “liberal” utterly lost its validity as a political descriptor when it was adopted in the first half of the 20th Century to disguise the arrant fascism that had first pustulated under the “progressive” banner in the 1890s.
As those advocating the collectivist violation of individual human rights are revealed to the general public to be the enemies of social comity, good civil order, and the ability of the average yutz to survive the vicissitudes of reality, they flop gracelessly into other appellations.
The week before last, they were socialists. Last week, they called themselves “Liberals.” Today they’ve resurrected “progressive.” Were it not for the fact that they’re a bunch of Health Nazis as well, I’d expect them to come up with some linkage to Mom’s Apple Pie.
But we shall see.
So when these collectivist tyrant-wannabee clowns can’t sell themselves as True Believers in Big Science (’cause Big Science is rapidly running away from them in frantic efforts to escape the attentions of prosecuting attorneys general), they’re going to try hand-waving themselves as “skeptics.”
How truly good.
—
10
Redefining words and labels for rhetorical purposes instead of trying to explain and clarify only leaves people simultaneously confused and suspicious. Now it’s “climate change” instead of “global warming”, “skepticism” instead of “belief”.
10
In the USSR during the Cold War, a play was produced that contained the following interchange between two bureaucrats:
Boris: Tell me comrade, is black the colour today, or is it white, it would not do to be wrong.
Gregor: I think it is black comrade. Yesterday was white.
Boris: Ah, good. It is so hard to remember which day is what. In memory they all turn to grey.
Gregor (shocked): Comrade! Do not mention such things. It is not good to have such subversive thoughts. We are required to know which colour each day is, and to do so without compromise.
Boris: You are quite right comrade. I must make more effort to know which day is what colour, even though the purpose of my knowing is quite beyond me.
The whole thing got past the censors, but cause wry smiles every time the play was performed.
Perhaps the Sceptics-formerly-known-as-Warmists would not find it funny at all.
10
To be skeptical is good, to claim, as you do in your handbook, that the warming has stopped is poor science.
10
Ahh one of the minions of the forces of confusion have dropped by to say that I’m not allowed to say “The warming has stopped since 2001” even though it was accurate when I wrote it, backed by research, that I didn’t claim it proved AGW was wrong or that the world would not get warmer at some later date (but does show the models were wrong and other forces are at work).
Apart from a cherry picked el nino, no one has convincing evidence that it has warmed lately. Just noise.
20
And extremely naughty of Professor Phil Jones to back Jo Nova up by admitting to the BBC in February that there has been ‘no statistically significant warming’ since 1998.
10
Cherry picking a few years worth of data is really bad science too!
10
The difference between Jones and Nova is that Jones knows it takes a longer period of time in order to show any statistical significance. Nova doesn’t get that.
10
—
Crumple writes:
On the contrary. In the analysis of observed phenomena, the validity of a conjecture can be tested over “a longer period of time by using historical data, including (with cognizance of the limits of accuracy) proxy assessment methods.
What Ms. Nova appreciates – and which Prof. Jones and his e-mail correspondents have striven with vicious desperation to suppress in the refereed literature – is that such analyses not only fail to support the anthropogenic carbon dioxide forcing mechanism at the center of the “catastrophic climate change” blunder but provide evidence for assessments which disprove the AGW cabal’s contentions.
But, of course, Crumple doesn’t want to get that.
—
10
Crumple: #10
August 31st, 2010 at 6:02 pm says…
Crumple, what you don’t get is, if something is statistically insignificant, not much can be read into the result.
Whether more time is needed is irrelevant. AT THE TIME OF JO’s COMMENT, NO ONE COULD SAY IF THERE WAS ANY WARMING OR NOT. Indeed, there is a statistical chance that a cooling had occurred.
Going back to the early 90’s, when alarmists like you were saying “a discernable human influence on climate”, satellite temperature readings were barely a dozen years long. BUT THEY STILL USED THE DATA TO ALARM PEOPLE.
Cherry picking on a grand scale. (google the words: Santer, discernable human influence)
Me thinks your screen name has a typo, it should read “Crumble” to reflect the state of your argument.
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I think the core ‘belief’ that has caused much harm is about the efficacy of computer models for complex and poorly understood systems. They caused havoc in UK farming in response to mad cow disease thanks to innumerate and not very bright politicians being swept away by forceful promotion of model outputs (e.g. http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/pn103.pdf). The result was a massive cull of cattle, an action taken by none of the neighbouring states, none of which saw any hint of the catastrophe the cull was touted as prevening. Back in the 1970s, the ludicrous but influential ‘Club of Rome’ saw the astonishing impact of the also ludicrous ‘Limits to Growth’ computer model and associated PR. I suspect this inspired their, and their like’s, vigorous promotion of climate models once they discovered they brought bad news of a suitable kind. We have seen the remarkable political success they have enjoyed from this. All based on fatuous, thought-inhibiting computer models. They should have been seen as curiosities proving amusement for a few, and not to be taken seriously by anyone. I think they have done huge intellectual damage to ‘climate science’, but the harm this had led to for society as a whole is far more serious.
10
—
I do wish that the Brits and their Commonwealth confreres would not use “mad cow disease” when discussing bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
Gives me visions of Elsie with headband, grenades, machine gun, and a grim determination in her expression, set to go a-Rambo-ing all over the countryside.
—
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Recently in a discussion, I pointed out to a declaration of a geologist who had told he didn’t know a geologist who had accepted the CO2 doctrine. The Main Green of the discussion admitted it arguing: “Geologists keep being irrational … They don’t seek the TRUTH.” That stunned me back. Is geology an irrational science to them? What in its methodology makes it “irrational”?
Then I came to an explanatory conclusion. They – the Carbonari warmists – seek for a rationalization – a beautiful doctrine that explains all and everything fits together in a fully internally consistent rational form like in mathematic. That is their rational truth. And the one who put the rationalization in doubt is an irrational skeptic of the rational “science”. Then I came to understanding and recall someone’s declaration: “When you meet an internally consistent system it is always a dirty ideology with all the nasty stuff that belongs to an ideology, which has been refined to scientific like discipline.”
The geologists – the real scientists – don’t seek perfectly rationalized models. They know their models and explanations are imperfect semi-products waiting for reprocessing into better imperfect haft-truth within recurrent process of science evolution – not within a process of rational TRUTH achievement. May be they would consider a perfect looking theory, that don’t call for removing with a better model, an intellectual trap hampering father evolution of their real science.
That why they are irrational skeptics of the truth. 🙂
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To Crumple 9:
“Cherry picking a few years worth of data is really bad science too!”
Jo has a co-culprit in the nasty cherry-picking. Ha has been revealed by CRU ClimateGate. He is Professor Tremberth who was furious writing his e-mail telling it is a travesty their models cannot explain the lack of warming within the first decade of 21st century. 😀
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To Rick Bradford:
Jones admitted no statistically significant warming since 1995.
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Bridges…Science? I thought that was down to Engineering but….If the bridge stays up I can see it and the traffic that uses it……AGW, nope, still cannot see any empirical evidence!
By the way, Where is Jones now? Back at the UEA?
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Jo, you called it once again! As evidenced by the high ‘thumbs down’ numbers. They want ‘skeptic’ for themsleves and they want it Bad!
10
I hate having afterthoughts….. 😛
I am, btw, one of those irrational geologists. I turned away from AGW when I read two newspapers articles, printed about a week apart. One had to do with hurricanes, the other, with a new system they had discovered in the Pacific ocean…. the El Nino! (yes, I know the origins go back 400 years. But the actual discovery Was recent). They as yet had not seen how the two work together.
I saw the connection right away. That shot AGW in the head for me.
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And of course the general public will also see this:
The Daily Mail, the by far, biggest circulation of a newspaer in the UK.
Daily Mail – pg 4
UN climate experts ‘overstated dangers’:
Keep your noses out of politics, scientists told
“UN climate change experts have been accused of making ‘imprecise and vague’ statements and over-egging the evidence.
A scathing report into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for it to avoid politics and stick instead to predictions based on solid science.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1307446/UN-climate-change-experts-overstated-dangers.html#ixzz0yAtIznpr
One more cold winter, and the media and the public, may move on mass to scepticism.Especially, if the CAGW alarmists, get even more shrill, demanding actions, damming deniars, spinning, etc..
The public will pick up on the behaviour of the advocates. Who do not seem to realise that the old tactics, of ‘deniar’ – ‘sceptics’, will not work any more to shut out difficult questions..
They may also be increasingly surprised, that some of the media no longer thei their press releases as ‘gospel’ and start asking questions..
Evertime I have seen a CAGW advocate pushed on a questiuon, they have performed very badly.
10
The Times (UK)
Has an large full page – OPinion Piece (behind a paywall – but reproduced on the authors blog)
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/reform-ipcc-sake-science
I wonder how many other journo’s, scientists (ie Judith Curry) thought this and are re-thinking their positions?
Times – Opinion Piece
“Three years ago, not having paid much attention, I thought that IPCC reports were reliable, fair and transparent. No longer. Despite coming from a long line of coal-mining entrepreneurs,
I’m not a “denier”: I think carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. I’m not even a sceptic (yet): I think the climate has warmed and will warm further. But I am now a “lukewarmer” who has yet to see any evidence saying that the current warming is, or is likely to be, unprecedented, fast or tending to accelerate.”
followed by this….
“So I have concluded that global warming will most probably be a fairly minor problem — at least compared with others such as poverty and habitat loss — for nature as well as people.”
“After watching the ecologically and economically destructive policies enacted in its name (biofuels, wind power), I think we run the risk of putting a tourniquet round our collective necks to stop a nosebleed.”
Very Damaging: (in The Times)
“The unilateral redrafting of IPCC reports by “lead authors” after reviewers had agreed them, and the writing of a sexed-up “summary for policy makers” before the report was complete, have discomfited many scientists since the first report. It is no great surprise that the “experts” who compiled one part of the 2007 report included three from Greenpeace, two Friends of the Earth representatives, two Climate Action Network representatives, and a person each from the activist organisations WWF, Environmental Defense Fund, and the David Suzuki Foundation.
10
To quote Jo:
But I have a problem – I use argument from authority every day. That is, I talk to someone about something, and realise that they know far more than me on that topic. So I’ll most likely accept that what they say (on that topic) is correct.
It works both ways of course, sometimes I know a lot about something, and I help someone out with a fact that they simply don’t have the expertise to work out themselves.
This is not say I’m gullible. I’ve never known a plumber who didn’t look at a tap and think that it needed replacing…..
But, when it comes to the crunch, I don’t play AFL football – I just support guys who are awesomely good at it. Same deal with climate science – my judgement is not about the minutae of the science, “moist adiabat”, the complexity of getting actual temperatures out of satellite data, how CO2 levels from the distant past are estimated by proxies, etc etc. My judgment is on which side of the argument has the experts that impress me more, and I’ll let you in on some bad news – its not the skeptics.
10
I talk to someone about something, and realise that they know far more than me on that topic.
*nods* Like Mesmerism, or phrenology….
10
John Brookes: It would be interesting to know what exactly it is that impresses you. To me, it’s the exact opposite. The AGW advocates, and often the most knowledgeable, say such obviously stupid things sometimes. For example, this idea that climate science can be likened to gravity or evolution or whatever. Well, the IPCC says that AGW is “very likely”. So evolution is only “very likely”? I don’t think many of the experts in that field would agree.
Obviously though, it will depend on which experts on either side you’re listening to. (Note: I think the very idea of two sides is ridiculous given the complexity of the issue; I’m just trying to keep this particular point simple.)
10
Unfortunately John, they only play hockey,and fairly poorly with a broken stick and constantly moving goalposts.
10
John Brookes:
August 31st, 2010 at 8:03 pm
You make some good points John, ‘though one shouldn’t confuse authority on a subject with conferred authority.
