One part of a recent survey caught my attention:
The strongest correlate of opinion on climate change is partisan affiliation. Two-thirds of Republicans (67%) say either that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of natural changes in the atmosphere (43%) or that there is no solid evidence the Earth is getting warmer (24%). By contrast, most Democrats (64%) say the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity. … The divide is even larger when party and ideology are both taken into consideration. Just 21% of conservative Republicans say the Earth is warming due to human activity, compared with nearly three-quarters (74%) of liberal Democrats. [Pew Research Center] (Skip to videos, data, index.)
In other words, most of the general public appears to believe that the existence of abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. (formerly known as anthropogenic ‘Human-caused’ global warming) is a question of politics rather than science. They’re not looking at evidence published in peer-reviewed science journals before adopting a position. Instead, they seem to decide that their political party’s position on climate change is “X,” so they believe “X.” Finally, this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smug politician’s You have to realize that I view ‘politician’ as a VERY dirty word in order to get the full effect of this sentence. alarmism. I run into hordes of them on campus, and I always rebuff their attempts to guilt me out of driving by saying “Why worry about the Earth when we’ve got 7 planets R.I.P. Pluto, 1930-2006 to spare?!”
Keep in mind that I’m only saying the existence of abrupt climate change is a purely scientific question. I realize that our response to climate change is a legitimate political question. But let’s set that question aside to contemplate the existence of abrupt climate change. Instead of lining up behind politicians, let’s take the road less traveled by examining some evidence given to us by modern science.
To begin with, it’s indisputable that the Earth’s climate has varied wildly in the past. Vostok ice core data confirm that for nearly half a million years, the climate has changed cyclically. In all that time, the maximum CO2 concentration never went above 300 ppm parts per million . It’s hit higher levels millions of years ago, but usually Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (among other examples of natural abrupt climate change) show that the natural climate is only fairly stable in the long run. These events show that the climate can quickly move from one stable “attractor” to another. I should stress, however, that results like Meehl 2004 show that today’s changes aren’t natural. in gradual ways. Plus, the Earth was essentially a different planet back then, with a different biosphere basking under the light of a very slightly The Sun was only barely fainter tens of millions of years ago, but high CO2 concentrations hundreds of millions of years ago or more were partially compensated for by the lower solar luminosity. Also, the continents shift on these timescales which affects the climate too. dimmer Sun so comparisons across that much time are tricky at best.
Natural variations are evident in the data, of course. The most prominent cycles over geological time are governed by (among other effects) Milankovitch cycles which are caused by periodic variations in the Earth’s orbit.
Bizarrely, the CO2 concentration is at 380 ppm parts per million today. That’s ~26% higher than it’s been in the last half million years. Notice that the current CO2 concentration is off the scale of the Vostok data graph. If this is due to natural variability alone, it’s quite a coincidence that it’s happening right after we started burning enough oil to fuel ~800 million cars, and burning coal by the gigaton to supply ~50% of our electricity.
Furthermore, it seems like the CO2 at Vostok typically increased centuries after the temperature started to increase. (Ice core data are difficult to analyze in this manner, though.) At least, that’s the way it used to work. Right now, the CO2 concentration is at an unprecedented level but the temperature is barely above normal. Again, this implies that we’re not experiencing natural climate variability because what’s happening today doesn’t match the behavior of the ancient climate.
According to physics that was firmly established decades before I was born, CO2 warms the planet by absorbing infrared radiation from the ground better than it absorbs visible radiation from the Sun. So this rapidly increasing CO2 should cause a rapid temperature increase:
The above graphs are quite busy, so here’s an overview of each one:
- The top graph shows temperatures over the last 300 years, as recorded by instruments. Notice that several independent instruments are telling us that the temperature has increased dramatically in recent decades.
- The middle graph shows temperatures over the last 1000 years as reconstructed from various proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, boreholes, glacier retreat, etc. The different curves are based on different data and algorithms, and were derived by scientists from all over the world. Note that all of them show an abrupt temperature increase in the last few decades. See Table 6.1 for more details.
- The bottom graph shows a “most likely” temperature reconstruction over the last 1000 years. This estimate uses all the previous curves, weighted according to their statistical uncertainties. The shading represents the combined uncertainty; darker areas are more confidently known.
Perhaps this is a coincidence? All the evidence I’ve described so far just shows that CO2 and temperatures have both risen in an apparently artificial manner in the last few decades. But Meehl 2004 tested whether or not recent temperature observations could be explained by natural variations alone:
The black curve represents observations. The blue curve represents the result of a computer simulation that accounts for natural variations like volcanic eruptions and changes in the brightness of the Sun. The shaded blue area represents the uncertainty of that simulation. The red curve includes all the natural variations in the blue curve, but adds human emissions like CO2 and sulfate aerosols. Notice that after ~1970 the observed temperatures aren’t consistent with natural variations, but they are within the error bars of the prediction made by accounting for human emissions.
The Earth is so massive and ancient that we tend to instinctively believe ‘Don’t treat C02 as a pollutant’ in the Christian Science Monitor by Mark W. Hendrickson on June 23, 2009 wrongly says “And how do you propose to regulate Earth’s temperature when as much as three-quarters of the variability is due to variations in solar activity, with the remaining one-quarter due to changes in Earth’s orbit, axis, and albedo (reflectivity)? This truly is ‘mission impossible.’ Mankind can no more regulate Earth’s temperature than it can the tides. … 1. Human activity accounts for less than 4 percent of global CO2 emissions. 2. CO2 itself accounts for only 10 or 20 percent of the greenhouse effect. This discloses the capricious nature of the EPA’s decision to classify CO2 as a pollutant, for if CO2 is a pollutant because it is a greenhouse gas, then the most common greenhouse gas of all – water vapor, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect – should be regulated, too. The EPA isn’t going after water vapor, of course, because then everyone would realize how absurd climate-control regulation really is.” that humans aren’t powerful enough to affect the climate on this scale. For example, those awe-inspiring volcanic eruptions simply must dwarf anything we do, right? Surprisingly, humans emit ~100x more CO2 than volcanoes.
Even still, the Earth is a stable system, right? Won’t our changes to the atmosphere just provoke a natural response that cancels them out, preventing us from significantly altering the climate? Well… maybe. The natural climate certainly did appear fairly Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (among other examples of natural abrupt climate change) show that the natural climate is only fairly stable in the long run. These events show that the climate can quickly move from one stable “attractor” to another. I should stress, however, that results like Meehl 2004 show that today’s changes aren’t natural. stable in our absence. However, a number of positive feedback effects present the disturbing possibility that the climate is only metastable:
- Melting Arctic sea ice uncovers darker ocean water, so more heat is absorbed after the ice starts to melt, which speeds up the remaining melting…
- Warmer oceans will evaporate more water vapor into the atmosphere, which is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.
- Warmer deep ocean temperatures may destabilize methane hydrate deposits, releasing another more potent greenhouse gas.
- Melting permafrost releases CO2 and methane.
- Melting glaciers help to lubricate the slide of the glacier into the ocean, speeding up the loss of glaciers once the process starts.
- Higher temperatures increase the risk of forest fires, which release CO2.
- The dust caused by vegetation loss due to shifting precipitation patterns, fires and even other pollutants darkens snow, causing it to melt earlier.
There are also negative feedback effects, such as the fact that trees grow faster in higher CO2 and thus store carbon in their wood faster. [Update Thanks to Dr. Geoffrey A. Landis for his additions and corrections to this section and the faint young Sun caveat. by Dr. Landis: Also, the Stefan-Boltzmann equation says that hotter objects radiate more, and higher temperatures = more evaporation = more clouds = higher albedo.] But I worry that the abrupt spike in CO2 levels might cause positive feedback effects to dominate– at least temporarily. In other words, it seems likely that a little bit of warming will lead to more warming.
Bottom line: As far as I can tell there’s a mountain of scientific evidence showing that abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. is a matter of serious concern.
On a completely different note, as an ordinary American I think we should do something about this matter. We’re still the most To my foreign colleagues and friends: You wanna fight about it? :) technologically advanced nation in the world, with one of the largest, best educated workforces in history. Our economy is very capitalistic, which makes us highly adaptable compared to more socialist countries that are mired in bureaucracy. If any country can solve this problem, it’s us.
The legislation currently in the Senate needs to be passed. This bill has already been weakened in the House and it’s only the first step, but it’s the least we can do to convince the world that the United States is ready to lead once again.
Update: Here are some related videos:
- The GRACE satellites observe ice mass loss in Greenland and West Antarctica, and observe global water storage.
- Here’s a brief history of CO2, and a NOAA animation of daily CO2 concentrations during 2008.
- This interactive graph and this short video compare emissions from different countries over the last few centuries.
- This animation shows the importance of looking at long-term climate trends rather than short-term weather noise.
- Dr. Marshall Shepherd promotes climate literacy and slays zombie theories.
- David Attenborough has a short conversation with Peter Cox about how scientists attribute the recent global temperature rise to human activities.
- National Geographic asks “Could just 1°C change the world?” What about 2°C, 3°C, 4°C, 5°C, or 6°C?
- Greg Craven made a short video about risk management.
- A 10 minute video summarizes the end-Permian extinction; a longer version goes into more detail.
- A 5 minute video introduces ocean acidification.
- Earth: The Operators’ Manual tells the story of Earth’s climate history and our relationship with fossil fuels. Here are short clips of Richard Alley discussing ice core climate records, and explaining that clean energy costs about as much as modern plumbing.
- The UK forum on “Climate Change: Values, National Security, and Free Enterprise” featured Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Steve Anderson and Republican Bob Inglis.
- David Archer made a series of video lectures called Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast.
- Naomi Oreskes talks briefly about the implications of climate change, and gives a longer presentation based on Merchants of Doubt.
- A series of short videos examines claims made by Anthony Watts regarding his surfacestations.org project, and the Oregon “Petition Project”.
- An episode of Horizon called “Science Under Attack” discusses “climategate” and climate change contrarians.
- A BBC special called “Meet the Climate Sceptics” examines some of Lord Christopher Monckton’s many claims. Peter Sinclair also did this, as well as John Abraham and Peter Hadfield (followup).
- Barry Bickmore gives a talk about his own former skepticism.
- Stephen Schneider faced 52 “climate sceptics” in an episode of Insight called The Sceptics (also available at YouTube). He also gave a more technical lecture and discussed the boundary between politics and science.
- Richard Alley gave a technical 2009 presentation called “The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History.”
- Jerry Mitrovica gave a technical 2011 presentation regarding accelerating sea level rise.
- Here are videos from the 2012 AGU and other AGU videos.
- Bob Watson gave a technical 2012 presentation summarizing climate change.
- Ray Pierrehumbert gave a technical 2012 presentation summarizing successful predictions in climate science.
- Richard Alley gave a technical 2013 presentation called “Slip Slidin’ Away – Ice sheets and sea level in a warming world.”
- Jennifer Francis gave a technical 2013 presentation called “Climate Change and Extreme Weather.” Here’s a related 2 minute video.
- Andrew Dickson gave a technical 2009 presentation called “Acidic Oceans: Why Should We Care?”
- A series of panels at the 2011 AGU discussed declining reef health and tipping points.
- Ken Caldeira gave a technical 2012 presentation called “Ocean Acidification: Adaptive Challenge or Extinction Threat?”
- Global climate models have made many successful predictions.
- In 2005, 11 national science academies urged world leaders to “acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing.”
- In 2009, 13 national science academies told world leaders that “the need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.”
- Climate change statements from world religions and Young Evangelicals.
- NASA tracks vital signs of the planet at JPL’s Global Climate Change website. Don’t miss interactives like Eyes on the Earth.
- Skeptical Science has a wide variety of informative articles with versions ranging from “basic” to “advanced”.
- Real Climate is climate science from climate scientists. It’s an excellent resource for readers who understand Skeptical Science’s “advanced” articles and want more.
- Tamino is a professional statistician whose blog Open Mind tirelessly debunks contrarian arguments. Some old articles can be found here.
- Science of Doom evaluates and explains climate science in a lucid but very technical manner.
- The equilibrium climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 can be determined in many different ways. For instance, here’s a figure from Royer et al. 2007 (PDF) which concludes that “a climate sensitivity greater than 1.5°C has probably been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate system over the past 420 million years”.
- Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (2009) summarizes the science and the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. This NAS report (2012) examines sea level rise off the U.S. west coast. Sea level rise varies regionally due to factors like the gravity of thinning ice sheets.
- The American Institute of Physics describes the discovery of global warming, including the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect.
- The IPCC’s 2007 report (PDFs) on the physical science basis of climate change reviews the scientific literature and provides a summary for policymakers (PDF). Previous reports: 1990, 1995, and 2001.
- The Copenhagen Diagnosis summarizes some of the science published since the IPCC’s 2007 report. Here’s their list of figures.
Links to climate data and source code:
- NOAA’s climate indicators and climate at a glance calculates trends for many different climate variables, as does WoodForTrees. The Skeptical Science trend calculator also estimates statistical significance.
- Here are maps of global temperature from NASA and New Scientist, and U.S. temperature trends in each state.
- Here are sea level rise data, NOAA’s coastal flooding impacts viewer, and informal interactive maps of global (caveats) and American coastlines.
- These interactive models explore the spectrum of CO2, the carbon cycle, climate models, and much more.
- Here’s an interactive simple climate model.
- The Javascript Ice Sheet Model is interactive and open-source.
- caerbannog666’s global temperature virtual machine runs in VirtualBox; here’s the documentation.
- JPL archives NASA’s climate and ocean data at PO.DAAC, which features the State of the Ocean.
- Temperature proxy data and various instrumental temperature records can be downloaded here.
- The code for past temperature reconstructions can be downloaded here.
- The Ice Sheet System Model is open-source software from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.
- Climate models from the IPCC 2007 report can be downloaded here and here. Newer RCP scenario data are here. The model outputs are available here.
I’ve been discussing abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. on the internet for several years, mostly at Slashdot under the pseudonym khayman80. The interesting bits of these conversations have been copied here, but please note that my statements have been edited Each comment is linked back to the original location in the Slashdot archives so you can compare the current version to the original. Those links look like: [Dumb Scientist] or [Jane Q. Public] and expanded since I first wrote them. Here’s an index with links to each conversation:
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People wonder why “climate change” replaced “global warming.”
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Rrvau asks if scientists predicted an ice age in the 1970s.
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People inquire about the scale and impact of human CO2 emissions.
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An Onerous Coward asks about nuclear and solar power.
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Stormcrow309 asks about potential flaws in the Vostok ice core analysis.
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M4cph1sto doubts that temperatures are increasing.
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Jane Q. Public asks if sunspot activity causes global warming, among many other topics:
- The importance of peer review.
- “Cosmic rays are responsible for global warming.”
- “Water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.”
- The accuracy of the “hockeystick” graph.
- What does the IPCC say about hurricanes?
- “CO2 increases after temperature, so it doesn’t warm the planet.”
- “CO2 is already saturated, so adding more CO2 isn’t going to warm the planet any more.”
- “It’s not that simple.”
- We agree that the media over-hypes disaster scenarios.
- The Salem Hypothesis and the application of a modified version to this debate.
- “The troposphere isn’t warming enough, so greenhouse warming theories are fundamentally flawed.”
- Jane says her comments have been taken out of context and deliberately portrayed in a negative light. So please compare her statements to the originals at Slashdot, which can be accessed through links that look like [Jane Q. Public]
Update: Jane’s index continues here.
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Kyle asks about the political and economic implications of climate change. Also, he asks if global temperatures are only appearing to increase due to urban expansion.
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Jim P.E. asks if the President is receiving sound advice.
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Bopeth asks about our population growth, and economic issues associated with climate change.
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Anonymous says that my “comments exhibit the most profound and disturbing kind of scientific elitism,” along with:
- “How do you wager on whether climate change is anthropogenic or not?”
- I criticize peer review.
- “What I want to see next is the contrary case from a well-versed expert who has reached conclusions that conflict with yours.”
- Why shouldn’t we look to politicians for scientific answers?
- “What, exactly, would you like to see from the general public in terms of reasoning about this subject?”
- Marbs asks “What opinion do you currently hold that contradicts the mainstream scientific community?”
- Why do high tides happen on opposite sides of the Earth at the same time?
- “… we can’t do ‘parallel earth’ experiments to test various parameters … and nobody has a track record of ‘getting it right’ long term because there hasn’t been a long term yet.”
- Marbs asks about the graph on Steven Fielding’s website and the “due diligence report.”
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Spector asks how climatologists attribute the recent warming to human activity.
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Reivan asks about thermodynamic equilibrium.
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Gkai says “… newest global data are not so supportive of the idea that man-produced CO2 is responsible for the bulk of global warming” then claims that no climate model takes clouds or changes in the Earth’s albedo into account, and says my article is not convincing because of model validations.
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Thethibbs doesn’t want to quarrel with my “religion” so he rebuts the evidence I’ve presented with a link to an article by Marc Morano.
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Elkto doesn’t believe CO2 is causing any problems because “Earth cooled a degree last year, satellite images show arctic ice cap growing the last three years, lack of sunspots is pointing to a scary minimum, the CO2 increase contributes to less than 1/2 of a percent increase in greenhouse gases (do not exclude the largest greenhouse gas, water vapor.)”
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Shivetya says “natural CO2 production is 20x man’s … but it damn well won’t stop the “consensus” train.”
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Techno-vampire says I’m leaving out significant information about the Little Ice Age, and the Medieval Warm Period, which he implies was a global event.
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Someone implies that I’m a semi-honest “scientist” because I’m referring to ice core records that “only” extend 650,000 years into the past. Also:
- “Tacking high resolution data from modern thermometers on to data taken from ice cores seems dubious.”
- “Be careful about weeding out data just because it doesn’t support your hypothesis. … You seem quite certain that there is only one way to explain things. You’ve already assumed your hypothesis is true. It’s not good science, and I think you should be more skeptical.”
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Avysk claims that I’m a lying idiot who perverts things deliberately because I pointed out that the current CO2 concentration of 380ppm is ~26% above the 650,000 year maximum of 300ppm.
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Fluffy99 says that scientists assume that the Earth’s temperature is supposed to be constant, leading them to ignore solar variations which Fluffy99 claims are responsible for global warming. He claims human emissions aren’t the dominant climate forcing, and it’s possible we’re having no effect at all. Later, he implies that scientists reach conclusions that are motivated by funding.
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Someone says “How come global-warmists never mention water vapor, which is by far the biggest greenhouse gas. I guess there isn’t any money in selling “steam credits”.”
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Flyingrobots says “The main problem I have with your position is the incessant manipulation of temperature data by those who really believe in global warming.”
- Flyingrobots uses the Galileo Gambit, cites Claude Allegre as a creditable person who argues against my point of view, and says “I’m not claiming giant conspiracies amongst scientists, however, I think the author [Stephen Goddard] raises some valid points that require further explanation.”
- Flyingrobots repeats: “Folks like Monsieur Allegre raise valid points that should be addressed and not swept under the carpet.”
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Jmerlin claims that “man-made climate problems (even if they are true – though largely unproven)” haven’t caused anything “bad” to happen, and won’t cause anything “bad” to happen until our children’s great great grandchildren are dead, and possibly not for hundreds of thousands of years. So if politicians want to use a “destructive” tax to “punish” him for using coal and oil, he thinks they should be worried about angering citizens like him, because “it’ll be the French Revolution all over again, and I’ll bring my guillotine with me.”
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Ivan256 claims that the Vostok ice core graph I included is horrendously misleading because, apparently, I was fooled into thinking the data suggest that increased atmospheric CO2 leads to higher temperatures.
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Disco inferno criticizes nuclear power.
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Tmosley claims to be a scientist who wonders how any temperature increase can be proven to be anthropogenic when we don’t have a control [Earth], seems to think heat capacities of water vapor and CO2 are the basis of the greenhouse effect, then implies that environmental legislation would murder people and “cut off the arms and legs of our civilization with an environmentally friendly electric chainsaw”.
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SmilingSalmon thinks that McIntyre and McKitrick have uncovered a weakness in the scientific process when they tried to publish a comment implying that the “hockey stick” algorithm of MBH98 was tuned to produce a hockey stick from any input, even “red noise”.
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Budenny claims that the climate could exhibit negative feedback, wonders if the climate is warming faster or differently than ever before, and accuses the climate science community of refusing to release their data.
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The AGU Fall Meeting is the largest geophysics conference in the world. Most attendees are mainstream scientists, but occasionally one runs into a climate change contrarian:
- At the 2008 AGU Fall Meeting, I found a poster by Maruyama et al. which claimed that most of the warming over the last 50 years is caused by natural oscillations, and that we should expect 0.5K of global cooling by 2020.
- I met Norman Rogers at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting next to his poster called “Inconsistencies and Fallacies: IPCC 20th Century Simulations, Multi-Model Ensembles and Climate Sensitivity”.
- At the 2010 AGU Fall Meeting, I saw Norman Rogers again at his poster titled “Why do anthropogenic global warming skeptics have poorer scientific credentials than their opponents?”
- I met D.C. Smith at the 2010 AGU Fall Meeting in front of his poster titled “Line by Line Analysis of Carbon Dioxide Absorption for Predicting Global Warming” which claimed that doubling CO2 would only result in 0.26C warming (at most).
- Norman Rogers of the Heartland Institute (H.I.) and David Smith present contrarian posters at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting.
- Norman Rogers (H.I.) et al. praise Lomborg, imply scientists want to kill off most of humanity.
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Radtea says “Global atmospheric heat content is meaningful. Global mean temperature is not.”
- Radtea says “I don’t agree with your characterization of heat as strictly a type of energy transfer. … I still don’t understand what anyone thinks they are doing with global average temperature, but whatever it is, it isn’t physics.”
- Radtea says “… you’re not a computational physicist, or you would have noticed the lack of energy conservation in some models (it is added by hand as a correction on each time step) or unphysical boundary conditions in others (ocean surface in particular).”
- Radtea asks “… what data would make you change your beliefs regarding global warming/climate change?”
- Radtea says “isn’t it curious that there’s no evidence of warming in the past 15 years but we keep on hearing about how Arctic ice is melting at record rates.”
- Radtea says “your claim that most of the models used in climate research are true to first principles is false. I am a computational physicist, and every GCM I have looked at has non-physical aspects that violate well-established physical principles, most worriesomely conservation of energy.”
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Beryllium Sphere correctly notes that “Qualitatively, what you’d expect from climate change is more precipitation (because there’s more evaporation) and therefore thickening at high elevations where the snow stays cold, while lower warmer regions flow faster or even melt”, then someone who tends towards quantum physics briefly challenges that idea.
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Hadlock helpfully corrects my terminology regarding glacier melt/flow/thinning.
- Jbengt and HiThere make genuinely helpful comments about glacier thinning.
- At the 2009 AGU fall meeting, I met a glaciologist next to her poster about glacier feedback effects.
- At the 2010 UNAVCO conference, Meredith Nettles showed that glacial earthquakes in Greenland have dramatically increased in frequency recently, Steve Nerem showed that Helheim glacier in Greenland is accelerating based on GPS, imaging and InSAR, and Tim Dixon showed correlations with independent estimates that subtract calving/meltwater flux from snowfall accumulation.
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In response to a study showing “surprising, extensive thinning in Antarctica, affecting the ice sheet far inland,” Jarek asks “Does it? The increased temperatures of west Antarctica are more than compensated by decreased temperatures elsewhere in Antarctica.”
- Jarek says “We are literally being served half truths. Or is less than half truths. Most of Antarctica gets colder, some of it gets warmer. By reporting on the parts that get warmer, media tries to sell disasters just because it sells better than the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
- Troed claims that “Antarctica as a whole isn’t warming unless you deal in dubious statistical models.”
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Whatanut wonders if it will be cheaper to adapt to climate change rather than trying to avoid it by reducing CO2 emissions.
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Msevior says “One of the catastrophic outcomes of climate change are large sea level rises due to ice melt in the polar regions. Presumably there are models that predict how this could occur with global warming. So the question is, do these data agree with these models?”
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Smoker2 says “… there is actually more minimum ice cover than last year, and last year had more cover than the year before. Why do they [NASA] not mention this at all ? Maybe the point is to mislead?”
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After repeating several common contrarian talking points, Tontoman links to a speech by Michael Crichton where “he criticises the papers done by IPCC and debunks other global warning myths.”
- JLF65 suggests that I’m discounting Crichton merely because he’s a science fiction author whose opinion goes against mine.
- Tontoman says “If you think we should discount Crichton, then perhaps we should debunk the ‘global warming’ movement because one of its leaders, Al Gore, also is a politician whose highest degree is Bachelor of Arts in Government.”
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Research into the effects of cosmic ray intensity on tree growth rates sparks an interesting discussion.
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A friend brings up the “climategate” hacking story.
- I mention that working group 2 of the IPCC made some embarrassing mistakes, and I find some errors in the IPCC AR4 WG1 report.
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Jerry McGowan claims that “it’s right that CO2 is already saturated and more CO2 won’t warm the planet anymore.”
- Joshua claims “add CO2 and the humidity is reduced. Net change to greenhouse effect = 0 = saturation.”
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DTJohnson claims “There are no mountains of research that show why any climate change is happening or even IF climate change is happening.”
- DTJohnson lectures me about seasons, and is “struck by how little I seem to understand about the basic physics of gases… which is, after all, what we’re talking about.”
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Phantomfive claims that “there is no really good scientific evidence of a threat from CO2 …”
- Omb criticizes a paper I linked, saying things like “This paper is evidence of one thing only, that the mesh used in the (DOE) PCM is far too course”.
- I agree with phantomfive that sea level rise during the 21st century will be less than 20 meters, but point out that even a ~1.2 meter sea level rise by 2100 will bring substantial hardships, along with problems caused by changes in precipitation patterns.
- Phantomfive tells me not to go insane over “scenarios like this that have no scientific backing.”
- Phantomfive claims that “temperatures have not continued to rise as those models predicted would happen.”
- Phantomfive says that my argument is “about the weakest line of logic ever.”
- Regarding projected climate changes, phantomfive asks “In the worst case, will it be worse than the dustbowl?”
- Phantomfive claims that “the warming seen over the last few decades is entirely attributable to the reduction in aerosols in recent years. This is mentioned in WGI chapter 2 of the IPCC report.”
- Phantomfive notes that President Bush did eventually listen to climate scientists.
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I lament the fact that NASA’s mission is no longer to “understand and protect our home planet”.
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“Yes, sounds like someone didn’t read What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.”
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“I’m finishing a program that inverts GRACE data to reveal fluctuations in gravity such as those caused by melting/thinning glaciers.”
- I’d previously compared GRACE to GOCE.
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Khallow says “there’s a pile of articles from Dr. McIntyre. Many of these criticize HadCRUT3 or its components. So yes, the data itself has been called into question repeatedly.”
- Khallow: “Fraud may well be occurring.”
- I show Khallow where to download climate data and source code.
- Khallow goes Sky Dragon Slayer: “Jane Q. Public won… Fuck you, khayman80.”
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Thirdeye asks “do you know how much pollution is discharged into the atmosphere when a single volcanic eruption occurs? Wondering how it compares to the anthropogenic discharge?”
- Thirdeye asks “aren’t there some schools of thought that think that increased CO2 in the atmosphere may actually contribute to a cooler Earth by increasing the Earth’s albedo?”
- “Also, is there any nuclear activity going on in the core that could be warming the planet?”
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JordanL says “One of the things that REALLY bugs me about climate research is seeing LEGITIMATE scientists use the word “SKEPTIC” as a SMEAR.”
- Daniel Dvorkin points out that “when you have a bunch of people spouting pseudoscientific garbage who are handed the ‘skeptic’ label as a gift, it’s inevitable that those who point out the garbage will appear to be ‘smearing skeptics.'”
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I say “I’ve never heard of Lomborg before today, but your summary makes him sound like someone I could agree with. That’s mainly because I think most of the ‘green’ movement is irrational, and one manifestation is that they’ve blocked the advancement of nuclear power for decades.”
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I say “Cool, that’s an awesome website! I especially liked the graphic here. I think the ‘Phil current’ curve describes me well. I agree with Phil that the IPCC’s error bars seem a little narrow, but not by much.”
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Timmarhy says “I’ve never seen any overlap between creationists and AGW skeptics. I demand you show me some evidence of this.”
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BonquiquiShiquavius says to climate scientists: “publishing a single report that wildly contradict previous findings makes it practically impossible to defend you.”
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Amouth claims that extracting tidal power would slow/stop/reverse the Moon’s ascent from Earth.
- Prof. Pete Bender adds some insights regarding tidal dissipation.
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ShakaUVM and I have an extended discussion about many topics.
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I’ve been toying with the idea that loggers can fix the CO2 problem. Send them out to harvest pine trees at the end of their fast-growing (and thus fast-CO2-absorbing) phase.”
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Arc86 and I discuss various surveys of the scientific community regarding climate change.
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The Hatchet has “been debating global warming for a damn long time, and NOBODY has ever had a damn thing to say about the real global heat content (including oceans) …”
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Reythia ran across a new, more accurate term: ‘climate destabilization’.
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Stella says “Unless we stop procreating mindlessly and start to deindustrialise the society there’s no solution to this world. However clean the technology may be, it will always produce harmful waste.
And not everyone should have the license to have children.”- Stella asks “Isn’t the current dramatic overpopulation the scientists’ fault? We’ve eliminated natural selection…”
- Stella says “The general consensus among scientists was that asbestos, mad cows, DDT, fossil fuel consumption, food stuffed with hormones and antibiotics, etc. were beneficial, too. We should be guided by our common sense, rather than majorities or minorities.”
- Stella says “Lighting a branch isn’t technology, much less invention, it’s reproducing naturally occurring phenomenon. And most importantly, you don’t need energy sources to make it work.”
- Stella asks “When did I say I was against any technology? I always liked science, but without deifying it.”
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I try to explain the difference between relative and absolute humidity to Steven Goddard.
- Steve Goddard et al. deny that increasing CO2 raises sea level.
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The editor-in-chief of Remote Sensing resigns over the publication of Spencer and Braswell 2011.
- Dr. Spencer wrongly claims to be part of the 97% consensus.
- Dr. Spencer rants about “global warming Nazis”.
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Mike Haseler calls climate science a scam.
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Eric Worrall points to one of Steven Goddard’s WUWT articles and says “Grace is a failure – its not measuring what you think.”
- Eric insists that Goddard’s point about GRACE is valid.
- Eric focuses on how long it will take for Greenland’s ice sheet to entirely disappear and says “A reasonable description of the current rate of ice loss is ‘noise’.”
- Eric asks to let him know when the models predict something before it happens.
- Eric calls GRACE junk, cites JPL.
- Eric implies scientists want to force totalitarian dictatorship, lectures me about quantum physics, PCA, etc.
- Eric is trying to keep us from persuading the world to act as one, because he wrongly believes that attempts to reduce CO2 are economically damaging.
- Eric et al. praise Lomborg, imply scientists want to kill off most of humanity.
- Eric asks about climate sensitivity and the carnivorous unicorn outbreak.
- Eric blames me for all the CO2 “fertilizer” and blackmails humanity: “watch our deadlock destroy your world.”
- But, Officer, alcohol is a minor trace! Also, it’s such a powerful intoxicant that the first sip saturated my blood!
- Let’s take the blue sky from future generations. Babies are unemployed, don’t speak English, and will take our jobs!
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Tweed asks if increasing CO2 requires lowering concentrations of other gases.
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Treeman repeats Goddard’s misinformation about GRACE.
- Treeman claims warming stopped in 1998, wonders if a new Maunder Minimum would lower temperatures, etc.
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Mark Imisides claims that increasing CO2 can’t heat the oceans.
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At WUWT, Steve Goreham repeats misinformation while accusing the National Academy of Sciences of indoctrinating students with unproven assumptions and ideology.
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Bjorn Lomborg, George Will, Fox “news” hide the incline in wildfires and wrongly accuse Obama of fear-mongering.
- Ray R. cites Marlon et al. 2012 to downplay recent wildfires in Colorado.
- Bjorn Lomborg: “When climate ineffective way to help & poverty very effective, you say ‘let’s spend $xbn on each’? $2xbn on poverty is better“
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I won’t declare victory until we have some kind of price on carbon.
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Heartland Institute “experts” react to science standards. Does the Dunning-Kruger effect explain the Fermi paradox?
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Nova et al. claim Antarctic mass gain of 2100 Gt/yr, which implies ocean mass loss ~4x faster than actual total gain.
- Nova and Motl agree that @PhysicsGirl is “… an astroturf of a sort who has clearly no idea about the climate …”.
Forbes lets Peter Ferrara deny warming, Antarctic ice mass loss, Arctic sea ice loss, imply tampering…
- chrisy spreads misinformation about statistical significance.
- John Williams claims climate “scientists” make it up as they go along, repeats McIntyre’s claims of “egregious errors” in MBH98, etc.
- Economart (Gary Marshall) laments all the ad hominems from AGW nutjobs, spreads misinformation about Arctic sea ice, asks a “question” about lunar temperatures, etc.
- James Taylor denies sea level rise, burns paleoclimate strawmen, notes that he’s nuttier than the Flat Earth Society.
- thephysicsguy accuses physicists of thinking the Earth is flat, etc.
I discuss funding conspiracy theories with jdixon1980.
CNBC anchor Joe Kernen compares climate scientists to “high priests” and tweets misinformation.
Meteorologist Kevin Lawrence calls climate change a “farse”, cites climatedepot, WUWT.
Bill Jamison: “Some uninformed people seem to think that ALL (or at least the vast majority) of warming is due solely to increased atmospheric CO2. The educated know that is not what scientists claim.”
- Bill claims that almost everyone is in the 97% consensus.
“The Denier” says feedbacks are “hypothetical” and says “if you think you’re pariahs now, you ain’t seen nothin” before asking how fast CO2 emissions need to be reduced.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Stan Sholar accuse climate scientists of fraud.
- Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) lectures about computer models and misrepresents the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Josiecki makes claims about ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc.
I visit WUWT and Climate Audit.
Niven and Harrington on grantsuckers.
Prof. Richard Tol lectures about the impacts of global warming and ocean acidification, and disputes the 97% scientific consensus.
TallDave visits.
Lgw accuses scientists of fraud.
Rujiel repeatedly tells me to kill myself.
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Jane’s index continues here.
- “The stratosphere isn’t cooling, so greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed.”
- Someone says that “increasing stratospheric ozone could have significant climate effects, and was completely unknown until now.”
- Someone asks “If you’re complaining about a few satellite instruments, why aren’t you complaining about CRU’s temperature proxies based only on a low number of bristlecone pines?”
- Someone says “You’ve criticized every climate change skeptic argument I’ve seen presented.”
- Someone says “The IPCC screwed up 2350 with 2035 and used non-peer-reviewed sources, so their credibility is shot to hell.”
- Someone claims that climate predictions have been mostly wrong, and implies that temperature trends over 8-9 years can be used to evaluate climate predictions.
- I explain that scientists have long understood that increasing stratospheric ozone warms the stratosphere, and compare the heat capacities of the troposphere, oceans, and the stratosphere.
- Someone says that I’ve contradicted myself by saying that UV is strong enough to cause sunburn, but not strong enough to affect surface temperatures.
- Jane Q. Public: “ocean level has actually decreased over the last couple of years.”
- Jane Q. Public insists that she made no threat to sue me, and notes that I’m an insufferably arrogant pompous ass doing a “wonderful job of distorting other people’s statements” and inflating my own ego.
- Jane notes that “if you actually follow the links he provides, you can easily see how grossly he distorts and cherry-picks my own statements in an attempt to make himself look good.”
- Jane observes that the “internet does not constitute safe haven from libel. Other people have been sued in the real world for less, and lost.”
- Jane offers a screenshot called “asshole-pseudo-scientist.png”.
- Jane didn’t answer because I’d “demonstrated bad faith” in our discussions, but that doesn’t mean she did not have answers.
- Jane says “This high-schooler somehow thinks he/she can protect him/her self from libel and copyright … If I were this person, and possessed some intelligence, I would shut this site down. Sadly, it is looking more like he/she is going to end up in Litigation Land.”
- Jane: “you have sunk yourself to blatantly obvious ad hominem … You persist in your implication that I ‘threatened’ to sue you? That is laughable. I stated that I was NOT going to sue you. … you seem to be pretty weak at logic.”
- Jane: “I am NOT a ‘climate change contrarian’. I simply dispute the validity of certain CO2 warming models.”
- Jane: “your further ad hominem, in regard to that article happening to be on a particular website, just makes you look that much more foolish. It is an article about physics. … I don’t think you really CAN refute LaTour’s physics … I really do expect you to run into legal trouble with that blog of yours, if you keep doing it the way you have. I meant that sincerely. But that is a far cry from ever threatening to cause any of it myself… that is something I never stated or even implied.”
- Jane: “You are preparing even further ad hominem arguments. … it is pretty obvious that on that same scale you can’t bring yourself to do better than ‘DH1’.”
- Jane: “What you are saying, in effect, is that anybody who questions CO2 models is a ‘climate change contrarian‘ … just because YOU and a few fellows define ‘climate change contrarian’ to be anybody who disagrees with your viewpoint, that does not make it so.”
- Jane: “I never ‘threatened’ (your word) to sue you anyway. I did the opposite: I specifically stated that I was NOT going to sue you. … YOU link to information about ‘libel’, but you obviously don’t understand the first things about it yourself. You demonstrate as much by somehow equating fair use of recordings of public figures with online libel. … No ‘threat’ intended or implied. I’ll let somebody else nail you for it, as they surely will if you keep it up.”
- Jane: “You know very well that I did not ‘threaten’ (your word) to sue you, so why are you linking to libel laws in association with my name? What is the point of bringing it up again in that fashion, unless it is to give readers a false and misleading impression? Once again, I question your methods and your ethics.”
- Jane: “you have a lot to learn. … Just another example of your foolish argument style. You would have been booted with prejudice from my high-school debate team.”
- Jane: “my honest opinion at the time: your arguments were below the quality of a decent high-school debate, and that if you keep presenting things on your blog in the manner in which you have, then you are likely to get sued (the reference to ‘litigation land’).”
- Jane: “a great many scientists believe that land-use changes has had MORE effect on climate than CO2. So this survey is completely useless in determining how many agree about CO2-based warming.”
- Jane lectures about the Casimir effect and warp drive.
- I debunk Jane’s 2011 lecture on neutrino oscillation.
- I debunk Jane and Lonny Eachus when they say respected scientist Prof. Wibjorn Karlen shows that the IPCC reports are BAD SCIENCE, a travesty and a tragedy of data used improperly and irresponsibly, leading to very severe faults with the data that was cherry-picked for IPCC reports.
- Jane repeats Prof. Judith Curry’s claims of fraud against Richard Muller regarding the BEST project.
- Layzej shows UAH warming since 1980 of 0.16C/decade. Jane accuses him of cherry-picking; suggests starting at 1998 instead.
- Jane et al. praise Lomborg, imply scientists want to kill off most of humanity.
- Jane: “If they were honest, why are they calling it ‘Climate Change’ now, rather than Global Warming?”
- Jane falsely attributes WUWT and Lloyd nonsense to NOAA and IPCC, respectively, denies the last 17 years of warming.
- Jane helpfully points out a genuine error in a Slashdot summary regarding temperature and CO2 in the ocean.
- Lonny Eachus: “Mann’s work has been pretty thoroughly discredited.”
- Here’s #R code showing the (too short!) 1997-2012 trend in Cowtan & Way 2013 is inside HadCRUT4’s error bars.
- Jane isn’t smearing CRU.
- Jane: “… Even creationists have some facts that support their position…”
- Jane cites CFACT about the Spirit of Mawson.
- Lonny Eachus complains about rude, aggressive comments.
- Jane muses about ENSO and Antarctic sea ice.
- Jane: “the earth has been trending warmer for over 6,000 years!”
- Jane and Lonny Eachus on correlation.
- Jane on Antarctic ice mass, etc.
- Jane vs. Jane.
- Jane on long-term ice loss.
- Jane on Dr. Bengtsson’s paper.
- Jane and Lonny Eachus on ocean acidification.
- Jane on sea level rise.
- Jane on the hottest May on record.
- Jane is Lonny Eachus.
- Nobody Jane knows disputes that humans caused the CO2 rise.
- Jane/Lonny goes Sky Dragon Slayer.
- Jane isn’t an Obama Birther or a 9/11 Truther.
- Jane/Lonny Eachus on Rossi’s E-Cat LENR hoax.
- Jane: What makes you think “Steve Goddard’s” blog is “anti-science”?
- Jane: “The IPCC was not created to determine whether AGW exists. It was created to promote AGW and tell everybody that it DOES exist.”
- Jane lectures about GPS.
- Jane misrepresents Llovel et al. 2014.
- Jane: “I’m sure as hell not willing to pay to clean up some CO2 demon which science says is largely imaginary.”
- Jane: “climate science, to date, has been poor at prognostication“.
- Jane on the “Greatest Generation”.
- Jane on the “dumbass Charon moniker.”
- Jane: “$106 BILLION (GAO rpt.) by 2010 for AGW was wasted.”
- Jane: “Billy Nye DEMONSTRATED that he knows squat about AGW”.
- Jane on the KKK and Lincoln.
- Jane: “your precious warmism sources consistently start THEIR charts in 1979, and if that isn’t cherry-picking, nothing is.”
- Lonny: “SCIENCE ISN’T SETTLED. PERIOD. Only people who don’t understand science say so.”
- Jane/Lonny on Shawyer’s “EmDrive” hoax.
People wonder why “climate change” replaced “global warming.”
When did “Global Warming” become politically incorrect and “Climate Change” became politically correct? [dwiget001]
When they realized they might be wrong. [girlintraining]
I’ve noticed that shift in wording too. I think it was intended to address some misconceptions the general public has regarding “abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. ” (the officially accepted title).
Most people don’t seem to understand the difference between “local weather” and “global climate.” Local weather is a phenomenon that changes very quickly– sometimes in a matter of minutes. For example, “will it rain tomorrow in Denver?” Local weather is very hard to predict because that requires solving vector-valued numerical models of the motion … and many other properties like pressure, temperature, phase changes, wind speed, humidity, ground water, electric charge, pollution density, tidal forcing, turbulence caused by ground structures, albedo of ground structures, the exact position of the Sun in the sky at each moment, etc. of the atmosphere on a very high-resolution grid. The global climate Hereafter referred to simply as ‘climate.’ ignores these fast variations by averaging the weather over a long period of time (years, at least) and a large area (the entire globe in this case.) Ironically, the climate is actually easier to predict because it just requires Obviously this is a ridiculous oversimplification, but the point is that weather modeling (emphasizing conservation of momentum) brings modern supercomputers to their knees, whereas climate models (emphasizing conservation of energy) aren’t nearly as demanding. Weather models can be described as “initial value” problems which lose “skill” as time goes on, whereas climate models are “boundary value” problems that don’t suffer from the same forecasting limitations. summing energy input and subtracting energy output.
One way to distinguishApparently I’m the only one who found my original tire analogy intuitive, so I replaced it with the more popular NOAA analogy. Here’s the original: One analogy is that it’s easy to predict the pressure in a tire based on the amount of air you put in it, but nearly impossible to predict the exact path of all the air molecules bouncing around inside the tire. Predicting the climate is like predicting the tire’s pressure, while predicting tomorrow’s local weather is more like predicting the path of a single air molecule. between weather and climate is that the climate of your hometown will determine how many sweaters you have in your closet. The weather will determine if you should be wearing a sweater right now. Our inability to model weather says very little about our ability to model the climate, and local weather will always vary randomly. Scientists want to emphasize the word “climate” to stress that cold temperatures on [random day] in [Random Town] don’t disprove abrupt climate change.
Also, the term “global warming” is oversimplified. A more accurate description is that our addition of greenhouse gases has reduced the rate at which thermal energy leaves the planet. As a result, the average energy in the atmosphere and ocean is increasing, which allows this system to “explore more of its phase space.” More energy means more chances of extreme weather– even weather that involves colder temperatures! (Again, note that weather is local and temporary.)
The word “abrupt” was added to emphasize that what we’re experiencing is too fast to be a natural process. The ice core from Vostok shows that CO2 hasn’t risen above 300 ppm parts per million in the last half million years. It has varied in the past, but usually Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (among other examples of natural abrupt climate change) show that the natural climate is only fairly stable in the long run. These events show that the climate can quickly move from one stable “attractor” to another. I should stress, however, that results like Meehl 2004 show that today’s changes aren’t natural. over a timespan measured in millennia. Atmospheric CO2 is at 380 ppm parts per million now, and this dramatic rise occurred in the span of several decades. As a result, temperatures are rising faster each decade. Changes this rapid haven’t occurred in the hundreds of thousands of years over which we have records. Keep in mind that scientists are primarily concerned about the unprecedented rate of the current changes in our climate.
Update: Jane Q. Public, Lonny Eachus, Ted Cruz (R-TX), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Donald Trump, Norman Rogers, Eric Worrall, Khallow, Joe Kernen, Anthony Watts and Fox News keep riding this hobby horse.
In reality, the term climate change had been used for decades even before the 1988 formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
- Wallace S. Broecker 1975 (PDF): “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”
- Earl W. Barrett 1971: “Climate Change.”
- George S. Benton 1970 (PDF): “Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change”
- Reid A. Bryson 1968: “‘All Other Factors Being Constant…’ a Reconciliation of Several Theories of Climate Change.”
- Gilbert Plass 1956 (PDF): “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change”
- A. P. Crary et al. 1955: “Evidences of Climate Change from Ice Island Studies.”
- A. J. J. van Woerkom 1953: “The Astronomical Theory of Climate Change.”
- William Morris Davis 1933: “Climate Changes and the Last Glacial Period.”
- Ellsworth Huntington 1914: “The Solar Hypothesis of Climate Changes.”
- T.C. Chamberlin 1897: “A Group of Hypotheses Bearing on Climatic Changes”
Rrvau asks if scientists predicted an ice age in the 1970s.
Paraphrased: “Didn’t scientists predict an ice age in the 1970s?” [rrvau]
In a word: no. That myth can be traced back to sensationalist articles in popular media like Newsweek. Genuinely peer-reviewed scientific articles were far more responsible, which is one reason why I highly recommend learning science from them rather than the general media.
Update: Here’s figure 1 from Peterson et al. 2008:
Another update: Dr. Roy Spencer, Jane Q. Public, Lonny Eachus, Eric Worrall, Norman Rogers, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Steven Goddard, Glenn Beck, Jeff Miller (R-FL), George Will et al. keep riding this hobby horse. Some even use fake magazine covers.
Ironically:
- The term “global warming” was first used in a 1975 Science article by Wally Broecker called “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?”.
- Sawyer 1972 estimated climate sensitivity as 2.4°C, and Schneider 1975 gave a preliminary range of 1.5°C to 3.0°C.
- Manabe and Wetherald, 1975: “The Effects of Doubling the CO2 Concentration on the climate of a General Circulation Model.”
- In 1977, Freeman Dyson wrote that the “prevailing opinion is that the dangers [of the rise in CO2] greatly outweigh the benefits.”
- In 1977, Robert M. White, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote a report for the National Academy of Sciences that said “We now understand that industrial wastes, such as the carbon dioxide released in the burning of fossil fuels, can have consequences for climate that pose a considerable risk to future society.” (White, 1978) White, Robert, 1978, Oceans and Climate Introduction, Oceanus, 21:2-3
- The 1979 JASON report “The long-term impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide on climate” estimated climate sensitivity as 2.4°C to 2.8°C.
- The National Academy of Science’s 1979 Charney report estimated climate sensitivity as 1.5°C to 4.5°C and said “If carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we] find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”
… I still think that it is the ultimate arrogance that humans think they can alter the planets evolution. Think of continental drift and the accompanying earthquakes, volcanic activity etc. and you’ll understand how insignificant humans are. [rrvau]
Continental drift and earthquakes are completely irrelevant to the climate on the kind of timescale we care about. As for volcanic activity, eruptions only put about a hundredth of the CO2 into the atmosphere that humans do. Massive eruptions in the geologically distant past (such as the Siberian traps which are a suspected cause of the Permian extinction) have likely put more CO2 into the atmosphere, but none of the eruptions in the last 500,000 years pushed the CO2 level above 300 ppm parts per million .
Update: I’ve failedTHe IPCC is a political organisation therefore full of bullsh*t. Blaming CO2 is just a reason to tax the air we breathe. Regards, Royce R. Vines to communicate again and again and again and again and again.
People inquire about the scale and impact of human CO2 emissions.
Global warming is a consequence of climate change. Global cooling is a consequence of climate change. [smoker2]
I think the term global dimming more accurately describes a separate problem that is sometimes referred to as global cooling. Aerosols directly reflect sunlight and indirectly decrease the size of cloud droplets, thus increasing the albedo of the clouds. This reflects more sunlight back into space. Its effects have been seen in long term trends of sunlight brightness, and in long term evaporation rate measurements. Surprisingly, evaporation depends Roderick, et al. 2007 also shows that wind speed is a strong factor. on the rate at which photons hit the water’s surface more than typical changes in temperature or humidity, so it serves as an independent check of the phenomenon.
Update: Consider this table of radiative forcings. Forcings that warm the planet are colored red, while forcings that cool the planet are blue. Each forcing has an error bar associated with it, and a “Level of Scientific Understanding” (LOSU) on the right hand side.
Global dimming isn’t a threat anymore because regulations were effective at curbing emissions of these aerosols. Plus, aerosols don’t stay in the atmosphere for very long, so once we stopped spewing them into the atmosphere the problem went away. CO2, however, stays in the atmosphere for ~100 years, so our children and grandchildren will have to deal with it. Unfortunately, aerosols used to counter the effects of greenhouse gases like CO2. (No, we can’t just start emitting aerosols again and hope they cancel each other out. The biggest reason is that the CO2 will acidify the oceans regardless of whether its temperature effects are cancelled by aerosols.)
… I am not a denier, but I am not about to be told we must halt climate change. This is a phenomenon that is as old as the earth, and to think we can just stop it when we want to is ludicrous. If you want to limit our impact on that change, fair enough. But don’t tell me it has to stop, because you make yourselves look like idiots. The climate has changed in cycles … if you take those same records which are used to promote the current scare tactics, you would see that after it (CO2) goes up, it goes down – way way down. It is cyclic. So even if we completely stop producing CO2 now, the cycle will continue. … So go ahead and do your worst. The only way to stop climate change is to kill the planet.
I think we’re talking about different things. You’re talking about natural variability, and I’m talking about human-caused climate change. Scientists are aware that both phenomena exist, and we can see that our CO2 emissions have recently pushed the climate beyond the range of natural variations.
Update: Smoker2 suggests that NASA is trying to mislead people regarding Arctic sea ice.
The fact is, automobiles account for (at most) 2 percent of CO2 emissions. … We need to convert our major power generation systems to something more reasonable like wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and (yes) NUCLEAR. [Someone]
Huh? All the data I’ve seen places the “transportation sector” near the top of the list. Here’s a quote: “The transportation sector is the second largest source of CO2 emissions in the U.S. Almost all of the energy consumed in the transportation sector is petroleum based, including gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Automobiles and light-duty trucks account for almost two-thirds of emissions from the transportation sector and emissions have steadily grown since 1990.”
That said, I do agree that nuclear power is our best course of action.
An Onerous Coward asks about nuclear and solar power.
[An Onerous Coward]
While I’d replace all coal with nuclear in a heartbeat given the chance, I don’t think nuclear power is viable. To me, it seems too expensive, too politically infeasible, too centralized, and too prone to terrorism. Concentrating solar looks very viable at the moment, and I think geothermal could become a major player before 2020 with the right incentives.
But I think energy efficiency is the untapped gold mine. I’ve seen quotes for nuclear running about $6000-$11000 per installed kW of capacity. By my rough calculations, for $3500 you could buy enough CFL bulbs up front* to eliminate the need for that kW of capacity for 30 years.** Even better, CFLs eliminate that demand precisely when the energy is needed. Any generation-based solution has to predict demand and compensate.
* If you assume that the cost of bulbs will go down over time, or that you could invest the money for the bulbs you don’t need immediately, or that another high-efficiency lighting technology will beat CFLs in the future, the strategy works even better.
** $3/bulb, bulbs last an average of 5 years, running for 3 hours a day on average, 17w CFL vs. 60w incandescent.
[Dumb Scientist]
Nuclear power is expensive, but it’s the only option available right now that we know works on an industrial scale. Update: My dad just told me about an interesting proposal for small, self-contained, tamper-proof nuclear generators which wouldn’t be as centralized or expensive as our sadly obsolete nuclear plants.
Concentrated solar is certainly the most promising renewable, but it requires massive battery banks, or expensive water pumping schemes to provide a base load at night. That said, I like it a lot more than photovoltaics. Geothermal only works in certain places, and corrosion makes them very expensive to maintain. In either case, we’d need a superconducting power grid to avoid losses from moving energy from the deserts (solar) or hotspots (geothermal). All these goals are noble, but we need power now to replace coal and oil.
Incidentally, tide power and osmotic power are also good long term goals.
And you’re right- efficiency is absolutely necessary. But the newer technology has to be better in every way, otherwise people won’t switch. My mom doesn’t use CFLs because she can’t stand the quality of the light (yes, some are better than others, but still no cigar) and the fact that they don’t reach full brightness immediately. I have them nearly everywhere, but my reading light is still an incandescent because the CFLs that can be dimmed are expensive and don’t look as nice.
Update: In 2012 I replaced my remaining incandescents with Philips Ambient LED bulbs. They’re dimmable, quickly produce a nice spectrum, and as of April 2015 all six of my bulbs still work. I just put their newer household dimmable bulbs in my parents’ house. They’re cheaper and look much less bizarre when turned off than the earlier generation.
My understanding of CSP was that, to increase its baseload ability, you just made it bigger (especially the molten salt tank). I don’t remember the source, but I remember someone was quoted as saying that you can store energy as heat 20x cheaper than you could store it in a battery. As the reservoir gets bigger, it loses heat more slowly. Build it big enough, and you can keep it warm all night, even as you’re drawing power from it. [An Onerous Coward]
Yeah, you might be right about that. I think I remember seeing similar studies, and probably spoke too soon. I’ve yet to be convinced that this is a sure bet, but I’m delighted that Obama is putting more research money into these areas.
You also have the option of burning something to keep the fluid warm, for cloudy days or to provide more baseload.
The only thing we can afford to burn in the long run is hydrogen, which requires energy to produce.
Update: No, actually that’s wrong. You were right about concentrated solar allowing for a burner backup. Biofuels won’t cause any net CO2 increase because their combustion only releases the CO2 they’ve recently absorbed to grow. I’m not a big fan of generation 1 biofuels, because they tend to provide an incentive for farmers to grow crops that humans can’t eat. But generation 2 biofuels use the discarded husks of human-edible plants and might be industrially feasible some day. Genetically engineered bacteria also look like they could produce biofuels given enough time. Also, artificial leaves look promising; they might eventually split water into hydrogen and oxygen far more cleanly than any method available now.
I’m not sure there’d be a point to building that kind of backup into the concentrated solar plant, though. The ability to use the molten salt loop with an oil burner might not be worth the added design complexity, materials and labor. Wouldn’t that be exactly like Well, except for the fact that the soot from this burning would likely fall onto the mirrors. building an ordinary oil-powered backup generator, which we already have in abundance? One potential benefit is that we could decommission the old generators and recycle their parts, but that’s probably more trouble than it’s worth right now.
Transmission losses, while not negligible, seem manageable. I’ve seen figures of about 2-3% to move electricity 600mi using HVDC. I mean, it’s on Wikipedia, so it must be right.
Yes, HVDC looks promising, but some population centers are farther away than that from a good spot for solar or geothermal (not all northern countries are as fortunate as Iceland). In the long run this isn’t a serious problem because we’ll eventually build a superconducting grid, but until then it’s a nuisance.
The big problem I see with the “we need power now” argument is that we could probably install several gigawatts of CSP and wind before we could even get the nuclear reactor through the permitting process.
If it works, that’s great. The problem is that no country has ever successfully powered their civilization in that manner, so it’s a bit of a gamble. France gets 80% of their power from nuclear, so we know it works. I’m also inclined to say that the delay in getting new nuclear plants online is more of a problem with lenders being extremely cautious about nuclear energy because of public disapproval, so the permitting process is much more ridiculous than it should be. Nuclear power isn’t nearly as dangerous as it’s commonly made out to be, and we need enrichment for medical isotopes anyway so terrorism will always be a problem.
I think concentrated solar is great, and might be our best bet in the long run. I just don’t want these unproven technologies to be our only bet. It’d be nice to see our civilization put no more than, say, 30% of our power generation into one particular technology so that the loss of any one mode of power generation isn’t catastrophic.
Update: I’m going to write a separate article about nuclear power whenever school gets less crazy, but for now I’ll quote another couple of paragraphs from the same recent survey:
… About half (51%) of Americans favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 42% oppose this. … More college graduates (59%) favor building nuclear power plants than do those with a high school education or less (46%). … Seven-in-ten scientists favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 27% are opposed. Among scientists, majorities in every specialty favor building more nuclear power plants, but support is particularly widespread among physicists and astronomers (88% favor). … — Pew Research Center
In other words, statistically speaking, the more someone knows about physics, the more they favor nuclear power. I’m just sayin…
Stormcrow309 asks about potential flaws in the Vostok ice core analysis.
… What are the problems with the Vostok data? … [Stormcrow309]
Diffusion of isotopes over time leads to large horizontal error bars (i.e. it’s uncertain when particular temperature/CO2 measurements occurred, especially relative to each other). Accumulation rate uncertainty makes these horizontal uncertainties larger at deeper depths (older ages). But vertical uncertainty is smaller (i.e. the absolute maximum of CO2 is less uncertain). Furthermore, the correlation of those values to the global paleoclimate is still a matter of debate, but ice cores from other locations and other independent proxies yield similar reconstructions.
[Stormcrow309]
… Petit et al. (1999) takes no effort to describe the methodologies used in handling ice cores, which raises questions on the process used. The line “Ice cores give access to palaeoclimate series that includes local temperature and precipitation rate, moisture source conditions, wind strength and aerosol fluxes of marine, volcanic, terrestrial, cosmogenic and anthropogenic origin” is not attributed, which leads it reading as opinion or possible plagerism (Petit et al., 1999, p. 429). Since it is the bases of the work’s analysis, it would make sense to give that sentence more concrete foothold in established theory. There is no discussion on this approach’s appropriateness or flaws. There is a good discussion on the research team’s reason for limiting the data set but not the impact of that limitation. There is no review of further research questions. It reads as a set of scientists too worried about analysis and not with synthesis. The work is biased to its approach and thusly flawed in its presentation.
… Petit et al. (1999) takes no effort to describe the methodologies used in handling ice cores, which raises questions on the process used. [Stormcrow309]
That’s because they didn’t handle the ice core at all. They simply applied a newer computational algorithm to the data collected from the ice core by other scientists years before they published. In fact, the second to last sentence in the paper says “We thank C. Genthon and J. Jouzel for performing the CO2 spectral analysis…” Their papers are, of course, listed at the end with all the other references.
Just in case you don’t have free access to Nature articles, I’ve found a source (see section II) that provides a rough overview of the way the ice core was handled. It was sliced into 1.5m sections, put into a clean stainless steel tube in Grenoble, France and melted so that various types of spectroscopic and chemical analysis could be performed. Update: Eric Steig points out that handling methods were studied decades ago, so they’re careful to keep the temperature of the ice cores below -10°C.
But it needs to be stressed that a deep understanding of this process is only available from the original peer-reviewed articles. I only linked that website for the benefit of people who don’t have free access to journals through their universities.
The line “Ice cores give access to palaeoclimate series that includes local temperature and precipitation rate, moisture source conditions, wind strength and aerosol fluxes of marine, volcanic, terrestrial, cosmogenic and anthropogenic origin” is not attributed, which leads it reading as opinion or possible plagerism (Petit et al., 1999, p. 429). Since it is the bases of the work’s analysis, it would make sense to give that sentence more concrete foothold in established theory.
It might be a good idea to read at least the next few sentences before making accusations of plagiarism. When you do, notice that you quoted the “topic sentence” of that paragraph. Other sentences in the paragraph serve to expand on individual points in the topic sentence, and they’re all referenced. In fact, there are no less than 14 references you can read (they’re all listed at the end of the article) to catch up on the science contained in that sentence.
There is no discussion on this approach’s appropriateness or flaws.
Really? How about…
- Page 431, paragraph 2, sentence 4. “This approach underestimated deltaTs by a factor of ~2 in Greenland (ref 22) and, possibly, by up to 50% in Antarctica (ref 23).”
- Page 431, paragraph 3. The entire paragraph is devoted to understanding shortcomings in the deuterium-temperature connection.
- Page 431, paragraph 4, sentence 3. “… the Vostok record may differ from coastal (ref 28) sites in E. Antarctica and perhaps from West Antarctica as well.”
- Page 434, paragraph 6, sentence 4: “However, considering the large gas-age/ice-age uncertainty (1000 years, or even more if we consider the accumulation-rate uncertainty), we feel that it is premature to infer the sign of the phase relationship between CO2 and temperature at the start of the terminations.”
There is a good discussion on the research team’s reason for limiting the data set but not the impact of that limitation.
Limiting the data set in what sense? If you’re referring to the fact that they stopped drilling to avoid contaminating Lake Vostok, the impact of that limitation is that the time series stops roughly 500,000 years ago rather than extending slightly farther back in time. If you’re talking about some other data set limitation, you’ll need to be a little more specific so I know precisely what you mean.
There is no review of further research questions.
Really? how about…
- Page 433, paragraph 4, sentence 3: “We suggest that there also may be some link between the Vostok dust record and deep ocean circulation through the extension of sea ice in the South Atlantic Ocean, itself thought to be coeval with a reduced deep ocean circulation34.”
- Page 435, paragraph 1, sentence 1: “We speculate that the same is true for terminations II, III and IV.”
- Page 435, paragraph 1, sentence 6: “We speculate that variability in phasing from one termination to the next reflects differences in insolation curves (ref 41) or patterns of abyssal circulation during glacial maximum.”
Are you talking about: J R Petit, J Jouzel, D Raynaud, N I Barkov, et al. (1999). Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature, 399(6735), 429-436. Retrieved April 7, 2009, from ProQuest Medical Library database. (Document ID: 42351682)? Because the phrase is not in there. The paper reads like the researchers were involved in the drilling. [Stormcrow309]
Yeah, that’s the paper I originally linked, but you’re right– the phrase isn’t there. I was at work (with access to the journals) when I wrote that, and had 4-5 of the older Vostok papers open at once. That particular phrase is probably in one of those papers, but I don’t have journal access at home (and my cache is empty) so I can’t verify that right now. The phrase you’re looking for in the paper I did link is below the references, in the Acknowledgements section: “We thank the drillers from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute; the Russian, French and US participants for field work and ice sampling…”
Sorry about the confusion; I was juggling too many papers to keep them all straight on my desktop. But you can also verify that J. Jouzel is referenced many times, with reference 6 being published in 1987 (several years after the section from 950-2083m was extracted in 1982-83), and 12,13 published in 1993 and 1996. C. Genthon is reference 14, published in 1987.
I must humbly disagree that the paper “read like the researchers were involved in the drilling.” They’ve certainly tried to describe the drilling process in a brief manner for the benefit of the reader, but acknowledged the hard work of their fellow scientists, thanked them for their contributions, and provided citations to their original work in extracting and sampling the ice core. It all seems perfectly civilized.
They limited the ice core due to volcanic activity without discussing the impact. None of my editors would allow me to get away with that.
That limitation has exactly the same impact as stopping the drilling above Lake Vostok. It merely truncates the time series, preventing the reconstruction of data earlier than 423,000 years ago. You’re probably thinking about studies which fail to sample the population in a uniform or unbiased manner, and thus alter the resulting statistics because they’re using a skewed sample. This is a serious problem in many sociological studies, but it’s not a relevant concern here. An ice core taken from a shallower hole (like the 3310m core in the paper) has precisely one impact: it provides data back to 423,000 years before the present instead of even further back in time.
Update: The Vostok ice core data have now been confirmed by the EPICA ice core data. Not only do they agree with the Vostok data, EPICA extends the time series back to 650,000 years before the present.
In addition, the flaws I listed have been addressed, and the historical maximum was defended— this is the reference he mentions. Also, here’s a good list of Vostok references and the actual data.
m4cph1sto doubts that temperatures are increasing.
I’m a scientist too, and I judge theories based on merit, not popular opinion. [m4cph1sto]
(Ed. note: In a much later post, he elaborates on a similar claim by explaining that he’s an engineer. See the Salem Hypothesis, or my discussion of its application to this debate.)
As a rule, scientific theories are not accepted by the scientific community until they have done two things: (1) explained known observations in a more simple or fundamental way than alternative theories, and (2) made a prediction about something that is currently unknown and that other theories don’t predict, which is then confirmed by observation.
Global Warming theory has met neither of those requirements. The main statement of Global Warming is something like this: “small changes in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cause large changes in global temperature”. Despite this theory, there is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO2 has ever caused the temperature to change, over the entire billions-years history of the planet. So GW theory doesn’t explain past observations.
Abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. is the direct result of an unprecedented excavation of fossil fuels, and the combustion of said fuels which releases CO2 into the atmosphere that’s been trapped for millions of years. It’s not supposed to explain past observations. Update: Remember the ending of Snowball Earth, that little kerfuffle with the Siberian Traps, and the PETM.
It doesn’t explain current observations either: CO2 concentration has steadily increased over the past 100 years, while temperatures have gone up, then down, then up again, then down again (as they are currently). There is no dramatic warming trend as predicted by GW theory.
I’ve never met a scientist who made a claim like the one you’re attributing to me. Most scientists recognize that long term trends are only discernable in the data after accounting for annual variations, multi-year variations, etc. Once those fluctuations are removed by a 5 year averaging procedure, a disturbing upward trend is apparent.
Finally, GW has not made any unique predictions that have later been confirmed as true. It predicted more and bigger hurricanes; that hasn’t happened. It predicted significant temperature increases; that hasn’t happened. In fact, the theory seems totally based on computer models that have failed to make a single correct prediction about the climate ever since I first started following the issue, in 1998.
To summarize, GW theory does not meet the standards of scientific acceptance, not by a long shot.
First, the temperature is increasing. Second, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report made a very limited claim regarding hurricanes: “It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.”
Third, Meehl 2004 showed convincing proof that natural forcing can’t account for recent global temperature trends, but including anthropogenic forcing provides a good match for the data.
Look at the data again. There is most assuredly a dramatic warming trend, despite the slight decrease in global mean temperature over the past few years. Run a regression on the data, it’s quite clear. [Red Flayer]
You mean this data? … Or this one? [m4cph1sto]
Interestingly, I posted another reply to your parent comment that also included those links. Except, I linked to the main page. I was referring to the figures above the one you directly linked to. Figures A2 and A show the Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change, measured using two different data sets. Uncertainty is indicated by the green bars. Notice the trend in both figures.
Instead, look at the temperature trends I linked to above, based only on direct measurements made in the United States since 1880, or “mean global temperature” using modern measurement techniques (since 1996). These datasets are, IMO, the only ones we can believe with any confidence. Is there a dramatic warming trend? The answer is as likely no as yes, or a resounding “we don’t know”.
The graph you’re talking about from 1880 onwards is from this paper, where they specifically state that the warming in the U.S. is known to be smaller than the rest of the world. The reasons for this are not (to my knowledge) completely understood. But the rest of the world have had temperature sensors too, we’ve had satellites up for decades, and we can use proxies to confirm that global temperatures are increasing at an unprecedented rate. Update: More recent studies confirm that the U.S. temperature increase matches those in the rest of the world.
In my opinion, any evidence based on “global temperature” that includes data from more than just recent years should be viewed with scepticism, because our worldwide measurement and calculation techniques have changed dramatically, which likely skews the results in one direction or another. NASA presents data on mean global temperature extending from today back to 1880 as a single line graph with no error bars, which is ridiculous.
Figure A is based on this article, which describes adjusting for inhomogeneities in station records and station history adjustments. Sensibly integrating differing data sets is an irritating task, and it’s an ongoing process. But it doesn’t seem to be a problem climate scientists are ignoring– the techniques for dealing with non-uniform noise characteristics and biases in different data sets are well known.
Furthermore, we don’t just have to rely on mechanical recording devices. Tree rings, coral growth rates, borehole measurements and ice core proxies can be used to independently verify the temperature record. They agree to within the limits of experimental and algorithmic uncertainty.
My point is that arriving at a “mean global temperature” is a very difficult calculation to make.
I wholeheartedly agree. I think scientists should be careful to state the estimated uncertainty in all their statements, and abrupt climate change is no exception. It’s just that the error bars are now small enough to rule out the hypotheses “climate change isn’t happening” and “climate change is largely natural.”
Update: After further thought, I think m4cph1sto was referring to a recent argument circulating around “skeptic” sites claiming that the average temperature has been decreasing since 1998. I’ll let Rei handle this one:
FYI: 1998 was one of the strongest El Nino events in modern history. El Nino raises the atmosphere’s temperature by slowing the upwelling of deep, cold water in the eastern pacific. La Nina cools it by just the opposite. It doesn’t change the long-term picture, of course; the rate at which water cycles in the ocean has no bearing on how much total heat input there is into the system; ocean waters aren’t magically decoupled from the rest of our atmosphere. It’s just a source of white noise on top of the blatantly obvious signal. [Rei]
Another Update: This subject came up again here.
Jane Q. Public asks if sunspot activity causes global warming, among many other topics.
[Jane Q. Public]
…one theory is that lack of sunspots causes Earth to warm up. (There is a very strong negative correlation between sunspot activity and temperature on Earth.)
Maybe now we’ll find out who’s right.
No it doesn’t [youtube.com].
[Jane Q. Public]
I was wrong about the correlation being negative, but I was not wrong about the correlation. But one thing pointed out in your video, that solar activity has not corresponded to temperature in just the last few years, is totally meaningless. Long-term trends are the only ones that matter. And as for long-term predictions, nothing comes close to beating the analysis of sunspots. The science is good. Very good.
I’ll see your YouTube video, and raise you one:
video [youtube.com]
video [youtube.com]
And a whole bunch of articles:
article [typepad.com]
article [wordpress.com]
article [bbc.co.uk]
article [examiner.com]
article [mlive.com]
article [wordpress.com]
[Repossessed]
Do you have any citable sources? Those are blog postings and new sites (which is even worse than a blog).
[Jane Q. Public]
Sources were referenced in both the videos and the articles. I would think that a few minutes with Google should lead you to them.
[Repossessed]
Wikipedia is not a citable source, nor does it have the details necessary for me to do a peer review.
None of your links have any actual data to them, they do not have citations which include the data. They do not include the equations used to come to the conclusions either. Without those, there is no way to determine if the theory has merit.
[Jane Q. Public]
I see. So a presentation by a University professor about his research project is not self-citing?
Are you completely inept at Google? You can’t find his name or the research he was demonstrating?
Look, bud. This is not a peer-reviewed journal itself. If you can’t find the data from the information given (I did), then just blow it off and say you don’t believe it. I don’t care one way or another. But I am not going to spend a half hour looking it up again just for you.
[Repossessed]
I have no interest in believing thing or not believing them, I have an interest in knowing if they are true.
[Jane Q. Public]
Look, guy. I literally just spent 10 seconds on Google and found plenty of information about David Archibald, including a new paper he published just this month.
Do you own damned homework, and stop demanding to be spoon-fed by others. I won’t respond to you again.
[Repossessed]
And yet you are incapable of providing me with that information.
[Jane Q. Public]
NO, just unwilling, you lazy ass. When I was young (NOT that damned long ago), finding information like this meant spending a day at the library finding out what books contained the information, then arranging for inter-library loans, and waiting a week to a month or even longer for the books to even get there.
I am not Al Gore, to pretend that I “invented the internet”. But I have spent a good part of my life helping to build the infrastructure that brings this information to your fingertips. And if you are too goddamned lazy to lift those fingertips to even bother to look something the fuck up, when you so easily can, then I am NOT going to help you!
Is there anything unclear about that???
[Dumb Scientist]
You’re suggesting that other people should embark on a wild goose chase to try to find respectable references behind the pseudoscientific sites that you clearly believe are more rigorous than Nature and Science? Curiously, you haven’t even responded to the reasonable and insightful comments by Geoffrey Landis in this very page. I guess it really is true that “you can’t reason someone out of a position that she didn’t reason herself into in the first place.”
Incidentally, I know this won’t sway you, but I study the climate in my day job and all your posts prove is that you’ve never taken graduate-level classes in this area. Every serious climatologist that I’ve met at the conferences agrees with the mountain of evidence showing that sunspots aren’t strongly correlated with climate. Again, see Geoffrey’s posts.
(Ed note: At this point, Jane responds to Geoffrey with a truly epic post that I later responded to.)
[Jane Q. Public]
No, I was suggesting that ONE particular person was being a lazy ass, and trying to put demands on me as a result. As I have mentioned, one of his questions could have easily been answered had he bothered to spend literally 10 seconds on Google.
Further, I had in fact answered one of Geoffrey’s posts, and I have just answered another one, at length, with a reply that indirectly references about 150 or more peer-reviewed scientific papers. That will have to be good enough, because I am tired of catering to lazy asses who believe what they are told on the 11 o’clock news, and who can’t be bothered to do any real research or even lookups on their own.
[Dumb Scientist]
Or maybe scientists aren’t the brainwashed idiots you clearly think we are? We’re aware that the Sun exists, and that it impacts the climate. But the overwhelming evidence is that sunspots have a negligible impact on the climate.
People are asking you for serious, peer-reviewed references not because scientists are idiots who “believe what they are told on the 11 o’clock news, and who can’t be bothered to do any real research or even lookups on their own” but because we’ve spent our lives studying these issues and what you’re saying contradicts all the evidence we’ve seen.
Further, I had in fact answered one of Geoffrey’s posts, and I have just answered another one, at length, with a reply that indirectly references about 150 or more peer-reviewed scientific papers. [Jane Q. Public]
Here’s proof that the Moon doesn’t cause the tides, that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that the Earth doesn’t move. The website has more than 150 peer-reviewed references, I’m sure!
Not convinced? Why not? Do you see any difference between the post you wrote in response to Geoffrey Landis and the fixedearth.com website? Because I don’t. That’s why we’re asking you to provide us with a direct link to an actual peer-reviewed article supporting your claim that sunspots are responsible for global warming. It’s all too common for pseudoscientists to quote legitimate articles to support their outlandish claims, and then ignore the scientists’ complaints.
Apparently you think *I* am an idiot. Try reading the goddamned thread. … If you really don’t want to be perceived as a “brainwashed idiot”, maybe you could bother to figure out what the argument is about before you put in your irrelevant 2 cents. … As for the rest, you are one of those lazy asses I mentioned. … But you are too damned lazy to look any of them up? … And yes, that to me means “brainwashed idiot”. … get off your lazy ass and LOOK IT UP YOURSELF!!! … since you insist on being spoon-fed … There are many more, very easily found, but I am not going to do your homework for you. Now go away. You disgust me. [Jane Q. Public]
There’s really no need to be so uncivilized. I’m just saying that all your posts on this subject clearly imply that scientists are either so stupid that they overlook trivially obvious “problems” with their own research, or that they’re willing members in a global conspiracy. Based on your (mistaken) assumption that I haven’t read this thread, I don’t have to guess which of these alternatives you’ve chosen in my case. Pity. I bet conspirators get jetpacks!
And I most certainly do not think you’re an idiot. At worst, I think you’re making mistakes while talking about a highly advanced subject that lies far outside of your own professional experience. Everyone does that. It’d be a different story if I were saying that you were pathetically wrong about your own life’s work… the subject that you’ve studied since childhood with the passionate intensity of a monk. I’d never insult you like that; at most I’d simply ask polite questions to try to understand your subject of expertise better.
First, the Petition Project is a legitimate collection of scientists.
I asked for peer-reviewed references, not a list of people with PhDs. There’s a difference. A list of PhDs is an appeal to authority. A peer-reviewed article is evidence of a very specific claim, along with equations and links to data that I could use to verify the claim. It’s given weight by the confrontational nature of the review process in addition to the fact that everyone involved has a PhD in that specific field. Like other people who take your position, you appear to think that science is democratic– that scientific decisions are made by comparing the number of people on each side. It’s not. It’s about evidence.
So, since you insist on being spoon-fed, here is one: Solar Cycles and Predicted Climate Response, which appeared in Energy & Environment (an appropriately peer-reviwed journal) in 2006. You asked for one, you got it.
My apologies. I wasn’t nearly specific enough in my original request. Scientific journals are rather specialized, and we’re discussing a very specialized hard science topic. It wouldn’t be appropriate to reference an article from a social science journal (which is what Energy & Environment is). The reason is that the referees need to be experts in their field in order to properly vet the paper. Journals I’d suggest reading are Science, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Journal of Climate, Environmental Research Letters, Climatic Change, etc.
I’m sorry for not making that caveat more explicit, but I figured it was an assumption that all scientists would make…
But I’ll make it up to you. Here’s an article by Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen, published in Science in 1991. This would have been a legitimate example of a peer-reviewed journal article supporting your claim.
Of course, it’s incorrect. You can find out how– if you’re interested– by following its citations in google scholar to the present. For nonscientists, read the summary here. The moral of this story is that data smoothing is difficult to do in an objective manner, which is something all computational scientists screw up on occasion. Please don’t mistake this comment as criticism of Friis-Christensen or K. Lassen– I’ve certainly made far bigger mistakes in my own research. The ability to admit a mistake and move on is the mark of a true scientist.
Like other people who take your position, you appear to think that science is democratic… [Dumb Scientist]
THAT is complete bullshit. That is the exactly the point that I made in a preceding post… and you claim to have read this thread??? Go back and read it again. You are in error. [Jane Q. Public]
When asked for a peer-reviewed article, you presented a list of scientists. It doesn’t really matter what you’ve written in any other post– this kind of category error gives the appearance that you think science is democratic because that’s the only scenario in which this wouldn’t be a category error.
… Note that peer review is a necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing a valid scientific claim. Not all peer-reviewed papers are accurate, as I’ve shown. But if you want respect from scientists, you have to first rise above this reliance on pseudo-scientific websites that display approximately the same level of rigor and oversight as this site.
And perhaps that particular article WAS wrong. But I have cited — and pointed you to — much more recent research that contradicts that. [Jane Q. Public]
More recent != This is C++ for “is not equal to.” more credible. If they were both articles in Science, yes, all other things being equal, the more recent article would have more weight (unless it was so new that other scientists hadn’t yet had time to respond to it.) In fact, that article you’re leaning on quotes Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen (1991) several times, without seeming to understand that the reason their conclusions aren’t valid has little to do with the data they used; the real problem is the way they smoothed the data. My other post quotes legitimate, peer-reviewed articles showing this warming is due mainly to anthropogenic CO2.
Journals I’d suggest reading are Science, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, Physical Review… [Dumb Scientist]
Aha. Exactly those journals that have been experiencing famous failures of the peer-review system in recent years? Of course. Sir, that was only one paper out of a great many. I repeat: why do you want me to do your homework for you? You refuse to look these things up for yourself… [Jane Q. Public]
… I can’t help but point out that you’ve casually dismissed every top-tier hard-science journal, in favor of a social science journal. With all due respect, Science, Nature and all the other journals I mentioned are where science actually happens. The claim that sunspot cycle length correlates well with Earth’s average temperature was made in the mainstream journals in 1991. But it was quickly shown to be a spurious connection based on data smoothing parameters. The fact that Energy & Environment didn’t catch this when the argument was made again 15 years later just shows that they’re not experts in the field. As I’ve said, there’s no shame in that. I’m not an expert in all subjects in the universe, so I don’t fault their lack of highly specialized knowledge in this particular subject any more than my lack of knowledge about synchronized swimming is a black mark on my career as a climate scientist. I’m sure their journal is excellent at analyzing the social science issues associated with energy use, and those issues are important too.
[Jane Q. Public]
As I stated before, I only found that paper after you asked me to find one, and I was not particularly careful in choosing it; you had asked for a peer-reviewed paper, and I just grabbed the first one that was visible. And indeed, some of its claims do appear to be refuted, particularly in a paper by P. Damon, published in Eos in 2004. However, though you apparently knew this (as, I could guess, did Mr. Landis), neither of you bothered to cite any kind of actual data in an attempt to refute the one paper I provided, per your request.
After you mentioned the data smoothing issue, it took me about 2 minutes to find Damon’s paper. If I had been aware of it in advance, I would of course not have offered that paper. But if you really wanted to make a point — and practice what you preach — you should have cited your sources. Instead, you left me to look it up… which makes you are guilty of exactly the same faux pas of which you accuse me. In point of fact, Damon’s paper itself states, “The graphs [from Friis-Christensen and Lassen] are still widely referred to in the literature,and their misleading character has not yet been generally recognized.” Without citing sources, then, how did you expect me to know? …
[Dumb Scientist]
Thanks for the link. You’re right, it is a good paper. I’m sorry that I missed it.
(Ed note: This post was written in response to Jane’s huge post which she wrote in response to Geoffrey Landis.)
[Dumb Scientist]
Mon Dieu! Quantity != This is C++ for “is not equal to.” quality. You’d get a lot more respect if you’d simply link to one or two legitimate, peer-reviewed articles instead of dozens of pseudoscientific websites. I don’t have time to relieve you of all your misconceptions, but here are the most glaring errors:
If you had done your homework (or even watched the YouTube videos I posted above), … On the contrary, if you had watched those YouTube videos I linked to… [Jane Q. Public]
We’re scientists, not preteens looking for cat videos. Link to peer-reviewed articles or expect to be ignored.
Anthropogenic CO2 is the cause of a small, but measurable, increase in average global temperature. This temperature increase is a detectable deviation away from the statistical variations due to natural causes, and is now quite well understood. [Geoffrey Landis]
That is the most ridiculous thing I have heard to date. It is NOT known, precisely because it has been impossible to statistically separate it from other influencing factors. (Including sunspots!) While many scientists believe that it probably has some effect, nobody has yet managed to measure it with any real statistical significance. Where did you get this idea, anyway? Do you have any sources that purport to have this measurement? The fact is that such a beast does not exist! [Jane Q. Public]
Geoffrey’s statement is most certainly not ridiculous. I suggest looking at the IPCC 4th report. Download chapter 3, open the PDF to page 15 (which is labeled 249) and look at figure 3.6. These data show a global temperature increase of 0.65 °C plus or minus 0.2 °C over the period from 1901 to 2005. The report notes that this rate is higher than at any other point since the 11th century. Meehl 2004 shows that this warming can’t be explained by natural forcings alone, but including anthropogenic CO2 emissions matches the observations very well. And, yes, those “natural forcings” include variations in solar output, which can be measured by satellites so there’s no need to search for weak correlations in sunspot data.
Furthermore, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Vostok shows that the current CO2 level is higher than it’s been in half a million years. If you don’t think that CO2 can warm the planet, I suggest you remember your sophomore-level physics classes and examine the spectrum of the Sun. Then open a textbook and examine the absorption spectrum of CO2. Notice that the peak of the Sun’s radiation goes through? Now open your thermodynamics textbook and calculate the blackbody radiation of a planet at 286K. Notice that the CO2 absorbs more of this radiation.
That’s why scientists say that CO2 is warming the planet. It’s not exactly cutting-edge science.
Most of the science that is used to support the greenhouse warming model come from the IPCC Assessment reports, and much of that “science” has been shown to be flawed, not to mention that the reports themselves are heavily politicized, and their conclusions do not match the actual science that they reference. [Jane Q. Public]
That’s exactly backwards. The IPCC reports are simply compilations of pre-existing, peer-reviewed science. I’ve read their reports and talked with scientists whose work is referenced in the IPCC reports. No scientist I’ve met (in public or private) thinks your conspiracy theory is valid. In fact, I’ve personally confirmed the mass loss in Greenland’s glaciers with my own research. I’ve seen climate change happening with my own data and my own personal algorithms. Does that mean I’m part of the conspiracy too?
Below I link to a letter from Chris Landsea, who is the one who actually did the research on whether hurricanes and typhoons would increase in number or severity due to global warming. His conclusion was that they would not. BUT… the IPCC didn’t let that stop them.
Yes, science is sometimes contentious (which seems to contradict your opinion that scientists are either brainwashed into accepting global warming, or engaged in a massive conspiracy.) Also, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report made a very limited claim regarding hurricanes: “It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.”
The giant red “hockey stick” graph from Al Gore’s movie? (The researches who published that paper have publicly admitted that it was based on faulty procedures and have officially withdrawn it.)
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here, but I see no reason to doubt the overall accuracy of that graph.
Therefore, the statement in AR4 that “It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.” is likely an exaggeration, not supported by the actual research. [Jane Q. Public]
According to the IPCC guidance note on uncertainty, that’s basically the weakest statement they could make without being utterly silent. (See table 4.) Months ago, I said that hurricane intensity couldn’t be linked to climate change, and I later corrected another poster who was under the impression that the available data contained a clear correlation between hurricanes and climate change.
If the IPCC report had used any other qualifier from table 4, you might have a more convincing point. Furthermore, another paper in Science says “Results show that the increasing trend in number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes for the period 1970-2004 is directly linked to the trend in SST [sea surface temperature].” Dr. Landsea is a legitimate scientist, but he’s not the only one studying hurricanes, and I fail to see how his claims automatically rule out those of other scientists– especially when they’re making such a weak claim given the observed trends.
And, yes, those “natural forcings” include variations in solar output, which can be measured by satellites at L1 so there’s no need to search for weak correlations in sunspot data. [Dumb Scientist]
Please be specific. “Solar output” can mean many things. [Jane Q. Public]
I was quoting Meehl 2004 in that sentence, which itself quotes Meehl 2003 to show that variations in solar luminosity affect the climate. Of course, Meehl 2004 shows that this effect isn’t responsible for the warming in the latter half of the century, which is shown to be due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
And by the way, I would like to point out a mistake you have made more than once: there is in fact a clear and valid correlation between sunspot cycles and Earth surface temperature, from the distant past up to at least the mid-20th century. [Jane Q. Public]
Further, while it was implied by Mr. Landis, neither of you bothered to acknowledge that there is in fact a strong correlation, at least up to the mid-20th century. Instead, you gave me the impression that you were disputing any correlation at all, which I knew to be incorrect. [Jane Q. Public]
First of all, Dr. Landis and I were careful to hedge our claims. Here are all the statements I’ve made (unless I’ve missed one?) regarding the correlation between sunspot cycle length and the climate:
- Every serious climatologist that I’ve met at the conferences agrees with the mountain of evidence that show sunspots aren’t strongly correlated with climate. [emphasis added]
- … the overwhelming evidence is that sunspots have a negligible impact on climate. [emphasis added]
- The claim that sunspot cycle length correlates well with Earth’s average temperature was made in the mainstream journals in 1991. [emphasis added]
- … so there’s no need to search for weak correlations in sunspot data. [emphasis added]
Which of these statements gave you the impression that I was “disputing any correlation at all”?