Many are in positions of authority and have a need to defend such positions. If maintaining that position means not questioning a particular party line on something then that very authority can stifle thinking in an unhealthy way.
So the very recognition of authority in someone, creates a need to maintain that position of authority, and in so doing can corrupt their authority to be a fully competent an impartial authority on a the subject.
Institutional authority works very much like this, understanding and promoting the accepted wisdom, and it’s only very occasionaly when someone dares to fly in the face of accepted wisdom, sometimes at great cost to their own ‘authority’, that institutions are forced to change.
Beware of the authority of experts, the more esteemed they become.
10
Maybe I’m just a genius or something 🙂 but I’ve found that you don’t have to be an expert to understand the science and the arguments. Don’t worry about which experts impress you, read the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick or Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion, read Brian Sussman’s book, Climategate, or Ian Wishart’s Air Con, or even Jo’s Skeptic’s Handbook. Read the Climategate emails and their context from Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit. They are all easily understandable, they ask questions that are very hard to ignore (and remain unanswered) and uncover facts that are simply damning.
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John Shade: #13
I could not agreed more. The reliance on models, as if they are some sort of deity, is at the centre of this whole fiasco.
I have written complex computer models in my time – as a professional modeller, not as a scientist-amateur.
There are three types of model:
Theoretical models assume that every variable has a finite and fixed value. A voltage is always constant, resistors are always stable, and there are no such things as electrostatic fields. These are useful in science and engineering for working through a range of alternative hypothesis because the rules never vary. But they ain’t real, never will be, and cannot be used for anything outside of the lab.
Empirical models work with real measurements where every variable has a range of normal values within a given statistical distribution. Voltages can and do fluctuate under load, resistors become temperature sensitive, and there is always unpredictable electrostatic interference. These are useful for investigating and understanding what has happened in the past, and how apparently random changes in one or many variables can cause unpredictable results. But the ain’t real either, never can be, and cannot be used for anything outside of the lab.
Operational models work with real objects in space and time, according to the known laws of physics and chemistry and highly predictable changes in the operating environment. I have never worked with these, but the best examples I know of are air traffic management systems, where the characteristics of each aircraft, and its known position, height, speed, fuel consumption, loaded weight, etc. can be used to visualise the complex traffic movements in real time.
Of these, only the last can be used to predict the future.
Theoretical models don’t work with reality, so when used to predict a future event, they are just plain wrong.
Empirical models may take real values as input, but the math and the statistical variances between variables quickly gets out of hand and they produce rubbish. Having a supercomputer just helps you produce rubbish faster. Also, for Empirical models to work correctly, you need to reduce every physical force and chemical reaction to a mathematical formulae or algorithm. You need to know exactly how everything works (and we are still arguing about whether positive feedback breaks the laws of thermodynamics or not).
Operational models are very good at prediction. If you have two aircraft occupying the same airspace at the same time, then there is a calculable probability that they are going to meet and crash.
None of these are any good at predicting anything for any useful period of time. We just don’t know enough about the way stuff works.
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“In all these areas, though, from bridges to medicine, we accept “ in broad terms I can agree “we accept” things but only in as much as we believe subject matter experts have done their due diligence. That general held “belief” only holds up if things don’t fall down (like a bridge under construction in north ACT) or otherwise fail (missing hot spots predicted by faulty models). I lived in a country once upon a time that looked as if it were almost ready for associate EU membership, first world look and feel in many respects, building codes, building inspectors, lots of new impressive looking construction projects on the go. In a matter of tens of seconds thousands of buildings collapsed and thousands died in an earthquake. One construction firm had over 5000 structures it had built collapse (as I recall the majority of fatalities ultimately linked to this firms structures). Certainly the construction firm was largely responsible but there was plenty of blame to go around as due diligence had failed the public from engineers to building inspectors. Outside the immediate quake zone in areas that had no quake damage, many lived outside their homes for months as they no longer believed their apartment building were safe (which in all likelihood they weren’t and for that matter probably still aren’t). What are you left with? So the public trusted until that trust was violated.
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This has entertained me about AGW for years. The continuous remarketing and rebranding of AGW shows how weak the cult fundamentally is. This latest move, to try to pose as skeptics, is simply the latest effort. There has been a believer blog pretending to be about skepticism trying to get attention for years. The trap that AGW cult members have walked into- of showing clearly how fundamental their faith in AGW is to their position on AGW- is something even the most extreme true believer by now finds disconcerting.
This, like all other AGW efforts to rebrand, will ultimately fail, but it will be entertaining to watch as the believers bumble along once again.
10
Obviously in every other field of “scientific” endeavour it is possible to DISPROVE hypotheses through physical evidence
Considerable evidence against AGW has been gathered by the very people who believe in it, although the believers reject that notion (and accuse others of “misinterpreting” them).
When motivations that give meaning or purpose to lives are on the line it is difficult (to say the least) to question or to let go of conclusions – or even to SEE contradictory evidence to firmly entrenched conclusions
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Even though I promised myself I would never waste my time again, I strayed on to RealClimate to see their take on the IAC report. Of course it is all sugar coated not accepting that there are any real problems or criticisms, and claiming that the underlying science still holds firm. Of course Gavin and his mates don’t point out the IAC review was simply looking at the IPCC processes, not the science. They also managed to skim over some pretty damning comments including:
“Authors reported high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach ‘high confidence’ to the statements,” it said. One summary for policy makers “contains many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly”.
But I had to laugh when comment #14 at RC provided this link: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/2992897.htm#transcript It is to the ABC Science Show’s 35 year celebration program where climate alarmist and ABC Science editor Robyn Williams, in a moment of self congratulation posted an interview with Peter Ritchie-Calder from 1975. They were talking about how the world was recklessly pumping carbon into the atmosphere and how that was going to create dangerous climate change. What Williams didn’t reveal, and what the RC poster obviously didn’t realise, was that back in 1975 Robyn Williams and his guest were warning of global cooling and the prospects of an ice-age.
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Hey look, I’ve got a problem, a technical problem, and maybe someone smart like Mr Valentine can solve it. It is entirely off topic, but it involves simple science, and many of you guys seem to have a handle on this stuff.
Its a little problem, pretty simple really, a lot easier than climate science – but its got me stumped. You know me, it doesn’t take much to stump me.
I’m helping out in a 1st year physics lab at uni, where the students do an experiment called Melde’s experiment. You can see a description of it on Wikipedia.
Anyway, the setup is pretty much like the pic on Wikipedia. The tension in the string is supplied by a weight hanging over a very light pulley, and the vibrations are 50Hz, from the mains. Get it set up and you get standing waves in the string.
The theory says that you can calculate the velocity of waves in the string from the tension in the string (supplied by the weight hanging from the pulley) and the linear density of the string (ours is 1.00g/m).
You can measure the wavelength as twice the distance between two adjacent nodes of the standing wave formed by the string.
With the velocity and the wavelength you can calculate the frequency (which you already know is 50Hz). But the problem is that when you do it using a weight of 200g or so for tension, you calculate a frequency of ~47.5Hz – and this is pretty repeatable. The same goes for using a 350g weight. If you use less than 100g, the results move a bit towards 50Hz. Some students do get results around 50Hz, but the ones I trust (because they are generally more careful) tend to 47 – 48Hz.
The formula for frequency is f=sqrt(Mg/ro)/lambda. Where M is the mass supplying tension, g is 9.81, ro is the linear density of the string (1.00g/m in our case), and lambda is twice the measured internodal distance (i.e. the wavelength).
So why does the calculated frequency not be 50Hz? There is at most 1-2% uncertainty in the calculated f – but 47.5Hz is around 5% away from 50Hz.
Now as you increase the tension in the string, the linear density will decrease slightly as the string stretches, but not enough to produce a 5% “error”.
I’m also aware that the formula above is derived for a string under constant tension, while a string vibrating in a standing wave must be a bit stretched at maximum amplitude compared with when it is flat – hence there is a variation of tension with time. However I thought (perhaps naively) that by increasing the weight supplying the tension and keeping the amplitude of the vibration in the string small, the effect of any variation in tension would become less important. But the evidence is to the contrary – using 200g or 350g made no change to the calculated value of f.
So please, help! What is causing the divergence from 50Hz? And if you know what it is, how can the experiment be done to minimise the effect?
I know its not as important as climate change – but its a little real-world system I’d love to understand better, and I’d love for the students to understand it better too.
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They could congratulate themselves for being alarmists at any rate.
Thirty five years ago it was projected for the growing seasons of the Northern Hemisphere to shrink by half today
Then by force of personality Hansen warned of impending doom all right, because we overheating ourselves
Emotions have been the only casualty of overheating, and I’m sure there is evidence to show this has been the worst influence of AGW on human health.
It’s a shame this damage has been self-inflicted but that as in many other cases is easily overlooked
10
Jones admitted no statistically significant warming between 1995-2010, a 15 year period. By statistically significant he meant 95% positive, i.e. only 5% chance that given the noise in the temperature data that it was not warming. It was not significant by those generally accepted criteria.
Instead, over that period it was only 92% positive.
If you take a 30 year period (argued to be the right time averaging, given noise from El Nino events, weather, etc), over 1980-2009 the warming trend is significant at the 99.9999% level. Over the last 100 years it’s significant at something over 99.99999%.
—————
A side note: Arguing about temperature records, hockey sticks, and emails can certainly put those pieces of data into question. But if that’s all you do, you’ve only (if you’re correct) invalidated a single piece of evidence, not disproved a larger theory with multiple streams of evidence supporting it. If a data set is invalid it says nothing at all, positive or negative! There’s still glacial melt, sea level rise, top of atmosphere spectral changes, ocean acidification, expanding growing seasons, CO2 physics, atmospheric CO2 increase in isotopes attributable to fossil fuels, lots of other things that seem to point to global warming.
If the AGW theory is wrong, there should be a Michelson–Morley experiment that proves it. Solid, repeatable data that clearly contradicts global warming, just as the Michelson–Morley experiment contradicted the Aether theory.
If you think AGW is wrong, find that experiment, show that it contradicts a core element of global warming, and work from there.
The tropospheric hot spot is a good place to look – there’s certainly some issues with radiosonde data accuracy and the details of the AGW predictions (in both directions, very arguable either way), but that’s the kind of data that can contradict AGW. But nit-picking about individual data sets or experiments won’t convince anyone on the AGW side.
Just saying…
10
My guess is that a portion of the error is the result of buoyancy of the suspended mass which could be minimised by redesigning it to have minimum exposed bottom surface area.
Furthermore the tension in the string is a non-linear function of the force to stretch it as a result of (inelastic) stretching of the fibres
10
To Brian 32:
The finished proof of the Heliocentic model of the Universe was also derived from data collected by a geocentrist Tycho de Brahe. Tycho didn’t accept the Heliocentric hypothesis as Kepler’s model didn’t produce the data from Tycho’s precise measurement. The astrolabes of geocetrists (models) could produce it then skeptical attitude to Heliocentrism wasn’t obscurity in the days, yet. Then Kepler recalculated Copernicus’s model on base of Tycho’s data deriving Kepler’s laws. In these days it was still a matter of interpretation of the data.
But now we are in time after Kepler in climate explanations but CarbonCentrist still oppress heretics backed by authority of the “Church”.
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John Brookes @ 34 see: propagation delay
10
KR @ #36
The reason sceptics raise the issue of temperature is that climate alarmists rely on their models to ‘prove’ their position. Their models say that if CO2 emissions go up, then temperature will go up in an unprecedented way. Sceptics simply point out that has not happened and ‘The Team’ considered that a ‘travesty’.