Based on your response to Abcd1234 (who carefully said that the correlation hasn’t been true for the last 50 years), I’d assumed you were talking about the last 50 years. In fact, that’s why I stopped lurking. Did I misunderstand your post?
Secondly, you’ve been emphatically denying that the correlation you’re proposing is between luminosity and climate. But that’s precisely what Meehl 2003,2004 and most other peer-reviewed papers show. A correlation between luminosity variations and Earth’s climate isn’t in dispute. What those papers emphatically don’t show is that variations in luminosity are responsible for recent warming, or that variations in sunspot cycle length have a significant effect on the climate.
Update: A good reference regarding solar variability is section 2.7.1 on pages 188-193 of chapter 2 in the 4th IPCC report.
Previously, you cited luminosity data when I had clearly stated that the correlation was with period length, not luminosity.
That’s because other correlations have been disproven by later research, as you now seem to agree. I was just trying to steer you back towards the only correlation that’s well-established in the peer-reviewed literature.
Another problem with your claim is that some kind of mechanism other than variations in luminosity would be needed to support your hypothesis. For example, in this post you claim “The sunspot activity tends to blow away the solar winds, allowing more radiation to get through to Earth’s surface.”
This is indeed a claim made in a real journal. But it’s far more controversial than you’re implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.
Furthermore, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Vostok shows that the current CO2 level is higher than it’s been in half a million years. [Dumb Scientist]
Once again: correlation alone does not imply causation. You have to show cause, not just correlation. Otherwise you have demonstrated nothing. [Jane Q. Public]
Strong correlation plus a demonstrated causal mechanism does imply causation, though. Many nonscientists seem to get stuck on the fact that the causal mechanism between CO2 and temperature works both ways. In the paleoclimate record, temperature swings induced by (among other things) Milankovitch cycles are amplified by CO2. An astonishing number of “skeptics” appear to think the ~800 year phase lag between CO2 and temperature proves Joe Barton to Al Gore: ‘An article from Science magazine explains a rise in CO2 concentrations actually lagged temperature by 200 to 1000 years. CO2 levels went up after the temperature rose. Temperature appears to drive CO2, not vice versa.’ that CO2 can’t drive temperatures. This sort of bizarre statement seldom (if ever) shows up in peer-reviewed journals, though, because it’s simply not true.
The real point of these ice core analyses is that the natural climate experiences a temperature rise centuries before CO2 rises. That’s not happening now, because the CO2 in the air isn’t part of a natural feedback cycle. Instead, we dug it out of the ground in unprecedented amounts and pumped it straight into the atmosphere. Thus we’re not looking at natural climate change, it’s anthropogenic abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. .
Also, the natural climate exhibits feedback effects wherein higher temperatures release CO2 from natural reservoirs such as the ocean and permafrost. This feedback CO2 is completely different from the anthropogenic CO2 that’s already pushed the concentration 26% above its natural peak, which means that the climate is likely to get even warmer due to natural feedback effects when that natural CO2 is released.
In short, the phase lag has persisted for at least 650,000 years, but it isn’t happening today because we’re not experiencing natural climate change any more.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Then open a textbook and examine the absorption spectrum of CO2. [Dumb Scientist]
I suggest that YOU look at the absorption spectrum of a cloud. See how they compare… it is not as simple as all that. [Jane Q. Public]
I first encountered the absorption spectrum of water in my first thermodynamics class, ~10 years ago when I was a sophomore physics undergrad. My professor, Dr. Glenn Agnolet, was an especially good lecturer, and pointed out that it’s not a coincidence that humans consider 400nm-700nm to be “visible light.” That’s because there’s a very narrow range of low absorption surrounding those values. It’s also not a coincidence that bees and small birds can see UV while we can’t, because our large watery eyes filter it out, but a smaller eye filters less UV so they evolved receptors for it.
Amusingly, this spectrum even has military significance in that the only frequency ranges useful for talking to submerged submarines have wavelengths longer than a kilometer. Not only does the transmitter have to be kilometers across and placed on a site with very low ground conductivity so it’s located in Wisconsin, the low frequency also results in very slow data transfer rates. That’s why subs receive messages in shorthand even to this day. Water’s absorption spectrum has fascinated me ever since.
But presumably you were implying that the existence of a stronger greenhouse gas like H2O (which in our atmosphere accounts for roughly 3x the warming of CO2) means that CO2 is irrelevant. However, the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is much longer than water vapor, because oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and therefore H2O reaches equilibrium in a matter of days. In other words, if we pumped gigatons of water vapor into the atmosphere, it would be back in the oceans within a few weeks. On the other hand, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for many decades, which is why it’s so dangerous. Water vapor concentration is also low in the stratosphere, so CO2 is more important there.
Update: This was a general response to claims about water vapor, which keep getting repeated.
I am not citing some “conspiracy theory”, though I will admit that it may seem that way. [Jane Q. Public]
Yes, it definitely does. Ironically, the very next statements in your post tend to reinforce my earlier conclusion.
Most of the science that is used to support the greenhouse warming model come from the IPCC Assessment reports, and much of that “science” has been shown to be flawed, not to mention that the reports themselves are heavily politicized, and their conclusions do not match the actual science that they reference. [Jane Q. Public]
No scientist I’ve met (in public or private) thinks your conspiracy theory is valid. In fact, I’ve personally confirmed the mass loss in Greenland’s glaciers with my own research. I’ve seen climate change happening with my own data and my own personal algorithms. Does that mean I’m part of the conspiracy too? [Dumb Scientist]
But aside from that, your “own research”, even if it does indeed show mass loss in Greenland’s glaciers, does not make your point at all… unless it demonstrates that the mass loss was caused by raised CO2 levels. Remember: nobody here is disputing that the globe is warming! The debate is about the cause! [Jane Q. Public]
Note that I wasn’t attempting to use my research to support any particular cause of climate change. That statement was aimed squarely at your conspiracy theory. You might be able to convince nonscientists that there’s a massive conspiracy (intentional or not) among scientists, and any reference I produce to show that ~84% of scientists oppose your position would probably just solidify your belief in an evil conspiracy. My anecdote was only intended to show you that I’ve personally verified glacier melt through its effect on time-variable gravity above the glaciers in Greenland and Alaska. Because of this first-hand experience, I’m very skeptical that there’s any large-scale incompetence or data manipulation in the scientific community.
I’m also a little confused. You say “nobody here is disputing that the globe is warming!” but at the end of the very same post you present the Wegman Report in an attempt to discredit Figure 5(b) here which shows that the Earth is warming. Doesn’t that mean you are “disputing that the globe is warming”?
Obviously, this is not a peer-reviewed paper… but it IS a clear damning statement by one of the official reviewers, and I don’t see how you can ignore that. Nor is he the only one. Now, please don’t chide me about that last one… it is not a peer-reviewed paper either but it IS an official statement by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and cites over 400 renowned scientists around the world who disagree with the IPCC conclusions. … Now, remember… that was yet another official reviewer of the IPCC reports.
First of all, I’m allergic to politicians so I’m only going to comment on the genuinely peer-reviewed articles you’ve referenced. Secondly, your focus on reviewers seems to assume that I’m worshipping my fellow scientists as high priests. I’m not. I respect peer review precisely because it’s very confrontational, even downright nasty at times. I respect the process of peer review, not necessarily the people involved. Because 16% of scientists disagree with abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. (which seems to confirm my personal assessment based on what I saw at the Fall 2008 AGU conference), I’m not surprised that some people with PhDs (even people holding respectable positions) voice those views in public. If those reviewers ever publish their research in a respectable peer-reviewed journal, I’ll read their articles. This is because I have a limited lifespan– if I were immortal I’d have time to read every last “skeptic” argument in existence. But I’ve only got a precious few decades of life left, so I don’t waste my time on “science” that hasn’t satisfied the minimum acceptable standard for evidence: peer review.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here, but I see no reason to doubt the overall accuracy of that graph. [Dumb Scientist]
I am referring here to the particular graph that appeared in Gore’s movie, nothing else. [Jane Q. Public]
I’ve never seen the movie. This is partially because of my fetish for learning science from physics classes at accredited universities, textbooks and peer-reviewed articles rather than YouTube videos and documentaries. But it’s mainly because the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.
So I’m going to assume that by “hockey stick,” you were referring to Figure 5(b) here.
McIntyre and McKitrick, in about 5 reviewed papers in 2003 and 2005 … thoroughly debunked the statistical methods used to produce this graph. … Further, a review committee, consisting of Edward J. Wegman (Center for Computational Statistics, George Mason University), David W. Scott (Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University), and Yasmin H. Said (The Johns Hopkins University) recently reviewed and confirmed these findings.
The Wegman report wasn’t peer-reviewed, but it did contain genuinely useful criticisms of Mann’s methodology. However, followup journal articles such as Rutherford 2005 used completely different analysis methods and arrived at the same result. Also, Wahl and Ammann 2007 independently confirmed that conclusion. If you’d like, you can download their code here to confirm for yourself that the PCA centering issues raised by MM03 and MM05 don’t noticeably impact the results. I’m not disputing that better inter-disciplinary communication leads to better science. I’m just disputing the claim that these errors had any significant impact on the graph itself.
Furthermore, even if Mann et al. really did make some kind of fatal error in their calculations, that has practically no impact on the current scientific understanding of “recent” temperature reconstructions. Here’s a compilation of time series produced by a dozen independent studies, using different algorithms, different statistical methods and different data. They vary significantly, but the abrupt temperature increase appears in all of them.
My apologies, but this is the last comment I can write. I’m struggling under the weight of academic deadlines, and I don’t want to fail out of school because of my Slashdot addiction…
Meehl does not actually show that CO2 causes warming, he relies on the research of others to do so. In fact, while this may be a slight exaggeration, about all Meehl did here was to integrate the work of a number of other authors. [Jane Q. Public]
At least you’re aware of the exaggeration, if not the magnitude or (more importantly) the fact that this criticism could be applied to any research that expands on previous results… which includes nearly every paper in the history of science.
(Ed. note: Slashdot adds notes like [iop.org] to all links, which I’ve restored here to demonstrate how the original posts looked.)
This is indeed a claim [ameyamhatre.com] made in a real journal. But it’s far more controversial than you’re implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated [iop.org] to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. [Dumb Scientist]
“This is indeed a claim made in a real journal. But it’s far more controversial than you’re implying. The maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover.”
Estimated by whom? I have already shown you at least one peer-reviewed paper (although you objected to the journal’s lack of reputation for “hard science”) in which the estimation was far over what you state here. (Which, I admit, appears to be validly refuted for a specific period of time.) But if you are going to make an argument, as you seem to be doing here, then refute my source with one of your own, otherwise you are wasting my time. [Jane Q. Public]
That estimate was by T. Sloan and A.W. Wolfendale in the article I originally linked… that’s the link which was originally followed by “[iop.org]” before you quoted it. Also, the paper you previously found contains similar criticisms of Svensmark 1998 on its second page.
Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”
Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.
Yet another update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
But there are a lot of complex interactions going on here, including the fact that reflection by CO2 tends to be logarithmic… requiring a doubling of CO2 concentration to equal an incremental increase in reflection. … Books could be written about it and probably will be. [Jane Q. Public]
Yes, of course. The fact that CO2 absorption depends logarithmically on concentration has been known since 1900 when Angstrom and Koch Ångström, Knut (1900). ‘Über die Bedeutung des Wasserdampfes und der Kohlensaüres bei der Absorption der Erdatmosphäre.’ Annalen der Physik 4(3): 720-32. published online 308(12): 720-32 (2006) [doi: 10.1002/andp.19003081208] first measured it in a tube filled with CO2. The absorption dropped by less than 1% when Koch lowered the pressure by 33%, which convinced an entire generation of climatologists that CO2 wasn’t dangerous because it was already “saturated.” In other words, they believed that adding more CO2 wouldn’t warm the planet because it was already absorbing almost all it could.
But this research is 109 years old. Books have already been written about it. As early as 1931, Hulburt Hulburt, E.O. (1931). ‘The Temperature of the Lower Atmosphere of the Earth.’ Physical Review 38: 1876-90. used the brand-new theory of quantum mechanics to study absorption in more detail. He concluded that doubling the CO2 concentration would warm the Earth by 4°C. This is still the conventional method of expressing “climate sensitivity” with respect to CO2. (Although it’s important to note that this convention ignores slow The climate sensitivity classically defined is the response of global mean temperature to a forcing once all the ‘fast feedbacks’ have occurred (atmospheric temperatures, clouds, water vapour, winds, snow, sea ice etc.), but before any of the ’slow’ feedbacks have kicked in (ice sheets, vegetation, carbon cycle etc.). feedback effects which may sum to produce a temporary(?) net positive feedback effect, given the unnaturally abrupt nature of the forcing.) His prediction is still within the error bars of modern estimates which assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9°C, with a 95% confidence that it’s less than 4.9°C but greater than 1.7°C. Sadly, his breakthrough wasn’t recognized at the time.
In the 1950s, the Cold War prompted U.S. scientists to study the atmosphere for military purposes. They mounted spectrometers on planes and sent them high into the atmosphere, where the absorption spectrum changed Kaplan, Lewis D. (1952). ‘On the Pressure Dependence of Radiative Heat Transfer in the Atmosphere.’ J. Meteorology 9: 1-12. . At standard pressure, CO2 absorbs radiation in broad “peaks” in frequency space because of pressure broadening but the lower pressure at altitude narrows these peaks. Thus, CO2 acts as a less effective greenhouse gas at higher altitudes.
Subsequent studies confirmed and expanded on these results. The short version is that the atmosphere needs to be modeled as a series of layers, where the pressure in each layer causes CO2 to absorb differing amounts of radiation at different wavelengths. Each layer insulates all the layers below it, and the outer layer of the atmosphere isn’t saturated until it reaches a higher concentration than would be required to saturate at standard pressure. Furthermore, water vapor concentration falls off rapidly with altitude while CO2 concentration doesn’t, so water vapor doesn’t play a large role in the outer layer of the atmosphere.
If you’re wondering why these references aren’t linked, it’s because this debate is ancient and certainly not news to any climatologist who’s less than 50 years behind the cutting edge. Many of these articles’ abstracts aren’t even available online, so you’ll have to search your local university library to find them. You may find this overview (complete with references) helpful in your search, but nonscientists may prefer this less technical version.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Of course, it’s possible that you weren’t “trying to make any earth-shattering observations there,” and were just waxing eloquent about the beauty of science. If that’s true then I apologize for wasting your time, and we agree that science is really frakking cool. This response would then be aimed solely at pseudoscientists like Joanne Nova who claim that “CO2 is already absorbing almost all it can!”
So, I was not trying to make any earth-shattering observations there, just: it’s not so simple.
Virtually no subject in modern physics is simple enough to be described completely in a single Slashdot post, a single textbook, a single semester, or even a single college degree. For example, high school students learn that gravity is described by F=m*g, where “g” is a constant 9.8 m/s2. This is oversimplified because “g” decreases with altitude. Undergrads learn that gravity is described by F=G*m1*m2/r2. This is oversimplified because it can’t account for the precession of Mercury’s orbit or the orbital decay of binary pulsars due to energy loss from gravitational waves. Graduate students learn that gravity is one of several physical manifestations of the curvature of spacetime due to the stress-energy tensor. This is also an oversimplification because it can’t be quantized and produces unphysical predictions at black hole singularities.
In this sense, abrupt climate change A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems. is no different from general relativity. It’s a hideously complicated subject that requires at least a graduate education in physics to struggle through the many layers of simplification in order to reach the frontiers of knowledge. When talking with the public, physicists need to make simplifications, or the explanations would take years. Be wary of assuming that these simplifications are anything but pedagogical tools.
We already know of the penchant that the media has for sensationalism. Have you not heard the news reports that “sea levels are expected to rise as much as 10 meters in our lifetime”?? I have. Yet even the IPCC says nothing of the sort. … Which made it prime fodder for Mr. Gore’s movie. Which caught the attention of the public. Which caused alarmism out of proportion to the actual problem.
I completely agree with every statement you’ve made here. My advisor is a world-renowned expert [*] in geophysics And a really nice guy! :) Hi! I’m working, I promise! who recently said “I don’t think climate change is going to kill anyone.” (Provided we take decisive action I agree, but worry that the effects will act as a catalyst to worsen existing political conflicts.) That’s why I’ve insisted on restricting this conversation to peer-reviewed papers. The mainstream media is biased towards sensationalism, and the internet is a tarpit of misinformation.
[*] I’m sorry that I can’t provide more details with which to judge this claim, but my career is just starting so I don’t want to commit professional suicide by making my views on, say, gay marriage or gun rights Pro-2nd amendment article coming soon, to be linked in permanent version of this article. available to potential employers. I’ll say this, though: I suspect that the last woman I dated (a fellow geophysicist) was with me at least partly because I promised to introduce her to him. This suspicion is based on her reaction when she found out who my advisor was, which wasn’t unusual Sadly, I only mean that the initial jaw-drop isn’t unusual… at all.
If you had been paying attention, you might have understood that the Wegman, et al. report was “peer review”
Articles published in scientific journals are peer-reviewed. Again, peer review isn’t about worshipping scientists, so it’s not just about the qualifications of the reviewer. It’s about a process. Scientific articles are subjected to a process called peer review, which means the author gets viciously attacked by people who (sometimes) think he’s an moronic asshole. This process is the bedrock of modern science because it results in articles that are better for it after surviving the inferno. But the nasty emails sent by the reviewers to the author haven’t been through peer review themselves. And that’s basically what the Wegman report is, except they “reviewed” it among themselves. It makes some good points, but draws a completely exaggerated conclusion which hopefully wouldn’t have made it through a proper peer review.
… even if Mann et al. really did make some kind of fatal error in their calculations, that has practically no impact on the current scientific understanding of “recent” temperature reconstructions. [Dumb Scientist]
Possibly. But it means you have to find other research to make your point. [Jane Q. Public]
Each time series in the graph I previously linked is referenced in chapter 6 here. Turn to page 469 and examine Table 6.1 (later, if you get bored, consider checking out column 2 of page 466 which reviews the claims of MM03 and MM05.) Every time series is referenced well enough to be found on google scholar— for example here’s one of them. As you’ve seen from the graph, they all support the abrupt temperature increase in Mann’s graph. (I freely admit that all these authors could be drooling morons, sheeple incapable of independent thought, or evil conspirators… any of these scenarios or a linear combination of them would completely discredit my position.)
2015-06-15 Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
You might be able to convince nonscientists that there’s a massive conspiracy (intentional or not) [emphasis added] among scientists, and ironically any reference I produce to show that ~84% of scientists oppose your position would probably just solidify your belief in an evil conspiracy. [Dumb Scientist]
… they essentially all complain about the same problem: the fact that those involved in the IPCC reporting and review process who disagreed with a preconceived conclusion were blatantly ignored. … IPCC reports are politicized and unreliable. … the IPCC has had a chronic problem with bias and failure of peer review. … Well, not exactly. It’s because until that point, I was not aware that other possible correlations were ever even taken seriously. … That is almost correct, if you are looking at it in a sort of sideways-logic kind of way. … If these statements, by the both of you, do not imply that there is no correlation, I will eat my hat. But of course some of the very literature you rely on contradicts that. … I could not possibly accept the results of this survey as anything but an exercise in data manipulation — intentional or otherwise. … I cannot accept those reported results as anything. As reported, they are meaningless. The word “valid” is not on the horizon. … Oh, come on. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Or did you just not bother to read the papers? … The fact is that the Mann, et al. graph was out of proportion, and tended to exaggerate the appearance of the recent warming. Which you would know, if you actually read the papers. But I suspect that you were just baiting me. … so far you have not managed to validly refute even one point I have made. … it was more like destroying his methodology, not just criticizing it. … What a COSMIC coincidence. The same three people who did the original paper! And they reached a similar conclusion??? How outrageously surprising! Seriously, how can you be surprised? And the fact that they used a different methodology does not impress me in the least. Wegner, et al. strongly implied that while those people might otherwise be competent researchers, they do not know their statistical asses from a hole in the ground … Further, a textbook is anything but a peer-reviewed paper. Would you like me to do a brief review of how many of my high-school and university textbooks contained errors that seem laughable now? Get real. By the time half of them get to publication, they have significant errors. … If you will not accept Energy and Environment as a source because it may not be “sufficiently hard-science” for your taste, then I am sure as hell not going to accept your textbook. [emphasis added] … This was not apparent to me at first, but as it turns out, Meehl’s climate model has relied upon the data generated in the 1998 Mann study. So, at least until some adjustments are made, I have no choice but to consider the Meehl model to have also been successfully refuted. … When a climate model relies upon past temperature variations that are shown to be inaccurate, to say that the whole model becomes questionable is an understatement. … That sounds like a “conspiracy theory” to you? [Jane Q. Public]
In a word: yes. I’ve encountered the same attitude here and in my discussions with creationists and people who dispute the Big Bang. In each case, they insist Article on Slashdot: ‘EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming’ that peer review is broken. Sometimes they merely say this is because of widespread incompetence or “groupthink,” but it’s also common to see them accuse scientists of active conspiracy. They perform “research” by browsing pseudoscience websites rather than pursuing a graduate education in the field they’re obviously interested in. With all due respect to the parties involved, I think they’re making errors that could be avoided by opening graduate-level textbooks (which have little in common with high school or lower-level undergraduate texts) and solving the problems inside.
Curiously, they’re often The Salem hypothesis states ‘in arguments with creationists, if the fellow on the other side claimed to have personal scientific authority, it almost always turned out to be because he had an engineering degree.’ — I think this hypothesis applies to computer scientists too, and is true about pseudoscience in general, not just creationism. computer scientists or engi Here m4cph1sto claims to be a scientist- see link in 2nd half of word for example of the modified Salem hypothesis neers Here m4cph1sto explains that he’s an engineer in an example of the modified Salem hypothesis. . I suspect this is because natural sciences like physics, chemistry and biology appear similar to computer science and engineering. We all use math (in fact, electrical engineers use way more math than biologists) and the first year of college classes are quite similar. Our fields are highly complex and probably equally mysterious to the general public, so we become used to being “the person with the answers.”
However, engineers and computer scientists are, fundamentally, “builders.” Engineers figure out how to use materials like metals and plastic to build amazing technological marvels that enrich our lives. Computer scientists build shining edifices out of pure logic which have bound the human race together and (IMHO) will play a central role in giving our descendants “technology indistinguishable from magic.” In each case, notice that the emphasis lies on creating something that didn’t exist before. They develop preconceptions of the form their algorithm or building will take, then beat raw materials into a shape that conforms to their original vision.
Scientists, on the other hand, are more like detectives. They observe the natural world and try as hard as they possibly can to avoid letting their preconceptions contaminate the results of their experiments. Scientists are supposed to avoid creating something that didn’t exist before!
This isn’t to say engineers don’t have to think critically; for example, they have to recognize why the Tacoma Narrows bridge was badly designed and foresee similar mistakes. But they’re working within known natural laws, and it seems to me that the challenge of deducing those laws without prejudice is completely different. I’m starting to think that computer scientists and engineers are prone to assuming that their skills transfer to the natural sciences better than they actually do, which could explain why rational thought occasionally mutates into rationalizing ‘There Is No Evidence’ by David Evans .
Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not insulting computer scientists or engineers; I’m definitely not saying a significant percentage of them are pseudoscientists. I spent several years as an aerospace engineering major, my dad is a mechanical engineer, and many of my family and friends are in these fields. My physics degrees certainly don’t mean I can design a skyscraper or write a new programming language. I’m just speculating as to why some of them tend to be over-represented in the ranks of pseudoscientists.
Update: Here are some examples of the modified Salem hypothesis:
- Jane Q. Public – web developer/software engineer.
- Lonny Eachus – web developer/software engineer.
- Dr. Pierre R. Latour – retired chemical engineer.
- Eric Worrall – IT consultant.
- Dr. David Evans – electrical engineer.
- Joseph A. Olson – retired engineer.
- Prof. Lucia Liljegren – mechanical engineer.
- Burt RutanAnthony Watts: Recently after some conversations with a former chemical engineer who provided me with some insight, I’ve come to the conclusion that many engineers have difficulty with many of the premises of AGW theory because in their “this has to work or people die” world of exacting standards, the AGW argument doesn’t hold up well by their standards of performance. – aerospace engineer.
- Dr. Edward E. David Jr. – electrical engineer.
- Pete Ridley – retired Chartered Electrical Engineer.
- Royce R. Vines – engineer.
- Tom Harris – mechanical engineer.
- Prof. Pehr Bjornbom – Professor Emeritus, Chemical Engineering.
- Jim Peacock – retired aerospace engineer.
- Steve Goreham – electrical engineer.
- Dr. Charles Battig – retired physician and electrical engineer .
- Prof. Michael Economides – petroleum engineer.
- Prof. Robert Essenhigh – mechanical engineer.
- Dr. David Wojick – civil engineering, philosophy.
- Dr. Richard Saumarez – biomedical engineer.
- Andrew Schlafly – electrical engineer.
- Warren Meyer – mechanical and aerospace engineer.
- Ian L. McQueen – chemical engineer.
- Frank Lemke – electrical engineer.
- Tom Nelson – electrical and electronics engineer.
- Steve Burnett – chemical engineering graduate.
- Monte Hieb – mining safety engineer.
- Ronald D. Voisin – retired engineer.
- Dr. John Brignell – industrial instrumentation.
- Jon Brock – software developer.
- Berthold Klein – civil-environmental engineer.
- Charles S. Opalek, PE – engineer.
- Mike Haseler – engineer.
- Mark Wells – engineer.
- Mark – mechanical engineer.
- “m4cph1sto” – engineer.
- “TinyCO2” – IT engineer.
- “Lichanos” – engineer.
- “Bobl” – engineer.
- “adb” – engineer.
- “catweazle666” – engineer.
- “danbert8” – civil engineer.
- “elkto” – engineer.
- “TallDave” – programmer.
- “paulus” – aerospace system engineer.
- “Big Wave Dave” – professional engineer.
- “phamNewan” – engineer.
- Etc.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
[Dumb Scientist]
… The proponents of “man-made global warming” have seized upon the CO2-based warming model as their poster child. Unfortunately for them in the long run, that model has some serious problems. For example, in order for the CO2-based warming model to work, the upper atmosphere must be warming in proportion to the surface. However, it simply is not. Weather balloon and satellite data just do not find the upper-atmosphere warming that would have to be there if the CO2 warming model were true. You can look that up for yourself. Use actual data, dude, not what you find on the 10:00 news. But enough of the basic background. … [Jane Q. Public, Oct 24, 2007]
… the CO2-based warming theory REQUIRES the upper atmosphere to be warming at a rate proportional to the low-altitude temperature… and it simply has not been. Actual satellite and weather balloon temperature data do not support the CO2 warming theory at all. … ALL greenhouse gas “global warming” theories require the upper atmosphere to warm proportionally to the surface temperature. That is directly involved in the whole mechanism that is supposed to be CAUSING the warming from such gases! Whether CO2 were the “sole” greenhouse gas involved is irrelevant! They all require that the upper atmosphere be warming to a degree that it just has not been. Actual satellite and weather balloon temperature data DIRECTLY CONTRADICT the greenhouse warming theories. And if something that MUST be happening in order for those theories to be true is not happening (and it isn’t), then those theories are fundamentally flawed. [Jane Q. Public, June 22, 2008]
… Once again: the greenhouse gas models, specifically, require that the upper atmosphere be warming to a degree that has SIMPLY NOT BEEN HAPPENING according to the actual temperature data. If you disbelieve that, then try googling NOAA along with a few choice key words and do your own homework for a change. [Jane Q. Public, June 25, 2008]
… And contrary to popular belief, the troposphere has not been warming to the degree it would have to, were the greenhouse models of warming correct. But they are not. They have some very serious flaws. …[Jane Q. Public, July 9, 2009]
I presume you’ve been referring to an algebra error in assimilations of satellite temperature measurements of the troposphere.
- This error was corrected in 2005.
- The troposphere is actually the lowest portion of the Earth’s atmosphere. The upper atmosphere is divided into the stratosphere and the mesosphere.
- Greenhouse warming models predict cooling and contraction of the stratosphere.
Kyle asks about the political and economic implications of climate change.
[Kyle]
Interesting. For the record, what’s your view on all this climate change stuff? Personally, regardless of how the data is broken down, I think it’s crazy to build US legislation to tax all of our energy production based on the notion we can control the earth’s climate.
[Dumb Scientist]
… The scientific case is quite clear: humans have pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere because we burn coal for our electricity and oil for our cars, planes, and ships. This has raised the Earth’s average temperature and will continue to do so unless we stop it.
Of course, science doesn’t imply any particular political response. But fighting climate change is almost exactly the same thing as “energy independence” which we desperately need anyway, if only to stop throwing money at so many corrupt governments for their oil. The only difference is that we need to stop burning coal, which is something we have in abundance here in the U.S. All I can say is that this might be bad in the short term, but absolutely necessary in the long term. It’s not clear to me that these taxes would slow the economy down over the medium to long term. The U.S. is still the world’s leader in science and technology, so we’re most likely to be the ones to invent and sell the new cleaner energy tech which would actually make Americans richer in the end…
To replace coal, I liked McCain’s plan to build 45 new nuclear power stations. (Oh, how I wish Obama would listen to him on that particular subject!) Not the fusion plants many people are saying we should wait for (which don’t exist yet and may never exist), just better versions of the fission nuclear plants we already know work because they supply 80% of France’s electricity.
[Dumb Scientist]
I have no problem with using technology to develop cleaner energy sources. I do find fault in the idea of punitive tax policy that punishes consumers for being good capitalists – buying the energy that is the most efficient to produce. [Kyle]
But that’s the way regulation has worked for decades. For example, companies can’t simply dump toxic chemicals into the water (even though that’s cheaper than responsible disposal) because they’d get fined by the EPA. That’s basically the only reason our rivers aren’t even more polluted than they already are. Without a clear disincentive to pollute, companies will choose the most “efficient” means of creating their product, regardless of how much pollution they create in the process.
The only difference here is that the effects of CO2 pollution are more subtle than, say, dumping acid into a river. But it’s even more dangerous in the long run because CO2 causes a global problem rather than a local one.
The thing that kills me about the proposed plan is the idea of creating carbon credits, essentially fake money to be bought and sold, and forcing US energy companies to pay new taxes on all the carbon they produce.
Actually, cap and trade strikes me as a very capitalist way of addressing the problem. This is just the latest example of regulation to compensate for what economists call a “negative externality.”
Negative externalities represent rare failures of capitalism; they’re situations in which economic transactions can hurt people who aren’t directly involved. Again, the best example is that of a chemical plant dumping waste into a river. The people downstream will be affected regardless of whether they buy that company’s products. That’s why regulation exists: to protect people from situations where it’s cheaper to ruin the environment than to act responsibly.
This new kind of regulation will have the effect of making dirty technology expensive which will then prompt companies to invest in cleaner technologies for the most capitalist reason imaginable: to make a profit. I hope that the environmentalists will eventually relent and let us build nuclear power plants, because they’re the cleanest form of energy we have that can power our civilization. But I seriously doubt they’re rational enough to see that their fears of radiation are due more to Hollywood than actual physics…
America has always had an advantage in the global economy by having the best infrastructure and cheap energy. I can’t believe that any other countries are going to levy similar requirements on their businesses.
That’s a very serious problem indeed. If other countries don’t clean up too, production will simply shift to countries with lax regulation. One goal of the climate legislation that’s about to hit the Senate is to set an example; to show the world that the United States is ready to lead once again. With a firm domestic commitment to fighting climate change, Obama will have a more credible case to present at the Copenhagen Conference this December.
On a side note, have you ever checked out surfacestations.org? They make a pretty compelling case that the US temperature record over the last several decades is showing artificially high readings.
He’s saying that the surface temperature record is contaminated by the “urban heat island” effect– that temperatures are only rising around cities because of economic growth. One example he shows is that exhaust vents have been placed closer and closer to the sensors over the years.
This is a superficially compelling argument, but it’s also one that scientists have considered and rejected. One test is that the urban heat island effect should be less pronounced on windy days than calm days. That’s because if this warming is just caused by local exhaust vents, wind should carry that heat away whereas calm weather won’t. This doesn’t happen: calm and windy days have the same warming trend. This conclusion is from an article published in Nature by Dr. Parker in 2004; here’s a BBC article quoting it. Other studies have confirmed this result using different methods and data in 2003, 2006, and 2008.
NOAA recently published an answer to that specific website. They took the 70 stations that surfacestations.org designated “best” or “good” and created a time series based on them. Then they used all 1218 stations to create another time series. Both of those time series are plotted on page 3. They’re practically identical.
Also, scientists don’t blindly trust these sensors. Land temperature measurements are independently confirmed by sea surface temperatures, satellite data and proxies such as ice cores, boreholes, coral growth, tree rings, stalactites, fossil beds, ocean sediments and glacial deposits.
Update: Another paper casts doubt on the claims of surfacestations.org.
[Dumb Scientist]
I will say this: The EPA at its core is a political organization. EPA policies have quickly reversed under each new administration and I think this is an area where unfortunately the politics are very intertwined with the science. [Kyle]
Perhaps. But all I’m saying is this: we can agree that some types of pollution are bad, right? Sure, extremists like Earth First and Greenpeace give the whole notion a bad name, but I don’t think any of us want acid rain or smog. CO2 is just a more subtle problem which is more difficult to explain to the public, but ultimately poses a bigger threat to humanity.
That, and they even admit that these policies will cause an immediate and substantial rise in US energy prices, which trickle down to every segment of the economy. I think the plan is guaranteed to do very tangible economic harm to people all over the US in the near term, and that left alone…
Only in the sense that investing in a college fund “harms” one’s monthly budget. Also, it shouldn’t be more substantial than the “harm” that most other countries have experienced already. For quite a while, Europeans have been paying more than twice as much as we do for gasoline. As a result, their cars are smaller, their cities are much better for walking and biking, and their subway systems are better.
Frankly, we’re already far behind the Europeans in this regard. They’re not going to be hit nearly as hard as us when the shit really hits the fan because they’ve already been adapting to the post-oil era.
… companies will eventually develop cleaner technologies without having to be forced to by the government, because consumers want alternatives, and that to me is what it’s all about.
The keyword here is “eventually.” I doubt it would be soon enough, because every ton of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere worsens the problem, and we still get half of our electricity from coal which needs to be changed to nuclear yesterday.
Last modified September 30th, 2016
Do you know what the last (President Bush) and present Science Advisor to the President is telling the President about this situation? Are they getting the correct story from Science Advisors?
Dr. John Holdren is Obama’s science advisor. He’s got an impressive scientific record and I see no reason to believe that he’s giving bad advice. My only quibble is the lack of progress on the nuclear power issue, and I suspect that’s because Obama can’t confront the environmentalists in the Democratic party. It’s probably not because of bad scientific advice, but rather the usual politics.
Dr. Steven Chu is the current Secretary of Energy, and again he seems really well-qualified. His recent suggestion that we paint roofs white To be precise, he suggested that any roof which needs to be replaced anyway be replaced with a white roof, and that roofs on new buildings be white. The costs of this strategy are negligible. The benefits include lower air conditioning bills for homeowners, lower CO2 emissions because of the reduced electricity demand, and reflecting sunlight back into space which helps cool the planet. Roofs in Siberia should remain black, but white roofs are optimal even away from the tropics because snow covers them during much bitterly cold weather anyway. Also, black roofs aren’t efficient heaters because heat rises, and there’s less sunlight in the winter. Plus, black roofs radiate heat away better than white roofs. in order to reflect more sunlight seemed simple, cheap and effective.
Dr. John H. Marburger was Bush’s science advisor. He’s also a good scientist, but Bush waited until ~6 months into his presidency to appoint him, and subsequently demoted the position of ‘science advisor’ from its customary Cabinet level. I wonder how much of Dr. Marburger’s advice was taken seriously.
Here’s a recent interview with Dr. Steven Chu.
Steven Chu resigns; ShakaUVM says good riddance.
I am not a scientist but I have read a lot of engineering reports and, as an Army program manager, led several different teams of scientists and engineers pushing the envelope of technology in both aviation and missile defense.
I found your article to be compelling when it comes to the data and scientific conclusion but I have a different opinion when it comes to your personal views on what to do.
I think the world is behind the power curve on addressing CO2 emissions and will never catch up by imposing extraordinary limits on the US, alone. The new economic engines and sources of emissions are China and India. The US could stop emitting tomorrow and within a few years the world emission levels would, once again, start increasing. No amount of diplomacy, world opinion or scientific data is going to stop the developing nations from asserting their right to do what the US and other developed nations have already done. Further, the US (as well as every other nation) must be very careful in how it addresses putting limits on emissions. Having the technical ‘know how’ and the resources to ‘do something’ must be balanced against our economic needs. If we push too hard and the economy goes south, again, our leaders will be thrown out of office, or worse (civil war in China).
Global warming/CO2 emissions, pollution, hunger, disease, poverty, species extinctions, over fishing, coal mining, etc. are impossible to address when our numbers keep increasing. Every new problem that we address (successfully) is overwhelmed by our increasing numbers. The world sits at approximately six billion today and is forecast to be at nine billion in a few short generations. I listen to our scientists, politicians, and various advocates scream at the top of their lungs about all of these pressing issues. It is my opinion that they are screaming about symptoms without addressing the underlying problem of too many people. All too few are willing to talk about population. Certainly, our politicians would never talk about population. It would be like touching the ‘third rail’. So, here we are. Sometimes I feel like we are part of a big lab experiment. We are all rats. Science has already demonstrated that the more rats you put in a cage the more they tend to fight and kill one another. Sound familiar?
From what I have read about emissions, it looks to me like even the most successful efforts cannot stop what has already started. Instead, we need to concentrate on the consequences: sea rise, new agricultural trends, new diseases, population displacement, etc. And, last but not least, reverse our propensity to procreate. Fewer people could pollute and emit all they want and it would have no consequence on the Earth. At the rate we are going, even the slightest pollution by each of our increasing numbers will lead to an uninhabitable world. I guess that would fix the problem.
I’m interested in your thoughts on population.
Yes, that’s why I support the legislation in the Senate. Obama will have a more credible case for worldwide emissions targets at the Copenhagen conference this December if he’s backed up by a strong domestic commitment.
And that’s why environmentalists are wrong to try to guilt people into riding bikes everywhere and giving up air conditioning. Progress can only occur if we create new technology that’s cheaper, cleaner and better in every way, otherwise people won’t switch. If we can do that, we wouldn’t have to convince developing nations to use the new technology– they’d be lined up around the block to buy it voluntarily.
I completely agree. The water crisis is yet another symptom of the same fundamental problem: there are far too many humans on this planet. Lately, it seems like most developed nations have much lower birth rates, which is usually attributed to better availability of birth control and the fact that kids aren’t as useful in modern offices as they are on subsistence farms. So maybe the quickest way to fix this problem is to figure out how to help the developing nations develop faster. But it’s also true to say that the developed world consumes more resources per capita. So even though their birth rate is higher than ours, each birth in the U.S. is a larger drain on the world’s resources than each birth in Africa.
Eventually, governments might be forced to mandate a limit on the number of children each person can have. A stable number of births per woman would probably be ~2.1, but that would have to be continually recalculated to compensate for changes in mortality rates, the percentage of people who don’t want children, and projections of Earth’s carrying capacity. (Given an equal gender ratio, I suppose that nominal figure means every person could be guaranteed the right to have one child, with a lottery for another?) Regardless, the sort of exponential growth that we’ve been experiencing for millennia is utterly unsustainable. But, as you say, everyone ignores the elephant in the room…
Those are all noble goals, and the most likely scenarios can probably be handled in that manner. But I don’t think worst-case scenarios could be easily or cheaply handled by adaptation. (And note that our future emissions will play a large role in determining which scenario actually comes true.)
Even aside from reducing emissions, it seems prudent to wean ourselves off oil before we run out of easily-extracted oil deposits. It’s also bad to be so dependent on corrupt, totalitarian states for our energy. Nuclear fission is our best hope for achieving all these goals in one fell swoop.
Frankly, I don’t understand the political/economic situation well enough to say with certainty that our most successful efforts would be futile. I’d like to think the situation isn’t that bad, but maybe I’m wrong. In that case, I think we need to buy enough time for the next generation to develop technology that is capable of fixing the problem.
The voice of reason. Unless we stop procreating mindlessly and start to deindustrialise the society there’s no solution to this world. However clean the technology may be, it will always produce harmful waste.
And not everyone should have the license to have children.
Yes, it’s unfortunate that our society glamorizes unsustainable, mindless procreation like “Octomom” and “19 and counting”.
There will be no de-industrialization. Period. Look elsewhere for a solution.
All technology produces waste, even domesticated horses and campfires. The search for cleaner technology is rightly aimed at developing more advanced technology which will have smaller environmental effects than current technology.
I just emphasized that every person should have the right to have at least one child. It’s the second child per person that could lead to dangerous exponential growth.
I know nothing about climate change. I don’t intend to challenge any of your data as such. My thoughts are more philosophical than scientific, but philosophy of science is important, no?
It’s actually rather timely that you should send me such an invitation. In recent weeks I’ve had a lingering concern over what I see as scientific overconfidence. It’s everywhere, and it’s in your article, too. This is a multifaceted problem, and I’m still not sure where to start in discussing or analysing it. Maybe this little chance to ramble will help me get my thoughts in order. I didn’t even have a label for it up until now: “scientific overconfidence” is a term I just coined because I had to give the problem a name. In extreme cases it becomes scientific arrogance, but I’ll get to that if and when it’s appropriate.
Please indulge me while I ramble a bit, and please don’t take any of this as a personal attack. I fear that it may come across as highly offensive in parts.
One aspect of scientific overconfidence is overconfidence in the ability or prowess of science as a whole. Science is practically venerated as the pinnacle of all human knowledge. When scientists are challenged on this point, they usually defend the position by attacking the alternatives: asking whether you’d like rockets built by priests, or medical treatment from a witchdoctor, or something like that. I’m not sure what this demonstrates, other than the fact that some people have a really high opinion of science, but fail to see the value in anything else.
For me, the more I examine science, the less confidence I have in it. We’ve achieved some clever things, no doubt, and scientists are always willing to point out the computers, the rockets, and the other marvels of modern technology that science has given us. I don’t dispute that! Not for a second! It does seem, however, that the success of science as a basis for technology is then used to assert scientific supremacy over other things, like history, or the future, or the supernatural even! Somehow the demonstrable *usefulness* of science has been enlarged to make it the most authoritative source of guidance for every possible question.
Also, isn’t the focus on technological successes extremely one-eyed? Science is best loved for its successes, but success is the exception. How many sweeteners and preservatives have been invented, only to be found harmful later? Hydrogenated vegetable oil — how clever! Then we discover what a “trans fat” is, and what it does to your internal workings. Today’s technological marvel is tomorrow’s carcinogen, toxic waste problem, or ecological disaster — possibly all three.
The history of scientific theories fares no better: it is a litany of outmoded ideas, each of which were held in the utmost respect in their day, and some of which resulted in really awful practices. Vestigial organs, anyone? It’s ironic that Galileo is now hailed as a hero and the church vilified, but his Copernicanism was considered *unscientific* by the mainstream of the day. Spontaneous generation was a Fact of Science until quite recently. How many of today’s theories will be next year’s outmoded ideas? But this doesn’t seem to be a source of embarrassment for scientists, or even a cautionary tale. Instead, they crow about how superior their way of thinking is to that of religions, presenting the straw man that religions are fixed and immutable, whereas science is open to new evidence. Open to new evidence it may be, but that’s no reason to have extra confidence in the theories of here and now: quite the opposite, in fact.
Then there’s the difference between science as it is portrayed and science as I have experienced it, by participation. The vast majority of academic papers I’ve read in my field are dreary, unimaginative, and of questionable value to anyone. Peer review is often just a respectable way of saying “group-think”. Publication is an intensely political thing — why is the myth of the “objective” scientist still so strong, even amongst those in the thick of it? Scientists have pet theories. Scientists are not, in my experience, more open minded or “rational” than anyone else: I’ve had more luck with philosophers than scientists in that regard, although the title “philosopher” doesn’t guarantee much either. None of this would bother me so much, except that science has such a misleadingly superior public image.
One last thing before I finish ranting about scientific overconfidence — and this is more to do with the process of science, and therefore more relevant to you. I think the generally high opinion that scientists hold of their endeavour is causing them to be sloppy. After all, if you’re pretty sure that your methods are leading you to correct conclusions, you’re likely to see other evidence which confirms those conclusions. You’re not so likely to attempt active falsification of your conclusions, or to try to find other explanations which also fit the evidence. You are likely to overlook the conflicting data as “anomalous”. Can you see how this might be a problem?
I can relate this back to climate change, or I can relate it back to creation and evolution. There’s a prevalent attitude in science that theories compete in a sort of “elimination match” with each other. Evolution has eliminated creation: it’s no longer even considered proper science to entertain the idea of creation. It looks like the anthropogenic theory is prevailing in the abrupt climate change debate, and if that’s so, the group-think of peer review will eventually lock out the dissenters as promoting a debunked theory. I think this is bad science. Very bad. There shouldn’t even be such a thing as a “scientific consensus” about anything, because no fact of nature was ever altered by a group consenting to its truth. Consensus is for policy-makers and standards committees, not scientists. Scientific consensus is merely a bullying process whereby the scientific school of thought with the most influence drives competing ideas out of the arena. This is why science progresses in “scientific revolutions” — and it’s not necessarily a good thing.
The major implication of “scientific overconfidence” for your article is the ease with which you translate scientific data into policy prescriptions. You are confident that the data implies a certain fact: that anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is precipitating abrupt climate change, roughly speaking. You then expect policy to move forward on this basis. Those who continue to question whether the alleged fact is a fact are, in your view, simply not approaching the question as a scientific one, because science has spoken, the results are in, and no correspondence will be entered into. I baulk at this attitude because I disbelieve in the whole idea of scientific consensus. The view that the consensus can not be questioned is particularly harsh in that it brands all dissenters as irrational, or politically motivated liars. Believe it or not, some people have genuine evidence-based grounds for questioning the “consensus” position — not just in the climate change issue, but in science generally.
I know what you’re going to say! People can dissent on the basis of evidence — that’s perfectly good science. But in actual practice what happens is this: the evidence is considered, a “consensus” is reached on the basis of that evidence, and then further objections on the basis of the evidence are not entertained because it’s already been taken into consideration. The evidence-based objection is no longer considered “valid” at this point. To cite a fairly extreme example of this, by way of illustration, consider the plight of someone who thinks that the fossil record provides strong evidence against gradualistic evolution. That person can cite supporting facts about the fossil record until he’s blue in the face, but the scientific mainstream will just shrug and say, “we know all that — but we still think that gradualism is the best explanation of the facts.” It would be professional suicide (without the protection of tenure) to make “evidence against gradualistic evolution in the fossil record” one’s research speciality — not because it’s unscientific in any way, but because its countercultural and will result in ostracism.
This confidence, that science has unequivocally reached a particular conclusion (which, while not actually guaranteed to be true, is allegedly the most reliable source of truth we have), begets scientific elitism, and I’m afraid to say that your comments exhibit the most profound and disturbing kind of scientific elitism. This is particularly so in your comments about population control. I’m frankly quite shocked to hear anyone speaking favourably of the idea that birth rates should be legislatively controlled. China does it, sure, but I don’t see them as being an example to follow. I realise that you’re motivated by the survival of the species as a whole, but I think you’re walking a road paved with good intentions that leads to an undesirable destination. Seriously — this is the kind of stuff which acts as a plot device in futuristic dystopian sci-fi stories.
The model of governance that you’re using, perhaps implicitly, seems to go something like this: the scientific elite determines the facts and declares the scope of “reasonable policy”; the proles and their elected representatives may decide policy within those reasonable bounds as they see fit. In this case, the scientific elite has made certain determinations in relation to the environment, and failure to act in accordance with those findings is just plain stupidity.
My ever-developing lack of confidence in science suggests a more restrained approach. For one thing, I think that disagreement among scientists should be recognised and given the utmost respect. Scientists are still entitled to consider theories other then their own to be bunk, but there should be no such thing as “consensus” except that it actually happens naturally. Competing schools of thought should be encouraged, not engage in a battle of elimination. Where elimination occurs, it should be for lack of willing supporters, not for fear of it being a career-limiting choice. As a consequence of this, there will rarely (if ever) be an actual “scientific consensus” on any matter, climate change included. This is not a problem: governments would still take advice from experts, and it is ultimately the job of government to formulate policy based on many considerations, the prevailing scientific theories (plural) being among them.
In short, the scientists should not be in control. They should not be supervising the species. They should be advising, yes — and offering conflicting advice in most cases — but they should not be so arrogant as to presume that they know what’s best for the species as a whole. Heck, it’s not even clear that they ought to be given control even if they were infallible, godlike predictors of long-term consequences — and they are a long, long way from being that.
(Ed. note: Originally posted at 2009-08-08 on 11:03, but the time was changed for clarity’s sake.)
I’m not really sure if you understand philosophy enough. Also, you generalise too much.
I’m going to rashly assume that your scientific field is computer science, so my parable will be aimed in that direction:
Bob: “Working on a new public key cryptography algorithm.”
Alan: “It’s much better to use letter substitutions: A -> C, B -> D, etc.
Bob: “But that’s vulnerable to attack by letter frequency analysis. For instance, the letter ‘E’ is very common and ‘Q’ is almost always followed by ‘U.'”
Alan: “You’re just trying to lock out the dissenters as promoting a debunked theory. I think this is bad science. Very bad. You scientists are so overconfident, but remember that you’re the ones who gave us hydrogenated vegetable oil!”
Bob: “Wow, you’re right. That’s a good point. Here, you teach my graduate class for the rest of the semester, and I’ll pay you to design a secure algorithm for our nation’s banking transactions.”
Bob’s just following your advice. He’d be wrong to exhibit scientific elitism by treating Alan as irrational, right?
If you don’t agree with Bob’s actions… why not? It seems like you can’t say that Alan’s statements are silly, otherwise you’d be exhibiting the same kind of scientific elitism that you see in my writing. If Bob should debate Alan, how long should he do so?
Not me. I just think it’s a sort of response to tone (DH2). As a result, I don’t know how to answer it constructively– or if that’s even possible at all.
Scientific theories compete in the sense that every new observation either supports or falsifies them. For example, the Ptolemaic system that preceded Copernicanism was a genuine (albeit crude) scientific model because it made specific predictions about the movements of the planets. Careful observations were thus able to prove it wrong.
But, as I’ve stressed, creationism can’t ever be refuted, because its inherently supernatural properties make it compatible with any potential discovery. On the other hand, I’ve listed two simple falsifications of evolution: chimpanzees in the Precambrian and many species with totally different DNA bases.
Prior to the discovery of evolution, there simply wasn’t a decent scientific explanation for the origin of species. It’s not that creationism used to be scientific before Darwin; it’s that creationism wasn’t– and couldn’t– ever be scientific. Note that I’m not saying creationism is wrong! Quite the opposite! It’s just not a scientific theory because it isn’t falsifiable.
Sure, if 1859 fits your definition of “quite recently.”
I’ve discussed a similar issue before, and said “… even religions that explicitly disavow fideism tend to engender a culture of faith, which is anathema to science’s culture of doubt.”
It’s not that religions are “fixed and immutable,” but rather that they’re based on faith moreso than doubt which means they’re slower to change than science.
Because I’ve met so many inspiring scientists who work very hard to live up to that ideal. Not all of them, of course. But enough.
Actually, yes, I have: “The problem here is that I’ve come to believe that the easiest person for me to fool is myself. That’s because I want to believe the fibs that I tell myself. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to correct my reasoning because I’d ignored a piece of evidence that I simply didn’t want to see. So I’m much more cautious than usual when I’m evaluating a situation in which I know that I have an intrinsic bias.”
I said “On a completely different note, as an ordinary American” right before switching to discussing our response to abrupt climate change. What I meant to stress is that I didn’t give up my voice as an ordinary American citizen when I went to college. I’ve got the same right to voice my opinion about my country’s future as any other citizen.
I spent less than 3 pages at the top of the article reviewing the science, followed by more than 30 pages corresponding about it, and you think I won’t enter into correspondence? I’m perfectly willing to listen to anyone who asks even a single, solitary question about the science. Heck, sometimes I don’t even enforce that rule too strictly.
First of all, I’ve repeatedly stressed that science isn’t democratic, so I don’t give “consensus” any weight. For example, I once said “… I don’t see how the popularity of an idea has anything to do with its veracity.” I really don’t see why you think I’m saying the consensus can not be questioned.
Secondly, your argument could be used equally well to defend astrologers and homeopathic healers.
Yes, some objections that were once consistent with the evidence at hand later conflicted with other observations.
I can only speak for myself, and I’ve already endorsed Dawkins’ continuously variable speedism, so I completely agree that the fossil record doesn’t support a strictly gradualistic position. But I wonder how many professional biologists still support strict gradualism?
We have:
If we were any other species, our population would just overshoot the carrying capacity and then perform damped oscillations around it. But our technology has artificially increased the carrying capacity of the planet, and as a result our crash is likely to be much worse. Also, our fearsomely powerful weapons will only work against us in that kind of nightmarish scenario. If humans are willing to commit genocide for territorial and ideological reasons already, imagine what they’d do if “starvation” were added to that list of motivations…
I know what I’m saying is unpopular, and I definitely recognize the potential for abuse. Also, if the trend in developed nations spreads to the developing world, the problem will go away without the need for such drastic and unpleasant measures.
But what really terrifies me is that anyone who even mentions this issue is treated as a wanna-be Dr. Evil. All I’m saying is that we should carefully examine our growth rate, compare it to future projections of the carrying capacities of our planet(s) and make an informed democratic decision.
I certainly don’t want to create some kind of technocracy. That would be unstable in the long run because most of the stability of democracies comes from empowering citizens. If peoples’ voices count, they’re less likely to violently revolt. A technocracy would convince many people that their voices no longer matter, so I’m firmly opposed to it.
What gave you the impression I think scientists should be supervising the species? I believe in democracy– it’s the least bad system I’ve seen. How is my position on abrupt climate change any different from those of scientists who said:
I’d rather say that scientists are like “lookouts” for the human race. They poke around the world, looking for interesting phenomena. Sometimes they run across something that could be dangerous, and rush back to tell other people what they’ve seen. If they didn’t do that, what use would they be to anyone?
Here’s how that conversation should go, minus the intro.
Bob: “I know how to break that kind of code. I’m trying to design a code that I believe nobody can break.”
Alan: “You’re just trying to lock out the dissenters as promoting a debunked theory. I think this is bad science. Very bad. You scientists are so overconfident…”
Bob: “Look, if you think you can do better, go for it. I’m not going to stop you. Just quit telling me how to do my job, okay? I didn’t ask for your advice, and I don’t want it.”
I’m not sure that this altered version of the conversation proves anything — but then I’m not entirely sure what the original was supposed to prove. Did you seriously think that it was a representative consequence of my position? If so, then my lengthy ramble has failed to convey its intended message quite spectacularly: an Epic Fail, in fact. I think I should quit while I’m behind rather than prolong the agony.
Representative? Perhaps not. I do think it’s a consequence of your position that you didn’t explicitly recognize. Your argument is just so sweeping that it applies to practically anyone who claims to know anything. You’re aiming it at scientists who accept evolution and abrupt climate change, but my point is that it also applies to people like yourself who– I’m assuming– occasionally claim knowledge in your own field too.
Actually, I mostly agree with your version of the conversation. Except I try not to tell anyone to “quit telling me how to do my job” because in that case I get accused of scientific tyranny. So I try very hard to answer every comment– even comments like Alan’s– in the most calm manner I can possibly muster. But either way, I’m apparently perceived as an Evil Scientist Overlord… so maybe I should just do away with patient civility if that’s my inevitable fate.
Incidentally, I also had exactly the same feeling of Epic Fail regarding my article when reading your comment. I kept trying to figure out why a patient, 30 page long correspondence with skeptics got labeled as “scientific elitism,” “shutting out dissenters” and interpreted as though I’d said something like “the consensus can not be questioned.”
Wow. This must be how cynics are made. I can feel my optimism slipping away by the moment…
Having dabbled in Epistemology, both as a personal interest and at the undergraduate level, I’ve come to the conclusion that “knowledge” is overrated. In those instances where I consider myself relatively expert compared to someone else, I usually express that by willingness to place a bet — my prediction versus theirs. Not everything can be reduced to a testable wager, however. How do you wager on whether climate change is anthropogenic or not? You just wind up disputing the same evidence you started with — it gets you nowhere. The crypto example you gave is the opposite case: lots of crypto reduces to “I bet nobody can crack this cipher” (given time-frame X and unfettered access to the mechanism, but not the key).
It’s only scientific tyranny if you claim that your way of doing the job is the only one that produces knowledge. If you believe in The Scientific Method (singular), and think that you are following it, and that someone else is not, then there may be some confusion between “stop telling me how to do my job” and “stop telling me how science which produces knowledge is performed”. If you believe the process of science is not negotiable — that The Scientific Method is narrowly defined — then there’s no difference between these two statements. If you think that scientific problems are amenable to fairly diverse methods of investigation, then the former statement is just another way of saying “stop telling me which scientific approach I should be taking”. If there’s only one method, it’s a question of “science or not”; if there are many, then it’s a matter of preference, like which programming language one uses to write a computer program.
Our problem at this stage is that we haven’t figured out what our disagreement is. Despite your protestations to the contrary, you do come across as elitist, but I haven’t put my finger on the problem sufficiently. I’m hoping that I’ve come a little closer with this idea of The Scientific Method. In the hope that we might further identify the exact nature of this difference, here are some other differences which strike me as important.
I consider this claim to be extremely problematic, or at least grossly oversimplified. I doubt it was meant to be taken completely literally, though. Still, I’m a very long way from this position. New observations can cohere well or badly with a model — or be quite irrelevant — but few theories are so brittle as to be “falsified” by any observation. Mathematical conjectures are brittle in this way: they are demolished by a single counter-example. Physical science, not so much — you can make excuses or tweak your theory. Observations are also interpreted in light of theory, so the meaning of the evidence is open to question even if the evidence itself is “fact”.
I’m not sure that it can — I haven’t figured out the exact chain of reasoning you used there — but the more interesting aspect of this is that you raise it as a problem at all. It so happens that I don’t care if my argument can defend those people. This is probably another key to our differences, so perhaps you could explain why you think your objection has the status of “problem”.
Something along the lines of (a) the species must behave a certain way in light of scientific facts, and (b) scientists determine that which is a scientific fact. Again, I think that the difference arises from your (apparent) view that real science is an objective kind of process that leads to a correct view of reality when properly applied. It’s a “neutral” sort of thing, so a world governed by “scientific facts” is not a world governed by scientists, but rather a world in which governance is simply in touch with reality — and why would anyone object to that? I take an opposing view: science is intrinsically political. The “scientific facts” depend on theory, and thus on the mindshare of the theory. A world governed by “scientific facts” is, in my view, equivalent to a scientific ruling class. Perhaps the closest “-ocracy” is “noocracy” rather than “technocracy”. Plato might approve, but I’m not enthused.
I don’t gamble, so I’d phrase the central issue in my article differently. Namely, “How do you determine if recent changes in the global climate are caused by natural variations or by human activities?” Update: If you really want to gamble, here’s a discussion you may find interesting.
Many of the preceding 30 pages are devoted to this topic, but here are the highlights:
I’d be happy to discuss any of these points if you think I’ve made any mistakes in my reasoning.
I honestly don’t know what would lead you to say that, especially when you haven’t even peripherally discussed any of the science that appears in the 30 pages above your comment. It’s also worth noting that our knowledge of abrupt climate change is based on many different types of evidence, so it’s possible to compare models generated using independent data.
I’m aware of the fact that data used to generate a model can’t be used to verify it, if that’s what you meant.
Maybe you’re referring to the fact that most (but not all) scientific journals charge for access, or that scientists tend not to release their source code or data by default. In that case, I completely agree.
Or perhaps you’re questioning the importance of peer review. I do have problems with modern peer review; it’s usually single-blind when it should be double-blind, and less than a dozen people usually review each paper. Here’s an excellent site with more criticisms of peer review. Personally, I’d like to see peer review completely automated by a system similar to “recommender systems” currently being implemented on P2P networks. This way, all scientists could rate each paper they read. That would allow more alternative views into the community, and prevent a few people with chips on their shoulders from dominating any debate. But right now the alternative to peer review is “no peer review” which is much worse.
Based on your references to creationism, it’s also possible that you’re disputing methodological naturalism as the basis of modern science. I’ve previously explained why science needs to be defined the way it is, and listed mistakes that creationist “science” would make. If an alternative scientific method exists which wouldn’t result in the kinds of mistakes I’ve listed, please describe it– along with specific reasons why those mistakes wouldn’t be made– and I’ll consider it.
I’ve previously said: “Science only provides an asymptotic approach to the truth if the universe can be described by natural laws. As a result, I think Brett was right to say that science is effectively searching for “credible falsehoods.” That is, the answers obtained by restricting one’s attention to falsifiable, naturalistic explanations are only accurate if a completely objective reality exists.”
So my position is a little more nuanced than you’re implying.
You seem to think that your argument can be aimed– like a rifle– at scientists who study abrupt climate change or evolution. However, I think that it applies to nearly all claims. What I’m trying to say is that your argument isn’t a rifle that can be aimed. Instead, it’s a nuclear bomb of solipsism. You’ve tried to explain that computer science is exempt while physics isn’t, but I don’t have the foggiest idea what you meant. It’s frustrating– and probably futile– to discuss science with someone who answers every scientific claim with variants of:
I’m now convinced that we’re speaking two completely different languages, both of which happen to contain English words. So there’s probably no point to this conversation, unless you want to discuss the science itself.
I haven’t checked your reasoning. It’s not your reasoning from the evidence you’ve provided that I doubt. What I want to see next is the contrary case from a well-versed expert who has reached conclusions that conflict with yours. You could then rebut each other somewhat, as you feel the need. In the end, however, I doubt that I’ll be able to judge between your case and his, because the whole thing is too esoteric for me. Frankly, if two specialists in a field can’t agree on something, what hope do the outsiders have? This is part of the problem.
In your opening statements (to this blog entry), you said the following.
The average member of the public doesn’t see it as a political issue: they just expect their elected representatives to be on top of this kind of issue and so look to them for guidance. The average member of the public will gain absolutely nothing by reading a peer-reviewed science journal, since it may as well be written in hieroglyphics. The average scientist would be out of his depth reading a journal in a discipline other than his own.
Let’s keep the issues simple for a moment, since my whole “philosophy of science” angle is just causing you frustration. What, exactly, would you like to see from the general public in terms of reasoning about this subject? Clearly you want them to think scientifically, or treat the problem as a scientific problem, not a political problem, but this request isn’t specific enough. You’ve bemoaned the fact that they don’t read the journals, but I hope you’ll agree, on reflection, that such a requirement is unreasonable. You’ve addressed the problem here by presenting a scientific argument, and it looks like quite a compelling one, but the average person is in no position to analyse it. Furthermore, they’ve heard that some other scientist or other has reached a different conclusion — and he had the right political leanings, so they’ll go with his story, thanks. That’s not a particularly good reason for thinking he’s a better scientist than you, of course, but what’s a poor layman to do?
Please advise.
That’s the point of this web page. I’ve been searching for years– and more than 30 pages– hoping to find a well-versed expert whose conclusions differ substantially from mine. The conversations in this article– and the documents I’ve referenced in it— are all I’ve managed to find so far, but here are some more.
Pick any random topic, and you’ll probably be able to find at least one specialist who disagrees with his peers to some degree. Uniformity of opinion is neither expected nor desired. Consensus is irrelevant; evidence is all that matters.
That’s a serious mistake. Politicians are rewarded for saying what voters like to hear, and for having the appearance of knowledge. Clearly you believe that physicists are highly political too, and only reach “group-think” conclusions that further their careers. With all due respect, I’ve been in physics all my adult life along with many of my friends, and I strenuously disagree. Physicists argue fiercely among themselves. The bad ones do care about appearing smart, but they’re outnumbered by the physicists who care deeply about knowledge and are genuinely grateful to people who point out mistakes in their reasoning.
For example, my first research advisor once scared me by thinking for a full minute before answering one of my questions. He paused… stared at the ceiling… and sat still for so long that I almost thought he’d gone into a coma. I slowly realized that he just wanted to make sure his answer was thoughtful and accurate rather than snappy but possibly wrong. My current advisor is the same way.
I don’t know how many professional physicists you hang out with, but given your dismal opinion of my field, they’re obviously horrible at their jobs; it’s a good idea to avoid the universities where they teach or do research.
On the other hand, politicians only need to appear smart and have snappy but superficial “sound bite” answers in order to get (re-)elected. Looking to them for scientific answers is a serious category error, similar to assuming that comedians are qualified to design computer languages.
They do need to understand that peer-reviewed journal articles are where science actually happens. Take away peer review, and you’re left with this.
The average scientist does find papers in a different field hard to grasp… at first. When I don’t understand a topic in a different field, I remain agnostic about that topic unless I think it’s important enough to spend the time and energy trying to understand it. For example, I have no opinion about the validity of superstring theory. The general public doesn’t seem to hold themselves to that same standard of intellectual rigor. And I mean that about both sides.
I still think you’re underestimating how esoteric all this stuff is. Joe Sixpack is not going to read scientific journals, or even summaries of scientific journals. Joe Sixpack’s exposure to science is going to occur through the popular media: preferably TV or a movie, but he might actually read a book on the subject if you’re lucky. If you require more than that, prepare to be frustrated, because your expectations are unreasonably high.
I’m not Joe Sixpack — I have been known to sit down and read published scientific papers from top to tail, and I’ve got a trifling number of published papers myself — but even I am not going to invest the time necessary into examining climate-related papers in order to reach an “informed decision” (by the standards you have presented). I’m not going to do that because I know what I’m in for! Hours and hours of dreary writing accompanied by dry facts and figures, and very little way to determine how seriously I should take the results. Peer review only tells me so much in that regard, because specialists always have an inflated view of the importance of their own subject. I’ll get a good feel for where research is happening in the field — which research angles are popular — but I doubt that I’d come out the other side with your convictions on the subject because of my doubts in the impartiality and reliability of science as a whole (although we’ll steer clear of that discussion).
So I think that you have unreasonable expectations of people. You also have a rosy view of (peer reviewed) science and a jaundiced view of politics, and not everyone shares that balance of opinions. They tend to have some respect for a certain subset of politicians — the ones they vote for. Looking to politicians for scientific answers is not a category error, believe it or not: it’s just practical. It’s not a category error because we don’t expect the politicians to actually perform the science. We just expect (some) politicians to have invested the necessary effort in understanding the issues, or at least to have been briefed by someone paid to do all that laborious research.
Another way of describing the problems I’ve mentioned above is that (specialised, esoteric) science is out of reach to all bar the specialists. The average man needs someone to digest it all for them and translate it into comprehensible terms. That’s what Al Gore did. People go to the sources that they trust and understand the most. I don’t see how it could be otherwise. You want there to be fewer middle-men, but I think the only way you’re going to get that is with a fundamental change in human nature. Good luck with that.
All of the above falls into the category of “unreasonable expectations” — a matter of opinion on my part. I have one more wrinkle for you which is more philosophical, and it relates to peer review again. The problem is that anyone can have peers and ask those peers for approval of their work. Creationists have peers and peer reviewed journals. Clearly you don’t want people giving this pseudoscience any weight, so you may want to tweak your criteria about peer review a little further. (This won’t address the “out of reach” issue, but it is a separate problem that you would have to address if the “out of reach” issue were solved.)
Thanks for the link to the “tides” thing, by the way. I didn’t read it in detail, but it made me realise that I don’t understand how tides work. I thought I did! So much for knowledge! Maybe I’ll figure it out one day, but probably not. The tides will do as they do regardless of my understanding.
I think that people tend to live up to– or down to– expectations placed on them.
Scientists publish science in peer-reviewed science journals. That results in better science. Lawyers publish law in peer-reviewed law journals. That results in better law. The mere act of peer review doesn’t turn lawyers into scientists, though.
Similarly, creationists don’t become scientists just by publishing creationism in peer-reviewed creationist journals. As I’ve repeatedly explained, science needs to be defined the way it is because creationist “science” would make mistakes like these. If an alternative scientific method exists which wouldn’t result in the kinds of mistakes I’ve listed, please describe it– along with specific reasons why those mistakes wouldn’t be made– and I’ll consider it. But we should discuss that in the intelligent design article, because it’s off-topic here.
That’s one of the most depressing and horrifying paragraphs I’ve ever read. I’ll shut up now, because I’m clearly doing more harm than good.
Scientists publish science in peer-reviewed science journals. That results in better science.
…well it appears the International Symposium on Peer Reviewing says ‘kind of’…
Empirical studies have shown that assessments made by independent reviewers of papers submitted to journals and abstracts submitted to conferences are no [sic] reproducible, i.e. agreement between reviewers is about what is expected by chance alone. Rothwell and Martyn (2000)…
Wikipedia has a decent little summary about the criticisms of the peer review process.
And if you open reference #12 and skip (past all the scary fringe pseudo science) to the end – you’ll get to what looks to me to be a long tasty list of literature talking about suppression and the issues concerning challenging the mainstream.
Of course I actually don’t think peer review is at all worthless. Double checking peoples’ work is a very useful tool and used across multiple fields under different names like auditing and design reviews etc, for very good reasons.
But I think it can and does play a part in the suppression of new ideas / new science more than you clearly expect.
In pondering this discussion (Many thanks to Mr Anon for his sterling contribution – he’s said many things that I had been thinking – but worded with greater depth than I could have) I’ll brainstorm a couple of things here that may unwittingly be contributing to your perspective (BTW – I’m not attached to any of these – just submitting them for consideration)
a) Your sample size of physicists you know well is small.
b) If you get on well with / respect them you probably share similar ideals, including honesty in science etc. – so your sample also suffers from a selection bias.
c) Even limiting your selection to within an organisation means your sample suffers from a organisational cultural bias.
It’s also occurred to me that you probably haven’t had the need to challenge the consensus on something they’re already biased against. Some of the articles above are about / written by people who have had challenged the consensus and eventually won. But not without a huge battle and emotional cost along the way.
It’s all very well to say that consensus opinion is worthless, but in actual fact it is very comforting to know that it is on your side. That’s just human nature… a form of ‘herd psychology’ perhaps… its like all those people have ‘double checked’ your thinking and have come to the same conclusion – who wouldn’t be comforted by that? Why bother investigating just a little further when everyone else knows it’s wrong?
What’s more a consensus opinion in science can be self perpetuating, especially if the following example is true from MetaResearch
When budgets became tight, NASA “adopted” certain theories as essentially established, and stopped funding research into alternatives. These financially favored theories include the Big Bang, “black holes”, “dark matter”, and “dark energy”.
And I would expect that this particular set up of circumstances is why revolutions necessarily occur in science.
I’m baffled to see comments like this, and Anonymous’s claim that I “have a rosy view of (peer reviewed) science” when less than 48 hours ago I said pretty much the same thing:
Or perhaps you’re questioning the importance of peer review. I do have problems with modern peer review; it’s usually single-blind when it should be double-blind, and less than a dozen people usually review each paper. Here’s an excellent site with more criticisms of peer review. Personally, I’d like to see peer review completely automated by a system similar to “recommender systems” currently being implemented on P2P networks. This way, all scientists could rate each paper they read. That would allow more alternative views into the community, and prevent a few people with chips on their shoulders from dominating any debate. But right now the alternative to peer review is “no peer review” which is much worse.
I’ve been saying for years that peer review has these problems. It’s just the least bad alternative we have at the moment. Otherwise people write rambling pages like this one, without seeming to understand that they’re fundamentally confused about vector addition which is usually taught in high school physics.
“Small” is relative. That’s why I wondered out loud regarding how many professional physicists Anonymous knows. Again, I’ll say that whoever gave the both of you these horrible impressions of physicists needs to have their PhDs revoked. And again, try not to take any classes from the universities where they teach or do research.
Here’s just one example: “It took me a long time to believe in black holes (even after most physicists thought they were conclusively proven to exist) so we agree on this principle.”
It’s common to look back on the history of science and notice that most new science started as an anomaly that was regarded as nonsense by contemporary science. But this statement isn’t true in reverse. Most anomalies regarded as nonsense by scientists never amounted to anything. Modern examples of these anomalies are Moon landing hoax conspiracy theories and the 9/11 Truth movement.
When reviewing scientific claims that bypass peer review, the signal-to-noise ratio is simply too low to be useful. I honestly see no way to distinguish many of the claims made here (or in this article) from the conspiracy theories I just listed. I don’t say that to insult you, but in the hope that you can understand why I don’t want to spend the rest of my mortal life combing through those kinds of claims.
I’m sorry – but you caved in in the black hole example ;) What opinion do you currently hold that contradicts the mainstream scientific community?
I puzzle on this disconnect that both Mr Anon & myself are experiencing with you. And this is a classic example. I’m not saying that the implication does run backwards at all. No one has. You’ve rebutted nothing by this paragraph.
Wow. Just Wow. Do you realise what you’ve just said? Perhaps this is the reason for our disconnect.
Clearly scientific revolutions will be all black swan events for you.
Personally, I’m interested in the truth – now. Not just the ‘scientific theory of the day’ which – as Anon pointed out – has a history of / is guaranteed of getting outmoded as more knowledge becomes available. If you feel you need to limit yourself to the scientific method & peer-reviewed journals to ultimately discover truth, then you’re really going to miss some biggies.
The scientific method may be one measure of confidence – but it is demonstrably not infallible, and is limited in it’s application. Others in other articles and above do a far superior exposition of this.
Well – speaking broadly – I guess you’d better start looking for more ‘unexplained things’ and trying to fit them within your world view. That’s the only way I can see of having the best chance of building the most accurate and internally consistent world view.
Perhaps start by reading some NDE’s (the actual NDE’s), and then compare them to the (occasionally self confessed) inadequate scientific explanations. Bear in mind which way the scientific consensus is on life after death though.
As you mentioned your mortal life – I promise one day it’ll be directly relevant to you… just like tax legislation is ;)
Well gosh, thanks. I didn’t really intend to get into a public discussion. My first comment was emailed to DS — he asked permission to post it, and here we are.
Fine. So you want peer review and methodological naturalism. I think the anti-anthropogenic climate change crowd can accommodate that. There’s almost certainly more than one of them, so they can review each other, and there’s nothing remotely supernatural about their claims. On the contrary: they’re super natural (two words). I believe if they can just get a “journal of anthropogenic climate change scepticism” going between them, they’ll meet your gold standard and the problem will go away.
(I have to stop mentioning Creationism. Every time I do, you assume I’m trying to defend it. I’m not. I’m using it as an example — as a way of pointing out, “your prescription must be missing something, because it allows creationism to be classified as science.”)
You find it depressing and horrifying because you take things too seriously. Well, it’s certainly the case that you take science too seriously. You’re thinking, “here’s an obvious example of religious nutter pseudoscience, AND HE’S TAKING IT SERIOUSLY!” The truth is nothing like that. I find that nearly any piece of reasoning, no matter how horrible, is likely to have at least one point that will challenge you if you don’t miss it because you’ve pre-judged the whole lot.
In the case of the “tides” nonsense, the point that caught my attention was the mention of how high tides happen on opposite sides of the Earth at the same time. The explanation (which was allegedly quoted from a children’s science book) seemed like rubbish, sure enough, but on reflection the fact that high tides do happen on opposite sides of the Earth is counter-intuitive. I mean to say, if some kid said to me, “you know how the pull of the moon causes the high tide? Then why is it high tide when the moon is pulling the other way?” — I’d be stuck for an answer.
No doubt you understand the physics of this well enough that you’d be able to answer the question. Whether the kid would understand your answer is a different matter, of course.
Why be baffled? You go on to say,
In any case, I was saying that your view of peer-reviewed science is rosy and your view of politics is jaundiced, so you should understand the comparison to be a relative one. I’m not suggesting that you think peer-reviewed science is perfect — merely that it’s the best thing we have at present, or similar.I don’t think that anyone has claimed the reverse is true, or based an argument on it. The point is not, “anthropogenic sceptics might be right because their idea is regarded as nonsense”, but rather, “the anthropogenic theory could well be wrong because it’s regarded as a scientific fact.” Scientific “facts” aren’t all that reliable in the long run — that’s the point. Scientific revolutions are often quite unforgiving to their predecessors.
Sorry, but I’m at work and can’t continue these examples. I hope I’ve made my point that I’m not simply a brainwashed sheep incapable of independent thought.
Updated ~12 hours later after going home:
I wonder if “dark matter” is the result of gravitational interactions with galaxies in parallel universes. Suppose parallel universes exist in the same physical “space” we inhabit, and only interact with each other (and us) via gravity. The galaxies in different universes would then clump together, but their disks wouldn’t necessarily be aligned. So the total gravity would appear similar to a spherical halo of dark matter. This would explain the too-high velocities of stars at the edges of galaxies and the too-high velocities of galaxies in superclusters.
2009-07-25 Update: I don’t think my hypothesis is consistent with the Bullet cluster data.
2009-07-27 Update: Also, I wonder if galaxies in my imaginary parallel universes really would clump together. They’d certainly be gravitationally attracted to each other, but if each universe has roughly the same density of galaxies, they’d typically have a long way to fall towards each other. As a result, they’d be moving so fast that I doubt any damping mechanisms could have brought them to rest in ~13.7 billion years. But… what if they formed in the same place initially? That would make sense because supermassive black holes likely play a large role in proto-galaxy formation. Gravitational collapse in one universe would trigger collapses in other universes leading to galaxies with small relative velocities. But in that case, it seems like the disks would be aligned because disk formation probably doesn’t involve a large percentage of actual physical collisions (any actual astronomers want to help me here?). I think this would result in the wrong velocity profile for stars versus distance from the center of the galaxy? Oh, and all these stars in different universes would cause gravitational lensing events to occur with a much greater frequency than has been observed by the OGLE. Galaxies with non-aligned disks would look even weirder- that implies lensing with bizarre relative velocities.
Sorry about that. My list is now one item shorter, and I see no alternative to dark matter. I caved in just like when I investigated the evidence behind black holes as a senior undergrad physics major in 2003.
The direction of “imprinted” magnetic fields in ancient glacier dropstones are supposed to be proof that glaciers covered the equators during Snowball Earth. I don’t see how they’re able to determine this, because by definition glacier dropstones have been picked up and moved, so we have no idea what their original orientation was.
2009-08-27 Update: I met a grad student studying glacier erosion and asked him this question. He said that the direction of the imprinted magnetic field is obtained from the sedimentary rock that forms around the dropstone after it’s deposited. If those sediments have magnetic fields that are horizontal, they were formed near the equator. This makes sense, so I’m afraid I have to cave in once more.
I don’t understand how the UV catastrophe and the photoelectric effect are proof of the existence of photons– as I’ve often been told. I think these effects are only proof that light interacts with matter in a quantized fashion, which is a much weaker claim.
2009-07-29 Update: One of my colleagues who works in experimental quantum optics said:
I’ve never looked at squeezed states of light closely, but I really should’ve noticed this fact while studying quantum teleportation. Looks like I should take my own advice about drawing premature conclusions from simplified explanations. Thanks!
… I guess I’ll take your word for it.
You do realize that’s my job, right? I look for ‘unexplained things’ and try to fit them into my world view professionally. All I’m saying is that the examples you’re presenting are nothing of the sort.
Okay, that’s considerably less horrifying. I originally thought you were drawing a much broader conclusion based on your statement “So much for knowledge!”. But obviously I read far too much into that. Sorry.
The reason the tides are high on the side of the Earth opposite the Moon is ultimately because the Moon doesn’t actually orbit the Earth. Both bodies orbit their common center of mass. This means the gravitational force on the Earth due to the Moon has to exactly balance the Earth’s centripetal acceleration at the center of the Earth due to Newton’s second law. However, the surface of the Earth closest to the Moon experiences a larger gravitational force due to the Moon because of the inverse square nature of gravity. So those tides are due to the fact that the Moon’s gravitational force on that surface of the Earth points “up,” and that it’s larger than the Moon’s gravitational force on the center of the Earth.
The tides on the other side of the Earth are caused by the fact that the Moon’s gravitational force is weaker there than at the center of the Earth (because that side is farther away from the Moon.) That means the Moon’s gravity doesn’t pull objects “down” quite as hard as it does at the center of the Earth. The result is a tide that’s exactly as high as on the near side of the Earth.
In other words, tides happen on the far side of the Earth for essentially the same reason that water will stay in a bucket even if you hold it in your outstretched hand and spin in a circle. It’s all about centripetal acceleration. I don’t want to give the impression that I think this is easy to understand; it’s really necessary to draw the free body diagrams and compare those vector sums to the centripetal acceleration via Newton’s second law.
My problem with the link– and the reason I keep mentioning it– is that he got lost in introductory physics, and ended up writing an entire book accusing scientists of faking their results when he could have saved himself the trouble by staying in school. The only reason he made it past the first paragraph is that he didn’t have peer review to help him.
Frankly, this was a mistake. I should leave some room for people who want to discuss the evidence. I think only about 1% of this conversation has.
It looks more to me like he’s a conspiracy theorist. Once you’re convinced that there’s wilful deception involved, you don’t bother with peer review, do you? They’ll just tell you you’re wrong because that’s part of their plan. I used to be partial to conspiracy theories, but I’ve since come to embrace Hanlon’s Razor as a much better general explanation for human behaviour: “do not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” That’s not to say that there are no conspiracies, of course.
I think you mean “sceptical nuclear bombs” rather than “solipsist”, and I disagree anyhow. It’s a question of degrees of scepticism, based on faith/doubt in the reliability of various kinds of evidence, the relatedness of evidence to theory, the possibility of alternate explanation, the theory-ladenness of evidence and relative trust in those theories, and so on. Surely some of this stuff rings a bell? I can’t treat all theories with equal trust or equal scepticism because the claims of the theories are different, the quality of supporting evidence is different, and the quantity of supporting evidence is different.
When you speak of scientific theories, it seems that you consider them to be alike and uniform, and that picking and choosing between them would be simple inconsistency. I disagree completely. Each theory must be considered on its own merits, not on a simple classification as “scientific or not”. Heliocentricity is a model that I only accept as a useful but informal approximation, because I subscribe to a relativist physics in which there is no such thing as an absolute central position. Germ theory was a bold and radical proposition in the days before germs could be observed with microscopes, but the nature of the game has changed with advancing instruments. Climate change is an area in which we don’t have sufficient experience to know which facts are most relevant, we can’t do “parallel earth” experiments to test various parameters, and nobody has a track record of “getting it right” long term because there hasn’t been a long term yet. If you want to place your bets on anthropogenic climate change, then you go for it; I’m not ready to do that yet, even given the evidence.
Scientific theories can be useful or factual.
If a theory is useful, I don’t care whether it’s factual. For example, I don’t care whether electrons actually exist or not — they’re key to electronics, and that makes them useful. Electrons are the basis for a lot of technology. Who knows — maybe another fifty years down the track we’ll have a revolution in subatomic physics again and electrons will go the way of caloric fluid. That would surprise me, frankly, but it won’t make electronics any less useful if it happens (although I hope it will produce something even more useful — like antigravity or something).
Anthropogenic climate change is not a “useful” theory in the sense of bearing any technology. It’s an attempt to explain cause/effect relationships — a factual theory — and we want it to be true if we are to base important decisions on it. The evidence is the means whereby we attempt to discern the truth, but the evidence is ultimately not the important thing: all that matters is the truth itself. Unfortunately, evidence is all we have, and just having evidence isn’t enough, because sometimes we misinterpret it. Evidence is necessary, but getting from “evidence” to “truth” is a path fraught with peril.
Please read the last sentence of my previous comment again: Frankly, this was a mistake. I should leave some room for people who want to discuss the evidence. I think only about 1% of this conversation has.
Here are the only parts of your comment dealing with the scientific evidence:
Exactly! That’s why it’s a good idea to examine the evidence, right? I recommend starting with the IPCC summary and asking a scientist about anything regarding the evidence that you don’t understand. I’ve even included every skeptic resource I’ve been able to find at the top of this post so you can see the opposing case.
I think you misspelled the word “I” as “we.” Common mistake.
650,000 years isn’t enough? Remember that our knowledge of the climate doesn’t only come from physical measuring devices. And these ice core data agree with other proxies: we’re changing the climate.
Or perhaps you meant the track record of the actual predictions? I imagine that your timescale is different than mine, because you consider Pasteur’s experiment 150 years ago to be “quite recent.” But, personally, I think a track record that goes back 78 years is pretty good for modern science. As early as 1931, Hulburt used the brand-new theory of quantum mechanics to study CO2 absorption. He concluded that doubling the CO2 concentration would warm the Earth by 4°C. This is still the conventional method of expressing “climate sensitivity” with respect to CO2. (Although it’s important to note that this convention ignores slow feedback effects which may sum to produce a temporary(?) net positive feedback effect, given the unnaturally abrupt nature of the forcing.) His prediction is still within the error bars of modern estimates which assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9°C, with a 95% confidence that it’s less than 4.9°C but greater than 1.7°C. Sadly, his breakthrough wasn’t recognized at the time.
When I suggested the need for parallel Earths, I was hoping to establish a control group and a sample size sufficient to lend statistical significance to the results. Extrapolating over history is a poor substitute for direct observation and controlled conditions, particularly given the theory-laden nature of geological history.
But I’m just annoying you with all this guff. You want to discuss whether the evidence supports your theory (check for errors in reasoning, etc.), and I can’t help you with that because it’s a long way from my speciality. You’re not here to discuss what science is, or how society should relate to it, or where it fits into the overall scheme of human knowledge. Frankly, I think you should consider these broader issues in more depth, because I think that much of your initial problem is grounded in those questions, and not the question of whether the evidence supports your theory. That’s why I’ve been going on about it. But if it’s just a discussion of evidence you want, so be it.
Here’s my contribution.
“I don’t really understand the significance of any of that data, sorry.”
Simple, irrefutable, and completely unhelpful. Not surprising, given that I don’t even understand how tides work.
It’s not a substitute, it’s a supplement to the others I’ve listed.
Steven Fielding – An independent senator here in Australia, has only very recently reversed his supportive stance on climate change.
I haven’t digested this due diligence report myself yet – but that’s the best place I can point you towards for now.
Okay, this focuses on the science so I can work with it. The graph on Steven Fielding’s website is similar to the claim made by m4cph1sto and answered by Rei.
I plan to expand on his explanation, but I’ve got a friend’s wedding Saturday and Sunday, so I won’t be able to for a while.