I do not think there is anyone who questions that the world has warmed over the last 100 years. In fact we would expect it to have done so given past climate history. All sceptics I know have the position that the warming is not unprecedented, and is largely due to natural climate variation. Furthermore, the increased temperature is likely to be overall more beneficial to human habitation. The theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is also not a problem for most sceptics. All AGW establishes is that human activity in releasing greenhouse gases can create some global warming (thus AGW). However most sceptics believe the amount of global warming is not detrimental and may be beneficial. In fact the IPCC report demonstrates a scenario taking into account AGW where the outcomes are not a concern.
The problem arises because climate alarmist prefer to assume there are only positive feedback mechanisms in play with increasing CO2 emissions such that we will have runaway temperatures and catastrophic climate outcomes. Their sole source of evidence for this is climate models. These climate models are flawed by the IPCC’s own admission, not largely publicised, that they do not account for many know climate variables simply because we do not understand enough about how they work. There is however ongoing and significant research which contradicts this alarmist model based position. This is based on a range of evidence including past temperature proxies and climate histories, and present day observations. All this has been discussed at this site previously.
The other problem with climate alarmists is that they have chosen to include projections of a whole range of signals which ‘prove’ the need to act. The IPCC reports included such things as glacial melt, sea ice coverage, ice pack melt, extreme weather conditions, ocean levels, ocean acidification and of course temperature. On the latter we have seen extensive evidence bringing into question the measures the alarmists have used to try to demonstrate unprecedented temperatures. Arbitrarily homogenised data, poorly located sensors/gauges, station ‘drop outs’ which skew the data, and problems with satellite temperature records to name a few. On the former matters, we are all aware that the the alarmist projections have not stood up to scrutiny either in quantum or relevance.
We therefore have every reason to be sceptical of the climate alarmist position and to resist policy measures they argue are necessary to stave of highly questionable climate outcomes. Sceptics like me would much rather apply our resources to actions which will have known and direct benefits to the environment without damaging the economy or placing our country at a competitive disadvantage to the rest of the world.
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The ABC, which regularly (or, I should say, continually) presents uncritical stories predicated on the certainty of looming catastrophic “climate change”, yesterday presented news items revealing that, despite all the problems with lies and deceptions from the IPCC, the science on “climate change” is sound.
The proof? Ban ki-Moon, the Secretary-General of the UN, says so!
According to the ABC, there’s no need to seek evidence (or to interview dissenting voices) when you can rely on the argument from such an unimpeachable authority.
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Brahe had stated that his observed orbit of the Earth was a circle (Earth circling the Sun or conversely didn’t matter), Brahe rejected Kepler’s assertion that planetary orbits were ellipses. To Brahe’s limits of error of observation, the orbit is a circle.
Corrections to Brahe’s measurements to show the orbit is an ellipse could have been made, although Brahe did not know ho to make them because he didn’t know how to handle errors of measurements.
Nobody did, until Gauss systematized this (although Kepler was aware that the precision of measurements was proportional to the inverse square root of the number of measurements)
Incidentally it is evident from this that Newton “fudged” his reported observations to fit his theory of deriving the law of universal gravitation from Kepler’s data reduction, but Newton couldn’t have known that the indeterminate errors of observation propagated in a systematic was
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How did I come to know this?
From a physical chemist and mathematician who first introduced to me the ideas of Arrhenius, Plass, and Callendar on overheating the atmosphere from the CO2 produced by burning fuel when I was 15 years old, and who showed me that the notion was “absurd.”
I never dreamed I would hear about this idea again until I heard (to my surprise) Hansen discuss it in 1988 (although I was aware that Revelle had been making noise about it at Harvard although Revelle was generally dismissed as “crank” by the scientific community at the time.
All of this means it is important to instill a scepticism of AGW in children at a very young age, before it becomes too late
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O/T sort of, but keep an eye on
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/world/top-climate-change-sceptic-does-u-turn/story-e6freoox-1225912590257
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30/bjorn-lomborg-climate-change-u-turn
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I never trusted Lomborg in the first place
I put him in the same category as Judith (“Climate Change Science Make-up”) Curry
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“In all these areas, though, from bridges to medicine, we accept the dominant scientific conventions.”
Sure! Just like the medical establishment did prior to 1992, when Marshall & Warren first proposed the preposterous proposition that gastric and peptic ulcers were caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, not stress or excess production of stomach acid, and it can be cured quite simply by the administration of bismuth and antibiotics instead of lifelong medication, bland diets, stress management and, ultimately, major surgery.
“Not so”, they chorused. “Bacteria can’t tolerate the acid environment of the stomach, besides, loads of learned articles in peer revued journals attest to the stress/acid genesis”. Pity that they did not consult with their veterinary colleagues who discovered the bacterial link in pigs way back in the 1950s.
Marshall & Warren eventually prevailed, much to the benefit of the hapless patients, and went on the win the Nobel Prize for their pains.
The Marshall & Warren saga, among other similar ones, should be a salutary lesson the legions of smart alec consensus freaks who volutarily give up the capacity to think for themselves on the merits of evidence based propositions .
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I see Labor, in last ditch desperation, has thrown its last shreds of decency out of the window and fallen into bed with the Green
s:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/labor-greens-strike-alliance-deal-for-stable-government/story-fn59niix-1225912672100
Doesn’t it give you a rosy glow when there is a love in between the socialists? Maybe it will bring a little colour back to Julia’s cheeks because she has been looking a tad tired since the election night flogging.
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“In all these areas, though, from bridges to medicine, we accept the dominant scientific conventions. When a body of qualified scientists reviews the evidence and issues their judgements we act accordingly.”
If I was suffering a life threatening condition that the ‘dominant scientific convention’ held no promise of curing, I most certainly would not accept their word for it. I would research myself to find alternative theories, as many have done before and proved wrong the ‘body of qualified scientists’.
Such an example recently is farmer Alan Smith here in NZ, whose family fought to have Vitamin C intravenously administered as “acutely affected by the H1N1 virus, Smith lay in intensive care close to death.”
“The family had to battle doctors to allow the treatment to proceed and even had to enlist top-flight constitutional lawyer Mai Chen to apply the legal blowtorch to the hospital treating Smith to allow the treatment to continue.”
The ‘dominant scientific convention’ was that this was futile, and even after Mr Smith’s life was saved we have an “unskeptical scientist” disparaging the vitamin C treatment with these remarks:
“Where did the family come across the idea of administering vitamin C intravenously? What does the peer-reviewed literature say about this sort of treatment for pneumonia-like symptoms? Could Smith’s family have actually risked harming him by giving him large doses of vitamin C?”
All quotes sourced from the blog of Peter Griffin, the unskeptical scientist:
http://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2010/08/20/sins-of-omission-in-60-minutes-miracle-story/
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Another Ian @ 44:
WoW … I am simply amazed at Lomborg… not that he buys the whole CAGW argument, he always did, but he struck me as someone more pragmatic in terms of how to deal with the potential impacts of warming. It seems he has slipped into the lazy tax-and-spend philosophy as well.
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Kepler was a strange bloke, if his biography by Arthur Koestler is to be believed. He was what modern physicists refer to as a “nutter”. He spent his time trying to prove things that weren’t true. He expected the the radii of the orbits of the planets to obey some simple mathematical rule. I forget, but it was either geometrical or musical or sometimes one and sometimes the other.
But, where Kepler was brilliant is that although he didn’t find what he wanted, he did accurately report what he found, even if he himself was disappointed with it. The amount of effort he must have put into tedious arithmetic calculations was prodigious – but I guess he wasn’t distracted by TV.
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I’m not sure we hotties want Lomborg on our side. Although as an economist he is probably ok.
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I think Kepler made a sort of living by practicing astrology, although he shouldn’t be condemned for this; Jim Hansen does the same thing
There’s no secret at all to it: it involves taking money from the soft-minded to tell them what they want to hear
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I guess if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. It’s a kind of praise actually; perverse to be sure but praise nonetheless, even if not intended.
However, I suspect they’ll find their new facade hard to keep up.
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1 Sept: Radio Australia: Climate sceptics switch sides as UN panel hammered
Presenter: Paula Kruger
Two of the world’s most influential climate sceptics appear to have had a change of heart, coming as the UN’s climate body completes a review aimed at restoring its credibility for reporting on climate change…
(LOMBORG – who was never a sceptic on the science – is #1 of course)then we have…
Michael Hanlon, the formerly ultra-sceptic science editor of Britain’s 2 million copies-a-day Daily Mail has also changed his mind after a recent trip to see a glacier in Greenland…
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/pacbeat/stories/201009/s2999167.htm
Hanlon is not quite the believer Paula suggests!
10 Aug: Daily Mail Michael Hanlon Blog: Melting scepticism
Don’t get me wrong; I still think much of the climate change narrative, for want of a better word, is rotten to the core…
Again, we must not exaggerate; the idea that the Greenlandic ice sheet will be gone in 100 years (as some reports have maintained) is a science fiction story. ‘This is happening on the millennial scale’ according to Alun Hubbard, the eminently sensible and trustworthy (i.e. non-alarmist) glaciologist leading Britain’s scientific investigation of the Greenlandic ice…
The questions is, is the Greenlandic ice sheet merely a fossil remnant of the last ice age which is (as one would expect) disappearing in a naturally warmer world? Or are our activities contributing to (and accelerating) this process? I am not sure, and to be honest I am not sure anyone knows for certain. But a few days up here is certainly enough to blow a few sceptical cobwebs away
http://hanlonblog.dailymail.co.uk/2010/08/melting-skepticism.html
jo, it would be wonderful if u would critique the following:
13 Aug: Daily Mail: Michael Hanlon: The crack in the roof of the world: ‘Yes, global warming is real – and deeply worrying’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1301713/The-crack-roof-world-Yes-global-warming-real–deeply-worrying.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
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Australia has just been “Greened” – I wonder how many sceptical voices there will be “invited” onto the new climate committee which now replaces the election campaign related Citizens Assembly. Strange how the latter did not last long…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/01/2999219.htm
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jo – a deserved win for Mr. Spencer:
1 Sept: FarmOnline: Lucy Knight: Peter Spencer wins his day in High Court
PROPERTY rights crusader, Peter Spencer, who went on a hunger strike on his southern NSW farm earlier this year, has broken down outside the High Court in Canberra following an unanimous decision in his favour to finally have his case heard…
But the High Court today ruled that Mr Spencer has a case to be heard, and that there was essentially no case to stop it from being heard.
The High Court also ruled the Commonwealth pay full costs for Mr Spencer…
He hugged supporters outside the court and broke down when asked what the ruling meant to him and all Australian farmers.
Mr Spencer said the decision means “rural Australia will now have hope”.
“To have a rural Australia, a civil Australia, you have to have property that belongs to people; that people respect.
“Between the citizens, and between the Government and the citizens.
“Today we have proved after 13 years that it’s worth believing.
“When I first spoke of carbon 13 years ago, people said ‘what are you talking about?’
“It has been the biggest lock-up, the biggest takings, in the free world out of war time.
“It represents 109 million hectares. 90 per cent of Australian land was stolen from the people and used to meet an international carbon treaty when it should have been taken from the coal-fired power stations.
“This was a cover-up of the worst proportions.”
Mr Spencer said by allowing the case to proceed and his evidence to be heard it would reveal “treachery against the Australian people”…
http://fw.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/peter-spencer-wins-his-day-in-high-court/1929375.aspx
how extraordinary!
1 Sept: SMH: Lenore Taylor: Cool calculations continue in the hottest five seats in the house
Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott met Lord Nicholas Stern and Professor Ross Garnaut yesterday on climate change and an emissions trading scheme – where they, and Wilkie, have views closer to Labor than the Coalition..
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/cool-calculations-continue-in-the-hottest-five-seats-in-the-house-20100831-14fiw.html
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THE GREEN COMMUNISTS ARE AT IT AGAIN!!!
The Greens deal with Labor: ban all sceptics….