That due diligence report contains some topics that I’ve discussed here, and some that I haven’t yet addressed. It’s also so long that if I tried to answer everything in it, I’d fail out of school. If you want to pick one argument that you consider most compelling– one that I haven’t already answered in this article– I’ll do my best to answer it. No rush, though… I won’t be back to the computer for a while.
If you don’t mind I’d rather suggest this. Select the argument you find most troubling for AGW and respond to that one.
Use the Giant’s strength against himself type strategy;)
The graph on Steven Fielding’s website (also on page 10 of the due diligence report) shows temperatures from 1998-2008, and there’s no obvious warming trend visible to the naked eye. This is despite the steadily increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Rei’s response to this argument was excellent, but I’d like to expand on it.
First, note that climatologists aren’t saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that’s happening to the climate. It’s just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions. The temperatures in that graph are affected by many factors, including the fact that the Sun is unusually dim right now. Compared to the last solar minimum in 1996, visible light is 0.02% reduced, and extreme UV is 6% reduced. This cools the Earth very slightly, partially countering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.
Second, modern dynamical climate models can’t account for the physics of El Nino and La Nina events. Usually, circulation in the Pacific ocean sends cold water to the surface which serves to cool the atmosphere by warming the ocean. El Nino pauses that upwelling of cold water, thus warming the atmosphere by reducing the rate at which heat from the atmosphere is dumped into the ocean. La Nina does the opposite; it intensifies the upwelling of cold water, which draws more heat than usual from the atmosphere.
The El Nino in 1997/’98 was unusually strong, which led to the large spike in atmospheric temperatures visible in that graph on Fielding’s website. The large dip in atmospheric temperatures in 2008 occurred because of a significant La Nina. These short-lived events have little effect on the long-term climate because they merely swap heat between the oceans and atmosphere. But they do make it difficult to use either ocean or atmosphere temperatures alone to study the climate.
So we really need better data regarding ocean temperatures. Unfortunately, the Argo network is only a few years old, so we don’t yet have reliable long term data regarding ocean temperatures. Rei was right to say that these events are “just a source of white noise on top of the blatantly obvious signal.” Climate is different than weather, and the graph on Fielding’s website confuses the two.
In reality, scientists are concerned that recent observations of sea levels indicate they’re rising faster than expected, and the annual minimum of Arctic sea ice is declining faster than expected. It’s too early to tell if this is because the climate models have underestimated the speed of the melting, or if this is simply short-term variability due to weather. Update: Luckily, the rapid sea ice decline appears to be due to weather.
Now, about my request for you to pick an argument from the due diligence report. I suggested that you pick an argument because I desperately want to understand how the general public views arguments like these. Arguments I find compelling may not convince members of the general public, and vice-versa. For example, at the bottom of page 16:
Jane Q. Public made a similar claim that can be accessed through 7(d) in the index: The accuracy of the “hockeystick” graph.
So this argument obviously appeals to the general public. If true, it’d be evidence of mind-boggling incompetence and massive fraud on the part of the scientific community. But as I’ve shown, it’s simply not true. I’m also baffled by their claim that the Mann et al. 1999 reconstruction “was discarded for the IPCC 4th Assessment Report,” when in fact it’s the purple time series in Fig 6.10 (b).
Furthermore, I’ve mentioned that chapter 6 of the IPCC 4th report reviews the claims of MM03 and MM05 on column 2 of page 466. So you can verify for yourself that the claim “without explanation” is also false.
Overall, the due diligence report contains a broad spectrum of errors. Some are exaggerations, some are omissions of later studies that disprove the ones they’re referencing, while others are howling misconceptions. Typical for “science” which hasn’t been through peer review.
If I had to single out one part of the report that’s reasonably accurate, it would be this point:
They’re right to say that feedback effects aren’t yet well understood. But they imply that this uncertainty manifests itself as an overestimate of the positive feedback effects, and an underestimate of the negative feedback effects. If true, that means the IPCC’s projections of temperatures over the 21st century are too high. But I don’t see any proof that this is the case. I think it’s just as likely that we’ve underestimated the positive feedback effects, and overestimated the negative ones. In other words, the IPCC temperature projections could be too low.
And the scientific community is well aware of this issue. For example, my office mate just returned from a trip to Alaska. While there, he assisted in extracting core samples of permafrost to analyze the amount of carbon stored in them. This will help us to quantify the feedback effect of melting permafrost, which releases methane and CO2 as a result of bacterial growth. Update: He just showed me some pictures of the core samples. They’re black as coal…
They also say that the 2°C target is arbitrary. That’s basically true; it’s a safe target which probably won’t change the climate to an extent that severely disrupts our civilization.
Just to be clear, it’s necessary for the overall natural feedback to be negative otherwise the long-term climate wouldn’t have been stable enough for life to evolve. (Thanks again, Dr. Landis.)
But not all feedback effects operate on the same time scale. It seems to me like the (geologically) rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases will cause a different set of positive and negative feedback factors to interact than those which stabilized the natural climate before our arrival.
To be more precise, long term stability depends on the climate’s gain being less than 1, which means that the feedback effects don’t diverge (in the sense of limits).
‘Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.’ Einstein
Isn’t the current dramatic overpopulation the scientists’ fault? We’ve eliminated natural selection and have substituted a naturally controlled number of strong individuals for the countless herds of sickly animals. Mind that the third world countries are much more likely to survive without technology than the developed world, since we are critically dependent on it.
I’m afraid in the long run scientific progress will be our undoing.
In my humble opinion, so much debated climate change is just a symptom of a much bigger issue that is global pollution. The more we develop the more we contaminate, it’s a vicious circle.
In other words, the scientific method resulted in technology which improved our lives to such an extent that previous limits to our growth fell away. Yes, this means we’ve (nearly) eliminated natural selection. That’s the point. Natural selection is inhumane; civilization shouldn’t be based around it any more than we should base our society around the laws of gravity by pushing people off skyscrapers.
Update: Continued here.
Bopeth and I agreed on a similar evaluation. Exponential growth will lead to a series of crises as waste that was safely diluted at previous human population densities becomes dangerously concentrated when our population increases. Equivalently, resources that were previously abundant will become scarce.
Stella, tell me: do you like to eat? One of the most amazing changes that we humans have made to our world in the last ~10,000 years involves the production of food. A purely natural, non-technological world would have almost all of us starving. And yes, that includes those in those ‘third world’ countries you mentioned. After all, what is a house, but technology? What about a fire? Does a horse-drawn plow exist because of ‘natural selection’? What about irrigation, can that ever be ‘natural’? You seem to be implying that technology is evil and implicitly destructive. And to a certain extent you’re right. All technologies change the world around us.
Then again, doesn’t a beaver dam do the same thing? Is his home ‘natural’? Does his waterway diversion aid or destroy the ‘natural’ habitat?
There are types of crow able to use tools. This isn’t something we taught them: they’ve been doing it for thousands of years, maybe millions. I recently read an article about a type of crow that’s been observed using three different tools in rapid succession, in order to get to his food. Like scientists, they teach their hatchlings and youths how to use these tools and encourage experimentation. Is this different from a man using a rake, plow, and bag of fertilizer, except in scale? Is it any different than building a machine to plow the fields for you and feed more people from them than you otherwise could?
I agree that the scale of the problem is different — and worrisome. I also agree that we’re different from beavers and crows in that we have a greater capability for reason, and thus the moral and intellectual responsibility to correct for our actions and limit them where appropriate. But I have difficulty calling all technology and all science evil. I think we’ve got to remember that in one important way, we’re just like the beaver and the crow: we want to survive and to thrive, and we’re willing to change the world around us to make that happen. All creatures do that: plants and animals both (just watch how dianthus will crowd out other flowers in the garden, if you don’t believe me). There’s nothing ‘un-natural’ about technology, I hate to tell you. How could there be? We humans are just creatures, founded and molded by natural selection in the same way the dianthus, beavers, and crows were.
The difference comes down to scale. A dianthus may out-compete a flower patch and a beaver destroy life downstream in his river, but neither impact the broader world. We can, and do. And we’re also aware that we’re doing it. With that comes a moral dilemma: how much to curb our all-too-natural competitive behaviors. How much should we save for later and for others, that we could be selfishly (naturally!) using ourselves? You seem to think that this dilemma is brought on by science, but ask any parent: how many would be willing to starve their child, in order to act more ‘natural’? Science and technology have been the tools we’ve used, but any halfway decent parent knows that in order to feed the child, you use whatever tools are at hand. Just ask a crow. They do.
And if science and technology are just tools, we can choose as a society how to use them. We can do great global harm with them, or we can do great good. We have that choice, difficult and complicated though it may be. The problem, in my eyes, is that the ‘natural’ thing to do — the thing that beavers, crows, and dianthus all do — is NOT what we’re starting to think is the best choice for all life on the planet, or even just for all human life. We need to learn balance, which doesn’t come naturally to ANY creature. In nature, balance doesn’t happen by chance or because plants and animals are somehow aware of the need for it. It happens because some other creature comes along and eats the crap out of you before you can permanently unbalance the system.
Huh. I was about to write, “We humans have overwhelmed that balance, for the first time.” Then I realized that that’s not correct. The balance has been overwhelmed by life before — by blue-green algae (cyanobacteria)! Those are the little guys who created the majority of the first atmospheric oxygen on Earth, around 3.5 billion years ago. They produced so much oxygen (as a waste product, rather like we release CO2) that they converted the entire atmosphere to an oxidative state, killing off the vast majority of life on Earth at the time (which was anaerobic) and triggering what was possibly the longest snowball-Earth ice age in the entire history of the planet! All that, from bacteria living naturally!
Two conclusions:
As I see it, the basic question is whether our recent climate change is physiogenic (natural) or anthropogenic (caused by man). With our sun going through its longest period of low sunspot activity since 1856 (just before the “Carrington event”), I think we should soon have evidence one way or the other. If this year and the next show a progressive pattern of increasing temperatures, then our climate is being changed by man-made pollution. If it turns cooler, then we must assume that it is being driven by external natural causes.
Abrupt climate change is a long-term warming trend imposed on top of natural variations which tend to swing wildly in both directions. If you mean that the temperatures remain inexplicably high after subtracting all those natural variations, you’re almost right.
But, it’s important to understand that the global climate is different than weather. I think you’re underestimating the extent to which these measurements need to be averaged over time in order to ignore short-term fluctuations. An additional year isn’t enough to invalidate a warming trend that’s been going strong for ~40 years.
Furthermore, if CO2 isn’t responsible for the recent warming trend, we’re fundamentally confused about basic physics. At least one of these statements needs to be false. Which one?
I have a question that has always bothered me about global warming. The way i understand global warming is since the earth is warm, it emits infrared radiation into space. CO2 however absorbs some of it and reflects it in a random direction sometimes back to earth. As CO2 concentration increases more and more infrared light is reflected back to earth, causing it to warm. Here’s the question. Isn’t nearly half of the light from the sun composed of infrared radiation? Shouldn’t the amount of infrared radiation reflected in to space balance out the infrared light reflected back to earth until some critical point when almost no infrared rad is able to pass through the atmosphere. At that point only shouldn’t the earth start warming since the infrared rad reflected away from earth is no longer able to compensate for the infrared rad reflected back to earth?
Yes, that’s true.
I’m sorry, but I don’t really understand your question. You seem to be asking if the Earth will reach thermodynamic equilibrium, but that definition concerns the whole spectrum rather than just IR. The Earth will eventually reach an equilibrium temperature where the net power radiated away from the planet will equal the net power incident on the planet. But that’s not true now– the Earth is radiating less power than it would need to remain at this temperature because of greenhouse gases.
I think Reivan is referencing the saturation point where increasing CO2 concentrations beyond it will have negligible affect as all the appropriate wavelengths have been already absorbed.
As outlined in The Skeptics Handbook – Point #4.
Ah, okay. Then that’s covered in point 7 (g) of my index: “CO2 is already saturated, so adding more CO2 isn’t going to warm the planet any more.”
Very useful article. One for the bookmarks. Sorry I got around to reading it so late, but I didn’t see your request for commentary. [An Onerous Coward]
No worries. Thanks for the link– it’s useful too (and amusing.)
While I appreciate the fact that you showed some of my comments here, I am concerned that some of them appear to have been extracted out of context, and in other places my own replies to you, which could have clarified some points, have been omitted. In brief, it appears to me that some of my statements have deliberately been portrayed in a more negative light than a reader might personally conclude, if that reader had been privy to the entirety of the online conversation.
I will reply in more detail when I have time to read all of this more thoroughly and put together a more formal and complete response. That may be some days at least, as I have been rather busy.
I omitted the rest of your remarks to focus on the science, and as an act of mercy to my (undoubtedly overwhelmed) readers. Everyone wanting to read the rest of what you wrote can follow the numerous links leading to the original Slashdot conversation.
Here we go again…
Update: Jane Q. Public continues lecturing and complaining.
Really? Then I guess that my doubts are not reasonable, and I should not worry that IPCC numerical models predictions are more and more challenged by experimental data, and by dissidents within the IPCC itself…
It may have been beyond reasonable doubts until about 2005. I do not think it is anymore, the recent scientific advances and newest global data are not so supportive of the idea that man-produced CO2 is responsible for the bulk of global warming, and even less of the more catastrophic predictions for future climate change…
Please link to legitimately peer-reviewed scientific articles that back up these claims, because what you’re saying contradicts all the evidence I’ve ever seen.
It’s usually a bad idea to quarrel with somebody’s religion, but what the hell: One or two scientists disagree.
In science, it’s a good idea to focus on evidence rather than conspiracy theories. What evidence in my article are you disputing?
What evidence? Certainly no evidence of consensus. Does the phrase “cherry picking” mean anything to you?
A peripheral observation: the earth’s climate is a complex adaptive system. I know of no computer model that takes this into account. That’s why they can’t predict the past, much less the future. Even if they did, the best they could produce is probabilities with wide multimodal distributions. They’d be useless for decision making. All the data we have on climate history falls nicely onto a power curve. There’s no way to predict whether anything we do will have any effect or, if it does, whether it would make things better or worse.
The climate may warm–the best thing we can do is prepare for it. The absurdity that we can not only predict the climate but we can also control it has to be the most extreme case of hubris in human history.
The scientific articles referenced all over this article, which is what the whole issue is about… and with all due respect you still haven’t said exactly which point I’ve made that you think is wrong.
As I said in a comment: First of all, I’ve repeatedly stressed that science isn’t democratic, so I don’t give “consensus” any weight. For example, I once said “… I don’t see how the popularity of an idea has anything to do with its veracity.”
And later: “Uniformity of opinion is neither expected nor desired. Consensus is irrelevant; evidence is all that matters.”
So if you have some credible evidence, please let me know.
Where– exactly— did I do that?
A good place to start is chapter 8 of the IPCC report. I’ve also previously discussed this general issue.
Hindcast experiments are one of the standard ways to validate dynamical climate models. They’ve been tested against instrumental records and proxy data like borehole measurements, tree rings and ice cores. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo showed that climate models can predict climate response very accurately.
Yes, the error bars are large, but the separation between the future scenarios is larger still. The models are plenty good enough to see that we need a new industrial revolution, or risk further damaging the climate.
Indeed, I think the consensus is shifting right now, and I guess that at one point it may become funny and some heads could start to roll…A few more years of flat or decreasing global temperatures, a few more theoretical and experimental blows to IPCC models, a few more scientists resigning from IPCC or publicly expressing doubts, and it’s done.
It will not be so fast though, given the media and political huge investment in global warming: they will try to keep it silent, quietly put the last decade hysteria under the rug and will not easily do a mea culpa…I have noticed much less mention of global warming on TV since about 2 month though, while it was cruising at full sail propaganda before…Maybe some are feeling the wind turn already? ;-)
Really? That’s the impression you got from reading the legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journals? I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is well-supported by a mountain of credible evidence. If you’ve examined the IPCC models and found flaws that I haven’t debunked in that article, by all means leave a comment describing these flaws and I’ll look into them.
A few flaws:
I have read your article, and it is not convincing. Especially, the way you insist that the model should be applied to recent time only is not sound: a numerical model should be tested in as much conditions as possible, especially for other input that the ones that have been used to calibrate it!!! And man produced CO2 is just the same as natural CO2, any attempt to separate the two (one have a greater effect that the other???) is highly suspect.
In fact, I think many reader objections in your article are valid, and you seem to agree as you do not really debunk the well formulated ones…
Actually, all models take clouds into account. I’ve previously linked to a new paper describing recent improvements to models of clouds.
You’re probably referring to a 2004 paper by E. Pallé et al. Their conclusion appears to be based largely on 2003 values of earthshine, which may have been caused by undersampling the data. A separate 2005 paper measured the albedo using satellite data and didn’t observe the same dramatic change.
Because, as I state in a popup on the words “very slightly” in the third paragraph of the article, there are so many changes to the Earth over such long periods of geological time (you have to go back tens of millions of years to see higher CO2 concentrations) that the dynamical models wouldn’t be expected to apply. Plus, proxy data are unreliable at such timescales, so we’re stuck with “recent” data like the last 650,000 years from EPICA.
Huh? You’re not under the impression that climate models are empirical models, are you?
That’s because those other effects have been shown to be very small. See 7 (b) in the index: “Cosmic rays are responsible for global warming.” If you’ve found evidence contradicting these papers, please let us know.
I’ve explicitly addressed this point. The point is that feedback effects act on different time scales, and our forcing is geologically very rapid.
I didn’t mean that man-made CO2 has a greater effect, just that feedback CO2 appears after the temperature rises, not before. Therefore the recent CO2 rise is anthropogenic, and we should expect the natural feedback CO2 (observed in Vostok) to add to it.
For instance? I’ve got my own research distracting me, so I don’t always have time to answer each and every question, but I’ve tried really hard to answer all the scientific questions that people have posed. I’d like to see which questions are “well formulated” that I haven’t “really debunked.”
I am not, I am sufficiently well informed to know that those models are solving huge set of nonlinear PDE representing simplified thermal radiation equation, convection, gaz exchanges, …, so they are based on basic laws of physics.
Problem is, i am more informed than that: I solve big sets linear PDE for a living, create the models and simplification under it, and had a go to nonlinear PDE during my Phd. Not a climatologist, i worked more in fluid dynamic and vibro-acoustic…
Now, you are not trying to tell me that the tuning of adjustable numerical parameters, grid size, time steps, simplifications, linearisation techniques, and choosing of unknown physical parameters in the simplified mathematical models are not of the utmost importance, are you? That, except if you are extremely careful and work in a field for which mathematical modeling is not under discussion, your numerical models are, when you are honest, sophisticated empirical models that may give insight to fine details, but always produce pretty color plots in 3D? The validations I have seen for those models (single curve fitting over small period) are not convincing enough, too much local errors for such a model to be reliable imho. I am aware that it is the best we can currently do, but I have enough experience in numerical models to consider it is far from being enough to trust…
No, it’s just that these parametrizations are only performed for the mean climate, and shouldn’t change over a timespan measured in decades. Continental drift and increasing solar output invalidate them over geological time, but not over the period from 1990 to 2010.
I presume you’re referring to the model validations via the Pinatubo eruption. There are other validations, chief among them being comparisons to proxy data which extend over hundreds of thousands of years. Initial condition ensembles are taken to average out the weather, and models with completely different parametrizations are averaged in a multi-model ensemble to produce the IPCC results (see chapter 8).
What scientific evidence led you to that conclusion? I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern.
Me too…..
Earth cooled a degree last year, Satellite images show arctic ice cap growing the last three years, lack of sunspots is pointing to a scary minimum. The CO2 increase contributes to less than a than 1/2 of a percent increase in green house gasses (do not exclude the largest green house gas, water vapor)
It is very tiring repeating the same facts over, and over. I feel your pain.
After warming for many years, but sitll the *trend* is upward, which, after all is what global warming is about. It is not about a slight deviation from a trend to cause people to ignore it. That is what people call jitter or noise.
Huh? 2007 was the lowest recorded amount of ice coverage. You are simply wrong. 2008 was slightly more than 2007, but still less overall. 2009 is the current year, and the data is thus not complete.
Source? Over what time frame? Maybe you mean that carbon dioxide is a trace gas, at less than 1/2 of a percent composition OF the atmosphere. It has increased concentration 35% since 100 years ago. The only true thing you’ve said is that water vapour is the the largest source of greenhouse gas.
As I’ve explained, ENSO events are (mostly) irrelevant to the long term climate.
In the same link as above, I referenced this 2007 paper titled “Arctic sea ice decline: Faster than forecast.” Also, the 2008 melt season was the longest in satellite record, and the ice is thinning dramatically.
Again in the same link, I explain that this means the Sun is unusually dim, which (if anything) would tend to cool the Earth very slightly.
As I explained in the fifth paragraph of this article, CO2 has jumped ~26% above the highest value it’s reached in the last 650,000 years. And this staggering increase occurred in the span of several decades, which is ~35x faster than at any point in the last 400,000 years.
As I’ve explained, water vapor reaches equilibrium in a matter of weeks, so we can’t change its concentration except by changing Earth’s average temperature. Water vapor concentration is also lower in the stratosphere, while CO2 is well-mixed even to the highest level of the atmosphere, and it stays in the atmosphere for many decades which is why it’s so dangerous.
No, sorry, everything stated is true. I dislike giving source sites as they radicals have away of destroying facts, but here you go.
You probably dislike giving source sites because none of the sources you’ve used are reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. See 7(a) in the index to see why this bothers scientists.
BohaHHHAhahahhahha….
You did not even look!!!!!
You, scientist! Hey I will admit I did not look at your stuff yet, but you just snubbed The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, NOAA, and an individual who compiled raw info.
Buddy, honestly, who reviewed you? You seem very self important at this time.
But Ok, hey I am not a scientist by profession, review the info let me know….
I looked at the first one. It actually shows the opposite of what you are saying. According to that graph the mean for polar sea ice is dropping, and recent years have been worse than less recent years.
The third one is from NOAA statistics you say. But it is only one month (August, unless I am mistaken?), compared against a mean of the previous years. That shows August 2008 was cooler, on average in most areas (and in others, quite neutral), to the mean global temperature of the previous decade. If you look at this data for 2008, it shows the opposite of what you’re trying to show. And here’s one of the NOAA saying that 2008 was one of the warmest years on record.
The second link you provided has been much better refuted than I could do on khayman80’s blog. (Look up his links about water vapour).
Don’t be precious. The issue isn’t the specific facts you’re referencing, but rather the bizarre conclusions you’re using them to support. As SilverEyes said, the first graph shows Arctic sea ice is decreasing. I’m not surprised; I use AMSR-E data in my hydrology research, and they’ve got high quality data. I’ve already shown that the second link about water vapor is wrong in a previous comment to you. The third link was addressed in that same previous comment.
No it does not, though I made the same mistake when I first read it. It may below the mean at the present time, it is show a recovery.
I do not know at this point who’s website dumbscientist.com is, but it excludes, very typically, Maurder Solar minimum / Little Ice age data. I am still going through it.
And are you refuting the fact that water vapor makes up %95 of the greenhouse effect on earth? If so, what percentage does it make up?
No, it is because the sites are routinely sabotaged. The fact is in this current political climate, all the dirty tricks claimed to be used by one party, are now being employed in force.
In my world of engineers, many statements made on the dumbscientist.com would drive them nuts because it lack obvious common sense.
I do not know other worlds, but explore often looking for answers.
EV’s are not a answer here.
More importantly, it shows a trend where more recent years have a lower minimum than earlier years. Remember not to confuse weather with climate like Steven Fielding. The long-term trend simply has irrelevant noise due to ENSO events, etc. imposed on top of it. As I said before, the real problem scientists face is here.
You might be referring to this paragraph: Abrupt climate change is a long-term warming trend imposed on top of natural variations which tend to swing wildly in both directions. If you mean that the temperatures remain inexplicably high after subtracting all those natural variations, you’re almost right.
But that reference removed the ENSO events, and figure 2 shows a warming trend even before this subtraction.
Also, contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren’t denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun’s brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren’t saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that’s happening to the climate. It’s just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.
No, solar variability is smaller than greenhouse effects.
Ok, so it is your site.
Answered in another comment to you here. Again, I’m saying your conclusions don’t flow from these cherry-picked examples, I’m not disputing the AMSR-E ice minima record.
It’s mine, and this point was also answered in another comment to you here.
I’ve been strenuously trying to say that it’s the conclusions you’re reaching that are wrong, not necessarily these details. As a matter of fact, H20 makes up 66% to 85% of the greenhouse effect in our current atmosphere. But that’s not the point. As I’ve repeatedly explained to you, water vapor reaches equilibrium with the oceans in a matter of weeks, so we can’t really change its concentration except by changing Earth’s average temperature. Water vapor is also not present in the top level of the atmosphere where the greenhouse effect is most important. CO2, on the other hand, is well-mixed even to the highest level of the atmosphere, and it stays in the atmosphere for many decades which is why it’s so dangerous.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see any point to having a conversation where all my words hit a brick wall, requiring me to immediately repeat them. Have a nice day.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate again.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here)
I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. There seem to be an endless number of internet ninjas promoting claims like this, despite the fact that CO2 hasn’t risen above 300ppm in the last 650,000 years. But then we come along and the concentration skyrockets to 380ppm in a matter of decades, which is 35x faster than any increase in the last 650,000 years.
As others have said, natural CO2 production and absorption aren’t relevant to the current CO2 problem because they balance each other. Our emissions and volcanoes are the only sources of CO2 that aren’t balanced, and humans emit 100x more CO2 than volcanoes.
I took a look at your article, and found it interesting, and not obviously biased. Very good!
I also noticed that you were very careful to specify that your temperature graph only went back 300 years. This is significant in a way you didn’t mention: it means that the first half of it records temperatures at the end of The Little Ice Age, and the portion between about 1830 and 1900 (roughly) shows the climate “recovering” from that. As the graph doesn’t go far enough back to show The Early Medieval Warm (Yeah, I know: you have to work with what you’ve got.) it gives the impression that the climate hadn’t changed for thousands of years, then suddenly began to warm at or near the beginning of The Industrial Revolution.
Thanks. As you say, the climate changes naturally. The graph immediately below the one you’re talking about shows temperature reconstructions over the last 1000 years that support what you’re saying. These natural climate changes establish a range of natural variability, and current measurements show that the climate is now changing much faster than can be attributed to natural causes.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate again.
Wow, 650,000 years is a big number. How long has there been life on the Earth? How high had CO2 skyrocketed before 650,000 years ago?
This is what I love about you semi-honest “scientists”. Why are you limiting your dates to 650,000 years ago? That’s not really a long time in the history of this planet.
Single-celled life may be ~3 billion years old, but multi-cellular life is ~600 million years old.
We’re still searching, but the current level is higher than at any point in at least the past 2 million years. Furthermore, as I’ve mentioned, the Sun was dimmer in the distant past, and the biosphere was totally different so the ecology had different requirements than ours. Also, the positions of the continents have a profound effect on the climate, and they move on those timescales. Comparisons across distant geological time are tricky at best.
Because as I’ve mentioned, that’s the age corresponding to EPICA, the deepest Antarctic ice core extracted so far.
Consider some additional information.
It looks to me like the earth has been going through warm spikes for a lot longer than we’ve been around. Our current spike started well before mankind was doing much of anything. One could even conjecture that we’re around because it got warmer…
As far as “rates of change” go, I’m not certain you can say much at all about the long term history without better resolution in the data. For instance, the rate could vary quite wildly in the blink of 100 years, but that would be blurred in the long term record. These ice and sediment cores implement a nice low pass filter based on how they accumulated and are measured.
Tacking high resolution data from modern thermometers on to data taken from ice cores seems dubious.
Interesting study, without a doubt. But it uses oxygen isotope records as a proxy for the global mass of ice sheets, and I was discussing CO2 records. Plus, it agrees with the Vostok ice core temperature reconstruction.
Yes, ice core data are smoothed by diffusion and compaction, but studies like Delmotte 2004 and Jouzel 2007 have examined the data at a resolution of ~100 years and largely support the conclusions in the original Vostok and EPICA papers.
Of course, you could respond that decadal variations could exist, but to the best of my knowledge no known natural mechanism exists that could allow CO2 to fluctuate so wildly so quickly. Actually, the Siberian traps may qualify as a plausible natural source, but what sink could possibly have absorbed the CO2 quickly enough to drive the level down far enough below the average for the low-pass signal to record no evidence of this event?
Sure, but they are apparently correlated. With such sparse records, I think it’s fair game to look at long term temperatures as well as CO2. Be careful about weeding out data just because it doesn’t support your hypothesis. Temperature is certainly on topic.
That’s one way to see it. It’s also possible that the separate records have a shift in their timescales. I’m sure there are other ways to see it too.
You seem quite certain that there is only one way to explain things. You’ve already assumed your hypothesis is true. It’s not good science, and I think you should be more skeptical.
Again, that’s too strong of a statement. Use your imagination, and I think you could come up with other hypotheses that you can’t contradict either.
Science isn’t about “facts”. It’s about hypothesis that haven’t been contradicted yet. When a hypothesis survives some scrutiny and starts to yield accurate predictions, then maybe we could start to get a little faith that we’ve got an accurate understanding, but even then, you don’t “know” the truth. A new experiment could tear it all back to zero. That’s why I hate it when someone says how there is no more doubt – if you aren’t doubting, it’s not science.
If your sampling is at a 100 year resolution, you can’t say much about what happens in less than 100 years.
It doesn’t have to be wild fluctuations. A smooth 100 year increase followed by a smooth 100 year decrease would be completely hidden.
I appreciate your honesty, and the phrase, “to the best of my knowledge” is fair. However, I’m guessing there are a lot of things required to understand the climate that fall outside of anyone’s present knowledge.
Anyway, you could be right about all of this. Maybe we are ruining the world as we know it. However, I’m going to remain skeptical until I see something more compelling than I’ve seen so far.
I’m not weeding out data; just saying that temperature and CO2 aren’t the same. The recent rapid CO2 rise has nothing to do with the gradual warming that preceded the industrial revolution, as you implied earlier. That’s all I meant.
Yes, as I’ve mentioned in the sixth paragraph of that article, the time lag is difficult to determine with any great accuracy.
I don’t think I’ve assumed anything. You’re basically accusing me of committing the cardinal sin in science. All I’m saying is that there’s a lot of evidence for abrupt climate change, in the same way that I’d say there’s a lot of evidence for evolution or the big bang.
I’ll try to avoid taking offense, and just note that I’ve been training my entire life to be skeptical about everything I study. Why do people insult scientists in this manner? It’s like telling a plumber “Oh, come on… you don’t really know the difference between a bathtub and a sink.” Presumably, people wouldn’t insult him by suggesting that he’s fundamentally incompetent at his life’s work. Maybe that’s because plumbers carry big wrenches, while scientists carry calculators?
If it’s not a wild fluctuation, then the Vostok and EPICA ice core analyses are basically right: the current CO2 concentration of 380ppm is ~26% above the 650,000 year maximum of 300ppm. If they are wild fluctuations, the increase you describe would have a 100 year mean far above the average, and would show up in our CO2 reconstructions. As I said, in order to be invisible to the reconstructions, the wild increase would have to be very rapid and immediately followed by an equally rapid and wildly low anomaly to produce a long-term mean that remains below 300ppm.
You say that as though my life’s work isn’t developing and falsifying hypotheses. I’ve been trying to find an alternative explanation for Meehl’s results, and can’t think of one. Maybe you could read the paper and show me where their mistake was?
Certainly. But the last 20 years have seen a renaissance in climatology; as a result the error bars can now confidently rule out the possibility “climate change isn’t happening” and fairly confidently rule out the possibility “climate change isn’t human-caused.” Perfect knowledge isn’t necessary to make predictions, otherwise Voyager wouldn’t have made it to Saturn because quantum gravity wasn’t available to calculate its orbital burns. All that matters is whether the signal is larger than the error bars, and that’s true for abrupt climate change.
This topic came up again here and here.
In the process, I found more high resolution ice core studies, and a quote from page 447 of chapter 6 of the IPCC AR4 WG1 report:
“There is no indication in the ice core record that an increase comparable in magnitude and rate to the industrial era has occurred in the past 650,000 years. The data resolution is sufficient to exclude with very high confidence a peak similar to the anthropogenic rise for the past 50,000 years for CO2…”
Also, more recent evidence shows that CO2 is higher than at any point in the last 15 million years.
Update: Correction: ~3 million years.
A recent “news and views” [*] asserts that temperatures 3-5 million years ago were 3-4°C higher than today in the tropics, and up to 10°C higher at the poles with “little extra CO2.”
[*] What are “news and views” articles? Are they peer-reviewed? Nature is one thing, but Nature Geosciences is barely two years old, and I haven’t yet read many articles in it.
Actually, solar variations are too small to account for recent warming.
I can’t speak for politicians, but scientists aren’t making any such assumption.
Actually, as I’ve shown, we’re very likely causing the majority of the recent warming.
Other than the section devoted to that exact issue, you mean?
Yes, that’s why I’ve got an entire section (7b) in the index devoted to the Sun’s magnetic field effects on the Earth’s climate. And, yes, UV light might be forcing the climate in ways that aren’t currently understood. But the Sun is unusually dim right now, especially in UV light. Also, solar output varies primarily on an ~11 year cycle, and the recent warming has been growing for ~40 years. As I’ve repeatedly explained, the lack of a long-term trend in solar output means that it’s probably not responsible for the recent warming.
As I’ve been saying repeatedly, climatologists aren’t saying that human emissions are completely responsible for everything happening to the climate. All we’re saying is that most (>50%) of the warming since ~1970 was very likely (90% confidence) caused by anthropogenic greenhouse emissions, and that percentage grows larger each decade.
I can’t load that page, but this may be my cable modem’s fault. At any rate, your description makes it sound like a retread of Svensmark 1998, which I’ve discussed already.
The main problem I have with your position is the incessant manipulation of temperature data by those who really believe in global warming. This article points this out. How can we believe these pretty charts when temperature data is so easily manipulated?
Yes, it’s common for people to claim there’s a giant conspiracy among scientists. I’ve faced this repeatedly in the article from people like Jane Q. Public. No, data aren’t being manipulated to serve some political agenda. Scientists aren’t evil monsters. We’re people just like you, and our primary interest is in understanding the universe, not pushing an agenda. For instance, my interest in this subject began when I was trying to solve an unrelated problem and the mass loss in Greenland’s glaciers jumped out at me.
That website is confused on many levels, most of which I’ve already covered in the article. They confuse weather with climate regarding ENSO events, mistake Newsweek and other mainstream media for “science” and assume nefarious motives for what is simply an ongoing process of assimilating data from various sources properly.
I’m not claiming giant conspiracies amongst scientists, however, I think the author raises some valid points that require further explanation.
There was once a time when it was consciences that the earth was flat. A didn’t take a scientist to prove them wrong. Okay, I understand that we are much more sophisticated in sorting out what is truth and what is not. But I also wish to point out that there was a time were all sorts of “models” that accurately predicted the movement of celestial bodies under premise that the earth was in the center of the galaxy. One notable multi-disciplined individual begged to differ. We know what happened to him when he did.
Bottom line? I naturally wary scientific “consciences”. It doesn’t exist. So until the views of the educated and qualified folks who don’t write for the New Scientist are addressed w/o name calling (i.e. skeptics) I think it is utter foolishness to consider the science settled. Anyone who doesn’t take into account and rejects the views of qualified folks in order to establish scientific theory as consciences should be regarded with suspicion.
By the way, the loss of glaciers are non-events. It has occurred before and will occur again. Until scientists models start predicting the future accurately, GW is going to be a hard sell.
I will agree with you that I certainly have more reading to do. However, I must say that the New Scientist is not he end all be all and neither is it a final authority. It is troubling to me that you reject papers from other peer-reviewed journals (as seems apparent in one of the responses to posts to your article). It raises questions in my mind why include some and exclude others.
Bottom line, there are too many creditable people who argue against your point of view. The most prominent and surprising is Claude Allegre, who was one of the first to warn about man-mande global warming. He has sense recanted and now considers global warming to be:
“…over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.” (see Allegre’s second thoughts)
I look forward to a continued lively debate on the subject.
I’ve never included New Scientist in my list of reputable peer-reviewed journals. I’ve provided a couple of links to it, but only because I’ve verified that the story matches the evidence provided in genuinely peer-reviewed journals.
I presume you’re referring to the incident where Jane Q. Public tried to reference an article from Energy and Environment (a social science journal) when that research had been presented in hard science journals 15 years previously and quickly dismissed as a fluke of data smoothing parameters. That’s the reason I dismissed the paper: it was wrong.
When it comes to the general public, this subject is quite similar to evolution or the reality of the moon landings. It will always be a hard sell to most nonscientists despite the many model validations like the Mt. Pinatubo prediction. I’m not under the impression that anyone I’m talking to has the slightest intention of looking into the science deeply enough to understand it.
Again, I’ve repeatedly stressed that science isn’t democratic.
I find it unnerving that you would dismiss creditable dissension to a closely held theory as something to do with democracy. Folks like Monsieur Allegre raise valid points that should be addressed and not swept under the carpet.
We the folks are trying to examine both sides of this sometimes hard to understand argument, and when one dismisses the other with words such as “science isn’t democratic”, then (in my view) you’ve left their arguments unanswered and your credibility questioned.
Like I said, I have more reading to do, I’m sure we’ll be speaking again.
Best Regards…
The questioning of the moon landings comes from NO ONE with any credible scientific background, yet LOTS of credible (and credentialed) folks are questioning the work being done on global warming. Yet those good folks are being put in the same category as the loons who question the moon landings…incredible.
You’re implying that science is democratic– that it depends on the number of people who support a theory– by emphasizing that there are “too many creditable people who argue against your point of view.” But as I’ve argued over and over again, science is about evidence, preferably in peer-reviewed journal articles. I humored you by opening that non-peer-reviewed article, and didn’t see any compelling evidence. All he mentions is Kilimanjaro’s glacier, which I’ve already linked, and Antarctic ice mass, which is well known in the climatology community to be losing mass in the west and gaining it in the east.
Update: Some of Monsieur Allegre’s claims are examined here.
It’s wrong to consider science democratic, but if you really want to play that silly numbers game, consider that ~84% of scientists agree that abrupt climate change is happening, and that it’s being caused by humans. Again, science isn’t democratic! It’s about evidence!
Notice that I said “when it comes to the general public.” All you have to do is skim this article to see how juvenile and repetitive most of these arguments are. Then consider that I’ve tried to edit their responses so they look less crazy. For instance, compare my version of Stormcrow309’s objections to the Slashdot original. I’ve encountered similar attitudes in my conversations with creationists.
And again, your repeated emphasis on “LOTS” continues to imply that you think science is democratic. I’ve tried to convince you that science is actually about evidence. If you can find convincing evidence that these people have published in reputable peer-reviewed journals, then I’ll read it. But please make sure that I haven’t already addressed these issues here. So many people on this thread are rehashing issues which I’ve repeatedly debunked that I’m starting to wonder how Carl Sagan managed to talk to nonscientists without pulling all his hair out. Maybe that’s why he died so young?
An actual scientist! Do you work under grants? Tell me honestly, if you applied for a grant to study a theory that C02 concentrations are not driving the earth-air temp, do you think you’d actually get funded? Or would all the other research groups that want to expand upon the theory get funded first? If you got a grant to prove C02 levels were the driver and you failed to establish the connection, how likely are you to get funded again? My wife wrote grant applications for quite a while, and we’re both very familiar how the process works.
The strong bias I see in scientific research isn’t at the working level – it’s primarily at the funding level which very politically driven. I’m going with the assumption that 99% of scientists are trying to be objective. Unfortunately the occasional example of scientific results being deliberately skewed to support the initial assumptions do make people question the whole lot of them.
In principle, yes. But my advisor handles all that. After graduating I plan to leave mainstream science because it’s too annoying to deal with funding. I’d rather just teach physics at a community college and study on my own. I don’t know how funding works, and frankly I don’t want to waste time on that when I could be learning more physics. I’ve only got a couple of decades of life left, and I’d much rather spend them studying relativity and quantum mechanics than navigating bureaucracies.
Update: Huh? That’s not how science works. Research is performed to constrain parameters of climate models using as diverse a collection of evidence possible. Scientists don’t propose research in order to support either “side.” The proposals don’t guess at the results, instead they sound like “We’d like $X to study the equilibrium climate sensitivity using proxy data/satellite data/etc. This is how our proposal is significantly different than previous experiments…”
I’ve read about rare examples of this kind of thing happening, and you’re right: it is a serious problem which calls the credibility of scientists into question. I just don’t see any reason to believe that any of the research behind abrupt climate change is significantly affected by this. The competition is intense, and any scientist who could prove that climate change isn’t a problem would almost certainly get a Nobel prize for overturning basic thermodynamics.
I got tired of repeating myself on Slashdot, so I wrote an article showing that abrupt climate change is a matter of serious concern. Climate change is already having negative effects, and they’ll get worse over the next century. Hundreds of thousands of years is wishful thinking according to the best scientific evidence available today.
I’ve directly addressed cap and trade, which seems like a very constructive, capitalistic approach that will jumpstart a new industrial revolution. My hope is that the United States invests heavily in nuclear fission technology, preferably using waste reprocessing and newer designs like pebble bed reactors.
As I’ve stressed, the existence of abrupt climate change is a scientific topic. It’s a good idea to ignore politicians and their ridiculous claims, and focus on the science.
Fixed that for you.
Oh, and that version of the Vostok ice core graph you included is horrendously misleading. If you don’t overlay the two graphs on top of each other you can easily be fooled into thinking the data suggests that increased atmospheric CO2 lead to higher temperatures. When you do overlay the charts, it becomes clear that the increase in temperature slightly preceded the increase in CO2 in each cycle, including this one.
I’ve specifically addressed that point in 7(f) of the index: “CO2 increases after temperature, so it doesn’t warm the planet.”
But since the tone of your response implies that you probably won’t bother, I’ll repeat myself once again: this phase lag isn’t known with great accuracy or precision, and the highest plausible lag would be ~1000 years out of ~5000 year deglaciations. More fundamentally, the difference between the small Milankovitch forcings and the actual observed temperature swings shows that CO2 amplifies the natural forcing. CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, make no mistake about that.
And I’m sorry if you’re offended by ads. I tried really hard to force them to be non-animated, and only put them off to the side (I hate interstitial ads with a burning passion.) And to be honest I make ~8 cents a day from them– all I want is for them to make 30 cents a day so the website pays its own hosting fees. And, yes, even though I’ve archived most of my responses for people to read, I still find it necessary to repeat myself because people keep bringing up the same strange talking points regardless of the scientific evidence. Again, sorry if this is horribly offensive to you.
I’m not offended by ads. I’m offended by hypocrisy.
You say you did it so that you wouldn’t have to repeat yourself, but you’re still repeating yourself. Your goal seems to be driving traffic to your blog, and not reducing the need to repeat yourself as you state.
And why? Who are you? You’re not an authority. You, like me, are some random idiot on the internet.
I certainly try not to repeat myself. But people keep repeating arguments that I specifically addressed in the sixth paragraph of this article, and discussed in more detail in sections 7(f) and 7(g). I suspect the repetition is more annoying for me than it is for you, because I had to research these issues at length, type nearly 50 pages in an attempt to translate some very complicated physics into terms the general public might understand, then provide links to the peer-reviewed articles that are the basis of this science. All you had to do was click on the link, see the first picture, and stop reading before the sixth paragraph where I discuss the claim you made.
But I’m sad to see that you didn’t address any of the science I’ve discussed, instead implying that I’m trying to pass myself off as an authority. The very title of my website should be proof that I’m not, but I’ve also repeatedly tried to get people to focus on the actual scientific evidence rather than trying to identify “authorities” or “consensus.” Science isn’t about authority, it’s about developing models to predict new phenomena, and rigorously testing them in peer-reviewed journal articles.
My actual goal is to try to find another scientist who disagrees with the science behind abrupt climate change. I’m desperately searching for someone who disagrees with me, but does so in a polite manner while focusing on the science and discussing the evidence. Are you that person?
Ignoring my Bias against Nuclear power (the swapping of one waste product for another doesn’t seem to solve the problem) I would like to point out that if one so desired you could make an industrial sized photovoltaic plant, and using HVDC could send it almost anywhere. (coming from an Australian point of view here) Power plants here are a reasonable distance from the Sydney basin (the coal seams end in both Newcastle and Wollongong) and coal plants that were built in the city have long been shut down.
I agree with your observation that it would be political suicide for a politician to suggest building a nuke in city limits, even if it could provide the city with free hot water/steam (same could be said for any combustion plant.. or thermal solar i guess)
*nit picky i know* a base load would be a group of consumers – not a power source.
i believe that you are misinformed about what a base load is. a base load is the description to the amount of load that is almost static, and if you look at the electricity market in NSW (http://www.aemo.com.au/data/GRAPH_30NSW1.html) (or go http://www.aemo.com.au/data/price_demand.html then NSW) you can see that the minimum demand (at 0400hrs was 6500 MW (the scales are left off, the one on the left is in dollars per MWH) whilst the peak load for that day was 10500MW. The variation in load between day and night would be more pronounced if it were not for the large financial incentives that available due to a cheap supply of power from a system of generators that are unable to economically change their output.
I believe that the “baseload” problem is largely one manufactured by power companies, and in turn comes from one of their problems, namely what to do with all the power produced by a power station once everyone is tucked up in bed. this was a problem historically because the regulators on turbines weren’t as good as they are now, nor were they as wide ranging. Many applications for electricity require a stable frequency, without good regulation, the frequency that a generator spins gets faster with less demand. A good way to provide a buffer between changing loads is to have a nice stable one, like an incandescent light that stays on for the duration of the period of predicted fluctuation.
Off Peak hot water heating was once the main method of hot water heating in nsw, and was controlled by the power commission via zelwigger tones which would turn your hot water heater on or off. This gave the power company a nice stable load that it could turn on and off at its wishes, and keep the generator running within the regulators limits. A more modern version of this is the contracts signed with big power users (ability to turn them off in case of power shortage) and market prices which more accurately reflect the costs of running coal power stations as your main power source.
Just as the marketing of cheaper electricity in offpeak times has shifted load to the night it could work the same in reverse (although there would be extra cost in providing transmission lines which could cope with the increased load, which in turn, would be tempered by distributed generation.)
Australia’s energy market covers a distance of over 4000kms (2400miles) of which there are losses in powerlines, transformers, and in the case of HVDC switching gear. one could also argue that there are losses in mining shipping and burning coal too so i dont see your point there, it just means that you need a bigger powerplant or plants. all this is done already to compensate for transmittion losses for coal plants, its not rocket surgery to apply the same math to whichever power source you choose
i agree with your efficiency comment, however not your one on better technology. Personally i am a fan of fluorescent lights, i like their white blue colour. Marketing and what someone has grown up with will sway a persons opinion. As someone who has an interest in lighting (Theatrical) its disgusting to see what some people do in their designs. (especially in workspaces, kitchens ect) not to mention the little halogen lights, which are pretty (in terms of the spectrum and intensity of the light they emit) but to see people use them as washlights, and then complain about how hot they are and how much power they chew.
Im a tad concerned that we seem to want to re-invent the wheel when it comes to hydrogen, insofar as when you have a energy transfer medium that is reasonably easy to store, easy to create, easy to turn into other products and already has a large pipe distribution system in most countries, why not use it? Sure methane has one carbon atom but the poison is in the dosage, and as long as you are creating/ capturing carbon i dont see that as a problem. combined generation methane burners (turbine + steam boiler) are up to 60% efficient, and can also be small enough to used as hot water process heaters (aircon, ect) and then for room heat/domestic hot water in larger buildings, reducing inefficiency of creating heat, converting it to electricity, transporting it, then converting it to heat again.
Biofuels is a nice idea… but looks like it is going to get hijacked by the corn and cane industries, pushing food prices up. Extracting methane from sewage and landfill on the other hand does place pressure on food supplies.
Speaking of nuisance, have a look at most large hydro schemes. Snowy mountains Hydro scheme is miles from anywhere (bar Canberra, but Canberra doesnt count… its just full of politicians( and therefor has a very small load compared to Sydney and Melbourne)).
The Hoover Dam was directly connected to LA some 266 miles away. The Pacific DC Intertie is almost 850miles long and the “line capacity is 3,100 megawatts, which is enough to serve two to three million Los Angeles households and is 48.7% of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) electrical system’s peak capacity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie) Long distance is not a problem, just an engineering detail.
(Edit : I totally forgot about AC Grids, Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid. Stretching 13 timezones (i know.. crap measurement, but its wiki) and europe from Spain to Siberia (once they tie UPS and UCTE together)
I thought that your proof that nuclear works because France has 80% of its capacity on it was a bit… simple.. Turbines have been around since 1884 and now produce 80% of the worlds power.
I would suggest that it is a safer gamble than many people would like you to believe. Natural gas production facilities blow up from time to time (one in Western Australia a year or so back) , Oil producing nations get pissed off and squeeze everyone by the balls by cutting supply, wild fires cause tripping of main power feeders nearly tripping out the whole state (Victoria a few years ago) not to mention poor maintenance taking out Queens in 2006. We deal with these problems as best we can, but its not like it will send us back to the dark ages.
Most coal powerplants could easily claim that 25% of their power was green by usings evacuated solar collectors (or parabolic troughs to preheat their water, saving them large amounts of fuel with the “peace of mind” that they can crank up the burners at anytime. (see http://www.ausra.com/ as an example of this tech)
short of a fuel shortage im struggling to think of a reason you would lose mode of power generation. That said, there may be a cheaper/more effective way of doing things so for that reason i agree that we should spread our sponsorship of emerging technologies around.
See Meehl 2004 for a primary source, but I’ve also recently discussed a very similar issue.
Just curious: what degree in which field of science? I’ve described my research here, for quid pro quo.
I’ve talked about water vapor in depth, repeatedly. As I’ve explained, water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. It’s not dangerous because it doesn’t remain in the atmosphere long and isn’t well-mixed to the top of the atmosphere. That’s why legitimate peer-reviewed journal articles don’t “complain about the deleterious effects of water vapor in the atmosphere.”
First, this discovery isn’t related to abrupt climate change in any significant manner. Second, the goal of the legislation in the Senate is to jumpstart a new industrial revolution. No chainsaw involved.
Murderous hyperbole aside, this isn’t far from the mark. I’d say we have to make small tamper-proof nuclear reactors like SSTAR available to developing nations, but keep the reprocessing and enrichment technologies tightly restricted. Actinide poisoning of the fuel (to make weaponization more difficult than simply starting a clandestine enrichment program) is also probably a good idea.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Good luck with that. Three quarters of the green movement just put you on their hit list.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here.)
It doesn’t show a weakness in the process, it shows that computer power isn’t infinite. Redoing all the calculations without the benefit of PCA requires use of a large cluster for a long time. This was done (in point 5) and shows that any PCA errors were negligible. Scientists aren’t evil monsters engaged in a massive conspiracy. Really. We’re ordinary people, just like you.
I can’t get that graph to load (but my net connection has been flaky lately so it could be my fault.) At any rate, it sounds like a claim that MM have made: that sending “red noise” into the MBH98 program results in a hockeystick. The main problem is that the extracted trend explains very little variance relative to the trend extracted from real data. Here’s a 4-part primer on PCA to help people understand the basics.
I read some of it, and their complaints sound very similar to what other scientists go through when trying to get their research published. Peer-review is often an unpleasant process because it’s based on confrontation, but this is true for everyone. In this particular case, I think Nature was right to reject their article based on the mountain of evidence against their claims.
I’m referring to this quote: “I’ve now done some stuff with random series rather than the MBH proxy series. This has the advantage of allowing you to create as many proxies as you like. I’ll hive that off to a separate page: here. What that appears to demonstrate is that M&M are right about one thing: it often does lead to a ‘hockey stick’ shape in random data. But the problem is that the variance-explained of the PC1 done this way is tiny: the first eigenvalue is about 0.03. Whereas when you run it on real data the first eigenvalue is about 0.55 (back to 1000) or 0.38 (back to 1400). Which means the two problems are very different.”
In the other link, the eigenvalues are supposed to be accessible via a link, but I can’t get figure 1 to display. Again, don’t know if this is just me. Regardless, they’re saying much the same thing. The eigenvalues of the MM fit to red noise aren’t statistically significant.
But the real point is that the same answer emerges from more straight-forward analyses that don’t rely on PCA (which avoids all these issues.) In fact, as I’ve mentioned in my article, multiple independent analyses have been performed, all of which agree that the hockeystick shape is accurate.
Update: I probably should have quoted the relevant bit in the first link anyway:
There’s a debate about how much positive feedback exists, but the case for negative feedback is very weak. For example, events such as Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events are the best examples of abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record. These ancient events are worrying because they show the climate has a propensity to shift quickly from one state to another, given even small forcings. That requires positive feedback.
Also, the estimated magnitude of the Milankovitch cycles and other forcings are insufficient to account for the temperature variations observed in ice cores from Vostok and EPICA. This requires positive feedback. In fact, the estimates of positive feedback are too small to bridge the gap.
Just to be clear, when I say that the case for negative feedback is very weak, I don’t mean the long-term feedback that acts on slow, natural forcings. It’s clear that the climate must be relatively stable (i.e. negative feedback or at least a gain less than 1) with respect to slow, natural forcings otherwise the Earth wouldn’t have been hospitable for the evolution of life. But the rapid, unprecedented speed of CO2 increase is likely to involve a different mix of positive/negative feedback effects than the ones that stabilized the climate before our arrival.
Chapter 3 of the 4th IPCC report says temperatures in the last ~30 years have increased faster than at any point in the last ~1000 years, a rate which is steadily increasing. Meehl 2004 shows that the warming since ~1970 is primarily caused by anthropogenic emissions, and they used models that are consistent with a climate sensitivity having a maximum likelihood value of 2.9°C, with a 95% confidence that it’s less than 4.9°C but greater than 1.7°C. That’s troubling, because CO2 is increasing approximately 35x faster than at any point in the last half million years.
Proxy data are available, Wahl and Ammann have made their code available, the CMIP3 database makes model output public for researchers to perform comparisons, etc. I’ve previously complained about the (widespread) tendency of scientists to keep their data private to wring every last discovery out of it before making it public. It’s worrying, but not a problem unique to climatology. Nor are all climate scientists so hesitant to release their code and data. I publish all my code under the GPLv3, for instance.
At the 2008 AGU Fall Meeting, I found this poster by Maruyama et al. which claimed that most of the warming over the last 50 years is caused by natural oscillations, and that we should expect 0.5K of global cooling by 2020. I encountered Dr. Maruyama next to his poster and after a few confusing minutes began to suspect that he thinks the greenhouse effect is somehow saturated. So, as at the bottom of this comment, I began to point out that Venus’s properties seem to indicate that the greenhouse effect isn’t inherently limited. The first three words had barely left my mouth, however, when he abruptly spun around and walked away, leaving me standing alone next to his poster.
Oh, well.
The next hour was very interesting. I stood next to his poster and watched other scientists as they saw it for the first time. Their reactions (e.g. “His poster is just a random collection of incorrect climate myths circulating the internet!” and “His cooling prediction has no error bars!”) were very similar to my own.
I met Norman Rogers at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting next to his poster called “Inconsistencies and Fallacies: IPCC 20th Century Simulations, Multi-Model Ensembles and Climate Sensitivity”.
I asked him about the solar forcing part of his poster, where Svensmark 1998 is referenced without mentioning any of the issues that I’ve discussed starting in section 7(b) of the index. He quickly acknowledged the original study’s inconsistent smoothing problem, and I mentioned the other estimates of the magnitude of the effect of cosmic rays on the Earth’s climate.
Also, his paper says:
When we discussed this point, I tried to think of a good metric to estimate the relative magnitudes of the systematic and uncorrelated errors in GCMs. Coincidentally, the day before I’d attended a lecture regarding a related topic. The speaker rehashed a well-known fact: the multi-model ensemble has better skill than any of the individual models comprising the ensemble. This seems to indicate that a significant fraction of the errors are uncorrelated, so I said “Some. Some of the errors are uncorrelated, and the multi-model ensemble helps to reduce those. Some are systematic, and the ensemble doesn’t reduce those errors… which is exactly why the IPCC doesn’t use ‘many more’ models.”
Later, I confirmed that AR4 WG1 chapter 8 says: “Systematic biases have been found in most models’ simulation of the Southern Ocean. … The virtual salt flux method induces a systematic error in sea surface salinity prediction … In order to identify errors that are systematic across models, the mean of fields available in the MMD, referred to here as the ‘multi-model mean field’, will often be shown. … The extent to which these systematic model errors affect a model’s response to external perturbations is unknown … Because most AOGCMs have coarse resolution and large-scale systematic errors …”
Chapter 10 repeats: “… evidence for systematic errors in the formulations of radiative transfer used in AOGCMs. … However, some processes may be missing from the set of available models, and alternative parametrizations of other processes may share common systematic biases. Such limitations imply that distributions of future climate responses from ensemble simulations are themselves subject to uncertainty (Smith, 2002), and would be wider were uncertainty due to structural model errors accounted for. … members of a multi-model ensemble share common systematic errors (Lambert and Boer, 2001) … Giving more weight to the observational record but enlarging the uncertainty to allow for systematic error …”
It’s one thing if he believes that most errors are systematic. It’s quite another to claim that professional climatologists are naive enough to think that all the errors are uncorrelated. But I really don’t understand why he jumped from these misconceptions to the conclusion that multi-model ensembles are simply political ploys.
His paper also says:
Again, I asked him to explain this in person. He made the above points and stressed that “There’s only one Earth!”
Yes, there’s only one Earth. But its forcing history isn’t known perfectly, and each group independently tunes a handful of parameterizations controlling still-not-well-understood components of the climate, particularly the highly uncertain indirect effects aerosols have on cloud albedo (i.e. how strong a negative feedback X gigatons of aerosols constitutes). This isn’t a weakness of experimental protocol, because experiments should be as independent as possible.
All this means is that a climate model group which assumes a large concentration of aerosols in the mid-to-late 1900’s and/or tunes their aerosol forcing parameterization to yield a strong negative aerosol feedback will find that their GCM deduces a higher equilibrium climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 than a group which doesn’t. In other words, uncertainties about various indirect aerosol effects are a significant part of the uncertainty of the equilibrium climate sensitivity.
Yes, tuning is undesirable. No, it doesn’t mean climate modeling efforts are bizarre or dubious.
I wonder where he got the strange idea that this represents a fallacy or an inconsistency in the IPCC’s results. In fact, it’s neither. I guess I still don’t know the full story, because the IPCC’s ensemble graphs don’t seem dubious to me.
Finally, he stressed that the IPCC ensemble can’t account for the instrumentally recorded warming around the 1940s, which can also be seen here. Of course, the executive summary of AR4 WG1 chapter 3 says that “Arctic temperatures have high decadal variability. A slightly longer warm period, almost as warm as the present, was also observed from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, but appears to have had a different spatial distribution than the recent warming.” Chapter 11 says “Arctic decadal variability has been suggested as partly responsible for the large warming in the 1920s to 1940s (Bengtsson et al., 2004;Johannessen et al., 2004) followed by cooling until the 1960s.”
Tamino notes that “The biggest disagreement is just prior to and during world war II, when the method of measuring sea surface temperature changed, which may have caused a discrepancy in the observed temperature data.”
Also, here’s a simpler explanation of this issue.
Update: Hansen et al. 2010, Global surface temperature change, also discusses the World War II instrument artifact.
Tamino also examined the volcanic lull in the early 20th century.
Gavin Schmidt also addressed this issue.
Also at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting, I heard a fellow GRACE researcher mention that there was no need to establish acceleration of Greenland ice mass loss in order to correlate it to abrupt climate change. I disagreed, saying that a constant rate of mass loss could have been going on for centuries (which would contradict earlier in-situ studies, but GRACE alone couldn’t tell the difference). Accelerating mass loss, on the other hand, is more clearly a modern phenomenon.
At the 2010 AGU Fall Meeting, I saw Norm Rogers again at his poster titled “Why do anthropogenic global warming skeptics have poorer scientific credentials than their opponents?”. After struggling for several minutes to think of a productive question, I finally asked “Are there any scientific disciplines where your argument wouldn’t apply? For instance, biologists are routinely accused of suppressing anti-evolution research in order to keep creationists out of academia. What’s the difference between their argument and yours?”
Norm responded that this is a judgment call. Which I completely agree with.
After I said that I work with GRACE data, he said something to the effect of “That’s the satellite system which showed that Greenland was melting half as fast as previously believed.” I then quickly summarized my review of Dr. Wu’s paper.
After I mentioned that GRACE shows acceleration of the mass loss in Greenland, he said that the 9 year GRACE timeseries is too short. This is an understandable objection because (as I’ve repeatedly emphasized) trends shorter than ~20 years reveal short-term weather, not long-term climate. However, as I’ve obliquely mentioned, even if GRACE showed no acceleration from 2002-2010, previous in-situ studies found a smaller trend, so the combined datasets shows accelerating mass loss anyway.
It’s also important to remember that a ~20 year timespan is necessary to obtain statistically significant temperature trends because of the intrinsic noise in the temperature record. A quick glance at the GRACE timeseries for Greenland should make it clear that its signal-to-noise ratio is higher than the temperature record; I’m working on making this more quantitative.
We then revisited the “1940s warming isn’t understood” argument, and I stressed the same spatial distribution argument that I found in the IPCC AR4 WG1 last year, but unfortunately I didn’t have any graphs showing temperature anomaly versus latitude.
We agreed that terms like “denier” are unproductive, and he mentioned the existence of extremist environmental religions. I agreed that these movements are unsavory, but also noted that I hadn’t seen them at any of my department’s colloquia.
I was also pleasantly surprised to hear him say that the Svensmark cosmic ray argument has lots of problems.
I met David C. Smith at the 2010 AGU Fall Meeting in front of his poster titled “Line by Line Analysis of Carbon Dioxide Absorption for Predicting Global Warming”. He stressed that most CO2 lines are saturated and therefore increasing CO2 concentrations don’t matter for these lines. Infrared radiation from the ground at these frequencies is nearly completely absorbed in the first kilometer of the atmosphere. I said “Okay, then what? Does the energy absorbed by each CO2 molecule just stay there for the rest of time?”
He responded that the energy was then transferred to other molecules by collisions because the radiative lifetime of these lines is longer than the average time between collisions at standard pressure. I said “So, you’re saying that the percentage of absorbed radiation that’s re-emitted is literally 0.000000…”
After the sixth or seventh “zero” he said that perhaps 1 in 10^10 molecules re-emits the radiation it absorbed.
Then I looked carefully at his poster where he claims that doublingHis poster also said that tripling CO2 would result in 1.32C warming. That’s right- he gives three significant figures. Of course, this is an absurd underestimate which contradicts all modern observations, paleoclimate evidence and AOGCM results, but curiously it also seems to imply that he’s suggesting the climate response to CO2 is faster than logarithmic. In a world where doubling CO2 only raises the equilibrium global temperature by 0.26K (his abstract tries to lower it to as little as 0.13K), tripling CO2 would only raise it by 0.41K (or by 0.206K if we humor his abstract and choice of sigfigs). Perhaps one value includes feedbacks and the other doesn’t? CO2 would only result in 0.26C warming (at most), and asked where he derived the change in the “effective radiating level” due to this increase in CO2 concentration. He didn’t seem familiar with the term, so I summarized the idea.
He responded that he was 99.9% sure that this isn’t the way the greenhouse effect works. So I googled “effective radiating level”, printed out the first three pages of the first link, and handed them to him. He read it and said “Well, none of this matters because the radiation never gets up to that level anyway.”
I said “Notice that the first sentence defines the ERL as ‘The lowest level in the atmosphere from which infra red radiation is able, on average, to escape upwards to outer space without being reabsorbed.’ … so they agree with you about this basic point. But that’s the beginning of the story, not the end.”
P.L. Ward’s poster was nearby, and he participated in this discussion as well.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
I sent two emails to JPL scientists over the weekend that may be of interest:
1 – At AGU, the Heartland Institute will “add clarity” to deep ocean heat storage
2 – At AGU, David Smith will disprove ~80% of CO2’s radiative forcing
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1 – At AGU, the Heartland Institute will “add clarity” to deep ocean heat storage
Everyone,
At this December’s AGU, Heartland Institute senior policy advisor Norman Rogers hopes to “add clarity” to the question of deep ocean heat storage from 700m to 2000m. Once again, his lengthy abstract (below) is available worldwide, and given credibility by association with AGU.
Norm seems to be preparing the next contrarian talking point, that deep ocean warming is unrelated to the TOA energy imbalance. I’m not an oceanographer, but I’m under the impression (from Tony Song’s GRACE talk, Von Schuckmann et al. 2009, 2011, Levitus et al. 2012, etc.) that deep (>700m) ocean heat content does seem to be increasing. I’m also skeptical that his vague (and mistaken?) references to up/downwelling constitute a proximate cause of this warming that’s actually unrelated to the TOA energy imbalance.
Based on our previous encounters, I seriously doubt Norm intends to add clarity. I’m going to debunk him again, but many of you are far more expert than me, especially on this topic. Does anyone have tips/references to help me prepare for this encounter?
Thanks,
Bryan
P.S. In what seems like an attempt to weaponize irony, Norm also submitted a poster to the “Countering Denial and Manufactured Doubt of 21st Century Science II” Poster session.
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A23A. A23A. Atmospheric Sciences General Contributions: Atmospheric Dynamics, Radiation, and Cloud Properties Posters
TITLE: Is Ocean Heat Storage Presently Knowable?
AUTHORS (FIRST NAME, LAST NAME): Norman L Rogers1, 2
INSTITUTIONS (ALL): 1. Independent Scholar, Miami, FL, United States.
2. Heartland Institute, Chicago, IL, United States.
ABSTRACT BODY: Ocean heat storage plays a key role in predictions of global warming. The oceans’ great thermal inertia moderates any radiative energy imbalance.
A number of authors have suggested that most ocean heat storage takes place in the upper 700 meters. With the deployment of the Argo system in 2003 and the subsequent failure to detect the expected ocean warming investigators started to look deeper, down to 2000 meters.
A mostly ignored problem with using ocean heat below the tropical/ temperate thermocline to measure current energy imbalances is that, as revealed by tracer studies, below thermocline water is old water that has not been in good thermal communication with the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The thermocline can be thought of as a collision between the mixed layer and very old and cold water that is rising from the abyss in an elevator-like fashion, at a rate that is uncertain but perhaps a few meters per year. The elevator is driven by dense water that, in the polar regions sinks into the abyss. A slow downward flow of heat from vertical mixing, driven by currents and tides, warms the bottom water, thus making room for new, denser, bottom water.
It is helpful, as a thinking aid, to divide the Earth into the surface realm, consisting of the atmosphere and upper layer of the oceans and a second realm consisting of the deep ocean. The deep ocean may as well be in outer space since it is thermally isolated from the Earth’s climate except for a very slow and presumed constant seepage of heat. Between the two realms are transition regions, the polar sinking regions and the thermocline upwelling regions. Cold water sinking warms the surface because we have removed water colder than the Earth’s average temperature of 15 C from the surface realm. Upwelling cools the surface because we add water colder than the average temperature to the surface realm. The sinking and upwelling flows are equal but variable. If we draw a line at 2000 meters we can hope that the upwelling mainly consists of water riding the “elevator” driven by polar sinking, 2000 meters being mostly below vertical circulations such as coastal upwelling. A complication is that both deep upwelling and downwelling is thought to take place in Antarctica. We may be able to quantify the heat flow through 2000 meters as the combined effect of upward mass transfer of cold water less a smaller, and fairly constant, downward flow of heat due to mixing. If the deep ocean is in a steady state there are 3 components to the heat flow: sinking water near 0 degrees, rising water at 2000 meters near 2 degrees, and the (nearly constant) slow downward, mixing-driven heat flow. If this works (i.e.is not fatally oversimplified), then variation of heat flow into or out of the deep ocean is mainly due the 2 degree difference, between sinking water, and rising water at 2000 meters, times the heat capacity of the rising or sinking mass of water. If the sinking circulation is 30 Sv the heat flow proportional to the circulation amounts to about 1/2 watt over the Earth’s surface.
If the ocean is warming in the region of 700-2000 meters the proximate cause may be a slackening of the overturning circulation accompanied by a downward drift of the thermocline, not warming of the atmosphere.
I will try to work through this puzzle with the hope of adding clarity.
KEYWORDS: [3015] MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS / Heat flow, [0312] ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Air/sea constituent fluxes, [1626] GLOBAL CHANGE / Global climate models, [4283] OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL / Water masses.
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2 – At AGU, David Smith will disprove ~80% of CO2’s radiative forcing
Everyone,
At this December’s AGU, David Smith will present his second poster challenging the basic atmospheric physics of the greenhouse effect (below, juicy parts bolded). Once again, his claims are given credibility by the AGU. I debunked his first poster in 2010.
In 2010, he calculated that doubling CO2 only leads to a bare no-feedbacks equilibrium temperature rise of 0.26C, which is ~4 times less than the mainstream value of ~1C. I found that he hadn’t accounted for the rise of the effective radiating level as CO2 doubles, which makes it radiate less power because higher=colder in the troposphere.
In other words, his groundbreaking study of the greenhouse effect hadn’t accounted for the greenhouse effect.
Now he’s comparing the IPCC’s 3.7 W/m^2 radiative forcing per doubled CO2 to his value of 1.1 W/m^2. Once again, his value is ~4 times lower than the mainstream’s. He blames this discrepancy on the IPCC not using line-by-line calculations, seemingly ignoring statements like this one:
Collins et al. (2006) performed a comparison of five detailed line-by-line models and 20 GCM radiation schemes. The spread of line-by-line model results were consistent with the ±10% uncertainty estimate for the LLGHG RFs adopted in Ramaswamy et al. (2001) … [IPCC 2007 WG1, Ch. 2.3]
But what really startled me were these two sentences from David Smith’s abstract:
The dependence of the absorption and line width of each transition as a function of altitude is accounted for.
Based on our previous conversation, I think this means that he’s accounting for pressure broadening at altitude.
The temperature dependence of the absorption with altitude is not and an evaluation of this error is given.
Seems like he’s still not accounting for the greenhouse effect. I’d bet that his evaluation of this error will be that it’s too small to worry about.
I’m not an atmospheric physicist, and don’t know how to contact any. Can satellite observations place error bars on radiative forcing that are tight enough to distinguish 3.7 W/m^2 from Smith’s 1.1 W/m^2?
—————————–
A21D. A21D.* Atmospheric Feedbacks and Climate Change: Observations, Theory, and Modeling II Posters
TITLE: Line by Line CO2 Absorption in the Atmosphere for Input Data to Calculate Global Warming,
David C. Smith, DCS Lasers & Optics LLC, Old Saybrook CT 06475
AUTHORS (FIRST NAME, LAST NAME): David C Smith1
INSTITUTIONS (ALL): 1. DCS Lasers & Optics LLC, Old Saybrook, CT, United States.
ABSTRACT BODY: Compter modeling of global climate change require an input (asssumption) of the forcing function for CO2 absorption. All codes use a long term forcing function of ~ 4 W/M2. (IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers. In:Climate Change 2007. The Physical Sciences Basis.Contributions of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, Cambridge U. Press N.Y.)..This is based on a band model of the CO2 rotational/vibrational absorption where a band of absorption averages over all the rotational levels of the vibration transition. (Ramananathan,V.,et al, J. of Geophysical Research,Vol 84 C8,p4949,Aug.1979).. The model takes into account the line width,the spacing between lines and identifies 10 CO2 bands.. This approach neglects the possibility that the peak absorption transitions in a band can “use up” all of the earths IR radiation at that wavelength and does not contribute to global warming no matter how much the CO2 is increased. The lines in the wings of a band increase their absorption as the CO2 is increased. However, the lines that are lost are the strong absorbers and those that are added are the weaker absorption lines. When a band begins to use up the IR then the net result of increasing the atmospheric CO2 is a decrease in the absorption change. This presentation calculates the absorption of each line individualy using the Behr’s Law Approach. The dependence of the absorption and line width of each transition as a function of altitude is accounted for. The temperature dependence of the absorption with altitude is not and an evaluation of this error is given. For doubling CO2 from 320ppm to 640 ppm, the calculation gives a forcing function of 1.1 W/M2. The results show the importance of using individual lines to calculate the CO2 contribution to global warming, We can speculate on the imact and anticipate a computer code calculation of a factor of 4 less global warming than the published results.
KEYWORDS: [1600] GLOBAL CHANGE, [0399] ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / General or miscellaneous.
I didn’t get to Norman Rogers’ posters.
The good news is that David C. Smith’s poster at the AGU didn’t reduce the no-feedbacks radiative forcing of doubled CO2 from the IPCC’s ~4 W/m^2 to 1 W/m^2 as his abstract claimed. When I asked about this change, he said that he’d fixed a mistake in his calculation, which now actually suggests a forcing of ~5 w/m2, but he said that further improvements would reduce this value by ~25%. I replied that I was impressed, because admitting mistakes is what distinguishes scientists from crackpots.
I handed him a printout of the Collins et al. 2006 abstract, noting that it was cited by the 2007 IPCC report and shows that physicists have compared GCM radiation schemes to line-by-line calculations.
The bad news is that he still hasn’t acknowledged that raising the effective radiating level is how doubling CO2 leads to this radiative forcing. I repeated the same explanation I gave him in 2010 and later expanded. Once again, he responded that this isn’t how the greenhouse effect works, and said we could agree to disagree. I replied: “With all due respect, you’re not just disagreeing with me. You’re disagreeing with the overwhelming majority of scientific research performed over the last century.”
The worse news is that his poster:
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from here.)
This sounds similar to the arguments presented in a 2007 paper that’s widely considered to be some kind of joke. Update: More relevant discussion.
Perhaps you mean that different substances have different heat capacities. That’s only a problem if you want to determine the equilibrium temperature, and even that’s just a weighted average. But even an unweighted average improves the signal-to-noise ratio of temperature measurements, which is why climatologists routinely speak of global mean temperatures.
And to be really pedantic, “heat content” isn’t physically meaningful either. Heat is a type of energy transfer across a thermodynamic system boundary. Systems don’t store heat, they store internal energy, which is also measured in Joules but can be transferred as heat or work. (Yes, this distinction is irrelevant. That’s my point.)
I looked around for Pielke’s work mentioning heat content and found this. Is that a good reference? I agree that internal energy of the atmosphere is a more robust and useful variable than temperature, but I’d go one step further. That is, a much more useful variable would be the internal energy of the atmosphere and ocean combined. That would eliminate the spurious temperature swings associated with ENSO events that seem to mislead many people. This heat transfer between the atmosphere and oceans wouldn’t distort such a metric.
Update: As far as I can tell, many climate scientists agree that in theory ocean heat content is a better diagnostic of climate change. However, the pragmatic issues of limited and unreliable data mentioned in that ENSO link makes surface temperatures more useful in actual practice (until Argo records a long enough time series.)
Actually, I’m a physicist too. Never was that good at chemistry. I still think heat is a form of energy transfer, not a state variable. But I’ll drop this argument because (like your point) it doesn’t seem particularly interesting or relevant.
The internal energy of the atmosphere is a weighted mean of temperatures, where the weightings reflect differing heat capacities. A global average temperature cannot be used to determine the internal energy of the atmosphere because it isn’t properly weighted (as I believe you’re saying.) But as I’ve said, even an unweighted average improves the signal-to-noise ratio of temperature trends. More measurements improve the statistics in the same way multi-model ensembles improve climate predictions compared to single-model runs. The global temperature isn’t intended as a formal variable, it’s simply an easy-to-measure diagnostic of the global climate.
Here are links to the source code for many GCMs. Please name the model which doesn’t conserve energy. If you’re feeling generous, it would also be nice to know how to reproduce this (obviously serious!) problem.
Last year, you said something similar:
I’m baffled by these statements. Energy conservation is a fundamental law of the universe, but floating point calculations are necessarily imprecise. Correcting for roundoff errors that affect energy conservation in every time step seems like good programming practice.
Also, there are other reasons to apply conservation laws “after the fact.” Several years ago I studied the gravitational effects of shifting precipitation patterns. The GRACE satellites measure the global gravity field every month, which changes because of heavy rainfall, droughts, etc. Comparing the GRACE monthly gravity field to the gravity field implied by hydrology models like GLDAS revealed interesting discrepencies like a consistent phase lead in the GLDAS model which we hypothesized was due to a flawed river model.
But that was only possible because I “added mass conservation by hand as a correction in each time step.” You see, GLDAS only provides gridded water content on land. The total mass of water obtained by summing over the globe each month isn’t constant in time. Of course, this just shows that the water is being swapped between the land and the oceans. So I wrote a short script to add a spatially uniform layer of water to the ocean each month that forced the total amount of water on Earth to be constant. (Obviously this was only a first order estimate because I neglected water vapor and oceanic circulation patterns which violate the assumption of spatial uniformity.)
Incidentally, my confidence in GCMs is drawn primarily from their demonstrated skill in completely different validation techniques. I’m not surprised or concerned that tuning parameterizations simplify microphysics, perhaps to the extent of oversimplifying them. As my comments in that linked conversation show, I do consider such imperfect approximations to be good reason not to consider GCMs sophisticated enough to produce regional climate predictions. But their track record with global averages seems impressive.
I’m also eager to learn what you meant by “unphysical boundary conditions at the ocean surface.”
Update: Rei’s reply is also interesting:
Good question. Since climate is an average over ~20 years, a sustained 20 year trend below the IPCC AR4 WG1 model ensemble’s 95% confidence level would be powerful evidence. Note that the model output depends on forcing inputs, so if the sun suddenly got dimmer that would push temperatures and the models down. As would a reduction in emissions or volcanic activity, etc.
I’d also like to see some kind of plausible argument as to how it’s possible for CO2 levels to rise but not increase temperatures. For instance, to the best of my knowledge no one’s ever made a model that matches observed temperatures and forcings in the 20th century but doesn’t predict that increasing CO2 makes the climate hotter. That’s not terribly surprising, because the physics of the greenhouse effect have been established for decades.
Update: In 2013, I linked this comment and noted that a more complete answer would be that all these paleoclimate studies would have to be independently wrong.
A good reference regarding solar variability is section 2.7.1 on pages 188-193 of chapter 2 in the IPCC AR4 WG1 report. “Remarkably invariant” wouldn’t be my first choice of words. Solar output varies cyclically, mainly at an 11 year cycle. But the satellite fleet hasn’t detected a long term trend in solar output over the past ~40 years to match the surface temperature trend over that timespan.
Again, it’s better to think about the heat content of the ocean+troposphere system. That eliminates the spurious ENSO heat redistributions which seem to confuse so many nonscientists. Plus, the internal energy of the Earth certainly includes the heat of fusion of melting glaciers and sea ice, so I don’t agree that the Earth’s heat budget has been neutral over the past 15 years.
Wow! If climate models have the accuracy you’re claiming they do, why do climatologists bother to take initial condition ensembles? Is it because they enjoy increasing the run time on expensive supercomputers by an order of magnitude?
GCMs with better skill than those available to modern science will eventually be able to make predictions that require less temporal averaging. But right now I’d say his figure is on the low side; climate is only meaningful when discussing averages over ~20 years.
Update:
As opposed to those arrogant bastards known as climate “scientists”, who are engaged in massive fraud based on their “models” which are much worse than economic models. Of course, economic models deal with human behavior, thus involving free will. Climate models deal with fundamental thermodynamics and radiative physics, which don’t directly involve free will, and are therefore easier to construct and validate. But forget that! Climate models are bullshit! Climatologists are incompetent!
Chris Burke also answered this point.
I haven’t looked at the current report, although it looks at first glance like they have used some fairly strong, robust, estimators, which is good. It is extremely unfortunate that the reporting around it is the typical sensationalist nonsense that has done so much to discredit anyone with concerns about climate change. In a year or two when someone finds an error in the data and it turns out that the past ten years WEREN’T “the warmest on record” we’ll inevitably treated by another round of self-serving propoganda from the same smug bastards who spent years promoting 1998 as THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD as if that was proof the world was ending, and then said, “well, it really isn’t all that important” when the claim turned out to be false.
No serious Bayesian would accpet that A can vastly increase the plausibility of B, but !A does not decrease the plausibility of B one little bit.
However, your claim that most of the models used in climate research are true to first principles is false. I am a computational physicist, and every GCM I have looked at has non-physical aspects that violate well-established physical principles, most worriesomely conservation of energy. For a model that is nohting but a long-term integration of a physical system to violate conservation of energy is extremely problematic, and yet I have seen no discussion anywhere that looks at how this and other unphysical assumptions affect the model results.
This is unusual: in the area of radition transport physics, for example, there are a variety of relatively standard computational models that are used, with minor variants. Despite the tiny size of the community compared to climate science, there are a significant number of papers exploring nothing but the effects of various unphysical aspects of the models.
If you could point me to anything similar for any major GCM I would be most greatful. The publications I have seen are all over-views of the model, detailing the assumptions but not donig anything to explore their effects.
For the record: I think dumping tonnes of shit into the atmosphere is a bad idea, and strongly support cap and trade on the basis of how well it worked for sulphur emmissions in the ’90’s; I think ocean temperatures are by far the most compelling evidence for global climate change; I think our understanding of the science is inadequate to use as a basis for public policy; I think people who pass from “the science is established” to “we must do XYZ to fix things” are letting their emotional concern for the possible consquences of the science and one particular interpretation of the results get in the way of their objectivity and contribute more noise than value to the debate.
What are you talking about? 1998 (an incredibly intense El Nino year) was the hottest year on record until 2005, which passed it on two of the three major climate datasets. There was a minor GISS revision based on a discontinuity related to data from NOAA, but it was very small, and applied only to the US. It had essentially no change on the global record. However, 1998 ceased to be the hottest year on record *for the US* (but again, only by a very small amount, as it was very close to 1934 to begin with). But since when is the US the world? The US only makes up a couple percent of the planet’s surface area.
With only a couple exceptions, nothing is done from a purely empirical basis (certain aspects of clouds being the big empirical example; clouds are very difficult to model, and make up most of the margin of error in the models). Some things have to be handled using sub-grid level approximations, like some turbulence effects, but those are readily calculated independently, as well as being empirically verifiable. Violations of conservation of energy? Please, by all means, show me a single peer-reviewed paper that supports that assertion. That’s a major charge and these models have been out for a very long time. Certainly *someone* has passed peer-review if it’s true, ne?
I can’t find the specific document I was thinking of, which was a detailed technical report on a particular GCM by the people who wrote it, but if you dig into the details of any GCM description you will find statements like this: “In this process, salinity is added to the newly formed snow-ice to guarantee the salt conservation. It is more physically reasonable to reduce the salinity of sea ice, but such a treatment requires to deal with the sea ice salinity as a prognostic variable.”
That one happens to deal with non-conservation of salinity, but the problem and the procedure in the same in all cases: the models do not strictly conserve some important quantity, and is therefore “fixed up” by performing some ad hoc adjustment. This is unphysical, and anyone who has ever done a long-term integration of any model describing any physical system that can be actually tested in the lab knows that such ad hoc corrections almost always produce significantly unphysical behaviour in the results.
I’ll hasten to say that model authors are up-front about this stuff: the GCM’s I’ve looked at have been well-described. But they have also all been unphysical in one respect or another, from artificially fixed boundary conditions to non-conservation of energy (which was then “fixed up” by adjusting air temperatures) and that is a serious problem for the predictive power of their long-term integrations.
You seem to assume that climate models are central to our understanding of the climate’s response to rising CO2 levels. In reality, they’re just methods of reducing the error bars on (for instance) modern estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity. Compared to pre-computer estimates like Hulburt’s 1931 estimate of 4C per doubled CO2, computer models have actually reduced the maximum likelihood value to ~3C. They’re also backed up by multiple independent experimental constraints on the climate sensitivity, in contexts where I doubt the problems you’ve been talking about are relevant.
I’m unaware of any model in computational physics (except perhaps lattice QCD?) which can claim to be completely “physical” in the sense that you seem to want. My own research which inverts gravity to solve for ocean tide heights assumes a constant density of water because GRACE measurements are due to changes in mass, not height directly. Not only do I ignore local seasonal fluctuations in temperature (which affects density), I also ignore local seasonal fluctuations in salinity due to calving glaciers (which also affects density).
Of course, my software is an empirical inversion of data rather than a dynamical physical model like a GCM. But in one sense my reason for neglecting salinity fluctuations (and noting it clearly in the upcoming JGR paper) is probably similar; the “unphysicality” is examined and the error estimated. In my case the error introduced by any reasonable density fluctuation is well beneath the noise floor for my desired observable. In a GCM, salinity likely has a negligible effect on global mean temperature which doesn’t justify using it as a prognosticating variable. That would increase the degrees of freedom of the model and thus make it harder to evaluate using, say, an F-test. Any serious effects of any of these examples of empirical “tuning” should have shown up in comparisons of the models to instrumental and proxy records of forcings and temperature. More likely, they play a minor role in the size of the established error bars.
In a completely different sense, long-term integrations of weather models certainly are thrown off by small errors. The “skill” of a weather prediction does indeed fall off exponentially with time because of oversimplified microphysics in addition to errors in measurements of the initial conditions. But the whole point of taking an initial condition ensemble is to average away this noise. By running dozens of simulations and changing the initial conditions each time, it becomes obvious that even though the weather noise is different, the extrema stay in the same “corridor” which we call the climate. The skill of a climate prediction doesn’t fall off exponentially with time because the climate is a boundary condition problem, not an initial condition problem. Instead, the skill of a climate prediction depends primarily on taking a long enough temporal average (in addition to specifying the forcings).
For instance, a credible climate prediction would be “If natural forcings remain within established variances and human emissions of CO2 continue to rise at specified rate X, then the global temperature averaged from 2030-2050 will be higher than the equivalent average from 1990-2010.
On the other hand, a bogus climate prediction would be “The global temperature in 2030 will be higher than in 2010.” That’s bogus primarily because models have precisely the flaws you’re talking about, in addition to our insufficient understanding of ENSO, PDO, NAO, etc. turbulent heat transfer phenomena, flaws in projections of human and natural forcings, flaws in our understanding of “slow” feedback mechanisms, flaws in models of cloud formation, not to mention our instruments’ finite time series, spatial coverage, spatial/temporal density and limited accuracy.
Update: The IPCC explains that simple climate models complement intermediate-level EMICs and full-blown AOGCMs. Simple climate models can help to verify that certain parameters are independent of methodology; the resulting diversity of models likely contributes to the fact that the ensemble RMS error is lower than the RMS error of any particular model in the ensemble.