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_greens_deal_with_labor_ban_all_sceptics/
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Pat:
Coincidently I was looking for updates on the Narrogin Beef Producers tragedy, so I looked up the WA EDO (Environmental Defenders Office) and came across their newsletter section. Here is the latest letter, which includes a piece on the Spencer case (see page 5):
http://www.edowa.org.au/newsletters/201003Newsletter.pdf
What you have to love is the appalling (lack of) logic used to defend their position:
So in a nutshell… climate change causes extreme weather which destroys farming, and reduced clearing is how we “prevent” climate change. Therefore by not allowing farmers to clear their land (to pursue productive processes) we “enable more successful farming.” I would really struggle to make a weaker argument if I tried…
Not only that, they carry on to argue that the Feds should not have to pay compensation for removing a landowner’s right to clear their land…
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Green communists don’t have a symbol to identify themselves with!
The gold Hammer and Cycle on a scarlet background has already been taken – although some don’t seem to mind borrowing it
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The Greens leader, Bob Brown is too YELLOW to admit that they are RED!!
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WE’VE NOTH ING TO FEAR CAUSE OUR KATTER MAN KNOWS THE TRUTH!!! !!
Bob Katter will protect our write to minerals mining! !!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/01/2999212.htm
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CLIMATE CHANGE LIES ARE EXPOSED!!
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/196642/Climate-change-lies-are-exposed
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I cannot wait to see how the denialists spin the fact that one of their poster boys, Bjorn Lomborg, has crossed over to the other side.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-change-sceptics-uturn-20100831-14fng.html
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That is good news about Peter Spencer. Less so about Lomborg, not converting, because he has always been AGW-lite, but uping the ante, as it were; this new desire to spend completely contradicts his conclusions in his 2nd book, Cool It, at page 41, Figure 11, where Lomborg compares, in a cost/benefit analysis, all the various approaches to dealing with AGW; the most sensible, in that it is the only one in which the money worth of the benefits exceeds the costs, is option 1, the optimal, that is, doing nothing; the other options have a progressively worse cost/benefit ratio as the effort to ‘solve’ AGW increases with the worse being an attempt to keep temperature increase to 1.5C above what it is now which would cost $A 85 TRILLION and have benefits worth $A 11 TRILLION.
Lomborg has some explaining to do.
The Upton article about being converted by Greenland glacier melt is why selected representitives of the MSM should be regularly tarred and feathered; they continually reveal that they are arrogant and impressionable, gullible, but once their opinion is expressed their egoes prevent them admitting they have been conned. A couple of sceptic analyses of the Greenland situation are here:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/OllierPaine-NoIceSheetCollapse-AIGNewsAug.2009.pdf
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/ice-sheet-loss-cut-in-half/#more-10167
GIA, or glacial isostatic adjustment is just starting to get a run in respect of the alleged glacier declines; there are lots or papers out there if one cares to google GIA. As for the particular glacier decline which Upton was so worried about; here is an explanation and alarmist Alley, who is mentioned in this link should be run out of town for saying what he does say without mentioning GIA, which as a professor of geo-science, he must be aware of:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Canyouge.pdf
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Gillard LIES about NO carbon tax just to get elected!!
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/pm-says-no-carbon-tax-under-her-govt-20100816-126ru.html
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oh dear @ 63:
Lomborg was always an AGW believer… the only thing that changed was that he was against CO2 taxation systems to “prevent climate change.” He was always much more for the pragmatic approach to solving real environmental issues now and investing in systems to offset the impact of climate change. I hope that helps to explain your confusion.
Therefore the SMH is completely wrong in the following statement:
Lomborg was never a “sceptic” in the AGW sense… i.e. he always believed the IPCC view of the science.
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Oh dear @ 63
No spin required. I’d just be interested to know what evidence he used as the basis for his comments – perhaps you can tell us what evidence there is that global warming is REAL, MAN-MADE and CATASTROPHIC? If he can’t, then his comments don’t have much scientific validity – probably no more than yours, in fact.
Before we go off spending billions of dollars on fixing a problem, let’s check that the problem really exists and that the so-called solution addresses the cause of that problem.
Cheers,
Speedy
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On the subject of Bob Katter. He doesn’t seem to be to concerned about CAGW but a few times he has mentioned troubles with the reef. He may actually have a concern about ocean acidification. I intend to send him information that shows that this is also a bogus issue. Perhaps other people who have similar info should also contact him.
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Why do they even pretend to be “scientists” these warmocommunists? Do they think we’re all stupid?
I mean CO2 IS PLANT FOOD! Don’t these pseudoscientists realise that undersea volcanoes put out more CO2 in one year than all of humanity has in its industial lifetime? And they expect us to follow the lies they call “science”!
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Oh dear 63:
Lomborg always have been a warmist and nothing but that. Each one who knows what he really wrote is familiar with it. That’s why it is amusing when all these recurrent “discoveries” of his re-conversion appear. He is a warmist but he always told that the ways of response to AGW, in which he believes, are utter nonsense and waste of recourses. This is way of his heresy. He never used to be AGW skeptic but used to be and is a skeptic of response to climatic change. Nevertheless an AGW phenomena believer but skeptic of AGW response is e. g. also Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis) or meteorologist Tim Garrett etc.
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Adolf Balik: By that token, you could even consider James Hansen a skeptic. It’s all part of the absurdity of terminology that has more rhetorical than analytical value.
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Bob Katter is well meaning but not the brightest bulb in the house. He illuminates his own area well with little contribution. Like a porch light when there is a street lamp outside. Keeps the snakes and bugs from the front door but does not illuminate the pathway.
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Symbol for Green Communism:
As Greens accepted 100th anniversary of Lenin’s born as their top fest – Earth Day – telling Lenin is a divine son of Gaia who brings about Gaia’s real order then their symbol should be the green not blue planet Gaia with huge red muliebria from which Lenin’s revolutionary head protrude out to the world. 😀
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To Dagfinn 71:
Yes, you are absolutly right! 🙂
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Jaymez:#40
Excellent – well put.
I hope you don’t mind if I quote your comments from time to time?
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JaniePo:
September 1st, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Janie, Don’t you know that election promises are ideals (presupposing that the party making them will get elected).
The reality of coalition government excuses all such committments, (as then you’re being governed by no elected government).
🙂
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John Brookes @34, if you are doing everything correctly, consider the following:
“Mg” is acting vertically on one side (a) of an “imperfect puley”; the vibration is in a horizontal string on the other side (b) of the pulley, so: Tension @ (a) = Mg – pulley friction; i.e. Tension @ (a) < Mg; ergo, f < expected value.
If frequency is constantly between 47 and 48 Hz, you can deduce that Tension @ (a) is somewhere between 225 and 234.9 grams (with a "perfect pulley"). Your 350 gram mass @ (b) should give 58.6 Hz (with a "perfect pulley").
This suggests the pulley is preventing your 350 gram mass from being fully effective in generating tension in the horizontal part of the string. (friction? inertia?)
May I suggest you avoid the pulley by using a vertical string and see what happens.
Good luck.
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Crumple at post #6,9,10:
Example’s:
Does that mean we can throw out the common warmist chorus of the last few months,that a five month period of 2010 as being warmest on record?
Thank you for shooting yourself in the foot.
ROFLMAO!
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Thanks Pat@77 – good idea.
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KR @36
Slightly off topic, I know, but you must be careful. In the context in which you use it, it is nonsense to say,
To “contradict” one hypothesis (theory) is merely to assert a contrary hypothesis, not to disprove the other. It is equallly true to say “Aether theory” contradicts “relativity theory” (but does not prove it wrong).
What the M-M experiment DID do was show that one particular proposed form of aether was not applicable in the context of the M-M experiment, i.e. with standing EM waves between pairs of ‘relatively’ fixed mirrors. Einstein himself never stopped believing that there is an aether; he simply didn’t need it in his relativity mathematics (as water vapour feed-backs are now omitted from climate models).
I can propose that uncritical belief in the “theory of relativity” has seriously damaged Physics; an hypothesis for which I might offer belief in “black holes” and “dark matter” as proof of insanity. But that does not prove relativity is wrong, nor establish aether theory as valid; it merely explains the origin of “mad scientists”; such as will believe uncritically in the outputs of “vapour-free” climate models.
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Pat Cusack,
More exactly:
To be a contradiction requires that the object of discussion both has and does not have a particular attribute at the same time and in the same way. That you arrive at a contradiction proves only that there is an error in reasoning that has occurred. By itself, it proves nothing more.
An hypothesis and its contrary are not technically contradictory. They are simply provisional and untested statements about reality. Jointly, each is nothing but a null hypothesis for the other. It is the testing of the hypotheses that exposes the contradiction to reality. It is possible that the hypotheses are so badly stated or the test is so badly formed that one cannot distinguish between the hypotheses. This is nothing but sloppy science. In which case one must go back to the drawing board and reformulate both the hypotheses AND the tests. Then redo the testing.
What the M-M experiment showed is that the speed of light within a moving frame of reference is a constant to a very small experimental error.
What Einstein did was simply to extend, conceptually, that observed constancy to between moving frames of reference. He then derived the consequences of that extension. Subsequent experiments/observations demonstrated that too was valid to a very small experimental error.
Together, the experimental results demonstrate that the concept of Aether was not necessary to model the observed properties of EM propagation and thus was dropped from anything but discussions of the history of physics.
Unfortunately, the substitute for Aether, a time-space continuum, is not any more substantial. It presumes that mere geometry can be a cause. This has lead to theoretical physics devolving to the position that the operations of mathematical equations cause reality rather than simply being an analog model of it. See the so called explanations of Quantum Mechanics with its “observation causes the collapse of the wave equation” for a case in point. (Save the photon – don’t look.)
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PS: If what you are discussing is not about reality, then anything goes even conceptual white noise. The discussion may be entertaining or instructive but it is not a resident in the realm of science: the study of what exists and its qualitative and quantitative nature.
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—
I make no pretense to omniscience, but I’ve been skeptical of the AGW fraud since the late ’70s, when it was nothing more than a whacked-out and manifestly unsupportable hypothesis advanced by a number of dubious characters better at writing grant applications than actually doing scientific research.
With that understood, I’ve been paying attention to the arguments – and those who have been speaking to the subject – on either side.
And I’ve never even heard of this “Lomborg” fella about whom the warmist wankers are wagging their piddlers.
Not that I blame the True Believer types. Since Climategate, the slimy little sonzabitches really haven’t had much with which to console themselves.
—
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KR @36:
Since M & M has gotten so much attention I’ve a comment for KR. You cannot prove a negative! That’s what the whole trouble with the climate change scare is all about. You have no evidence that actually connects CO2 with anything and yet you yell that we must prove that you are wrong. From where I sit it’s game, set and match to the skeptics so far.
By contrast M & M presented experimental evidence from the real world, all well documented in every detail so that anyone interested could examine it and if desired, repeat it. The world of physics devoured it hungrily, examining every detail looking for any flaw with which to shoot it down. Yet it stood tall. And within the limits of the technology of those days it still stands tall today. M & M ultimately forced the whole world of physics to rethink itself. This is what science and skepticism are all about.
Where is climate change by comparison? You run around like a rudderless ship with all your heroes embroiled in scandal and suspicion trying to deflect attention from your problems back onto us. You are amazing in your lack of any sense of shame. And your evidence collapses of it’s own dead weight when examined honestly. I suspect that if Michelson and Morley were alive they would be laughing at you.
As I said back at post 53, Paul Gilding is a kind of praise. And an admission, I might add, that honest skeptics have won the day.
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To all the warmists out there:
Are you happy now? A lunatic was inspired by Gore’s movie and is now holding hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters, in the name of ‘fixing the planet’. Are you starting to see the consequences of fear mongering? Yes, the weak minded and gullible may fall for these tactics, but there are lunatics among the weak minded who will take it way to far.
George
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co2isnotevil –
here’s some detail:
2 Sept: SeattleWeeklyBlog: James Lee, Discovery Channel Hostage Taker, Is From British Columbia?
In 2008, Lee was arrested for disorderly conduct by Montgomery County police after a lengthy protest outside of the company’s headquarters. Lee was upset by what he saw as a pro-capitalist, anti-environmental agenda in Discovery’s shows.
Lee spent thousands of dollars in local newspapers advertising the protest. He also hired homeless people to stand next to him to make it appear as if he had a larger group of demonstrators and threw money into the air while saying “money is nothing, money is trash.”
A website called savetheplanetprotest.com is registered to Lee at an address in Burnaby, British Columbia…
Lee’s website is one long Malthusian rant against overpopulation, immigrants and Discovery’s role in turning the world to shit…
UPDATE: Lee’s manifesto isn’t available online, probably because the server he’s using can’t handle the millions of hits it’s getting right now. But Business Insider managed to copy and paste it before it got overwhelmed by traffic.
(FULL TEXT)..
2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it…
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/09/james_lee_discovery_channel_ho.php
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MSNBC: Man holds hostages at Discovery TV building
Lee said he experienced an ‘‘awakening” when he watched former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental documentary ‘‘An Inconvenient Truth.” ..
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38957020/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
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The difference between Crumple #10 and a person with an IQ above mongoloid is that the latter person knows that regardless of the timescale statistics NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER prove any physical reality.
If Jo Nova and the entirety of the skeptical crowd agreed 1000000000000% with the statistics THEY WOULD STILL PROVE EXACTLY 0.00000000000000000000000 about Climate Change or anything else.
Why, 15 years into this debate, people are so scientifically inept as to continue to present arguments where statistics prove reality, is beyond me. But to be sure it is a testament to the gulliblity, stupidity and simple manipulatibility of people.
Crumple, not only are you 1000% wrong, you are too stupid to understand WHY you are wrong and how obvious your brainwashing and lack of thinking ability are to the rest of us. You would be very very ashamed to see yourself as we see you. Pathetic…
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Roy Hogue @ 84
There’s certainly some evidence for CO2: here’s a summary of some of that evidence.
And here’s some for our influence on the issue: the human fingerprint.
Lots of papers, lots of references – AGW’s not just a bad dream, sadly to say. I wish it was.
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A further note on AGW and Michelson–Morley experiments – the Michelson–Morley experiment broke the Aether theory, providing a direct contradiction to a core element of the Aether theory. Aether made sense at the time; it explained just about everything about radiation propagation in a consistent fashion.
So – is AGW an Aether theory, apparently consistent but not true? Or is an Evolution theory, without which nothing (for evolution, nothing in biology) makes sense?
An AGW Michelson–Morley experiment would directly contradict some core AGW element; whether CO2 radiation blocking, our contribution to CO2 levels, that nights aren’t warming faster than days, proof that the changes we’re seeing aren’t occurring, proof that the rate of change isn’t excessive compared to past climate shifts, something like that.
—————
And that AGW Michelson–Morley experiment will have to hold up upon examination, which so far hasn’t happened. Nature is a harsh critic – Michelson was furious that his experiment disproved Aether, and the consensus in the scientific community at the time was quite surprised. But the experiment held, and they had to come up with some new theories. If AGW’s not correct, there will be a contradiction somewhere! And if someone can prove that, the facts will change the consensus, as with Aether.
—————
So please – disprove AGW. Nobody wants it to be true – it’s just (so far) the most consistent conclusion from the current evidence.
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Pat Cusack @ 80
You’re quite correct – the Michelson–Morley produced results inconsistent with the Aether theory (stationary Aether would have induced differential speeds for radiation propagation with and against the movement through the Aether), and as the Aether theory was unable to reconcile with that experimental result the Aether theory was shown to be false.
Einstein certainly did continue to believe in a kind of Aether, as per his mentors – but his (re)definition lacked substance and any state of motion.
————
So – an AGW Michelson–Morley experiment would produce repeatable results that cannot be reconciled with the AGW theory.
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Some clever tactics by KR; guilt by association, or as the case may be validation by association; this works, or doesn’t, so this other thing does or doesn’t work. The Aether theory has some interesting aspects; the Universe has a fabric which is flexible and light speed can be affected by the medium. As for AGW, it has been tested, it has failed. I have submitted an essay to Unleashed on this very point dealing with the testing of AGW. I discuss a number of recent peer-reviewed papers which, in my opinion, conclusively show that AGW is a failed theory. If it doesn’t get up at Unleashed perhaps Jo will run some aspects here or I will put up details of the papers I refer to.
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KR,
To quote Joanne from above:
She’s saying that if some real evidence turned up honest skeptics would turn around 180 degrees.
You have not shown anything that makes an empirical link between CO2 and anything happening anywhere in the world. Indeed what you linked doesn’t show anything happening. It’s just hot air. Skeptical science is an out-and-out fraud when it comes to climate change. Joanne calls it an ambush site.
Please come back when you understand the difference between evidence and, “I wish it were so.” Then we have a basis for debate.
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KR,
Is this the best you can do? Evidence of climate change combined with evidence that CO2 increasing and statement that CO2 is a GHG doesn’t make your case. For example, we know that if the climate wasn’t changing, it would be broken, since the evidence tells us that the climate is in a state of continuous change, moreover; nothing about contemporary change is unusual compared to the paleo record, and this is even true when we compare changes in recent 5 year averages to the changes in multi-century averages recorded in ice cores. While the fact that we burn fossil fuels will have an influence on ambient CO2 levels, there also substantial amount of ‘missing’ CO2 that the system somehow absorbed that the ‘consensus’ can’t adequately explain. The stated relationships are more likely a coincidence since temperatures and CO2 levels, on a year to year basis, go in the same direction only about half of the time.
What’s missing from your argument is a scientific explanation for how incremental forcing power from CO2 absorption is amplified to be 4 times more powerful, on Watt by Watt basis, than power from the Sun. Claiming that CO2 is a GHG does not explain this. The fact that CO2 is a GHG only explains the first 0.9 +/- 0.3 C of the alleged 3C warming. Even this seems less than what can be reasonably attributed to any kind of linear trend, most likely because the net feedback acting on the climate is negative. What this means is that it takes exponentially more power to linearly increase temperatures (a consequence of SB). Claiming water vapor feedback amplification doesn’t help because this will act on forcing power from the Sun as well as GHG forcing power.
For you to make your case, you must present the mechanism which amplifies power absorbed by GHG’s by at least a factor of 4, yet has no amplification effect on solar power. The fact that this piece of science is missing is why there are skeptics. Feel free to take a stab at it, but I’m certain you can’t resolve this paradox.
George
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I’ll bet there are not a few who wish that the mental case who grabbed hostages limited his activity to “climate skeptics.”
There would be some sympathy for him then wouldn’t there. (hopefully he wouldn’t be regarded as a “hero”)
Anyway we seemed to have concluded that Michelson and Morley measured a null result to first order in v/c and it therefore follows that “climate skeptic” arguments are imbecilic (or something to that effect).
The logic escapes me at present, although there are doubtless some for whom the argument is perfect
(the hostage maniac would probably be among the easily convinced)
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co2isnotevil @ 94
I agree, the feedback effects on the ~1.0 C from a doubling of CO2 are the big deal. As far as I can see it’s ~3 C in climate sensitivity, from both models and paleo calculations, taking the midpoint of the various estimates. Here’s a link with half a dozen papers each from modeling and from observations. There’s certainly some error/disagreement room, but that seems to be dropping over time with additional work.
Lindzen and Choi disagreed, and their ‘Iris Effect’ did get taken seriously. But the iris effect turns out to be small, and their reliance on tropical events only (not including energy transfers between the tropics and the polar regions) produces artificially low estimates. Worse than that, small changes in choosing start/end dates from their data drastically change the sensitivity estimate – you could tweak the start/end dates and get any sensitivity you want!
I suggest you look at at least one or two of the papers I linked estimating sensitivity from observations (rather than from models).
cohenite @ 92
When you have some papers listed, let me know – I’d love to look at them.
Roy Hogue @ 93
Take a look at Evens 2006 regarding direct evidence for CO2 effects. They directly measure downward IR from the atmosphere using FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometers), and have some hard numbers as to individual GHG contributions.
As to “ambush site” – you can certainly disagree with the conclusions reached on skeptic science; the moderators do have their own points of view (as do Jo and Watt – should I avoid them and their sites?!). But they do provide direct links to some relevant papers in the field, and those should be considered on their own merits. As do papers disagreeing with AGW, which I also try to read and evaluate.
—————
Like I said, I wish I weren’t currently convinced that AGW is occurring. But I have had to come to that conclusion based on the evidence presented…
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As Roy already pointed out, you are asking to prove a negative. That’s not how logic works. It’s up to people like you to prove AGW, not the other way around.
Oh and you are so passé with the whole AGW thing. Didn’t you get the memo? Your side, when unable to provide evidence for AGW, changed the threat to “Climate Change” which is a bit more non-specific.
Block links to a warmist site hardly qualify as providing evidence of anything. NONE of the references on “Skeptical Science” provide empirical evidence. Pick a paper that provides said evidence if you are so certain and demonstrate that you have the foggiest notion of what the study really says.
Clue: you are not the first warmist to visit this blog and fail utterly when put to the test. Nor will you be the last.
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KR,
All of the references which claim a high sensitivity are extracting it from data with an exceptionally low signal to noise ratio. Moreover, the general tendency is to use CO2 as the catch all for anything that can’t otherwise be trivially explained. Show me the physics, not some speculative conclusions based on preconceived expectations. Explain, in your own words, the physical mechanism that is amplifying CO2 absorption and tell me why it only works on GHG absorbed power and not solar power.
The ‘iris’ effect is more complicated than Lindzen implied. Clouds are the more important active regulating element. Increasing clouds has 2 offsetting effects, first is to decrease incident power by increasing reflection and second is to block surface power from escaping. One warms and the other cools and it turns out, the effects are almost equal and opposite. That is until the surface is covered by snow, which being about the same reflectivity as clouds, cancels the decrease in the incident power so that the net effect is to trap surface warmth.
The other effect of clouds is that from space, you see warm surface power and cold cloud power, where the surface is warmer than the 255K required and the clouds are colder. The percentage of clouds is adjusted by the system such that the percentage of cold cloud power and warm surface power integrated over the planets surface produces an energy flux equal to the net energy flux entering the planet. The thermostatic control mechanism acting on the planet is really just this simple. The fact that the push and pull on cloud percentages is relatively neutral, relative to the planets energy balance, makes them the perfect regulatory mechanism.
Many of the larger sensitivity estimates are based on starting from much colder temperatures. The fact is that when it’s cold and there is more surface covered by snow and ice, the sensitivity to changes in solar power are much higher, then for example, at the equator. In fact, at higher temperatures, the gain drops below 1 as the increase in latent heat removed from evaporation exceeds the increase in solar power arriving from the Sun.
As for the spectral measurements, I would expect there to be changes owing to changing CO2 concentrations. There’s no dispute about that. But what you’re missing, is that half of the extra absorbed power is re-radiated back into space at wavelengths that are not subject to CO2 absorption (or even H2O absorption for that matter). The total power redirected back to the surface is only about half of the 3.7 W/m^2 claimed by the IPCC.
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Ye gads! Take a statistics class for crying out loud before you make such asinine comments!
All results arrived at by statistical methods have the downside that they might be caused by pure statistical accident. Temperature anomalies are arrived at via statistical methods; therefore it is necessary to test for significance, because the results might be statistical accidents.