Also, chapter 8 says: “Most AOGCMs no longer use flux adjustments, which were previously required to maintain a stable climate. … Development of the oceanic component of AOGCMs has continued. Resolution has increased and models have generally abandoned the ‘rigid lid’ treatment of the ocean surface. New physical parametrizations and numerics include true freshwater fluxes, improved river and estuary mixing schemes and the use of positive definite advection schemes. Adiabatic isopycnal mixing schemes are now widely used. Some of these improvements have led to a reduction in the uncertainty associated with the use of less sophisticated parametrizations (e.g., virtual salt flux). … An explicit representation of the sea surface height is being used in many models, and real freshwater flux is used to force those models instead of a ‘virtual’ salt flux. The virtual salt flux method induces a systematic error in sea surface salinity prediction and causes a serious problem at large river basin mouths (Hasumi, 2002a,b; Griffies, 2004).”
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Update: … and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here.)
Qualitatively, what you’d expect from climate change is more precipitation (because there’s more evaporation) and therefore thickening at high elevations where the snow stays cold, while lower warmer regions flow faster or even melt.
Exactly. I’ve described my research into Greenland’s ice sheets. My most recent estimates show that Greenland as a whole is losing ~100 Gtons of ice every year, but my advisor believes my estimate is too low by a factor of 2. As you say, northern Greenland is gaining mass, but southestern Greenland is losing much more mass.
While I’m not a climatologist (I tend towards quantum physics), I’m not sure you can make that assertion. The formula for evaporation has myriad factors, including but not limited to heat. (The actual formula is W = [A + (B)(V)](Pw – Pa)/Hv). It was stated in a BBC Horizon documentary entitled Global Dimming that the more important factor was the amount of sunlight that hits the water, rather than temperature. In addition, the Horizon episode explains that there is both an observed decrease in evaporation and rainfall based on fine particulate matter in the atmosphere.
Higher average global temperatures imply higher upper ocean temperatures, which imply a higher water vapor pressure. Thus more water will evaporate into the atmosphere. Yes, Roderick 2007 showed that wind speed has a stronger effect on the evaporation rate than changes in temperature, but I doubt that affects the expected theoretical equilibrium vapor pressure from basic thermodynamics. When that more humid air is carried across a tall mountain range, its temperature decreases and the water precipitates.
While searching for an elevation map of Greenland I came across a map showing rates of surface-elevation change. It’s tangental to my specific point, but I found it interesting nonetheless. I don’t have access to recent climate data indicating evaporation rates, rainfall, or quantity of particulate matter in the atmosphere, but in the Horizon episode they asserted that there was a decrease in rainfall because extra particulate matter in the atmosphere created more water droplets that — in aggregate — were too small to form rain. Even if warmer temperatures were to increase evaporation, there are other factors involved in the amount of rainfall that would result from increased evaporation. The evidence presented thus far is a decrease in rainfall, not an increase. But, as I said, I don’t have access to the raw data required to prove that definitively either way.
I saw the same Horizon documentary. Although sensationalist, it did explain Global Dimming pretty well. But at the same time, regulations of CFCs and similar chemicals have been fairly effective, and their lifetimes in the atmosphere are generally measured in months. So that particular problem has waned, I think. But I agree, whatever effect it would’ve had on rainfall would’ve opposed the greater precipitation expected from global warming.
I admit that I haven’t watched the Horizon episode in over a year, even though I have it in my Documentaries directory. At the time, though, I did describe it to a friend as “alarming”, so I would probably agree with the sensationalist tag. I don’t recall, though, whether they were blaming the particulates on CFCs, or just generic pollution. I do recall that they showed the massive pollution cloud coming out of China.
I read in another of your posts that you are an advocate of nuclear power. I wholeheartedly support that position and wish you luck in banging that drum. I vacillate on whether climate change is real (and if it is real, that the effects are a net negative to humanity), but I think regardless it is a net positive to have more and cheaper sources of energy.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from an article regarding thinning of polar ice.
Which… is sort of what healthy glaciers do. Thick, healthy glaciers flow quickly due to the pressure they exert on the deeper portions, giving the lower ice under pressure more plasticity. This could be construed as abnormally healthy glacial activity, but IANAAG (i am not an artic geologist).
You’re right. Glaciers melt all the time for reasons unconnected to emissions of fossil fuels. However, the current warming is atypical in many respects (which I’ve linked in another comment in this article.) Glacier melt isn’t- by itself- proof of the anthropogenic origin of abrupt climate change.
Double check your terminology there. The article specifically states glacier flow, not glacier melt in Antarctica. Glacier flow only occurs when you have lots of extra ice pushing more ice down the slope. Flow != Melt! It’s way, way too cold in Antarctica for glaciers to melt anywhere on the actual landmass. Thinning ice shelf in this case is specifically due to improved glacial flow, pushing more ice out to where it can melt – in the sea.
Okay, that sounds reasonable. Thanks for the correction. I’ve heard of research showing positive feedback effects from melting glaciers lubricating the slide of the glacier into the ocean, though. Does this only happen in glaciers in more temperate regions than Greenland?
Update: Glacier thinning on the Greenland coast is due to those glaciers calving and melting. Antarctic glacier thinning is almost completely due to calving because it’s so much colder there than in Greenland. Because my research centers around Greenland, I previously used the terms melting and thinning somewhat sloppily. Sorry for any confusion that caused.
The article is about measurements of glacial thinning which have been explained as due to increasing flow of the glaciers. I don’t see how accumulations of ice pushing more ice down the slopes could cause the thinning. Faster flowing ice would have less time to thin from melting by sea water, and, contradictory to other observations, would imply more area of ice on the water. Also, the thinning was observed over land.
Even without extra ice accumulating, glaciers can speed up due to changes in friction between the ice and the ground, such as would be caused by the presence of meltwater. It can get warm enough, especially Greenland, for melting to occur, at least at low elevations in the summer or at the base of the glacier under the insulating layer of snow and ice. And to the extent warming sea temperatures breaks up the sea ice, there is less holding back the glaciers, so they can accelerate.
Part of the increase in the rate of flow is due to the calving of ice-sheets off from around the edge of the glacier. This removes some resistance to the flow at the downhill end of the stream.
I don’t know how generally significant this is, but it’s been measured recently when large ice-sheets have broken away from Antarctica.
At the 2009 AGU fall meeting, I met a glaciologist next to her poster about glacier feedback effects. She pointed out that many locations along the Greenland coast have daily average temperatures that are above freezing in the summer, and reminded me that pressure melting would occur at the bottom of the glacier. Her poster summarized a few additional feedback effects having to do with the lapse rate and shadows caused by topography (which are more relevant to inland glaciers than coastal glaciers.)
At the 2010 UNAVCO conference, Meredith Nettles gave a fascinating presentation on “Geodetic and Seismic Observations of Variations in Glacier Flow on Multiple Time Scales”.
Her papers show that glacial earthquakes in Greenland have dramatically increased in frequency recently, are spatially correlated with large outlet glaciers, and temporally correlated with calving events, increases in the speed of glacier flow, and local tsunamis caused by the calving.
Steve Nerem showed that Helheim glacier in Greenland is accelerating based on GPS, imaging and InSAR. He notes that the IPCC AR4 WG1 included a caveat excluding “rapid ice events” and that several more recent papers include 1m of sea level rise by 2100 within their error bars (1.4 +- ?).
Tim Dixon referenced Wouters 2008 showing accelerating mass loss in Greenland, and showed correlation with independent estimates that subtract calving/meltwater flux from snowfall accumulation.
Zwally, Larson et al. wrote a paper on the role of sub-glacier lubrication on ice-sheet flow acceleration, as did Bell.
A Joughin 2000 Science paper shows melting and glacier speed aren’t well correlated, so lubrication is less important than ocean temperatures. Is this the paper in question?
Also, Abbas Khan reminded me that geothermal heat would contribute to melting at the base of glaciers.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from the links attached to the posters’s names. They were written in response to an article describing research using ICESat which shows “surprising, extensive thinning in Antarctica, affecting the ice sheet far inland.”)
As far as I understand it, Antarctica as a whole is warming more quickly than climatologists expected. Antarctica should be warming more slowly mainly because currently most of the land mass is in the northern hemisphere. The fact that Antarctica is warming at all is a little troubling.
We are literally being served half truths. Or is less than half truths. Most of Antarctica gets colder, some of it gets warmer. By reporting on the parts that get warmer, media tries to sell disasters just because it sells better than the whole truth and nothing but the truth. West Antarctica has according to climatologists always behaved differently from the rest of Antarctica.
Climatology news is starting too resemble a boxing match where only the strikes delivered by one of the boxers are being reported.
It is perfectly legitimate to report mostly on the parts of Antarctica that get warmer. That’s because the fast-warming part of Antarctica is the part which is holding back the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a major potential contributor to sea level rise. By contrast, the parts that are getting cooler are mostly the interior of the continent, which can have no effect on sea level. As you say, climatologists understand that the two parts of Antarctica behave differently, so it’s not news that they do so. What is news is how that’s going to effect us, which mostly has to do with impacts on sea level.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Antarctica as a whole isn’t warming unless you deal in dubious statistical models. The west Antarctica peninsula has been warming though, and that’s where the hyperbole comes from.
That has likely more to do with natural shifting of the polar current around Antarctica than anything else. Changes in current location affects weather at the peninsula without affecting the rest of the continent.
I see very little reason to suspect that the Steig et al. 2009 study was wrong to say: “… significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 °C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive.”
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
Okay, yes. Technically I agree. The political/economic ramifications of our response to climate change aren’t completely within the domain of physical science, so they’re not facts in the way that the anthropogenic origin of abrupt climate change is a fact. For example, our technology could suddenly jump forward very quickly, rendering adaptation very simple and cheap.
But we’re talking about the future of the human race here. Let’s choose the safest option, and try to avoid the worst effects by moving from coal power to modern nuclear power. As technology advances, solar, wind, tidal and geothermal power can play an increasing role. We’ve stagnated and become complacent in a world powered by cheap oil; another industrial revolution is long overdue.
The last article I read in Science compared model prediction of sea level rise, and found that observations showed the sea levels rising even faster than the models predicted. Perhaps this was just short-term weather, though: more recent measurements may indicate agreement with the models.
Yes, 2008 and 2009 had slightly larger ice extent minima than 2007. But the point is that climate models had previously predicted larger ice extent minima than were observed in 2007. So the last several years tend to confirm that the record low in 2007 was due to short-term weather variability rather than a flaw in the climate models.
Ask, and you shall receive. No serious scientist is just “guessing” that the decline has been constant, and no climate model that I’m aware of makes that prediction. Short term variability is expected, but the data show a clear downward trend over the last 30 years.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here. In that link, Tontoman confuses weather and climate, implies that Al Gore is a climate modeler, lectures about water vapor being the most abundant greenhouse gas and that natural activity is the largest cause of CO2 emissions. Tontoman also criticizes the IPCC for not performing original research and says many scientists are skeptical of global warming. After I tried to point out that natural sources are balanced, Tontoman told me to reread the article I cited. Tontoman also says it’s not worth trying to “fix” warming because it’s all cyclical and humans are too tiny to matter, then implies that humanity’s “extra” CO2 is just a few tons rather than a few gigatons every year and increasing, and points out that CO2 is a trace gas and says that “cap and trade” is a truly dangerous idea.)
Here is a speech given by the late Michael Crichton, (who wrote Jurassic Park and other novels and screenplays, and who also graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University.) Here he criticises the papers done by IPCC and debunks other global warning myths.
Wow, I feel dumb for congratulating you about recognizing the need for reading peer-reviewed journal articles. You do realize that you’re listening to a science fiction author with a lot of irrelevant experience rather than reading the peer-reviewed journals, right? And, no, reading a novel with footnotes doesn’t count as reading a scientific journal.
(Ed. note: JLF65 also responded to one of my posts, suggesting that the AAAS “scientists” who were polled regarding global warming are actually just functionally illiterate janitors.)
I see you and the AC below will ignore scientists/doctors who write SciFi when their opinion goes against your own. That’s no reason to disclaim them as mere “science fiction authors”, as if their degrees and teaching positions are somehow negated by their writing of fiction. Do you also decry Benford and Sagan? They too are/were also mere “science fiction authors” as you like to put it. Obviously that makes them quacks who should be discounted. :P
The point is that his experience isn’t as a climatologist. He’s a medical doctor who hasn’t published a single solitary peer-reviewed article on climate science. You’ve just seen two links (Ed. note: one was from me, the other was from a stranger below.) detailing the sloppy scholarship in his novel. I’m completely uninterested in the scientific opinions of medical doctors and politicians like Al Gore. Just like I’m uninterested in receiving medical advice from a climatologist. All I’m interested in is evidence, presented in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Well Crichton he is a Scientist and also a Medical Doctor and Science Fiction writer who happened to write a fiction book called “State of Fear”. However, he also a scientist who gave a factual speech to National Press Club that I linked in the other message as well. If you think we should discount Crichton, then perhaps we should debunk the “global warming” movement because one of its leaders, Al Gore, also is a politician whose highest degree is Bachelor of Arts in Government.
This word you’re using: “factual.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also, I’ve been emphatically trying to convince you to focus on evidence in peer-reviewed journal articles. I’ve even specifically asked people to ignore nonscientists like Al Gore.
A recent conversation reminded me of Crichton’s underendowed child rapist in Next.
Thinkprogress’s link to Michael Crowley’s original article doesn’t work. Needless to say, it doesn’t seem proportional to Crichton’s response.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from a conversation about speculation that cosmic rays help trees to grow faster. Geoffrey Landis correctly points out that the evidence is extremely tenuous.)
That’s what I’m thinking too. GCR intensity is highest when sunspot activity is lowest, generally modulating on an 11 year cycle. But solar irradiance also varies at the same frequency; the Sun is actually (~0.1%) brighter when more sunspots are present, contrary to intuition.
If tree growth between 1953-2006 really is highest when sunspot activity is lowest, that implies trees grow faster when the Sun is very slightly dimmer. Weird. Their diffusion explanation makes sense, but as they note this cloud condensation effect is supposed to be a very small effect. Perhaps it’s just large enough to be noticed in these proxy data, though. I agree, however, that a link to solar irradiance is more intuitively appealing, and it’s not immediately obvious how it could be ruled out.
I’d bet they’ve already considered this issue and ruled it out, possibly by using satellite measurements of solar irradiance and solar wind over the last few decades. They’re supposed to be tightly correlated, but if the solar wind varies even slightly differently than solar irradiance it should be possible to see which is causing this variation in growth rates.
Though there is little variation at visible and near UV wavelengths, the solar flux has a huge (factor of three) variation with the solar cycle in the extreme UV.
EUV and X-ray photons constitute a marked fraction of the total solar output. A much larger fraction than you would expect from the short-wavelength tail of the black-body spectrum of the solar surface. Indeed, these emissions are mostly from the corona, not the surface: EUV at 171A, and an X-ray image.
Such high-frequency photons are absorbed in the very upper layers of the atmosphere. However, roughly 50% of the secondary energetic effects (heating, fluorescence, ionization-recombination emission, etc.) will reach ground level instead of going back out into space.
If something here on earth is varying with the solar cycle, the first cause to consider is therefore the solar EUV and X-ray flux.
Indeed, and temperatures also show an 11 year cycle…
Most plants are more sensitive to the blue-violet side of the spectrum for photosynthesis, with a few exception having increased sensitivity to the red side.
My theory is that since humans tend to have peak sensitivity in the green portion of the spectrum and our perception of brightness is near zero in the blue-violet-ultra-violet range it is possible that the brightness of the sun has limited or no effect on plant growth.
Moreover, the solar wind is directly proportional to the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field and the Earth’s magnetic field blocks less blue-violet-uv then when the magnetic field is weaker so more blue-violet-uv frequencies make it to the plants and hence increase a plant’s photosynthetic rate thus contributing to higher growth.
Maybe GCR is to photosynthesis what steroids are to muscles.
Magnetic fields don’t affect light, only charged particles.
I do believe magnetic fields do indeed have an effect on light since there seems to be a relationship between luminosity and magnetic activity.
Moreover, while the following effects may not affect luminosity they do show interaction between magnetism and light: the Faraday effect and the Magneto-optic Kerr effect.
The polarization of light through a magnetic field may also play a role in the properties of the light reaching the plant.
It’s only a theory, and quite possibly incorrect since my Ph.D. in astrophysics is a perfect example of the “null” effect. :P
That just shows that the solar cycle affects both the luminosity and magnetic activity of the Sun. It doesn’t show a causal connection between the two.
Yes, Faraday rotators are used in optics labs to rotate the polarization of polarized light. I didn’t mention either of these effects because they’re irrelevant in this context. Sunlight isn’t polarized, so rotating its polarization doesn’t do anything. Plus, the magnetic fields required for a measurable rotation are far stronger than the Earth’s field. Finally, notice that the effect is proportional to the square of the wavelength. This means the effect is much weaker for visible light (and especially weak for blue-violet light) than for radio waves.
Didn’t we learn from Intro to Biology that plants grow on the side facing away from the sun? That direct sunlight inhibits growth?
Most plants exhibit positive phototropism; i.e. they grow towards light. I’d think that more sunlight = faster growth, as do the researchers in the article because they reason that higher GCR intensity = more clouds = more diffuse light = easier to penetrate forest canopy = more light available to plants = faster growth.
Right, because the cells facing away from the light are the ones growing at the faster rate, so the net is that the plant as a whole grows towards the light (the faster-growing cells become the outside of the curve).
Interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Plants have evolved to orient towards the Sun in order to maximize growth rates (presumably- otherwise why would this strategy be selected for?). This implies that cells receiving less light than other cells in the same plant will grow faster in order to point the leaves towards the Sun, thus maximizing the plant’s overall growth rate. I originally thought you meant a plant would grow faster on the shaded side of a hill than on the sunnier side, but I now understand that you were making a different point. I’m still not sure this effect would occur if the overall light intensity changed– it seems like an effect that depends on relative differences in light intensity.
Good question – as I recall the sunlight has an inhibitory effect (the plants still grow at night), but all of this is from my freshman in high school bio class. I had a super good teacher, but I’m certainly no botanist.
NY Times climate hackers
Now mostly I wonder why people are so violently opposed.
Been watching that unfold. Seems like a mix of:
Not that I really care, of course. None of the key pieces of evidence that convinced me came from these researchers, so the controversy that’s erupting seems really silly.
Update: We also talk about little/big endian, secular rates, unity, decimating time series, and I usually hide the trend (gasp!) before a Fourier spectral analysis. Also, here are some other views on the email hack.
Various contrarians have repeatedly accused me of blindly accepting a theory without considering alternative evidence. Then I see them crowing about scientists emphasizing flaws in research by using words like travesty, and the cognitive dissonance hurts my head.
I’m tired of talking with people whose interest in these tabloid stories clearly outweighs whatever scientific curiosity they once had.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here and here. Rei’s comment is here.)
Working group 2 of the IPCC made some embarrassing mistakes. Upon seeing the letter in Science, I wondered why I’d never noticed these ludicrous statements before. Then I realized that the mistakes weren’t in the working group 1 report, which is all I’d ever bothered to read. Here’s what each working group does:
The wild claim that “glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world”, the 2350/2035 typo, confusion of Himalayan glacier area with the worldwide total, and reliance on non-peer-reviewed source material all occurred in a single paragraph(!) in the WG2 report (section 10.6.2, paragraph 2).
Statements in the WG1 report regarding glaciers, on the other hand, accurately reflect conclusions in the peer-reviewed literature.
Due to my obsession with the physical sciences, I’d never even realized that other working group reports existed. Perhaps other scientists reacted in a similar fashion, which might be why such an absurd cluster of errors went undetected for so long…
Found errors in the IPCC AR4 WG1 here and here.
That’s true! The fundamental question is whether our recent climate change is nature/human caused. Regarding the saturation point, it’s right that CO2 is already saturated and more CO2 won’t warm the planet anymore. I am a college sophomore with a dual major in Physics and Mathematics @ University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. One of my Professors was discussing this the other day. By the way, I came across these excellent physics flash cards. It’s also a great initiative by the FunnelBrain team. Amazing!!!
No, that’s wrong. I guess you didn’t read my explanation or follow the last 50 years of climate research. It’ll make more sense after you take a few years of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics courses.
Incidentally, a compelling argument would include specific reasons why the science I’m referencing is flawed.
No worries, how about this one?
Add CO2 and the humidity is reduced. Net change to greenhouse effect = 0 = saturation.
First, that simply isn’t happening. Water vapor has a positive feedback effect (as explained above ad nauseum) rather than negative as you suggest. As CO2 and temperature have increased, so has precipitable water vapor. For example, see studies like this one.
Second, the PDF you linked is a set of 78 slides including statements like “I regard this deduction one of the most beautiful results in the history of theoretical physics.” on slide 53. Needless to say, it hasn’t been through peer-review. However, it’s related to this 2006 paper by Ferenc Miskolczi which was peer-reviewed, albeit in an obscure weather journal. Luckily, it’s a mere 40 pages long.
Joshua isn’t the only one saying things like: “In essence Dr Miskolczi showed that the solution to a differential equation for the greenhouse effect developed in 1922 by Arthur Milne, and central to the current paradigm, wrongly assumed an infinitely thick atmosphere. In re-solving this equation a new term and also a new law of physics have been proposed setting an upper limit to the greenhouse effect. Dr Miskolczi’s theory indicates that any warming from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide will eventually be offset by a change in atmospheric moisture content.
Many other people have already torn apart his paper, though the most extensive discussion is unavailable(!).
Short version: modern GCMs certainly don’t assume an infinite atmosphere. Also, Milne’s model used gray-body simplifications (no structure to absorption spectra.) Modern line-by-line radiative transfer code represents the spectra more accurately; gray-body models are outdated and only used for teaching purposes. In other words, Milne’s 1922 model isn’t “central to the current paradigm”.
Miskolczi’s main point, that the greenhouse effect is “saturated” because the mean optical depth of the atmosphere is held constant, is based on a gray-body model. It’s also based on equation 7 in his paper (seemingly pulled out of thin air), a misunderstanding of Kirchhoff’s law, and a bizarre use of the virial theorem.
There are no mountains of research that show why any climate change is happening or even IF climate change is happening. Arctic ice cover has increased every year since 2007, for example, while the AGW models pushed by the NSIDC and IPCC don’t allow for any such increase. Carbon dioxide is routinely pushed by politicians as the cause of global warming and yet it is a simple calculation to show that there is already more than sufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to absorb ALL of the IR radiation radiating from Earth that is in the wavelength where it can be absorbed by carbon dioxide… within the first few hundred meters of the atmosphere. It is even easier to show that gas-phase H2O in the atmosphere (commonly referred to as humidity) is present in much higher concentrations in the atmosphere than CO2 and is a far more potent ‘greenhouse’ gas than CO2…and yet the planet is obviously still able to radiate sufficient heat to space in the non-absorbable IR wavelengths to cool itself. Finally, supposing for argument’s sake that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration really was: 1) a problem and 2) correctable, why would it be the ‘climate scientist’s’ job (read IPCC and NSIDC) to tell us how to prepare for it’s impact? They seem even less qualified for that job than they are for the investigation of global warming.
I’ve collected dozens of independent, peer-reviewed articles here. I even described my own personal research which independently confirms Greenland and Alaskan glacier melt through their effects on time-variable gravity. Just last month at the GRACE Science Team Meeting, my advisor displayed the most recent GRACE results over Greenland, showing that the mass loss is accelerating and spreading from the southeast coast to the entire western coast.
There most certainly is a mountain of evidence showing that abrupt climate change is happening, and that it’s due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
As I keep repeating, 2007 was the steepest drop in ice cover on record. It scared a lot of us when the extent of the drop was shown at the 2007 AGU conference because the climate models weren’t predicting such a huge drop. The subsequent increases actually confirm that this decrease was due to weather, not climate, which tends to validate the models.
Completely wrong. Global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That’s the whole point of taking an ensemble with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. Please remember that weather is different than climate, which is an average over at least several years.
When studying any science, it’s best to ignore politicians and focus only on peer-reviewed scientific articles. In this case, you should be paying attention to the fact that scientists are saying CO2 is causing abrupt climate change.
Again, I’ve discussed this in detail many times. You’re neglecting to consider pressure broadening, which forces any realistic climate model to treat each layer of the atmosphere differently. CO2 isn’t saturated in the highest layer of the atmosphere, which is what really matters.
Yet again, I need to repeat that water vapor is a feedback in the climate, not a forcing. We can’t change the amount of water vapor in the troposphere because it establishes equilibrium with the oceans in a matter of weeks. However, because we’re increasing the temperature of the planet by increasing CO2 concentrations, water vapor will tend to provide positive feedback which will make the problem worse.
Also, water vapor isn’t well-mixed to the top of the atmosphere, so CO2 plays a larger role in that important outer layer.
Scientists shouldn’t dictate public policy. All we can say is that abrupt climate change is a serious danger, and that humanity needs to stop emitting CO2 if we intend to keep our current standard of living. Physics can show us what a “sustainable” concentration of CO2 would be (350ppm seems like a safe goal) but politicians will have to figure out a practical way to achieve that goal. The choice of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade or some other effective mechanism is, of course, ultimately not a scientific question. All we can say is that we clearly need to do something or risk seriously destabilizing the ecosystem that we all depend on.
No, 2007 was not the ‘steepest drop’ in arctic ice cover, it was the ‘smallest minimum extent’ recorded. The increase and decrease in arctic ice cover follows the seasonal cycle and the rate of the decrease and increase in the seasonal change is similar from year to year. It is the ‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ extent of the ice cover during the year that are of interest as a monitor of climate warming or cooling. The increase in the ‘minimum’ extent in 2008 and 2009 indicate a cooling trend that cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases since the concentration of those has increased during that time period. If you want to claim that cooling somehow validates the models (which it obviously does not) you need to explain where a significant amount of planetary heat is being stored since the ‘greenhouse gas’ theory of planetary warming requires that the amount of heat being radiated from the earth must continuously decrease.
Pressure broadening? Atmospheric gas pressures are very low, varying from 1 atm at the earth’s surface to near vacuum at the upper atmospheric limits. These low pressures have no significant effect on the carbon dioxide adsorption spectra. The simple fact is that there is more than sufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at this very minute to absorb ALL of the IR radiation radiating from Earth that is in the wavelength where it can be absorbed by carbon dioxide… within the first few hundred meters of the atmosphere. Your reference to carbon dioxide saturation in the ‘highest layer’ of the atmosphere (whatever that is) suggests that you lack any understanding whatsoever of ‘saturation’ or phase equilibria.
Water vapor is an atmospheric gas that has a much stronger ‘greenhouse’ effect than carbon dioxide. Water concentration in the atmosphere varies VERY widely around the globe and over time, but is always many, many times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, in contrast, is at a relatively constant concentration around the globe. Water vapor is certainly NOT a ‘feedback’ in the climate but is the single biggest driver to the climate we experience on earth due to it’s contribution to global energy transfer, it’s unique ability to condense and form atmospheric optical barriers, it’s unique ability to accumulate as a solid over thousands of years, and it’s enormous global reservoirs in liquid form. Mixing has nothing to do with water concentration in the upper atmosphere. That is determined solely by pressure and temperature (which also vary widely around the globe). When I read your comments, I’m struck by how little you seem to understand about the basic physics of gases…which is, after all, what we’re talking about.
Thanks for the lecture about seasons; it would’ve been informative if I were still in elementary school. If you’d clicked on the “steepest drop” link, you’d notice that the plot’s title is “Sea ice area at summer minimum.” A casual visual inspection will confirm the peer-reviewed conclusion that the summer minimum experienced its steepest drop from 2006-2007.
Well, first of all it’s not that simple. Ice extent at the summer minimum is just one observable, others include duration of the melt season, and thickness of the ice.
More importantly, please recognize that climate models don’t predict monotonic warming. This strawman you’re attacking simply doesn’t exist. Short-term variability is expected; long-term averages are what’s important.
The models predicted drops in sea ice extent, but nothing like the drop observed in 2007. If the drop in 2007 had continued for (at least) several years, that would’ve been a genuine climatic signal rather than short-term variability due to weather. But since the models never predicted such an extreme drop, that would’ve indicated that the models were flawed.
Contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren’t denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun’s brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren’t saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that’s happening to the climate. It’s just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.
For example, modern dynamical climate models can’t account for the physics of El Nino and La Nina events. Usually, circulation in the Pacific ocean sends cold water to the surface which serves to cool the atmosphere by warming the ocean. El Nino pauses that upwelling of cold water, thus warming the atmosphere by reducing the rate at which heat from the atmosphere is dumped into the ocean. La Nina does the opposite; it intensifies the upwelling of cold water, which draws more heat than usual from the atmosphere. The large dip in atmospheric temperatures in 2008 occurred because of a significant La Nina. These short-lived events have little effect on the long-term climate because they merely swap heat between the oceans and atmosphere. But they do make it difficult to use either ocean or atmosphere temperatures alone to study the climate.
I’ll repeat: Global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That’s the whole point of taking an ensemble (see chapter 8) with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. For example, here are individual realizations of a climate model. Notice that the short-term fluctuations are severe and unpredictable, but the long term trend is robust and predictable.
Scientists would’ve agreed with you 109 years ago due to Angstrom and Koch’s experiment. Over the next few decades, however, scientists learned that the definition of “significant” is more subtle than one might think at first. This is ancient history, though. You can either refer to my summary or browse the journals in your university’s library, perhaps starting with: Kaplan, Lewis D. (1952). ‘On the Pressure Dependence of Radiative Heat Transfer in the Atmosphere.’ J. Meteorology 9: 1-12.
At which point it’s re-emitted, and (roughly) half of the emitted radiation travels upward to the next layer, where the process repeats. All atmospheric physicists understand this effect, and for the past half-century all climate models have accounted for it. Those same climate models show that the CO2 sensitivity has a maximum likelihood value of 2.9°C, with a 95% confidence that it’s less than 4.9°C but greater than 1.7°C.
As I’ve been trying to explain, modern global circulation models need to treat the atmosphere as a series of layers, each with a constant pressure. The highest layer is generally in the stratosphere or mesosphere, but this will vary depending on the model in question.
The fact that the average water vapor concentration is determined primarily by pressure and temperature is precisely what makes it a feedback rather than a forcing. The global average of relative humidity is “nearly constant at most altitudes”. On the other hand, CO2 concentration doesn’t establish equilibrium so quickly, which is why scientists are worried about CO2 but not water vapor.
Ironically, the stratosphere is the only layer of the atmosphere where anthropogenic water vapor can act as a forcing:
Only the stratosphere is dry enough and with a long enough residence time (a few years) for the small anthropogenic inputs [of water] to be important. In this case (and in this case only) those additions can be considered a forcing. Oxidation of anthropogenic methane (which is a major source of stratospheric water) and, conceivably, direct deposition of water from increases in aircraft in the lower stratosphere, can increase stratospheric water and since that gives a radiative forcing effect, they do appear on the forcings bar chart (under “H2O from CH4“). [Gavin Schmidt]
Yes, you’ve made it quite clear that you think I’m a drooling idiot (along with 84% of the scientific community.) But maybe… just maybe… you’ve missed some crucial details in the graduate-level physics underlying modern climatology?
Update: I’ve failed to communicate again and again and again and again and again.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from the links attached to the posters’ names.)
I actually disagree with you on your assessment of the risk, there is no really good scientific evidence of a threat from CO2 (and I seriously doubt you can show me any good evidence of a link). …
Seeing as how the scientific consensus is that there is a link between CO2 and global warming, YOU are the one who needs to prove there isn’t one (and I seriously doubt you can show me any good evidence that there ISN’T a link, as ‘a definite link’ is what the facts show.)
No, the onus is on the scientists to provide evidence to support their claims, as it always is. You don’t ask scientists to prove that God doesn’t exist, do you? There can be no such proof.
While we are at it, it is important to look at what scientists do claim, and you will not find anywhere a scientific consensus that CO2 is going to cause some kind of global calamity. What you will find is consensus that CO2 does affect the global temperature. What you will not find is a consensus on how much it affects the global temperature. Global warming has become a kind of a scare in the mind of the public that is detached from the scientific reality.
Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9°C, with a 95% confidence that it’s less than 4.9°C but greater than 1.7°C.
OK, what you have done is linked to a modern estimate (if by modern you mean 2006) made by two people. You tried to do this to show consensus. Even if the paper is 100% accurate, and 100% true, you still have not shown a consensus, you have shown that two people feel that way. To establish a consensus, you have to show that most of your sample feels that way. You have not done this. Sorry.
Incidentally, 5.76 degrees F is a rather large range. Don’t you think they could cut it down at all?
The paper itself combines multiple estimates from different independent scientists. If you don’t want to read the article, the summary says: However, a new paper in GRL this week by Annan and Hargreaves combines a number of these independent estimates to come up with the strong statement that the most likely value is about 2.9ºC with a 95% probability that the value is less than 4.5ºC.
You’ll get similar results from examining models used in the ensemble of Meehl 2004. Sorry that I don’t have time to make all this explicit. As you can tell, I’m swamped with pseudoscientists and I simply can’t give everyone a crash course in climate physics.
We’re trying to, as fast as we possibly can. But note that this is a 95% confidence interval, not a 1-sigma error bar.
The effect of increasing the resolution of the models has been extensively studied. It provides a modest increase in model “skill” but runs enormously slower. They’ve chosen instead to run at a coarse resolution but create an ensemble of many runs which actually works better than increasing the resolution.
Update: Schmidt et al. 2006 makes a similar point on page 154.
Notice in the first sentence of the first paragraph of section 2 that they used the DOE PCM described in Washington et al. (2000).
Some of the GCMs have publicly available code, which is indexed here.
Okay, something we can agree on. The estimates at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting predicted ~1.2 meters of sea level rise by 2100, though it varies around the globe due to factors like the gravitational attraction of the glaciers that are thinning. People who quote estimates of ~20 meters are simply calculating the volume of the Greenland/Antarctic ice sheets/glaciers as a whole, which is absurd because even our most pessimistic estimates don’t allow those glaciers to completely disappear in less than ~500 years.
But even a 1.2 meter increase in sea level would bring substantial economic hardship. For example, a storm surge in New York up to a level that would now be considered “once in 100 years” would happen every ~5 years.
While this doesn’t sound as melodramatic, it’s a real threat, and it’s not the only one. I worry that the most damaging impact of abrupt climate change will be unpredictable changes in precipitation patterns. If a substantial fraction of the world’s farmlands experience droughts because water is falling in areas that are currently deserts, serious disruptions of the global food supply could result.
If people are willing to kill for territory and nationalism now, imagine how much more aggressive starving people will be. This is what worries me. Not the immediate effects of climate change, but their secondary effects on international relations.
This is exactly the problem. People think about climate change, and then they get into scenarios like this that have no scientific backing. Just like with Y2K when they worried about power plants exploding and planes falling out of the sky. Everyone has a scenario to worry about.
Of course global warming is something to keep our eye on, but lets not go insane over it.
No scientific backing? Altering the global average temperature will affect precipitation patterns. Our current croplands are chosen to match current precipitation patterns. Altering them would be extremely expensive, maybe even impossible given the short amount of warning we’ll probably get. (That’s because predicting exactly how precipitation will change is very difficult.)
I’ve tried to condense the science into a (hopefully) accessible summary, complete with dozens of references to genuine peer-reviewed scientific articles showing the seriousness of the threat posed by CO2.
OK, I’m going to try to condense your link down to your main points to make it easy to respond to. If this is an inaccurate representation of your argument, please correct me, but this is what I understand you to be saying:
1) CO2 level are drastically increasing because of human activity (now seem to be 25% to 50% greater than their historical levels)
2) The earth’s temperature is warmer than it has been in the past
3) Computer models can show no other way to account for the warming trend between 1965 and 2000 other than CO2.
4) Feedbacks in the environmental system could make things significantly worse, although they might not.
This is something logical we can work with. This is how you do science, not by deferring to consensus of people who might be smarter than you.
No one disagrees with point 1. Point 2 is fairly well accepted, although the trend in the past is in no way indicative of the trend going forward, which is why you had to go to point three, to establish that it will continue into the future if we continue to release CO2.
Point 3, while technically true, is extremely shaky. I don’t think many people realize that the entire link from CO2 to the warming is based on computer models not being able to think of any other explanation. That point alone is suspect when you consider that from the time the study you linked to was published until now, the temperatures have not continued to rise as those models predicted would happen. What this means is that there are other factors affecting global temperature, that are unknown, that are at least as big as CO2 (otherwise they would have continued to rise).
Ignoring that, if you look into more detail about how CO2 and the computer models work, there seems to be a rough consensus that doubling CO2 will increase the earth’s temperature by .7 degrees. The computers predict a rise from 1.2 degrees to 5 degrees or so. In order to do this, they rely on feedbacks in the environmental system. Now, any scientist who claimed to understand all the potential positive and negative feedbacks in the system would be laughed out of the room, but there are known important feedbacks that they aren’t considering, such as clouds (to understand the difference clouds can make, consider the difference in temperature on a cloudy day and a clear day, or even the difference of temperature in the shade of a tree). The fact is, these computers are known to be inaccurate.
Whether you believe the computers to be accurate or not depends on who you are: the people who wrote the summary of the IPCC report believed them to be accurate enough, whereas the full IPCC report doesn’t actually make that claim. Of course most news agencies read the summary, not the full report (I can’t say I blame them, it’s thousands of pages long).
As for the fourth point, even on your web page you admit it is nothing more than a worry.
You summarized one of my points as “The earth’s temperature is warmer than it has been in the past” but in fact what worries scientists is the rate of the warming, which is probably higher than at any point in the last 1000 years. Scientists are concerned about the abrupt nature of these changes, not the absolute temperature.
It’s based on the fact that global circulation models account for temperatures after 1970, which can’t be explained by any other process like increasing solar illumination, magnetic effects, etc. Those GCMs have been validated in multiple ways, by correctly predicting climate response to volcanic eruptions, by comparison to independent paleoclimate data and modern temperature records (which are independent because GCMs are dynamical models, not empirical models.) As I’ve explained, GCMs are able to reproduce strange features of modern warming like the cooling stratosphere which can’t be explained without multiple coincidental forcings.
Nonsense. I’ve already been over this. ENSO variation isn’t all that important to the long term climate.
Very close. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9°C, with a 95% confidence that it’s less than 4.9°C but greater than 1.7°C.
Of course. What’s troubling is that our estimates of the long-term positive feedback effects are known to be too small to account for the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.
Yes, I’ve already had to explain that I’m aware of how important clouds are. But why do you say clouds aren’t being considered? In fact, all models take clouds into account. I’ve previously linked to a new paper describing recent improvements to models of clouds.
Yeah, it’s a worry about the future of human civilization.
OK. If you look at the top and middle graphs the actual rate of warming doesn’t seem any different than the rates of change in the past. I haven’t investigated the climate temperatures enough to really comment on them, but we are talking about a difference of a degree, which is a change small enough that I am usually willing to accept it as reasonable: it’s not likely to be wildly inaccurate so in my opinion not worth much time arguing about.
Onward:
Exactly. “We can’t explain it any other way.” This is about the weakest line of logic ever. Sometimes it works, but all it takes is one missed piece of evidence to topple your logical castle. One problem and you’re screwed. If I were staking my career on this point, I would definitely want more research done and stronger evidence.
This isn’t impressive, though, because it isn’t hard. We have lots of test eruptions to go on from the past, and you could probably do the calculations by hand on paper to make some good estimates of the change in temperature if you knew the output from the volcano.
You’ve probably already seen the argument I made to the other guy, but I feel I should make it here, too: look at this graph. There is a calculation difference of nearly a degree in those climate models, whereas the temperature itself has varied significantly less than that. Do these models really inspire you to trust them? They are not very convincing to me at all.
I’m going to say, your writing style makes me feel like you spend a lot of your time on realclimate.org. I strongly suggest instead that you look at the ipcc report (the actual report, not just the summary which a lot of people don’t feel represents the report). realclimate.org has a kind of propaganda-ish feel, and the IPCC report covers tons and tons of ground. If you are an information junkie, that is where you should go. It’s the good stuff.
Huh? I just showed you how the greenhouse warming model explains the current observations, has been validated in multiple independent ways, and has no serious competition. That’s exactly the same thing I say about evolution, but I gave up trying to explain that to creationists. Perhaps I should give up here for similar reasons?
Holy crap! You’re telling me to look at the source which– in that very article– I’ve referenced over and over and over and over? Are you serious? Most of the graphs in the article that you were just talking about are from the AR4 report. I’ve only deviated from it with respect to sea level increase, because their information is out of date and too conservative based on data collected since 2007.
Had it ever occurred to you that maybe I spend most of my time studying the climate as a professional physicist, and that I’m not just regurgitating bullshit I read on the internet?
How ironic. Maybe you should stop looking at a single realclimate.org graph and consider the AR4 scenarios from the IPCC report. (Yeah, the same ones I linked in my article months ago.) Notice that the uncertainty for each scenario is wide, but the error bars for different emissions scenarios don’t overlap. The scenarios are referenced in the second column of page 755 of chapter 10 of the AR4 report.
These uncertainties are estimated using procedures described on pages 805-809, in section 10.5.4: “Sampling Uncertainty and Estimating Probabilities”. Those pages describe the role of multi-model ensembles and perturbed physics (i.e. perturbed parameters) ensembles in evaluating the uncertainty of climate projections.
And, yes, I’m impressed by the careful job they’ve done. The methods they’re using to validate the models are ingenious. The error bars don’t have to be infinitesimal; just smaller than the difference between emissions scenarios. And they are.
My point in emphasizing the future projections was to stress that this uncertainty doesn’t grow over time (aside from uncertainties as to which emissions scenario we adopt.) But even the “large” uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970. Even though the two curves have wide error bars, they don’t overlap. The entire point of that graph you’re fixated on is that the observed temperatures stay within the IPCC’s error bars. You couldn’t even see the prediction for the temperatures without human greenhouse gas emissions on that plot (as in the Meehl 2004 plot), because they’d be far below it.
I think at this point in the discussion it would be useful to discuss what exactly these computer models are. I think you already know all this, but sometimes going over such things can help clear things up.
A computer climate simulation is just a big calculator. A lot of the things they simulate can be calculated by hand, even without a computer. For example, we can calculate how adding CO2 to the atmosphere affects temperature directly with a pencil and paper. We can estimate how a volcanic eruption will affect the temperature fairly easily by itself. We know how the reflectiveness of snow changes temperature compared to the unreflectiveness of dirt. We know all these things because of experimental evidence, although we understand some better than others. The computer comes in handy for the large calculations that are required when they are all put together, because they are all interconnected and all affect each other.
Of course, we get these different pieces of the simulation based on observations from the natural environment, and so the simulation can only be as good as the observations. Thus when a person says their climate model is 90% accurate, what they are really saying is that they have a 90% understanding of the natural environment (at least, so far as it affects the temperature). I am wary of anyone who claims to understand the environment that well.
The good thing is we are getting better observations. We now have satellites that measure radiation coming off the earth in various wavelengths, so we can get a direct measurement of the greenhouse effect as it is happening on earth, for example. We have more thermometers all over the earth. So in the next decade we should gain a much clearer picture of what is going on.
In essence, it is certainly possible that greenhouse gasses could warm the earth as much as 5 degrees, but the observational evidence supporting this scenario is not very strong; it is still a lot of guesswork.
Which leads to my other disagreement with you, which is the scale of the disaster you predict when you say things like this
I mean, come on, is it really? In the worst case, will it be worse than the dustbowl? That sucked, but it in no way threatened the future of human civilization. Is it going to cause California to redistribute its water, so Los Angeles has to start extracting water from the ocean (like Israel does now) so there is more for farmers? Is it going to cause subsistence farmers on the edge of the Sahara into battle because they have no more farmland?
The fact is, farmers have been facing droughts as long as there have been farmers, and they will continue to do so into the future, whether global warming comes or not.
In fact, the human race is guaranteed to have some horrible disasters in its future, as there have been in the past. We’ve had war, drought, disease, famine, and meteor impacts. In the absolute worst case, global warming will be just one more thing we have to adapt to. If human civilization is not good at adapting, it will cease to exist no matter what happens to the earth’s temperature.
A lot of these disaster scenarios are things that could happen. The scientists are rarely saying this will happen, they are saying it is something that could happen. As an example, going back to the drought scenario, it could be that we will have more droughts because of global warming. But the truth is, nobody knows. And I for one, am not going to drastically change my behavior over a scenario that has such a small level of confidence.
I thought they quantified uncertainty in a very nuanced, open manner.
The scale of the damage is, as you say, still up for debate. It may well be comparable to a global dustbowl, which by itself would be worse than the 1930s version that was specific to north America. But it could also be worse if we’ve underestimated the positive feedback effects at the timescale from now until 2100 in the same way we’re underestimating the longer-period positive feedback effects of the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.
And you’re right, the human race is good at adapting. I think the evidence available is sufficient that we need to start adapting by spurring a new industrial revolution (probably nuclear-based) to help wean ourselves from a (limited) fuel that props up oppressive foreign regimes.
Just to clarify, I’m saying we have a choice between making the shift to a carbon neutral civilization now or waiting until the last possible moment. The more we continue to stagnate, the less prosperous our future will be. Extinction of the human race is unlikely, but our civilization may be unrecognizable after some of the worst case scenarios.
Yeah, it’s odd that an ~18 page summary for nonscientists doesn’t include all the nuances in a ~1000 page report filled with scientific jargon.
The summary’s forcing chart clearly shows a huge, lopsided error bar on the cloud albedo effect, and lists the Level Of Scientific Understanding as “low”. This is a copy of figure 2.20 on page 203 of chapter 2. In both charts, notice that the CO2 forcing is very large and known far more precisely.
The particular statement you found, that “the warming seen over the last few decades is entirely attributable to the reduction in aerosols in recent years” isn’t something I’ve seen in chapter 2. The bottom panel of figure 2.22 on page 206 seems like the closest match to your statement, but it’s a projection based on emissions over 20 years in the future. Could you specify the page number where you found your statement?
I’ll note that your claim isn’t necessarily contradicted by figure 2.20 because that’s the radiative forcing integrated from 1750-2005, whereas you’re referring to something like 1985-2005… right?
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from a discussion about the National Academy of Sciences urging a carbon tax.)
I didn’t notice scientists telling President Bush that it was perfectly okay to burn fossil fuels. In fact, it seems like scientists have been saying pretty much the same thing for decades, but the last head of government never listened.
Actually, he did eventually listen. I noticed he started talking about it after he started talking about dependence on foreign oil. I think he saw it as a convenient way to help us get off oil. He also created a plan to stop CO2 emissions from increasing by 2025, which included building more nuclear power plants, but Democrats opposed the plan vocally. Too bad.
Okay, good points. I vaguely remember Bush’s plan, and I strongly disagree with the Democrats on the nuclear issue. But, oddly, I think Bush’s plan requires more “fine-tuned” government intervention. Without some way to account for the negative externalities of coal (i.e. carbon tax, cap-and-trade, whatever- for brevity’s sake I’ll just call it a carbon tax), nuclear stations would never get built by the “free” market because coal is much cheaper. Thus construction of nuclear plants would have to be subsidized mostly or entirely by the government. On the other hand, a carbon tax would push the “free” market to develop a new generation of nuclear plants purely to chase profits, the most capitalist reason imaginable.
Yes, in some abstract sense imposing a tax on carbon moves us further from laissez faire capitalism. But that seems awfully similar to fining companies who pour chemical waste into rivers. It’s like a tax on pollution, and it provides incentive for companies to find ways to handle waste responsibly. Bush’s global warming plan would be more analogous to the government creating an bureaucratic agency to find ways to fix the waste issue, without bothering to stop (or even fine) the people who are dumping chemicals into rivers. That’s probably not the best idea because government bureaucracies are generally worse at innovation than the free market.
Also, it seems like Bush was proposing an underfunded plan (like practically everything else he and Congress did during that period: Medicare increases, No Child Left Behind, Constellation, Iraq, etc.). So he seems to be saying that the government should build nuclear power plants (because without a carbon tax the free market simply won’t) but he doesn’t want to hurt the economy so he’s not going to raise any kind of taxes to build the nuclear power plants. That’s a recipe for doing exactly nothing. At the very least he’d have to raise taxes for his government program to build nuclear power plants.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
In 2002, an open process involving scientists and employees modified NASA’s mission statement to include the phrase “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”
But then in 2006 the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” was dropped over the objections of many scientists. Considering that climate scientists have long used NASA satellite data to monitor abrupt climate change (including me), I think it’s time to re-emphasize this vital role that NASA can perform.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here.)
I think there are at least two “rounds” of peer review. The first round: “is this research published in a reputable and appropriate journal, considering the topic?” If the answer is no, scientists generally won’t waste their time on it, because there are already too many legitimately peer-reviewed papers for us to read.
Then the second round of peer review begins: other scientists independently reproduce (or disprove) their results.
Interesting paper. Of course, it doesn’t say (or even imply) that “greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed.” The stratosphere cools as CO2 increases because that causes the Earth’s “effective radiating level” to move higher into the troposphere. As a result, Earth emits less long wave radiation because temperature decreases with altitude in the troposphere. Because that radiation normally warms the stratosphere, the stratosphere cools. Update: Also, increasing CO2 in the stratosphere helps it radiate heat.
But other factors can warm the stratosphere, like decreasing water vapor or increasing aerosols. Also, increasing ozone warms the stratosphere, which is why the paper you cited actually suggests that “the reversing trend may relate to a possible recovery of stratospheric ozone concentration.”
In reality, global circulation models (GCMs) are validated in a more robust fashion than examining a single variable in a single paper. After running an initial condition ensemble to average away the weather, and a multi-model ensemble to average away non-systematic errors, GCM outputs are compared to paleoclimate reconstructions and instrumental records (though the mean climate can’t be independently verified because of model “tuning”). The GCM response to forcing events such as volcanic eruptions can be compared to reality. Both the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response to increased CO2 implied by the GCM ensembles can be compared to independent estimates, including comparisons with the last glacial maximum. Chapter 8 here is a good source for background information concerning climate models and their evaluation.
Maybe you understand the physics behind these arguments better than I do, but the overwhelming majority of the evidence I’ve seen says that abrupt climate change is happening because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases like CO2. Considering that this conclusion has been subjected to extensive independent verification, I see no reason to be concerned about any questionable practices that have been floating around the tabloids. The few stories that weren’t complete nonsense simply showed that scientists are human– that countering the never-ending deluge of misinformation from nonscientists is stressful enough that they need to vent to each other privately via email.
I can sympathize. If every one of these climate skeptics put as much energy into getting a graduate physics education as they do into reading crackpot blogs and hurling insults at me online, maybe I’d have more time to work on my actual research…
Indeed, the claim that “all” scientists agree that CO2 is causing warming is an exaggeration. “An overwhelming majority” is more accurate, according to all the surveys I’ve seen and my own anecdotal observations at AGU conferences. But, of course, evidence is far more persuasive and interesting than counting heads. Some evidence (like the paper you found) suggests that GCMs might need to be improved in some areas or have their uncertainty estimates revised at certain altitudes. But I’ve never seen credible evidence that our understanding of climate physics is fundamentally flawed, which is what so many people in the general public seem to think.
This debate did happen, but you’re implying it was pivotal “for the most commonly accepted greenhouse warming models to be even halfway predictive”. That’s not true; as I just outlined, scientists have settled on more robust model evaluation techniques.
You’re certainly free to make that inference. But I don’t think it’s reasonable because you haven’t addressed the fact that stratospheric warming can be due to many different causes, as Liu and Weng note in their paper’s discussion:
“From long-term ozone measurements at Arosa Switzerland Zanis et al. (2006) found a negative trend in stratospheric ozone before 1996 and a positive trend in lower stratospheric ozone between 1996 and 2004. Miller et al. (2006) have utilized a statistical model (Reinsel et al. 2002) to study the ozone trend by using the ozone data from 12 ozonesonde stations in the midlatitude of the Northern Hemisphere. They also found a negative trend before 1996 and a positive trend since 1996 in the lower stratospheric ozone. Their two-dimensional regional model results agree with the measurements and show a clear recovery of stratospheric ozone concentration in the future. This study may provide evidence to the recovery of stratospheric ozone. It should be pointed out that other greenhouse gases such as CO2 and CH4 are increasing and also affecting stratospheric temperatures (Ramaswamy et. al 2001).”
Also, other GCM validation techniques seem considerably more reliable than comparing temperature trends in the stratosphere, where the effects of CO2 are smaller relative to other known forcings, the instrumental uncertainties are larger than surface measurements, dataset lengths are shorter, and the small densities imply similarly small changes in heat content. Why should I believe that your measure is more robust (i.e. has more statistical “power” and fewer type 1 and type 2 errors) than those I just listed?
You didn’t cite any papers, so I had to guess what you were talking about. If you could show me some papers regarding that other debate mere months ago, maybe this conversation would be more productive.
I only linked that press release in an attempt to see if this debate is what you were talking about. Since it’s apparently not, I should really just wait for you to link the journal papers central to that other debate.
But just in case you’re interested, this particular debate began with a 2004 paper by Douglass, Pearson and Singer. As usual, the first step in evaluating any scientific debate is to follow the citations. Notice that a more recent paper (PDF) says: “Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in the tropical troposphere and in tropical lapse rates are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets, and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability, and application of an inappropriate statistical consistency test. “
There are useful lessons to be drawn from this debate. For instance, they suggest (along with other lines of evidence) that GCMs can’t yet fully account for ENSO and other oscillations, need improved moist convection and cloud parameterizations, etc. I caution people not to make regional climate predictions for precisely this reason: the GCMs aren’t yet sophisticated enough. Global averages, however, are considerably more reliable and robust for the same reason that opinion polls with larger sample sizes have smaller error bars.
If you really did understand my statement, you wouldn’t have written that paragraph. I just listed some of the methods that scientists actually use to validate the models. These validation techniques aren’t that new, and they have almost nothing to do with this debate.
Huh? Climate models are being improved all the time, of course, but I don’t think this debate involved any changes to GCMs. It didn’t even involve changes to model validation techniques, which I have called “more robust” than your proposed single-variable-in-a-single-paper test. The troposphere warming debate was always about the temperature data and their uncertainties, which are independent of the GCMs because they’re dynamical models, not empirical (again, except for “tuning”).
(Incidentally, this last point is very important. The difference between empirical and dynamical models is enormous, and doesn’t seem to be fully appreciated by most members of the general public.)
Yes, global warming could be caused by various factors. But, as I’ve repeatedly emphasized, scientists have produced upper bounds on the contributions of all known factors affecting global surface temperature trends. The effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases can be distinguished from these other factors.
In contrast, stratospheric temperature trends aren’t as well understood. Again, I’ve just listed some of the reasons: larger uncertainties in stratospheric forcing, fewer teams examining fewer instruments with higher uncertainties and shorter timespans, measuring extremely tenuous gases with correspondingly low heat capacities (i.e. small amounts of energy translate into large temperature changes).
Where– exactly– did you arrive at this notion that the best way to test GCMs is to look for temperature vs. altitude curves? If it was a peer-reviewed paper, please cite it. If it was from a graduate physics textbook, please let me know which one.
I ask because– again– the techniques actually being used to validate climate models are radically different from what you’re suggesting.
Really? Because your argument seems to be “this paper says that stratospheric temperatures are rising, not falling as predicted by GCMs, so the cause of this stratospheric temperature rise can only be something that implies GCMs are fundamentally flawed.”
I’m saying, okay, suppose this paper is right to say that the stratosphere has been warming since 1996 (though most research I’ve seen shows the stratosphere cooling.) Even if that’s true, your conclusion only follows if there isn’t a mechanism that compensates for the stratospheric cooling effect due to CO2.
And just to be clear, you’re the only one drawing such an absurd conclusion from this paper. Liu and Weng explicitly say that the observed warming suggests stratospheric ozone has increased since 1996, and they cite several independent studies that arrived at the same conclusion.
It’s true that all other things being equal, greenhouse warming cools the stratosphere. But scientists are well aware that multiple factors (table 1 on page 5) influence the climate, and one of those is that increasing ozone in the stratosphere warms it. Of course, increasing ozone doesn’t invalidate GCMs.
However, suppose that stratospheric temperatures rose with no increase in stratospheric ozone or aerosols, no increased solar output, no volcanic eruptions, and no decrease in well-mixed greenhouse gases. Then you might have a more convincing case that GCMs were “fundamentally flawed.” That’s all I’m saying: you need to first rule out other possible causes of stratospheric warming before jumping to this extreme conclusion. (And, yet again, consider why scientists use totally different validation techniques than the single-variable-in-a-single-paper test you seem to be advocating.)
This conversation is either finished, or its SNR is about to get even worse. Incidentally, this might be the more recent debate to which she refers.
Nope, not finished yet. Also, Solomon 2010 recently showed that stratospheric water vapor decreased by about 10% since 2000, which warms the stratosphere.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
… Of course, I just listed more fundamental reasons why I think that looking for signals of abrupt climate change in the stratosphere rather than on the surface is a wild goose chase. Then I listed them again but I may as well have been talking to myself. Ironically, figure 1 in that paper (overlapping sensitivity kernels) and figure 4 (huge aerosol forcings and small heat capacity = low SNR) vividly illustrate several of those reasons.
Compare the surface forcing due to stratospheric ozone at any reasonable concentration to that of CO2 at today’s concentration, and then re-examine your use of the word “significant”.
Then open the IPCC AR4 WG1, Chapter 2, page 149…
“…Global [stratospheric] ozone amounts decreased between the late 1970s and early 1990s, with the lowest values occurring during 1992 to 1993 (roughly 6% below the 1964 to 1980 average), and slightly increasing values thereafter. Global ozone for the period 2000 to 2003 was approximately 4% below the 1964 to 1980 average values. Whether or not recently observed changes in ozone trends (Newchurch et al., 2003; Weatherhead and Andersen, 2006) are already indicative of recovery of the global ozone layer is not yet clear and requires more detailed attribution of the drivers of the changes (Steinbrecht et al., 2004a (see also comment and reply: Cunnold et al., 2004 and Steinbrecht et al., 2004b); Hadjinicolaou et al., 2005; Krizan and Lastovicka, 2005; Weatherhead and Andersen, 2006). …”
… and re-examine your use of the phrase “completely unknown“.
The old debate you’re describing was exacerbated by precisely this overlap issue. Sensors designed to measure the upper troposphere also pick up signals from the lower stratosphere.
And just to save you from pointing out that “this context” isn’t what was quoted directly above that: I know. The reason I ignored all the sentences that preceded the statement about overlapping sensitivities is that I’m not saying Liu and Weng did shoddy work or that there are problems with their instruments in particular, so there’s no need to recite their validation techniques.
What I’m saying is that all of these remote measurements are subject to larger uncertainties than surface data. The reasons I gave are similar to those on page 6 of this report. I’m merely trying to emphasize that the troposphere debate was due to uncertainties in remote measurements, which still remain larger than surface measurement uncertainties.
I’m not referring to the error bars on the linear trend. I’m referring to the fact that predicting the climate is a boundary value problem; it’s really all about measuring the energy imbalance of the Earth. Notice that skeptics like Dr. Pielke advocate using ocean heat content as a diagnostic of climate change rather than surface air temperatures. I agree with him about this point, because the ocean has a vast heat capacity compared to air at the surface. So it’s a better place to look for an energy imbalance (in theory).
In contrast, the heat capacity of the stratosphere is even lower than that of air at the surface. In other words, it’s a really bad place to look for signals of a global energy imbalance.
Good thing we know what to expect because of GCMs… right?
Because there’s a difference between remote measurements made by a few dozen sensors over the last ~40 years, and thousands of surface temperature stations backed up with boreholes, ice cores and numerous other proxies extending much further back in time. I’ll complain when I see a genuinely peer-reviewed paper make a sweeping claim based only on weak proxy data.
Not all of them, no. Also:
… I just don’t agree that the overwhelming majority of scientists are spectacularly incompetent or engaged in a vast conspiracy.
Update: Oh, I forgot an anecdote in that list of mine. I was nursing a beer at a talk on the reliability of GCM predictions at the 2009 AGU Fall Meeting… I don’t remember the title or speaker, but I think it was the middle of the week and I vividly remember the sweet, sweet taste of free lager, so it must have been right after “beer o’clock” which at the AGU is mid-afternoonish. Anyway, the guy was mocking a website claiming to provide regional climate predictions for annual averages (not ~20 year averages!) of temperature, humidity, precipitation… out to 2030… for specific zip codes. By the end, the crowd was howling with laughter. The notion that current science is anywhere near this accurate is on par with the idea that the CIA is advanced enough to remotely control our brainwaves unless we’re all foiled up.
Another update: Found the talk; it was given by Lenny Smith and was even worse/funnier than I recalled:
“Is it conceivable that models run on 2007 computer hardware could provide robust and credible probabilistic information for decision support and user guidance at the ZIP code level for sub-daily meteorological events in 2060? In 2090? Retrospectively, how informative would output from today’s models have proven in 2003? or the 1930’s? Consultancies in the United Kingdom, including the Met Office, are offering services to ‘future-proof’ their customers from climate change. How is a US or European based user or policy maker to determine the extent to which exciting new Bayesian methods are relevant here? or when a commercial supplier is vastly overselling the insights of today’s climate science? …”
Another anecdote: At the 2009 GRACE Science Team meeting, I was chatting with a self-described “politically conservative” Arctic oceanographer who chastised the mainstream media for trying to blame everything on AGW. We agreed on this, but also agreed that statements in the peer-reviewed literature have been far more intellectually rigorous. He went on to describe what happened when a contrarian invited him to debate on a blog. I asked if this was McIntyre’s climateaudit, he wasn’t sure but said it sounded familiar. Anyway, as the insults started piling up he got uncomfortable with the fact that he was posting under his real name and address but getting abused by people known only by names like “Mad Dog”.
As I’ve already discussed, you’re talking about errors in the WG2 report, which isn’t the scientific report. If you want to discuss science, try the WG1 report. I’ll even help you by finding an error in the WG1 report: at the bottom of the first column of page 624 in chapter 8, the phrase “too to the west” appears, which is grammatically incorrect!
Update: Found another error!
Again, you seem to be assuming that GCMs are empirical models. They’re actually dynamical, which means that aside from a few tuning parameterizations, they simply describe basic physics. Forcings such as levels of greenhouse gases, ozone concentrations, solar variability and volcanic eruptions are inputs to these models. The models don’t have to be changed at all, but ozone forcing inputs need to be adjusted. Again, you seem to be the only one who thinks the surface forcing will be significant. I’d really like to see a paper or some basic calculations, even if just to establish the order of magnitude compared to other forcings.
As I’ve explained, climate is the global average over ~20 years. That’s a limitation of modern science; computers aren’t fast enough, raw data isn’t extensive enough, and not enough oscillations (ENSO, AO, AAO, NAO, PNA, AMO, PDO, MJO, etc.) can be simulated precisely enough to meaningfully talk about “climate” on a shorter timescale. Trends of 8-9 years are probably under the noise floor, and (as I explain in that link) it’s important to remember that just because CO2 is the most significant forcing, that doesn’t mean other forcings are completely insignificant.
Because of this limitation, climatologists primarily use hindcasts through proxy records to validate the models, among other techniques. Making a prediction and then waiting 20 years to see if it comes true isn’t practical, so few peer-reviewed papers tend to ask “Hey, what did that model 20 years ago predict?” But these analyses are also informally performed and they seem both honest and generally positive to me. You can verify this yourself by downloading the GCM source codes and global temperature data in the sources listed here. Remember to smooth over at least 20 years, and compare the projected emissions used to the actual values. (Most projections give several “scenarios” where CO2 emissions change differently to account for uncertainty in future human behavior.)
If you’re implying that scientists detected the possible increase in stratospheric ozone without realizing it would have a warming effect on the stratosphere, that’s not true. The problem is that ozone and CO2 and volcanoes aren’t the only forcings strongly affecting stratospheric temperatures, so the connection isn’t that clear.
Again, the stratosphere has an extremely low heat capacity compared to the lower atmosphere (let alone the ocean). Because of this, small amounts of energy can send its temperature through the roof. Plus, it’s more exposed to the solar wind than the lower atmosphere. So it’s buffeted by many different forcings. Yet again, I’m saying that stratospheric trends aren’t as well understood as surface trends, and their temperature trends aren’t useful indicators of an energy imbalance (unlike surface temperature trends).
If what is so, specifically? It almost sounds like you’re asking me to justify the statement “If you’re implying that scientists detected the possible increase in stratospheric ozone without realizing it would have a warming effect on the stratosphere, that’s not true.”
But that would be silly. Atmospheric physicists have long known that ozone warms the stratosphere by absorbing UV from the sun. As a side effect, we’re protected from severe sunburns. That’s why governments banned CFCs to protect the ozone layer. And that’s probably why we’re seeing ozone recovery today.
So maybe you meant: “the stratosphere has an extremely low heat capacity compared to the lower atmosphere (let alone the ocean).”
The “short-term” heat capacity of the ocean can be approximated by neglecting deep water because heat rises and deep ocean mixing is too slow to matter on a human timescale. The heat capacity of the upper 1 m of the ocean (p 126) is ~1.5×1021 J/K and Lukas 1991 estimates the depth of the upper mixing layer at ~30m in the western Pacific. It may be more shallow elsewhere, but an area-weighted average is likely to be close to that of the Pacific.
So the ocean’s relevant heat capacity is ~4.5×1022 J/K. The atmosphere’s total mass is ~5.2×1018 kg, and ~85% is below the tropopause. Since the specific heat of air is ~1.0×103 J/(kg*K), the troposphere’s heat capacity is ~4.4×1021 J/K. So the ocean+troposphere system has a (short-term) total heat capacity of ~4.9×1022 J/K.
Now compare that to the stratosphere’s heat capacity, which is ~7.8×1020 J/K because it contains most of the other ~15% of the atmosphere’s mass. These are crude approximations, of course, but look at the differences in the exponents. Then consider that global warming is a boundary value problem concerning a decades-long energy imbalance. That’s why Dr. Pielke advocates using ocean heat content rather than air temperatures, and the same reasoning implies that the stratosphere is a bad place to look for signs of an energy imbalance.
What sentence in the paper gives you this impression? Every relevant sentence I can find is loaded with qualifiers like “may relate”, “may provide evidence”, “may suggest”, etc. That’s not an accident; scientific language is used like a scalpel.
I agree with the authors; their research is good reason to suggest that stratospheric temperatures are increasing because of ozone recovery. It’s interesting research. I just don’t see any other point to be drawn from it.
Scientists have known about sudden stratospheric warmings since at least 1971: Matsuno,T., 1971 : A dynamical model of stratospheric warmings. J. Atmos. Sci., 28, 1479–1494.
They’ve been studied for ~40 years, but still aren’t well understood because of the complexity of the stratosphere, multitude of forcings, and difficulty/sparseness of measurements.
Again, what are you talking about? I just haven’t seen any papers that fit this (obviously fraudulent/ridiculous) description. I’d like to at least see these extremely questionable papers that you’ve repeatedly accused me of accepting.
If you’re genuinely interested in the physics and independent verification, I highly recommend borehole data. By measuring the temperature of the ground at various depths, past surface temperatures can be reconstructed using heat conduction equations.
This doesn’t use CRU data at all, but it yields a similar temperature reconstruction. That’s not too surprising, because there’s no evidence that the CRU data was falsified as you imply. If you don’t believe me, download the data from different centers and apply the same test as in that “no evidence” link. Or come up with a better analysis to uncover evidence of this nefarious conspiracy. Seriously. I’d be interested to see the results of your code. Post them, and I promise I’ll read them.
Update: Oerlemans 2005 shows that glacier records also give a similar answer using a completely different proxy and methodology.
Stratospheric ozone absorbs UV, which is good for animals and plants because sunburns and skin cancer are dependent on the energy of each photon, which is inversely proportional to the photon’s wavelength. Because UV wavelengths are shorter than those of visible light, each UV photon has enough energy individually to break the chemical bonds in our DNA.
Thermodynamic effects, though, are dependent on the total energy of all the photons summed together. So when I say that ozone’s surface radiative forcing (i.e. global warming effects) are small, that’s because sunlight has less UV than visible light. Ozone’s absorption of UV can warm the stratosphere, but only because of its low heat capacity.
Again, ozone’s radiative forcing at the surface is much smaller than CO2‘s. In fact, notice that the error bars on stratospheric ozone actually lie on both the positive and negative sides of the forcings chart, which means modern science can’t distinguish its effect from “zero”.
If by “ignore” you mean that I’ve asked you to show me the faulty papers in question, yeah. Please note that I’m not telepathic, so I don’t know what paper you’re talking about. Yes, this means I’m too stupid to do research. I understand that you think I’m an idiot or a conspirator, so there’s not much point in repeating that statement.
But please, could you help me out and at least cite one paper based on these few bristlecone pines that you think is particularly questionable? I honestly just don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you’re going to accuse me of accepting these papers… shouldn’t I get to read them first?
That’s how I usually do it. I read the paper. Then I draw a conclusion about it.
This conversation seems to be finished, but I think this might be the debate she was talking about.
I tend to agree with CapitalistImperialistPig: dendrochronology seems kind of spooky. Research involving living matter just strikes me as softer and somehow ickier than “pure” physics like boreholes, ice cores, instrumental records, etc. For instance, the divergence after 1960 makes me uncomfortable, but mainly because I don’t know much about it. I also don’t know how many cores are “enough” for reliable temperature reconstruction (even aside from all the other considerations), and the thought of taking enough time to try to understand that question makes me shiver. I’m comfortable relegating tree ring data to the status of “supporting evidence” which happens to correlate well (before 1960) with other proxies.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Update: Jane Q. Public returns.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here regarding an examination of scientific code that concludes: “What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during the running of programs.”.)
Yes, sounds like someone didn’t read What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.
There are interesting things that can be done with a merely single significant digit, namely, order of magnitude calculations. It’s a useful to be able to determine the useful weighting of contributions to greenhouse gasses, for example. A classic case from climatology is figuring out the relative contribution to carbon dioxide emissions of human activity and volcanism (the former is much greater).
Yes, but you want that uncertainty to come from limitations in the experimental data, not inadequate guard digits. What the article was describing was a situation where the accuracy of the results dropped from 6 significant figures to just 1. In some rare situations, this could be intentional (to obtain an order-of-magnitude estimate using shortcuts that sacrifice accuracy for speed), but it’s more likely to be your garden-variety roundoff error that the programmer didn’t even know was corrupting his results.
Losing 5 digits of accuracy (especially if you don’t realize you are losing that much accuracy) is really ugly. I see your point there. I was just saying sometimes it is useful.
Update: My conversation with Khallow continues below.
But what they don’t tell you is that the purpose of the program was to convert a floating point number between 0 (inclusive) and 10 (exclusive) into a truncated integer value.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here regarding an article about the need for open source code in climate science.)
I’m finishing a program that inverts GRACE data to reveal fluctuations in gravity such as those caused by melting/thinning glaciers. This program will eventually be released as open source software under the GPLv3. It’s largely built on open source libraries like the GNU Scientific Library, but snippets of proprietary code from JPL found their way into the program years ago, and I’m currently trying to untangle them. The program can’t be made open source until I succeed because of an NDA that I had to sign in order to work at JPL.
It’s impossible to say how long it will take to banish the proprietary code. While working on this project, my research is at a standstill. There’s very little academic incentive to waste time on this idealistic goal when I could be increasing my publication count.
Annoyingly, the data themselves don’t belong to me. Again, I had to sign an NDA to receive them. So I can’t release the data. This situation is common to scientists in many different fields.
Incidentally, Harry’s README file is typical of my experiences with scientific software. Fragile, unportable, uncommented spaghetti code is common because scientists aren’t professional programmers. Of course, this doesn’t invalidate the results of that code because it’s tested primarily through independent verification, not unit tests. Scientists describe their algorithms in peer-reviewed papers, which are then re-implemented (often from scratch) by other scientists. Open source code practices would certainly improve science, but he’s wrong to imply that a single bug could have a significant impact on our understanding of the greenhouse effect.
There’s a large amount of scientific code that’s written to be run once, for a one-off analysis for which there will never be an exact duplicate. Why would the author go to the trouble of finding an optimal solution when a brute-force method is faster in meat-time?
I recently went through this exercise for a graduate class in biometrics. In researching a particular fingerprint-evaluation algorithm, I found 6 papers that had an algorithmic description, and they all disagreed. Eventually, I could see that 5 out of the 6 were due to various kinds of typos. They simply would not work as written.
In the part of NASA I’m familiar with, data is publicly released along with software tools. I searched for GRACE and found that they make data available.
Yes, but I’m not using the vanilla level 1-b or level 2 data products. I’m using accelerations that have already had background models like FES2004 and various dealiasing products subtracted. These data were only given to me when I promised not to share them or publish papers on certain topics using them.
(Ed. note: this comment was posted on 2009-03-17.)
I am a physicist working with GRACE data, and I feel the need to nitpick. GRACE uses a microwave ranging system, not a laser ranging system. The increased accuracy of a laser ranging system wouldn’t be useful because there are so many other sources of noise, but it is being considered for GRACE 2.
Also, the baseline between the GRACE satellites is more than a couple dozen miles. On average, GRACE A and B are 220 km apart.
GOCE is an amazing satellite, and its low altitude combined with its ion engine (to precisely compensate for drag) will increase the resolution of our static (i.e. not time dependent) gravity field maps. But it can’t replace GRACE’s measurements of the changing gravity field. GRACE has provided independent measurements of the Greenland ice sheet melt and helped to correct water storage models, which underestimated the 2005 Amazon drought.
My research involves pushing GRACE’s temporal resolution even further down. Rather than detecting annual signals or slowly varying linear mass changes (like ice sheet melt), I’m trying to measure the gravity changes from ocean tides. My preliminary results show that GRACE can detect gravity fluctuations from twice-daily tides, which means that it can be used to improve our ocean tide models. This helps oceanographers, but indirectly helps all gravimetry because tides are a source of noise even for static measurements of the earth’s gravity field. Modelling the tides better can help to reduce this noise.
GRACE isn’t dead yet.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
First, it’s in a sun-synchronous orbit. That means that it only passes over a certain spot on the earth’s surface at a particular time of day, which never changes from day to day. As a result, it can’t tell if gravity is different at that spot at a different time of day. Secondly, the GOCE mission is expected to fall out of the sky in 20 months (and that’s if the ion engine works well). It just won’t be up there long enough to measure a long enough time series for any serious analysis.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
The “drag-free” concept that GOCE is using has been popular at the GRACE Science Team Meetings. This would allow GRACE’s altitude to be lowered from its current ~500km (starting) altitude to something more like 200km. Lowering the altitude improves the spatial resolution because from very far away the Earth’s gravity field looks exactly like a point mass’s. The closer to the surface the satellite gets, the more clearly smaller features appear.
A laser ranging system is also being considered, but we’re having a great deal of trouble getting our noise floor (due to mis-modeled forces on the satellite and errors in modeling known sources of gravity fluctuations such as tides and atmospheric circulation) low enough so that we’re actually limited by the lower precision of the microwave system. Until then, it’s hard to argue for a more expensive system that doesn’t seem necessary.
I’ve seen interesting proposals for a more complicated orbit geometry. David Wiese proposed a “cartwheel” orbit where 2,3 or 4 GRACE satellites would revolve around each other as they orbit the planet. Sometimes the satellites would be at the same altitude, at other times they’d be right on top of each other. The laser ranging systems would be continually synced, so measurements of gravity variations could be made along radial directions instead of along the theta (or phi, depending on which spherical coordinate system you prefer) direction. These added degrees of freedom could help eliminate a strange, unexplained error source that we whimsically call “longitudinal striping” (Sean Swenson developed a smoothing algorithm that reduces it, but we still don’t really know why it happens).
Aside from that, we’re just trying to make sure there is a GRACE 2. Many of our long term measurements are limited by the short (~6 year) timespan of the data. GRACE is slowly falling out of the sky (I think it’s projected to burn up in 2012 or so) and it’s dangerously low on propellant. We need another mission like GRACE to extend the time series, and it’s best to launch the second mission before the first one fails to cross-validate the time series from both satellite systems.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here. Khallow and I have previously discussed floating-point accuracy.)
Look at his peer-reviewed papers and follow their citations in google scholar. If there’s a peer-reviewed paper that shows significant flaws in the HadCRUT3 dataset which hasn’t been convincingly rebutted, I’d like to know.
Please note that I asked for a peer-reviewed paper, which would contain some kind of physics-based argument. Conspiracy theories bore me; science is really much more interesting!
While peer-reviewed papers aren’t always correct, their signal to noise ratio is far higher than blogs, so I recommend learning science from them rather than the rantings of economists and mining engineers. If you seriously think the overwhelming majority of the scientific community is spectacularly incompetent or involved in an evil conspiracy, then there’s very little I can do. After all, that means I’m a drooling idiot or a conspirator too, right? I see no point in a conversation like that. Have a nice day.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here.)
The NAS report found no significant problems with Mann’s 1998 reconstruction, and it’s been confirmed repeatedly by independent teams.
They weren’t convened to critique the MM03/05 papers, so describing MM’s misunderstandings of selection rules in principal component analysis would be outside the scope of the report. I’ve listed some peer-reviewed papers here (7d in the index) which cover those topics in more detail.
Of course; chapters 9 and 11 both mention McIntyre 3 times. Each time, their claim is briefly but not extensively discussed because the conclusions on page 117 include: “The instrumentally measured warming of about 0.6°C during the 20th century is also reflected in borehole temperature measurements, the retreat of glaciers, and other observational evidence, and can be simulated with climate models.”
As far as I can tell, the largest caveats to emerge from the NAS report are concerns about the uncertainty estimates (especially prior to 1600 CE) and this sentence on page 115: “Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that ‘the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium’ because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.”
My point is that those papers can’t be affected by the claimed MM PCA “mistake” because they use different methodologies.
I’ve already linked the results of independent temperature reconstructions. And last year I said: Each time series in the graph I previously linked is referenced in chapter 6 here. Turn to page 469 and examine Table 6.1 (later, if you get bored, consider checking out column 2 of page 466 which reviews the claims of MM03 and MM05.) Every time series is referenced well enough to be found on google scholar— for example here’s one of them. As you’ve seen from the graph, they all support the abrupt temperature increase in Mann’s graph. (I freely admit that all these authors could be drooling morons, sheeple incapable of independent thought, or evil conspirators… any of these scenarios or a linear combination of them would completely discredit my position.)
Notice how all these reconstructions show an abrupt temperature spike in the last few decades. Most interesting is “PS2004” which reconstructs past temperatures using borehole data. By measuring the temperature of the ground at various depths, past surface temperatures can be reconstructed using heat conduction equations.
This isn’t based on CRU data at all, but it’s also consistent. That’s not too surprising, because there’s no evidence that the CRU data has been “cooked” as you imply.
Just two weeks later, it becomes clear that I’ve failed to communicate once again. The futility of these conversations is depressing and frustrating. It’s just not worth trying to clear up this apparent confusion of ~200 year instrumental aggregates with ~650,000 year ice core proxies like EPICA.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Another update: Khallow keeps digging and digging…
I think a key problem here that I simply am not capable of addressing is the claim of independence. You claim there are independent research confirming the original 1998 paper. The problem here is that the research may not be independent. Obviously, there is one good sense already in which they can’t be independent, namely, if they are an accurate description of reality, then they all should show similar things. The problem comes, if there is an expectation that they should show similar things when they shouldn’t.
The MM research showed that there should be a artifact of the type observed coming from the original Jones and Mann paper just from the statistical methodology used in that paper. What concerns me here is that the other research duplicates what may well be an flawed artifact of the original paper rather than a genuine phenomena. We may well be seeing an example of group observer bias (driven by the expectation that their results should look like older research). That would introduce dependence.
I’m also concerned by the CRU’s role in the political side of the AGW debate. I see you’ve replied to my post on that (on Slashdot) so it might be included on your site. Here’s my basic problem. There’s a lot at stake politically and economically (huge amounts of money and power). The CRU is funded by back-to-back pro-AGW governments in the UK (Blair and Brown). It also plays a role in supporting carbon emission regulation by the EU and the conclusions if the IPCC. It has the more aggressive predictions of future AGW out there (as far as I know, CRU researchers predicted a 6C rise in temperature by the end of the century last fall, conveniently before the international conference in Copenhagen, Denmark).
Much of its data and code used in this research has been for years shielded from outside observation (and as we see in the CRU “hacked” emails, there was discussion on how to thwart FOIA requests rather than deliver this information). Finally, the CRU appears to be one of the few sources for temperature estimates for paleoclimate temperature data (Hansen’s group being another source, doesn’t instill me with confidence. Why put a politician who has a 20+ year career of AGW hype in charge of such an important task?).
So we have an organization that delivers some of the more extreme predictions, deliberately hides its research and internal workings, and has both motive and opportunity to distort its research. You should consider the possibility that there is serious bias either accidental or intentional. Fraud may well be occurring. I’m especially suspicious due to the fake urgency surrounding carbon emission reduction. There’s no apparent reason, for example, for the Kyoto treaty, the carbon markets in Europe, or last year’s attempts by the Democrats in the States to pass cap and trade regulation on carbon dioxide emissions.
As I said in my post on Slashdot, I don’t see the situation as hopeless or even that much of a problem. Even if there is some vast hidden conspiracy to distort the temperature data, merely waiting a couple of decades solves those issues. If temperature is rising as claimed, it’ll be much more apparent by then. Then we can implement sound carbon emission control policies using the more solid evidence of the future and have better technological alternatives to fossil fuels at our disposal. We’ll also be a bit wealthier and more able to fund any necessary transitions.
This is understandable and perfectly natural for anyone who doesn’t spend the majority of his waking life studying this branch of physics. But the next two paragraphs extrapolate “I am not capable” to “no one is capable,” which is where we disagree. Again, I recommend reading those papers– at the very least the PS2004 one. With so many diverse datasets and methodologies pointing to the same conclusion, it’s highly unlikely to be caused by observer bias.
As have others. They are indeed higher than the IPCC’s most likely projections. According to this survey, only ~20% of scientists think the IPCC has understated the problem. While most of us favor the IPCC’s projections, I’ve described positive feedback effects throughout this article that might be large enough to make a 6°C rise possible under the “wait and see” approach to dealing with CO2.
Either way, as explained above ad nauseum, I think the best course of action is to spur a new industrial revolution by enacting John McCain’s plan to build 45 nuclear power plants before 2030.
What’s left is a longer version of the same conspiracy theory that bored me on Slashdot. If you have a physics-based question that hasn’t already been answered in the index above, I’ll try to answer it.
I didn’t say the task was impossible. I simply think the research is more intertwined than you claim and that there are groups on several sides with the power to warp the current research significantly. Plus the CRU code really needs fixing. And the guy who is fixing it is one of the most pitiable creatures on this planet.
I can’t help but notice that the MIT study you cite doesn’t have a place to download the code for their model. At this point, I’m seriously considering demoting any computer based prediction in climatology to the status of “opinion” unless they provide source code.
If there really is a warming trend, we will in time see sufficiently obvious signs.
The paper calls their model the “MIT Integrated Global System Model” which isn’t showing up in my quick search. However, it might have been renamed to the “MIT Global Circulation Model” which can be downloaded here. (I’m not sure if they’re really the same, but their references looked similar based on my quick glance… Update: No, it seems like MIT IGSM is more than a GCM, it’s also got some kind of economic model attached. If it’s not open source, it certainly should be.)
Anyway, they compare it to models from the IPCC AR4, which can be downloaded here and here with model output available here. The models can be compared to proxies and various instrumental temperature records. The code for some of the reconstructions can be downloaded here.
Update: These links have been copied to the climate data section.
That’s already happened, but I won’t continue to rehash the physics because I’ve given up hope that you might ask a new question about it. Your other comment is similar:
But, as the research summarized in the previous ~80 pages shows, the effects are already too obvious to explain away… and have been for many years. Apparently we can agree that there will always be conspiracy theorists, regardless of how overwhelming the evidence is.
The key to distinguishing a scientist from a bug eyed-crazy conspiracy theorist is that one discusses physical laws, evidence and uncertainty estimates while the other repeatedly asserts that a small cabal has brainwashed the overwhelming majority of scientists.
Let me put it simply. I don’t trust the current research. I don’t trust your or my characterizations of the current research. I don’t have the time to figure this out though my belief is that there is insufficient uncertainty in the predictions of future climate change.
I figure though that this will all settled down in a couple of decades. We’ll almost double the duration of satellite-based evidence (plus have a greater span of data collected) and global warming will be more pronounced by then. Further, the economics side will be better known. We’ll have a better idea of the future direction of fossil fuels since peak oil will probably happen by then with peak natural gas coming. Alternative technologies like solar cells (which appear to be declining in price per watt by about 50% per eight years) may obsolete some or most fossil fuel needs. Perhaps the problem will solve itself by then.
I thank you for this marvelous website though. You have been sincere, helpful, and knowledgeable. I will consider your words even though I’m obviously not very receptive at the moment.
Khallow goes Sky Dragon Slayer: “Jane Q. Public won… Fuck you, khayman80.”
Seemingly following Jane’s example, Khallow retracts his last paragraph above because I linked to his public comments, while Khallow copies illegally obtained private emails to continue insinuating that climate scientists are committing fraud.
Update: Jane/Lonny Eachus eventually admits that his argument (which Khallow called “sufficient”) actually violates “kindergarten-level physics”. So Khallow went Sky Dragon Slayer over an argument that even Jane/Lonny Eachus now seems to realize is “an insult to an adult discussion of the real issue under discussion.” Ouch.
I hope Dumb Scientist/khayman80 has become a better person than they were years ago. While I see considerable evidence for global warming, I still don’t see evidence for the supposed urgency of global warming. For example, I disagree that we should put aside other big problems because global warming exists.
Many of the mitigation strategies proposed, make other big problems like poverty, overpopulation, habitat and arable land destruction, resource mismanagement, corruption, etc. worse while doing little to help the very problem they’re meant to address. And I already view all of the preceding list as being more important than global warming is presently. That can, of course, change as problems grow or dwindle.
But it’s already almost halfway through the two decades I mentioned, and we’re just not there – the models fall short and there are all sorts of interesting accounting games going on with the data. Instead, I see the same dishonesty and madness overtake the movement that was exhibited here years ago.
It might not be fair to defenders of climate change mitigation, but I heavily discount arguments which aren’t made rationally and for which, proponents resort to underhanded tactics and propaganda.
Do you have any evidence to support your accusations? For instance: “dishonesty and madness” “exhibited here years ago”. The last time we spoke, you said:
Once again, it’s astonishing that Karl Hallowell found Jane’s absurd Sky Dragon Slayer argument “sufficient”, especially considering that Jane/Lonny eventually admitted that his argument actually violates “kindergarten-level physics” and belatedly seemed to realize that it was “an insult to an adult discussion of the real issue under discussion.”
If you still can’t admit you were wrong to “side with Jane Q. Public” to the extent that you said “Fuck you, khayman80”, why should anyone think that constructive dialog with you is possible?