If Jones had said that there was statistically significant warming from 1995-2010, it would only mean that the probability of the statistically derived warming being a result of a “statistical accident” or chance, was less than 5%. (The convention for most significance tests is 95% confidence.)
By talking about positives and negatives, you demonstrate that you do not understand statistical significance.
Your final paragraph is pure blather.
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I think John Brooks has demonstrated something rather significant in this thread. He posed a scientific question in post 34 and we have seen nothing but polite, constructive and skeptical debate regarding the experiment since then.
Ponder that for a moment…
Just goes to show that climate science should stick to exactly that… climate SCIENCE. The moment the field starts slipping into the realm of political advocacy is when the knives come out.
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KR,
I used M & M only to highlight the difference between honest science well done, the honest, albeit somewhat frantic skepticism that followed and the current state of climate change, which is lying on the floor in a crumpled up mess at the moment. You provided it for me to use and its exquisite contrast material.
Your last linked stuff is typical of what has been dealt with here time and time again. Someone saying I believe this means that or that means this is simply not evidence. I corrected your misconception about proof of a negative. I’ll allow that you can disagree with me but you should at least acknowledge what I said and state your disagreement. But at post 90 you go on in the same vein. There’s no real communication possible under such circumstances, much less debate. If you’re here just to declare yourself right unless we can prove you wrong then you’ll not get very far.
By the way, what is contradictory in the M & M experiment? An old theory was shown to be incorrect and that’s all it did. A contradiction is an attempt to show that something is both true and false. M & M did no such thing.
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JLKreuger re. our mutual friend KR.
Nice to see you back.
It is impossible to disprove a negative -on the other hand theories are like balloons – one prick and they’re busted. e.g. the missing hot spot, e.g. paleoclimate, e.g. rise and FALL in temperature in the face of rising CO2, e.g. the Medieval Warming Period, the Roman Warmning Period etc. If these are not addressed in a logical manner, then the AGW theory is worthless.
On the other hand, a theory that cannot demonstrate a cause and effect between one thing and another (i.e. cannot PROVE – with PHYSICAL evidence that man-made CO2 is the dominant cause of a warming global climate that is harmful) then it only deserves a place in the dumpster.
Our mutual friend might also like to read the Skeptics Handbook, by one Jo Nova.
Cheers,
Speedy.
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KR@96; Climate Sensitivity [CS] papers, including the revised Schwartz one which still produces a CS far below the IPCC range, all deal with the IPCC standard, which is 2XCO2; that is, CO2 in isolation; feedbacks are additional and assumed to be positive; this is why actual temperatures are far below what has been predicted by IPCC: even if one accepts the 2XCO2 standard feedbacks are not positive; but the 2XCO2 standard is wrong in itself; it does not deal with Beer-Lambert or saturation adequately. A couple of empirical based parameters for CS and CO2:
1 As I have mentioned many times, H2O is a much greater greenhouse gas than CO2; in fact it is 2.5 times as great:
http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/ramanathan-coakley-1978-role-of-co2.png
2 The Ramanthan effect is confirmed by the Evans and Puckrin paper which KR links to; from Evans and Puckrin we see in tables 3a and 3b);
Winter
H20 94 to 125 W m-2
CO2 31 to 35 W m-2
Summer
H20 178 to 256 W m-2
CO2 10.5 W m-2
Not only did the relative CO2 contribution drop in Summer, but the back radiation value decreased from about 30 Winter to about 10 W/m2 Summer. So the Evans paper gives a greenhouse role for CO2 which is even less than Ramanthan’s; in Winter when there is less water about the greenhouse ratio of CO2 to H2O is from 94/31 to 125/35, or at most 3 times and in summer, when there is more water about as little as 256/10.5 or over 24 times.
The reason why the Evans paper has not been advanced as supporting AGW, apart from the contradictions inherent in the paper which I have outlined above, is because the atmospheric radiative code they use has been superseded by far more accurate ones such as used by Miskolczi in his 2007 and 2010 papers. Miskolczi shows that, unlike Evans, the Optical Depth [OD] of the atmosphere, the measure of the greenhouse effect, has not changed in almost 60 years:
http://miskolczi.webs.com/Fig10.jpg
Miskolczi directly contradicts Evans et al, while Evans et al contradict themselves.
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SSDD
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co2isnotevil @ 98
The amplification (climate sensitivity) does scale with solar irradiance as well as with CO2 radiation retention – any change in energy. Take a look at Hansen 1993, scaling from radiation changes in last glacial epoch (plain orbital mechanics affecting irradiation), 3 ± 1°C, Chylek 2007, differences between the Holocene and the last glacial maximum, 1.3°C to 2.3°C, and Bender et al 2010, looking at the response from Mount Pinatubo and the volcanic aerosols, with current temperature ranges, 1.7 to 4.1°C.
I don’t think I claimed sensitivity only scales with CO2 – my apologies if it appeared I did.
Roy Hogue @ 101
Sorry, didn’t mean to ignore you or your comments – there’s been a lot of responses to my last postings.
Proving a negative? No, I don’t think that’s possible. Pat Cusack @ 80 quite correctly pointed out my poor terminology there. But proving that one of the core items supporting AGW is false, that’s entirely possible if the evidence can be found. Does CO2 not trap IR – does IR pass through (positive)? Is there a different mechanism that can explain recent temperature changes? Can someone support a temp record for the last 150 years that doesn’t ramp up so steeply? These are all positive assertions that are inconsistent with the core of AGW – prove one of these positives and AGW falls down.
My statements regarding Michelson–Morley are based on the point that invalidating a particular line of evidence only affects that line of evidence – if a theory is supported by multiple lines of evidence then you may have weakened the theory, but not disproven it. If on the other hand you validate evidence that conflicts with that theory, like Michelson–Morley and Aether, you’re on the way to disproving that theory. Prove something (positive) that is inconsistent.
As to belief – are you saying in your post that you don’t believe anything? That you haven’t been convinced by the evidence you’ve seen? We all have to make judgement calls based on what we know, on what evidence we trust (which seems to be a major issue on this topic). Give me some evidence that withstands the light of day, and I can be convinced!
So please, show that AGW is false! I certainly don’t like the consequences of it.
cohenite @ 103
The Ramanthan paper I found indicates that there may be some room for negative feedback in water vapor in temperate tropospheres, but that “The excellent agreement in Figure 10, however, suggest that it is highly unlikely models are missing some potentially important global scale water-vapor transport effects…”. And upper troposphere water vapor measurements have improved a lot since 1998.
Evans 2006 certainly shows winter/summer variation – but I don’t see issues with their GHG measurements? You would expect CO2 to have more effect in the winter (cold, drier air, lower absolute humidity for any relative humidity). I also completely agree that H2O is a more powerful GHG than CO2. It’s just that H2O levels will change in a matter of days with temperature (rain!), while CO2 levels take centuries to drop even in the presence of oceans and weathering. H2O is reactive, not a driver.
I’ll take a look at the Miskolczi papers (i.e., read them). I have to admit, though, that having his 2010 paper published in Energy & Environment is not a good sign for me – Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen has clear political goals overriding science in her publications, and has publicly said so.
——–
I’m out of town for the next week or so, and won’t be able to comment – my apologies. Have a good weekend, everyone.
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Lionell Griffith@81:
I think theoretical physics is always about trying to make a mathematical model of reality. What matters is not the squiggles the theoretical physicist makes on a piece of paper, or the words they choose to describe their theory. The only thing that matters is when they make a prediction about something which can be measured.
Of course, given two theories which both adequately predict some aspect of reality, physicists will lean to the one which is “prettier” – which usually involves Occam’s razor – the simpler theory wins.
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KR, you say: “while CO2 levels take centuries to drop even in the presence of oceans and weathering.” This not correct
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5e507c9970c-pi
You also say: “H2O is reactive, not a driver”; again no:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007JD008431.shtml
Also see that CO2 at best follows temperature movement and often has no correlation with temperature. Also see that CO2 has very low sensitivity to climate change:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/abs/nature08769.html
CO2 is a bit player.
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cohenite @ 103
I just read through (quickly, mind you) the Miskolczi 2007 paper you mentioned. That discusses differences between various radiative models for analyzing satellite data. The biases for the various models are on the order of 0.01°C to 0.02°C (Table 6).
I don’t see anything in that paper about optical depth of the atmosphere over 60 years or other long term behavior – is that in Miskolczi 2010? Which is unfortunately behind a pay wall?
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Roy Hogue:
No. Not quite. That is simply an attempt to do the impossible.
A contradiction is specifically a logical error. It occurs when a chain of reasoning leads to the object of the reasoning both having and not having the same attribute and the same time and in the same way.
The subtle distinction is important because the discovery of contradictions and its variants is the most fundamental error discovery mechanism in human thought. Since we are clearly capable of error we need a method to discover that we have made an error. However, we must choose to use that method because it is not automatic.
The most difficult part of the method is being explicitly clear about the context and content of each step of your chain of reasoning and, especially, not going beyond the evidence. Otherwise it is not reasoning. It is at best a flight of fantasy, conjecture, and make believe.
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Oops.
“the same attribute and the same time and in the same way.”
Should read:
“the same attribute AT the same time and in the same way.”
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KR@108, your Miskolczi link is to the Saunders et al paper; Miskolczi’s first paper is freely available; the 2nd paper is here:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/E&E_21_4_2010_08-miskolczi.pdf
Figure 10 is relevant.
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Again I ask the question, if CO2 is the main driver of global warming then why are the models that use CO2 with their high sensitivety, over estimating the so called measured temperature?
This same temperature data that has been manipulated to give a higher value than the raw temperature data.
So these models driven by CO2 as the main driver, can’t even match temperature data which has been artificially raised indicates a flaw somewhere in their thinking.
The general public are starting to wake up to the con with manipulated data – when we are having the coldest winter in years highest, highest snow fall in two decades and some joker comes out and indicates its the warmest year on record.
You can only lie for so long before even the most brainwashed start to see through the fog of the man made global warming cult.
Either the models are wrong and / or their sensitivity value is wrong.
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KR, Re 105
The papers you referenced citing higher sensitivities are full of assumptions. The stated uncertainty assumes many of these assumptions are true. One of these assumptions is that CO2 is driving the climate. There is no physical or theoretical evidence for this.
The Hansen paper in particular is weak on science and long on supposition and alarmism. For example, the temperature ‘predictions’ come from models which are known to fail at predicting the past, so how do you expect them to predict the future? He also relies on ice cores, which we all know do not support CO2 forcing of the climate. The CO2 lags by centuries, where this lag is highly asymmetrical and much shorter as temperatures rise, then as they fall. No amount of mutual feedback can account for this temporal discrepancy. In fact, this delay alone is sufficient to disqualify CO2 forcing as a viable possibility.
It seems that you agree that incremental Watts of power from the Sun and incremental Watts of GHG forcing power have the same effect, relative to the surface temperatures. Consider this plot of surface power vs. incident power. Notice how the gain is larger at cold temperatures.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/fb/is.png
The small dots are a scatter diagram of 25 years of satellite surface power measurements relative to measured incident power. The larger dots are 25 year averages for different latitude bands. The data came from ISCCP at GISS (Hansen’s organization). This shows that both the absolute gain and relative gain are about 1.1 around the operating point of the planet, i.e. 1 W/m^2 of incremental forcing results in 1.1 W/m^2 of incremental surface power. This corresponds to a climate sensitivity of about 0,75C per 3.7 W/m^2 of forcing. If instead, we measure the gain, relative to power arriving at the surface, the gain becomes 1.1/0.7 = 1.6. A gain of 1.6 corresponds to a sensitivity of about 1.1C. This doesn’t even account for the fact that only half of the 3.7 W/m^2 of incremental absorption finds it’s way back to the surface.
BTW, I suggest that you run the MODTRAN simulations yourself to verify that the 3.7 W/m^2 corresponds to incremental absorption (I’ve already done this). This 3.7 W/m^2 is captured by the atmosphere, which radiates it, as a grey body, radiates it in all directions so that half is radiated to the surface and half into space. Accounting for this, the actual sensitivity is closer to 0.6C, which is consistent with values measured and calculated by Lindzen and others.
You might also be interested in this plot, which shows the relationship between cloud coverage and surface temperature. Notice how this behavior validates my earlier description of how clouds behave. Pay special attention to how the direction of the relationship changes around 0C as ice melts and the surface becomes less reflective.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/fb/ca_st.png
Georgeio
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DEREK 88 YOU ARE 500% CORRECT!! ! !
Clumpy is one miliun % wrong
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I believe your calculations 100% Georgeio (my brother in law from Italy spells his name Giorgio) anyway I think you have made stellar use of MODTRAN, you’re probably the world’s authority of it.
Nothing I have seen so far attempts to incorporate the second law in all of this, Gerlich and Tscheushner make a start, in any case a cooling stratosphere coupled to a warming troposphere has to be answered somehow and the explanation “the radiation doesn’t get to the stratosphere” just doesn’t cut it for me. It’s not a big mirror up there at the tropopause, and either the “greenhouse effect” can warm the troposphere or it can’t.
By the way Kramm has recently shown that if the climate sensitivity to 2x CO2 is as small as your value then it cannot be discerned within the error of calculating any average annual temperature and if something can’t be observed then I wonder about its existence
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I saw the New Sceintist continues is ‘salvation’ and ‘exoneration’ of Phil Jones with an editorial
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727712.600-end-dirty-tactics-in-the-climate-war.html
and a full two page Q&A further on.
huh?!
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A tenuous connection from forty years ago of a known climate skeptic with the tobacco industry is enough for some people to reject anything he has to say about the “climate”;
if any “skeptic” was demonstrated to have communicated a tenth of what Jones did about what he was doing when he thought no one was looking then nothing they said or did in the future would be believed (not even by other “skeptics.”)
Yet Jones is “exonerated” of wrongdoing – what does he need to do ruin his credibility?
Is there anything?
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cohenite @ 111
Thanks for the correct link!
I’ve had a chance to give the Miskolczi 2010 a quick read – one thing jumped out at me. That is his requirement that Aa = Ed; energy in equals energy out.
Now, that’s certainly true at equilibrium, or at least as a time-averaged equilibrium (as some have noted, equilibrium is a rare condition, most times systems oscillate around an equilibrium). But given the time constants for heating (or cooling) the oceans, there’s at least a half-century time lag between a large change in forcing and a final temperature equilibrium. And during that time Aa != Ed; energy will be accumulating as heat. Or cooling, if the radiation forcing decreases, of course.
But it’s certainly not an absolute boundary condition that holds at all times!
Also of interest is Harries 2001, which actually measures spectral changes in TOA emissions between 1970-1997 – again showing that Miskolczi’s boundary condition doesn’t hold.
Looking further, I found a comment by Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog, which echoed my point on inequality, and also notes that the radiosonde data Miskolczi is looking at to argue 60 years of no change is, well, a bit poor.
scott @ 112
I’m not sure what you mean by the temperatures not hitting predicted values – the predictions are ~3C/doubling of CO2 with a long (half century?) time constant, and we’ve had (so far) ~1.35x CO2 since 1850, with predicted more warming to come. I don’t think the models for predicted temperature are involved in the measured temperatures, especially the satellite values, which are calibrated against empty space (3K) samples.
co2isnotevil @ 113
I completely agree that the ice cores show CO2 lagging temperature over the last million years or so. CO2 acts there as a feedback, with warmer/colder oceans holding less/more CO2, and changing CO2 concentrations along with (lagging) temperature changes induced by (forced by) insolation changes due to orbital mechanics. The changing CO2 feeds back into other forcings, amplifying the temperature swings a bit. No argument whatsoever about that lag.
Now, however, we’re changing CO2 levels directly. That changes the retained insolation, making CO2 the forcing. Other feedback mechanisms (water vapor, primarily) now kick in responding to the energy change.
The last million years we’ve had glacial and interglacial periods, and CO2 levels (lagged feedback) have ranged from 180-280ppm. We’re currently at 380ppm or so – much higher than anything from the ice cores.
Whatever changes first is the forcing, whether orbit/insolation, volcanic action, or now CO2 levels. Hopefully the consensus is wrong, and the feedback level is small enough that we won’t heat up too far with the current forcing change…
I’ll look at that web site (from where you provided the images) in more detail when I have a chance – at a first glance, though, where they assert “that the satellite data is inconclusive regarding any discernible trends in the global yearly average temperature over the last 25 years”, is a bit odd, given the >95% statistical confidence in warming over that time period (as per @30).
———-
Off to pack for the weekend – I hope everyone has a good one!
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What a silly statement, you’ve already contradicted yourself
bye for the weekend
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cohenite @ 107
My apologies, I had missed that post.
Individual CO2 molecules may only stay in the atmosphere a short time. But there’s constant exchange of CO2 with the ocean (the major sink), as well as with vegetation. “Recent work indicates that recovery from a large input of atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels will result in an effective lifetime of tens of thousands of years”. Individual molecules swap out, but the overall levels take much longer to change.
Your reference to Ferguson 2007 isn’t really relevant – that only discusses the carbon cycle (vegetation) and water in plants, not evaporation/precipitation.
Your last point, on CO2 responding to temperature, is of interest. Lots of work has been done on this, and there are definitely temperature/CO2 variations up and down all the time. But the average value of CO2 concentration, the trend, is still increasing at 2ppm/year. And climate (not weather) is all about the long term. I haven’t seen any work showing how cyclic temperature variations could induce a 150 year monotonic trend.
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brian @ 119
I’ve contradicted myself about “we’re changing CO2 levels directly”? Please, show me how!
…as we sit in our air-conditioned cars, driving to/from work, lit by electric lights – most of which is powered by burning fossil fuels…
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Are humans somehow responsible for the CO2 that volcanoes put out?
Are humans somehow responsible for the ancient decay of plants and storage of CO2 as fossil?
Do you think there was some “deus ex machina” that somehow governed Co2 levels of the Earth to some “correct” temperature before humans came along???
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Subject: Effective Government In Australia Held To Ransom By The Greens
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/effective-government-in-australia-held-to-ransom-by-the-greens/
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Brian,
I’ve also developed my own version that has some unique features which dramatically improves the performance and which integrates better with my simulation framework. By default, it uses a Lorentz function integrator that utilizes logarithmic time steps (a much slower linear integrator is optional and used only for cross checking calculations). This feature facilitates high resolution calculations with minimum memory requirements. It’s also fully parametric with run time configuration to trade off performance, precision, accuracy and memory requirements.
More to the point, yes, I’m very familiar with the spectral characteristics of the atmosphere and the physics behind it.
George no typo this time
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Kevin Trenberth in campaign to turn science upside down…
I see we have a subscription to New Scientist (I use the last term very loosely) in our library. With a few minutes to kill I browsed through the issue (28 august 2010) which should probably be labelled AGW Apologist… but I digress. I shall quote a short section, as I assume limited quotation is acceptable (Editorial, p3)
“When extreme weather strikes, such as the floods in Pakistan, the null hypothesis is to assume that humans have not played a role, then figure out if they did.
That’s the opposite of what should be done, argues Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. We should assume global warming plays a role in every climate event, then ask whether that role is a significant one.”
Well I don’t know about the rest of you but I see two enormous howlers in here, and that is only one-and-a-half paragraphs of the editorial, without even going into the garbage follow-on piece on page 14.
Firstly, since when do we have “climate events”? If something is a one-off, relatively short-lived event like the Pakistan floods then I think we can all agree that it is called weather … not climate.
Secondly, science always starts from a null hypothesis and attempts to reject it. Assuming man-made global warming as a starting point is not a null hypothesis. Besides which, AGW types need to reject the original null hypothesis that “man, through man-made CO2 emissions, does not significantly impact climate” before we can go anywhere with this “science”.
So Trenberth wants to put the burden of proof on those that believe the null hypothesis is a better explanation of reality than the H1 hypothesis AGWers push, that man-made GHG emissions will cause catastrophic climate change. Maybe if they were willing to heap all the research dollars on the sceptical* side of the debate and give us sufficient time (a couple decades perhaps) then the case might be made one way or the other. Until then Trenberth’s suggestion belongs in the “too loony to consider” pile of rubbish.
Trenberth (on p14) and others go on to suggest that complex modelling and analysis should be able to attribute blame for “climate events” on global warming. Using his “guilty until proven innocent” approach it is clear what he would like to see happen.
* Can we use “sceptic” anymore?
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KR, re 118,
The problem with your analysis is that the ice cores already reflect the ocean temperature by measuring the ratio of Deuterium to Hydrogen based on the difference in the relative evaporation of each, vs. temperature. As such, this ratio would take as long to establish itself as the equilibrium steady state between the atmospheric CO2 and the ocean, vis a vis, the temperature dependence of CO2 solubility. This dependence is a function of ocean water temperature, as the the ratio of D/H in the arctic snow. There will be no measurable lag.
You also fail to recognize that any effects that the CO2 we’ve added to the atmosphere will have has already occurred. The idea that the Earth is in a constant state of one sided disequilibrium has no foundation in fact, physics or measurements. The Earth is always in a state of mismatch between the incident power and the emitted power, except for twice per year, around the solstice. The hemispheres respond independently and during the summer, more power is arriving than is leaving and the temperature increases as the thermal mass of the planet soaks up the excess. Similarly, in the winter, more energy is leaving the planet than arriving from the Sun and the planet cools. The hemispheres act differently owing to the different topographies. As such, their sum also shows the same warming/cooling signature.
The point here is that the seasonal p-p power flux in and out of the Earth’s thermal mass is well over 100 W/m^2, plus and minus. The small plus of increasing CO2 (milliwatts/year) is lost in the noise and the Earth happily adjusts as is it does to all other changes. The Earth responds to the milliwatts per year from increasing CO2 at the same rate that it responds to seasonal solar power variability. This is weeks, not decades. If it was as slow as you need it to be, there would be little to no seasonal temperature variability.
George
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KR@118; this is a bit like Groundhog day; I have been through these very same “points” by AGWers so many times; blah! Aa=Ed, is not required by Miskolczi or derived by him; it is based on empirical observations:
http://miskolczi.webs.com/NASA_CERES_satellite_science_team.pdf
It has been confirmed elsewhere: see page 61, fig 11.1;
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=KaJHBv9FbYIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Geiger%E2%80%99s+%E2%80%9CThe+Climate+Near+The+Ground%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=2vWksoLUjX&sig=uzVQx1QlpuuIgcLfqjFI7x7-Eas&hl=en&ei=t_1oTJy5B5DCcYLg3awP&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Geiger%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%9CThe%20Climate%20Near%20The%20Ground%E2%80%9D&f=false
Sorry about the long url; I must learn how to use the link option. Anyway Miskolczi is discussed at Spencer’s blog; Aa=Ed and the constant Tau or optical depth are more or less the same thing; Miskolczi measured them in various ways:
1948-1997: Temp 288.8 K, H2O 2.6168 prcm, tau 1.867596
1959-2008: Temp 288.9 K, H2O 2.6106 prcm, tau 1.867976
There has been a slight increase between the first 50 years and the last 50 years but essentially this is within the error range. That is, the greenhouse effect has not changed [not as KR and others, even Dr Spencer, suggest, that there is no Greenhouse effect] in the 61 years of radiosonde measurements used by Miskolczi. KR suggests that this data is faulty; Roy Spencer says this about the data [at August 8, 2010 at 6:13am]:
“If you read and understood what I posted, Ferenc, I agreed that the *observational* result from 61 years of radiosonde data of a constant GHE (tau=1.87) is indeed intriguing, and possibly even true. (That it depends upon high humidities from the earliest sondes in the 1950s and 1960s, though, will not convince many people because there are so many instrumentation problems that affect long-term trends.) This is indeed a useful contribution, as I previously stated.”