If you still don’t see Jane’s mistake, please ask a polite question (e.g. please refrain from saying “fuck you” or accusing me of dishonesty or idiocy or “harassment from a fool” or “creepy stalking”) regarding those physics and I’ll try to explain how Jane screwed up “kindergarten-level physics”.
If you’ve finally recognized that Jane was wrong, a sincere apology for all the baseless accusations you flung at me years ago would help to show that you’re actually interested in constructive dialog.
And then we can move on to understanding why you hurled these more recent accusations:
Just out of curiosity, do you know how much pollution is discharged into the atmosphere when a single volcanic eruption occurs? Wondering how it compares to the anthropogenic discharge?
The quick answer is that our CO2 emissions are now ~100x greater than the average amount dumped into the atmosphere every decade by volcanoes. (Allowing for size/number of eruptions per decade, etc.)
Also, we can distinguish CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels from volcanic CO2 based on the isotopes. It turns out that plants slightly prefer one isotope of carbon (12C) over another isotope (13C). So fossil fuels are abnormally high in 12C.
The ratio of 12C/13C in atmospheric CO2 is rising in roughly the way you’d expect if our emissions were causing the current skyrocketing peak rather than, say, an undiscovered undersea volcano.
Update: Notice that the top panel of that graph also shows that atmospheric oxygen is decreasing, which is what we expect if the CO2 increase is due to combustion of carbon rather than volcanism.
In fact, we know how much CO2 we’ve emitted because governments tax coal and oil, and that amount is roughly double the increase in the atmosphere. This indicates that ~50% of our CO2 is building up in “carbon sinks” like the oceans and parts of the biosphere.
Ok that makes sense. Why the comment about the plants though? Is that how we sample the CO2?
Because plants are the foundation of the ecosystem. Therefore all biological carbon has more 12C than usual, which includes the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels and land clearing. But volcanic CO2 doesn’t pass through this filter, so the 12C/13C ratio of eruptions is different.
Actually, modern CO2 sampling is based on a network of mechanical sensors; the most famous is Mauna Loa.
This increase from 320-380ppm over 50 years might seem benign, but we can also analyze the gas trapped in ice cores in Antarctica. Sampling the gas to detect the CO2 concentration in the past yields these results.
What might seem like a slow increase in human terms is practically a discontinuity in geological time: ~35x faster than anything observed in the last half million years. More recent results suggest that you’d have to go back 15 million years to find CO2 levels as high as today’s:
“The highest estimates of pCO2 occur during the Mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum (MMCO; ~16 to 14 Ma), the only interval in our record with levels higher than the 2009 value of 387 ppmv. Climate proxies indicate the MMCO was associated with reduced ice volume and globally higher sea level (25 to 40 meters) (3), as well as warmer surface and deep-water temperatures (2, 20). These results are consistent with foraminiferal d11B data that indicate surface waters were more acidic ~20 Ma (12).”
Update: Correction: ~3 million years.
Also, aren’t there some schools of thought that think that increased CO2 in the atmosphere may actually contribute to a cooler Earth by increasing the Earth’s albedo? Can’t remember where I heard that, I think some atmosphere guy was on Charlie Rose one night.
I… don’t know. Never heard of that before, to be honest.
There are particles that have that effect, though. Aerosols decrease the size of cloud water droplets, increasing the albedo of clouds. For several decades, this was a problem called “global dimming” which worked basically the way you suggest. Here’s a discussion about that effect, with a table of radiative forcings.
Notice that CO2‘s forcing in that table is positive and large, so it warms the planet. The greenhouse effect is much more complicated than I first thought, but the underlying physics were firmly established by the 1960s. A great deal of uncertainty remains regarding details, though. For instance, global circulation models (GCMs) predict that doubling the CO2 concentration results in a long-term equilibrium temperature rise of 2.9°C (maximum likelihood value) with 95% confidence levels of 1.7°C to 4.9°C.
This number is known as the equilibrium climate sensitivity, and it’s largely a result of positive feedback from water vapor. As shown by the size of the error bars, getting it exactly right is very difficult, but it almost certainly can’t be negative. Unless I’m mistaken, that would violate the laws of physics. That’s why (to the best of my knowledge) nobody’s ever created a GCM that matches historical records of temperature/pollution/solar variability/eruptions/etc. without predicting that increasing CO2 warms the long-term global climate (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise).
Remember that the average temperature of the Earth is ~30°C higher than it would be without the greenhouse effect (holding solar radiation and Earth’s albedo constant).
Then consider that Mercury’s daytime surface temperature is 350°C.
That seems hot, right? Astonishingly, Venus has a nighttime surface temperature of ~470°C.
… despite the fact that Venus is 87% farther away from the Sun than Mercury, implying sunlight 3.5x weaker.
… and despite the fact that Mercury’s albedo is 0.1 and Venus’s albedo is 0.65.
… and despite the fact that a “night” on Venus lasts ~58 Earth days, during which the temperature barely changes from that at “high noon”.
Now, I’m not saying that the Earth will turn into Venus. That would be absurd. We have no reason to think that the “runaway greenhouse” on Venus is even possible on Earth. But the greenhouse effect is very real, very powerful, and our sister planet shows that it scales enormously. I wouldn’t gamble my money (or my civilization) on the notion that it’s inherently self-limiting.
Also, is there any nuclear activity going on in the core that could be warming the planet?
Yeah, nuclear decay is something like 0.1% of the Earth’s heat budget. The rest comes from the Sun.
Heat from decay of radioactive elements in the core should be slowly decreasing according to their half-lives, though. It shouldn’t be capable of producing a warming trend in the climate. The closest thing to an exception I can think of is the Oklo natural nuclear reactor that formed ~1.8 billion years ago and ran for a few hundred thousand years. But it was many orders of magnitude too small to cause the present warming.
Found another error in the online version of the IPCC AR4 WG1 report:
From: Bryan Killett
To: IPCC Secretariat address from website
Date: Feb 20, 2010 at 2:35 PM
Subject: Duplicated figure?
To Whom It May Concern,
First, thank you for your very helpful report. I’m writing because I recently tried to direct someone to the AR4 WG1 chapter 2, figure 2.3 (CO2 isotope ratios plot). But the relevant link is this.
However, that’s actually a copy of figure 2.4. Something similar happened with 2.5 and 2.6.
Sincerely,
Bryan Killett
From: Laura Biagioni
To: Bryan Killett
Date: Feb 22, 2010 at 8:24 AM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Duplicated figure?
Dear Mr Bryan Killett,
Thank you very much for your message.
The good version of the figures 2.3 and 2.5 of the AR4 WG I are on line now.
Thank you for the interest on the work of the IPCC.
With best regards,
Laura Biagioni
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here.)
One of the things that REALLY bugs me about climate research is seeing LEGITIMATE scientists use the word “SKEPTIC” as a SMEAR.
Scientists are SUPPOSED to be skeptic, and I understand that this is not what the phrase is meant to convey, but the mere idea of labeling a scientists “skeptic” to smear him shows how political scientists in general have become. Remember when they were all about the pursuit of truth and knowledge?
I guess it sounds better than “denier”, (which sounds like some McCarthy-era witch-hunt-ism), but why can’t scientists keep their professionalism in situations which become politicized?
It’s a smear only in a very specific context: Lomborg and his ilk are, unfortunately, often identified as “skeptics” in the press. They’re no such thing, of course — “denier” or “denialist” is much more accurate* — but when you have a bunch of people spouting pseudoscientific garbage who are handed the “skeptic” label as a gift, it’s inevitable that those who point out the garbage will appear to be “smearing skeptics.” The only answer appears to be to point out as often as possible that they aren’t skeptics by any reasonable definition of the word. There is simply no amount of evidence that will ever or could ever convince them. Their ideology trumps any data in their minds.
And not only is this the way they think, they assume that everyone else thinks that way too; thus the constant accusations of quasi-religion (“warmism”) leveled against people who actually study the data and try to figure out what’s happening to the environment. Arguing with denialists is closely akin to arguing with religious fundamentalists. Anything that is not of (their interpretation of) God must perforce be of the Devil. They just can’t acknowledge that there are other worldviews that don’t fit into their box.
*Since “denier” is often prefaced with a word beginning with “H,” those who get called “deniers” often take refuge behind Godwin. “Denialist” works nicely, and in fact may be the most accurate term since it describes an ideology rather than just an action.
I tend to use the word skeptic (as a gift, for precisely the reasons you mention) because I’m tired of dealing with the anger that I often find in the general public. It’s an undeserved compliment I give them to avoid headaches, but I think you’re both right to say that this tactic smears the word “skeptic” which (if genuine, of course) is a very good word. I think the word “contrarian” might be better at averting a Godwin defense, and it captures the general attitude I’ve seen pretty well.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here regarding an article about Friel’s “debunking” of a book by Lomborg.)
I’ve never heard of Lomborg before today, but your summary makes him sound like someone I could agree with. That’s mainly because I think most of the “green” movement is irrational, and one manifestation is that they’ve blocked the advancement of nuclear power for decades. Their myopic naivete kept us dependent on coal, and even today continues to sour public sentiment regarding the best practical solution.
I completely agree with these comments when they say that the article demonstrates that Friel doesn’t do a very good job. I also mostly agree with this sentiment regarding the shrill nature of these debates, and I agree with gkai’s assessment of this distinction between science and policy.
The errors on pages 67, 69 might have been enough to make me reconsider my agreement, but Lomborg beat me to it.
Update: Lomborg returns.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
Cool, that’s an awesome website! I especially liked the graphic here. I think the “Phil current” curve describes me well. I agree with Phil that the IPCC’s error bars seem a little narrow, but not by much.
Creationists confuse religious faith with falsifiable science. Among the general public, climate-change contrariansAnd most Greenpeace/PETA/etc activists. confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science. In both cases, scientists are much less likely to agree with either claim, and that likelihood decreases with increasing relevance of the scientist’s field. That’s probably why both groups tend to accuse the scientific community of conspiracy and/or widespread incompetence.
In my experience there’s a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational levels:
————————————————
SENATOR WHITEHOUSE: Let me turn to Dr. Spencer, let me first ask a kinda unrelated question Doctor; do you believe that the theory of creation actually has a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution?
DR. ROY SPENCER: Ha Ha! And why are we going in this direction?
SENATOR WHITEHOUSE: Because it’s something you’ve said and I just want to see if you still believe it.
DR. ROY SPENCER: Uhh, I believe that evolutionary theory is mostly religion, it is naturalistic, but my faith is not strong enough to believe that everything happened by accident. I mean there’s a lot of work out there that’s shown that you can not statistically combine all of the elements that are contained in the DNA molecule by chance over however many billions of years you want to invoke or how many, how much known universe there is with all of the matter in it. So what I’m saying is some areas of science deal a lot more with faith than with known science and so I’m open to alternative explanations.
SENATOR WHITEHOUSE: And do you still believe that the theory of creation actually has a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, to be specific?
DR. ROY SPENCER: I think, I think I could be put into a debate with someone on the other side and I think I could give more science supporting that life is created than they could support, with evidence, that life evolved through natural random processes, so yes.
————————————————
DUMB SCIENTIST: Dr. Spencer’s reference to “however many billions of years you want to invoke” suggests that he might also be “open to alternative explanations” about the age of the earth and the universe. Creationism isn’t even wrong. Evolution is science: it can be falsified by Precambrian apes, or if all species had different DNA bases, etc. about evolution, and is a famousTwenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as “fact,” I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism. … the fossil record, our only source of the history of life on Earth, is almost (if not totally) devoid of transitional forms of life that would connect the supposed evolution of amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to birds, etc. … One finally comes to the conclusion that, despite vigorous protests, belief in evolution and intelligent design are matters of faith. Even some evolutionists have admitted as much in their writings. … the intelligent design paradigm is just as useful to biology, and I believe, more satisfying from an intellectual point of view. … It is already legal to teach intelligent design in public schools. What is not currently legal is to mandate its teaching. The Supreme Court has ruled that this would violate the First Amendment’s establishment of religion clause. But I have some questions relating to this: Does not classical evolutionism, based almost entirely upon faith, violate the same clause? … climate change contrarianWe believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history. … We believe mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, achievable mainly by greatly reduced use of fossil fuels, will greatly increase the price of energy and harm economies. … We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming. … We deny that carbon dioxide—essential to all plant growth—is a pollutant. Reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures, and the costs of the policies would far exceed the benefits. … We call on Christian leaders to understand the truth about climate change and embrace Biblical thinking, sound science, and careful economic analysis in creation stewardship. .
By: Stephen C. Meyer
Human Events
December 22, 2009
Believers in human-caused global climate change have been placed under an uncomfortable spotlight recently. That is thanks to the Climategate scandal, centering on e-mails hacked from the influential Climate Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia. The e-mails show scientists from various academic institutions hard at work suppressing dissent from other scientists who have doubts on global warming, massaging research data to fit preconceived ideas, and seeking to manipulate the gold standard “peer review” process to keep skeptical views from being heard.
Does this sound familiar at all? To me, as a prominent skeptic of modern Darwinian theory, it sure does. For years, Darwin-doubting scientists have complained of precisely such abuses, committed by Darwin zealots in academia.
There have been parallels cases where e-mail traffic was released showing Darwinian scientists displaying the same contempt for fair play and academic openness as we see now in the climate emails. One instance involved a distinguished astrophysicist at Iowa State University, Guillermo Gonzalez, who broke ranks with colleagues in his department over the issue of intelligent design in cosmology. Released under the Iowa Open Records Act, e-mails from his fellow scientists at ISU showed how his department conspired against him, denying Dr. Gonzales tenure as retribution for his views.
To me, the most poignant correspondence emerging from CRU e-mails involves discussion about punishing a particular editor at a peer-reviewed journal who was defying the orthodox establishment by publishing skeptical research.
In 2004, a peer-reviewed biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published a technical essay of mine presenting a case for intelligent design. Colleagues of the journal’s editor, an evolutionary biologist, responded by taking away his office, his keys and his access to specimens, placing him under a hostile supervisor and spreading disinformation about him. Ultimately, he was demoted, prompting an investigation of the Smithsonian by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
The public has been intimidated into thinking that “non-experts” have no right to question “consensus” views in science. But the scandal in at the University of East Anglia suggests that this consensus on climate may not be based on solid evidence.
But what about the Darwin debate? We are told that the consensus of scientists in favor of Darwinian evolution means the theory is no longer subject to debate. In fact, there are strong scientific reasons to doubt Darwin’s theory and what it allegedly proved.
For example, contrary to Darwinian orthodoxy, the fossil record actually challenges the idea that all organisms have evolved from a single common ancestor. Why? Fossil studies reveal “a biological big bang” near the beginning of the Cambrian period (520 million years ago) when many major, separate groups of organisms or “phyla” (including most animal body plans) emerged suddenly without clear precursors.
While all scientists accept that natural selection can produce small-scale “micro-evolutionary” variations, many biologists now doubt that natural selection and random mutations can generate the large-scale changes necessary to produce fundamentally new structures and forms of life.
Thus more than 800 scientists, including professors from such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Rice universities and members of various national (U.S., Russian, Czech, Polish) academies of science have signed a statement questioning the creative power of the selection/mutation mechanism.
Increasingly, the Darwinian idea that living things only appear to be designed has come under scrutiny. Indeed, living systems display telltale signs of actual or intelligent design such as the presence of complex circuits, miniature motors and digital information in living cells.
The information and information-processing systems that run the show in cells point with a particular clarity to prior design. The DNA molecule stores instructions in the form of a four-character digital code, similar to a computer code. As we know from our repeated experience — the basis of all scientific reasoning — systems possessing such features always arise from minds, not material processes.
Thus, despite the orthodox view that Darwin showed “design could arise without a designer” there is now compelling scientific evidence to the contrary.
The question of biological origins has long raised profound philosophical questions. Have life’s endlessly diverse forms been the result of purely material processes or did a purposeful intelligence play a role? It’s not surprising that such an ideologically charged issue would illicit strong passions, leading even scientists to suppress dissenting views with which they disagree.
All the more reason — in this debate as in the one about global warming — to let the evidence, rather than the consensus of experts, determine the outcome.
Dr. Meyer is director for the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, honored in the Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2009. He received his Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. says that “Climategate” shows abuses, suppression and manipulation similar to those committed by “Darwin zealots.”
The big warmup: One very strong consensus among establishment scientists right now is that humans are causing global warming. Science Daily reported a survey of 4,000 abstracts of scientific papers that indicated an “overwhelming consensus among scientists,” as high as 97%, “that recent warming is human-caused” (cf. fallacy of statistics). Yet contrary data still arise from time to time. For instance, New Scientist reported that re-analysis of global temperatures over the last decade shows that “Earth will warm more slowly over this century than we thought it would” – diminishing some of the frantic appeals for immediate action of past years. Apparently the rate of heating hit a plateau even with more greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere. It doesn’t change the consensus; the new data are just “buying us a little more time to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change,” the article continued. Likewise, PhysOrg spun the new data to mean that we still face a “Dire outlook despite global warming ‘pause’,” according to the study published in Nature Geoscience. Skeptics of global warming like to point out that a few decades ago, the consensus warned that Earth was approaching a period of global cooling that would have drastic effects on human life.
What will the consensus believe about climate change in a few years or decades? Nobody knows. It’s instructive, though, to look at other examples of shifting consensus in science… climate changeAny fair-minded reader sees immediately that this bill says nothing about evolution, creation, Genesis, or “climate change” (formerly global warming)… Here, O’Hanlon has combined fear-mongering with glittering generalities to protect the association of “evolution” and “climate change” with the word “science.” This is also misleading because he didn’t define his terms. As it stands, “evolution” could mean anything from an albino monkey to molecules-to-man universal common descent by a blind Darwinian process. “Climate change” could mean anything from the changing seasons to cap-and-trade.
Dumb Scientist: No. Climate is defined over decades, and the seasons change over a single year. a “leftist ideology”Celebrating gay marriage is not the only leftist position frequently advocated by secular science news sites. They follow party-line liberal views with few exceptions, and now openly advocate leftist ideas. … Advocating climate change policy: One might also well ask what astronomy and space travel have to do with climate change. Another Space.com headline by another reporter reads, “NASA Chief Lauds Obama’s Climate Change Plan.” Again, the significant percentage of conservative Americans who disagree with that plan didn’t get any mention. Without a pretense of objectivity, National Geographic published naked ideological advocacy: “Five reasons for Obama to sell climate change as a health issue.”.
Dr. Walter Brown, retired U.S. Air Force colonel, mechanical engineer and former Chief of Science and Technology Studies at the Air War College, is another scientist featured in Miraculous Messages. According to Dr. Brown, it is inevitable that man contributes to some global warming, “but the amount is probably not large and no one really knows the extent.” “Those who argue that man is the sole cause of global warming,” he adds, “have overlooked a key question: Why does the Earth have so much ice—[8 million cubic miles]—in the first place?” “The Hydroplate Theory” developed by Dr. Brown “provides a far better explanation of the earth’s anomalies and present condition than the other more prevalent, well propagated, but highly implausible theories.” For example, what about the ice caps? “For a few centuries after Noah’s Flood, much of the moisture that evaporated from the warm oceans fell as snow and accumulated as glaciers on the high cold continents,” he explains. that the human contribution to global warming “is probably not large and no one really knows the extent.”
In Miraculous Messages Dr. John Baumgardner, retired geophysicist and researcher, does not dispute the earth’s experience of increasingly warmer temperatures—but he contends the primary cause is not related to man’s burning of coal and oil. Baumgardner spent 12 years working on a global ocean model at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and was directly involved in climate research. Dr. Baumgardner notes that the earth has experienced warming and cooling cycles several times since Noah’s Flood estimated to have occurred approximately 5,000 years ago. One such period was from AD 900 to 1300. “During that time the Vikings colonized Greenland, and abundant farming, grasslands, herds, and even vineyards were present in Greenland.” The “Little Ice Age” followed this warm period. In AD 1600, during this period, the Thames River in London froze. With unmistakable evidence of significant variations in global temperature over the past 2,000 years, the current warming is “not out of range,” Baumgardner explains. “Current warming actually started in the 1800s and accelerated during the 20th century, so now we’re about a degree warmer than we were 100 years ago,” he adds. Miraculous Messages looks at additional factors that affect climate cycles. According to Dr. Baumgardner, recent research indicates a connection between the amount of solar (magnetic) activity on the sun and the average temperature of the earth’s surface. “Currently solar activity is high. There are fewer cosmic rays reaching into the atmosphere and, as a result, less clouds and higher temperatures.” who also denies“Models, Genes & Global Warming” by Dr. John Baumgardner that the recent warming is primarily due to our useWhy do Evolutionists Resort to Insults?
“There is not a scientist on the planet who can make a coherent argument supporting macro evolution.” – Dr John Baumgardner, Phd. of fossil fuels.
Former Harvard physicist Lubos Motl added that those promoting the fear of man-made climate changes are “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”“
(Continued in next comment.)
(Continued)
The minority’s second witness was Lord Christopher Monckton, aka the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a British hereditary peer who’s become a minor star in the climate-skeptic world. “The right response to the non-problem of global warming is to have the courage to do nothing,” he told the panel. He readily agreed with Rep. Shimkus: “We are a carbon-starved planet.” might warm the planet, claims that the EPA could regulate breathing“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”, and claims to have baffledTranscript:
BARTON: Dr. Chu, I don’t want to leave you out. You’re our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?
CHU: (Laughs.) This is a complicated story but oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology and in that time also the plates have moved around. And so, it’s a combination of where the sources of the oil and gas …
BARTON: Isn’t it obvious that at one time it was a lot warmer in Alaska and on the North Pole? It wasn’t a big pipeline that we’ve created in Texas and shipped it up there and put it under ground so we can now pump it up and ship it back?
CHU: No, there are continental plates that have been drifting around throughout the geological ages.
BARTON: So it just drifted up there.
CHU: Uh…. That’s certainly what happened. It’s a result of things like that.
WAXMAN: The gentleman’s time has expired.
Update
Rep. Barton responds to Secretary Chu on Twitter:
Participating n climate change hearing. I asked energy secretary where oil in alaska came from. answer puzzles-from continental plate shift
Update
,The GOP liveblog calls Secretary Chu’s answer “perplexing.”
Update
,Evidently confused about who was confused, Barton is now claiming on YouTube that his “simple question” left the “Secretary of Energy puzzled.”
Update
,Another Barton tweet:
I seemed to have baffled the Energy Sec with basic question – Where does oil come from? Check out the video: http://bit.ly/O4m0p #tcot a Nobel laureate with his inane questions.
By Ben Stein on 12.15.09 @ 6:08AM
Turning the heat on Copenhagen and the EPA.
… Karl Marx invented such a model that purported to explain all of history. It was a cruel sham and an excuse for the most breathtaking cruelty in the history of the human race. Now largely abandoned, except on the campuses of universities, it promised salvation and delivered death and suffering. Adolf Hitler, borrowing largely from the vicious racist doctrines of the superiority of the Nordic races, promised a beautiful super race and a super future. He delivered mass murder and war.
Yet man still tries to come up with a theory to explain everything and then to use that theory to control his fellow man, always in the presumed wish to save the white race or the working class or someone or something.
The model we have now in this long and sordid catalogue is about climate. Based upon a great deal of data, many scientists have come up with a theory that human activity is wrecking the climate of the planet and that if the wise, good people are not allowed to compel the stupid, evil people to change their ways drastically, terrible things will happen. Unless some men can make the other men burn less oil, burn less coal, drive smaller cars, not heat or cool their abodes as much, stop growing so much beef and pork and chicken, stop exhaling so much carbon dioxide, the world will end badly.
I do not pretend to be a climatologist. I do claim to follow the subject and it has been clear for years that there is major controversy about whether global warming is really happening in a long-term way. Data suggest (not prove, suggest) that the earth was warmer hundreds and even thousands of years ago than it is now. There is some evidence that the earth reached a high point in temperature in 1998, and then fell, with a rebound just in the last year.
There has also been controversy about whether whatever climate change is occurring is anthropogenic (or of a scale to make much difference about most facets of life). There are terribly smart scientists in the field who say the effects are caused by solar activity or oceanic actions or something else they cannot explain.
In other words, the results of burning carbon are in doubt and the causes are in dispute. The recent publication of hacked e-mails among global warming advocates showing a clear effort to obscure the truth was a stunner to some, but not to those who knew there was a major controversy about this all along.
In this case, what on earth are we doing seeking to drastically change man’s activities on the planet in this quixotic campaign? Why are we seeking to turn industry upside down in the cause of something that may not even be real?
Maybe because the real goal of the climate change elites is not to save anyone from anything but to have as much social control as possible. Just as the real goal of Marxism was to elevate the power of the Marxists, possibly the real goal of climate change champions is to elevate their status in the world.
Karl Marx was a demon sent from hell, but he said a mouthful when he said that “all history is the history of class struggle.” Maybe what we are seeing now is class struggle between the academics and bureaucrats and the businesspeople and oil people and utility people. Maybe that’s what this recent tomfool notion of declaring CO2, a life-giving gas, a dangerous pollutant is. If the government can have a right to control CO2 emissions, it can control every aspect of life everywhere. This is a recipe for blowing up the Constitution. In the name of a goal which may be unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions, which may not even be a real target, which may be a wholly specious goal, we are considering giving government control over our lives beyond what would have been considered conceivable just a few months ago.
Surely this breathtaking assault on freedom merits absolutely total certainty by everyone with a microscope that we will all die very soon from carbon dioxide emissions if we do NOT take away freedom. To allow the government this kind of control over our lives, climate change should be an imminent, life and death issue understood as such by everyone. It should not have to be protected from inquiry and truth seekers as it obviously has been judging from the hacked East Anglia e-mails. The Constitution is far more important, human freedom is far more important, than bowing down to the climate change gods with their smoke and mirrors.
We are living in frightening times, and the ones who are the most frightening among us are, as usual, the ones pretending to save us..
Dear BonquiquiShiquavius,
The LA Times and NPR aren’t part of the scientific community. They reported on a book written by Eli Kintisch, a journalist who writes about science. Also not really part of the scientific community.
I don’t think geoengineering is a viable solution and I don’t care to read Kintisch’s book. But in the article he seems to be repeating the well known facts that aerosols cool Earth’s surface and have a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere than CO2. This doesn’t “wildly contradict previous findings”– I’ve been explaining for years that these nuances are described in detail by the IPCC AR4 WG1 report.
Sincerely,
A dumb member of the scientific community
No, he’s right. Consider an Earth that’s a perfect, frictionless sphere covered in a superfluid ocean. This idealized scenario has no friction, and the resulting tidal bulges would be directly under/opposite the Moon. In this case, the Moon’s average distance to the Earth wouldn’t change with time.
In reality, the coastlines and bathymetry of the liquid water oceans exert a drag on the tidal bulge. Because the Earth spins in the same direction as the Moon orbits, the tidal bulge is dragged ahead of the Moon. This asymmetry exerts a torque on the Moon which speeds it up and thus moves the Moon away from the Earth. This drag also slows down the Earth’s rotation which preserves conservation of energy, as you correctly say.
But harnessing tidal energy is equivalent to increasing drag on the tidal bulge, which will imperceptibly move the tidal bulges farther away from the line connecting the Earth and Moon. This will increase the torque on the Moon and hasten its rise, exactly as PMBjornerud said.
TheCarp and thatotherguy007 bring up this topic again.
Amouth also repeats his argument, and I noted that extracting energy from the tides would only cause the Moon to move toward the Earth if the Earth rotated in the opposite direction as the Moon orbits.
Amouth tried twice to use PE=m*g*h to calculate the gravitational potential energy of the Moon. Twice, I said:
No. PE=m*g*h is only an approximation to be used when g is approximately constant. This is useful if you’re puttering around on the surface of the earth where g really IS 9.8 m/s2, but you’re applying it to a situation where g changes enormously. Try PE = -Gm1m2/r instead.
That’s technically true, but not because harnessing tidal power would cause the Moon to move closer to the Earth. In fact, the Moon would recede from the Earth even faster, resulting in an imperceptibly small decrease in tide heights, because lunar tide heights are proportional to the inverse cube of the distance between the Moon and the Earth. Also, Earth’s slower rotation increases the time between each high tide, imperceptibly decreasing available tidal power.
“How much potential energy would the Moon gain by moving away from the Earth by 1 km? (Also, what about kinetic energy?)”
Potential energy = -Gm1m2/r, where G = 6.67×10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2, m1 = mass of Earth = 6×1024 kg, and m2 = mass of Moon = 7.3×1022 kg. The (current) average distance from the Earth to the Moon is r = 384,399 km.
So the potential energy of the Moon in its current spot is -7.6000718×1028 J. Moving the Moon 1 km away from the Earth raises its potential energy to -7.6000520×1028 J, an increase of 1.97×1023 J.
The rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is the source of tidal power. The Moon’s faster ascent from Earth would be a byproduct of extracting power from the tides. Currently, the Earth’s rotation rate is slowing by ~2 ms per century and the Moon is receding at a rate of ~3.8 cm per year.
The Earth can be approximated as a solid uniform sphere with moment of inertia I = 2/5 m1 a2, where a = mean radius of Earth = 6371 km. So the Earth’s moment of inertia is 9.74×1037 kg m2. Since kinetic energy = 1/2 I omega2, and omega = 2pi/sidereal_period (currently 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.091 seconds), the Earth’s rotational kinetic energy is currently 2.590022706×1029 J. In 100 years, the Earth’s sidereal period will be ~2 ms longer, at which point the Earth’s rotational kinetic energy will be 2.590022586×1029 J, a decrease of 1.20×1022 J.
The lost rotational kinetic energy is converted into frictional heat on the ocean floor and continental boundaries, and some of it goes into raising the Moon’s orbit. Thus we can perform a sanity check by verifying that the energy gained by the Moon is smaller than the lost kinetic energy of the Earth. If 1 km of lunar recession is worth 1.97×1023 J, then using a linear approximation 3.8 cm of recession each year is worth 7.51×1018 J of additional potential energy each year, or 0.24 TW. However, note that increasing the Moon’s orbital radius lowers its orbital velocity, which decreases its orbital kinetic energy. The virial theorem shows that this change in orbital kinetic energy is -1/2 times the change in gravitational potential energy. So the Moon gains energy at a rate of 0.12 TW.
Each year, the Earth’s rotational kinetic energy drops by 1/100 the amount it does each century, which means 1.2×1020 J are lost each year, or 3.8 TW. (Note that this is close to the 3.7 TW reported by Munk and Wunsch.)
So the Earth’s rotational kinetic energy is decreasing faster than lunar energy is increasing, which is physically plausible. Roughly 3% of the lost rotational kinetic energy goes into raising the Moon’s orbit. The rest is converted to heat by friction and turbulence.
2012-05-28 Update: I recalculated these values, added the virial theorem reference and uploaded a Sage worksheet showing my work. I’m still neglecting the slight decrease in rotational kinetic energy of the tidally-locked Moon as it moves to a higher orbit.
Pete Bender adds that much of the kinetic energy lost as the Earth’s rotation slows down goes into friction at the core-mantle boundary. The ocean tides slow down the crust, which couples to the mantle, which very weakly couples to the core. So the Earth’s core doesn’t slow down as much as the crust, introducing more friction at the core-mantle boundary layer. This explains where most of the ~97% of the Earth’s lost rotational kinetic energy is going, but it requires considering a model of the Earth that’s much more complicated than the rigid uniform sphere that I just used.
Also, Pete pointed out that the core and mantle of the Earth are constantly trading momentum in both directions; this imposes noise on the long term secular trend. Since only the long term secular trend is related to the ascension of the Moon, one has to filter out the “short” (i.e. decadal to century scale) noise which seems difficult at best.
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from the links attached to the posters’ names. This comment was actually posted on 2007-03-19 at 12:02 but I’ve changed the time so it appears right before the rest of ShakaUVM’s comments. Our subsequent conversation would probably be inexplicable without providing this context.)
Al Gore is relevant insofar as he is the perfect example of our dependence on energy. As much as he crusades about CO2 emissions, he takes a private jet instead of flying coach, and spends energy and CO2 in much vaster amounts than the average American that he hates so much. …
(Regarding an article about beaming power from solar satellites in low earth orbit.)
My AP Bio teacher back in the day talked about this technology being about the worst thing possible for global warming, as it actually increases the amount of energy coming in to the Earth. Even oil just burns energy that was stored as organic matter ages ago.
Nuclear is still the best way to deal with global warming.
Actually, your bio teacher was stupid.
The thing is, one CO2 molecule will trap much more energy in the atmosphere over its lifetime there (which can, theoretically be almost forever) than it generated for us when it was burnt.
For a beaming technology to work, it has to have relatively low power loss to the atmosphere, which means that most of the energy given to the atmosphere will actually be just waste heat from our appliances, which is so minimal compared to the total amount of energy the atmosphere gets from the sun that it will not matter.
Ok, maybe I’ve been a bit confusing here, but to summarize it: Even if ALL of our energy came from a beam like this, it would not have any measurable effect on the earths temperatures. Not directly anyway, chemical reactions happening as a result of the beam is another issue although I don’t think that would have any impact either.
The point about oil releasing trapped solar energy was just an academic one.
Beaming down light like this will actually increase the effective solar output of the sun, which is a bad thing if you’re worried about global warming. Depending on how much extra solar energy you’re beaming down, it actually can have a significant effect.
No, it cant. Because, as I said, even if ALL our energy came from energy beams, they’d still count for less than 0,01% of the incomming energy to the earth. Completely insignificant, and about 1% of the CO2, CH4, halocarbons, etc (that is, greenhouse gasses that humans take part in producing) in the atmosphere. For this to contribute as much to global warming as burning fossil fuels per unit of energy in our grid, 99% of it needs to be lost to the atmosphere in the beaming.
Also, this energy increase is basically equal to what you’d get from nuclear power. Not even solar power on the ground can give us energy without heating the earth up.
(Ed. note: Originally posted on 2007-12-24 at 9:55 but that breaks up Loke’s conversation…)
That’s what I used to think, but it turns out not to be a significant amount of energy. It’s far less than the amount of heat trapped by the resulting CO2 form burning oil. It’s isn’t about the production of heat as much as it is about the trapping of heat.
(Ed. note: Originally posted on 2007-12-24 at 15:25 but that breaks up Loke’s conversation…)
Actually, that would only be true when the satellite is not between the earth and the sun. Otherwise, the satellite going to be blocking light that would otherwise be hitting the earth anyway. The net amount of energy isn’t going to change (ignoring inefficiencies in the satellite), just the form of the energy. Now he would be right if the satellite was in the Lagrange point or something like that, but even then I would think we could safely ignore it.
… I might not have ever left college (I was a researcher for years) if the pay was good and I had an interesting task to solve.
I think the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves, with their predictions historically overstating global warming.
Climatologist James Annan has a whole series of blog posts debunking Pielke’s claims, e.g. here and here, here, etc. The short answer is that given the large amount of interannual noise present in the data, the 2.5 C “best estimate” trend is consistent with the observed trend, i.e. you can’t say with statistical confidence whether the discrepancy is due to statistical fluctuations in weather or is something real in the underlying climate system. Pielke also makes the common mistake of pretending that the model predictions don’t have any uncertainty and that you can “falsify” them based on a single best-guess trend. Actually, now that I look at it, he also used the projected 100-year warming rate, ignoring the fact that the warming rate is lower at the beginning of the projection period and higher at the end; this method will overstate the near-term warming projected.
For an actual published comparison of IPCC model projections to observations, try here. (Interestingly, they too ignore model uncertainty except for climate sensitivity uncertainty, although that is the largest uncertainty.)
Yes, as we all know from Al Gore’s memorable definition of what a “non-linear system” is: “It’s a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in big jumps.”
I used to work doing modeling of both ocean seawater and other things (like heart cells or full cardiac cycles) which attempted to accurately simulate whatever ODE or whatever it was we were simulating. These models were incredibly sensitive to the various constants used, and what the starting assumptions were. They’d fly off into incoherent-land if these values were not very precise, or if the constants didn’t match each other. The only way we could calibrate or test our simulation was by, say, pulling out a rabbit’s heart, wiring it up, flooding it with some solution, and having the severed heart beat for us when driven by impulses at different frequencies and amplitude. Testing and experimentation is the only way to truly know something, as Feynman said. If we just relied on the models without doing followup experimentation with them, we’d have gotten wildly inaccurate results.
Climatology, on the other hand, is “science-y”, but not really science. It wants to be science, it really does – and goes through the window dressings of having peer reviewed journals and conferences and all of that – but ultimately it is not science. There is no experimentation involved (or if you will, there is one large experiment running all the time), and there is no control for the experiment. Forgive me if I do not allow your models to substitute for actual experimentation, for the reasons listed above.
As one of my professors once said, never listen to anyone who claims to be really accurate over the sample data set. It’s real easy to be accurate on a sample data set. Hell, you can always just spit back out the original numbers if you want – for my neural net spam filter, we could have just returned the classifications of each email and claimed 100% accuracy, for example. If you don’t think that climate researchers actually make bullshit claims like this, check out the wikipedia page on global climate modeling, and look at, say, this graph. There’s charts like that everywhere on wikipedia, showing how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created.
What is important is the accuracy going forward into new data, and as they do, they’ve found numerous glaring problems with the predictive ability of climate models (such as rainfall changes being 25% of what is expected). (For some fun laughs, read predictions of what life would be like in 2010 written 10, 20 or 30 years ago.)
The simple fact of the matter is, I don’t believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.
And if it sounds like I’m picking on climate “scientists”, well, I am, but I had a number of friends who worked in the field at SIO, and they’re generally smart and nice guys, and think there’s a serious problem. Their problem lies in claiming more knowledge than they actually know. (Again, this is not how actual science works.) And it’s not like other fields have looked enviously at the tremendous success of real scientific fields, like physics, over the last hundred years. Psychology, sociology, hell even scientology and philosophy have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves. (Nearly every modern philosopher since Wittgenstein calls themselves an analytic philosopher, which was a movement to directly make philosophy more “scientific” and less heads-in-the-cloudsy.)
Indeed – the Heat Island Effect. Interestingly enough, this was the major premise of State of Fear, that the Heat Island Effect was causing much of the measured temperature gain – that it was being underestimated by climatologists, therefore resulting in perceived global warming.
Real Climate.org did a long blast on State of Fear, but interestingly enough, their response on the HIE was real weak, which essentially said “We know about it and are already compensating for it”. Well, yes… he said so. Why not just ignore stations within heat islands entirely (like he did in several charts)? RC.org’s response? Silence. And moderation of comments asking that question, too, interestingly enough. They like a little bit of criticism on the site, but not a lot. (Even if you ask it as nicely as I just did.)
Michael Crichton also theorizes there is peer pressure in the field to keep global warming dissent out of peer reviewed journals. (“Preposterous!” Real Climate.org claimed.) Of course, with the Climategate emails leaked out, we now see compelling proof that Crichton was actually right on the money with this – with a climate journal which promoted a single GW skeptic to the editorial board being pressured to fire him, and lacking that, for everyone to boycott the journal, take their papers elsewhere, and to refuse to cite any articles in that journal.
It’s all very interesting. I find RC.org informative, though obviously biased – when a British judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth could be shown in classrooms, but only with a teacher guide explaining that it is a polemic, NOT a documentary, RC.org conveniently left out this latter bit, making it appear Al Gore was completely vindicated in the courtroom.
I’m giving a guest lecture on global warming next week, and used mainly RC.org, in conjunction with a mix of Green and government information sources to prepare the lecture.
Yeah, it is. I actually lectured on this last Thursday (and tomorrow). The Clean Air Act is responsible in part for the spike in temperatures we got after, well, the Clean Air Act. Particulate matter is responsible for about a -0.3c to -0.5c temperature forcing (though it varies quite a bit when you get things like Pinatubo blowing off), and have been decreasing steadily in the last 40 years. I’m not saying belching smokestacks were a good thing, but a lot of the bullshit worry over global warming came as a result of temperature reaching a higher equilibrium from lowered particulate count as well as forcing from higher CO2 levels (which have contributed about +0.8C in forcing since the late 1800s. The actual numbers are doubled, but the oceans act as a buffer for a lot of the heat, so you only expect to see about half the gain from the forcings.
So yeah, the Greens are responsible for Global Warming: the Clean Air Act, the SUV, and the massive CO2 output from energy production are all so-called “environmentalists” fault.
Citations available upon request. My presentation is about 60 slides, for two days of lecture.
Indeed. When lecturing on AGW last Thursday, it was amusing when my students asked if the volcano erupting was good or bad for the environment.
The simple fact is that there’s no simple answer. If you’re an endangered bird who only nests on whatever-the-hell that volcano is, you’re pretty much fucked. If contrails from airplanes have a cooling effect, then grounding a bunch of planes might warm the atmosphere. The particulate matter will slightly cool the atmosphere. If you’re a specialized form of algae that eats volanic ash in saltwater, it might be great for you, but terrible for the fish nearby.
The really tragic fact about Greens, is that they’re stupid. They simply don’t understand that every choice is always a mixture of pros and cons, good effects and bad effects and side effects. Their mindset (based on the precautionary principle) is that if ANYTHING is negative about an option, they must file a lawsuit and get it banned.
This has led to:
As long as idiot Greens continue thinking in all-or-nothing terms, they’ll continue making decisions that are horribly bad both for the environment and for the economy.
MOD PARENT UP!
(Ed. note: this is slashdot-ese for, “I agree with this comment, so it should be more visible.”)
… I’m ranting because I have to give a lecture in eight hours and answer questions from the students about why our system is so badly run. …
… My lecture notes for this topic are about 10 pages long. I can post them all if you’d like.
… I actually research every topic rather thoroughly, and have probably spent more time on RC.org than any other single source, but it doesn’t mean I agree with RC.org (in fact, I think they’re deceitful hacks). I’ll listen to Glenn Beck and Pacifica Communist Radio in the same hour. …
Hey, thanks man. At least my post didn’t get modded as flamebait. Though I like the environment, clean air, and all that, I don’t have a lot of respect for the Greens, and I have to defend them in class (well, at least explain why someone would think that way), which tends to make me irritable toward them.
Speak power to truth, comrade!
The “effluent” CO2 coming out of your body in every breath certainly needs to be regulated. In the future, when my “carbon zero” plan is adopted, all people must wear CO2 rebreathers as they go about their daily business – or be “cap and taxed”, if you know what I mean. The guillotine is a carbon-neutral device, my friend!
Together we shall end this imperialist capitalist pig pollution chemical weapon! Death to CO2!
Note to people who don’t understand sarcasm: The EPA and others have begun pushing to label CO2 as a poison.
This is the ridiculous stance that I am parodying here. CO2 is not a poison. Unless you consider everything a poison, if you breathe nothing but.
That statement is in dire need of a citation.
Just because it’s funny to say “Straight from the horse’s mouth”. But here’s the primary link.
They’re using the endangerment clause (“air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare”) of the Clean Air Act, intended to be used to regulate actually dangerous emissions, to regulate CO2.
Enough links? =)
One link that backs up your claim would be enough but you have not posted anything that backs up your original claim that “The EPA and others have begun pushing to label CO2 as a poison“. You may have fooled a few mods but you have also reinforced my suspicion that your claim is bullshit.
I’m too tired to provide a car analogy, but what the EPA pulled is the equivalent of the state department claiming it can regulate all industry because industry produces CO2, CO2 causes global warming, global warming is against American interests, and therefore treasonous.
The endangerment clause was designed for pollutants which harm humans, i.e. poisons, fucktard, not a nebulous connection like it has. Unfortunately the supreme court opened the doors on this a couple years back, so it looks legal.
You were just wrong before, now you’re wrong and angry?
Not wrong… but kind of annoyed you’re failing basic reading comprehension.
[Citation Provided]
Nice!
YEs, it’s exactly the kind of citation you would use, ie: an irrelevant one that does not back up your claims.
A relevant one that shows the EPA is claiming CO2 is a pollutant that endangers human life, i.e., a poison.
Who put sand into your vagina?
No occurrence of the word poison in either of those pages, just an indication that greenhouse emissions are a danger to public health, and *NEWSFLASH* it appears they are, if indirectly.
There’s also the issue that things just keep speeding up over time. For example, the Copenhagen’s (failed) *goal* was to limit average global temperature rise to “only” 2 degrees celsius. Well, that’d mean “only” about 1 meter of sea level rise over the next hundred years. But the equilibrium sea level rise for a 2C temperature rise, historically, is 6-9 meters. It takes several hundred years for the planet to reach its sea level equilibrium, but we’re talking about (among countless other things) 1/4 of the land mass of Florida going underwater. 1m is mostly just the everglades.
Uh, no. In climate science, the general consensus is that we need to keep temperature gain below 2 degrees C. The IPCC estimates even with the high end (5 to 6 degree rise) still less than a .7m rise by 2100.
I’m not sure what source you’re using for your 2 degrees -> 1 meter gain idea. Did the lack of temporal data in An Inconvenient Truth confuse you?
You clearly haven’t kept up on the papers on sea level rise since the AR4 reports.
It’s probably not that bad. However, there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t be looking into solutions (geoengineering foremost among them) and switching to nuclear. There’s a variety of Really Good Reasons why we should be on nuclear power, AGW just one of them.
I’m not an expert in a relevant field to understand fully this issue, and chances are neither are you. Other than wait and reserve judgment, the only logical choice I can make when there is overwhelming consensus among experts (there is on climate change) is to listen to them. I support cap and trade, not because I think it’s a good idea – because I’m not qualified to know that – but because the majority of those who are qualified think it is, and science is not a political process even when the conclusions polarizes people along political lines.
Spend a few hundred hours researching the issue, and you can be qualified to comment, too. None of the issues surrounding energy production and global warming aren’t particularly hard to understand – the only reason it is so time consuming is that figuring out who is bullshitting on which point of contention takes a while.
For example, the issues surrounding bad station data is rather complex. RC.org hand-waves the issue, saying that they have “taken it into their calculations”, but on this issue, it seems obvious that RC.org is bullshitting.
Not true. These are scientists trying to dip their toes into the political waters with this, so of course it’s political. They’re not arguing about facts or anything, they’re proposing societal change, and honestly, they’re probably out of their league here.
Case in point: Kyoto was one of the worst designed treaties ever written. It is “cap and trade”, but would result in no CO2 reductions, only a transfer of money from America to Eastern Europe. Why? The CO2 levels were set at pre-USSR collapse levels, so all the Eastern Bloc countries have a massive amount of “credits” to sell to countries who therefore don’t need to reduce levels at all.
I’m not singling you out for this, but it’s really very dangerous when people give up on trying to research issues for themselves, and rely on what they hear from a single source as fact. Whether it be Fox News, or HuffPo, or “scientists”, I’ve never once been happy with a single perspective on a problem.
(Ed. note: this comment was actually posted at 2010-05-19 at 20:44, but I quoted this conversation and linked it repeatedly while talking with ShakaUVM, so it’s probably best to read it first.)
I can only speak about the weather station near me which by chance happened to be one of the top examples which made the international “news” with regard to this ongoing “story” and had the blogs all aflame. (not trying to hide my “bias” either) And unrelated to all this I happen to learn about the history of that station some years ago.
In the case of this station the adjustment was totally justified and above the board. It was moved from where it lived for 100 years at the edge of where the city used to be, to the local observatory which is some 300 feet higher in elevation. A few adiabatic lapse rate calculations later and the correction factor they used after the date of the move seems just about the same as you might expect. But of course only the existence of the adjustment made the “news”, never the justification for it.
No idea about all the other weather stations around the world, but to me the onus to prove that the other adjustments are part of some grand evil plot by the scientists is clearly on the bloggers. And so far they’ve only been able to come up with a lot of hot air and noise as far as I’m concerned.
No idea about all the other weather stations around the world, but to me the onus to prove that the other adjustments are part of some grand evil plot by the scientists is clearly on the bloggers. And so far they’ve only been able to come up with a lot of hot air and noise as far as I’m concerned.
The problem is, if you don’t know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That’s why I called bullshit.
In any event, with the move to satellite temperature recording, the debate will become increasingly irrelevant.
I know weather stations have become more automated but they still get visited on a regular basis. Any abrupt change in the data coming in is likely to get a visit. In general satellite records correlate with surface based records pretty well. You know satellites don’t measure the temperature directly. Instead they infer it based on the level of radiation in specific wavelengths coming out of the atmosphere.
And reported to whom? As far as I can tell, they just use statistical methods to guess which stations are bad, as well as some high level attempts to sort stations into urban and rural.
Link 1 [nasa.gov]
Link 2 [nasa.gov]
As I said, satellite data ought to make the debate moot.
Yes, they do use statistical methods to make the adjustments but they’ve tested them against the real world to verify their validity. You don’t have to visit 100% of the stations to test that.
Let’s say that Watts was completely right – 90% of the stations in America are badly sited, by the NOAA’s own guidelines, and have error rates that can climb quite high. You can filter out the odd outlier, but you can’t use statistical techniques to fix 90% of your data in any sort of fashion that would leave me confident in the results.
It’s possible that the data from the good stations might end up matching the overall totals (and in fact it looks like it might be this way), but this doesn’t mean that he’s wrong. I think that’s an important fact his detractors are missing.
I just find it dubious that IF 90% of the sites are bad (and who knows if he’s telling the truth or not) that the NOAA has any basis whatsoever for saying they can fix it with statistics.
Yet a recent study comparing Watts’ list of well and poorly sited stations showed that if anything after adjustments the poorly sited ones add a slight negative bias to the temperature record compared to the well sites ones.
Look, let me simplify the whole issue down to one question: Politics aside, is it better or not to know the quality of your surface stations?
Watts did a service to the climate scientists forcing them to examine their data more closely. In the end though it strengthened their case.
Precisely. Empirical research always trumps statistical approximation, especially when your dataset is potentially 90% error-prone.
But the AGW camp would rather shut up than admit that…
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. When scientists as NOAA examined Watts’s list of well sited vs. poorly sited stations and compared the results against each other the results strengthened their argument that their statistical methods are valid.
This is the key takeaway point here. Confirmation of something can often be as valuable as evidence that disproves a hypothesis.
He did legwork that nobody else did; it is entirely possible he could have found that they’d overlooked something in their purely statistical methods, and it’s possible that he did, but the errors he found fell well within the fairly generous error ranges of the measurement data.
When you say “research” do you mean enrolling in graduate physics courses at an accredited university to learn about the radiative physics of the atmosphere? (This would involve some kind of objective measure of your ability to construct and solve equations.)
Or does “research” mean reading crackpot websites, then using trick #11: “10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it. (10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own.)”
Considering your other comment (which is wrong), it’s probably not necessary for you to answer this question.
Keep in mind that all the creationists I’ve seen are convinced that they understand evolution better than 97% of evolutionary biologists. Just like you seem to be convinced that you understand radiative physics better than 97% of climatologists, and the overwhelming majority of scientists in all fields.
I was being sarcastic. Labeling CO2 as a poison is one of the most stupid recent advancements in the debate over global warming.
I have a Master’s degree in computer science; my master’s thesis was on the modeling of seawater. But beyond that, I actually do my own research, and know how to eliminate crackpot theories better than Al Gore, who uncritically reported several false stories in an Inconvenient Truth.
Consider that 97% of climate scientists think they can run an economy better than anyone else. Then become scared when they point to Kyoto as a model for the future.
Another example of the modified salem hypothesis.
Let me guess, the crackpot theories you’ve eliminated happen to be the ones that my previous comment showed are accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists who actually study these topics for a living?
Note that this article starts with the sentence “… this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smug politician’s alarmism.”
Later in the article, during my conversation with Jane Q. Public: “… the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.
So I’ve already listed several points that Al Gore got wrong in his silly little movie. I’m also amused by nonscientists who think Al Gore is relevant. He’s not a scientist. He’s a smug, pompous, washed up politician. If you seriously want to learn about the science behind abrupt climate change, stick to peer-reviewed journal articles and stay away from politicians like Al Gore.
Did I mention it to begin with? No. So don’t get angry when you bash on someone for not having graduate credentials in a related field, and they turn out to. I wasn’t bragging, and if you read my original post, I’m encouraging people to do their own research instead of just reading what they should believe online. I can’t believe anyone would disagree with that.
FWIW, I believe in AGW, and think it’s a serious problem. Does that sound like a crackpot creationist to you? No? Oh, I guess you don’t fucking know what you’re talking about, do you?
What I was taking issue with was the notion that because scientists know science, they can design economic and political systems just as well. This is clearly a flawed point of view, but one the OP clearly subscribed to.
Don’t mistake my disappointment in the (lack of) intellectual rigor of most non-scientists [whom I find lecturing about this topic] as anger. It’s an emotion much more akin to sadness. And the point of my modified Salem hypothesis was that computer science isn’t really all that closely related to the radiative physics of the atmosphere. In my opinion, computer science should probably be called “algorithm engineering” in an attempt to emphasize the difference between it and the “natural sciences”. The “standard” Salem hypothesis is similar and (as far as I can tell) very descriptive of reality; my only modification was that of generalizing the statement somewhat.
My current point is that a staggering number of crackpots stress the amount of time they’ve spent independently studying an idea, missing the fact that they have no objective way to determine if this “study” has actually enabled them to solve serious graduate physics problems because no one’s ever graded their homework or exams. It’s important to stress that this kind of independent verification is a critical part of the educational process.
No, but I disagree with your assessment that Real Climate are bullshitting deceitful hacks, for reasons that I’ve explained at length in my article.
Indeed, I just remembered that I asked people to mod up one of your previous comments. But I also disagree that “the IPCC has done a good enough job discrediting themselves, with their predictions historically overstating global warming” for similar reasons as Ambitwistor in his reply to your comment.
Out of curiosity, what do you think half of climate science is? It’s computer modeling. Of what? Of the atmosphere, land, and oceans.
But my point remains that I wasn’t standing on that as an expert, merely that I’d gone to the effort to educate myself on the issue. I’m a firm believer in doing primary research for oneself.
What article? And I do read everything Real Climate.org posts on their blog, so it’s not like I think they’re entirely composed of shit, merely that they stand on the wrong side of the facts sometimes, because of their political alignment, and I call them on it. For example, they defended the mistakes Al Gore made in an Inconvenient Truth, saying in essence that it was more important to get people talking about global warming than it was to get the facts right. This is the kind of stuff that irritates me about the site, along side of their heavy handed censorship of posts.
I just re-read AR1 recently, and it predicts a 0.3C rise per decade (or between 0.2C and 0.5C per decade). But if you look at the temperature graph it is right on the lower boundary 0.2C per decade.
In other words, that graph that I linked to appears to be correct – that world temps are matching the lower bound of predictions, which is ~60% of their “best guess” for predictions. Perhaps “discrediting” is a bit too strong, but the data matches the graph and analysis that I linked to, so I think it’s a reasonable accurate statement.
But what really sets me off are the people that cut off temperature graphs right when the temperatures were rising the sharpest. Al Gore (I know, I know) did it. In his movie, he got on a little electric lift to show how high temperatures would be if that trend continued. However, temperatures have remained higher than average, but not steeply increasing, in the last decade.
But when you look at the main page for AGW on Wikipedia take a look at the very first graph you see. It just beckons the reader to continue the line on up. It’s not like we haven’t had a decade to put some new graphs together or something.
Do you agree or disagree that this is misleading?
Sorry, I was wrong on this. It looked like a more famous graph I’ve seen in a lot of places that cuts off at 2000.
As I’ve explained at length, the problem is that programmers think their Java skillz enable them to understand both halves of climate science. For example, a programmer might say something like this:
… without noticing that scientists perform many independent verifications of these stations. Just like evolutionary biologists face a deluge of engineers who disprove evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics (standard Salem hypothesis), climate scientists face a deluge of engineers and programmers who use their hacking skills to prove that CO2 is saturated, or that global warming is caused by sunspots, etc.
The same one I’ve been linking for a while now.
I’ve already been very critical of Gore, so I’m tempted to agree with that small criticism. But I haven’t yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don’t blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I’ve seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don’t devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like “Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both!”
Considering that you haven’t commented on James Annan’s analyses, I guess there’s no reason for me to mention Ambitwistor’s links again. There’s also probably no point in linking my analysis of this issue again, where I provided several links showing comparisons that show temperatures tracking well inside the 95% confidence level.
It’s important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don’t provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc.
All the analyses I’ve seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC’s error bars.
For reasons that I don’t understand even after several months, I can’t access Wikipedia. Everything else on the net is accessible, but I have to use the text-only google cache to see any Wikipedia pages, and the graphics aren’t included. If you’d like to link to the graph as it appears in a peer-reviewed article, I can see what you’re talking about. But I doubt I have time; I have to get a presentation ready for the Western Pacific AGU conference.
Without seeing what you’re talking about, I’d have to say that the best choice would be a plot of recorded global temperatures vs. the IPCC ensemble’s 20-year average based on actual records of forcings, including all the data available. This would likely show temperatures and the IPCC ensemble average “flattening out” over the last decade (but not completely flat, of course, and most of that is due to turbulence like ENSO that I’ve discussed ad nauseum.)
As I said in another thread on here, if we stipulate that Watts was right, and 90% of stations are bad, there’s simply no way of statistically filtering out the bad stations. Or, let me back up a second. If I had to pick, blindfoldeds, not knowing which guy was a crackpot and which was a NASA scientist, between two guys:
Guy 1) A guy who did an empirical study of surface stations to determine their relative quality, and
Guy 2) A guy who claimed that he could use the magic of statistics to filter out an arbitrarily high number of bad stations…
I’d be inclined to pick Guy #1. Now lets say they get the same answer for the temperature average. Does that mean that Guy #1 is right or wrong? It’s neither.
This would be a good time to repeat my quote that you just quoted: The problem is, if you don’t know that someone has put asphalt around your temperature station, how on Earth can you expect to correct for it accurately? They attempt to correct the data just using statistics, without actually sending people out to inspect the stations. That’s why I called bullshit.
Now, if you’re claiming that Watt is a crackpot and making up all of his surface station data, that’s another thing entirely, but since his results correlate with other datasets… it’s weird form of verification for him.
Sure, and that’s how most online forums work. RC.org takes it a step further and aggressively blocks or edits even the most reasonable of fact-based comments. I had a paragraph cut down to a single sentence, taken out of context, and then attacked by Gavin. (I believe I was criticizing the use of inferno-red colors in a graph to make it look like the world was on fire in AGW graphs. It’s an old trick out of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. My point was that you shouldn’t use tricks like that to describe relatively minor +0.1C temperature changes… which got cut out entirely.)
Considering I just went back to the original source and verified the claim… ok, fine. James Annan claims that the date (1990) was cherry picked as a minimum. This is laughably wrong because 1) 1990-1992 were the dates that AR1 came out, and 2) as I showed in the links above, I was using an averaged temperature graph, and there was no minima in 1990. It confirmed the graph that I linked to, which showed AR1 being accurate only on the extreme lower edge of their estimates for temperature in the next 10 and 20 years.
Or to put it another way, because the article I linked to was accurate, there’s very little reason in debunking a guy trying to debunk it. If you think I’m wrong, please let me know.
Sure, if you make your error bars large enough, you can always be right. =)
As I said, (and the article I linked to) it was right within their lower bound. The problem was that their lower bound was quite a bit lower than their best prediction. I think over 20 years of average temperature data there’s enough of a trend to show that their prediction was about 50% too high. (And if 20 years is not enough, how much time would you say needs to go by?)
I just flipped through some of the other predictions from the impact report of AR1. I’ll have to do some research to see how they’ve turned out.
Care to send me the link to your presentation?
Second quick note, based on one of your references (I’ve been reading through the various links off your site, good times).
Scroll down to the Hansen analysis. It’s basically saying what I’m saying, that the prediction was wrong, statistically speaking, or at least on the outer edges of the lower boundary. Whereas I was probably a bit too harsh on it, RC.org is characteristically too weak.
A prediction of 0.26C+0.05C versus a reality of 0.19+0.05C becomes “running a little warm compared to the real world. BUT…” This is what I take RC.org to task for. It’s not their science, really, nor their facts or data. (That’s why I read the site.) It’s the fact that they are, well, biased.
I’d been reading Anthony Watts’s websites for years before Kyle and I discussed surfacestations.org last year. He acts like a serious crackpot on his other site wattsupwiththat.com, but clearly tries to keep a lid on the crazy when writing surfacestations.org.
Taken together, both sites make it clear that Watts believes climatologists are incompetent and/or engaged in a massive conspiracy. He ignores the multiple independent proxies and wind studies which back up the instrumental temperature record. He implies that the urban heat island effect is responsible for the rise of instrumental temperature record because 90% of stations are “poor quality” according to him. So scientists take the 10% of stations that are “approved” by Watts, and its time series is very similar to the time series of all stations. Furthermore, the abstract of the Menne 2010 paper I’ve already linked pointed out that the bias was “counterintuitive” to Watts’s preconceptions. This is not a verification of Watts in any sense.
That’s not how I read James Annan’s series of three articles. He seemed to mainly be criticizing Pielke’s sloppy statistics. I’ve previously described this in many places, but the best I can find at the moment is here. Again, the analyses I’ve linked take proper ensembles of the AR1 models, updated with actual emissions and other forcings, and analyze the results with an understanding of the statistical limitations imposed by the need to average out weather noise. I don’t see any evidence that Pielke actually did any of this, which is probably why he hasn’t gotten any of these rants published in a reputable journal.
Again, I think the stratospheric water vapor issues I’ve previously linked and the inherent unpredictability of turbulence like ENSO are enough to explain most or all of this difference.
Even the “large” uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970. Even though the two curves have wide error bars, they don’t overlap. What other objective measure should we use to determine when the error bars get “small enough”?
I’ve recently been threatened with a lawsuit on Slashdot, so my commitment to anonymity is stronger than ever. I don’t want to end up like the CRU scientists. But I’ve described my research anonymously before, for whatever that’s worth.
Of course, you could always show up in Taipei on June 22 and look for the GRACE presentations…
Ok great. But his politics don’t matter, unless he’s lying about the surface station data. Are you saying his surface station data is wrong? That’s the only thing that matters. I haven’t seen anything that says it is, but I could be wrong.
In regards to the verification, what I mean is that the fact that his good stations agree with the national average shows his selection process is probably a good one, since it matches satellite temps.
I’m not an AGW denier. By no means am I claiming that. I only take exception when people overstate a threat, or ascribe global warming to whatever news item of the week it is. Back when I was living in SF, pretty much everything was ascribed to global warming on the local news.
In terms of the error bars, I just find it amusing that they’re so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong. Being off by 30-50% over twenty years, for example, is considered acceptable. My own personal prediction is that by 2100, the temperature of the earth will be somewhere between the surface temperature of the sun, and absolute zero. Even though I’m confident this will play out, I’m still waiting to pick up my Nobel Prize, unfortunately.
Ouch. Now that’s what a nutcase actually looks like, BTW.
What surface station data? Anthony Watts has a blog filled with photos and a history of failed journal submissions. I’m not disputing his politics. I’m saying that he clearly implied that the “best” 10% of stations would show global cooling (or stagnation) whereas the “bad” 90% of stations contaminated by the UHI would show an even bigger increase. When someone actually checked this, it turns out he was wrong. Seriously, read Menne et al. 2010, linked previously but I’ll give it one more shot. Scientists hadn’t ignored any of the issues Watts implies. They’d actually checked the time series in quite a few interesting ways. Watts simply didn’t do a thorough literature search before making his wacky claims.
I’ve made a list of all the nonsense I’d seen from the Greens. What utter rubbish. I’ve still got things to add to that list, too, I just can’t divert time away from school…
They’re smaller than the error bars you can get using the most sophisticated approach that can be solved using a paper and pencil. Decreasing the error bars further will require better understanding of cloud formation and aerosol interactions, faster computers, raw data at higher spatial and temporal densities, and a better theoretical understanding of the turbulence that is currently extremely difficult to model such as the oscillations ENSO, AO, AAO, NAO, PNA, AMO, PDO, MJO, etc.
Radtea already asked what would be necessary to convince me that our emissions aren’t responsible for at least the majority of the warming since ~1970, as measured using 20 year smoothing to account for our current limitations.
What data? His data on which stations match NOAA guidelines. Again, do you think this data is accurate or not? That is the only question that matters.
How many different ways should I explain this? Watts implied that his “good” stations would have a significantly smaller warming trend than the “bad” stations. Menne 2010 showed that any differences are negligible:
Watts’s response is incoherent, filled with healthy doses of a persecution complex:
He spent years posting pictures and implying incompetence/conspiracies on the part of NOAA/NASA scientists without ever bothering to redo NOAA’s analysis on his subset of “good” stations. When someone actually did some science with his rankings, his claims ended up looking silly even to nonscientists who aren’t familiar with previous studies like Parker 2004.
And, obviously, Watts doesn’t see Menne’s paper as verification of any sort. You appear to be alone in that opinion, and I don’t understand why you’re taking a position that even Watts is sensible enough not to take. He’s saying that Menne is wrong, and pointing to several non-peer-reviewed (heck, unlinked) analyses of “more complete” data which he’s apparently not going to share.
Yet again, you are missing the point. There’s two related issues here: 1) his assessment of surface station quality and 2) differences, if any, between his collection of stations and the national average. I’ve been only talking about 1), which you keep ignoring in order to talk about 2.
Hell, the quote above you give seems to accept his rankings of surface stations. This is what I mean as a validation of his work. I’m utterly uninterested in his conclusions or lack thereof from his subset of stations (ie 2), only if you or others think his assessment of stations is accurate.
Perhaps you’ve never seen what I’m talking about?
No, you haven’t been talking only about issue #1. You were clearly implying that Watts has uncovered issues that Real Climate is “bullshitting” about. I’ve been trying to stress that this isn’t true.
You know what? Forget it. This is too repetitive for me to bother. Have a nice day.
I have been. You’ve been failing to understand this.
Empirical research trumps statistical filtering. Go back and read what I said.
It’s a shame… yet another pro-AGW person that has a complete mental block to ever admit that someone in the anti-AGW camp might be right about something.
It’s a very simple question: is his surface station data accurate or not? Why can’t you answer this question??
I have answered that question. Repeatedly. First I linked the section in my article containing the surfacestations.org conversation, where Menne 2010 is linked at the end. I assumed that any scientist interested in the instrumental temperature record would follow the links and read the Menne paper. When it became clear that you hadn’t, I mentioned Menne 2010 explicitly and urged you to read the abstract. When that didn’t work, I directly linked Menne 2010. When even that didn’t work, I finally quoted from the abstract:
… Results indicate that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites …
In other words, Watts can apparently rank stations on a 1-5 scale well enough that the mean bias agrees roughly with his rankings. That’s what you’re calling argument #1, and you call it “a validation of his work”. If you want to consider that validation of his work, fine. Personally, I think it’s only validation that he isn’t blind or in a coma.
I view argument #2 (Watts’s ubiquitous claims that the instrumental temperature record is contaminated by the UHI effect) as Watts’s main point. This claim has been convincingly falsified. Watts himself seems to agree that argument #2 is his main point, because he attacks Menne’s analysis and character rather than thanking him for “validating his work.” That’s why I’ve been focused on argument #2. If you’ve really just been talking about argument #1 this entire time, then I was wrong to assume you were claiming that Watts had performed important, original research which NOAA scientists and Real Climate had been bullshitting about. Sorry for the confusion.
And, yet again, your apparent belief that Watts was the first one to perform empirical research to test surface stations simply isn’t true. Aside from the many studies I’ve linked that show the UHI isn’t responsible for the instrumental temperature rise, notice the sentences I’ve previously quoted:
“this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. … Adjustments applied to USHCN Version 2 data largely account for the impact of instrument and siting changes, although a small overall residual negative (“cool”) bias appears to remain in the adjusted maximum temperature series.”
If NOAA hadn’t already been “documenting” changes to surface stations, there’s no way these bias corrections could possibly have been accurate.
I’m not trying to say that Watts is blind, or that he’s unable to fill in bubbles on a multiple choice form (which, if true, would refute argument #1). I’ve just been saying that his “research” isn’t original, ignores many previous studies, and didn’t uncover the UHI problems that Watts was clearly expecting (which does refute argument #2). I’m sorry that I mistook your statements as endorsement of argument #2. We can certainly both agree that Watts has good enough vision to see the stations and has mastered multiple choice forms.
No, you haven’t. Answering a question involves writing a thesis statement. References are not an acceptable substitute for a thesis statement. The Menne quote you’ve given twice before accepts his classification of surface stations as “good” and “bad”, and you’ve now accepted #1.
My entire point is that empirical studies trump statistical filtering. The GISS data for example, does some of its UHI filtering by comparing temperature spikes between an urban station and a rural station. How do they know which is which? They look at them on a map. This is what I called bullshit on – if the rural station has had asphalt put around it, and now has an AC exhaust blowing right on top of it, they have no way of knowing except by doing the legwork that Watts did. Claiming that stats can fix everything when 90% of stations are compromised is nonsense. I know they do a lot of clever tricks (checking for temperature dips on windy days for example), but I’m not happy with any substitute except satellite data (validating via another empirical source).
As I’ve said, I’m tired of the repetitive nature of my conversations with non-physicists. You’re the N’th person to claim that Watts has performed some vital, original research that scientists have been “bullshitting” about. I don’t have time to provide free tutoring to every person in the general public, so I tend to provide references under the assumption that nonscientists are willing to read papers on their own. Like I said, I have actual research to do, and I thought you were interested in understanding why scientists don’t think Watts’s research is original rather than playing a cynical game to see if I’d praise Watts for his 1-5 rankings while ignoring 99% of his claims. What a waste of time that I could have used to continue developing a new tsunami early warning system using GRACE/GRACE2!
Claiming that 90% of the stations are compromised would require showing that the previously documented empirical evidence hadn’t corrected for the bias. Menne 2010 showed that this isn’t the case. You seem to think that Parker 2004 and all the other papers I’ve quoted are merely playing games with statistics. Nonsense. Those papers are validating the instrumental temperature record with wind sensors, which are another independent empirical data source, even if you personally prefer satellites. (I work with GRACE satellite data, and frankly I don’t understand that subjective preference, but to each his own.) The only differences between these peer-reviewed papers and Watts’s blogosphere “research” (aside from the peer-reviewed part, obviously) are that the actual scientists didn’t ignore previous studies, didn’t make crackpot claims about what the comparison would reveal, and are using a source of empirical data that’s less subjective than Watts (station rankings are inherently more subjective than automated wind sensors).
If you can’t engage in proper argumentation, then you’re really not helping. An argument takes the form of a thesis statement, and supporting statements and references. When the references you cite support my point, and you don’t make a thesis statement, you’re accomplishing less than nothing.
The Watts research is case in point. He went out and did legwork that everyone else was ignoring. Unless you’re actually claiming it’s better off not knowing the quality of surface stations, he made a contribution. But the papers you reference, and your own statements on here, show your amazing reluctance to ever grant a single scrap of credit to the guy. I actually agree with you that he’s a nutjob, but these… blinders… that climate scientists put on really does away with a lot of the aura the field so desperately tries to craft around itself.
To use your own words, it’s like a modified Salem Hypothesis that lets non-physicists like climate scientists think that their hand-waving is a legitimate form of argumentation, whereas everyone else is an anti-scientific nutjob. It probably comes from their field being only tenuously considered a science. Yes, yes, I’ve read RC’s article “Is Climate Modelling Science?”, and as someone who as actually studied the philosophy of science, in graduate school… RC.org is wrong, again. Climate science is closer in practice to economics than any other field. So either economics is a science, or climate science isn’t, or you have to put some sort of nebulous grey area together for fields that make observations and construct hypothesis for predictions, but can’t run controlled experiments and have problems with falsifiability.
You’re not familiar with the Gettier paradox then. I’m tempted here to just quote a bunch of papers on it to show you why you’re wrong, without ever saying why, just to show you why your method of argumentation is so poor. But I’ll just leave it up to you to research it and figure out for yourself why this claim is fallacious.
Yet again, it’s the “everyone else was ignoring” clause that I’m disagreeing with. Watts isn’t the first person to repeatedly survey stations in person, as riverat1 and I have been saying over and over. Notice that the emphasis is on correcting for undocumented changes. That is, scientists long since recognized that even their labor-intensive survey efforts would miss changes to the site quality, so the last decade has seen additional steps above and beyond repeated surveys. Watts isn’t the first person to examine stations by doing legwork, he’s just the first person to become an internet celebrity by claiming he is.
Radtea made a similar argument, which I’ve already pointed out is ridiculous.
You’re not the first “graduate student of the philosophy of science” to say these things. And it’s really odd to see you label me a non-physicist. My physics B.S. had a research emphasis on experimental optics. I went to graduate school planning to focus on quantum teleportation (that presentation and review paper were part of my physics M.S. defense). It’s only in the last 4 years that I switched from optics to studying Earth’s time-variable gravity field using GRACE k-band satellite ranging measurements (which got me interested in the physics of the climate). I realize you think that “I don’t fucking know what I’m talking about” but I’m curious as to what you think qualifies someone to be a physicist?
Again, you’re not the first person to change the topic from “how many independent empirical data sources have been shown to be consistent with dynamical climate model ensembles” to something like “Is justified true belief knowledge?”.
Again, you’re having trouble with the thesis statement thing, though I appreciate the various links to read.
Economics is actually the closest parallel to climate science, as applied mathematics is very close to some parts of computer science (and other fields with other parts).
If you think the consensus that climate science isn’t science by the philosophy crowd bothers you, you ought to wonder why. I’m perfectly well aware that people in the field have adopted the title of scientists for themselves, in order to achieve a patina of respectability, but everyone has been doing that these days. Even philosophy has tried to adopt the patina of science for itself since the early 20th Century.
I’m not of the camp that it’s not science (well, depending on my mood), but it certainly doesn’t meet all the criteria of a real science, either. That’s why I think we really should have a third category beyond arts and sciences for the semi-scientific schools of inquiry, like climate science and economics.
I was just annoyed that you called me a non-physicist. I let it pass once with your rather insulting Salem Hypothesis thing, but I don’t let things go twice. To re-iterate what I said before, you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re trying to insult me like that.
If you label me a non-physicist, then I’ll have to start calling you a weather man.
As I expected, you missed the point. It was amusing that you linked a pdf from the department I took classes from, though.
I’ve already pointed out that this economics comparison is ridiculous. I’ve also already pointed out that I’ve worked in both experimental optics and a field which is more related to climate science, and I don’t agree with your assessment that the fields have differing levels of intellectual rigor. This assertion that climate scientists can’t perform experiments to test hypotheses has been made before. A similar assertion was made about modern cosmology, but as I point out it could just as easily be aimed at forensic science, astronomy, paleontology, etc.
Citation needed. Notice that the person who preceded you wasn’t so much a representative of the philosophy crowd as he was a representative of the creationist crowd.
From the paper that you just cited at me as “Watts wasn’t the first person to survey stations in person”:
Yes?
In other words, several studies have already examined the more important issue of site characteristic change over time and found that current adjustments are valid. The patient records of thousands of anonymous scientists over decades are actually more useful in a climate change context than an exhaustive snapshot of the network as it stands today.
Metadata like station quality, for instance. Menne 2010 made a similar point: Further, the influence of non-standard siting on temperature trends can only be quantified through an analysis of the data.
Again, scientists are considering both documented changes (via station visits, other empirical evidence, etc.) and undocumented changes (for stations that are too remote to visit or understaffed, etc.).
Some more relevant quotes:
Sure. I read the paper.
Actually, it was interesting to read in large part in terms of the numbers of way faults can occur in the station data. Given the rather hackish heuristics used to detect faults, it actually lowered my confidence in the quality of station data.
When you conduct science, you try to eliminate confounding factors until you’re left with just your one experimental value. In this case: temperature over time. Given the number of error sources listed in just this paper alone, along with the fact that half the changes went undocumented, it would make me even more dubious of the temperature record without having empirical data to verify it. That’s why I’ve said the satellite data makes the issue moot moving forward; unless something goes tragically wrong the environment around a satellite won’t be exposed to any of the confounding factors that impact surface station data.
To go back to my original point, somebody needed to get out there and do the legwork that Watts did, and provide empirical confirmation. You might not like the fact that he’s a crackpot, but you (and RC.org) show a very disappointing trend seen quite commonly in climate scientists, that they dismiss anything that comes out of someone that disagrees with them, even if their contribution is valuable. The Menne 2009 paper refreshingly takes the opposite approach even while reinforcing your point that the longitudinal data is much more important. It even cited Pielke as a source of criticisms about the temperature record.
When I said back in my first post in this long thread that RC.org was on the bullshit end of the surface station data, this was precisely the point: empirical data trumps statistical filtering (especially with something so complex). Dismissing a source of empirical confirmation data, because you don’t like the guy’s political views, is the bullshit end of the argument.
Or to paraphrase Phil Jones: Why should I make my data available, when critics might use it disprove my work?
Anti-scientific bullshit.
Yes, as my previous quotes showed, half of ~6,000 “statistically significant changepoints” were already recorded in the metadata. In other words, scientists had already documented the timing of ~3,000 changes to network; these are mostly relocations and instrument upgrades but the timing of changes to surface station site characteristics are also documented.
Notice that they’re referring specifically to surfacestations.org, and they mention it only to quote several studies showing that Watts is making a claim that has already been considered and rejected. I’m referring to that website and wattsupwiththat.com. Also note that I’ve already agreed with Pielke when he makes sense.
Like I said, I don’t understand that subjective preference, but to each his own. I’ve already talked about problems unique to satellite data; it’s useful (which is why my research centers on satellite data) but introduces new problems and suffers from a very short time series relative to the surface instrumental record.
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from here.)
… I’ve been toying with the idea that loggers can fix the CO2 problem. Send them out to harvest pine trees at the end of their fast-growing (and thus fast-CO2-absorbing) phase. Stack the wood in warehouses or use it to build houses, just as long as it’s treated so it doesn’t decompose. If we can do this on a large enough scale, loggers might be able to sequester CO2 by cutting down enough trees, then planting another set of trees to continue the process.
Depending on your latitude, it may more more sense not to re-plant the trees, as snowpack reflects more IR back into space than the trees’ CO2 sequestration offsets.
Assuming global temperature is the only concern, of course, but that seems to be the trendy thing to do.
Thanks. This should be modded insightful, not funny. He even obliquely referred to the fact that not replanting the trees would reduce average global temperatures but wouldn’t help with ocean acidification.
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from the links attached to the posters’ names.)
Truth isn’t slippery. Truth is absolute. The problem is that things are presented as truth when they are not. A scientist does a study and finds that cows fed fatty diets die of heart attacks more often than regular cows. That is truth. But that study is published, and by the time it gets to the ordinary human it comes out as a health book explaining why all fat is bad. That isn’t truth. It is an interpretation: a generalization from a subset of scientific information summarized and handed down.
The pseudo-scientists, news reporters, and pundits purport to offer truth when they offer interpretation. And after a while, the average person doesn’t know what to believe any more.
We see this on Slashdot all the time. A paper published in Nature, summarized by a reporter, published, blogged, and respun until “I found a way to improve transistor density 2.5%” becomes a Slashdot headline like “AI robots will take over the world by next Tuesday.” Somewhere… there was a grain of truth behind that headline.
Science doesn’t deal in truths, but theories. This is the point that you miss, and the general public gets, but misunderstands.
Scientific theories are generalizations that attempt to be best fits to the data we have available. The Standard Model is (what a lot of people think is) our best guess about the subatomic world, but it’s possible it is wrong in more ways than just cutting down the error on some of the terms.
What really annoys the public is when scientists present theories as truth. The scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991) Oh, but we only got +0.2C per decade. So how people react to this takes different forms:
1) Global warming is proven false. Because the +0.2 gain was right on the bottom of the error bars for the AR1 best guess prediction.
2) Global warming is proven true. Because a +0.2 gain was included in the error bars.
3) I can’t trust scientists because they said something would be true, and it wasn’t.
The really fucked up thing is that for people who say that global warming was proven true because the actual numbers fell within the range of the predictions would then have to say that global warming was false if we’d actually gotten +1.0C gain. Because it got too hot! It was outside the range of predictions! Contrawise, the AR4 predictions include +0.0C change in their prediction, so if we have no warming at all, people can say that the AR4 report was happily accurate.
See where the problem is? No? Ok, here it is in a nutshell:
1) Scientists like you present their theories as truth, when it’s not.
2) People have grown distrustful of scientists because of this, and gain an unfortunate lack of faith in perfectly good scientific theories as the result.
3) The media presents all theories equally, so people don’t understand when we should have confidence in a result (like the charge of an electron or the shape of DNA) and less confident results (like all those various epidemiology hand-waving studies).
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from the links attached to the posters’ names.)
Because it’s a transparent shot at climate change science, implying that it’s all a conspiracy. Apparently practically everyone who is qualified to interpret the data have conspired to deceive the entire world about the subject. I can’t think of a single scientific organization in the world that has researched the subject that doesn’t agree with the IPCC findings. Yet some folks with no background in the relevant subjects, who haven’t done any actual research, feel that they can dispute the findings and allege all sorts of malfeasance. THAT is not science. That’s just people with vested interests or ideological loyalties defending their turf and trying to spread FUD in order to prevent any action being taken.
They don’t have scientific evidence to back up their claims, they just want to sow doubt. Do they really care if they’re wrong? No. They’ll simply blame the government for not acting to prevent whatever problems arise, just as the “drill baby drill” folks are now blaming the government for not doing more to prevent the gulf spill and for not fixing it faster now. This, despite the fact that they would vehemently oppose regulations on industry that might affect their bottom line, and that they always claim that government is generally incompetent and industry knows best how to do their jobs. It’s all quite self-serving.
Let’s assume you’re ignoring all of the parts of the AR4 written by non-scientific interest groups like the WWF, and the various other issues with the glaciers and all that. You probably didn’t know they were included in the report, but who cares?
The real issue is: How can you disagree with predictions? If the top people run some models and produce a collection of results based on different CO2 levels in the future, then how can anyone disagree with them?
It’s been 20 years since AR1, so we can actually look back at their predictions and see that they predicted a temperature rise around 50% higher than what we got (Real Climate.org called the prediction “a bit warm”), but don’t let me stop you from believing predictions are infallible. And it’s not like the planet *didn’t* warm up in the meantime (AGW is very likely true), but the real story here is about how angry climate scientists get when you point these kinds of problems out to them, because it’s inherently not a very scientific field (you can’t run experiments in real life to test your hypothesis), and I think deep down they all know it.
They do like to call each other scientists though. That makes them feel better.
You do the best you can with the knowledge and information available to you. Yeah, we knew a lot less 20 years ago than we do today. The models have improved and a lot more data has been gathered to include in the models. Sure, they’re probably still going to be wrong to some degree, but they’re probably not going to be nearly as far off as they were 20 years ago, and the situation is going to be bad. A lot of people would like to just wait until the shit hits the fan before doing anything. Then they’ll yell and scream at the government for not doing anything about it, just like the drillers do. You can’t really win with people like that. I’d rather see us start doing what we know we need to be doing anyway.
Huh? The article doesn’t mention angry climate scientists, and I don’t see angry climate scientists in this thread. Like before, you seem to mistakenly believe that you’re being insulted by angry climate scientists. For instance, you claimed to be insulted when I implied that you were a non-physicist… just because you don’t have a graduate (or even undergraduate?) physics degree. In comparison:
Do you think I’ve repeatedly insulted myself, or have I simply been honest about my credentials?
But if you’re describing angry climate scientists that you’ve met in real life, then I don’t know why they’d get angry. You’re just innocently pointing out that they’re bullshitting deceitful hacks who aren’t scientists any more than economists are, and that deep down they realize that they’re frauds who merely call each other scientists just to make them feel better about the fact that they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, while they discredit themselves by inflating error bars to prevent anyone from falsifying their predictions. I can’t imagine why your reasonable and polite position would spark unprovoked anger, unless these belligerent climate “scientists” have something to hide…
(There’s probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who’s genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though.)
As MobyDisk said, the problem is that pseudo-scientists commonly misinterpret scientific results when “lecturing” about science that they don’t study professionally. For instance, someone might claim that “the scientific community concludes that global warming will result in +0.3C gain per decade! (1991).”
You didn’t link or cite the paper where you claim this sentence appears any more specifically than “it was published in 1991,” but you seem to be referring to the IPCC AR1 WG1 which was published in 1990. So let’s open the IPCC AR1 WG1 and read the first page of the Executive Summary (p14 of the PDF):
… under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2C to 0.5C per decade), this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a rise of about 1C above the present value by 2025 and 3C before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors. Under the other IPCC emission scenarios which assume progressively increasing levels of controls, rates of increase in global mean temperature of about 0.2C per decade (Scenario B), just above 0.1C per decade (Scenario C), and about 0.1C per decade (Scenario D)…
The actual quote seems very different than your oversimplified version. First, notice that the IPCC is well aware that their models are dynamical, not empirical. This means they predict the climate response to radiative forcings, which in turn means that temperature predictions are tied to emissions scenarios. Second, you mentioned the “0.3C per decade” prediction from emission Scenario A, but you’ve repeatedly ignored Scenario B which Hansen himself called “more plausible” in 1988. Pat Michaels used a similar trick in his 1998 testimony to Congress, and Tim Lambert has an apt word to describe this behavior.
Aside from “forgetting” the more plausible emission scenario, you also seem to forget that the IPCC AR1 WG1 explicitly said that the rise wouldn’t be steady due to the influence of other factors. That’s why they repeatedly used the word “about” to describe the decadal trends. The analyses that I’ve previously linked made similar points:
The spread of results shows that the computer models indicate a range of plausible behaviors; no single result, not even the average of all the model runs, can honestly be called “the” IPCC result, and it’s especially misleading to portray the results as having no variation or uncertainty. Hence it’s no surprise that the IPCC report, when forecasting future global warming, only goes so far as to say that we can expect about 0.2 deg.C per decade over the next several decades — the model results exhibit enough spread that no more precise prognostication is warranted, and even that prediction only merits a single significant digit. Only the deceitful would attempt to portray the IPCC projections as an ironclad prediction of 0.2 deg.C warming every decade. [Tamino]
The projections shown in R07 don’t follow the strict 0.2 deg.C/decade rate of increase claimed to represent IPCC projections. So what are the actual projections from IPCC TAR? The TAR states in more than one place that we can expect “about” 0.2 deg.C/decade warming over the next few decades. Note the qualifier “about,” and that the quoted figure is accurate to only 1 significant digit. The logical conclusion is: between 0.15 and 0.25 deg.C/decade, in which case flatly stating 0.2 deg.C/decade as though that were an ironclad exact figure isn’t an honest representation of the IPCC projection. [Tamino]
Not for the reason you’re implying, though. For instance, average global temperatures could have risen if the sun had brightened, but that warming wouldn’t have had anything to do with AGW. In reality, one reason (among many) that scientists believe anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing global temperatures (averaged over at least ~20 years) to increase is that only model ensembles which include the radiative forcing due to anthropogenic CO2 yield temperatures since ~1970 that match the instrumental temperature record. As you can see, model ensembles which don’t include anthropogenic emissions aren’t consistent with the instrumental record, even after taking into account the “large” instrumental and algorithmic uncertainties. Notice that this reasoning has more to do with the climate response to forcings than with raw temperatures, which is a direct result of using dynamical rather than empirical models.
Huh? Who said anything about predictions being infallible? Not the person you’re replying to, nor any peer-reviewed paper I’ve ever seen.
You’ve been repeating the phrase “a little warm” ever since I showed you my collection of tests performed on old models. But let’s read the entire quote:
And finally, let’s revisit the oldest GCM projection of all, Hansen et al (1988). The Scenario B in that paper is running a little high compared with the actual forcings growth (by about 10%), and the old GISS model had a climate sensitivity that was a little higher (4.2ºC for a doubling of CO2) than the current best estimate (~3ºC). The trends are probably most useful to think about, and for the period 1984 to 2009 (the 1984 date chosen because that is when these projections started), scenario B has a trend of 0.26+/-0.05 ºC/dec (95% uncertainties, no correction for auto-correlation). For the GISTEMP and HadCRUT3 data (assuming that the 2009 estimate is ok), the trends are 0.19+/-0.05 ºC/dec (note that the GISTEMP met-station index has 0.21+/-0.06 ºC/dec). Corrections for auto-correlation would make the uncertainties larger, but as it stands, the difference between the trends is just about significant.
Thus, it seems that the Hansen et al ‘B’ projection is likely running a little warm compared to the real world, but assuming (a little recklessly) that the 26 yr trend scales linearly with the sensitivity and the forcing, we could use this mismatch to estimate a sensitivity for the real world. That would give us 4.2/(0.26*0.9) * 0.19=~ 3.4 ºC. Of course, the error bars are quite large (I estimate about +/-1ºC due to uncertainty in the true underlying trends and the true forcings), but it’s interesting to note that the best estimate sensitivity deduced from this projection, is very close to what we think in any case. For reference, the trends in the AR4 models for the same period have a range 0.21+/-0.16 ºC/dec (95%). Note too, that the Hansen et al projection had very clear skill compared to a null hypothesis of no further warming.
You accuse Gavin Schmidt of being a bullshitting deceitful hack who isn’t really a scientist. I disagree; he seems to be honestly and competently evaluating Hansen’s model as applied to more recent temperature data. He understands that the model is dynamical, so he corrects for the fact that emissions have been 10% lower than projected in scenario B. Then he notes that the modern estimate for the climate sensitivity is closer to 3C than the 4.2C used in 1988. That’s the real lesson to be learned here: careful experimental methods can help to constrain our knowledge of the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response to doubling CO2.
Moreover, 1988 climate models differ from 2007 climate models in other ways:
The sharp-eyed among you might notice a couple of differences between the variance in the AR4 models in the first graph, and the Hansen et al model in the last. This is a real feature. The model used in the mid-1980s had a very simple representation of the ocean – it simply allowed the temperatures in the mixed layer to change based on the changing the fluxes at the surface. It did not contain any dynamic ocean variability – no El Niño events, no Atlantic multidecadal variability etc. and thus the variance from year to year was less than one would expect. Models today have dynamic ocean components and more ocean variability of various sorts, and I think that is clearly closer to reality than the 1980s vintage models, but the large variation in simulated variability still implies that there is some way to go.
In other words, computation-hungry climate models had to be very crude to run on “supercomputers” roughly as powerful as modern smart phones, and this simplicity introduced errors and uncertainty. Who’d have guessed? Oh, right… the IPCC AR1 WG1 did, in the summary:
The size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability, alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse warming. The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more. … The best tools we have … are known as General Circulation Models (GCMs). They synthesize our knowledge of physical and dynamical processes in the overall system and allow for complex interactions between the various components. However, in their current state of development, the descriptions of many of the processes involved are comparatively crude. Because of this, considerable uncertainty is attached to these predictions of climate change…
In other words, scientists in 1990 were very careful to state that their predictions were limited by many different factors which aren’t as relevant 20 years later. Furthermore, notice that Gavin only said Scenario B was “likely running a little warm” in December 2009. In May 2007, his verdict was different:
The bottom line? Scenario B is pretty close and certainly well within the error estimates of the real world changes. And if you factor in the 5 to 10% overestimate of the forcings in a simple way, Scenario B would be right in the middle of the observed trends. It is certainly close enough to provide confidence that the model is capable of matching the global mean temperature rise! Real Climate
Also, Rahmstorf 2007 examined IPCC AR3 WG1 projections of temperature and sea level rise, only to conclude that temperatures were rising somewhat faster than expected.
So what happened in between 2007 and 2009 to change the interpretation? Well, a significant La Nina occurred in 2007/08, temporarily depressing global air temperatures. But as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, ENSO variability doesn’t strongly drive the long-term climate because it merely swaps heat between the atmosphere and the ocean. As noted above, 1988 models didn’t include ENSO turbulence (even 2010 models aren’t yet that good at modelling inter-annual oscillations.)
Once again, the important point is that the IPCC models are dynamical, so they can only predict the climate response to radiative forcings. If significant forcings aren’t measured accurately, the climate model will predict incorrect temperatures. For example, I’ve already shown you Solomon 2010 which states: “Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000–2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% as compared to estimates neglecting this change. These findings show that stratospheric water vapor is an important driver of decadal global surface climate change.”
Because the IPCC AR4 WG1 model ensembles didn’t account for this effect, they predicted a somewhat higher global temperature increase during the last decade than was observed. To me, this seems like a good reason to include this effect in the next IPCC ensemble, rather than calling climate physicists deceitful hacks who discredit themselves by spreading bullshit. But to each his own.
Despite these limitations, predictions from the IPCC AR1,AR2,AR3 generally agree with the instrumental temperature records. You can even see how weather noise makes short-term trends extremely variable; a good example is the strong El Nino in 1998 which temporarily increased global air temperatures.
It’s interesting that you claim physicists who study the climate are inflating their error bars in a blatant attempt to avoid falsification, especially when you’ve previously said “I don’t believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.”
Are you saying that physicists who study the climate are bullshitting deceitful hacks because their error bars are too large, or are you saying they’re bullshitting deceitful hacks because their error bars are smaller than the difference between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun?
In other words, if a physicist derives error bars which are smaller than ~600C/decade, you wouldn’t believe those error bars because they’re too small, which obviously means he’s completely unjustified in arrogantly claiming to understand the physical processes involved in the climate well enough to derive a “small” error bar. But if he quotes error bars of ~0.2C/decade for short timespans, then suddenly his error bars are too large, which obviously means he’s deliberately inflating them to avoid falsification.
You set up a similar catch-22 by repeatedly denigrating statistical methods in favor of empirical evidence. Sans context, that’s not necessarily an unreasonable position. However, as I repeatedly pointed out, it’s not relevant to the issue of reliability of the instrumental temperature record. But later you said: “… along with the fact that half the changes went undocumented, it would make me even more dubious of the temperature record without having empirical data to verify it. …”
As I pointed out, the undocumented changes you refer to are actually called “statistically significant changepoints”. They were only discovered using the pairwise algorithm described in Menne 2009. In other words, even though scientists were struggling to use purely empirical methods to detect changepoints, a supplementary statistical method confirmed the existence of all the empirically confirmed changepoints, and then found just as many undocumented statistically signficant changepoints. I think most scientists would view this as a success of the statistical pairwise algorithm over purely empirical methods, which doesn’t seem to agree very well with your previous position. But you ignore that implication and instead claim that the success of the statistical pairwise algorithm is actually just more proof that the temperature record is “dubious”.
You appear to understand that experimental science is largely a process of eliminating error sources. But you repeatedly imply that scientific results which eliminate “lots” of error sources are “dubious” and “low confidence” and “hackish”. Nonsense.
Recently, another programmer argued that satellite data was more trustworthy than surface instruments because she thought that the satellite analysis accounted for “lots” of error sources. That was nonsense too.
In reality, physicists don’t judge a scientific result by the number of error sources that have been eliminated. I suggested that she read page 6 of this report which was co-authored by J.R. Christy:
That’s how physicists judge the robustness of analysis techniques.
I disagree too, because that’s not what I think of him. Gavin is not a “bullshiting deceitful hack who isn’t really a scientist”. I wouldn’t bother being subscribed to RC.org for years if he was that bad. I’d ignore him like the other nuts. He’s a political hack. There’s a big difference.
What it means is that instead of outright lying about this or that (which is much more common in the anti-AGW camp), it means that he goes easy on anyone on his “side” (Al Gore, IPCC predictions) and hard on anyone that even slightly disagrees with him.
The absurdity I was pointing out was that even if we have no warming at all over the next decade (if you missed the time period, there it is), people like RC.org will say that the AR4 predictions are confirmed, but by implication this means that if we get too much warming… global warming is false. (So to speak. If you’ve read all of my posts on here, which it sounds like you have, you know that I know that scientific theories are never proven true or false, it’s a sloppy shorthand I use.) No, I’m NOT saying there is a prediction of no warming – even if we shut off all anthropogenic CO2 production today, the earth would still (probably) warm.
In this thread I’m talking about the rather silly world of hypothesis confirmation, especially as it relates to AGW, nothing more.
Did you actually read their methods? I’m curious how you can think they’re anything but a bunch of heuristics. (And for the record, they can be hackish AND valuable at the same time.)
On Slashdot it’s hard to show that someone’s directly contradicting himself because his previous statements are hard to find. In my article anyone can search for the words in question and quickly read all your posts which use them. Tread carefully.
… not an absurdity at all, as I explained ad nauseum above.
Note that I didn’t respond to the neutral word “heuristics” and instead concentrated on the colorful (and inherently subjective) adjectives that you used.
I don’t believe I’ve ever contradicted myself on RC.org, though I suppose it’s possible. Care to share? It’s possible that you got distracted by my language (which is generally negative toward them and Phil Jones and others), so let me summarize for you. Please let me know if you agree or disagree on each point. Answering this summary will be easier than you dancing around through a bunch of different threads.
1) RC.org is a valuable website, but they have a very strong political bias, censor and edit posts heavily, and engage in biased behavior that borders on the dishonest, giving free passes to people that agree with them, and nitpicking heavily on people that disagree with them. I don’t believe their core science is bad, though I take issue with how they present it sometimes.
2) Phil Jones and his merry band of climatologists engaged in bad behavior, using legally-questionable tactics to dodge FOIA requests. Most telling was his statement that he wouldn’t share his data because they might use it to disprove his work. This is anti-scientific. In a field where all you really have are climate data and computer models, refusing to share them with the world is akin to a physicist claiming that he’s invented Cold Fusion, but refusing to show exactly how (except perhaps to a couple of his friends). Gavin of course defended him saying that while maybe THEIR data wasn’t available, HIS data was available, and so that made it all better. (Which it didn’t – it rather just highlighted their shady behavior). However, I think that most of the rest of the Climategate scandal was completely misrepresented in the media, with absolutely horrid reporting by a variety of sources. The real story – which everyone ignored for red herrings like “hide the decline” – was Phil Jones mailing people (Gaving Schmidt included) talking about ways to dodge FOIA requests. I’d also take Jones to task for losing the data, but I’ve worked at universities before and know how disorganized they can be.
3) I think AGW is real, a serious threat, that parts of it are exaggerated, parts of it are under-reported (most significantly the acidification of the oceans) and that most of the mainstream solutions are horrible. The AGW community (painting a very wide paintbrush here) has a fascination with solutions that will kill people, destroy the economy, and be horrendously expensive, but refuse to look at geoengineering solutions that could be cheaper and more effective, and refuse to look at green technologies like nuclear because they’re ignorant. Climatologists also tend to think that because they know the science of global warming, they’re qualified to write policy.
4) Depending on how puckish I’m feeling, climatology could or could not be a “science”. Science is defined by empirical observations, hypothesis generation, testing, and hypothesis confirmation or falsification. Climatology doesn’t meet up to this full set of requirements to be science, so it, like a lot of other fields, fall somewhere in the middle of the science divide. Due to the prestige “science” acquired in the 20th century, most fields nowadays have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves, and I see this as being more of the same. It’s also why I think that climate scientists are much more angry and defensive than, say, plasma physicists.
You’re not a computer science, guy, then. A heuristic IS a hackish attempt to solve a problem without mathematical elegance or rigor. It’s just a nicer way of putting it than I did. Heuristics can certainly be effective (that’s why I thought your criticism of my statement was rather silly), but they’re really just educated guesses at solving a problem.
You mean, do I care to share again? No, that seems futile because you haven’t even bothered to address the contradictions I just described in excruciating detail. What would be the point of responding to the rest of this comment, when all you’re doing is endlessly restating the same views that I’ve either already agreed with or debunked in this article over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over?
You were debunking strawnen that I didn’t make. I bloody well understand what error means, but you completely missed my point on it, and so forth. Your references were wonderful, but also completely missing the point.
I just gave you a nice summary of my stances. If you can’t give a simple agree/disagree after all the posts we’ve traded on the subject, I’m bound to suspect your honesty.
You’re right, my honesty is suspect because I want to finish my research so I can finish my presentation before I leave for the conference in Taiwan so I don’t fail out of school. It’s not that I haven’t quoted your statements in explicit detail and shown how they conflict with your other statements and how they support MobyDisk’s point, and how they generally seem to be oversimplifications of a frightening degree. You responded to a dozen pages of carefully referenced science without saying anything new, and responding to it would require linking all the previous times I’ve addressed these issues with you (OCD, long story). This would take more time than I have available right now. If I don’t suffer an untimely death in the backwoods of Cambodia, I might bother to do all that… someday.
But if I don’t survive, at some point in the future you might want to re-read our conversation (included in its entirety here) and consider what percentage of the sentences in that repetitive comment you just posted are simply restatements of positions that I’ve already directly told you I agree with. Then consider the percentage of sentences that I’ve already tried repeatedly to explain aren’t accurate. Then consider the percentage of statements that I’ve already answered in the >200 comments before yours.
By my estimate, you’ll be left with 5% to 20% of your original comment. And it’s the part of your comment that has the least to do with science and the most in common with the tabloid nonsense that I’ve already gotten disgusted with talking about (there’s a big section here on that, but your particular half-truths aren’t there).
I still don’t understand why I should divert this time away from my attempt to develop a new tsunami early warning system using precision gravity measurements. But I promise that if I survive I’ll eventually do just that. Eventually…
I can argue the same way as you. I can strawman your arguments, give extensive reasons why the argument (that you didn’t make) are wrong, and then shut up when you present your points in a clarified manner.
That’s why I’m doubting your honesty. Believe me, man, I understand about writing papers, but you seem allergic to actually answering anything I actually say.
Here’s a quick one that you can answer in one sentence (or more, if you’d like): do you think Phil Jones acted appropriately?
I’d also like to answer this. Most all of your links are to your own website, which abuse the nice, nested comment threads here on slashdot and flatten them. If you have something to say about a post on Slashdot, reply to me here. I’m not going to scroll through another mega-block of flattened text trying to pick out your non-existent thesis statements.
If you ever figure out how to do proper argumentation (thesis statement + supporting statements), please reply to this post here, and not on your site. It’s annoying in the extreme to debate someone who doesn’t know the proper forms of debate.
Another programmer has a similar habit of accusing me of making strawman arguments. She also didn’t bother to mention what arguments she was talking about. Yet again, I’m blockquoting your statements for the entire purpose of avoiding the construction of strawman arguments. I’m intentionally quoting the “language” you use (which isn’t a distraction as you claim because I’m not telepathic; your language is the only way I can discern your position.) So far the most specific “strawman” example you’ve presented is the fact that you were using “proven true” sloppily. Okay, that’s
onetwo sentences out of a dozen pages, and that was really all I meant bythatthose sentences anyway. Next you murmured something to the effect that you “bloody well understand what error means” but I don’t have the foggiest idea what you meant. Your error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical… among other mistakes which would be inexplicable if made by someone with a graduate or undergraduate (?) degree in physics.I’m only allergic to answering the same questions repeatedly. The whole point of discussing something in written form is so that I don’t have to tutor the entire planet individually. And that’s the second time you’ve accused me of being dishonest, on top of saying that I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, that I’m not even really a scientist, and probably more examples that I’m repressing…
Answering this question with any rigor would require finding a dozen links. But of course I’ve already criticized the closed-source culture in many different fields of science, emphasized that I’m endangering my scientific career in my naive commitment to open source/science principles, and compiled an extensive list of open source climate codes and data.
So of course I think data and code should be shared freely. And yet I don’t share your obvious contempt for Phil Jones. I don’t have time to link everything now, but here’s the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle, in a type of harassment that reminds me of the Lenski affair. Then one of the FOIA requests that Phil Jones DID fulfill was used to try to get one of his colleagues arrested because some crackpot thought he’d found evidence of fraud.
What he did was wrong, but you’ve omitted most of the story and tried to imply that climatology is unique in its closed source attitude. I can only assume you haven’t been reading Nature regularly for the last 6 months, because this very topic was explored in that timeframe.
I hate to leave this unlinked, which is why I wanted to wait until I get back from Asia.
I tried nesting the comments deeper, but the comments became too narrow. I like nested comments too, but I haven’t figured out how to increase the nesting level past 3 without severe readability problems.
Isn’t that what I’ve been doing? Dumb Scientist just mirrors these slashdot conversations so that I have a single-page archive of all my links. I’ve always posted my comments to slashdot first, then copied them to Dumb Scientist for easy browsing. But note that I won’t be back from Asia for 3 weeks, at which point this article will be locked. My plan was to post the eventual response to whatever slashdot comment is at the top of your queue at the time.
Another programmer with a similar debating style as you also recently accused me of being dishonest because he didn’t want to do a lot of reading.
Another person also accused me of being a hypocrit who’s trying to fool people in horrendously misleading ways. Then I pointed out that he only needed to read 6 paragraphs into the article to see that I’d already discussed his claim. He also found it reasonable to complain about having to read 6 paragraphs, so I noted that his reading time investment was far smaller than researching, writing and linking 50 pages of science, so it seemed like I should be more annoyed at having to repeat myself over and over. He found my hypocrisy offensive because… get this… I was repeating myself.
Talking with you is giving me a serious case of deju vu regarding these last two conversations. Notice that those links weren’t to my website.
I’ve also noticed you perhaps get me confused with other people.
Two years of physics as an undergraduate, perfect score on the SATII Physics Test, 5 on the AP Physics test, I taught methods in solving physics problems, etc., including an undergraduate quarter spent on error analysis. I also read a great deal. This is one of the reasons I get annoyed when you so blithely disparage people as non-physicists. The main reason, though, is that it’s arrogant and rude. I don’t assume that you don’t know how to program a computer because of your field, except when I’m intentionally insulting you. =)
That’s awesome for you. Except I think that I had never stated my stances in an encapsulated fashion before. Perhaps you’re tired of answering them from multiple people? Because from my perspective, you just appeared to be dodging the subject.
Making a claim, then refusing to answer it, provide supporting evidence, etc., and then claiming to have already answered it is dishonest behavior. Now that you’ve actually given an answer to one of my four claims, I retract that statement.
From what I understand, one of the anti-AGW M’s filed one FOIA request a month, and only then because Phil Jones refused to ever answer a single FOIA request. This hardly seems like flooding his office, and his circumlocutions to hide the data reek badly in a field that needs openness to survive.
I do thank you for your answer on this, though. It’s nice to see that we both agree on the core matter.
I don’t mind reading. To the contrary, really – my wife thinks I have a reading problem. But linking to a hard to read flat thread is tedious in the extreme to work with.
(Ed. note: This comment was posted on 2010-06-15 at 17:26, but the time has been changed to keep ShakaUVM’s comments in sequence.)
Also, it’s important to state that up until this point, climatologists thought that contrails had a forcing effect helping to cause global warming. And still show it that way, for example.
However, papers like this rather convincingly argued that they have a rather strong forcing in the opposite direction (i.e. that they help to dim sunlight more than they trap heat).
While honest climatologists will admit that some areas in AGW are very well understood, and others are much less understood, dishonest climatologists will pretend that they know everything and how dare you for questioning the global warming groupthink. In fact, how they respond to reasoned criticism is often a clear giveaway as to which camp they fall into.
Yeah, pity you’re actually reading the fucking results wrong. *sigh* To quote wikipedia:
The daytime temperature didn’t increase. The difference between night and day increased. And guess what? That matches expectations! Why? Because:
So when there are contrails, it stays warmer at night, due to radiative forcing effects. No contrails? It gets colder at night. End result? *Larger night-day temperature difference*.
But, hey, let’s actually look at your study, shall we? Hey, here’s a choice quote from the abstract:
Hey, look at that… that’s what they fucking found. Science at work: scientists make prediction. Scientists have convenient experiment. Observations match predictions. The system works.
But, hey, don’t let facts get in the way of your “skepticism”.
No problem. I’ll see if I can dig up a better paper for you. From what I recall, the average temperatures went up as well, ~2.0 C
Posted anonymously by khayman80 (Dumb Scientist) from an internet cafe in Koh Phi Phi Don.
I’d like to thank Abcd1234 for once again reducing my workload– especially during my vacation. But this statement is doubly redundant because (1) All climatologists I’ve met or researched have been honest (defined as PhD physicists specializing in a range of subfields related to climate prediction or paleoclimatology.) and (2) all scientific fields have areas that aren’t well understood.
(Of course, if you’d said “members of the general public who identify with the Green party”, I’ve already repeatedly agreed with you. But you didn’t.)
In fact, climatologists express how “well understood” an effect is by the error bars on the radiative forcings chart. The larger the error bars, the “less understood” the effect is. That’s just the way all natural science is done. Strangely, some pseudoscientists criticize climatologists when their error bars are too small (i.e. pseudoscientists accuse climatologists of pretending to know everything) AND when their error bars are too large (apparently that means they’re deliberately avoiding falsification.)
Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult…
You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered?
For example:
“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.”
Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan.
Or the tendency for certain climatologists to throw out offensive notions like the Salem Hypothesis when someone disagrees with them.
To a certain extent you can do this. If you have a positive or negative feedback cycle that is poorly understood, error bars become so large as to be meaningless. For example, if all the ice in Greenland suddenly slides into the ocean next week, it would create a global catastrophe that would lead to various situations well outside of our confidence levels.
That’s the third time you’ve accused me of being dishonest. I’ll add these repetitive comments to the huge list you’ve repeatedly demanded that I answer lest I be considered dishonest. This will take ~10 hours, and consist of ~10 pages of statements like “I’ve already answered this here, here, and directly to you here, and this is the text: ….”
I’ll only post this redundancy to Slashdot (and Dumb Scientist) with the expectation that you’ll have the courtesy to finally explain (in a similar point-by-point fashion) why you think this comment is filled with strawman arguments (which, if true, would mean I’m a drooling idiot or a deceitful hack…)
We’d never even talked about the Phil Jones issue before, so your attempts to avoid answering it (because you’d answered it before) were indeed dishonest. You’ve now answered that question, but there’s three to go. Just a short paragraph answer to each one please – I won’t call you dishonest for not thoroughly referencing your summary, but I will if you keep saying you’ve answered them before, because I’d never *formulated* them in summary before.
As to your strawmen arguments:
Uh, no. Since you’ve ostensibly read my posts before, you know that I was very careful to say that I don’t think that people like RC.org are generally deceitful, but rather politically biased (yes, “hacks”), shooting withering attacks on anyone that disagrees with them, and yet giving free passes to people like Al Gore or Phil Jones. Occasionally I think climatologists’ arguments are wrong (like RC.org and your stance towards Watts), but overall I don’t think there’s any great conspiracy to invent AGW or anything like that.
Since you like to reference my posts mirrored on your own website, you should see that I’ve said this repeatedly, even in the post you quoted above.
If you want to take a shot at defending the mistakes in An Inconvenient Truth, let me know. RC.org was borderline lying on some of its points on the movie.
In any event, you shouldn’t take offense at being lumped in the same category as economists, in terms of observation, modeling, and prediction, economics is the closest field to climatology. The point I was trying to make is that if climatology is science, the economics is science. If economics is not science, then climatology is not science. Or to put it another way, I think we need new labels for a category somewhere between hard science and social science.
No… but referencing the Salem Hypothesis (a reference to Creationism) *was* insulting. I don’t mind if you were offended I lumped you into the same category with economics, but I think the field is closer than you might think.
That’s great, but I’m not talking about Hansen88, but AR1, which focuses on Scenario A. It’s possible this was done to scare politicians into action, but when one reads it, the +0.3C increase appears to be the best guess.
You wanted to know which statements were strawmen? These are some more.
You’ve missed my point repeatedly on error in predictions, so I’m not going to bother repeating myself again. (See how annoying that is, when someone does that?)
That’s the fourth time you’ve accused me of being dishonest, and of not really being a scientist. I tried to tell you twice that economics involves people who have free will but radiative physics involves molecules which don’t have free will (unless you’re a pantheist, I suppose) but you haven’t even peripherally answered that point, and I’ve long since lost interest.
Your reading of AR1 yet again misses the point that climate models are dynamical, not empirical. So the entire reason for giving different scenarios is to account for uncertainty in human pollution, solar activity, volcanism, etc. As Gavin pointed out, the projected forcings assumed in scenario B were actually slightly too high compared to reality. But that uncertainty is compartmentalized away from the GCM uncertainty.
Huh? I’m now convinced that you’re just playing a cynical game to see how much of my time you can waste. I’ve archived all of your statements in this article, so I’ll simply let my readers decide if you called climatologists deceitful hacks who make bullshit claims, aren’t really scientists, just make themselves feel better by calling each other scientists and holding “science-y” conferences even though they can’t falsify their hypotheses because their error bars “so large you can basically never prove the predictions wrong.” Maybe they’ll agree with you that these are just strawman arguments which you didn’t actually make.
Obviously, this conversation is a waste of time. Let’s just agree to disagree, okay?
Then honestly answer my four questions. That’s all I’ve been asking for.
The issue about the label of ‘science’ one is not an attack on you, but rather a philosophical musing on the nature of climatology.
If you spent half as much time actually answering the four questions (and again, I don’t need a fully referenced essay) instead of engaging in meta-conversation… well, we wouldn’t be having this meta-conversation.
No, you didn’t just ask four questions. You repeated many accusations about climatology not being falsifiable science (etc.), which were merely grouped into four paragraphs. I’ve already explained that I have serious OCD and can’t answer all these insults without referencing all the times I’ve already answered the same cynical accusations. Do you think that answering all these accusations for the N’th time is more important than developing an early warning system for tsunamis? I don’t. Seriously, let’s just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
Again, instead of talking about all this other stuff, which is incidental, you could just answer them.
Which is completely meaningless to me. I don’t care that you don’t like the fact that climatology is kinda-sorta science. I don’t care this insults you, however it is an accurate description.
That’s why I stopped the conversation at that point and formulated four very simple questions for you, which you’ve refused to answer over and over again. I simply can’t understand how you can spend so much time arguing with me, and yet still can’t spend the five minutes to define your position on the issues surrounding global warming. It feels like pulling teeth.
I survived my trip through Cambodia, so unfortunately I’ll have to spend WAY more than 5 minutes answering your huge list of “philosophical musings”, primarily by showing that I’ve already answered them repeatedly. I will eventually do this, but my actual research has to take priority. I’ll post this epic response to your most recent Slashdot post when I’m finished. Until then, please let me focus on trying to not fail out of school, okay?
Sure. No worries, dude.
Just one final clarification for you – keep in mind that my comments on error bars were musings on the falsifiability of global warming, from a philosophy of science perspective.
That’s why I especially like one prediction they did (in AR4, I think) that included no change in the predicted models for 10 years out within the error bars (which was something like +0C to +4C).
So even if there’s no climate change, it verifies climate change.
But if there’s +5C change, then, by golly, global warming has been falsified! The results didn’t match prediction.
In all seriousness, though, I think there’s a real paradox in what we consider falsification and verification in science if the above two statements are both true.
Yes, there’s a problem with what you consider falsification. Falsification applies to theories, not to observations.
If the temperature rises 5C, it would falsify the theory by which we model and predict global warming. However, the observation of global warming would be stronger than ever. So, we’d have to change our theories.
It’s similar to how experiment falsified the Caloric theory of heat because the result did not match predictions, but did not falsify the concept of heat. Observations that did not match Newton’s Law of Gravity did not “falsify” the observation that gravity exists.
On the other hand, a temperature change of 0 degrees, that would validate the theory by which we model and predict global warming. However the observation would be of no global warming for that period. It would be correct to say “there was no global warming in this ten year period”. Just remember that unlike a theory or model, this would not “falsify” the previous observations of warming.
Theories generate predictions which are then tested.
For example, the Extremely Simple Theory of Everything might predict the existence of new particles. A physicist does the math, and figures out a way to generate these new particles (if they exist). He runs the experiment. If the results come back positive, it adds +1 verification points to the ESTOE. If it doesn’t, it adds +1 falsification points to it.
The point is, if we do have a theory (AGW) and it results in certain predictions with a certain, very wide, error range, we can’t run tests on it. (This is a key difference between climatology and hard sciences.) There’s just one experiment running (Earth), and it takes a long time to results back. But the paradox that I mention is this: even if we have no global warming, the +0C result is within the band of error bars, so this counts as verification of the prediction. But a +5C change counts as invalidating the prediction. So we have less confidence in AGW than before. Even though, paradoxically, the world heated up faster than we thought, and we really do have AGW.
What you’re talking about is the fact that if the-current-best-guess-AGW theory is falsified, people can always adjust it to account for the new data, and develop new predictions. But there’s two major problems with this: one, we don’t know if they’ll be any more accurate (until another 10 or 20 years has gone by) and two, this means that AGW can never be falsified, and so it is not a scientific theory at all.
In this context, error bars aren’t simple numbers; they’re actually functions of the temporal smoothing applied. If for some reason you decide to smooth the GCM output and sensor data at only 10 years, the error bars will be large. That’s why professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages.
More fundamentally, falsification requires proper understanding of the dynamical nature of GCMs. This proposed “falsification” is woefully misguided because modern GCMs are dynamical physical models. If GCMs were simply empirical fits to past temperatures (as many seem to think), it would be meaningful to test the model by discussing temperatures alone. But GCMs don’t incorporate timeseries of past temperatures, instead they model the climate based on the physics of forcings such as solar output, volcanic activity, aerosols, and human emissions. In other words, scientists don’t develop GCMs to predict global temperatures; instead, GCMs are used to constrain a number of parameters such as (for instance) the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response to doubling CO2.
All IPCC scenarios explicitly define the forcings that serve as inputs to the GCMs, and the temperature increase is the output. Since physicists are interested in testing physics rather than trying in vain to predict economic activity which could change CO2 emissions, falsification of any parameter constrained by the IPCC GCM ensemble requires comparing the projected forcings to the actual forcings.
If you’d like to engage in a gedankenexperiment, consider if predictions after 20 years had error bars from +0C to +10C. (Error bars themselves are fuzzy things, but I digress.) The same paradox applies to the notions of falsification and verification. No change verifies AGW, but a massive +20C change falsifies AGW (technically, the current-best-guess-AGW theory).
They are models which create predictions which can either be verified or falsified. If you say verification and falsification don’t apply, then climatology is not science. If you say that AGW can never be disproven by temperature data, then climatology is not a science. Alternatively, our notions of verification and falsification are flawed measures of “science”.
This is philosophy of science type stuff, which I know you don’t have much appetite for, Khayman. But the point of my original post above was to talk about the very paradox of verification and falsification in regards to climate science… which I think it seems you agree with. They are very problematic.
An honest skeptic would look at the Greenland melt data and say that there wasn’t enough evidence. An honest Al Gore would have looked at the Greenland melt and put large error bars around his predictions. Dishonest people on either side refuse any results that disagree with their presumptions.
I recall watching CSPAN and seeing climatologists talking about how the Greenland melt rate would be 10 times greater than we’d expected, because of the wet pancake effect or something. I’m not an AGW skeptic, though I *am* critical of idiots like that, that claim more evidence than there is. He’s up there scaring senators, and… he’s wrong. (Or probably is – the Greenland melt is an active area of research.) I’m also critical of people like Sarah Palin who think that human beings can’t possibly, ever, affect the climate.
Unfortunately, it seems most people are dishonest dogmatists for one side or another.
Actually, halving our CO2 output is the consensus view of what we need to do to stabilize temperatures at a reasonable level.
We could nearly accomplish this by switching from coal to nuclear (40% of our CO2 comes from coal alone), and make the target with minor other improvements. Without disrupting our economy, like a CO2 tax would impose.
By contrast, bullshit like Kyoto tries to merely stabilize CO2 targets at our 1988 levels, which isn’t enough. It’s basically nothing more than a feel-good tax on rich countries, and if that sounds paradoxical to you, well…
At this point I examined ShakaUVM’s implied “physicist” credentials.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Here the summary implies that previously published GRACE ice mass balance estimates didn’t take GIA into account. At first I assumed this ridiculous implication must have been a mistake on Slashdot’s part. Then I read the article:
No, previous research didn’t ignore (see section 2.2.4) GIA/PGR. These news stories are reporting on a paper by Xiaoping Wu et al. (free PDF). In table 2, Dr. Wu shows that his estimates are half as big as those in papers published separately by Velicogna, Chen et al. and Luthcke et al.
Luthcke et al. corrects for GIA using the ICE-5G model which combines many proxies and other empirical evidence regarding ice history since the Last Glacial Maximum, mantle viscosity and the Earth’s various Love numbers. Chen et al. used the similar IJ05 model. Velicogna used multiple independent models to estimate uncertainty in the GIA signal. After reading Dr. Wu’s paper, it’s clear he never claimed that previous research had ignored or failed to correct for GIA.
That would have been a real surprise, because he wouldn’t make a claim that can be disproven simply by skimming the papers he referenced. Nor is he rude enough (or at all, for that matter) to imply that the rest of the GRACE community ignored this important issue. Coincidentally, Dr. Wu worked for my advisor as a postdoc in the 1990s, in the same office that I’m currently using. I met him several months ago at the WP-AGU conference in Taiwan, and as far as I can tell he’s overwhelmed by the bizarre attention his paper has gotten from the general public:
Before accusing multiple scientific teams of dishonesty based on journalists’ confused “summaries” of a single brand-new paper, it’s probably a good idea to first thoroughly review that paper. Table 2 lists two new estimates for present day mass trends (PDMT) between 2002 and 2008. The one called “GIA estimated” uses GPS and GRACE to simultaneously solve for GIA and PDMT. For Greenland, “GIA estimated” has a PDMT of -104 +- 23 Gt/yr. “GIA corrected” uses GRACE alone to solve for PDMT, correcting for GIA using the widespread ICE-5G model. For Greenland, “GIA corrected” has a PDMT of -161 +- 35 Gt/yr.
These new estimates are compared to Velicogna’s Greenland PDMT of -234 +- 33 Gt/yr over the same timespan.
2011-08-22 Update: Dr. Wu has revised his numbers.
First consider the “GIA estimated” result which combines GPS and GRACE data to simultaneously solve for PDMT and GIA. Figure 2a shows his estimated GIA model and figure 2b is the a priori ICE-5G model. Notice that Wu’s model and ICE-5G generally agree on the rebound signals in Canada and Scandinavia, which are both well-studied and well-covered by GPS stations so this supports ICE-5G in these areas. However, look at the places where figures 2a and 2b disagree. The largest disagreement is in the interiors of Greenland, Siberia and Eastern Antarctica. Alaska/Yukon and Svalbard are also places where Dr. Wu’s model differs appreciably from ICE-5G.
Now look at supplementary figure 2. Notice that there are no GPS sites in the interiors of Greenland and Antarctica, and only sparse coverage in Siberia. There appears to be only a single GPS station on Svalbard, located right on the coast. Alaska/Yukon is covered by GPS stations but they have “missing or deweighted components.” So the largest deviations from ICE-5G occur in places where their GPS data are most sparse.
Also, the long-term GIA signals they’re estimating are distinct from the elastic rebound of land under thinning ice, which is instantaneous and acts much more locally than GIA. For instance, at least one of Dr. Wu’s GPS stations in Greenland is at Helheim glacier which is thinning rapidly. I think this suggests that the simultaneous inversion is using coastal GPS stations that are strongly affected by small-scale signals in an attempt to constrain the large-scale GIA signal in the interior.
Incidentally, Bromwich and Nicolas make similar points in their “news and views” article (free PDF) in the same issue of Nature Geoscience. They also briefly refer to the fact that Wu’s “GIA estimated” ~100 Gt/yr Greenland PDMT is inconsistent with independent estimates which subtract ice discharge from surface mass balance.
Next consider “GIA corrected” which uses GRACE alone to solve for PDMT, correcting GIA using ICE-5G. Dr. Wu’s inversion differs from previous estimates because of what his methods section calls the “optimal averaging function” which is described in his 2009 paper.
Some background is necessary. GRACE records precise distance measurements every few seconds between the two GRACE satellites. These measurements are made available as level 1b data. Independent GRACE centers such as JPL/CSR/GFZ invert each month’s worth of level 1b data to solve for the average time-variable geoid for that month. For instance, if strong monsoons flood Bangladesh during the month in question, the geoid will temporarily be abnormally high there. The GRACE centers call these monthly geoids “level 2” data, and make them available so scientists can invert them to solve for the mass change using their own custom software.
It’s important to note that these level 2 monthly geoids are described not by values at regularly spaced coordinates on the globe, but by spherical harmonic coefficients. Most GRACE centers truncate the infinite expansion at degree 60, which roughly speaking means the geoid’s resolution has a half-wavelength of ~333km (latitude dependent, etc.) which (again, roughly) means that GRACE can’t distinguish between masses that are closer together than ~333km.
The process of obtaining a rigorous mass loss rate estimate for, say, Greenland from these monthly geoid spherical harmonics has been refined for years now. The really short version goes like this. First, a “sensitivity kernel” for Greenland is defined. A first guess at the optimal kernel might equal 1.0 inside Greenland, and 0.0 everywhere else. Then this sensitivity kernel is projected onto the spherical harmonic basis up to degree 60, and used to weight each month’s geoid coefficients.
That’s only a “first guess” because of the truncation at degree 60 which is imposed by the GRACE data. This will tend to smooth the sensitivity kernel, but more importantly it will introduce ringing similar to the Gibbs phenomenon in Fourier transforms. So it’s important to truncate the sensitivity kernel and examine it for sanity as Velicogna and Wahr 2005 did in figure 1. Notice that their sensitivity kernel is smooth, and they scale to compensate for the uneven weighting.
Dr. Wu’s method is different. Rather than going directly from spherical harmonics to Greenland mass estimate like Velicogna and Wahr do, Dr. Wu seems to construct “optimal spatial average values” around grid points spaced 1 degree apart in latitude and longitude. I believe he then sums those values over Greenland to get his mass estimate. In a sense, his method solves for “mass concentrations” (mascons) as an intermediate step which is similar to the way my inversion method works. However, I invert a more “raw” time series of acceleration values recorded every 5 seconds (similar to level 1b data) rather than inverting a monthly table of geoid spherical harmonic coefficients. Combined with an inversion algorithm that avoids the use of spherical harmonics altogether, my technique doesn’t suffer from the same non-local “ringing” errors caused by truncating spherical harmonics.
On the other hand, Dr. Wu is using spherical harmonics, so ringing effects could affect his inversion in ways which need to be approached very carefully. An important question which he doesn’t address in the paper or the supplementary information is: “What does the effective truncated sensitivity kernel for Dr. Wu’s Greenland mass estimate look like?”
To answer this question, I think one just needs to sum the spherical harmonic weights of all the optimal spatial functions constructed for grid points in Greenland, then view those summed coefficients in the spatial domain. I suspect this effective sensitivity kernel wouldn’t be smooth, and that the “GIA corrected” PDMT estimate is too small because (for instance) it overweights the mass gain in the interior and/or underweights mass loss on the coasts.
I suspect that the simulations he describes in section 5 of the supplementary information missed this algorithm artifact because it would have the same effect on the inversion which goes from observations to mass changes as it would on the reverse process of simulating observations given specified mass changes. Perhaps simulating observations using grid points spaced at (say) 1.17 degrees apart, then inverting using a grid point spacing of 1.00 degrees would have been illuminating. It seems to me like that would cause the effective sensitivity kernel for each process to look different and thus enable the simulated tests to detect the artifact. But I don’t completely understand his 2009 paper, so my idea might not be relevant or useful.
2011-08-10 Update: Based on a conversation I just had with Xiaoping Wu, it’s clear that I don’t understand his 2009 paper. His technique isn’t similar to a mascon inversion at all; I’m still not sure exactly what his “optimal averaging function” is.
I don’t know what he’s referring to on page 3 when he says that their “results are generally in better agreement with altimetry (over different periods) 10-13,30 than with other GRACE estimates.” I thought maybe the supplementary information would include some kind of RMS error comparison, but I can’t find anything like that…
Having said that, I think this is interesting research. I completely agree with Dr. Michael Watkins, also from JPL: simultaneous inversions of GRACE and other geodetic data sources are invaluable, and this is a bold first step. I applaud Dr. Wu for publishing (what I think is) the first such inversion in the literature. I’d like to do something similar in the future (albeit combining GRACE with GOCE data or superconducting gravity meters rather than GPS) so I’ll definitely be in touch with Dr. Wu to learn more about his techniques once the peanut gallery moves on to the next conspiracy.
You’re saying the error bars should be ~4 times larger than the detected signal… with no reasoning, no references, and no calculations to back up your claim? Wow.
On the other hand… at least chris y committed to an actual number (albeit one seemingly pulled out of thin air) rather than being hopelessly vague. Error bars for GRACE PDMT estimates are defined rigorously. They’re as large as required by the noise in the data and the low resolution obtained when measuring gravity ~500 km above the surface.
The Copenhagen diagnosis has summarized the peer-reviewed research on Greenland PDMT. First, notice that the plot is two-dimensional because most papers study trends over different time periods. Second, notice that all of the published estimates have error bars… in fact, the estimate with the smallest error bars is the discredited study saying that Greenland was gaining mass from ~1992-2004. Third, notice that Dr. Wu’s estimates overlap with those used by the IPCC AR4 WG1.
Wow. I googled “wet pancake effect” and your comment was the only result. Or something, indeed.
I’ve previously mentioned that sea level rise is faster than projected, and that Greenland’s glacier thinning is accelerating and spreading up the western coast, and that projections at the 2009 AGU were ~1.2 meters by 2100 rather than the 18-59 centimeters projected by the IPCC AR4 WG1 for the same emissions scenarios. So is it really necessary to call me and the vast majority of my colleagues idiots? I don’t think my comments or the vast majority of the peer-reviewed papers I’ve read on the subject “claim more evidence than there is.” We’re just claiming more evidence than you seem to be aware of. There’s a difference.
I’ve discussed many independent lines of evidence for Greenland’s accelerating mass loss. Some research that I’ve been reporting on as it was presented in conferences has since been published. The glacier thinning in Greenland is accelerating and spreading up the western coast, as observed by GRACE and GPS. Here’s the movie that was shown at the GRACE science team meeting last year, though I prefer the youtube version. I’ve since confirmed the accuracy of this movie using my own custom algorithms and a more “raw” GRACE dataset that (as far as I know) is only used by me.
Glacier thinning is confirmed by laser altimetry, radar interferometry and estimates which subtract ice discharge from surface mass balance. Allison 2009 is a good review article summarizing these findings, and here’s a more accessible overview which includes updated data since Velicogna 2009 was published.
The PDMT over Greenland is useful both as a diagnostic of climate change, and as a guide to predicting future sea level rise. Neither of these applications are significantly affected even if Wu’s ~100 Gt/yr estimate of the linear trend is correct.
First, I’ve already pointed out that it’s the acceleration of the mass loss that’s used as a diagnostic of climate change, not the linear trend. Velicogna 2009 says “The GIA correction used for the Greenland ice sheet is 7 +- 19 Gt/yr. This correction represents the largest source of uncertainty in our ice mass estimate. However, the GIA rate remains constant over the satellite’s lifetime, thus a change in the rate of ice mass-loss would not be contaminated by GIA errors.”
She’s right, of course. GIA is the linear response to ice loading that happened millenia ago. In order for GIA to contaminate an acceleration measurement over ~10 years, the mantle’s viscosity would have to be absurdly low. Aside from conflicting with various seismology studies, that would imply that GIA should’ve finished millenia ago. Also, the mass loss spreading along Greenland’s western coast definitely can’t be due to GIA.
What about predicting future sea level rise? Again, that has almost everything to do with the acceleration of the mass loss rate and very little to do with the current linear trend.
Unsurprisingly, your link says the opposite of what you implied it does. In it, Stefan reviews a paper which uses unphysical reasoning to arrive at an unrealistically low estimate for sea level rise.
To the same “extent you can do this” in any field of science. All experimental science has error bars and aspects which aren’t well understood yet. That’s why I’ve previously said: “I think it’s important to gauge how big these flaws are, relative to how many phenomena are satisfactorily explained by the theory in question. Isaac Asimov wrote a great essay on this subject.“
And once again, Greenland’s accelerating mass loss makes the case for [overall] negative feedback dubious at best.
I’ve also already explained that Greenland’s ice sheet would take centuries to completely melt. I’ve never seen any peer-reviewed research that says otherwise, so you might want to make your “gedankenexperiments” a little less ridiculous.
I’ve already told you that I’ve looked at the PDMT over Greenland and said there was more than enough evidence. But is it really necessary to continue to accuse me and my colleagues of being dishonest? I’m getting deja vu of a conversation with Steven Goddard. He also made a bunch of unfounded claims about GRACE scientists, then when Robert explained exactly how he was wrong— in depth, Goddard accused him of using strawman arguments, and twice accused him of dishonesty before inevitably babbling about Al Gore.
I might have mentioned that Al Gore is irrelevant because he’s a washed-up politician, not a scientist. I’m not completely convinced that he hates the average American, and I’m baffled at how many in the general public confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
Last year, Dr. Xiaoping (Frank) Wu et al. published a paper which claimed that the present day mass trends (PDMTs) of regions such as Antarctica and Greenland had been overestimated in previous studies:
… [Dr. Wu’s] “GIA estimated” uses GPS and GRACE to simultaneously solve for GIA and PDMT. For Greenland, “GIA estimated” has a PDMT of -104 +- 23 Gt/yr. [Dr. Wu’s] “GIA corrected” uses GRACE alone to solve for PDMT, correcting for GIA using the widespread ICE-5G model. For Greenland, “GIA corrected” has a PDMT of -161 +- 35 Gt/yr. These new estimates are compared to Velicogna’s Greenland PDMT of -234 +- 33 Gt/yr over the same timespan.
At the GRACE science team meeting earlier this month, Xiaoping Wu revised his numbers. For Greenland, “GIA estimated” now has a PDMT of -144 +- 27 Gt/yr. For Greenland, “GIA corrected” now has a PDMT of -219 +- 33 Gt/yr.
After his presentation, I asked Dr. Wu what changed in his methodology to make his new numbers more closely match those of Velicogna, Chen, Luthcke, and all the other non-GRACE measurement techniques. He said that he expanded his sensitivity kernel to 0.5 degrees off the coast of Greenland because secular trends in the ocean are very small compared to those on land. Thus his new inversion doesn’t underweight the mass loss (as much), because it’s occurring primarily on the coasts.
I took a picture of the slide in his presentation which contains these revisions, but it’s illegible. When the GRACE meeting slides appear on the web (hopefully later this month), I’ll share the address of these slides and the exact slide number so my report of his revisions can be verified.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here and emailed to Rush Limbaugh at the same time.)
Dear Rush Limbaugh, ShakaUVM, and many other climate change contrarians,
Last year, Dr. Xiaoping (Frank) Wu et al. published a paper which claimed that the present day mass trends (PDMTs) of regions such as Antarctica and Greenland had been overestimated in previous studies because their glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) corrections weren’t large enough.
… [Dr. Wu’s] “GIA estimated” uses GPS and GRACE to simultaneously solve for GIA and PDMT. For Greenland, “GIA estimated” has a PDMT of -104 +- 23 Gt/yr. [Dr. Wu’s] “GIA corrected” uses GRACE alone to solve for PDMT, correcting for GIA using the widespread ICE-5G model. For Greenland, “GIA corrected” has a PDMT of -161 +- 35 Gt/yr. These new estimates are compared to Velicogna’s Greenland PDMT of -234 +- 33 Gt/yr over the same timespan.
In that same comment, I explained that Dr. Wu’s estimates of Greenland’s mass loss rate conflict with several other GRACE estimates, measurements that subtract ice discharge from surface mass balance, laser altimetry, radar interferometry, and other empirical evidence regarding ice history since the Last Glacial Maximum. I even suggested some potential areas of improvement in Dr. Wu’s algorithm, including the statement “I suspect this effective sensitivity kernel wouldn’t be smooth, and that the “GIA corrected” PDMT estimate is too small because (for instance) it overweights the mass gain in the interior and/or underweights mass loss on the coasts.”
Then, at the GRACE science team meeting earlier this month, Xiaoping Wu revised his numbers. For Greenland, “GIA estimated” now has a PDMT of -144 +- 27 Gt/yr. For Greenland, “GIA corrected” now has a PDMT of -219 +- 33 Gt/yr.
After his presentation, I asked Dr. Wu what changed in his methodology to make his new numbers more closely match those of Velicogna, Chen, Luthcke, and all the other non-GRACE measurement techniques. He said that he expanded his sensitivity kernel to 0.5 degrees off the coast of Greenland because secular trends in the ocean are very small compared to land. Thus his new inversion doesn’t underweight the mass loss (as much), because it’s occurring primarily on the coasts.
So after Dr. Wu fixed one of the issues I mentioned, his “GIA corrected” PDMT increased from 68% to 93% of Velicogna’s Greenland PDMT. His “GIA estimated” PDMT has increased from 44% to 61% of Velicogna’s Greenland PDMT.
Rush Limbaugh, do you regret calling GRACE research a “sham” and a “hoax” (four times) based on numbers that are being corrected as we speak? Do you regret calling for climate scientists to be drawn and quartered because you fell for the overhyped and manufactured drama called climategate? Do you regret weaving that conspiracy theory into your attacks against me and my colleagues by saying that we “forgot to hide the decline”?
To be clear, I respect Dr. Xiaoping Wu both as a person and as a scientist. He’s pioneering a new simultaneous inversion of GPS and GRACE that will eventually be very useful. Obviously, right now his technique is very new and seems to be yielding preliminary results that don’t match many forms of empirical evidence. That’s okay, it’s part of the scientific process. I especially respect him for publicly admitting that his previous Greenland PDMT calculations were too low. The ability to admit a mistake and move on is the mark of a true scientist.
What bothers me is that you (Rush Limbaugh, ShakaUVM, etc.) are using his research as an excuse to attack all the other GRACE scientists in the world. The language that both of you are using is absolutely uncalled for. Please think carefully about the effect you’re having on the public’s perception of science, and try to play a more constructive role in the future.
Sincerely,
A dumb scientist
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Charming. That’s why I posted the original comment at Slashdot as a reply to one of your comments, as I do with all the other comments I write… but that little detail hasn’t stopped you from repeating the same charming and constructive criticisms. Again, read the original comment on Slashdot and let posterity know whether or not you regret your baseless attacks.
Compare your original comment to my reply, and look for evidence that I’ve accused you of wanting to murder climatologists or throw them in jail. In reality, I’ve already pointed out that you’ve accused climatologists of being fascinated with plans that will kill people… in fact, one of your comments implies that 6 billion people would die, which is closer to genocide than it is to murder.
Again, look for evidence that I’ve accused you of wanting to kill me and my “little dog, too”. I find it interesting that you only seem to remember writing “it’s harder to estimate Greenland ice losses than people think”… it’s funny how the words dishonest idiot dogmatists have slipped your mind.
Oh, don’t worry, you’ve been quite clear about the extent of my “rank hypocrisy” (and that of most other scientists in the world). Perhaps if you actually tried to quote my “blatantly inaccurate and libelous tripe” in this one post above, you’d find that you were actually just quoting the Wizard of Oz rather than reading what I wrote.
Yes, you and Rush Limbaugh both fell for that climategate nonsense. I’ve already tried to explain how absurd your attacks on Phil Jones are, but your reply made it clear that I’d failed to communicate once again.
Good grief; that’s the fifth time you’ve tried to claim that I agree with your nonsense. This whole time I’ve been saying that the mountain of evidence supporting the mainstream estimates of Greenland PDMT is more credible than a single, brand-new paper exploring a novel technique. This whole time I’ve been saying that there are several specific problems with Dr. Wu’s methodology that, when fixed, would bring his estimates closer to the mainstream. That just happened. Now you’re trying to claim that this means I’m saying you’re right? Wow. Just… wow.
Then why don’t you prove it by refraining from calling GRACE researchers dishonest idiot dogmatists… using the same issues that Rush Limbaugh uses to accuse GRACE researchers of perpetuating a scam and a hoax?
You’ve previously said that “I could copy and paste links from thread after thread where you had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make even the smallest admission that Watts’ empirical station survey had any work [sic]. I could post all of those links, and make you look stupid. Or I could just say it outright. Which I just did.”.
Maybe you actually should copy and paste links from that thread to try to support your accusations. When you do that, you’ll discover that I was consistently saying that Watts’s station survey wasn’t original, and certainly didn’t support your claim that RealClimate.org is bullshitting about the temperature record. Climate scientists studying the urban heat island effect really had “taken it into their calculations”, a statement which even Watts’s long-awaited paper now agrees with. Seriously… before embarrassing yourself even further by continuing to make these bizarre claims about a conversation that you were involved in, try to actually “make me look stupid” by copying and pasting those links. You might learn something.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
What’s your point? I’ve already disagreed with those accusations against “the other side”: I most certainly do not think you’re an idiot. At worst, I think you’re making mistakes while talking about a highly advanced subject that lies far outside of your own professional experience. Everyone does that. It’d be a different story if I were saying that you were pathetically wrong about your own life’s work…
I think it’s wrong to say that climate change contrarians are dishonest idiot dogmatists. They’re just examples of the modified salem hypothesis. In other words, they’re honest people who aren’t necessarily idiots or steeped in dogmatism. They’re just trying to lecture about a highly advanced scientific subject, while not noticing that their background (programming, engineering, etc.) isn’t sufficient to understand the nuances of that subject. Ironically, I said this in an attempt to try as hard as possible to avoid writing down the kind of insults you are, but you seem to determined to see this as an insult, while innocently wondering why calling someone a dishonest idiot dogmatist is offensive.
I think you need to keep trying. In the meantime, I’ll start to address all the weird assumptions you wrote right after that statement, but I’ll have to group them with all the other similar statements you’ve made that I haven’t addressed. So this might take a while.
Again, I find it interesting that you only seem to remember writing “Watts contributed something with his surface station survey”… it’s funny how you don’t seem to remember writing “None of the issues surrounding energy production and global warming aren’t [sic] particularly hard to understand – the only reason it is so time consuming is that figuring out who is bullshitting on which point of contention takes a while. For example, the issues surrounding bad station data is rather complex. RC.org hand-waves the issue, saying that they have “taken it into their calculations”, but on this issue, it seems obvious that RC.org is bullshitting.”
This comment is depressingly similar to the bizarre version of our conversation that you just posted. Remember when you said you could copy and paste links to make me look stupid? Remember that I just encouraged you to try do that? The key words here are copy and paste. When you try to actually copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you’ll find that you were accusing scientists of bullshitting about temperature records, and that I was consistently saying that Watts’s “survey” wasn’t original and didn’t support your repetitive accusations of bullshitting. That’s still my position, and it’s bizarre that you keep crowing about “dragging me kicking and screaming” to admit that Watts’s work had any value. I still think his “survey” was pointless and didn’t add anything new to the scientific literature.
If you think these revisions vindicate your accusations of dishonesty, idiocy and dogmatism, there’s obviously nothing anyone could say to change your mind.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
This is exactly what I’m talking about. If you actually tried to copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you’d notice that I was explicitly saying that there had already been multiple independent empirical studies of the temperature record. Watts simply didn’t do a thorough literature search before declaring himself to be the only person empirically studying the temperature network. If he were the first person to try to study the surface stations empirically, or if his “survey” added anything new to the sum of human knowledge, then I would agree with you because you’re wrong to imply that I don’t care about empiricism. So you can holster the Feynman quotes; I’ve already got quite a collection.
I’ll add the rest of that comment to the perpetually-expanding list of accusations you’ve made that I haven’t yet addressed. Again, this could take a while.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Huh? The IPCC AR4 WG1 says: “For comparison with this constant composition case, it is useful to note that constant emissions would lead to much larger radiative forcing. For example, constant CO2 emissions at year 2000 values would lead to concentrations reaching about 520 ppm by 2100.”
Furthermore, “A 50% reduction would stabilise atmospheric CO2, but only for less than a decade. After that, atmospheric CO2 would be expected to rise again as the land and ocean sinks decline owing to well-known chemical and biological adjustments. Complete elimination of CO2 emissions is estimated to lead to a slow decrease in atmospheric CO2 of about 40 ppm over the 21st century.”
Notice that reducing emissions by 50% would only stabilize CO2 for less than a decade. It wouldn’t stabilize temperatures at all (see “constant emission commitment”) because the huge thermal inertia of the oceans causes surface temperatures to lag behind changes in the effective radiating temperature of the Earth brought about by increasing levels of greenhouse gases.
The scientific consensus is actually that the total amount of CO2 emitted is what’s important, not the emission rate. Every gigaton of CO2 we emit in 2010 is one less gigaton that our descendents will be able to emit in 2100. Therefore, the person you were lecturing was actually correct about this one point. Scientists wouldn’t ever say that we just need to halve our CO2 output in order to stabilize temperatures, because that’s simply not true.
As usual, I’ll have to guess that you’re referring to the title of a pop-science article. Next time, read past the title:
“It is wrong to believe that the temperature will remain constant with constant emissions,” says Knutti. … The models show that there is a 75 percent probability that global warming will not exceed two degrees if a maximum of 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere from 2000 to 2050. This number seems high, but 234 billion tonnes had already been flung into the atmosphere between 2000 and 2006. If the emission remain at this high level, or even increase, the budget would be exhausted before 2030. The results show that time to act is short. … This study also concludes that the total amount of CO2 emissions is crucial in terms of how much the earth warms up. The authors summarise a political interpretation in comments in Nature Reports Climate Change3. According to Knutti, “Every tonne of CO2 is one tonne, whether it is emitted today or in fifty years. This is often lost in the tangle of emission targets, certificates and negotiations. The total quantity is what matters, and must be limited, but short-term goals are necessary to see whether we are on the right track.” … The series of studies show that the total quantity of CO2 emission is limited if people want to limit climate change. “With every year of delay, we are using up our quota, losing flexibility, and increasing the probability of dangerous consequences,” says Knutti.
Or, look at the picture next to the title. Notice that Knutti’s graph of CO2 emissions doesn’t just drop in half, because that wouldn’t stabilize temperatures. As Knutti stresses, the total amount of CO2 emitted is what’s important, which in this graph is the area under the curve. Knutti’s curve has finite area because in his scenario CO2 emissions drop to zero in 2100. Simply halving our CO2 emissions would have a larger area under the curve until 2100, and the total CO2 emitted would continue to grow past 2100. That would not stabilize temperatures.
It’s strange that you didn’t correct his actual mistake, which was assuming that burning wood is intrinsically bad. It’s not, for the same reason that biofuels are carbon-neutral. Now, if we burned wood without planting enough trees to prevent deforestation that would be a different story. But we can certainly continue to enjoy campfires and barbeques as long as we do so responsibly.
Growing trees is carbon negative. Burning trees releases the trapped carbon. This isn’t rocket science.
When I get back from my trip I’ll dig up my references. A 50% CO2 reduction won’t stabilize temperatures at the current level (no reasonable scenario will), but it will stabilize below the Really Bad zones in the temperature prediction forecasts.
It is possible to reduce our CO2 by 50%, maily because we can attack the problem in a centralized way at the power plant level. 0 CO2 emission is simply not on the table, but the fact that climatologists think it is doable is yet another bit of evidence for the fact that being good at science doesn’t make you good at policy.
Notice that they’re meteorologists. In other words, they study short term trends and don’t have PhD-level understanding of ensemble averages and other techniques necessary to analyze long term trends. (Heck, they’re TV personalities. They might not know more than how to wave their hands around a green screen.)
But sqrt(2) is right to say that most [people-press.org] scientists agree [jamstec.go.jp] that anthropogenic CO2 is causing a dangerous temperature increase. The percentage of scientists who agree with this statement increases with increasing relevance [uic.edu] of the scientist’s field.
The Doran study’s survey question is phrased: 2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? So I believe you injected the “dangerous” evaluation. jamstec.go.jp link says that overwhelmingly the most common response of those surveyed was to agree that AGW is real, but only “at least some of the forecast consequences of this change are based on robust evidence.” So I don’t think scientists are necessarily in agreement that we’re headed for a cataclysmic disaster.
Notice that in the people-press.org survey, 70% of scientists call global warming a “very serious” problem. Only 6% call it “not too serious” or “not a problem”.
When have you ever seen the IPCC or any peer-reviewed paper discuss “cataclysmic disaster”? Note that in the jamstec.go.jp survey, 15-20% of scientists think the IPCC has understated the seriousness of the problem.
I think we need more specific consequences. When the IPCC tried to come up with a list of specific consequences, the Doran survey indicates most scientists found at least one to disagree with. Agreeing that too much CO2 is bad is one step, but considering the costs of reducing CO2 (possibly major economic damage) defining the magnitude of CO2’s harm is very important. If we’re doing it to avert widespread droughts/starvation/wars, cap and trade may be more palatable than if it turns out it’s just to protect the habitat of a few species of tropical fish (hyperbole intended).
Huh? Where does the Doran survey say that? As far as I can tell, the Doran survey ends with this conclusion:
It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.
Feeling lucky?
Sorry I meant to refer to the jamstec survey where most scientists said “at least some of the forecast consequences of this change are based on robust evidence.” Thanks to you I looked up the 2007 report they’re referring to. It does attempt to describe potential consequences though they are sorted into *medium **high and ***very high confidence of occurrence. So I still think I’m right in saying that that’s where the debate exists. We agree that the more CO2 we output the more we raise the global temperature. Debate still seems to be out on what will happen in terms of e.g. crop yields or extinctions. It’d be worth going back to an agrarian lifestyle today to prevent humanity’s extinction, is it worth it to prevent flooding for a few million people in 2080? (***very confident on the flooding by the way, scary stuff.) There are a lot of possible courses we could take, and a wide and disagreed-upon assortment of potential consequences.
Pretty much. The survey authors stress that only 47% of the general public thinks there’s a consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. As the Doran survey says, the scientific community is seemingly unable to convince the general public that we agree on the basic facts. The projections over the next 100 years are uncertain, of course, due to imperfect knowledge of feedback effects and imperfect knowledge of future economics/emissions scenarios. But many people in the general public assert that this uncertainty is so wide that, hey, climate change might be good for us. (Seriously, check out the rest of this article to see these crackpots in action.) No scientist that I’ve ever met thinks that abrupt climate change will be good for the human race; it’s either viewed as bad or very bad.
Uh… I haven’t heard any scientists advocating an agrarian lifestyle. I think that’s utterly absurd. As the people-press survey shows, ~90% of physicists (including me) think we should respond to climate change by building more nuclear power plants. I find it baffling that nonscientists seem to think we need infinitely precise climate models in order to justify a new industrial revolution that will also help reduce our dependence on oil from corrupt governments, help soften the inevitable blow of peak oil, and help our deep space program by increasing available plutonium for RTGs.
Incidentally, I’ve discussed ocean heat content several times, and agree that it’s a better diagnostic than air temperatures (subject to the caveats referenced in that post and those quoted at the very bottom of this post.) Also, here’s a rough approximation of the heat content of the oceans, troposphere, and stratosphere.
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. I’ve previously said that human CO2 emissions are ~100x larger than those from volcanoes. This is the comparison that matters, so your summary is essentially correct. But the biosphere’s yearly fluctuations are much larger than our yearly emissions, as you can see by the fact that the red line’s annual amplitude is much larger than its linear trend. The biosphere is a closed system, though, so it’s not relevant to abrupt climate change.
Neither of you are providing links to peer-reviewed articles, so I won’t bother trying to guess what specific events either of you are talking about. But most climate variability pre-1970 can’t be “significantly” blamed on anthropogenic CO2 (i.e. “soot”) because our population was small and the power generated was miniscule by today’s standards. The inefficiency of 1800s era technology just multiplied the total power generation by a larger coefficient than today’s (not much) more efficient tech, but the resulting fossil fuel use (and thus corresponding CO2 emissions) were tiny compared to the demands of the modern world.
Update: Soot’s albedo effect is completely different from CO2’s greenhouse effect. I still doubt that anthropogenic soot in the 1800s affected the global climate for the same reasons described above. Also, the warming due to black carbon on snow is very small relative to that due to CO2.
Various proxies (middle graph) show variability over the last 1000 years, but most of this is explained by natural changes like the solar Maunder Minimum and occasional sustained “statistically significant” changes in volcanic activity (which normally adds aerosols to the atmosphere thus causing a brief “volcanic winter” but the CO2 emitted stays in the atmosphere longer so volcanic activity warms the long term climate). Also, notice that the top graph (the shorter instrumental record) shows no real change from 1800 to 1850, and both absolute temperatures are below the current temperature– but this is from a period where they don’t even bother to provide error bars because there are only a handful of recording stations. If you examine the middle graph (proxy reconstructions) again, you’ll note that there’s some disagreement about variability on ~30 year timescales, but even the increase around ~1000 CE is consistent among proxy reconstructions, and explained in terms of natural causes.
Remember that climate scientists aren’t saying that natural variability doesn’t exist. We’re just saying that previous and current climate changes have natural causes which are relatively well understood, but the current increase in global average temperature as averaged over ~20 years is at least largely due to anthropogenic causes. Personally, I say this is a good reason to go nuclear. Yesterday.
No time for links, Dr. Jones… but the biosphere actually absorbs ~1/2 of our emissions, based on cross-analyses of Mauna Loa/etc. stations, “recent” proxies, tax records on coal/oil/etc., and carbon 12/13 isotope ratios. Whether this absorption will continue at the current percentage is an open question.
I came up with a useful counterargument for the climate change debate. First off, I ran across a new, even more accurate term: “climate destabilization”. That’s a lot more accurate a description of the real scientific fears than “climate change” is, I think. It points out that we’re not just noting that humans are changing climate, but that the changes we’re causing might cause a sort of problem that we’re not used to seeing and may not be able to deal with.
But anyhow, that’s mostly an aside. This counterargument comes into play when some skeptic claims that there’s a “conspiracy” among scientists, or that anti-climate-change science is looked down on by scientists, or that those scientists with valid anti-climate-change theories are purposefully being kept out of respected journals, or that there are really a lot of scientists who dispute climate change who just aren’t getting publicity, etc. Here’s my counterexample:
——-
Imagine, for a minute, that you are a life-long smoker. You go to the doctor one day, who tells you, “Sorry, but you’ve got lung cancer. We’ve got to get you started on treatment, and you’ll have to give up those cigarettes right away.” Now, being a smoker, you understandably wouldn’t be thrilled with the idea of going cold-turkey. So maybe you go to another doctor to get a second opinion. “Sorry,” the second doctor says. “It really is cancer and you need to stop smoking if you want to have a good chance of recovery.” Still upset, you go to a third doctor, then a fourth, a fifth. Finally, after sixteen doctors, you find one who takes your money and says, “Oh, don’t worry about the smoking bit. I’ve seen plenty of evidence that that’s a fallacy. Just undergo the operation and you’ll be able to go right back to your regular life.”
Does finding that seventeenth doctor mean that there’s significant disagreement in the medical community about the connection between smoking and lung cancer? Are you wise to ignore the overwhelming scientific consensus in this matter, just because you’ve found a voice countering it? If the wider medical community publicly frowned upon this seventeenth doctor, accusing him of lying to his patients and allowing harm to come to them, putting pressure on him to change his ways, would they be obstructing scientific principles? Would they be wrong to try to drown his voice out in public settings, in hopes of healing more people?
To me, most climate change skeptics are as the seventeenth doctor, who claims that smoking has no relationship to lung cancer. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that this is not true, but it’s not always considered “proven” by people uncomfortable with science because that evidence is statistical — ie: X% more smokers get lung cancer than nonsmokers; there is a Y% likelihood that global mean temperatures will rise by a degree this century. It’s entirely possible that the person in the above example might rid himself of the lung cancer, then smoke the rest of his life with no further noticeable damage, despite the overwhelming consensus in the medical community. It’s just not very LIKELY, which is why the medical community argues against it. Similarly, it’s possible that human-driven climate change will be minimal or harmless or quickly balanced by natural forces and reactions, dealing no noteworthy damage. It’s just not very LIKELY. In both cases, we understand the causes of the undesirable result, even if we can only give a statistical statement of how likely that result will be, or how damaging.
A smoker risks lung cancer for himself when he denies the broad scientific consensus connecting smoking to lung cancer. A voter risks hardship for himself and everyone else on Earth for the next century or two when he denies the broad scientific consensus connecting human activities to global climate change. I would argue that any smoker who accepts the seventeenth doctor’s statement is fooling himself and likely to bring himself a painful future. I do not wish the same to occur to my planet or my children, due to my actions now.
Thank you for that insightful analogy.
I like the term “climate destabilization”; you’re right to say that it describes the CO2 problem better than “anthropogenic global warming” or “abrupt climate change”.
I’ve misplaced a link I meant to show you, where someone in the last month was crying conspiracy because of the shift from “global warming” to “climate change” to “climate disruption”. (There’s an example at the top of this article).
It’s important to remember that the mere act of changing terms is highly negative, and has to be balanced by an absolutely enormous increase in the pedagogical content of the new term.
(Ed. note: This conversation is continued from here and here.)
The general consensus among scientists was that asbestos, mad cows, DDT, fossil fuel consumption, food stuffed with hormones and antibiotics, etc. were beneficial, too.
We should be guided by our common sense, rather than majorities or minorities.
The general consensus among scientists was that the earth was flat. Why should I listen to this new consensus that it’s an oblate spheroid? Isaac Asimov already addressed this topic, and I’ve mentioned that “common sense” is nearly useless. The universe doesn’t always operate in a manner that agrees with our primate preconceptions.
Stella, tell me: what exactly CAUSED our modern realization that things like asbestos and DDT have serious negative impacts?
Was it “common sense”? Well, sort of. But “common sense” is also much of the reason they were used initially and thought to be beneficial. Let’s not forget that “common sense” says that a material is GOOD if it is flame-retardant, heat-retardant, a good electrical insulator, resistant to chemical corrosion, high in tensile strength, and very flexible and durable. That, for the record, is why asbestos was originally used so widely. It was “common sense” to USE asbestos in housing! DDT and the other examples you mentioned also had strong positives which “common sense” originally supported. That’s why we used them.
But as you pointed out, asbestos (etc) is not considered a wise building choice now. WHY, Stella? Was it “common sense”? Well, in a sense. But you could equally well call it “science”, you know. After all, it combines the evaluation of “common sense” evidence (ie: “people working with asbestos are getting sick”) with a rational explanation demonstrated to cause the evidenced problems (“asbestos is demonstrated to move through the air or by physical contact, ending in the skin and lungs where its fibrous shape produces physical blockage”; “asbestos has been shown to cause tumors in animal trials”). The explanation of WHY which science provides is as important as the WHAT that common sense gives in this case. “Common sense” often points out a problem, but it rarely if ever explains why that problem exists; nor is it able to explain how to correct most complicated problems without the understanding added by science.
My point is this: in the cases you’ve mentioned, improved SCIENCE was a prime motivation for understanding the problem and a significant reason for stopping what had originally been a “common sense” decision. The fact that you and I both agree that using asbestos in household products is a bad idea is evidence that science often changes our society’s ideas of “common sense”! 150 years ago, you and I might have been marveling at how amazing this asbestos material was, how many oven fires it had contained, how warm it kept our houses at night, how safe it kept us from the electrical wires, etc etc. Now we know better. We know the negatives as well as the positives. That’s an advance in science and it led directly to an advance in our collective “common sense”.
In direct parallel, scientists are now aware of a problem that they were not aware of 150 years ago. Back then, coal was a wonderful, life-saving fuel that allowed society to grow and powered a huge bounty of technological advances (you know, like these computers we’re using now). Before coal, there was wood (leading to the total destruction of huge swaths of forests) and charcoal (leading to the same, as well as massive health problems for the charcoal-creators). Coal was a miracle! And oil, when it was discovered and made use of, equally so. The industrial revolution was allowing smart, hard-working people the chance to better their lives, at the same time as providing goods that everyone else wanted as well. Life was improving!
Back 150 years ago, the impacts of carbon dioxide on creatures was only poorly understood; the impact of it on a global scale was not considered. They had no way to measure even global temperature changes, much less temperatures at different levels of the atmosphere or variations in atmospheric chemicals. Nor did the scientists at the time have any idea that such records might tell them something interesting and worrisome. Just as the benefits of asbestos were recognized before the consequences were, so the benefits of industrialization were understood before its consequences.
We’re only realizing the full extent of those consequences now, through science. And because those consequences are newly-known, we don’t HAVE “common sense” about them yet. Our “common sense” is still a hundred years old, in this matter. But fear not: just as science eventually corrected our ideas on the value of asbestos, we are working now to correct our “common sense” ideas about how we humans affect the global climate. It’s taken us a good fifty years of serious scientific effort, but we’re there now. We understand our mistake now. We’re ready to correct it.
Will you let us?
Natural selection maintained human herds sustainable; however, we believe ourselves much wiser than nature and try to replace natural control for human. Death isn’t humane, diseases are inhumane, yet we have to put up with them (for now). There’s no compassion in Nature — it’s is ruthless, but people are many times more pitiless.
Would culling by humans be more humane? The record shows right the opposite (Hitler, Stalin, Pol pot, etc). Who would we entrust with such a delicate task? Corrupt politicians, self-opinionated scientists (no offence, I don’t mean you), eugenicists who would leave only fair haired blue eyed specimens or religious fanatics?
Letting children with malformations survive and lead lives full of pain and suffering, or making terminally ill people drag out their wretched existence against their will isn’t humanity, it’s the ultimate cruelty – something I wouldn’t wish either myself or people I care about. On the other hand, as you so rightly pointed out, unless we address the issue, the overpopulation will lead to devastating wars over control of the resources.
I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one, but scientists saying that “common sense is useless” scare me. To interpret the scientific evidence correctly you need at least some common sense, which by no means rules out the outside-the-box thinking. What our interpretation of reality should be based on or guided by?
Technology didn’t make our life better, but simply more comfortable for some. However, personally I’m not willing to have comforts at the expense of my health.
To me, the harm caused by science and the risks involved far outweigh the benefits. Science and technology are all very well as long as you aren’t collateral damage.
Reythia,
“a material is GOOD if it is flame-retardant, heat-retardant, a good electrical insulator, resistant to chemical corrosion, high in tensile strength, and very flexible and durable.”
Nope, first and foremost, the material is good when it has no side effects. That’s common sense.
BTW, the harmful effects of all these great inventions/discoveries, such as fossil fuels were well known or anticipated almost from the beginning, since I don’t believe those scientists were as stupid as not to foresee them. The only strong ”positive” these things had was the money the corresponding industries raked in.
“What exactly CAUSED our modern realization that things like asbestos and DDT have serious negative impacts?”
— People who started to die and keep dying.
Have you ever seen anyone dying from asbestosis or Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, that is, “mad cow” disease?
Do you know that DDT was found in the bones of the third (and further) generation of those exposed to it?
Did you see how people in Bhopal died?
Did you see how people died in Chernobyl, children born without their extremities? Etc, etc, etc.
Would you like to have a limbless child? Just imagine yourself dying this way and then tell in all honesty how you’d feel about scientific progress.
It is absolutely insane to claim that thanks to science we found solutions to the problems this very science had created in the first place, which is symptomatic of our demented society. Our thought process is flawed, that’s why whatever we invent is doomed to turn against us, and solutions we find sometimes even prove worse than the original problem.
We aren’t ready to correct our mistakes, we keep committing them – we keep creating potentially and obviously dangerous things. By the time we ”improve our common sense” humanity will be on the brink of extinction.
“What is the source of all this trouble? I’m saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That’s part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It’s like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, it’s far over 20%. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it’s creating them, and the more it thinks the more problems it creates.” (David Bohm, one of the greatest quantum physicists of the 20th century)
To sum up, how come humans survived for thousands of years without advanced technology, and in about 150 years of mind-boggling scientific progress we are on the verge of an abyss? Weren’t the things supposed to be the other way round?
Turning a blind eye to this fact — that’s the total absence of common sense.
Yes, that’s very likely.
Reythia,
It’s revelatory you didn’t answer whether you’d like to die of asbestosis or mad cow disease, etc. Happy-clappy technologists always take it for granted they will collect the benefits of technological progress, while the side effects will go to someone else, like the third world for example. How can you be sure it will never happen to you, unless you are a member of the Rockefeller family or the like.?
You must be kidding, it seems you have no idea what natural means. Animals don’t contaminate, we do. Beaver and such like use unmodified natural resources as tools, they don’t manipulate genetically the trees they fell and don’t make the river uninhabitable for other animals, conversely we create or use unnatural mechanisms to create substances that don’t exist in nature and for a good reason. Consequently, the environment can’t absorb them (differently from natural organic products like horse manure, an excellent fertiliser btw, etc.) and that’s how the toxic waste and therfore contamination builds up.
Bacteria created habitats over millions of years, thus giving the species time to adapt and evolve; we’ve almost destroyed ours in the blink of an eye, leaving the living organisms no chance to adapt. These bacteria survive to this day and are key to the ecosystems’ wellbeing. Get your facts straight.
Most part of the world population still starve to death despite industrial farming and globalisation, and much more now than in the past since due to a demographic boom induced by technological advances, while people in the developed world are dying out because of food stuffed with toxins. Yea, that’s progress.
Rather than the scarcity of resources, the absence of basic agricultural techniques is responsible for the food shortage in third world countries, look at the Hamish communities; they prosper wherever they go, even on lands considered barren, using primitive technology. Modern intensive farming has never been aimed at eradicating famine, but at making humongous profits by squeezing as much profits as possible out of the available land, thus exhausting the soil.
You’re right about the balance, but humans are intrinsically unable to maintain it because of our insatiable greed. There are agrarian societies in the world that have survived for centuries thanks to traditional agricultural methods without ever starving despite wars and other calamities. Instead, Nature has always been in balance, that’s why it lasted millions of years. Yet we are hell bent on disrupting its mechanisms of control.
I know I say things most people don’t want to hear, but closing your eyes won’t make the problems disappear. I’m well aware that most of the scientists make their living from developing waste producing technology or contributing to it. I guess, everyone has to defend their trade.
Mind that, there’s good and useful technology but we render it harmful by churning out single use products made in sweat shops that only make the corporations stinking rich. The throwaway society based on mere consumerism is unsustainable.
“The world began without man, and it will end without him”.
So much for our sophisticated brains.
Stella, you wrote: “Nature has always been in balance, that’s why it lasted millions of years.” Would you mind producing ANY evidence whatsoever of this fact? I can produce numerable pieces of counter-evidence, going back BILLIONS of years, I might add:
1.) As already mentioned, the respiration of blue-green algae some 2-3 billion years ago changed the atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing — a process which, despite your claims, occurred quickly enough to kill most life on Earth at the time. (Look up “Great Oxygenation Event” on Wikipedia if you want more info. It’s short, but gets the point across.)
2.) The aforesaid event and other lesser ones later on plunged the Earth into periods of total or near-total ice coverage, even to the equator. This destroyed very nearly all land life and much sea life as well. (Look up “Snowball Earth”.)
3.) Then there are the times life was destroyed by impacts from extra-Earth objects (see “K-T extinction event”, for just one example). Those are all “natural” events too, the largest of which destroyed 50-75% of the species living at the time.
And then let’s talk locally. Population crashes, for example. That’s what happens when, due to some natural situation, a population of creatures grows unusually large, then basically starves to death. Like most localized events, there IS long-term equilibrium in these situations — but nature is most assuredly NOT “in balance” on scales of years to decades, or arguably even to the scale of a few centuries.
So with respect, your statement about nature always being in balance is simply WRONG, and easily disproven. Interestingly enough, it’s precisely the argument that anti-climate-change people also use — in their case, to demonstrate how human activities couldn’t possibly alter the climate as we’ve demonstrated they do. Both their arguments and yours are based on a statement which has been repeatedly shown to be FALSE, making the rest of your arguments untrue as well.
If you still disagree, consider this question: If nature is always in balance, then how come the Earth doesn’t look the same now as it did 4 billion years ago, or 4 million years ago, or even 40 thousand years ago? The fact that the Earth has changed greatly is PROOF that nature is NOT “in balance”. “In balance” is just another word for “stagnant”, which our planet fortunately is not. THINK, Stella!
As a final note, I want you to consider a potential scenario from maybe 40-100 thousand years ago (very roughly). Urk the caveman sees a branch burning from a lightning strike. He thinks to himself, “Hey, that’s pretty awesome. I’m warm! I can scare away predators! The girls think it’s neat! I wonder if I can make this ‘fire’ stuff happen when I want it to…” And after much experimentation, Urk becomes the first man to intentionally strike a fire.
Is Urk “developing waste producing technology”? Is he “simply making life more comfortable for some”? Is he “try[ing] to replace natural control for human” control?
The answer to all of those questions is surely a YES! Urk didn’t invent a campfire to sing “Kumbaya” around or too keep the world “in balance”! He invented it TO MAKE HIS LIFE BETTER. Because that’s what people, animals, and plants DO. Even bacteria. All of us. It’s natural.
I do not see a notable difference between Urk creating a fire, or Mala the Hunter-Gatherer developing the first farm, and Alan Turing (the inventor of the first electric computer). All three inventions (fire, farming, and computers) have had serious negative effects on our planet and on people. They’ve also all had significant positive effects. To call one better than another is irrational. And before you try claiming that fire and farming are somehow more “essential” than computers, I would remind you that (A) you are not currently typing on an ear of corn, (B) humans lived for a good two million years without any of the three, and (C) would you really like to go back to living for a maximum of 30-40 years and watching most of your children die before age 5?
Because you seem to be forgetting that without the technology of the past ~200 years, all of which was based on the knowledge from the scientific revolution, that’s what life was. The average person did not live much past 40 even as late as 1900. It’s rather hypocritical to complain that technology is bad when you’re reaping the benefits of it. If that’s really what you believe, get off the computer, sell your house, go live in the woods with no electricity, do not allow your children to be vaccinated or treated with modern medicine, nor to learn and understand how the world works. Survive by growing your own crops and raising your own animals. When droughts come, or floods, or years of too-long or too-short winters, worry about death. Become ill from the “natural” pollution of your water supply by bacteria and animal fecal matter, not to mention your own, if you stay in the area too long. Allow your teeth to be ground down and your lungs to be damaged by the tiny particles of rock and dust you ingest, from the rocks you pound your grain with (wait… using a rock as a hammer is a piece of technology — are you allowed that, to be “natural”?). Protect yourself and your kids from wildlife as best you can, with no more than what you can make with your own hands.
Please, enjoy your very short and miserable, but “natural” life. (Of course, you could still be MORE “natural” if you gave up your farming and returned to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, if you want to be even more primitive.)
In the mean time, Dumb Scientist and I are going to live till we’re 80 and do our best to moderate the worst of humanity’s mistakes and the unforeseen side-effects of our technologies. Maybe we “make [our] living from developing waste producing technology or contributing to it” — but then, so would you, even in the ridiculous live-in-the-woods scenario I just mentioned. At least we’re honest about it, and doing what we can to understand, limit, and correct the problems.
“How come humans survived for thousands of years without advanced technology, and in about 150 years of mind-boggling scientific progress we are on the verge of an abyss?” you asked? Have you ever considered that we (life in general, not just humanity) is ALWAYS at the edge of an abyss, but that we’ve just realized that recently. That may not be “common sense”, Stella, but it IS reality. We’ve changed the nature of the abyss, but the looming destruction has always been there, for all life, ever since it formed.
Obviously you don’t grasp the difference between balance and evolution either, apart from erroneously concluding I deny the climate change. I just don’t call it climate change, but the disruptive effects of contamination. Makes me suspect you are a teenager. All these fluctuations you mention and the evolution itself were and are just part of the fine-tuned balance of the Earth and Solar system in general, since they span millions of years. Otherwise none of them would’ve existed today, unbalanced systems tend to fall apart and never last.
Earth has never been closer to destruction than today, because we are throwing it off balance by causing changes at breakneck pace. Hundred years is catastrophically fast. But Earth’s equilibrium could prove stronger than we think, and it might just shuffle us off as scabies and continue its path.
That said, it’s not that my statements are wrong, but that you simply don’t understand them.
The your arguments become really scary. Lighting a branch isn’t technology, much less invention, it’s reproducing naturally occurring phenomenon. And most importantly, you don’t need energy sources to make it work.
I wonder why people like you always talk about the extreme example of the stone age, and not about going back to the 19th century technology for a change. That’s the problem with humanity in general — always going to extremes.
Computers aren’t crucial to our survival, farming and fire are. Life expectancy is longer today because in many cases life is prolonged artificially. Which will soon become unsustainable. I’d prefer my child die rather than watch them suffer leading unwholesome life. Child death rate should be high when every woman has 18 children, otherwise they’re doomed to starve to death.
I wish I could live on a farm, growing my own food and living in harmony with wildlife. Clearly you have no idea that there are people who successfully use traditional agricultural techniques without producing toxic waste (and they hardly ever need a doctor, and are even as lucky as to have teeth to grind and chew food), since you seem so obsessed with stone age scenario.
Sorry, but if you stuff yourself with chemicals you body waste is indeed toxic. That’s why our rivers are full of hormones and medical waste among other things making fish change gender. There’re reports you know, I’m not making it up.
I guess you prefer to die attached to machines after years of slow agony, so keep eating junk food with plastic, stuffing your children with unnecessary vaccines (only a few are really indispensable), keep your lungs healthy by sucking in exhaust fumes and industrial pollution, and above all stay close to nuclear plants.
Don’t fool yourself, today Earth is in much greater danger than ever, because for the first time in history we are able to destroy it, and since we always do things because we can…
“to moderate the worst of humanity’s mistakes and the unforeseen side-effects of our technologies.” —LOL.
Fat chance of that if you keep applying the same mentality that created them in the first place.
You don’t get that it’s better not to create the problem, than to struggle to solve it afterwards, do you? Actually, you didn’t even read my previous posts attentively.
And don’t say “unforeseen”, because scientists aren’t that dumb, they just didn’t and don’t care. “Apré nous le deluge” — that’s the rule our society goes by.