But that data is NASA data; it is the official data; this is why noone has refuted Miskolczi in the peer-review literature.
This is a long post so I’ll finish but noting, once again, that KR refers to Harries 2001: will this paper never die?! There are many critiques; here is one comprehensive effort; David Stockwell has written a another good rebuttal but his site is temporarily down:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
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Cohenite, co2isnotevil, Bulldust, et al
I’ve been chasing down the IPCC climate model forcing datasets and have documented what I’ve found here comment 194.
The RCP Database is relevant to your discussion 126, 125, 107. I can’t duplicate the link here otherwise wordpress will throw me out.
If the Database is old news disregard but please leave me a tip here or on the other post.
Also, I’ve made an enquiry to Nasa GSFC asking (among other things) the following questions:
Question 1. Will super-parameterization (i.e. a cloud resolving model) be implemented in the up-coming frozen ar5 GISS ModelE(?) version?
Question 2a. Am I correct in that the GISS ModelE1 frozen ar4 version
uses Radiative Forcing methodology rather than Full Physics?
Question 2b. What methodology can we expect to see in the up-coming
GISS ModelE(?) frozen ar5 version – Radiative Forcing? Full Physics?
Hybrid? Also, will we still be looking at Fortran source code or OO?
(System Diagrams paint a thousand words) Or, has The ModelE series
been superseded by another model for ar5 purposes?
I will bore you with the response I get (if any) in case anyone is remotely interested.
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Richard, Roy Spencer has probably simplified the process: at Jeff Id’s Spencer says:
“There are 3 primary questions the IPCC answers every five years in their reports according to their working groups.
WGI – Assess the amount and severity of CO2 climate change and whether man is causing it.
WGII – Assess the impact good and bad of CO2 climate change including costs and options for adaptation
WGIII – Assess options for mitigation of climate change, look at the benefits and drawbacks of different policy scenarios”
Spencer concludes:
“These groups were established well before the consensus that CO2 causes warming even existed, but think about it, you don’t need question 2 if you haven’t already assumed 1 and you certainly don’t need 3 if you haven’t assumed 2. What’s more is, if the IPCC doesn’t answer all three of these assessments in an extreme fashion, the group itself would be dissolved. The more extreme the assessment, the more money they control, and more importantly to their intent the more policy they control.
If any of the following were true, the IPCC wouldn’t exist
WG1 – CO2 only causes only very moderate warming — IPCC closed
WG2 – Impacts of warming are mostly good or moderately bad — IPCC closed
WG3 – The solution to CO2 emissions is simple. Adaptation and adding more nuclear power generation over the next 50 years, fossil fuels will rise in cost on their own due to scarcity. — IPCC closed.”
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“WG2 – Impacts of warming are mostly good or moderately bad — IPCC closed”
I’m inclined to say that even with their best (or worst, if you prefer) efforts, the IPCC has only found moderately bad impacts. They have to be additionally exaggerated and misrepresented to maintain the degree of alarm some seem to consider essential.
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Cohenite@ 129
Yes.
The AV quote is Jeff Id’s, Id is responding to Spencer’s “Dump the IPCC Process, It Cannot Be Fixed” post at his site (worth a read).
I don’t subscribe to the IPCC’s RF methodology and even if it was appropriate, the deficiencies and omissions in the inputs make the outputs questionable (to say the least) but this is what govts are basing policies on (NZs ETS is based solely on “IPCC science”).
The scope for fiddling (input assumptions and code) is huge (think Harry_Read_Me) so I have decided to get up to speed on the models because the IPCC will still be around in 2013 and RF is what we will have in ar5 – unless Spencer, Id, Clark and everyone else get their way. To this end, the passing troll (Not-Richo) has been most helpful by extending my understanding. I now know what to look for in the ar5 models that will out soon.
I don’t give a toss about what model results say about CS unless I know what the input parameters are and have an idea what the code is doing so chasing down the input forcing datasets has been a revelation. They give substance to the simplistic summary of Radiative Forcing Components IPCC Table 2.4 (ar4).
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sorry Kr their models are not linear so by the time we hit half a century they will be out by approx 100% given the last 10 years out by over 400%.
better luck next tine sunshine 🙂
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opps 1000’s of % given they are already out by 400%
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That’s really great George – must have taken you a long time to do that
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Every scientist, no matter in what speciality, should have the humility of Sir Isaac Newton when he said, “I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
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Thank you Elsie
I need to remind myself of that, regularly
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Lionell @110
You caught me! And I knew better too. I should have proofread my own work better.
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KR,
Let’s just take a look:
AGW theory has exactly one and only one premise — that humans are emitting CO2 and that, if we don’t stop, there will be disastrous warming of the Earth. This comes along with the claim that such warming is now occurring and temperatures are rising. This is falsified by direct observation. Global temperatures are not rising in lock step with CO2 increase as demanded by theory. And the threat is always human produced CO2 as if we were the only source of it (provably false and to me, laughable if this was not so serious a matter to get right). Multiple lines of evidence are what? I see just one, actual temperature measurements. Various things may be changing but those changes tell nothing about what caused them. The single premise that CO2 is doing something is what needs to be dealt with. That premise is falsified by direct observation at the present time.
There has been absolutely no empirical link made between CO2 and anything going on, whether temperature or otherwise. It’s all mere conjecture. So as far as belief, what am I to believe? As I see it, so far there is nothing there to believe. In the meantime I remind you of the scandal ridden state of the AGW camp, which does nothing to bolster confidence in their position.
Sorry but this is back to prove a negative. Something you just agreed with me can’t be done.
Neither I nor anyone else in whom I would put any trust would like to see the dire consequences being predicted. But the predictions are not based on anything in reality. Would I like to see honest climate research being done? Certainly! The more we understand about the world we live in the better we can cope with it. But the current AGW/CAGW/climate change (pick your term) debacle that Joanne works to expose is not about science. It’s about power, control and money.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But the Michelson–Morley experiment was designed to show the presence of the Aether; it being expected that the speed of light would not be the same in the direction of the Earth’s motion and perpendicular to that direction. It was a natural enough assumption based on how sound behaves (and waves in general, except EM). What’s needed is a similar experiment designed, not to disprove AGW but to show a cause and effect relationship between atmospheric CO2 and Earth’s climate.
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switch to a single strand wire (not a cable) such as is used for jewelry or found inside a co-axial cable. There are cables and strings which also are good at minimizing the divergence for the model optimum, but most string and cable is wound in a way which doesn’t work well with the experiment (the individual strands are not under the same tension as the string as whole and create interference or they pick up contaminants and become heavier which changes linear density). In a pinch you could also switch to sewing thread which probably will be within your measurement error but single strand wire is better. If you must use the same string, triple check the linear density of the piece of string used in the experiment before and after the experiment, the problem is about 90% of the time in the string which is why I refer you to single strand wire which has fewer problems. The theory is good, it just needs spherical cows to be demonstrated in the real world.
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String stretching has to remain within the elastic limits of the material, evidently, for the application of this linear SHO theory. I’m trying to envision a material for a single strand that this remains true for the situation at hand
Steel? I’m not so sure
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WELCOME TO THE CLIMATE CRUSADES:
“Belief” is NOT benign. Belief, in the case of the hostage taking enviro yesterday motivates violence and aggression, and in this case the “believer”, a rabid enviro Malthusian, is apparently dead.
Dead men don’t talk. Mad enviros give Soros and Hansen and Suzuki others who incite violence through divide and rule tactics a bad name, so I guess they have to be shot beofre it become obvious that “green” equals Malthusian depopulation to those who need little to push them over the edge anyway, as well as to many seemingly “sane” greens now advocatin the greening of hatred, and its efficacy in immigration policy – a separate topic but how convenient to have a target that has to “go” first, because they are “worse” than “us”??? Exactly how did poverty level immigrants often without any cars become the main culprit polluters in the USA, more recently the Un-united States of Annihilism?
(SNIPPED)
(It is too far off topic and objectionable as well) CTS
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Copper wire works fine at this scale, a 24 gauge or .5mm wire won’t show plastic deformation until you put more weight on it. It’s not a good choice because of it’s ductility for many applications, but for this sort of experiment copper wire works fine, just don’t use more than a 1KG weight and you should have no problems. Put a heavier weight on it and you can use the wire for a demonstration of Hook’s law and/or the limits of elastic stretching, but under 1KG should present no problems even if the wire is of poor quality.
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Seriously OT, but: The MM experiments didn’t actually get null results, just results much smaller than expected (see the Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment. Dayton Miller repeated these experiments with increasing precision for 30 years, also getting results showing fringe shifts, but smaller than the original ether theory predicted.
Some people (no link, sorry) have noted that the only experiments getting actual null results were done in vacuum or solid material (fiber) — most experiments in air (or other gases) got some shift that correlated with interferometer position w.r.t. the celestial sphere, not the Earth coordinates, so that has kept speculation alive. The most interesting is that contraction is really happening w.r.t. a preferred celestial direction, which exactly cancels out the shift in vacuum, where the speed really is c; and also in solids, since the light always has to pass through the same amount of material regardless of whether it is contracted or not (hence takes the same transit time) — but not in gases where the material mass is less in a contracted arm (because gases can move). There seems to be a lack of experiments with sufficient controls to examine the various ideas that are floated.
This whole area (ether drift experiments) gets regularly chewed over in the literature (although not at a high publication rate) and whether or not it has been resolved seems to be more a matter of opinion than anything else.
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JB@34
Out of left field, but prompted by a few recent comments – have you considered using a steel guitar string, say 8-13 thou gauge. Think about the properties required for the intended purpose of use…?
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BobC @143,
Thanks for that link.
This is tongue-in-cheek. But it reads kind of like AGW — all theory and no substance as far as Aether goes.
It’s very interesting stuff and I’ve remembered the basics of the experiment and the fallout since college days. It was the most fascinating part of physics to me.
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Sorry John, as an economist he sucks as well. I know, I am one. Keep him – he is yours and you are welcome to him.
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Roy Hogue:
“all theory and no substance” makes a good definition of Aether 🙂
(Might work for dark matter too.)
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According to both Wiki and his personal website, Lomborg’s degrees are in Political Science and he has lectured in statistics. Nothing suggests any degree of expertise in economics.
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Gilding is displaying all the attributes of a lightweight. Indecisive, unsure, a foot in both camps. He used to be sure, but now he’s having second thoughts about that. Perhaps and maybe…hmmm…but…
Give us all a break and leave the comments to a professional.
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cohenite @ 127
Hey there.
I took a good look at Harries 2001 and their later papers – while they saw a CO2 signature in TOA spectra, it’s notable that this signal was on the same scale as the noise in the samples.
So, while it’s consistent with a CO2 warming effect (doesn’t disagree), it’s not a strong enough signal for any proof. Good to see.
Also saw a recent video involving Stephen Schneider. He notes that cloud feedback may halve or double CO2 doubling sensitivity (increasing cloud coverage by 2% halves feedback, increasing cloud height by 0.2km doubles feedback), and that current measurements are poor enough on this topic to give the +/- 1.5-2C in the current models.
Here’s to hoping it’s on the low end…
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co2isnotevil @ 126
I don’t know if we can say that any CO2 heating has already occurred. If it’s going into ocean heating (ocean heat content), that is enough mass that it might take a while to actually reach an equilibrium value.
Yes, yes, I know nothing stays at equilibrium – it merely cycles around it. But I don’t believe that any of the physics indicates that the oceans (if heating) have reached their final average temperature or CO2 saturation level.
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