I wouldn’t care, but the problem is that such mentality drags me, too, into the abyss it has created; and I haven’t found another planet to go as yet.
Anyway, keep hiding your head in the sand, who knows, it might work.
This reasonable statement obviously doesn’t conclude anything about your stance on climate change.
What a creative interpretation.
It’s good to hear that the PETM, Permian extinction and the oxygen catastrophe were “balanced.” Those must have been great times to have been alive, eh?
She’s going to extremes? Wow. The reason she’s talking about the stone age is that it’s hypocritical to rail against technology while simultaneously using that technology. 19th century technology is… technology. It’s more advanced than stone age technology and not as advanced as 21st century technology. But it’s still technology.
Domesticated fire is the quintessential technology. If you think it doesn’t count because it’s just “reproducing naturally occurring phenomenon” then smelting metal isn’t technology because that’s just harnessing natural fire in a stone depression, rather like reproducing the natural conditions in a volcano. Electricity just reproduces the natural phenomenon of lightning. Nuclear fission power plants aren’t technology because they just reproduce the conditions of the Oklo natural nuclear reactor, and fusion plants won’t count as inventions because (someday) they’ll just reproduce a natural phenomenon occurring in the center of the Sun. Oh, and all these technologies require energy sources. Like, say, the energy of the chemical bonds in a wooden branch.
I hope she doesn’t waste time responding to this nonsense. Far from being a callous teenager developing wasteful technology, Reythia got her PhD ahead of me and has more productive things to do with her time. Like improving GRACE so that we can better monitor climate change. Anyway, I think you’ve made your point that technology is evil… by endlessly typing on a modern computer connected to the fiber-optic internet.
(Ed. note: This rant began here.)
Haha… okay, unforeseen circumstance:
This high-schooler somehow thinks he/she can protect him/her self from libel and copyright by stating on the blog that “someone” said something, while still partially quoting said “someone”. And then even including a link to the original exchange.
Haha. If I were this person, and possessed some intelligence, I would shut this site down. Sadly, it is looking more like he/she is going to end up in Litigation Land.
Your use of the word “libel” is ironic, but not terribly surprising. I didn’t change your pseudonym to “Someone” to protect myself from libel and copyright issues, because I’ve done nothing wrong. The actual reason I paraphrased you was because I naively believed that climate change contrarians could be persuaded that the scientific community isn’t ridiculously incompetent, lying, or conspiring to suppress them. I stupidly thought that appeasing your absurd demands might prompt you to spend more time studying climate science and less time ranting about how badly you think you’ve been mistreated. Sadly, I was wrong. Even sadder, you’ll probably continue ranting about how distorted and cherry-picked your quotes are here, even after I’ve copied many of the exchanges you urged people to read in their entirety. If you put even 1% of this effort into taking accredited climate physics classes…
Anyway, before you waste money hiring a lawyer, you might want to look up libel and copyright. Pay careful attention to the four factors determining “fair use”. Comments made in public without being charged for (e.g. Slashdot) are generally subject to fair use. Perhaps you could learn from “Jane Q. Public”, who made a similar point last year:
… it is generally considered to be “fair use” to record something that is happening in public and not being charged for. There is a gray area, to be sure, but I think political speeches rightfully belong on the “fair use” side of the line. [Jane Q. Public, 2011-08-29]
… There is no justice involved in trying to hold a copyright on a speech that was given in PUBLIC, and broadcast to the public, almost 5 decades ago. … I think we have to draw the line and say that public political speech, that wasn’t done as a “performance” for profit, is public domain. [Jane Q. Public, 2011-08-29,30]
If you are attempting to refute an actual argument I made, please point out where, in this massive pile of your own maunderings, it exists.
And your own blog posts refer to “how to have a discussion”.
Haha. So you have sunk yourself to blatantly obvious ad hominem. Not that I expected anything more from you.
Where is your refutation of any argument I made HERE, in this thread? Where is it? You are pretending that this stuff from your personal blog is RELEVANT to what I stated HERE?
You claim to be a scientist yourself, but you don’t use logic and you don’t address the actual issues. Instead, you would rather attempt to refute things I said MONTHS ago.
I think your posts reflect on you a lot more than they do on me. This is a gross example of nothing more than personal attack. Why aren’t you discussing the issue I raised?
You persist in your implication that I “threatened” to sue you? That is laughable. I stated that I was NOT going to sue you. And just as I stated in that paragraph that you quoted above, anybody who clearly reads my whole, original comment can see that very clearly.
For someone claiming to be a scientist, you seem to be pretty weak at logic. I think your jumping in here was a pathetic attempt to justify yourself.
Charming. As I said in my responses, I’ll address your Sky Dragon misinformation when I get the time, but first I need to address some of your other misinformation to put it in context. Patience.
And by the way: I am NOT a “climate change contrarian”. I simply dispute the validity of certain CO2 warming models. I have stated this MANY TIMES over the last couple of years. But it has seemed to keep going over your head.
Correction: I was, at first, also arguing for other causes, too. I admit that. But I have since stopped doing so.
However, I have not, at any time, been denying that the climate is changing. The only thing that is even remotely in dispute, as far as I am concerned, is how much of it, if any, is due to CO2.
That’s the definition of a climate change contrarian: someone who disagrees with the overwhelming scientific consensus that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to human emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.
It’s only “the definition” if you do not possess a frigging dictionary.
Again, you sidestep my question. Why can’t you answer it?
And your further ad hominem, in regard to that article happening to be on a particular website, just makes you look that much more foolish. It is an article about physics. Would you like to refute the actual content?
The fact is that I suspect you will not actually address this. Unlike other things you post on your blog (which appear to be in a glaringy, self-servingly edited form). Because I don’t think you really CAN refute LaTour’s physics. Instead you will try to prove ME wrong.
And by the way: I really do expect you to run into legal trouble with that blog of yours, if you keep doing it the way you have. I meant that sincerely. But that is a far cry from ever threatening to cause any of it myself… that is something I never stated or even implied.
You’ve previously said: “Dictionaries do not accurately define words, they merely list popular usage. If you want technical accuracy, consult an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. “
That’s why I’m referring to technical statements like these:
In 2005, 11 national science academies signed a joint statement saying “It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities … The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.”
In 2007, 13 national science academies signed a joint statement referencing the earlier 2005 statement, and added: “Recent research strongly reinforces our previous conclusions. It is unequivocal that the climate is changing, and it is very likely that this is predominantly caused by the increasing human interference with the atmosphere. These changes will transform the environmental conditions on Earth unless counter-measures are taken. Our present energy course is not sustainable.”
Ah. I see. You are preparing even further ad hominem arguments. And you insist upon doing that FIRST, before addressing any actual issues I raised.
I expected nothing else from you.
You post a link on your own website to a page about “how to disagree” , and it is pretty obvious that on that same scale you can’t bring yourself to do better than “DH1”.
What does that have to do with my comment above? What you are saying, in effect, is that anybody who questions CO2 models is a “climate change contrarian”, when even in POPULAR usage, “climate change” does not equal “CO2”.
Dictionary or not, you can’t just go around expecting English to mean anything you want, in any give month.
I am busy with other things, so please pardon my frequent, overly-brief replies.
What I mean is, just because YOU and a few fellows define “climate change contrarian” to be anybody who disagrees with your viewpoint, that does not make it so.
Either by dictionary OR “popular usage”, you are still wrong.
And yet another brief reply to another ridiculous portion of Khayman80’s post:
First, as I have pointed out earlier, I never “threatened” (your word) to sue you anyway. I did the opposite: I specifically stated that I was NOT going to sue you.
But second — and this is most laughable of all — YOU link to information about “libel”, but you obviously don’t understand the first things about it yourself. You demonstrate as much by somehow equating fair use of recordings of public figures with online libel. They haven’t the slightest things to do with one another. As you further demonstrate, frequently, on your blog.
But that’s just a comment about your behavior. No “threat” intended or implied. I’ll let somebody else nail you for it, as they surely will if you keep it up.
(Ed. note: Jane continues.)
1.) Actually, I’m an aerospace engineer with a PhD, working in satellite oceanography. You must know some clever high schoolers. Additionally, you degrade your argument by insulting your debator.
2.) I never said you denied climate change. I said that others who DO deny climate change use very similar false arguments to prove a very different argument.
3.) “we are throwing [the Earth’s climate and ecosystem] off balance by causing changes at breakneck pace. Hundred years is catastrophically fast. But Earth’s equilibrium could prove stronger than we think, and it might just shuffle us off as scabies and continue its path. ”
— I don’t think either Dumb Scientist or I would dispute this, nor would most climate scientists.
4.) “Lighting a branch isn’t technology, much less invention, it’s reproducing naturally occurring phenomenon. And most importantly, you don’t need energy sources to make it work.”
— Um… if it doesn’t involve an energy source, then where does the energy COME FROM? Magic? Last I checked, there’s nothing different between lighting a piece of wood and lighting a piece of coal. Both produce energy through chemical reaction, in a very similar way. If developing a coal-powered power plant is “technology” then by definition, so is developing a wood-powered power plant (aka: the campfire). Duh.
5.) “I wonder why people like you always talk about the extreme example of the stone age, and not about going back to the 19th century technology for a change.”
— We go back so far because the differences are more evident, so it makes clear examples easier. The 1800’s are, in some ways, too similar to now to make clear distinctions. And please recall that my first example (asbestos) DID come from modern times. You demonstrated your clear lack of understanding of nineteenth-century opinions about asbestos, probably because you can’t separate “what we know now” from “what they knew then”. That’s understandable, since the situation is still meaningful today. On the other hand, the discovery of fire and agriculture are so long ago that they’re not personal, which means people SHOULD be able to separate “now” from “then” more easily. That’s why people use older examples.
6.) “Computers aren’t crucial to our survival, farming and fire are.”
— Amazingly, people lived for millions of years without either farming or fire. Billions of non-human animals still do. Clearly, neither of these most ancient of technologies is technically “crucial to our survival”. They’re awfully handy though. So are computers.
7.) As for your paragraph about happy eco-friendly farmers… have you ever actually READ a book on how life really was for people even a few hundred years ago? Did you totally miss the class in seventh grade where they talked about life expectancy? All of those things I mentioned before ACTUALLY HAPPENED to farmers only a few hundred years ago, all around the world. The fuzzy eco-friendly farmers who you’ve met (and yes, I’ve met, too) do NOT live like they did. Why not? Technology, science, and education (which is influenced by science). For example: why don’t they get sick as often as farmers 500 years ago? Because they understand the germ theory of disease and drink clean water. Why don’t their kids “need” vaccinations (a theory I and most other scientists completely reject)? Because all the other kids around them are already vaccinated and therefore cannot pass those diseases on. (Ie: if no one in the city has polio, it doesn’t hurt you not to have gotten a vaccine against it… until someone new moves in.)
8.) I don’t think either Dumb Scientist nor I will argue that humans can and have made a big mess of things. I would argue that we (as a society) have only begun to really realize that over the last few generations (“Silent Spring” came out in 1962, for example). And I hate to tell you this, but as a society (at least in first-world countries), we’re actually a whole lot more aware of the dangers we bring to the rest of the ecosystem than we were just a hundred years ago. Did you know that the Romans had major issues with lead pollution from their smelters? Almost all urban areas back in the classical era on had problems with water pollution — usually from toxic chemicals from manufacturing and from biological waste (ie: sewage). Rivers in the 1800s and early 1900s used to burn from all the oil and industrial wastes floating on them. England enacted what may have been the first air pollution regulations way back in 1273 — when they first switched over from wood to coal as a primary fuel source.
So yes, I’m perfectly aware that we humans are creating a mess. But I’m also aware that that’s nothing new, and that things were never as pristine as you keep claiming. The difference between 1273 and now is a matter of scope: we can affect larger areas more quickly and with longer-lasting consequences. Which is probably related to the fact that we currently have more laws, regulations, and public awareness of these problems than ever before.
9.) “Fat chance of that [moderating the worst of humanity’s mistakes and the unforeseen side-effects of our technologies] if you keep applying the same mentality that created them in the first place.”
— You’re right. That’s why Dumb Scientist and I are urging changes in our actions. But we’re not foolish enough to believe those changes will come instantaneously, nor that they will immediately undo all that we’ve done over the past 10,000 years or so.
10.) “And don’t say “unforeseen”, because scientists aren’t that dumb, they just didn’t and don’t care.”
— I find this deeply offensive. Scientists are only people, not gods. Any brief glance at a history book will demonstrate that to you. We’re not perfect, nor do we have perfect understanding. Nor can we tell the future. Claiming we “don’t care” is simply untrue and personally insulting. If you hate scientists so much, then STOP USING EVERYTHING WE’VE HELPED CREATE. You can begin with the computer you’re typing at.
11.) So far, you’ve done a whole lot of complaining, insulting, rambling, fear-mongering, and ranting. I’ve yet to read a practical, organized plan of what EXACTLY you think we should do to solve the problems which you, Dumb Scientist, and I all believe exist. Dumb Scientist and I would add “without killing off 95% of humanity within a generation”, by the way — we won’t accept other answers and neither will society as a whole. Please, do explain. I look forward to your clear and logical presentation of the obvious solution that we have all missed.
I suspected you were buddies.
You deliberately overlooked what I wrote about technology,
“there’s good and useful technology but we render it harmful by churning out single use products made in sweat shops that only make the corporations stinking rich. The throwaway society based on mere consumerism is unsustainable.”
So,
the words measure and moderation don’t mean anything to you;
you see no difference between balance in the long run and in the short run, forgetting that Earth has never been dead, regardless of its being inhabitable for humans or not;
according to you, contamination and the dangers we brought to ecosystems in the 19th were similar to modern levels, or technology back then was comparable to modern technology;
you don’t know eco farms exist today, and aren’t a relic of the distant past;
you don’t know what simple machine is (are compass, lens, binoculars, piano, lever etc technology? Do you need external energy source, except for human or horsepower, to produce or make them work? That’s the kind of technology I like). WOW.
When did I say I was against any technology? I always liked science, but without deifying it. Actually my first career choice was theoretical physics / astrophysics.
The point is, you’re just cherry-picking since you can’t come up with serious arguments.
I guess you can’t argue over blind faith.
“you didn’t answer whether you’d like to die of asbestosis or mad cow disease, etc. Happy-clappy technologists always take it for granted they will collect the benefits of technological progress, while the side effects will go to someone else, like the third world for example.”
So this is nonsense to you. Fine. Say that to the victims, tell them thanks to technology you now know it has side effects, it will console them a lot.
Of course you know for sure you’ll never be collateral damage.
“Just imagine yourself dying this way and then tell in all honesty how you’d feel about scientific progress.”
Did you? Oh, I forgot, these things never happen to people like you.
Actually, it’s you who started to insult, sending me to stone age (you clearly have a fixation¬ — calm down, no one is sending you there), while I said the 19th century would do for me.
I use computers because modern society forces me to, not because I need or like them.
Solutions? IMHO, the only way out is at least partial gradual deindustrialisation and reduction of the world population (otherwise world war would reduce population dramatically, but I wouldn’t call it a solution), if we want to stay on this planet.
But since you said that is out of the question (you can’t be impartial here, can you?), there’s no solution at all. We’ve already passed the point of no return, it’s only a question of time. I’m not as stupid as to believe that something can change in this world, unless our mentality changes first (and that’s utopia).
I wish I were wrong, really.
Let me know when you find a better one. Really, I mean it.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to bother you with my ramblings any more.
Btw, university diplomas or PhDs don’t imply intelligence or wisdom (and for God’s sake, don’t take everything so personally).
If only all the inventions fell on the inventors’ heads, there wouldn’t be so many problems in this world.
That “matter of scope” can be estimated in different years using the metric “population multiplied by the average power usage per person” which has skyrocketed since ~1970 as our population and average power use per person have both risen. Technological advancement since the 19th century just multiplies this rapidly-changing function by a slowly-decreasing coefficient, as I’ve already discussed:
… most climate variability pre-1970 can’t be “significantly” blamed on anthropogenic CO2 … because our population was small and the power generated was miniscule by today’s standards. The inefficiency of 1800s era technology just multiplied the total power generation by a larger coefficient than today’s (not much) more efficient tech, but the resulting fossil fuel use (and thus corresponding CO2 emissions) were tiny compared to the demands of the modern world. [Dumb Scientist]
The ancient contaminants she’s discussing were local; humans didn’t really pose a threat to the global ecosystem until ~1970. That’s the important point, but she’s right to say that in many ways these ancient contaminants were worse for the local ecosystems than their modern equivalents.
Yeah, how odd that we both “deliberately overlooked” a vague clause in a single sentence which was immediately followed by a negating clause. What were we thinking?
Oh, that’s right.
Metal smelting/forging, mining and shaping of magnetite, glassmaking and construction of pianos without an external energy source like the energy in wood, coal, or moving water? Good luck. It’s interesting that you reduce both humans and horses to animals of labor in the guise of “approved” energy sources. They both produce waste which is the reason why modern septic systems are so highly regulated and required to be a certain distance away from water wells and food gardens.
Update: Stella should tell Haiti that the UN’s sewage couldn’t possibly have caused their cholera outbreak because manure makes excellent fertilizer.
Yeah, how odd that she was offended by your innocent suggestions that she’s a clueless teenager who didn’t and doesn’t care about the suffering she’s causing in third world victims. Clearly, she’s just taking your statements too personally. Anyone who minds being told they’re as callous as a cartoon villain is obviously just being touchy.
“energy source like the energy in wood, coal, or moving water” are naturally existing unmodified non-contaminating (or minimally contaminating) PRIMARY energy sources, but you indulge in semantic debates for want of serious counter-arguments.
When you burn coal to produce SECONDARY energy source, like electricity, that’s when contamination becomes dangerously unsustainable . People burned coal for centuries without posing any serious threat to ecosystems. I’d expect a scientist to understand that.
FYI, organic waste is biodegradable, and manure is an excellent fertiliser and therefore recyclable. The technology used to make pianos, violins, lens etc. 100, 200, 300 years ago was hand-powered and didn’t contaminate. No serious scientist would compare its effects with the toxic waste produced by modern technology.
Did Chernobyl or mad cow disease victims lived in the third world?
Curiously, none of you answered these questions, I wonder why.
— How would you feel (in all honesty) about scientific progress if you were dying of asbestosis, mad cow disease etc or head a limbless child etc?
— Have you ever seen anyone dying this way?
— Would you be able to look them in the eye and tell them they died in the name of science and technological progress?
— Would any technological progress ever make up for the deaths of thousands of people not to mention ecosystems rendered uninhabitable? (It would as long as you aren’t among these people, I guess.)
And no one ever pays for such crimes.
Cherry picking as usual.
You took offence, because my words probably hit home, hence your defensive stand.
Oops, I hope this doesn’t qualify as “rambling”.
Well, now you’re just teasing me.
Still haven’t found a scientist or any willing to answer my questions (you know those along the lines of “How would you feel …?”), though. Telling detail.
(Ed. note: I tried (unsuccessfully) to post this comment to Steven Goddard’s blog.)
No. As the average temperature of the upper ocean and troposphere increase, relative humidity staying constant actually means that precipitable water vapor increases. That’s because relative humidity is related to absolute humidity through a temperature dependence.
Nonsense. Pressure doesn’t cause long-term equilibrium heating. Energy does. Once again, if scientists were wrong then basketball players would have to wear gloves because the pressurized ball would have to be very hot.
At WUWT, several Sky Dragon Slayers also regurgitated this nonsense about Mars. As I’ve explained, Mars has a smaller greenhouse effect than Venus because the total mass of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere is much smaller than the total mass of CO2 in the Venusian atmosphere. Therefore the effective radiating level is much higher on Venus than on Mars.
None of the Slayers at WUWT would answer this question: would Venus have the same surface temperature if its atmosphere were pure nitrogen, which isn’t a greenhouse gas?
The lapse rate. As I’ve repeatedly explained to Jane/Lonny Eachus, the lapse rate is a fundamental requirement of the greenhouse effect. Reduce the lapse rate to zero, and the greenhouse effect vanishes.
How ironic that “Steven Goddard” and Jane/Lonny Eachus keep pointing to a fundamental requirement of the greenhouse effect in their endless attempts to cast doubt on the greenhouse effect. Again, pressure alone doesn’t warm long-term equilibrium surface temperatures. Energy does.
The only way pressure affects long-term equilibrium surface temperatures only works if greenhouse gases (GHG’s) are present, and it has absolutely nothing to do with “Steven Goddard’s” unshakeable misunderstanding about the ideal gas law.
As I told Jane/Lonny Eachus, pressure only affects surface temperature by enhancing the greenhouse effect if and only if GHG’s are present.
Of course. As I told Jane/Lonny Eachus in 2009, the fact that CO2 absorption depends logarithmically on concentration has been known since 1900.
Since you now seem to admit the greenhouse effect exists, will you retract your bizarre claim that Venus’s heat is somehow due to pressure, not CO2?
Once again, all mainstream scientists since the 1800s describe the warming by CO2 per doubling which automatically tells us its warming is logarithmic. Otherwise the warming would be described in a linear fashion, like per gigaton.
But I’ve already explained that logarithms don’t have horizontal asymptotes, which is why your “saturation” meme is false.
(By the way, your uncited and unpublished blog graph has other problems which aren’t immediately relevant. Namely, it conflicts with 420 million years (PDF) of paleoclimate evidence. Another way to see this problem is to add all the warming on Moore’s blog graph up to 400 ppm. It’s much smaller than fundamental estimates of Earth’s total ~33°C greenhouse effect made by organizations like the American Chemical Society and the University of Colorado.)
Charming.
Again, the “Gas Law” doesn’t determine long-term equilibrium temperatures. That’s determined by conservation of energy.
If the “Gas Law” somehow determined long-term equilibrium surface temperatures, exactly where in the “Gas Law” equation did you plug in the brightness of the Sun? (The “solar constant” of ~1360 W/m2 at Earth’s distance from the Sun.)
You couldn’t have, because the “Gas Law” doesn’t determine long-term equilibrium temperatures. If Patrick Moore and Lonny Eachus and “Steven Goddard” and all the Sky Dragon Slayers were somehow correct, turning off the Sun wouldn’t change the planets’ surface temperatures.
Doesn’t that seem a little odd? Please read the University of Colorado’s introduction to the greenhouse effect, and look carefully at the mainstream equation for determining long-term equilibrium surface temperatures. Notice that it explicitly includes the solar constant? This is why mainstream scientists know that turning off the Sun would cool the planets.
Try to incorporate the brightness of the Sun into your equation for surface temperature. If you do this correctly, you’ll learn that the “Gas Law” doesn’t determine long-term equilibrium temperatures. Conservation of energy does.
Nonsense. As usual, Lonny presents no evidence whatsoever to support his absurd claim. And once again, this isn’t about “CO2 theory”. It’s about y’all insisting that long-term equilibrium temperatures are somehow determined by pressure, while physicists keep trying to tell you that conservation of energy does that.
You don’t even have to admit that CO2 exists to understand this point, Lonny.
Why not? Immediately after a basketball is inflated, the ideal gas law shows that it warms due to the increasing pressure. But this warming is temporary. The ball quickly loses that heat to its environment and reaches room temperature. The ideal gas law does not determine the long-term equilibrium temperature of the basketball. If it did, as y’all seem to insist, it would stay hot and players would have to dribble with gloves.
Now think about Venus. If Venus had no atmosphere until yesterday when someone suddenly poured the entire atmosphere onto the surface, the ideal gas law would show that it warms due to the increasing pressure. But this warming is temporary. Venus would quickly lose that heat to space and reach the equilibrium temperature determined by conservation of energy. The ideal gas law does not determine the long-term equilibrium temperature of Venus. If it did, as y’all seem to insist, turning off the Sun wouldn’t change the planets’ surface temperatures.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again.
Whenever Jane/Lonny Eachus can’t come up with an intelligible response, he cries “straw man argument” without explaining why. If that’s not what you’re doing, then feel free to explain why my comment above is a straw man argument.
Actually, I predicted that you’ll just keep whining. In response, you kept whining.
Can you explain why I should answer your silly “question” when you’re just continuing to avoid answering the simple yes/no question I’d already asked you?
My initial statement was hypothetical: “Venus would be colder if it had the same pressure, but swapped CO2 for N2.”
I wasn’t saying “I’ve swapped Venus’s CO2 for N2, so there’s now a planet with no GHGs and I could name it if you ask.” That would be silly.
In reality, I was addressing Patrick Moore’s repetitive and incorrect claims that pressure, not CO2, is responsible for Venus being hotter than Mercury (which is darker and closer to the Sun). I debunked Moore’s claim by pointing out that, hypothetically, Venus would be colder if it had the same pressure, but swapped CO2 for N2.
How fascinating that “Tallbloke” can’t answer my simple yes/no question and tries to change the subject by pretending he doesn’t realize my initial statement was hypothetical. In physics, problems almost always involve approximations (especially in non-physics-track courses). But there’s always one guy in each class who can’t solve the problem and doesn’t want to admit it, so he complains about the approximations:
“Can you name a planet which is a perfect sphere?”
“Can you name a planet which has a perfectly circular orbit?”
“Can you show me a rope which is completely massless?”
“Can you show me a pulley which is perfectly frictionless?”
And so on, ad nauseam. The guy who asks these silly questions isn’t trying to understand physics. He’s trying to avoid understanding physics by complaining about the very concept of approximations. For some baffling reason, these guys (and it’s almost always males) don’t generally get physics degrees.
And in this case, it simply doesn’t matter. Whether a planet has no atmosphere at all, or a dense atmosphere without any greenhouse gases, its effective radiating level will be at its surface. The fact that “Tallbloke” can’t acknowledge these basic physics bodes poorly for any future attempt to discuss physics with him.
No, if you removed radiative gases from Earth’s atmosphere (*) then the effective radiating level would drop from its current ~7 km altitude all the way down to Earth’s surface. This would cool the surface and the atmosphere below the former effective radiating level (the troposphere) while warming the atmosphere above that point (the stratosphere, etc.). Since most of the atmosphere’s mass is in the troposphere, the atmosphere cools on average and shrinks.
(*) Imagine removing radiative gases from Earth’s atmosphere while keeping surface pressure and initial temperature the same by replacing the radiative gases with an equal mass of non-radiative gases at the same temperature. Also keep the albedo constant, and all other variables except for the presence of radiative gases. Note that this is a hypothetical situation designed to help people (apparently hypothetical people) who are actually trying to learn physics. I’m not trying to claim that I’ve actually done this to an Earthlike planet so I could name that planet if asked.
If the non-radiative replacement gases have a lower molecular weight than the original radiative gases, they’d be lost more quickly at the same temperature because they’d have the same average kinetic energy but for less massive molecules that translates into higher average speed. That means more molecules would exceed the escape velocity.
That’s because the Moon’s surface temperature varies much more between its night and day (and its equator and poles) than Earth’s does. The Stefan-Boltzmann law states that power radiated is proportional to temp^4, so the average temperature is lower when temperature varies more. For example, raising the Moon’s dayside temperature by 10K increases its radiated power more than lowering the Moon’s nightside temperature by 10K reduces its radiated power.
I’ve mentioned this phenomenon, and Roy Spencer quantifies it.
Sadly, this also shouldn’t surprise “Rog Tallbloke”. But instead of remembering these basic physics, “Tallbloke” repeats this nonsense:
Nonsense. Once again, conservation of energy (not pressure) determines long-term equilibrium temperatures.
The stratosphere is a compressible gas. If you go deep into the stratosphere, the temperature doesn’t increase with pressure. Quite the opposite: higher pressures are colder in the stratosphere. As Physics 101 should have made clear, that’s because conservation of energy (not pressure) determines long-term equilibrium temperatures.
Faulty telepathy again. I believe that your “response” to my statement about attribution had nothing to do with attribution or the temperature record. Your “response” was the same quote crackpots (creationists, etc.) use to dismiss any science they don’t like.
Neither ocean heat content (OHC) or uncertainties are gibberish, and I’d already repeatedly reminded you not to keep ignoring them.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from here.)
They don’t keep all the accumulated heat. The heat inertia effect is closer to 50%.
But I’m not sure why you’re saying that oceans aren’t warming.
Actually…
“The oceans are absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat from global warming,” he says. “If you aren’t measuring heat content in the upper ocean, you aren’t measuring global warming.” [Dr. Josh Willis]
Josh’s estimate is plausible because:
Nice link, but he’s probably referring to a (resolved) problem with the Argo data that’s discussed in that same article:
“So the new Argo data were too cold, and the older XBT data were too warm, and together, they made it seem like the ocean had cooled,” says Willis.
Quick back of the envelope calculation:
The radiative forcing since 1750 is around 2.26 W/M^2. With a climate sensitivity of 0.8C/(W/M^2) that should mean an increase of +1.8C, but we’ve had an increase of +0.8C, which means the oceans have absorbed roughly (1-(0.8/1.8)) = 55% of the heat imbalance.
That’s a gross simplification and assumes that the numbers are right, but I think it’s a reasonable ballpark figure. Correct me if I’m wrong, though.
I thought zm was saying that the oceans were supposed to be keeping all of the accumulated heat due to radiative forcings rather than the land or the atmosphere. This is a slight exaggeration, but only by 25% at most. That’s all I meant. Obviously, we’re talking about different things so I’m forced to print a retraction for that irrelevant comment of mine.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Already discussed, but note that nuclear plants do generate small amounts of CO2 due to current enrichment and mining methods, as well as the curing of concrete containment domes. Averaged over the projected life of the reactors, this CO2 is only a few percent of the emissions from an equivalently powerful coal plant. Pebble bed reactors might be capable of safe operation without containment domes, but that unfortunate incident in Germany makes it unlikely that they’ll be built that way for a while. Nuclear power is our best hope of maintaining a prosperous civilization. Please don’t oversell it by making claims it can’t live up to yet.
Dr. Knutti’s emissions graph makes it clear that he’s examining a scenario in which CO2 emissions only drop to half of 2010 values by ~2030, and a quarter of 2010 values by ~2070. That doesn’t seem too different from the Lieberman-McCain “Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007″ which seemed doable.
Because much of the CO2 emitted by nuclear plants is emitted in a pulse as the concrete dome cures, any nuclear plants built in the next few decades won’t be emitting CO2 past ~2070 (unless we still haven’t perfected mining and enrichment in the next ~60 years.) As you say, centralized power plants are easiest to upgrade, but we’ve got ~60 years to perfect electric cars in order to hit Knutti’s target. They certainly can’t universally replace gasoline vehicles in time (especially in developing countries) but biofuels can be produced carbon-neutrally (albeit inefficiently at present) in a centralized fashion. Distributing biofuels just like gasoline will avoid the need to make and sell billions of electric cars by 2100. Even if that fails, I’d be astonished if ~60 years isn’t enough time for humanity to devise and implement a carbon sequestration program capable of making up the difference.
In fact, the only way the human race could possibly fail to tackle climate change would be if there were legions of crackpots arguing that climate “scientists” are actually just deceitful, shady, laughably dishonest, perverting, badly reeking, dogmatic, anti-scientific, idiotic, disingenuous, scurrilous, nefarious, damned, indefensibly guilty, laughably wrong, fundamentally rotten, self-discrediting, fraudulent, bullshitting partisan hacks with something to hide who do bad things, don’t fucking know what they’re talking about, claim more knowledge than there is, have huge systematic problems and serious improprieties/malfeasance in their bad, bad, shoddy research, and aren’t even scientists, but are actually just rank hypocrits who are fascinated with horrible solutions that will kill people, destroy the economy, and be horrendously expensive.
In that bizarre alternate universe, there might be a significant (and growing) difference between the viewpoints of the general public and scientists regarding abrupt climate change. This disturbing phenomenon might even spread to Congress, making it virtually impossible for them to compromise on something like John McCain’s plan to build 45 nuclear plants by 2030.
Let’s examine the economic impacts of some of those “idiotic” policies, starting with Lieberman-McCain 2007:
Electricity prices are projected to increase 22% in 2030 and 25% in 2050, assuming the full cost of allowances are passed on to consumers (as is the case in a full auction). If allowances are given directly to power companies, the cost of those allowances would not be passed on to consumers in regulated electricity markets, so electricity price increases would be lower in much of the country. [EPA Analysis of The Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007]
Notice that the economic benefits of reducing emissions weren’t considered, and that the enabling technologies are listed as carbon sequestration and nuclear power.
The price of electricity is between 5 percent and 27 percent higher in 2020 and between 11 percent and 64 percent higher in 2030 in the S. 2191 cases. Under S. 2191, average annual household energy bills, excluding transportation costs, are between $30 and $325 higher in 2020 and $76 to $723 higher in 2030. [EIA Analysis of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2007]
That quote refers to several different “cases” which are defined in table ES1 on page vii. Table ES2 on page ix shows that the “core” case only increases electricity prices by 5% by 2020, and 11% by 2030 over the “reference” case which assumes no further legislation. The higher estimates assume technologies like nuclear power are 50% more expensive to implement than expected (the “high cost” case) or unavailable until 2030 (“limited alternatives”), or assume no international cooperation (“no international offsets”). Also, notice that the core case triples nuclear power generation by 2030.
CBO estimates that households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40, while households in the highest income quintile would see a net cost of approximately $245 (see Table 2). Households in the second lowest quintile would see added costs of about $40 on average, those in the middle quintile would see an increase in costs of about $235, and those in the fourth quintile would pay about an additional $340 per year. Overall, costs for households would average 0.2 percent of their average after-tax income. [CBO Analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009]
The fourth quintile’s annual income had a lower limit of $55,331 in 2004. Families with that income would spend an additional $340 per year: 0.6% of their after-tax income. That would only double an electrical bill which started at $340 per year, or $28 per month. It would only triple an electrical bill which started at $14 per month. People who spend that little on electricity probably aren’t in the fourth quintile anyway; Table 2 shows that all other income brackets pay less. The EIA analysis reached similar conclusions.
Yeah, those nefarious AGW geophysicists are fascinated with horrendously expensive, economy–destroying death panels.
In reality, none of the geophysicists I’ve met at conferences have advocated solutions that will kill people or destroy the economy… at least not as far as I know. As I’ve already discussed, ~88% of physicists (including me) say we should respond to AGW by investing in nuclear power.
I was just thinking the same thing…
I’ve already mentioned that albedo geoengineering “solutions” like stratospheric aerosol injection wouldn’t address ocean acidification, so I don’t see why you think they’d be effective.
I’veKeep in mind that I’m only saying the existence of abrupt climate change is a purely scientific question. I realize that our response to climate change is a legitimate political question. But let’s set that question aside to contemplate the existence of abrupt climate change. … On a completely different note, as an ordinary American I think we should do something about this matter. … [Dumb Scientist] alreadyOf course, science doesn’t imply any particular political response. But fighting climate change is almost exactly the same thing as “energy independence” which we desperately need anyway, if only to stop throwing money at so many corrupt governments for their oil. … [Dumb Scientist] discussedI said “On a completely different note, as an ordinary American” right before switching to discussing our response to abrupt climate change. What I meant to stress is that I didn’t give up my voice as an ordinary American citizen when I went to college. I’ve got the same right to voice my opinion about my country’s future as any other citizen. [Dumb Scientist] the distinctionThe political/economic ramifications of our response to climate change aren’t completely within the domain of physical science, so they’re not facts in the way that the anthropogenic origin of abrupt climate change is a fact. For example, our technology could suddenly jump forward very quickly, rendering adaptation very simple and cheap. … [Dumb Scientist] betweenScientists shouldn’t dictate public policy. All we can say is that abrupt climate change is a serious danger, and that humanity needs to stop emitting CO2 if we intend to keep our current standard of living. Physics can show us what a “sustainable” concentration of CO2 would be (350ppm seems like a safe goal) but politicians will have to figure out a practical way to achieve that goal. The choice of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade or some other effective mechanism is, of course, ultimately not a scientific question. All we can say is that we clearly need to do something or risk seriously destabilizing the ecosystem that we all depend on. [Dumb Scientist] scienceOkay, good points. I vaguely remember Bush’s plan, and I strongly disagree with the Democrats on the nuclear issue. But, oddly, I think Bush’s plan requires more “fine-tuned” government intervention. Without some way to account for the negative externalities of coal (i.e. carbon tax, cap-and-trade, whatever- for brevity’s sake I’ll just call it a carbon tax), nuclear stations would never get built by the “free” market because coal is much cheaper. Thus construction of nuclear plants would have to be subsidized mostly or entirely by the government. On the other hand, a carbon tax would push the “free” market to develop a new generation of nuclear plants purely to chase profits, the most capitalist reason imaginable. … government bureaucracies are generally worse at innovation than the free market. … [Dumb Scientist] and policyI’ve never heard of Lomborg before today, but your summary makes him sound like someone I could agree with. That’s mainly because I think most of the “green” movement is irrational, and one manifestation is that they’ve blocked the advancement of nuclear power for decades. Their myopic naivete kept us dependent on coal, and even today continues to sour public sentiment regarding the best practical solution. I completely agree with these comments when they say that the article demonstrates that Friel doesn’t do a very good job. I also mostly agree with this sentiment regarding the shrill nature of these debates, and I agree with gkai’s assessment of this distinction between science and policy. [Dumb Scientist].
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
The last time you brought up this subject, I linked this similar exchange:
That’s not the way science works. In science, observations are compared to predictions, which are then used to modify the theory to make new predictions. There’s no fundamental distinction between science performed in a lab like chemistry and science performed through telescopes like cosmology. (Or any other discipline like paleontology, forensic science or paleoclimatology, for that matter.) [Dumb Scientist]
But I actually like coby’s version better:
In my experience, this claim is supported by the notion that wrt to earth’s climate you can not run any controlled experiments and thereby falsify any hypotheses. No complete ocean-atmosphere system in the lab = impossibility of scientific experimentation = not a science. I think the only effective and direct rebuttal of that is listing all the other sciences that whomever is making this argument would have to likewise reject. Cosmology, astonomy, geology, evolutionary biology to get started, I’m sure the list would be very long. It is unlikely that you are arguing with a serious philosopher so they are not likely to like the direction their own argument logically takes them. [coby]
What’s the root cause of this confusion?
Here’s a good example of coby’s point: despite the fact that cosmic inflation was a unique, singular event, your comments suggest that you aren’t applying your definition of “science” consistently. As I explained, cosmologists study inflation by cross-validating dynamical models against multiple independent datasets. That’s why I tried to show you this list[BEGINQUOTE]… we can’t do “parallel earth” experiments to test various parameters … [Still anonymous] [ENDQUOTE] Plate tectonics have produced multiple “Earths” over geological time. Supercontinents completely change mantle convection and atmospheric patterns, for just one example. The Earth has actually had 3 different atmospheres, each of which has left evidence for us to study. The Sun is steadily getting brighter, so the past climate contains evidence of how the climate would behave with a lower solar luminosity. There are other planets and moons in the solar system that we can observe. These aren’t Earth, of course, but we’re assuming they obey the same physics. In recent decades, space probes have examined the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, Uranus and Neptune. These data help us to understand the effects of varying parameters such as density, composition, gravity, size, irradiance, magnetic environment, etc. Observing these extreme regions of phase space helps to constrain our climate models, even though they deal with a much different phase space– the one in which Earth’s atmosphere currently resides and may go in the future. The dynamical models used in climatology are completely different from empirical models that members of the general public might be familiar with. Dynamical models simply describe physics equations; they don’t include empirical data. As a result they can be compared to the many sources of proxy data such as ice cores, boreholes, coral growth, tree rings, stalactites, fossil beds, ocean sediments and glacial deposits. They can test various (necessarily uncertain) physical parameters by comparing simulations using different parameters, data sources, initial conditions, and linear combinations thereof. [Dumb Scientist].
The other link in that same sentence expanded on the last bullet point… In reality, global circulation models (GCMs) are validated in a more robust fashion than examining a single variable in a single paper. After running an initial condition ensemble to average away the weather, and a multi-model ensemble to average away non-systematic errors, GCM outputs are compared to paleoclimate reconstructions and instrumental records (though the mean climate can’t be independently verified because of model “tuning”). The GCM response to forcing events such as volcanic eruptions can be compared to reality. Both the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response to increased CO2 implied by the GCM ensembles can be compared to independent estimates, including comparisons with the last glacial maximum. Chapter 8 here is a good source for background information concerning climate models and their evaluation. … [Dumb Scientist].
I’ve been trying in vain to get you to look at those independent estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Knutti and Hegerl 2008, summarized here, provides a more recent overview of independent estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity. But once again…
There’s probably no point in repeating that experimental constraints are placed on key parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response. Anyone else who’s genuinely curious about falsification can follow those links to learn more about it, though. [Dumb Scientist]
The third graph in my article shows how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created. But this isn’t a bullshit claim, unless you also think that cosmologists are making bullshit claims about inflation. Remember that inflation happened over a billion decades before the inflation models were created. It almost seems like cosmologists are competent enough to make sure their models don’t assimilate data that will later be used for verification. That’s why I’ve previously said:
… our knowledge of abrupt climate change is based on many different types of evidence, so it’s possible to compare models generated using independent data. I’m aware of the fact that data used to generate a model can’t be used to verify it, if that’s what you meant. [Dumb Scientist]
Surprisingly, this concept is useful for more than just baselessly accusing scientists of making bullshit claims. For example, my tidal analysis splits the GRACE satellite data into two segments; ~80% is inverted to obtain my empirical model, and the remaining ~20% is reserved for verification. Inverting gravity measurements to solve for tides everywhere (land and ocean) results in estimated tidal amplitudes in the ocean (which are large) and on land (which are ~10x smaller). When I calculated the gravitational effects of these tides on the GRACE satellites and subtracted them from the original data, the variance reduction due to the inverted ocean tides was similar in both inversion and verification data, but the variance reduction due to land tides was smaller with verification data than with data used in the inversion. This supports the idea that my inverted land tides are less likely than the ocean tides to be fitting genuine geophysical signals, so I used the land tides as an estimate of the noise floor. Happily, this noise floor agrees with an independent estimate obtained by splitting the dataset into two equal parts, inverting each separately and then subtracting the resulting ocean tides.
Whenever I describe this verification process to other geophysicists, they seem to understand it immediately. That suggests to me that the geophysics community isn’t so absurdly incompetent that they’d use circular reasoning by attempting to verify a model with data used to construct it. However, this explanation is also clearly futile because you’ve already ignored the same point multiple times:
Yeah, right. Because no one in the climate sciences has heard about Cross validation. And btw, if a model predicts the 1930’s accurately and these years were not part of the sample set, that is pretty good cross validation in my book. [Someone]
Sadly, you kept digging:
Not only have I already specifically addressed this absurd point:
… People who say that scientists have to CREATE MULTIPLE EARTHS in order to convince them aren’t really skeptics. … [Dumb Scientist]
… but I’ve also noticed that the same point is made by young earth creationists. My response to them was therefore similar to the response I’ve given you: a list of independent datasets which are all consistent with dynamical models that only make sense in a universe that’s billions of years old.
There’s also no point in rehashing the same point I made to radtea regarding falsification, because you’ve already ignored it and ignored Eric’s identical point.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Huh? You quoted me and repeated “20 years” as though your statement was a response to mine. But you’re talking about waiting “after 20 years” and implying that we need to perform gedankenexperiments rather than just reading the peer-reviewed literature? I haven’t ever been talking about waiting 20 years. This whole time I’ve been talking about the applied smoothing. There’s no waiting, no “after 20 years”. So there’s no need to make up numbers. In fact, I’ve already shown you the actual dependence of the error bars on the applied smoothing (or trend length- same idea.) Sadly, this isn’t the first time you’ve ignored this point:
… short term trends are not useful (a point I’ve made repeatedly). But you can see that the longer temperature trends are going to start being useful … [Gavin Schmidt]
So multiple scientists have already tried to tell you that longer temperature trends have smaller error bars than shorter trends, but you’re still blissfully fantasizing that the opposite is true. According to #6, you get another 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
Clearly, we need to review the difference between an empirical climate model and a dynamical climate model.
An empirical climate model:
A dynamical climate model:
Needless to say, modern GCM’s are dynamical.
As I’ve said repeatedly, they’re dynamical models which predict parameters of our climate, like (for instance) the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response to doubling CO2 concentration. Once again, these parameters can be tested in many different ways.
An empirical model that used past temperature data would indeed make a temperature prediction, and would be incapable of estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity or the transient climate response. Thus it couldn’t easily be compared to all the various sources of proxy data. An empirical model’s error bars would increase with time, as you seem to be assuming by talking about double the error at 20 years compared to 10 years. Because an empirical model is built using past temperature data, it would be necessary to wait 10 or 20 years because hindcasting would be an idiotic exercise in claiming “accuracy over the sample data.”
But once again, none of these limitations apply to modern GCM’s because they’re dynamical, not empirical.
Perhaps all my explanations have assumed too many physics prerequisites. Let me put it this way: climatology predicts values for parameters like the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which has units of (degrees C) / (doubling CO2 concentration). Physicists understand this, which is why we talk about falsifying values of the climate sensitivity by measuring both temperatures (to obtain the numerator) and forcings (to obtain the denominator.) Your proposed falsification most certainly is “flawed” and “problematic” because you’re explicitly and repeatedly only considering temperatures which means you’re not even using the right units. I’m fairly sure that the dire consequences of mismatched units are mentioned even at the sophomore physics level because I stress them to freshmen just like my professors did to me when I was in their shoes.
For instance, suppose someone claimed that “p=hf”. It’s not necessary to open a textbook to debunk that claim because the left hand side has units of momentum, and the right hand side has units of “h” divided by time. The energy-time uncertainty principle shows that the units of “h” are “energy*time”, so the right hand side has units of “energy”. Because the units don’t match, the equation is incorrect. In exactly the same way, you can’t use temperature measurements alone to falsify a value for the climate sensitivity because the units don’t match.
Yeah, if I’m saying the exact opposite of what I’ve actually been saying for years. This “scientific impotence excuse” might be popular among pseudoscientists, but you’ll have to look much harder to find an actual scientist who agrees with it.
I never understood why some scientists say that philosophers of science don’t understand science, or why Feynman said “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
Then anonymous chanted the phrase “philosophy of science” like a mantra each time I suggested he might need to understand specific details of the physics he was criticizing. (Having said that, I’ve got to give him credit for the honesty he displayed in his first sentence and his last sentences.)
But I still don’t agree with Feynman, because if you and “anonymous” really are typical specimens, philosophers of science would have been hunted to extinction by annoyed scientists centuries ago. Because that hasn’t happened, I assume that most philosophers of science don’t treat scientists as though they slept through elementary school lessons about the importance of “falsification” in science:
I’d already taken science classes, and I learned those lessons a little too well. I learned to keep an open mind, to question everything. I learned to check my assumptions to see if I’d mistakenly assumed something that was wrong or (worse) ambiguous. More than anything else, I learned to falsify my ideas by comparing them to experiment. … [Dumb Scientist]
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
No, what you and Michaels are doing isn’t “great” in any sense of the word. Again, by “summarizing” the IPCC AR1 WG1 report as though it only gave one scenario, you pulled a “Pat Michaels”.
As I’ve explained ad nauseum, the dynamical nature of climate models means that evaluating a GCM ensemble requires comparing projected forcings to the actual forcings. In other words, each scenario is an “if-then” statement: “If greenhouse gas concentrations rise at rate X, then temperatures will rise at rate Y.” You and Michaels not only chopped off the first part of that sentence, you both presented it as the only scenario… which “coincidentally” makes it seem like scientists are discrediting themselves by making bad predictions.
The correct approach is to open the AR1 to the Annex on page 333, and examine the rates of CO2 rise given in the top-left of figure A.3. Scenario “A” (BaU in that plot) only applies if CO2 levels exceed 400 ppm by 2010, which hasn’t happened. The top right graph also shows that methane rises to over 2000 ppb in that scenario by 2010, and once again that hasn’t happened either.
Just like in Hansen88, AR1’s scenario B is the closest match to the actual forcings. That’s not really surprising, considering that Hansen was a contributing author for sections 6 and 8, table 2.2 on p52 repeatedly references Hansen88’s radiative forcings and corrects a typo on p9360 of Hansen88, and chapter 3 repeatedly references Hansen88. Unsurprisingly, the emissions scenarios used in both studies seem very similar.
I thought you’d be able to learn something from the eerie parallels between your mistake and Michaels’s, but apparently I was wrong. Again.
Unlike many other scientists, I don’t think Michaels is lying because his “rebuttal” seems to indicate that he’s trying to draw conclusions based entirely on each scenario’s legend, and that he doesn’t understand the difference between dynamical and empirical models. If he thinks that climate models are empirical, it makes sense that he wouldn’t understand the reason for making three different projections. In that case, he’d probably think that climate scientists are just trying to “hedge their bets” by making three different projections, so he’d feel perfectly justified in cherry-picking the scenario that makes them look like idiots. He might even accuse climate scientists of trying to scare politicians rather than, you know, doing science.
Contrarians routinely accuse the IPCC of trying to scare politicians by making “alarmist” statements. In reality, scientists criticize the IPCC for just the opposite.
Repeatedly explainingIt’s important to realize that climate models like those used in the IPCC reports are dynamical models, not empirical. They don’t provide predictions of temperatures per se, rather they predict the climate response (averaged over ~20 years to ignore weather noise) to changes in forcings like sunlight, CO2 concentration, stratospheric water vapor, etc. All the analyses I’ve seen that have taken into account the actual history of these variables show that temperatures are well within the IPCC’s error bars. … the best choice would be a plot of recorded global temperatures vs. the IPCC ensemble’s 20-year average based on actual records of forcings, including all the data available. … [emphasis added in all quotes] [Dumb Scientist] that your “point on error in predictions” is nonsensicalAgain, you’re not the first person to change the topic from “how many independent empirical data sources have been shown to be consistent with dynamical climate model ensembles” to something like “Is justified true belief knowledge?”. [Dumb Scientist], only to be ignoredThe actual quote seems very different than your oversimplified version. First, notice that the IPCC is well aware that their models are dynamical, not empirical. This means they predict the climate response to radiative forcings, which in turn means that temperature predictions are tied to emissions scenarios. [Dumb Scientist] each time isn’t the way I’d define the phrase “missing your point.” Aside from the other instances[BEGINQUOTE]… And it’s not like the planet *didn’t* warm up in the meantime (AGW is very likely true) … [ShakaUVM][ENDQUOTE] Not for the reason you’re implying, though. For instance, average global temperatures could have risen if the sun had brightened, but that warming wouldn’t have had anything to do with AGW. In reality, one reason (among many) that scientists believe anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing global temperatures (averaged over at least ~20 years) to increase is that only model ensembles which include the radiative forcing due to anthropogenic CO2 yield temperatures since ~1970 that match the instrumental temperature record. As you can see, model ensembles which don’t include anthropogenic emissions aren’t consistent with the instrumental record, even after taking into account the “large” instrumental and algorithmic uncertainties. Notice that this reasoning has more to do with the climate response to forcings than with raw temperatures, which is a direct result of using dynamical rather than empirical models. [Dumb Scientist] I’ve documented… he seems to be honestly and competently evaluating Hansen’s model as applied to more recent temperature data. He understands that the model is dynamical, so he corrects for the fact that emissions have been 10% lower than projected in scenario B. Then he notes that the modern estimate for the climate sensitivity is closer to 3C than the 4.2C used in 1988. That’s the real lesson to be learned here: careful experimental methods can help to constrain our knowledge of the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response to doubling CO2. [Dumb Scientist], you haven’t even typed the words “dynamical”Once again, the important point is that the IPCC models are dynamical, so they can only predict the climate response to radiative forcings. If significant forcings aren’t measured accurately, the climate model will predict incorrect temperatures. [Dumb Scientist] or “empirical”Again, you seem to be confusing dynamical and empirical models. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the IPCC dynamical model ensembles are predicting the climate response to radiative forcings. No serious physicist would talk about falsifying a particular value for the transient climate response or equilibrium climate sensitivity using temperatures alone without a detailed history of the radiative forcings involved. And, of course, no serious physicist would use temperatures alone to say that both of these parameters are “zero” (which is what “global warming is false” means.) [Dumb Scientist] 60 pages after I first imploredYour error analysis seemed to repeatedly assume that climate models are empirical, not dynamical… [Dumb Scientist] you to learn about the graduate-level physicsMore fundamentally, falsification requires proper understanding of the dynamical nature of GCMs. This proposed “falsification” is woefully misguided because modern GCMs are dynamical physical models. If GCMs were simply empirical fits to past temperatures (as many seem to think), it would be meaningful to test the model by discussing temperatures alone. But GCMs don’t incorporate timeseries of past temperatures, instead they model the climate based on the physics of forcings such as solar output, volcanic activity, aerosols, and human emissions. In other words, scientists don’t develop GCMs to predict global temperatures; instead, GCMs are used to constrain a number of parameters such as (for instance) the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response to doubling CO2. All IPCC scenarios explicitly define the forcings that serve as inputs to the GCMs, and the temperature increase is the output. Since physicists are interested in testing physics rather than trying in vain to predict economic activity which could change CO2 emissions, falsification of any parameter constrained by the IPCC GCM ensemble requires comparing the projected forcings to the actual forcings. [Dumb Scientist] that you’re dismissing as bullshit.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
That’s quite a euphemism for repeatedly accusing scientists of failing to construct and test falsifiable theories, or accusing them of dishonestly claiming more knowledge than there is.
BecauseNow, I’d grown accustomed to ‘spiritual’ claims, and had decided to ignore them because they weren’t falsifiable. … I would like to see falsifiable evidence that they exist, rather than mere supposition. [emphasis added in all quotes] [Dumb Scientist] scienceMy sense of duty to science stops here, unfortunately, so I can’t falsify this hypothesis. [Dumb Scientist] is… scientific theories have to make unique, falsifiable predictions. … A metatheory has to be specific enough that it can be falsified entirely, though, otherwise it’s not scientific. … The Big Bang metatheory could be proven wrong by … in the strictest sense his theory was falsified in the 1940s … Evolution can also be falsified … [Dumb Scientist] primarily… But don’t include experimental data or unfalsifiable assumptions about parallel universes in order to account for fine-tuning of any physical constants … [Dumb Scientist] DEFINED… presumably high-speed photography could falsify Chris’s explanation. On the other hand, it’s harder to falsify my hypothesis because … [Dumb Scientist] byI agree that models which don’t make falsifiable predictions are worthless. I’ve just never seen that happen in peer reviewed journals. [Dumb Scientist] falsifiabilityIt’s definitely falsifiable science, too. [Dumb Scientist], youMy third piece of evidence is the concept of falsifiability. You see, a scientific hypothesis needs more than naturalism to be valid. It also needs to be falsifiable in the sense that an experiment (either real or gedanken) can be performed that will either support the theory or disprove it. Evolution, for example, is falsifiable in many different ways. … any scientific theory proposes a naturalistic explanation for some feature of the world, and makes falsifiable predictions … Because ‘Intelligent Design’ is not naturalistic and makes no falsifiable predictions, it not only isn’t right, it isn’t even wrong. … it’s clear that you think evolution produces no predictions and is not falsifiable. … supernatural explanations are … not falsifiable … [Dumb Scientist] shouldBut evolution as a whole just isn’t comparable to an unfalsifiable concept like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or intelligent design. … Evolution is falsifiable science, while intelligent design is a religious belief. [Dumb Scientist] probably… evolution is only compatible with the evidence ‘all life uses the same DNA,’ which means evolution is falsifiable science and creationism is theology instead. [Dumb Scientist] justIt’s possible that abiogenesis happened several times, so finding two types of DNA wouldn’t falsify evolution. … evolution is falsifiable science. … I’ve explored the idea that computer simulations can falsify evolution here. … It’s yet another way to falsify evolution. It wouldn’t falsify creationism … when did you offer these falsifiable predictions for creationism/ID? … Please show me specific falsifiable predictions that could – in principle – falsify creationism/ID. [Dumb Scientist] admitThe word ‘falsifiable‘ isn’t applicable, because creationism/ID isn’t science. … that’s my central point: creationism/ID isn’t science because it’s not falsifiable. Every time I mention this, you provide an example that could falsify evolution and claim that it’s (somehow) a way to falsify creationism. [Dumb Scientist] thatI’ll note that too short a time between the bombardment and the first microbes could falsify evolution. … it’s one of the simplest ways to falsify evolution. … they’re not making falsifiable statements. When omnipotence (or omniscience, or any kind of supernatural power) is an acceptable answer, falsification is impossible because there’s literally no limit to what an omnipotent being could do. [Dumb Scientist] yourWhile I admire your attempt to adhere to the scientific method, I’m not sure that these examples constitute falsifiability in a rigorous sense. If every animal had different DNA bases, that would utterly demolish evolution. All of the predictions you’re offering as falsifications merely seem to add a few more ‘why’ questions (as you say) to an already gigantic stack of ‘why’ questions that theologians have struggled with for centuries. [Dumb Scientist] nonsensicalIn science, nothing is ever proven true. Experiments might sometimes fail to falsify theories, but that’s very different from being ‘proven true.’ [Dumb Scientist] andI don’t know if you’re discussing heresy or orthodoxy. All I’m saying is that you’re discussing religion of some variety, not falsifiable science. [Dumb Scientist] insultingYou say that as though my life’s work isn’t developing and falsifying hypotheses. … [Dumb Scientist] commentsBut, as I’ve stressed, creationism can’t ever be refuted, because its inherently supernatural properties make it compatible with any potential discovery. On the other hand, I’ve listed two simple falsifications of evolution: chimpanzees in the Precambrian and many species with totally different DNA bases. … Note that I’m not saying creationism is wrong! Quite the opposite! It’s just not a scientific theory because it isn’t falsifiable. [Dumb Scientist] onScientific theories compete in the sense that every new observation either supports or falsifies them. … [Dumb Scientist] errorScience is falsifiable. It produces specific predictions. Creationism/ID doesn’t. [Dumb Scientist] barsThat’s what falsifiability means. There has to be some type of evidence which could, in principle, prove the theory wrong. I’ve linked to many many more tests in the conversation that list was taken from. [Dumb Scientist] wereEvolution is thus falsifiable in that manner. Creationism can work either way, so it’s not falsifiable and therefore not science. … It’s just not falsifiable, and therefore not a scientific statement. [Dumb Scientist] “libel”And yet again, the distinction is that your belief can’t ever be disproven because it’s based on religious faith, whereas scientific theories have to be testable by definition. [Dumb Scientist].
No, the “core matter” here is that you’re repeatedly and baselessly libelling an entire subfield of physicists, which I most certainly do not agree with, in any sense of the word.
Why do people insult scientists in this manner? It’s like telling a plumber “Oh, come on… you don’t really know the difference between a bathtub and a sink.” Presumably, people wouldn’t insult him by suggesting that he’s fundamentally incompetent at his life’s work. Maybe that’s because plumbers carry big wrenches, while scientists carry calculators? [Dumb Scientist]
This is the second time you’ve claimed that I agree with your bizarre misconceptions. Please stop. It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. As I’ve already discussed, some physics topics can seem very problematic if you spend your time (for instance) running a small business. That’s why professional physicists spend that time doing physics and getting structured feedback from other physicists. As it turns out, experience and peer-review can help one tackle subjects which armchair quarterbacks might consider “very problematic.” If that weren’t true, then physicists probably would agree with you… but only if they could manage to stop muttering “f*ckin’ magnets, how do they work?”
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.
Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That’s the interplay where he asked a bunch of ‘questions’ like “Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?”. Then Stefan replied:
Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph “debatable”. But let’s keep things in perspective: we’re discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You’ve been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here – how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as “honest broker”? Stefan
That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute “responding badly to reasoned criticism.” In fact, it’s not clear that Pielke’s rant counts as “reasoned criticism” in the first place. As far as I can tell, he’s gotten all worked up because there’s a graph in the supplementary material of the IPCC AR4 WG2 report that might not be peer-reviewed. It’s not news that WG2 has bigger errors which don’t require digging through the supplementary material. As I’ve pointed out, I’ve never read the WG2 report because it’s not about physics, but rather about political and economic repercussions. Pielke Jr. is probably fixated on it because he’s a political scientist, but physics is much more interesting to me.
Stefan was also being overly generous by calling the inclusion of that graph “debatable”. A common misconception is that the IPCC isn’t allowed to use non-peer-reviewed sources. In fact, that only applies to WG1 (where it was followed, as far as I can tell.) Search the WG2 Technical Summary for the term “grey”. You may also want to read the IPCC principles appendix, paying close attention to “Annex 2” (near the end) which is called “PROCEDURE FOR USING NON-PUBLISHED/NON-PEER-REVIEWED SOURCES IN IPCC REPORTS”.
Regarding the supplementary material itself, section 6 states: “All supporting material should be formally and prominently described on the front and other introductory covers as: “Supporting material prepared for consideration by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This supporting material has not been subject to formal IPCC review processes.”
Pielke makes a big deal out of the fact that Muir-Wood isn’t eager to get into an argument with him. As Bob Ward points out: “I know that Robert didn’t want to defend the use of his graph even though he willingly provided it, but I think that is more of a sign that he, like many contributors to the IPCC report probably now feel, would rather not become targets for those who have criticisms of the IPCC process. There are many researchers out there now who I believe are intimidated by the current bout of trials by media.”
After being called dishonest and idiotic countless times, I don’t blame Muir-Wood for his reticence at all.
Furthermore, since Pielke Jr. makes such a big deal of being an “honest broker”, it’s reasonable for Stefan to point out that his behavior is inconsistent with that self-proclaimed role. Actually, it’s only inconsistent to the extent that his “honest broker” concept makes any sense in the first place, but that’s beside the point.
Yes, it’s common for people who pick on a particular field of science to believe that scientists working in that field are angry and defensive. For instance, the Electric Universe crowd makes the same claims about astronomers and plasma physicists while endorsing similar claims made by Stephen Crothers about relativity theorists. In fact, some people say similar things about Feynman. Recently, Stella accused me of being defensive because I wouldn’t agree that post-1900 technology is evil, or that I’m responsible for thousands of horrible deaths.
It almost seems like people who routinely attack a particular group of scientists tend to arrive at the conclusion that those particular scientists are angry and defensive. Weird, huh? Aside from those nefarious climate “scientists”, I can’t think of any other humans who react defensively to a never-ending stream of baseless accusations…
(Ed. note: Originally posted here and linked at Slashdot, I later managed to get a version of the comment through Slashdot’s filter. That version only got through the filter after removing many of the links in the original, though.)
That sounds familiar:
… it’s absolutely true that other data and models are available (CR.org goes on about this endlessly), but the CRU people did their absolute best to weasel out of their responsibility to release these things. That’s what the emails showed – Phil Jones and his merry band of scientists devising quasi-legal strategies to hide their data and models… in an anti-scientific fashion. [ShakaUVM]
Indeed. This was the true scandal of Climategate (as anyone following the story knows). In a scientific field which relies pretty much entirely on climate measurements and models, withholding both of them is tantamount to claiming you’ve invented Cold Fusion but not saying how. And flipping off people when coming up with legally-questionable excuses to avoid FOIA requests is just icing on the cake. Sure, there were other models and climate data available – Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate.org hurriedly posted examples after the scandal broke – but that doesn’t change anything about Phil Jones and his merry band’s bad behavior. … [ShakaUVM]
… The climategate scandal was really about climatologists hiding their data and methods from critical review. This is not how science should be conducted, and certainly not in a science whose entire basis rests on certain sets of data and methods used to analyze them. Instead Phil emailed his colleagues on tricks for ducking out of having to respond to FOIA requests – the emails are all there in the climategate archives. Including emails to people like Gavin (of RC.org fame) who apparently didn’t seem at all perturbed by the attempts to hide data, only reversing his stance when climategate broke and posting (other) data sets on RC.org. The various Mc’s have found modest errors before, and have been cited in the literature for it. But when they request the same data that Jones or Mann gets so they can run the numbers themselves, they get rebuffed. … [ShakaUVM]
Gavin wasn’t just saying that other data was available, he was saying that CRU doesn’t do any primary data collection:
… Claims that data has been destroyed or lost are untrue. Claims that there is no access to the raw temperature data are untrue. There is nothing in any of the CRU archives that is particularly special or noteworthy and that isn’t mostly available to anyone already via NOAA. … [Gavin Schmidt]
… If you want the very original hand-written records from individual stations, ask the National Met. Service in the relevant country, not the people who collate the homogenised records for use in tracking climate change. [Gavin Schmidt]
The raw data is in the custody of the met services who originated it. CRU is just a collation, not a temperature measuring organisation. [Gavin Schmidt]
No data has been destroyed, the original files and numbers are with the national weather services that provided them. Removing a copy of a original file because it is not useful for my purposes is not ‘deleting data’ [Gavin Schmidt]
The raw data is the GHCN data (v2.mean.Z) (publicly available, as has been the case for decades). [Gavin Schmidt]
Unsurprisingly, that’s also what the reviews said:
The Unit does virtually no primary data acquisition but has used data from published archives and has collaborated with people who have collected data. … [Oxburgh panel, p2]
The CRU dataset, which forms the land surface component of the HadCRUT global temperature record, was compiled with the aim of comprehensiveness. The majority of the data in it are derived from the same freely-available raw data sets used by NOAA and NASA. … [UK House of Commons Inquiry, p13]
Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data. … Regarding data availability, there is no basis for the allegations that CRU prevented access to raw data. It was impossible for them to have done so. [Muir Russell Review, p48,53]
Somehow, you managed to twist the fact that it was impossible for CRU to prevent access to the raw data into a series of accusations that they… prevented access to the raw data. The most charitable explanation for your behavior is that you’re under the impression that CRU collects raw data. If this were true (which it isn’t), it would be possible for them to withhold data. Someone who (incorrectly) believes that CRU collects primary data probably would think that Gavin’s statements “just highlighted their shady behavior.”
This means those FOIA requests that have you so outraged are basically saying: “I don’t want to download the data from the same places you downloaded them. I want to get those exact same bytes from your computer.”
If this sounds unbelievably silly, that’s because it is. But aside from the fact that the contrarians were barking up entirely the wrong tree, why didn’t CRU simply mirror the data to satisfy their absurd demands? Was it because climatologists are re-enacting the biggest scientific scandal of the twentieth century, as you’ve repeatedly alleged?
There wouldn’t have been any point to releasing the data not covered by NDA’s. Again, that’s the exact same data that NOAA already makes available. But let’s ignore that too: why didn’t CRU just separate their publicly-available data from the data covered by NDA’s? The simple answer is that it would’ve entailed years of tedious, pointless busywork:
We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. … [CRU]
Keep in mind that CRUTEM3 is constructed using time series downloaded from over 3000 temperature stations. Asking CRU to manually remove all the confidential data from it, just so they can release the exact same data that they’d downloaded from NOAA simply isn’t a reasonable request. The history of these requests reinforces that point:
One of the most effective tactics is to continually claim that data is being hidden and that the process is not open and transparent. This is successful, not because anything is actually being hidden, but because regardless of what data is available you can always ask for more. Five years ago it was a demand than Mann make his code and data available – it was, and nothing changed. A couple of years ago the demand was for the GISTEMP data and code – that was made available… and nothing changed. The requests then moved to CRU, who because of their agreements with the Met Centers, can’t release everything in the public domain. This fact has been greatly exploited by people who conveniently ignore it when making ever more harassing demands for ‘the data’. Whether they get it or not, nothing will change. The target will simply be moved. Meanwhile, the real need for openness and transparency is set back because the vast majority of demands are very clearly partisan and insincere. [Gavin Schmidt]
So after he got bored harassing scientists who weren’t bound by NDA’s, McIntyre finally found a scientist who went to great lengths to collate a more comprehensive dataset, even if that data came with undesirable legal strings attached. Phil Jones immediately became a convenient target, but did McIntyre’s campaign against him have any scientific justification?
… One should put research in context and ask the question: what would one hope to find by double checking the processing of the raw data? If this were the only dataset in existence, and Professor Jones’s team had been the only team in the world to analyse it, then it might make sense to double check independently the processing of the raw data and the methods. But there are other datasets and other analyses that have been carried out … [UK House of Commons Inquiry, p16]
I’ve already linked to NASA’s GISTEMP, NCDC’s analysis and Clear Climate Code which are independent verifications of CRU’s work, but I didn’t mention Nick Stokes’s TempLS, Zeke Hausfather’s STATA model, Joseph’s GHCN Processor, Chad Herman’s analysis, caerbannog’s quick and dirty GHCN analysis or JeffId’s Thermal Hammer.
The computer code required to read and analyse the instrumental temperature data is straightforward to write based upon the published literature. It amounts a few hundred lines of executable code (i.e. ignoring spaces and comments). Such code could be written by any research unit which is competent to reproduce or test the CRUTEM analysis. For the trial analysis of the Review Team, the code was written in less than two days and produced results similar to other independent analyses. No information was required from CRU to do this. [Muir Russell Review, p51]
So McIntyre has been whining for the last decade about data which was already available from other sources, and which could be analyzed using code written by any competent team in two days without bothering CRU. That’s not too surprising, because he’s explicitly not interested in taking a weekend to produce a global temperature record using that data.
And once again, I’ve already found myself in the same position as Dr. Jones. The GRACE data I’m using were only given to me under an NDA. Other scientists have occasionally asked me for it, and my response is identical to his: “Sorry, I don’t have the rights to distribute these data.” Until and unless JPL decides to publicly release these data, I don’t have any other legal options.
I’ve also been on the other end of this process while trying to obtain Arctic bottom pressure recorder data. The same Arctic oceanographer I’ve already mentioned once said that he had some data from a spot off the coast of Greenland which was collected by some European scientists. I asked for the data, and he emailed them to ask permission to share the files with me. They refused, which was disappointing. But I didn’t throw a temper tantrum at either the primary data source (the European scientists) or the secondary data source (the Arctic oceanographer). Harassing the secondary data source would’ve been especially unprofessional because it simply wasn’t his fault: “the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.”
Another example is the anecdote at the bottom of this comment. My office mate extracted core samples of permafrost in Alaska to measure their carbon content. He showed me some pictures and I immediately asked if I could post the photos on Dumb Scientist, but he wasn’t able to get permission from the copyright holder. So I was reduced to describing the pictures he showed me. Like many other scientists, he simply couldn’t release data collected by the primary data source unless they specifically authorized it.
Regarding code, most scientists don’t have the luxury of starting a new codebase from scratch. Instead, they use code that was written by large teams decades before licenses like the GPL became common. Releasing this kind of code publicly would require slogging through a mountain of legalese, not to mention getting permission from all the authors of the code and the estates of authors who’ve since died.
Even scientists who work alone have to deal with subtle issues regarding public distribution. For instance, many physicists copy highly optimized algorithms from Numerical Recipes rather than re-inventing BLAS from scratch. I started doing this myself until I noticed that code from Numerical Recipes is incompatible with the GPL and other free software licenses. If I hadn’t switched to using the GSL so early, I wouldn’t ever be able to legally release my GRACE inversion program as open source software.
That’s why most scientists don’t bother with licenses, and just informally share their code with trusted colleagues who won’t report them for copyright violations.
Gosh, if you say that some anonymous “M” says that he personally only filed one request a month, and only because the badly reeking climate scientist started it, then case closed.
On second thought, there might be some quibbling skeptics who’d demand more specifics than the codename of a character in a James Bond movie. You can’t mean McIntyre, who deliberately flooded his office with over 50 requests in a single week. You also can’t mean McKitrick, because you’ve already “established” that people like him only sent one request per quarter. But that’s okay, because your awe-inspiring vagueness leaves you substantial wiggle room in the forms of Moene, McShane, Murty, Michel, Mackey, McFarquhar, McLean, Mosher, Montford, Monckton, Michaels, Marohasy, McClintock, Miskolczi, Morano, Motl, etc. Presumably one of these anti-AGW M’s has discovered a sense of restraint, but Motl’s clearly still searching for his so I’d recommend choosing one of the others.
It’s also conceivable that your metric “the number of FOIA requests a single anti-AGW M sent” isn’t as relevant as the metric “the total number of FOIA requests received.” Notice that even if all those anti-AGW M’s only filed one request a month, that would still be 18 total requests per month, or 324 person-hours per month, which is two full-time jobs spent handling frivolous requests. Then imagine what would happen if there were some anti-AGW people with names that don’t start with “M”…
Yes, you’ve been quite adamant that CRU never answered a single request. There’s just one small problem with that claim:
In 2007 four requests were received, of which two were given full release of the requested information but two, despite appeals, were rejected. In 2008 two requests were received, one was granted full release, but the other was rejected, both initially and upon appeal. In the first half of 2009 only one request was received and this was responded to in full. [Muir Russell Review, p90]
If you really don’t believe their “core science” is bad, you probably shouldn’t have spent the last few years ranting that it’s unfalsifiable bullshit which isn’t science any more than economics is. And once again, we’ve also already discussed your accusations of censorship:
… I haven’t yet censored any posts on my article, and I think that was a mistake. Two programmers (also creationists, incidentally) wasted ~50 pages on nonsense. I don’t blame scientists who want to keep the conversation focused on the facts, and I’ve seen contrary viewpoints on Real Climate. They just don’t devote hundreds of pages on each article to blather like “Water vapor is more important than CO2, so scientists are conspirators/incompetent/both! … [Dumb Scientist]
You’ve been repeating these accusations for quite a while:
… Perhaps your tiny little communist brain can’t understand the fact that RC.org is a bunch of partisan hacks that try to appear to be the voice of reason, and filter out any actual, verifiable, facts that are contrary to their beliefs. Doesn’t sound very scientific, does it? [ShakaUVM]
… Real Climate.org tends to censor posts. … [ShakaUVM]
You might want to browse the “Bore Hole” to see why certain comments get deleted. Perhaps you’ve missed contrary comments like this oddly familiar comment where “John A” accuses Gavin of using a strawman argument, and then actually uses it. You’ve also linked to a rant by Pielke Jr. which certainly seems like a comment that’s “contrary to their beliefs.” Unfortunately, your accusations have been far more numerous and specific:
… that doesn’t change anything about Phil Jones and his merry band’s bad behavior. Hell, he even wrote to Gavin Schmidt with advice on how to dodge FOIA requests. Post that on RealClimate.org though on any of their various threads on the scandal and they immediately delete it, though. [ShakaUVM]
… Even RealClimate.org, which is supposed to be the climate scientists talking about the science behind global warming mercilessly filter responses that disagree with them or make them look bad. Some sample comments they filtered: 1) You criticized State of Fear making it look like there was a conspiracy to keep dissenting viewpoints out of climate journals. But Phil Jones’ emails show that Crichton got it right. … Moderated away, twice now on two different threads. … [ShakaUVM]
I’ve tried asking a couple times on their “Climategate Debunked” pages what Gavin’s reaction to Phil Jones FOIA dodging was. … Every single time I asked that question, the moderators deleted it. … [ShakaUVM]
… They also don’t like to talk about the fact that Phil was discussing strategies of dodging FOIA requests with Gavin. As I said, RC.org deletes every post on their site referencing this. … [ShakaUVM]
Your accusations are only slightly tarnished by the fact that Real Climate published and answered these comments and didn’t censor these similar comments. It’s a little more bizarre, however, that Real Climate published and answered your “questions”.
Anyway, why did Gavin abridge your comments? Well, you’ve already explained that you were accusing him of “using an old trick out of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”… because he used a color palette that you didn’t like. Since that nonsense violates the comment policy, I’m surprised that he didn’t just delete them altogether. These are only “the most reasonable of fact-based comments” in the sense that Jane Q. Public asked a “polite question”.
It’s odd that you call that “hide the decline” nonsense a red herring when you’ve previously called it unethical fraud.
That sounds familiar…
… to paraphrase Phil Jones: Why should I make my data available, when critics might use it disprove my work? Anti-scientific bullshit. [ShakaUVM]
… Phil Jones made it very clear he didn’t want to give data to anyone who might contradict him. [ShakaUVM]
… Phil Jones refused to give his data to people that might disagree with him. … [ShakaUVM]
… it’s critically important that doing bad things like what Dr. Jones did do not happen in a field that is almost entirely government by the data – willfully and knowingly hide the data from people that might find problems with it. … [Bill K]
… to put it in Phil Jones’ words: “Why should I give you the data when you might use it to prove me wrong?” Bad, bad science, and he was rightfully slapped down for it. [ShakaUVM]
… Gavin probably agrees with what Phil Jones said, “Why should I share data with you, when you might use it to disprove something I believe in?” [ShakaUVM]
My favorite quote so far from the leaked emails: “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” -Phil Jones [ShakaUVM]
That quote is in the
leakedhacked emails, but only in the indirect sense that Dr. Trenberth told Dr. Jones that McIntyre testified that Dr. Jones wrote it. It would be better phrased as “Why should I spend countless hours satisfying your endless and pointless demands (pointless because you could get the data from the primary sources just like we did), when your aim is to invent some flimsy excuse to get us arrested for imaginary crimes?”It’s important to remember that an actual scientist would be trying to honestly assess the quality of the evidence. He would be trying to find a real flaw in the methodology. The crackpots harassing Dr. Jones aren’t doing this at all. You’ve been excoriating Phil Jones for getting frustrated with their nonsensical accusations and writing a badly phrased reply in an email that was probably written in frustrated haste, but I think anyone in his position would’ve done the same thing.
Aside from the fact that he doesn’t deserve your hateful attacks, I’m defending Dr. Jones because I really don’t like bullies, and I’m hoping that history won’t rhyme:
The ‘climategate’ inquiry at last vindicates Phil Jones – and so must I. The UEA’s climate science chief has been cleared: he was provoked beyond endurance. It was unfair to call for his resignation … [George Monbiot]
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
ShakaUVM claims that “intelligent design” is falsifiable science.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
Again, my stance towards Watts is that he’s convinced an army of crackpots that Real Climate is bullshitting about the temperature record despite the fact that he hasn’t performed any original research to back up these libelous conspiracy theories.
In exactly the same way that you’ve repeatedly disagreed with my stance, Watts likely disagrees with your stance that he’s a nutjob crackpot. I say this because he attacked the Menne 2010 paper that you claimed was a refreshing validation of his work and abused the DMCA in an attempt to remove a video summarizing it.
I finally looked at the gigantic wall of text you’ve erected in my honor.
Khayman, I find it hilarious you request comments be at “DH4” level or above, when you go and accuse me of being a Rush Limbaugh that apparently wants to draw and quarter climate scientists. (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2388172&cid=37183020)
I love how many quotes you have of mine that are cherrypicked out of context. For example, you state that “ShakaUVM claims that “intelligent design” is falsifiable science.” What I said is that it is *possible* to formulate ID as a falsifiable scientific theory, by restating it as a statistical interference with normal evalutionary processes. By cherrypicking that quote though, you’re attempting to libelously categorize me as an IDer (I’m not) or worse, a YECer.
To the ten people that actually read this blog, ignore Khayman’s cherrypicking. Here are my beliefs:
1) AGW is real, and a serious problem. (Yes, see, I’m just like Rush Limbaugh!)
2) Evolution is probably right, but it could be fun to scientifically test ID to see if there’s any evidence for it. We’ll need statistical tests to determine design *anyway* (as we move forward into a future with more and more bioengineering), so we might as well apply them to the historical record as well.
3) Climategate was mostly overblown hype by the anti-AGWers, but there were some serious issues discovered involving Phil Jones dodging FOIA requests so that AGW deniers couldn’t get access to the same data he shared with everyone else. Scientific inquiry needs a free exchange of data, and yes, this includes people you don’t like. He shouldn’t be drawn and quartered, but losing his chairmanship is appropriate, considering it could be argued he broke the law.
Note: the inquiry board agreed with me (the data should be free), which is in contrast to what Khayman and RC.org both said (they claimed it justified Phil’s actions), and the CRU recently did, in fact, make their data freely available.
4) For this and other reasons, Khayman (aka Dumb Scientist) and RC.org are biased sources of information. It’s not like I think they’re wrong in most cases, but they engage in partisanship. When RC.org reviews An Inconvenient Truth, it lightly brushes over the several major mistakes Al Gore made in the film, as well as the outright lies about the Drowning Polar Bear Myth. But when they criticize things made by AGW deniers, they’ll take them to task for failing to capitalize and punctuate every sentence correctly.
Khayman/Dumb Scientist engaged in a long, drawn out, teeth-pulling debate with me over if the Surface Station Survey was valuable or not. The cognitive dissonance was so strong in his head, that he couldn’t wrap his brain around the fact that even though 1) Watts may very well be a AGW-denying loon that 2) He might have something valuable to contribute to science.
I had to ask Khayman, over and over again, quote, “Look, let me simplify the whole issue down to one question: Politics aside, is it better or not to know the quality of your surface stations?”
Khayman could not give a straight answer to save his life, always dodging the question asked, answering one of two things: 1) Watts Is A Crazy, or 2) Even using the “good” stations from Watts, it doesn’t change the climate record.
This went on for several days, with me trying to get him to actually answer the question I asked, as opposed to making a non-sequitor (and non-sequitors they were). I even pointed out various climatologists that thanked Watts for his work. To the keen-eyed observer, it should be clear that Khayman/Dumb Scientist would rather chop off his left hand than admit that maybe some AGW-denier, somewhere, has contributed something to climatology.
5) I don’t consider climatology a hard science like physics, but something more akin to astronomy or economics, where the full scientific method can not be employed. There’s not a term for disciplines like this, but it doesn’t matter, Khayman reacts with nerd rage whenever anything regarding scientific theory or philosophy of science is brought up. He’s apparently never had any classes on it when in college (I studied it a bit in my undergrad and grad years), which explains his sort of caveman-like reaction to being out-thought by anyone who has even heard of Kuhn.
The point he misses though, is that it’s not a slam on climatology, not really, but actually a very apt analogy. Economists do a lot of data collection from a lot of heterogeneous sources, and run very large statistical models trying to predict the future. (What does that sound like to you?) But it doesn’t matter. He nerd rages.
6) Yes, I use hyperbole all the time. Yes, it’s a bad habit of mine. =)
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here, along with a copy of Shaka’s comment.)
Fascinating. I’ll respond to this (and all your other accusations that I haven’t yet addressed) whenever I get the time.
ShakaUVM’s return reminds me that I haven’t yet responded to his accusations.
My replies are on hold because ShakaUVM seems to support the plan proposed by Republicans Art Laffer and Bob Inglis.
(Ed. note: I just submitted this as a story for Slashdot.)
The Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing, Wolfgang Wagner, writes:
Dr. Spencer responded to Wagner’s resignation on “Watts Up With That” with yet another suggestion that Wagner’s honorable action must be due to political pressure.
Of course, as Tim Lambert and his commenters point out, Wagner’s letter specifically criticizes Spencer’s article for failing to respond to scientific arguments. Notice how Spencer’s response also fails to respond to those arguments.
Dr. Spencer expands his response on his own blog.
Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon examines the review process.
(Ed. note: These comments were moved from an unrelated conversation after Jane Q. Public showed how depressingly relevant they are here.)
Wow! If I love to call you a dogmatist, then surely you can find at least one quote from me supporting that accusation?
I just explained that you were wrong to call me and my colleagues dishonest idiot dogmatists (not to mention all the other libelous smears you’ve thrown at us). Bizarrely, you then claimed that I was calling you an idiot dogmatist, when I’d just explained to you and to Jane Q. Public that obtaining a graduate-level understanding of the physics of the climate requires… well… taking actual graduate level courses in physics related to the climate. A non-physicist who doesn’t understand graduate-level physics isn’t an idiot, as I carefully explained to Jane Q. Public. However, a professional physicist has no such excuse, which is why Jane’s accusations (and your incessant accusations) that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community are lying and/or making ridiculously incompetent mistakes really are accusations that we’re dishonest idiots.
If history is any guide, this is the point where you claim that you’ve never made any of these accusations, and that I’m making up strawman arguments. Please do that. I plan to eventually collect all your accusations of dishonesty, and then display them next to all your statements that you’re not accusing scientists of dishonesty. Adding more examples will make the cognitive dissonance more amusing.
“I try very hard not to be a dogmatist.” -ShakaUVM
“I think you need to keep trying.” -Khayman80
Care to print a retraction?
No?
Of course not.
It’s only libelous if they’re untrue, not because you get offended by them. It would be more accurate of you to call them insult, which is what they were.
Oh, please do. You getting your panties in a bunch by me calling the RC.org people politically biased does not make said statement dishonest, libelous, or untrue. It simply means you got your panties in a bunch.
In case you haven’t figured it out, biased doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying. This is a fine philosophical point which, as usual, flies right over your head. Although it can incorporate outright lying, in the case of RC.org, their biased means they shade things on “their side” favorably (An Inconvenient Truth is handled with kid gloves, and its numerous errors hand-waved away as not being serious), but statements on “the other side” (say, that recent Spencer paper in Remote Sensing that caused all the hoopla) are raked over with a fine-toothed comb for errors. In addition to the real criticisms, they point out he didn’t label one of his axes.
The point *that you will miss* if i don’t say this is that I’m not saying the Spencer paper was any good. To the contrary. I’ve read it, and I don’t think it really proves anything at all, and certainly isn’t the Tea Party Great White Hope that it was supposed to be. If you’ve read my posts on such web sites, you’ll see me flaming a number of people for their misapprehensions about the Spencer paper, and the web sites themselves for not pointing out that Pielke is not the most unbiased of sources. Here on Slashdot, I pointed out that Spencer at least had real academic credentials in the field.
Making mistakes is not the same as being a dishonest idiot.
Being biased is not the same as being a dishonest idiot.
Being a dogmatist is not the same as being a dishonest idiot.
How could I accuse you of making strawman arguments, when you’re obviously conflating my arguments with that of a person (Jane Q Public) that I’ve never even heard of?
That would be outrageous.
How depressingly repetitive all these conversations are. Remember that Jane Q. Public threw around accusations of fraud like it was going out of style. Then she misinterpreted my description of her accusations of fraud as though I was accusing her of fraud, and threatened to sue me. When I mentioned this incident to you, you had some choice words to say about her behavior.
So let’s look at the exchange you just quoted, the way I actually wrote it:
Notice that I was saying “I think you need to keep trying to understand my ‘confusion’ with you,” not “I think you need to keep trying to not be a dogmatist.”
In fact, if you read your original comment, you’ll notice that after you finished musing about Galileo and praising yourself for not being a dogmatist, you continued: Your mind is overly reductive, though. You equate someone looking at an issue from an oblique angle, and reduce that to one side or another. If I come up with a way to test ID as a scientific theory, you reduce that to mean that I’m an IDer (I’m not, I simply think it’d be fun to test). You see me say that Watts contributed something with his surface station survey? You reduce that to mean that I agree with Watts on every issue. You see me take issue with predictions of the Greenland ice melt, you reduce that to me thinking all predictions are nonsense.
In other words, you were accusing me of being “overly reductive”, contrasting that with your noble non-dogmatic approach, and saying that you finally understood me. So I pointed out that your understanding was wrong; you need to keep trying to understand why I don’t like being called a dishonest idiot dogmatist by every programmer with an axe to grind. Hint: it isn’t that I’m not trying as hard as you to not be a dogmatist.
As I just said, you definitely have heard of her, because I mentioned her and you called her a nutcase. I’m not conflating your comments with hers, just pointing out the fact that you’re following the same sad pattern that Jane Q. Public did. She threw around accusations of fraud, and got so confused that she thought I was accusing her of fraud when I was actually just rebutting her latest accusation of fraud. You tried to explain that you understood “my confusion” with you, which apparently has to do with my not trying as hard as you to not be a dogmatist. I then pointed out that you needed to keep trying to understand why I’m objecting to this endless stream of insults. The fact that you twisted this exchange around as me accusing you of being a dogmatist gives me serious deja vu regarding Jane’s mistake.
I just spent over 60 pages explaining that your libelous insults aren’t true. Of course you’re libelling scientists.
As I’ve repeatedly explained to you and to Jane Q. Public, when the two of you make a fundamental mistake about graduate-level physics, that isn’t evidence that you’re dishonest idiots because you shouldn’t be expected to understand physics that’s taught in classes that you haven’t even taken. However, when you accuse a professional physicist of making a ridiculously incompetent mistake, that certainly is an accusation of being an idiot.
I’m curious. Do you really think you haven’t accused scientists of lying?
Fair enough.
There’s enough nuts on Slashdot that second-hand accounts of nutcasery don’t stick in my memory. But there’s really no reason to equate the two of us, as I rather think it silly to want to sue someone on Slashdot for something they said. It’s about as silly as accusing them incorrectly of committing libel.
It doesn’t scan that way, but ok, great.
You’re not a lawyer, but that’s still no excuse for using using terms inaccurately.
Well, you do show a certain rigidity of thought, as this whole GI tract business has shown. It takes a certain freedom of thinking to be able to realize that your GI tract, both historically/evolutionarily speaking, physiologically speaking, and mathematically speaking are not part of “us”.
Your statements are false, and the baseless arguments you’re repeating have done harm to the scientific community. I’ve documented these facts extensively. The third criterion seems redundant; making false statements means that by definition you made them without adequate research into the truthfulness of your statements. I don’t think that scientists count as celebrities, but even if they do, ‘intent to do harm’ seems to be supported by the hyperbolic insults and malicious language you’ve used to baselessly accuse scientists of outright lying and making ridiculously incompetent mistakes.
But you’re right, I’m not a lawyer. Maybe you would be able to successfully defend yourself in a libel trial by arguing that you were simply one member of a legion who were all repeating these libelous accusations, so it’s difficult to prove that your particular repetitions caused any damage on their own. But why take that chance? If you don’t want to be accused of libelling scientists, you might consider finding a hobby that doesn’t involve libelling scientists. Would that really be so difficult?
All of your statements above are false.
Weren’t you the person who got upset when someone threatened you with a lawsuit? I know you’re not, but glass houses and all.
Steven Chu resigns; ShakaUVM returns to say good riddance.
(Ed. note: I posted this comment after Jane Q. Public said “ocean level has actually decreased over the last couple of years.”)
Thank you riverat1, Gadget_Guy, Arlet, berbo, and tbannist for correctly repeating that a solid undergraduate statistics education helps one to determine how long a timespan has to be in order to separate the long term climate sea level signal from short term weather noise (using a realistic noise model) by producing a 95% (for instance) confidence interval that’s entirely positive.
You’re both right; the GRACE analysis was performed by Carmen Boening at JPL. She showed that most of the precipitation fell in Australia and
BrazilColumbia. As Josh Willis explained, this is because of a very strong La Nina.Wow, Mr. “khayman80”. You sure do a wonderful job of distorting other people’s statements and inflating your own ego here.
I remember our “discussions”. As I recall, you were insufferably arrogant and pedantic, and rather consistently asserted I had stated things that actually I had not.
For example, you link to a statement above and write that I had threatened to sue you, when in fact I did not (as anybody who actually follows the link can see). What I *DID* write was that under different circumstances I would. Not the same thing. I made no “threat”.
Your listing here of your own ego-stuffed accomplishments are just full of similar distortions. Which is exactly why I told you to get stuffed and told you that UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES I would sue you.
You are a pompous ass, and you distort other peoples’ statements in order to try to make yourself look good. Then you use that as a self-advertisement to try to bolster your reputation as a “scientist”. When in fact all it proves is… you are a pompous ass.
I’m not the first person you’ve accused of trying to put words into your mouth. Here’s an example. I think this wastes my readers’ time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being distorted. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.
Haha. I have just been reading more of the post above by “khayman80”. The funny thing is: if you actually follow the links he provides, you can easily see how grossly he distorts and cherry-picks my own statements in an attempt to make himself look good.
At least he had the integrity to actually link to them… apparently (and probably correctly) assuming that other people would take him at his word and not actually follow them.
I’ve copied an example below, so other people don’t have to follow the links. Also, here’s my “grossly cherry-picked” version of a conversation we had regarding dark matter. Compare that to the originals that are available by following the links. I think this wastes my readers’ time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being cherry-picked in an attempt to make myself look good. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.
“khayman80”:
(To others: please pardon the multiple posts, but this is something that needs to be stated.)
As other people can clearly see if they actually follow your links, our exchange included an accusation by you that my comments were “fraudulent”. And that was not stated as an opinion but as a claim of “obvious” fact.
As I mentioned to you then: the fact that this is internet does not constitute safe haven from libel. Other people have been sued in the real world for less, and lost. And I would probably throw in some of your public mis-characterizations of my other comments, just to add some spice.
I did not threaten to sue you, but I did state that if the accusation had been against my real name rather than a pseudonym, then I would have. And in fact I would have. And I would have made it stick. The evidence is both blatant and public.
You can play that down all you like, but the fact is that your own online behavior has been less than stellar, in both an ethical and a legal sense. And that is a bit of an understatement.
Nevertheless, while I still think you behaved poorly, we did have an interesting and educational exchange. And no matter how arrogant and insulting you were being, you remained polite… which is something, at least. Not much, but it’s the only compliment I have to give.
In any case, to everyone else: Again I urge readers to follow the actual links and see the actual exchange, rather than accept the surface claims here. Your opinions and conclusions are of course your own. But if you read the actual exchanges I think many of you will end up disagreeing with statements made above by khayman80.
Here’s that exchange. I still think it wastes my readers’ time, but they can judge for themselves whether I think you’re even capable of scientific fraud. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.
So in exactly the same spirit as he claims to have “quoted” my comments, I offer you this, which is no more out of context than anything he has stated.
But again: dear readers, I urge you to look at the actual exchanges between me an “khayman80”, and judge for yourselves whether I was being unreasonable. I make no claims: your judgment is your own.
Thanks for the charmingly-named “asshole-pseudo-scientist.png” screenshot. It’s interesting that less than two hours after you noted that I had the integrity to link to the originals, you made a screenshot without a link to the originals and claimed it was “in exactly the same spirit” and “no more out of context than anything he has stated.” Here’s the exchange pictured in that screenshot, complete with links to the originals. I still think they waste my readers’ time. But like you said, they can judge for themselves whether you were being unreasonable. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.
What a completely ridiculous assertion. As you admit yourself, just prior to that WE HAD BEEN DISCUSSING THE CONTEXT in that very same thread, on the very same page. Anybody who saw that was EXTREMELY likely to have read prior parts of the discussion, in which the context was clearly spelled out. If they didn’t, then they don’t have a claim of “out of context” anyway.
That is far, far different from pulling something out of another thread, on another page, out of context. If you think they are the same things or even comparable, you have a lot to learn. But I suspect you really don’t understand that difference, because I see you have done it on your blog, very often.
You are trying to compare apples and oranges and call it valid. Just another example of your foolish argument style. You would have been booted with prejudice from my high-school debate team.
Re: “khayman80”:
If the guy had simply asked, I would have said “Sure, go for it. As long as you include the context.”.
He did neither.
Here’s where I informed you that I’d be copying my comments to Dumb Scientist; you replied but didn’t object. I think this wastes my readers’ time, but they can judge for themselves. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.
In reply to the “notification” you claim to have made, here were your exact words. Which you could easily have quoted yourself, but I’ve noticed that you like to hide things behind links when you could easily quote them yourself… but from what I’ve seen you only do that when you think it’s in your favor:
Interesting here that you mention writing “an article” about “educated and polite” comments. But nowhere did you mention entire sections of your blog devoted to ripping my comments out of context without informing me at the time, then “arguing” with them here when I don’t even know they exist to rebut. Interesting also that you say you casually mentioned this “long before” ever doing it, but then didn’t see fit to properly notify me when you actually did it. (Until much later, that is.)
Do you honestly expect me to daily search your page to make sure you haven’t created yet another mischaracterization of my words?
Here is a practice that I have noticed on your blog, which makes it very difficult for someone to responsibly rebut many things you say: it’s a maze of links to links (some of which go in circles) that often make it difficult for anyone to see the full exchange. I do credit you with (often) linking to an actual exchange, but even then you link to a part of it, not the whole thing. On the surface, you appear to be giving the nod to opposing viewpoints, but the reality is that you link when you feel like it and quote when you feel like it in such a way as to skew the impression in your favor.
That’s not a “complaint”, it’s merely yet another observation about how much of your behavior has been, in my opinion, far short of professional.
It is also quite evident that time has supported many of the arguments I made to you in earlier years. For some reason, it appears to me that this has made you angry.
Thanks for the quote, but clicking on the copying link shows that I already quoted it almost two years ago. That next comment even shows that I properly notified Jane on 2009-07-20 at 1:40AM, which was a few hours after I posted this article. Maybe Jane’s observing that a few hours is “much later” to a mayfly. I get it: we should treasure every hour we have. That’s very Zen. Thanks Jane!
My statement that “your posts are among the most educated and polite of those taking your position” is a scathing criticism of climate contrarians, not a compliment. I don’t expect you to daily search my page because, as I’ve told you, I’m posting my comments as replies to your most recent Slashdot comment to make a frozen public copy, and to give you a chance to respond on neutral ground.
Which of the arguments you made earlier have been supported by time?
First, my quote was from the original source, not from your blog. I, for one, prefer not to post quotes of quotes of quotes. As for the notification, that was 5 years ago, or close enough. How often have you notified me since, that you have been posting ONGOING diatribes containing my comments out of context? I’ve come here to look every couple of years or so, but your comments elsewhere have gotten rather extreme, so I decided to look again.
No, you told me (see quote above) that you were writing “a blog article” (which is generally understood to be a one-time thing, because of the word ARTICLE), not a years-long one-sided “debate”. And I will remind you that long ago I retracted any permission to so use my words. I am simply not obligated to come to your site to defend myself from your distortions.
I am quite familiar with the fair use doctrine, and what it says about publicly available material. But I will remind you also what that name means. Not all forms of “use” are fair game.
I do not intend to get into an argument about it here. I made an observation. If you disagree, you disagree.
I will also point out that your claim to the effect that you are “freezing comments in time” is pretty obviously disingenuous. The vast majority of comments of mine that you have used still exist in original form and could easily be referenced in their entirety, rather than cherry-picked fragments.
The excuse you make is not justification for repeatedly presenting my own comments in a manner that is obviously intended to reflect meanings or nuances that were not intended when I wrote them. I have mentioned this to you many times now.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
First you claimed I hadn’t notified you until after this article was posted, which you felt was “somewhat unethical”. After I linked and quoted my notification, you didn’t retract your suggestion that I’m “somewhat unethical”. Instead, you complained about the way I quoted my notification.
Then you claimed I hadn’t notified you after I wrote this article until “much later” when I’d actually notified you within a few hours. Will you retract your claim, or is “much later” actually defined as a few hours in Janeland?
Now you’re claiming I don’t notify you each time I write a comment debunking your misinformation. But again, I’d been posting my comments as replies to your most recent Slashdot comment. At least, I did until you politely requested that I post without replying to you. Now you’ve switched back to complaining that I don’t notify you. And you’re recursively complaining that I said you’re complaining.
So I suspect that even if I quoted your endless comments in their entirety, you’d just switch to complaining that I quoted your comments in their entirety. After all, the fair use four factors include “amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole” so larger portions would more strongly affect Lonny Eachus’s potential market or value for all his Jane Q. Public gems.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
And finally (barring unforeseen circumstances this WILL be the last):
The later replies by “khayman80”, in the Slashdot threads, were not answered. And they were not answered for 2 reasons: (1) He had demonstrated bad faith in his discussions, and (2) I told him I would no longer answer him.
That does not mean that I did not have answers.
(Ed. note: Due to unforeseen circumstances, Jane continues ranting here.)
Let’s find out. I’ll debunk more of your misinformation, and posterity will see if you actually do have answers.
(Ed. note: This comment was originally posted on 2010-04-06, and was copied from here (backup) after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
…
Yes, I’ve seen that happen to you quite a few times. Here’s one example:
When I read this comment, it seemed like you were equating climate science with astrology. But when Dr. Spork pointed that out, you said:
When hey! drew a similar conclusion, you said:
Perhaps there’s an alternative to your hypothesis that “everyone but Jane Q. Public got a low reading comprehension schore in school.” For instance, Beezlebub33 made excellent points, but the obligatory XKCD beat him to the punch.
You do make a good point, though. Your comment would only have equated climate science with astrology in some kind of bizarre alternate universe where NASA and NOAA are government agencies offering advice about climate change.
…
(Ed. note: This comment was originally posted on 2010-02-13, and was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
Perhaps it would help to show an example where my editing wasn’t intended to portray you in a negative light. After you cited an E&E paper to support the claim that sunspot cycle length is responsible for recent warming, I said:
After some more unpleasantness, I later repeated:
You responded:
I was shocked to see this comment. But addressing your mistakes wouldn’t have been scientifically interesting or productive. So my only reply (on Slashdot or on Dumb Scientist) was this:
I had every intention of leaving it at that. There was no reason to point out that you scolded me for mentioning the data smoothing after some period of time, when in fact it was the second time I’d mentioned it. The first instance, which you seem to have missed, happened nearly 12 hours earlier in my first comment regarding the E&E paper.
There also wasn’t any point in mentioning that I’d already provided two links in an attempt to help two different kinds of readers follow the debate. For experienced scientists, I linked the google scholar citations. For nonscientists, I linked a summary of the debate at Real Climate.
What really shocked me was that you bragged about independently finding a paper that was prominently linked in the fourth paragraph of that summary: “As discussed at length by Peter Laut and colleagues, the excellent correlation between solar cycle length and hemispheric mean temperature only appeared when the method of smoothing changed as one went along.”
It wasn’t buried under dozens of nonsensical links as in the pages you were citing. In fact, it was only the second link in the text. Now, I’m not saying that you read the summary and deliberately quoted it as though you’d found it on your own. I believe that you did find it yourself in 2 minutes using google, and that it’s merely a coincidence that you could have found it in 2 seconds by opening up the link I gave you originally.
I choose links in an attempt to satisfy the curiousity of both scientists and nonscientists. The google scholar link can uncover much more interesting research than Real Climate. For instance, Eos is a fine publication which I receive and enjoy, but it’s more of a newspaper than a research journal. For example: “We first sent it to EOS for their Forum section, which as Roger says, it seems well suited for. Note that this is not a formally peer-reviewed publication in the way that most academic journals are – it is a newspaper, not a research journal (their own choice of words).”.
More primary research includes Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s 2003 rebuttal.
I didn’t say a word about this because I don’t argue to win. My goal in a debate is to learn and educate, not to humiliate people or portray them in a negative light. That’s why I originally ignored statements like these:
I chose to be privately amused by these boasts rather than respond to them. But then you repeatedly accused me of unethical behavior, and that was annoying.
Another example of cherry-picking what you reproduce here, in order to make yourself look good. You just can’t seem to resist.
You accused me of not citing my sources, and asked me to provide a peer-reviewed paper supporting my statement, implying that none existed. I did so, per your request. In fact it took me only a very short time to do so, because it was one of many.
You were not satisfied, and pointed out a flaw in the paper. This (as it turned out later) was a legitimate criticism of the paper… BUT you did not cite your own sources for that. Instead, I was forced to spend time finding it myself. Which did indeed make you guilty of EXACTLY the same thing you had originally accused me of doing.
But you didn’t put those first parts here. In fact, it appears to me that most everything on this page is somewhat out of context. And I suspect that’s intentional.
I do know about “fair use”. I found it rather laughable that today, on Slashdot, you pointed me to references about libel… long after I wrote that I did not intend to sue you. And in fact I stated as much in clear, concise, English, and never, at any point, wrote that I did intend to sue you.
You know very well that I did not “threaten” (your word) to sue you, so why are you linking to libel laws in association with my name? What is the point of bringing it up again in that fashion, unless it is to give readers a false and misleading impression?
Once again, I question your methods and your ethics.
I linked to libel laws in response to your comment:
This high-schooler somehow thinks he/she can protect him/her self from libel and copyright by stating on the blog that “someone” said something, while still partially quoting said “someone”. And then even including a link to the original exchange. Haha. If I were this person, and possessed some intelligence, I would shut this site down. Sadly, it is looking more like he/she is going to end up in Litigation Land. [Jane Q. Public]
You think I didn’t already see that?
This comment (and I will repeat it here myself):
… stated my honest opinion at the time: your arguments were below the quality of a decent high-school debate, and that if you keep presenting things on your blog in the manner in which you have, then you are likely to get sued (the reference to “litigation land”).
But as I also clearly stated: *I* was not threatening to do so. I told you in very clear English, where everybody could see it, that under current circumstances I had no reason to try to sue you.
Sheesh. Get it straight.
This is one of the things you have failed to get straight: you seem to have trouble distinguishing between what people actually state, and your interpretation or inferences about what they state.
There is a difference. In your case, and in my opinion, that difference is large.
And just in case you fail to understand the comments I just made above, as you have so thoroughly failed to comprehend so many of my other comments, I will sum it up for you here in fewer, simpler words:
The fact that I opined that you were screwing up and were likely to get sued, DOES NOT equal a “threat” to sue you myself!!!
(Ed. note: This comment was originally posted on 2010-02-16, and was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
…
Why don’t you email the authors and see if they agree with that assessment?
Oh, you’re only saying that most of the evidence and most scientists agree that recent warming is largely due to anthropogenic CO2? Gee, I got entirely the wrong impression from your previous statements. It seemed like you were trying to compare climatology to astrology, and saying that greenhouse models are fundamentally flawed, and saying that the methodology used by scientists who “do not know their statistical asses from a hole in the ground” to reconstruct modern temperature trends was “destroyed” by an economist who can’t keep his degrees and radians straight.
My bad. Like you’ve repeatedly said, I clearly don’t understand a word you’re saying.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
You already have. Not one, but many. Perhaps not “sweeping claims” — that is a straw-man — but claims nevertheless. Any paper that relied on the data supplied by CRU over those years also relied on those ridiculously weak temperature proxies. That’s a fact, khayman. But then, I keep forgetting that such facts do not seem to sway you when they are on “that side” of the argument.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
…
Again, what are you talking about? I just haven’t seen any papers that fit this (obviously fraudulent/ridiculous) description. I’d like to at least see these extremely questionable papers that you’ve repeatedly accused me of accepting.
If you’re genuinely interested in the physics and independent verification, I highly recommend borehole data. By measuring the temperature of the ground at various depths, past surface temperatures can be reconstructed using heat conduction equations.
This isn’t based on CRU data at all, but it’s also consistent. That’s not too surprising, because there’s no evidence that the CRU data was falsified as you imply. If you don’t believe me, download the data from different centers and apply the same analysis as in that “no evidence” link. Or come up with a better analysis to uncover evidence of this nefarious conspiracy. Seriously. I’d be interested to see the results of your code. Post them, and I promise I’ll read them.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
…
… This statement is just yet another of your many disingenuous remarks. I have already explained to which papers I refer, and if you cannot make some small logical inferences about exactly which papers I mean, then I question your ability to do it about anything else. And I object in the strongest terms to the use of the word “fraudulent”. That is going much too far. I don’t care a whit if you disagree with me, but if you have any evidence of fraud on my part, I challenge you to present it right now. I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but you won’t get away with that kind of garbage.
My personal opinion might be that you are an insufferable, hypocritical asshole, and that your arguments are frequently contradictory, facetious, hypocritical, or disingenuous, but actual “fraud” never crossed my mind. An opinion that my claim was “ridiculous” is yours to have if you wish, and I don’t give a damn, but stating that I made one or more statements that were “obviously fraudulent” is serious enough that you had best either back it up with evidence NOW, or back the hell off. You have very much gone over the line.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
…
The prediction of ozone recovery isn’t the province of GCMs. As I said, that’s a forcing, not a part of the model. And it’s believed to be happening because of the ban on CFCs.
Strangely enough, I’ve been agreeing with your “sole point” about the temperature trends for weeks:
“In contrast, stratospheric temperature trends aren’t as well understood.”
“Yet again, I’m saying that stratospheric trends aren’t as well understood as surface trends …”
And in this post I agreed with that claim.
But, as I said at the end of this comment, I must have gotten the wrong impression about your sole point from previous comments. Like I said at the end of that post, my bad. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to misinterpret your position as though you were trying to use this paper to demonstrate that GCMs are fundamentally flawed. That’s completely my mistake, and I’d like to apologize once more.
I didn’t mean that you were engaging in fraud. I meant that your description of this “bristlecone pine” situation clearly implies that you think scientists are either ridiculously incompetent or literally faking their data (i.e. fraudulent). Isn’t that what you were saying?
If by “ignore” you mean that I’ve asked you to show me the faulty papers in question, yeah. Please note that I’m not telepathic, so I don’t know what paper you’re talking about. Yes, this means I’m too stupid to do research. I understand that you think I’m an idiot or a conspirator, so there’s not much point in repeating that statement.
But please, could you help me out and at least cite one paper based on these few bristlecone pines that you think is particularly questionable? I honestly just don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you’re going to accuse me of accepting these papers… shouldn’t I get to read them first?
That’s how I usually do it. I read the paper. Then I draw a conclusion about it.
(Ed. note: This comment copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
I have only a couple of comments to make, and those will be my final comments to you. Which is just as well, seeing as how this topic is about to drop off my queue again. Even if it doesn’t right away, I am not interested in any reply you may have.
And later:
Perhaps it really isn’t what you meant. But it IS what you wrote. Since I was the one doing the describing I am the only one who could have made a “fraudulent or ridiculous description”. The meaning of those words is very clear, and they don’t mean what you later claim them to mean. I note further that even if it were a misunderestanding (though I don’t see how, the meaning of those words is hardly vague), there was no apology forthcoming for such a serious and inexcusable mistake.
If it were not not for the fact that I am writing under a pseudonym, I would sue your ass and make it stick.
I ask you — and I want to emphasize how serious I am about this — to leave me alone in the future. I would say I demand it but I know of no reasonable way I can enforce that demand at this time. That means please refrain from butting in when I am having an exchange with someone else, and I shall no longer reply to any posts you make that address me, except to post my own comment explaining why I won’t answer you. I am also making copies of these recent posts for future reference.
That is all.
(Ed. note: This comment copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
As promised, I copied most of my comments to Dumb Scientist but removed your words and replaced them with paraphrased versions attributed to “Someone”.
As usual, I’ve removed your insults in an attempt to make this look like a more civilized conversation, and to focus on the science. Specifically, I removed the part where you interpreted “I just haven’t seen any papers that fit this (obviously fraudulent/ridiculous) description” as though I meant “I [Jane] am the only one who could have made a “fraudulent or ridiculous description”.
I really did just mean that I haven’t seen any papers that look extremely questionable (your words) or ridiculously incompetent (my words… which seem pretty similar). In fact, the situation you’ve been describing sounds so serious that it implies scientists are outright frauds. All I meant is that I haven’t seen such ridiculous and fraudulent papers. I’ve repeated that exact sentiment multiple times throughout our conversation, so I’m puzzled as to how you immediately jumped to a more sinister interpretation that’s inconsistent with the way I’ve used those phrases in the past.
Maybe if you’d asked me what I meant instead of (among other things) calling me a stupid, insufferable, hypocritical asshole… I might have been inclined to apologize for any vagueness in my statement. I will anyway, though: I’m sorry for any confusion my statement could have caused. I’ll try harder to be less ambiguous in the future.
The conversation as posted on Dumb Scientist also doesn’t draw attention to the contrast between these accusations (which really doesn’t seem like it could possibly be misinterpreted) and reality. Like I said in my reply to your previous accusations, that’s because I’m much more interested in discussing physics than humiliating people.
Have a nice day.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
I have no need to ask what you meant. What you WROTE was plenty clear enough. I won’t discount the possibility that it was a mistake, but if so, it was a damned big one and inexcusable, and so as far as I am concerned the result is the same.
Don’t try to make this look like I have done something wrong. If (just hypothetically — I am not accusing you of this) you had written something along the line of “Well, I haven’t seen any evidence from any other child molesters…”, and you later said “Wait! That’s not what I meant!”, do you think I should then ask what you really meant? I suggest that maybe just saying, “I am out of here. Even if it really was a mistake, I don’t want to be around when he makes another one of that caliber.” is the more appropriate response.
Gee, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable analogy. When you put it like that, I totally see your point.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
Yes, a very reasonable analogy. Let’s reminisce:
With that background established, here are the grievous insults I hurled at you:
Now, I still think that my statement is perfectly consistent with the way I’ve been characterizing your argument. You’re saying that scientists are ridiculously incompetent or outright frauds. But somehow, you interpreted that statement somewhat differently:
How baffling. At the top of this comment I quoted the only statement I’ve made about you. It still represents my viewpoint. That is, I think you’re trying to analyze issues that lie far outside your own professional experience, and as a result you’re making a series of errors that could be fixed with a healthy dose of graduate physics courses. I explicitly said that I don’t think you’re an idiot, just inexperienced in this field.
Furthermore, the notion that I think you’re a fraud (as in your hastily drawn conclusion) is just… nonsense. Fraud is the act of making a claim that you know to be incorrect. I wouldn’t accuse you of fraud because I don’t think you understand the physics involved in any of these arguments at anything higher than a sophomore-physics-undergrad-level… if that. You’re simply not capable of fraud. As I’ve said repeatedly, you’re making the kind of honest mistakes anyone could make if they assume that their specialty’s domain knowledge (computer science, programming, engineering, etc) makes them experts in quantum physics, relativity or modern climatology. In fact, you’re the quintessential example of my modified Salem hypothesis which says exactly that.
On the other hand, the scientists you’re accusing of incompetence and/or outright fraud (i.e. questionable practices, etc) are capable of fraud. (Which, curiously, doesn’t require an apology?) That’s why I’ve been repeatedly saying I just don’t buy this idea you’re presenting that scientists are incompetent and/or fraudulent.
But again, that analogy was amazingly reasonable and accurate. Your example of “Well, I haven’t seen any evidence from any other child molesters…” perfectly captured both the severity of my statement, and the ease with which it could be misinterpreted. Your analogy also portrayed your response as “I am out of here. Even if it really was a mistake, I don’t want to be around when he makes another one of that caliber.”
That also seems to be an extremely accurate version of your response to my statement in real life. You were polite, calm and rational. Kudos for your restraint and civility in both your analogy and in real life. It’s amazing how easy it is to clear up misunderstandings by introducing the topic of child molestation. I’ll have to remember to do that in my next conference presentation Q&A.
Other documented false accusations are ignored entirely (again, apologies aren’t necessary for that?), but I found several more instances where I mentioned that I was going to post our conversation long before actually doing so:
Jane Q. Public continues to lecture about science.
(Ed. note: This comment was originally posted on 2010-02-05, and was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
I appreciate that you at least appear to be trying to be objective. However, last time we had an exchange on Slashdot, and you mentioned to me that you were posting it on Dumb Scientist (or Bad Science, or whatever it was, I don’t remember now), I went to the site and was very surprised to find that only selected parts of our exchange had been presented there. To be blunt about it, it appeared to me that you cherry-picked specific parts of my posts and presented them out of the context of our actual exchange, in such a manner to make your side of the conversation appear to be more reasonable, and mine to be less. I left a comment to the effect that I would later reply to some specific objections I had, but in the long run I did not want to spend the time. While Slashdot exchanges are in fact public, I felt it somewhat unethical that you did not see fit to mention that you were posting any of our exchange elsewhere until AFTER it had been done, much less that you would present some of my comments out of context. Understand that in light of this, for whatever this statement may be worth here, you do not have my permission to post my comments elsewhere. If I find that you are doing so, I shall cease to exchange any words with you at all, and I shall post my reasons for that clearly not only on Slashdot, but also, if possible, on the offending site.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
Yes, and 2 minutes later I replied: I omitted the rest of your remarks to focus on the science, and as an act of mercy to my (undoubtedly overwhelmed) readers. Everyone wanting to read the rest of what you wrote can follow the numerous links leading to the original Slashdot conversation.
Most of the nonscientists I’ve spoken with display a very low ratio of “interesting physics-related comments” to “whiny conspiracy theories/insults”. As a result, their comments are abridged to focus on the few interesting comments. For example, compare my abridged version of Stormcrow309’s rant to the Slashdot original. Notice how he actually seems more reasonable in my version; that’s because my goal is to strip away the nonsense and focus on the science. Again, links to the originals are always available.
Well, as you can tell I’ve already posted this conversation. Goodbye.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
Your reasoning for omitting some comments did not seem to gibe with which particular comments you decided to omit. As I stated, it strongly appeared to me that the comments you used (sometimes out of context) were hand-picked to make any arguments appear very one-sided. I did not spend a lot of time on it, but that is the way it appeared to me. Perhaps the idea was to “focus on the science”, but there was a strong appearance of focusing on your personal version of the science, while dismissing others, perhaps unjustifiably.
In addition, despite the fact that I checked your evidence and repeatedly did the work to find some of my own, you obviously have included me in the mentioned “whiny conspiracy theories/insults” category, to which I object. I could as easily categorize you (with perhaps more justification) as an evangelical “warmist”, unwilling to consider contrary evidence when it is presented.
I did not see your reply because (as I clearly stated in my own post) I was very busy at the time, and intended to revisit the issue later.
You well know, as a reader of Slashdot, many (probably most) readers of a blog will never bother to check out links to original material.
The additional fact that twice now you have decided to post my edited comments elsewhere, without bothering to inform me until afterward, causes me to question your goodwill, if not your integrity. Perhaps there is nothing legal preventing you from doing so, but asking for permission or at least informing me in advance would have demonstrated a willingness to deal with others in good faith. That is not just the ethical thing to do, but also how things are normally done in polite society.
So, as I stated, for now I have no more to say to you, except to repeat that you do NOT have my permission to reproduce my words elsewhere, for any reason, without prior permission.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
Which probably works out in your favor, because (as with Stormcrow309) your rant looks marginally saner when some of the more insulting comments with little scientific content are removed. But from the very beginning I noted that your post was “huge” and “epic” right next to links to the original, and I publicized your claims of my dishonesty in the index in 7(k) as soon as you made it.
And I’m really confused about the notion that you were surprised to see my version, because all I did was copy my comments and post them, with your words quoted pretty much the same as they were quoted in the original conversation. I’m not obliged to act as your publisher. If you want to publish a more complete version of the conversation, feel free.
Huh? I wrote this comment before the majority of our conversation: … Just FYI, I’ll be linking to your comments and quoting them when I finally get around to writing a blog article about my experiences debating climate change with the general public. It’s usually helpful to see opposing points of view, and so far your posts are among the most educated and polite of those taking your position.
You even responded to it and didn’t object.
(Ed. note: This comment was originally posted on 2009-07-10, and was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
Hmm.. okay. Well, anyway, it’s been… interesting. Just FYI, I’ll be linking to your comments and quoting them when I finally get around to writing a blog article about my experiences debating climate change with the general public. It’s usually helpful to see opposing points of view, and so far your posts are among the most educated and polite of those taking your position.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
I’m sorry for being offtopic, but I don’t know how to reach you except via a Slashdot comment.
I just wrote a brief article on climate change that quotes some of your insightful and helpful comments to me in the past.
I’m scared that this article will be filled up with rude people insulting me, or (MUCH worse) acolytes blindly believing in whatever I say. So if you see any mistakes in my reasoning or have any questions, please leave a comment at the form at the VERY bottom of the page. I’d like for the first couple of people who do that to be polite and capable of disagreeing agreeably. That’s why I sent it to you first.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here after this complaint by Jane Q. Public. Anyone else who’s bored by this can skip ahead to more science.)
…
Oh, and I’m going to once again reproduce my own comments on Dumb Scientist. Notice that this is just like when I notified you in advance long before I posted any of our conversation, and even before most of our very first conversation. (You even replied and didn’t object.) Then you complained, saying something to the effect that since I didn’t copy all of your posts as well, I shouldn’t even be allowed to copy my own comments because they internally quote yours.
But I really want to share that anecdote and other info. So I’ll post my comments on Dumb Scientist (as I’ve always done) right after the end of our last conversation, but this time I’ll cite the internal blockquotes as coming from “Someone”. Of course, the links will lead here (but no one follows those, right?) so no one will know it’s you. Then I’ll replace your exact words in the blockquotes in my comments with paraphrased versions that– no matter how I write them– will likely provoke you into a blind rage. But either way, I won’t label these comments with your pseudonym, and all of your words will be replaced with the shortest, most neutral paraphrasings I can think of. Unless you claim the right to my words, or to the abstract concepts we’ve discussed, I don’t see how you would have reasonable grounds to object to this.
I guess I’ll have to come up with some kind of tortuous way around using the words “completely unknown” and “significant” and “destroyed” in my comments, though.
Oh, I also need to reword some of my phrases that imply continuity between “Someone” and “Jane Q. Public”.
Hmmm…
This will take quite a bit of time, but I don’t want to be accused of being unethical, or have people question my goodwill, integrity, or ability to deal in polite society. It seems a little odd that I’m not allowed to copy the comments I type into Slashdot’s comment box straight into the comment box on my own website, but you probably have a truer moral compass than I do, so I’ll defer to your wisdom and divert this time and effort away from my dissertation.
Mike Haseler, the Scottish “Sceptic”, calls climate science a scam.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
Could you please provide a citation documenting the claims made by these (unnamed) great many scientists you’re talking about?
Here’s a radiative forcings chart that actually does summarize research from many scientists:
Yeah, ~88% is less than 90%. The higher percentages in the Doran survey already included all the climatologists who are active publishers on climate change. So agreement is only as “low” as ~88% when climatologists who don’t publish regularly about climate change are included.
You seem to be implying that land-use changes can warm the global climate in ways that aren’t related to CO2. As shown above, land-use changes actually cause a cooling albedo effect. But land-use changes really do have a warming effect on the climate:
The primary source of the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial period results from fossil fuel use, with land-use change providing another significant but smaller contribution. Annual fossil carbon dioxide emissions[4] increased from an average of 6.4 [6.0 to 6.8][5] GtC (23.5 [22.0 to 25.0] GtCO2) per year in the 1990s to 7.2 [6.9 to 7.5] GtC (26.4 [25.3 to 27.5] GtCO2) per year in 2000–2005 (2004 and 2005 data are interim estimates). Carbon dioxide emissions associated with land-use change are estimated to be 1.6 [0.5 to 2.7] GtC (5.9 [1.8 to 9.9] GtCO2) per year over the 1990s, although these estimates have a large uncertainty. {7.3} [IPCC SPM, 2007]
In other words, land-use changes have warming effects because clearing jungles releases carbon stored in the vegetation. Note that in the 1990s, the upper bound on CO2 emissions due to land-use changes was less than half of the lower bound on those due to fossil fuel emissions.
Again, could you please provide a citation documenting the claims made by these (again, unnamed) many scientists you’re talking about?
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Jane lectures about the Casimir effect and warp drive.
I debunk Jane’s 2011 lecture on neutrino oscillation.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
These are very serious accusations, Lonny. And they’re all based on this WUWT article by Willis Eschenbach:
“One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like ‘Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn’t affect the results, it’s still warming.’ I got intrigued by one of the hacked CRU emails, from the Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth to Professor Wibjorn Karlen. In it, Professor Karlen asked some very pointed questions about the CRU and IPCC results. He got incomplete, incorrect and very misleading answers. … Professor Karlen was quite correct. The claims made by the CRU, and repeated in the IPCC document, were false. Karlen was looking at the evidence. … Now, I have not taken a stand on whether the machinations of the CRU extended to actually altering the global temperature figures. It seems quite clear from Professor Karlen’s observations, however, that they have gotten it very wrong in at least the Fennoscandian region. Since this region has very good records and a lot of them, this does not bode well for the rest of the globe …”
Sure, why not? The next day, Zeke Hausfather wrote When results aren’t bad which shows that Prof. Karlen, Willis Eschenbach and Lonny Eachus based their accusations on a misunderstanding of the geographical region represented in the IPCC’s time series. The first link in Zeke’s article leads to Lonny’s comment.
If scientists don’t bow to every absurd demand from contrarians, they’re accused of shutting out dissent. If scientists do work with a contrarian, he’s instantly respectable and has a fine reputation, so everything he writes is apparently endorsed by the scientific community. There’s no way out of this catch-22, which is presumably the point.
Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus: please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s threatening the future of our civilization.
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
GRACE isn’t a failure, Eric. The GRACE follow-on mission is scheduled to launch in ~2017, precisely because NASA recognizes that GRACE data are invaluable for studying the Earth’s changing gravity field.
That WUWT article you linked consists of Steven Goddard’s unfounded claims about GRACE scientists. Sadly, when Robert explained exactly how he was wrong— in depth, Goddard accused him of using strawman arguments, and twice accused him of dishonesty before inevitably babbling about Al Gore.
I’m a geophysicist studying GRACE data, and I don’t appreciate Steven Goddard’s baseless accusations, or the endless series of internet ninjas like Eric Worrall who regurgitate them. Please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s threatening the future of our civilization.
No, Goddard’s claim isn’t valid because GRACE reveals ice sheet thinning, which in Antarctica is primarily due to glacier acceleration, not melting. Glaciers are calving (creating icebergs) at an accelerating rate, which reduces the pressure on the rest of the glacier, speeding up its slide into the ocean. Anyone who clicked the links I provided would’ve already seen Robert’s helpful list of publications which make exactly that point. Skeptical Science even has a series of articles debunking Goddard’s claims. Since then, Rignot et al. 2011 (PDF) used InSAR to map these glacier velocities, once again independently confirming that GRACE-observed mass loss correlates with high glacier velocities.
I write open-source software which processes GRACE acceleration data to reveal the following present-day mass trend (here’s a Google Earth overlay, and other versions). Notice the crustal deformation from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake. GRACE also detected the 2005 and 2010 Amazon droughts, and the 2011 La Nina floods which were so strong, the oceans fell. GRACE also tracks global water storage. My research uses GRACE acceleration data to detect changes in gravity due to ocean tides, and I’ve described some of GRACE’s many contributions in my Slashdot interview.
So scientists are well aware that GRACE data contain a wealth of information about the climate and the Earth’s crust. Untangling these contributions is what we do for a living, after all. GRACE reveals mass loss in Greenland, West Antarctica, Patagonia, Alaska, the Himalayas, etc. Laser altimetry, radar interferometry and mass balance/flux measurements confirm this mass loss, as Robert noted. The largest remaining uncertainty is probably post-glacial rebound, but it can’t be responsible for accelerating mass loss.
Goddard really isn’t a credible source of information about science. For instance, a few months after he attacked GRACE scientists, Goddard confused triple points so badly that even Anthony Watts was forced to say “Steven, you really need to stop. … you are [behaving incredibly badly]“ A few months after that, Goddard accused Marc Airhart of contradicting himself because Goddard confused relative and absolute humidity. I tried to post a short comment correcting this mistake. My comment never showed up, of course.
About a month before Goddard’s article, Willis Eschenbach attacked GRACE scientists for similarly baseless reasons. Eschenbach’s blood boiled as he confused himself and others about GRACE, but he managed to heroically restrain himself (mostly) from “loudly speculating on the ancestry, personal habits, and sexual malpractices of the author”.
After suffering through Steven Goddard’s, Willis Eschenbach’s and Rush Limbaugh’s baseless accusations against GRACE scientists, it’s clear that they’re all incapable of changing their minds. The fact that Eric Worrall has twice regurgitated Goddard’s accusation without even bothering to address the points Robert and I have raised suggests that Eric has also lost his battle with Morton’s demon. Nevertheless…
Eric, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.
Outside of WUWT, who cares when the entire ice sheet disappears? What matters is that ice sheet thinning increases sea level, and that current research indicates that this (and thermosteric expansion) will cause sea level to rise 1-2 meters by 2100.
It’s hard to tell the cause of that discrepency because you didn’t cite your sources, but Goddard’s calculation seems strangely familiar. Either they’re using different models of post-glacial rebound (Antarctica’s PGR correction is more uncertain than Greenland’s) or they’re talking about different timespans.
That depends on which timespan you consider. For instance, here are two recent papers:
“Since 1992, the polar ice sheets have contributed, on average, 0.59 ± 0.20 mm/year to the rate of global sea-level rise.”
“… the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, including their peripheral GICs, contributed 1.06 ± 0.19 mm/year to sea level rise” from 2003 to 2010.
Notice that the second estimate (which refers to a more recent timespan) is almost twice as large as the first. That isn’t an isolated incident. Scientists aren’t concerned about the current rate of ice sheet mass loss, we’re concerned because it’s obviously accelerating.
No, that’s an incorrect description. Signal is distinguished from noise using statistics. I just calculated the statistical significance of Greenland’s (and West Antarctica’s) ice sheet mass loss since 2003 using the new JPL GRACE mascon solutions. Their trends/rates are both significant at the 95% confidence level, even when using an ARMA(1,1) noise model. Their accelerations are also statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. So both the trends and the accelerations are “signal”. I’m writing a Dumb Scientist post about statistical significance, and will release my R code and data when I’m finished.
Ice sheet mass loss is already accelerating faster than the models (including JPL’s Ice Sheet System Model) predicted. Basic physics and paleoclimate evidence both imply that this acceleration will continue. That’s why sea level is rising faster than the IPCC predicted. Scientists have already determined that sea level rise is a threat, because the extra meter (at least) that we expect by 2100 will:
Eric, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.
That’s an excellent list compiled by Barton Paul Levenson, who includes references for both the predictions and confirmations. However, he’s being too kind when he says that a bug was found in the UAH satellite data. There were actually at least four separate bugs, all found by other scientists. Here’s a brief timeline:
Spencer and Christy 1990 claimed their UAH satellite temperature record was “more precise” than surface measurements, and revealed “no obvious trend” from 1979-1988. Dr. Spencer’s later statements suggest he was being very modest.
Gary and Keihm 1991 showed that natural variability in only 10 years of UAH data was so large that the UAH temperature trend was statistically indistinguishable from that predicted by climate models.
Hurrell and Trenberth 1997 found that UAH merged different satellite records incorrectly, which resulted in a spurious cooling trend.
Wentz and Schabel 1998 found that UAH didn’t account for orbital decay of the satellites, which resulted in a spurious cooling trend.
Fu et al. 2004 found that stratospheric cooling had contaminated the UAH analysis, which resulted in a spurious cooling trend.
Mears and Wentz 2005 found that UAH didn’t account for drifts in the time of measurement each day, which resulted in a spurious cooling trend.
After these bugs were fixed, the UAH data revealed a warming trend that’s consistent with climate models and with surface measurements.
I’ll debunk Eric’s other claims when I get a chance, but I’m at the Fall AGU conference trying to simultaneously prepare my talk, attend other scientists’ talks, and debunk Jane Q. Public’s similar claims. So it might be a while before I respond, especially because these conversations are obviously complete wastes of my time. In the meantime, Eric might want to look carefully at the dates on Barton Paul Levenson’s prediction and confirmation references, and then reconsider his accusation that scientists aren’t making predictions. I’m not holding my breath, though…
After Eric Worrall kept calling GRACE “junk” I posted this:
Again, Eric, I’ve been overwhelmed with contrarians who seem more interested in wasting my time than learning about GRACE. If I respond to your comments about this GRASP proposal, will you reconsider your position? Even for a little bit?
I didn’t ask you to accept, just to please consider the possibility that JPL understands GRACE and GRASP better than WUWT. Right now I’m busy finishing a paper and responding to hordes of contrarians who are clearly just trying to waste my time by regurgitating talking points and ignoring everything I say. But if you’re different- if you’ll actually listen- then I’ll try to respond to your comments within the next month. Stay tuned.
No, Eric. That’s not what JPL believes. You’re just regurgitating WUWT’s absurd claims and falsely attributing them to JPL scientists like me. Again, I’ll try to respond when I can find the time.
I didn’t miss your link; you already showed it to me. It just doesn’t support your claims that GRACE is junk, etc.
Eric, please stop digging this hole. It’s not helping to convince me that you’re going to listen to a JPL scientist with an open mind. Why should I even bother trying to engage with you?
If I show that I’m a JPL scientist, will you read what I’ll write with an open mind and then please reconsider your claims that GRACE is junk, etc.?
If not, there’d be no point in spending many hours to show that you’re repeating baseless claims from WUWT about GRACE and GRASP, then falsely attributing those claims to JPL.
Trying? Cute is a word reserved for little girls with pigtails riding tricycles.
Bah. Everyone’s a critic. ;)
Thanks Stephen. I’m swamped now but will post it here and tweet when I’m finished.
You and Nick might be right. But I still have enough faith in humanity to hope that Eric will prove you both wrong by listening with an open mind.
Thanks; you’re not the first (or even the twentieth) person to tell me I’m wasting my time talking to contrarians. Frankly, I’d rather be Don Quixote than fiddle while Rome burns. Long live humanity!
Eric, I care because we met when you called GRACE a failure based on WUWT nonsense. Debunking it was anticlimactic because you just called GRACE junk based on other WUWT nonsense. Except now you’re falsely attributing this nonsense to JPL, which is worse. I worry that debunking this nonsense will simply prompt you to escalate your accusations again. That would matter, both for your own legacy and the future of our civilization.
Instead of tears, I’d much prefer an end to these baseless accusations against scientists. Please?
I’ll take that as a no.
Eric, you’re still digging that hole by libeling my colleagues by name while pretending they support your WUWT claim that GRACE is junk. I’ve tossed you rope; before I pull it up I hope you tie a bowline around your waist rather than some other knot.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Eric Worrall implies scientists want to force totalitarian dictatorship, lectures me about quantum physics, PCA, etc.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again, and again…
Quite apart from the fact that it’s actually a Republican idea, it’s clear that China’s not short-sighted enough to remain dependent on coal. We can work together, without need for an iron curtain.
Note that British Columbia is part of Canada.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Eric, if you ever tire of lecturing scientists about science, you should lecture Reagan’s economics advisor about economics.
That’s not necessary. The plan suggested by Republicans like Reagan’s economics advisor (great 2 minute video) would impose a tariff at the border for any country that doesn’t have the courage to prevent their industries from treating our atmosphere as a free sewer. That’s a powerful economic incentive, and we can check their compliance using satellites. As Reagan said, trust but verify.
As an American, I admire the leadership that Australia, British Columbia, and many other countries have shown. We’ll eventually wake from our slumber. I just hope we’re not too late.
Eric claims 1.6°C was “denier” territory (his words) so I show him the 1979 Charney report.
Then he asks about “flatlining” temperatures, so I show him my UAH analysis which reveals that there hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the rate of warming. So his question is like asking how many years the carnivorous unicorn outbreak is going to continue.
Eric Worrall blames me for all the CO2 “fertilizer” we’re emitting because I support nuclear in my own way, rather than exactly as he demands. So he blackmails humanity: “watch our deadlock destroy your world.”
Updates:
He also falsely attributes WUWT nonsense to NOAA, and continues to insist that it’s reasonable to discuss the outbreak of carnivorous unicorns.
He also calls ocean acidification a joke and pure junk science alarmism, repeatedly fails to mention that the Younger Dryas was a local event, and says that CO2 emissions will feed the hungry.
He also claims that anti-vaxxers are nuts before blaming doctors for the MMR vaccine scare and linking to a Daily Mail tabloid article that continues to try to link vaccines to autism.
He also repeatedly denies that mainstream estimates of sea level rise are due to paleoclimate evidence, preferring to believe that they’re due to “dodgy computer models.”
He’s happy for coal to be burned until it is exhausted, even though it’s a nasty fuel which Eric justifies because he ignored me when I pointed out that carbon fee and dividend plans don’t increase energy prices for the poor.
Does the Dunning-Kruger effect explain the Fermi paradox?
Eric repeatedly lectures scientists about the scientific consensus.
Eric repeatedly wonders why people won’t work with him while suspecting that many of us are “frustrated communists in green drag,” and accusing me and my colleagues of being panhandling scum who kill poor people.
When I demonstrate that there hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the rate of warming, Eric starts talking about Nazis and eugenicists and once again cites Steven Goddard. Then he cites a meaningless extrapolation and confuses the future with the past.
Eric babbles about lags, ignoring the end-Permian, PETM, and the thawing of Snowball Earth. He lies about the 1970s and even blames me for spreading his misinformation.
Backups, backups, backups, backups, backups, backups, backups.
Eric keeps denying that climate science is falsifiable. Eric and Mark spread confusion about dark energy and the Big Bang, joining Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus.
Yes. As Admiral Titley explains, that’s why it’s impossible to get drunk.
Also explain that your blood alcohol was much higher in the past, and alcohol is just brain food anyway, and your lack of coordination is actually due to cosmic rays, and scientists in the 1970s said alcohol makes us sober, and your blood alcohol hasn’t increased in the last 5 minutes, and Al Gore, and people on Mars are drunk too, and you’d stop drinking if only it wouldn’t kill poor people, etc…
After insisting that alcohol is a minor trace chemical, explain that Coors Light is such a powerful intoxicant that your blood was saturated after your first sip. Therefore, all the empty cans in your lap are irrelevant.
You don’t have to make sense, just spread confusion.
After implying that minor chemicals can’t have a large impact on coordination, quote scientists but don’t mention that the quoted section is How can minor chemicals have such a large impact on coordination?
Update: Mark both has and hasn’t read of the Slayers.
2015-10-07 Update: The same “hazym” gravatar used by Mark and a (different?) “marke” later show up at Hot Whopper.
Ironically, we can take the blue sky from future generations.
And why not? Many babies are whiny, smelly, illiterate, incontinent, unemployed layabouts suckling at Big Mother’s teat. Many don’t even speak English, and history suggests they’ll take our jobs!
So let’s crush their future. Serves ’em right for the Look Who’s Talking sequels.
Luckily, we just have to do exactly what we’ve been doing. Bwahaha!
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
When you claimed that climate scientists predict temperature trends on timescales of 8 or 9 years, I pointed out that 8 or 9 years is too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. Now you’ve tightened your self-imposed blinders even further by talking about 2 or 3 year temperature trends. Note that any 2 or 3 (or 8 or 9) year timespan would be too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. It’s not something special about the last 2,3,8, or 9 years, so contrarians can recycle this talking point ad nauseum. That’s the entire point of the Escalator, in fact. (Incidentally, at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures.)
But let’s read your article, Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague, by David Rose:
[Prof. Judith Curry] said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis. … Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming. In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained. ‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’ However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill. ‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’. … As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is ‘hide the decline’ stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline. ‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’
Wow. These are very serious accusations. But are they valid?
The graph in Rose’s article labelled “the inconvenient truth” is misleading, but mainly for the same reason that Jane’s references to short term trends are misleading. Since that graph only shows ~10 years of data, it can only tell us about the noise in the climate, not the long-term trend. But this isn’t really the media’s fault: Prof. Curry started talking about absurdly short timespans herself by talking about the trend since 1998.
Also, the abrupt cooling shown in the BEST data in April and May of 2010 isn’t real. Those months only include data from 47 stations in Antarctica, compared to March 2010 which has 14488 spread around the world. So April and May of 2010 don’t represent global temperatures, and thus shouldn’t be included in the analysis. That’s also misleading, but again it’s not really the media’s fault.
Less than a month before your comments, Anthony Watts also linked David Rose’s article and also noted that “timescales don’t match on graphs above”. So there’s no need to link to conspiracyblogging.com, even aside from the bigger problems described above (and below) with Prof. Curry’s quotes in David Rose’s article. (In fact, as of 2012-11-29, the entire conspiracyblogging.com domain seems broken. Perhaps the black helicopters got to them?)
All your newspaper articles repeat the claims made in David Rose’s article, including James Delingpole’s obviously unbiased Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again. I really do need more convincing, so I went to Prof. Curry’s own blog and read her comments myself:
… In David Rose’s article, the direct quotes attributed to me are correct. To set the record straight, some of the other sentiments attributed to me are not quite right, I will discuss these here. “Hiding the truth” in the title is definitely misleading, I made it pretty clear that there was uncertainty in the data itself, but the bigger issues are to analyze the data and interpret it. I made it clear that this was not a straightforward and simple thing to do. I told Rose that I was puzzled by Muller’s statements, particularly about “end of skepticism” and also “We see no evidence of global warming slowing down.” I did not say that “the affair had to be compared to the notorious Climategate scandal two years ago,” this is indirectly attributed to me. When asked specifically about the graph that apparently uses a 10 year running mean and ends in 2006, we discussed “hide the decline,” but I honestly can’t recall if Rose or I said it first. I agreed that the way the data is presented in the graph “hides the decline.” There is NO comparison of this situation to Climategate. Muller et al. have been very transparent in their methods and in making their data publicly available, which is highly commendable. Added note: I have dug into my memory. Rose brought up hide the decline in our first interview, in the context of the plot that ends in 2006. He called me back specifically to discuss this and teased the “hide the decline” out of me. The hide the decline discussion was in this particular context.
So Prof. Curry herself says that Rose’s article misrepresents her in several ways, but she also repeats her accusation that Muller is “hiding the decline”.
The BEST study was intended to debunk claims like these:
Global Warming: is it even happening? Check out this magisterial report by our old friends Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts and judge for yourself. In brief: the surface temperature records are such a mess that they simply can’t be trusted. [James Delingpole, 2010-01-28]
But after the BEST results were announced, Delingpole apparently developed selective amnesia:
“The planet has been warming,” says a new study of temperature records, conducted by Berkeley professor Richard Muller. I wonder what he’ll be telling us next: that night follows day? That water is wet? That great white sharks have nasty pointy teeth? That sheep go “baaaa”? … In the first half of his piece, Professor Muller sets up his straw man. He does so by ascribing to “skeptics” views that they don’t actually hold. Their case, he pretends for the sake of his wafer-thin argument, rests on the idea that the last century’s land-based temperature data sets are so hopelessly corrupt that they have created the illusion of global warming where none actually exists. … What is going on is exactly the kind of utterly reprehensible dishonesty and trickery I anatomise more thoroughly in Watermelons. [James Delingpole, 2011-10-21]
Actually, being able to change one’s mind after analyzing data is one defining characteristic of a scientist. I’ve repeatedly noted this in our conversations, and stressed it in my 2012 Earth Science Week article.
Note that Anthony Watts’s attacks on Muller were a 180-degree reversal from his previous position: “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they [BEST] produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” When Watts discovered that the BEST results confirmed the global temperature rise, he quickly called the paper “fatally flawed”. Anthony Watts then mocked Muller, WUWT moderator Smokey/dbs said that “Muller’s actions are despicable“, and Willis Eschenbach called the BEST team “media whores” twice before concluding that Muller is a “cunning snake”.
Watts and Eschenbach accused Muller of “whoring for the media” because he publicized the study before it passed peer review (that’s only okay when WattsUpWithThat does it). Furthermore, in 2010 Watts had publicized his non-peer-reviewed Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? which claimed that “Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era(1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant ‘global warming’ in the 20th century. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit signs of urban heat pollution and post measurement adjustments that render them unreliable for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.”
In other words, Watts repeatedly claimed that sites classified as urban would show more warming than rural sites because of urban heat pollution. Of course, when actual scientists helped Watts get his paper through peer review, it grudgingly conceded that “overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.”
So Watts and Eschenbach were criticizing Muller for showing that mean temperature trends aren’t significantly contaminated by urban heat pollution… which Watts had essentially conceded in 2010.
Good grief, not this again. Let’s read Muller’s article to see what prompted all your shouting this time:
What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice. … How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect – extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. [Richard Muller, 2012-07-28]
Oh. You’re shouting because Muller finally analyzed the data and drew the obvious conclusion. And you’re insisting that this is “NOT what the Berkeley study says” and urging people to “read a bit further”. So let’s do that:
Human Effect Many of the changes in land-surface temperature can be explained by a combination of volcanoes and a proxy for human greenhouse gas emissions. Solar variation does not seem to impact the temperature trend. The annual and decadal land surface temperature from the BerkeleyEarth average, compared to a linear combination of volcanic sulfate emissions and the natural logarithm of CO2. It is observed that the large negative excursions in the early temperature records are likely to be explained by exceptional volcanic activity at this time. Similarly, the upward trend is likely to be an indication of anthropogenic changes. … [Berkeley’s results]
Despite Jane’s suggestion, we really didn’t need to read further. The Berkeley study is clearly saying the same thing as Muller. But let’s keep reading anyway:
A more sophisticated analysis of the forcings and the details of the climate response may be able to improve upon the crude estimate offered here based solely on the linear combination fit. … In the simple linear combination, the anthropogenic term based on the logarithm of CO2 concentration has an effective response of 3.10 ± 0.34°C at doubled CO2 (95% confidence). This is within the IPCC range for the equilibrium climate sensitivity at doubled CO2 of 2-4.5°C; however, several important caveats apply. Firstly, the estimate provided here is based solely on land observations, and as such should be expected to overestimate the global change. Based on the last fifty years, IPCC observations suggest the land has warmed ~35% faster than the global average. Secondly, these numbers reflect the transient climate response to ongoing increases in CO2. Based on the global climate models runs reported by the IPCC, such a transient response will underestimate the equilibrium response by ~20-50%. Lastly, we reemphasize that CO2 is being used here as proxy for all anthropogenic effects, and is only reasonable because most anthropogenic effects are roughly proportionally to CO2. Despite these caveats, and the offsetting corrections for faster land warming and transient climate response, our very simple linear model is consistent with a climate sensitivity of around 3°C for an effective doubling CO2, consistent with the IPCC. [Berkeley’s results, p16-17]
Prof. Curry claims that this attribution is overly simplistic and is not convinced. That’s a bizarre objection after contrarians have complained (baselessly) for years that climate models are overly complex:
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect – extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. … Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase. [Richard Muller, 2012-07-28]
You’re repeatedly shouting the word PAST, as though attribution studies are supposed to measure future temperatures and forcings… perhaps using a TARDIS?
It’s clear that Jane’s impressed with Prof. Curry’s accusations, which are based on these statements:
In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties … ‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. … As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is ‘hide the decline’ stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline. ‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. … [Prof. Judith Curry (quoted by David Rose), 2011-10-30]
There has been a lag/slowdown/whatever you want to call it in the rate of temperature increase since 1998. [Prof. Judith Curry, 2011-10-30]
Does Prof. Curry have a scientific basis for these claims? Tamino
tried to postposted a comment at Prof. Curry’s blog asking her for that scientific basis, but she deletedither responseCorrection: Michael said his comment “was posted in reply to Judith’s post saying that she had no idea what Tamino was asking for (and that she couldn’t tell from the “screed” on his website), but it’s now vanished.”. So Tamino answered his own questions, showing that the BEST data have essentially identical trends before and after 1998.I confirmed Tamino’s analysis using the WoodForTrees database. As you can see by clicking “raw data” underneath the graph, the BEST trend from 1998 to 2010 is 0.22°C/decade. Compare that to the BEST trend from 1975 to 1998, which is also 0.22°C/decade. Apparently, that’s what Prof. Curry considers a “pause/lag/slowdown”. Much more importantly, the uncertainty in such short timespans is so large that no competent scientist would try to draw conclusions from them:
I mean, what they have done is an old trick. It’s how to lie with statistics, right? And scientists can’t do that because 10 years from now, they’ll look back on my publications and say, ‘Was he right?’ But a journalist can lie with statistics. They can choose a little piece of the data and prove what they want, carefully cutting out the end. If I wanted to do this, I could demonstrate, for example, with the same data set that from 1980 to 1995 that it’s equally flat. You can find little realms where it’s equally flat. What that tells me is that 15 years is not enough to be able to tell whether it’s warming or not. And so when they take 13 years, and they say based on that they can reach a conclusion based on our data set, I think they’re playing that same game and the fact that we can find that back in 1980, the same effect, when we know it wasn’t warming simply shows that that method doesn’t work. But no scientist could do that because he’d be discredited for lying with statistics. [Richard Muller, 2011-10-31]
Muller’s right: over short timespans (e.g. 13 years) the temperature trend is so uncertain that Prof. Curry doesn’t have a scientific basis for claiming that their data show a pause in warming. Muller even refers to the Escalator to show that this process noise has been present even as the world has rapidly warmed over the last few decades. And it’s not like the BEST team ignored the myth that global warming stopped in 1998:
Though it is sometimes argued that global warming has abated since the 1998 El Nino event (e.g. Easterling and Wehner 2009, Meehl et al. 2011), we find no evidence of this in the GHCN land data. Applying our analysis over the interval 1998 to 2010, we find the land temperature trend to be 2.84 ± 0.73 °C / century, consistent with prior decades. [Berkeley’s results (draft), p26, 2011-12-15]
So the BEST team already discussed the warming since 1998, and contradicted Prof. Curry’s claims. Note that their 95% confidence interval on the trend is way too small; perhaps they didn’t account for autocorrelation. This underestimated uncertainty might be why these sentences were removed from the final version of the methods paper.
Jane Q. Public and other contrarians obviously aren’t competent enough to analyze data, but Prof. Judith Curry is the Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prof. Curry is supposed to be a scientist, so she really should have analyzed the data before hurling baseless accusations of fraud at Muller. Sadly, no amount of evidence seems to matter: David Rose and Prof. Curry continue to blissfully repeat this misinformation.
Jane Q. Public, David Rose, Prof. Curry: please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacies and threatening the future of our civilization.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
That’s nonsense, Jane. Click on “raw data” then scroll down:
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0175687 per year
1978.92 -0.295807
2013 0.302992
So Layzej actually understated the warming trend, which his link calculates (not cherry-picks!) based on all the UAH satellite data to be 0.175°C/decade.
The supposed average? Do you mean the trend line fit to the UAH data with ordinary least squares? Also: what prior data? Again, there is no prior UAH data.
Again, this is nonsense. Layzej didn’t choose any years, as anyone who glances at the URL can tell. He loaded the entire UAH dataset.
Ironically, right after baselessly accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to show that the Earth is warming, you once again endorse cherry-picking a shorter timespan, despite the fact that shorter timespans have larger error bars.
These error bars can be shrunk by accounting for natural variability. I’ve recently discussed warming trends and uncertainties over the last 16 years. This graph removes natural variations like solar activity, ENSO, volcanos, etc. Notice that the warming trends since 1998 for all 5 adjusted datasets are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, and they’re all statistically indistinguishable from the IPCC’s projection.
No, you’re not arguing about anthropogenic global warming; you’re baselessly (and ironically) accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to “try” to prove the obvious point that the world is warming as scientists predicted.
Jane, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.
You’re right, woodfortrees is down. Instead, you could try the Skeptical Science trend calculator which also provides uncertainty bounds on the trend. Notice that when you select UAH without restricting the time period, it only goes back to December 1978 because that’s when the first satellite was launched.
You could always download the UAH data yourself and run a least squares regression using your own software. I’ve done that using R; here’s a PDF of my results. The regression line and its uncertainty come directly from R’s generalized least squares algorithm. It looks similar to the regression lines from woodfortrees and SkS. (Both my trend and SkS’s are closer to 0.14°C/decade; perhaps this is because SkS and I haven’t updated our local UAH datasets in over a year?)
The second page of my PDF calculates the trends and uncertainties of the UAH data up to 2012, for different starting years, using an ARMA(1,1) noise model. This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. Shorter timespans, such as 1998-2012, have larger uncertainty bounds (the red lines in that graph are 95% confidence intervals).
Update: Jane keeps digging.
So if CO2 has gone up from 350 to 400 PPM what parts of the atmosphere of the other 999,650 PPM that change to accommodate the increase of 50PPM of CO2.
Does nitrogen go from 780,000PPM to 779,950PPM? or does Oxygen go from 210,000 PPM to 209,950PPM or perhaps Water Vapour or Argon go from 10,000PPM to 9,950PPM. What does the Peer Reviewed research say about these movements in the PPM of the major components of the atmosphere?
Your previous comment at Cafe Whispers was similar:
You seem to be assuming that the mass of the atmosphere is constant, which is complete nonsense. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere doesn’t require any other gases to decrease in order to accomodate it. The atmosphere just gets slightly heavier. There’s no law of physics which forces the atmosphere to have a constant mass.
In fact, adding CO2 to the atmosphere warms the oceans, so they evaporate more water vapor into the atmosphere. This has been confirmed by multiple measurements showing a ~4% increase in global water vapor since 1970, as predicted by fundamental thermodynamics.
CO2 hasn’t been “about 350” ppm since the 1990s. According to climate.nasa.gov, CO2 is now at 393 ppm and climbing.
Peer-reviewed research shows that we’re increasing CO2 concentrations at least 10 times faster than during the last record, which preceded the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history.
No, O2 and N2 make up about 99% of the atmosphere, or about 990,000 ppm. Argon makes up about 0.93%, or 9,300 ppm. Water vapor varies due to temperature and other factors (see references in my last comment) but generally makes up another ~0.4% of the full atmosphere, or ~4,000 ppm.
Notice that these numbers don’t add up to 100% because water vapor depends on temperature and other factors so it’s not included in the “dry atmosphere”.
Perhaps it’s more useful to think about the masses of various gases in the atmosphere rather than their ppm fraction of the total. Especially because that total is constantly changing.
The mass of atmospheric oxygen is decreasing, but not to accomodate the CO2 on a ppm basis. In fact, oxygen wouldn’t be decreasing like this if the CO2 were vented from volcanos. But combustion uses up an O2 molecule from the atmosphere. So the fact that oxygen is decreasing as CO2 is increasing is one way we know that the added CO2 comes from combustion, not volcanic venting.
I’ve briefly discussed nitrogen after asking a question at an AGU lecture about nitrogen-induced pressure broadening in the context of the greenhouse effect and the faint young sun paradox. It’s not changing enough to matter now, though.
Your nuanced SFA point also implies that humans can’t get drunk. Please consider Admiral Titley’s analogy: the current ~393 ppm concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is similar to the concentration alcohol reaches in the blood when one starts to feel drunk.
I’ve previously discussed the IPCC’s 2035/2350 mistake. The WG2 report (not WG1, the science report) accidentally transposed the numbers. It was a mistake about the Himalayas, not the Arctic.
In reality, the Arctic sea ice is melting so quickly that the Arctic ocean could be essentially ice-free in September by 2030. This will expose the majority of the Arctic ocean to the atmosphere for the first time in
hundreds of thousandsthousands of years. (See this comment.)I study GRACE data which show accelerating ice mass loss in both Greenland and West Antarctica. As do GPS data, laser altimetry, estimates of precipitation minus glacier discharge, etc.
I’m a climate scientist. I live in a one bedroom apartment without a dishwasher or central air, and park my unsightly 12 year old Nissan Sentra in the dirt behind the building. What little time I have left after research, sleeping and eating is spent defending myself against a never-ending stream of baseless accusations, and drowning out the insults with Coors Light. I don’t socialize anymore because I don’t want to spread my depression.
A fashionable, fat career? Hardly; I’ve already burned out. If I could redo my education, I’d study anything but the climate. At this point, even foot fungus seems more interesting.
Tweed, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.
I’ve already pointed out that Antarctica’s mass loss is mostly due to glacier calving, not melting. That thread also shows how ice mass loss is distinguished from other gravitational effects.
No, that’s complete nonsense. The acceleration continues.
Two issues here DS. I think I’m speaking to Dumb Scientist. The thread is getting somewhat truncated.
Career wise my Golden Rule is…If I am not happy getting up at dawn to tear into work I realize that it is time to change jobs.
It has served me well over a long time. It sounds like a career of Global Warming stuff is not going to be a long term life plan for you emotionally or financially. Don’t be afraid to do something you get a buzz out of.
DS. Life is not a dress rehearsal. So ends our father son talk.
Now. I stick to my comments that the Global Warming fraternity, scientists or wide eyed evangelist are up shit creek in a barb wire canoe.
Too much undisciplined Global Warming BS has been vomited into the cyber world. People are not dopey. They read, digest, analyse and form an opinion. it is their democratic right. (depending in which country you vote of course) Opinion is that there is a fair degree of BS in what is packaged as “the science is in”, “the science is settled”. If it was settled we would not have these interminable blog exchanges. If the science was settled our BS Prime Minister would not be getting thrown out at the next election probably in March 2013.
Anyhow. Has anyone come up with the answer as to what gets sacrificed for the extra 50 PPM of CO2? O2 or N2 or do they share the pain. ….. and really there is a preponderance of people who do not give a rat’s arse either way.
As I said earlier. The Global Warmists are up Shit Creek in a barb wire canoe.
One other thing DS. When a Global Warmist goes to either of the Artics in WINTER, then I might take a modicum of notice of what they say. Haven’t been there but apparently it is DARK and FREEZING.
Yes, I’ve long suspected that all this abuse is meant to discourage scientists from studying the climate.
Your patronizing advice would be less hypocritical if it weren’t followed by the usual references to vomited BS, barb wire canoes and shit creek.
Sounds like you don’t give a rat’s arse about your own question, given that I’ve already answered it.
GRACE flies over both poles every 90 minutes during all seasons. Here are GRACE timeseries of the accelerating ice mass loss in Greenland and Antarctica. Clearly, ice gained during winter is less than the ice lost during spring and summer. That disparity has grown in recent years, which is why the ice mass loss is accelerating.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
I’ve already linked to peer-reviewed research showing that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to our CO2 emissions. My third comment shows results from 6 attribution studies which reach similar conclusions.
Analogies can be misleading; the ocean is not a glass of water. Increasing CO2 heats the cool skin layer over every square meter of the ocean surface. The same amount of sunlight warms the water below the skin layer, but less heat escapes up through the skin layer to the atmosphere.
You compared the heat capacities of the ocean and atmosphere, then calculated that the atmosphere would have to be at 4000°C to warm the ocean by 1°C if the heat came from the atmosphere. That’s completely irrelevant, because (as I’ve explained above) the heat comes from sunlight. Increasing CO2 just slows the rate at which that heat moves up, until it eventually leaves Earth at the effective radiating level.
Your article concludes:
Because there’s no significant trend in solar activity over the last 50 years as temperatures (and CO2) have both increased.
Update: Further reading.
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Baseless accusations of cherry-picking are depressingly common. I didn’t choose the timespans, the papers did. The 6 attribution studies shown in that graph had timespans between 50 and 65 years long.
That’s because our population and electricity use per person skyrocketed between 50 and 65 years ago, so our CO2 emissions also skyrocketed. It’s also long enough to establish statistically significant climate trends. No cherry-picking here.
Treeman quotes:
Interestingly, fewer sunspots mean the Sun is dimmer than normal. But not by much compared to our CO2’s extra radiative forcing. (Here’s a prettier chart which also projects into the future.)
Treeman quotes:
The key phrase is that “these results do not have any implications for global climate change…”
If you’re actually interested in global climate change due to a (hypothetical) solar Maunder Minimum in the future, you might want to read Feulner and Rahmstorf 2010 which says that its global climate effects would be “much smaller than the warming expected from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century.” Here are explanations for the general public.
Treeman also claims that global warming stopped in 1998, which is completely wrong, just like it was wrong the last time someone regurgitated this talking point, and the time before that, etc.
Treeman, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.
I look forward to reading your counter-argument in the peer-reviewed literature.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
I agree, Mobius Ecko. What scares me is that roughly 1000 people in the general public lose this particular battle with Morton’s Demon for every climate scientist in the world. We’re running out of time to reduce emissions quickly enough to limit global warming to “only” 2°C.
Obviously nothing could ever sway them, but I like to imagine that others with open minds might be reading. Frankly, I don’t know what else to do.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from a conversation regarding Steven Chu’s resignation as Obama’s Secretary of Energy.)
I’ve already addressed this:
To be precise, he suggested that any roof which needs to be replaced anyway be replaced with a white roof, and that roofs on new buildings be white. The costs of this strategy are negligible. The benefits include lower air conditioning bills for homeowners, lower CO2 emissions because of the reduced electricity demand, and reflecting sunlight back into space which helps cool the planet. Roofs in Siberia should remain black, but white roofs are optimal even away from the tropics because snow covers them during much bitterly cold weather anyway. Also, black roofs aren’t efficient heaters because heat rises, and there’s less sunlight in the winter. Plus, black roofs radiate heat away better than white roofs.
Nonsense. Making a new roof white rather than black has negligible costs, and many benefits.
Your recent lull in attacks on scientists prompted me to ignore your accusation that I’m quite simply lying, and your attacks on other scientists. However, your renewed misinformation campaign makes it clear that this was a mistake. I’ll add your other baseless accusations back to my list of contrarian arguments to debunk. Stay tuned.
Hey, my stalker is back!
Awesome.
Yes. I thought I mentioned this in a post on here, but it appears that comment got eaten.
Slashdot’s appetite for similar comments is insatiable.
So, wait.
You’re linking a post from another Slashdotter that you cyberstalk… to demonstrate that you can’t follow posts correctly on Slashdot anymore?
Was that the point?
My point was that the previously mentioned similarity deepens.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
That’s… hilarious, because 1) that hyperlink doesn’t have me accuse you of “quite simply lying” anywhere in it (in fact, you are nowhere in the thread), which 2) makes that a lie.
Anyone who cares to see which of us are telling the truth (which is most likely nobody), can go ahead and click on that link and see what I wrote myself.
Stop digging.
At this point, ShakaUVM leaves another charming comment.
There’s no need for you to read it, because you obviously read it (without comprehension) the first time around:
… I don’t have time to link everything now, but here’s the story: Phil Jones used to fulfill FOIA requests regularly. Then crackpots started flooding his office with too many requests to handle, in a type of harassment that reminds me of the Lenski affair. … You can’t mean McIntyre, who deliberately flooded his office with over 50 requests in a single week. … Notice that even if all those anti-AGW M’s only filed one request a month, that would still be 18 total requests per month, or 324 person-hours per month, which is two full-time jobs spent handling frivolous requests. Then imagine what would happen if there were some anti-AGW people with names that don’t start with “M” … [Dumb Scientist to ShakaUVM, 2011-01-27]
Defenders of Jones like to pretend he was being spamflooded by FOIA requests, but this is quite simply a lie from people unwilling to admit that “their team” could ever be in the ethical wrong. [ShakaUVM, 2011-10-30]
When you find yourself in a hole, it’s better to stop digging than to keep baselessly accusing scientists of lying.
Which was not written in response to you.
If you think that everything on the internet is about you, you have much bigger problems than I have been giving you credit for.
Heh. Okay, in that case I’m defending the anonymous defenders you’re accusing of quite simply lying when they echo my words.
Yep. If I think you’re not telling the truth, you can trust me to say it to your face. =)
I only trust the similarity between my words and those you claim are quite simply a lie.
Update: I’ve failedHow naive I was to expect Shaka to notice others’ responses to Jane’s stalking accusations, and ponder how they’d respond to his similar accusations. Or notice Jane’s hypocritical response to my observation that if responding to public comments is stalking, what’s it called when someone attacks scientists by repeatedly quoting hacked private emails? Notice that this observation applies equally to Shaka himself. It’s difficult to believe that Shaka really doesn’t notice that he paraphrased my comment and called it a lie, especially because of the other similarity I didn’t mention: he’s also previously accused me of having ‘a complete mental block to ever admit that someone in the anti-AGW camp might be right about something.’ But it’s especially puzzling that he thinks this is okay because he made that accusation to someone else. This is puzzling because libel law REQUIRES that other people read the claims. It’s actually worse now that he’s trying to convince other people that my paraphrased words are ‘quite simply a lie’ than when he was making those accusations directly to me. It’s also puzzling because ShakaUVM has already directly accused me of dishonesty at least four times (just search this page). to communicate once again.
My replies are on hold because ShakaUVM seems to supportIf Shaka wants to pretend that he’s previously proposed solutions similar to a revenue-neutral carbon tax, rather than comparing it to deindustrialisation, then so be it. the plan proposed by Republicans Art Laffer and Bob Inglis.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: these comments were copied from a CLN conversation about WUWT accusations.)
Watts doesn’t need any more traffic; he uses it to fake credibility. Please click on this link instead.
WUWT is a tarpit of regurgitated misinformation, and this article is no different. Ye ole “cooling prediction in the 1970s” canard appears, as well as trying to use a small increase in Antarctic sea ice (possibly driven by winds and/or snow; different than the Arctic because it’s a continent surrounded by ocean) to distract people from the much larger decrease in Arctic sea ice, conflating natural trends over 350 years with the recent 50 year trend that we’re very likely primarily responsible for, etc.
He also links to a Daily Mail article about Judith Curry’s bizarre statements about a “hiatus” in global temperatures over the last 16 years, which I’ve previously critiqued. Later, I addressed warming over the last 16 years in a conversation with JPL scientists.
Briefly: “no statistically significant warming” isn’t the same as “no warming”. A better phrasing might be “the warming trend since 1998 is statistically indistinguishable from the significant warming trend before 1998.”
I’m hundreds of pages and most of my sanity into a quixotic attempt to counter misinformation from WUWT. In my opinion it’s like the ending of the movie “Wargames” where the computer learns that the only way to win is not to play. Anyone who gets sucked deeply into WUWT is probably beyond hope of rescue, and will just monopolize time you could spend helping other students. Perhaps you might suggest that they learn science from climate.nasa.gov instead, and then move on to someone with an actual question.
After someone asked about WUWT’s funding sources, I said:
One funding source is the Heartland Institute, which compared climate scientists to the Unabomber and gave Watts $88k. But mentioning this will likely prolong that conversation, which is of dubious value.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
In his second inaugural address, President Obama said:
“… We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.
Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition. We must lead it.
We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared. …”
A few days later, Bjorn Lomborg wrongly accused Obama of fear-mongering:
“… Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%. Estimates published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that even with global warming proceeding uninterrupted, the level of wildfires will continue to decline until around midcentury and won’t resume on the level of 1950- the worst for fire- before the end of the century. …”
This is classic Lomborg misdirection. Mike is probably right: Lomborg seems to be referring to Pechony and Shindell 2010. Here’s an excerpt from its abstract:
“Recent bursts in the incidence of large wildfires worldwide have raised concerns about the influence climate change and humans might have on future fire activity. … We find that during the preindustrial period, the global fire regime was strongly driven by precipitation (rather than temperature), shifting to an anthropogenic-driven regime with the Industrial Revolution. Our future projections indicate an impending shift to a temperature-driven global fire regime in the 21st century, creating an unprecedentedly fire-prone environment. These results suggest a possibility that in the future climate will play a considerably stronger role in driving global fire trends, outweighing direct human influence on fire (both ignition and suppression), a reversal from the situation during the last two centuries.”
That’s right, Lomborg actually used a paper that projects “an unprecedentedly fire-prone environment” to criticize Obama for mentioning fires as an impact of climate change. Lomborg used the word “wildfire” twice, but Fig. 2(A) shows that the 1950 peak in fires was due to direct anthropogenic interference (both ignition and suppression). Pechony and Shindell even note that “… the common tool for land clearing was fire (13-16). Wildfire mapping for the 1880 US census, for instance, revealed staggering amounts of burning, predominantly of agricultural origins (15).”
So the 1950 peak wasn’t really a peak in wildfires. In reality, we burned “staggering amounts” of forests and jungles to plant crops. The paper projects that by 2100 actual wildfires will rival those staggering intentional burns, despite our best efforts at fire suppression.
Pechony and Shindell elaborate:
“… Toward the late 20th century, the charcoal-based records’ uncertainty increases, and they do not depict, for instance, increased burning in the tropics and the western United States in the past three decades (12). Although ice-core reconstructions show an increasing trend throughout the 20th century, it is likely that the downturn in the charcoal-based data, reproduced by the model both on a global scale and at the charcoal sites (SI Text), is real, though late 20th century fire activity may be higher than implied by the charcoal-based records. …”
I’ve recently discussed wildfires in the western United States, which apparently don’t appear in those charcoal-based data. Since 1970, all 11 western states have experienced statistically significant increases in large wildfires, and hotter years have more large wildfires.
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated incident. On page 116 of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg also downplayed the 1997 Indonesian fires, otherwise known as “the largest fire disaster ever observed.”
George Will also hides the incline in U.S. wildfires, which are very strongly correlated with spring and summer temperatures. In 2012, the area burned per wildfire in the U.S. was far more than any previous year. Fox “news” regurgitates Will’s nonsense to attack Obama.
Bjorn Lomborg, George Will, Fox “news”: please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacies and threatening the future of our civilization.
Update: Here are more Lomborg misrepresentations.
Incidentally, Marlon et al. 2012 reinforces the connection between temperature and wildfires. Marcott et al. 2013 shows that the globe cooled slightly between ~6000 years ago until the Little Ice Age, and Marlon et al. finds “a slight decline in burning over the past 3,000 y”. Also, observing a “prominent peak” during the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” which experienced regional warming but less global warming than today is disturbing.
Warming increases wildfire risk, independently of the fact that more humans are in harms way… that just makes us more vulnerable. As I’ve repeatedly explained, other human activities such as fire ignition and suppression don’t change this fact.
Accusations and insults don’t change the fact that warming increases wildfire risk either. Pity. Humanity seems to have a fire deficit and an insult surplus; it’d be great if we could exchange those.
Cost = risk + vulnerability. That’s not garbage. In fact, it’s exactly what insurers care about, which is why I wrote this:
Scientists aren’t the only ones concerned about risk management: large insurance companies like Munich Re, Swiss Re and Allianz have already noticed increased damages that are partially due to climate change. In 2010, the Pentagon said “Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.”
By definition, recent years are the oldest years of my life. However, it isn’t a tautology that we’re causing the world to warm, which increases wildfire risk, etc. That just happens to be true.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Any nudist can honestly bare the burden of deciding, and many music professors qualify.
(Ed. note: I left these comments at the Idiot Tracker.)
Thank you for that thoughtful essay, and all the other insightful and witty articles you’ve written. For what it’s worth, I hope you keep blogging.
However, I wouldn’t be so quick to declare victory. The dismissive might only be 8% of the population, but they’re a very loud 8%. Every minute they spend insulting us is one minute they can’t spend trying to confuse someone else. So I’m going to keep debunking them, even if that makes me Don Quixote. Actions speak louder than polls: I won’t declare victory until we have some kind of price on carbon. Republicans Art Laffer and Bob Inglis explain that this can be done without damaging the economy: energyandenterprise.com.
People certainly procrastinate about infrastructure and education, but America’s procrastination about health care seems to have been exacerbated by an onslaught of nonsensical claims about death panels, etc. Similarly, I think peoples’ reluctance to pay for clean energy is partially due to the confusion peddled by these merchants of doubt.
In a standard blog format, you’re probably right. Every new post is a blank slate which allows contrarians to pretend their past mistakes never happened.
I think casual observers are more likely to notice the holes that are dug by people who are treated with respect but don’t respond in kind. In many comments, I debunk their claims and then ask them to “please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.”
In response, they usually just dig faster. Rinse, repeat. Unfortunately, it can sometimes take hours to debunk nonsense that contrarians can type in mere seconds. But it might be helpful for others to see just how often and effectively Morton’s demon prevents them from acknowledging these debunkings.
I agree regarding new posts; my two latest climate posts take that approach. I dump most of my contrarian debunkings at the end of one older post called “Abrupt climate change”. Hopefully the index prevents them from convincing other people that their past mistakes never happened. Also, I’m not indulging their need for attention with multiple web pages, just one really long page.
Interestingly, #7 on that index is Jane Q. Public who’s also a 9/11 Truther, an Obama Birther, and rants about dark matter, string theory, neutrino oscillation, the Casimir effect, etc. Crank magnetism fascinates me, and I think longitudinal case studies can complement cross-sectional studies like Lewandowsky et al. 2012.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
Contrarians often use Lomborg to support their misinformation, possibly because he’s getting better at pretending to accept the science. When brucmack described Lomborg as more pragmatic than skeptic, I replied that “I’ve never heard of Lomborg before today, but your summary makes him sound like someone I could agree with.”
But when I actually read his claims, it became clear that Lomborg is repeatedly misrepresenting science. Like many contrarians, Lomborg also misrepresents his own position by claiming to accept the science while simultaneously misrepresenting that science. Lomborg’s books are often used to support accusations like these:
The cartoonish irony of these alarmist accusations is simply overwhelming. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that many economists (including Republican economists) agree that reducing CO2 emissions can be done without damaging the economy. In fact, clean energy creates more jobs per unit output than energy from coal or oil.
However, facts haven’t stopped contrarians like Eric Worrall and Alan Caruba from doing their bit to fight an “alarmist eco-Taliban” and “Climate Nazis” that don’t exist. Sadly, they’re not alone:
Jane doesn’t bother to provide a citation for her claim that preventing 1/2 degree of warming would cost as much as completely eliminating world hunger.
Norman Rogers is a senior policy advisor to the Heartland Institute (H.I.) who writes prolifically about climate change; I’ve visited some of his AGU posters.
Lomborg’s comparison of deaths due to heat and cold waves ignores extreme heat waves. It also assumes that increased winter mortality is caused exclusively by cold weather, and doesn’t demolish anything because the 2001 IPCC report openly acknowledged that “Limited evidence indicates that, in at least some temperate countries, reduced winter deaths would outnumber increased summer deaths.” Of course, their caveats never seem to show up in Lomborg’s books, and Table 3-10 makes it clear that heat and cold waves aren’t the only impacts of global warming.
The 2007 IPCC report also made similar points while noting that reduced winter mortality rates “can be overestimated unless they take into account the effects of influenza and season”. The IPCC was wise to be more cautious than Lomborg. A recent paper concludes that climate change is unlikely to dramatically reduce overall winter mortality rates.
How alarmist. Perhaps this is why Norman’s fellow Heartland Institute “expert” Lord Monckton accused climate scientists of being guilty of genocide.
Anyone who seriously thinks that a rapidly warming climate would benefit humanity probably skipped reading about the PETM and the end-Permian extinction, instead getting all their information from Lomborg’s sloppy analyses of biodiversity.
I share Norman’s concern about water security, especially in the developing world. Ironically, that’s also why I’m disappointed in Lomborg’s confused analysis of water security, which understates the price of desalination and misrepresents the IPCC reports.
Lonny’s only citation is to wave in the general direction of YouTube.
In 2002, Scientific American published a set of essays: Misleading Math about the Earth. These scientists used 11 pages to debunk some claims in 515 pages of Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg thought it was reasonable to ask a magazine to print his 32 page rebuttal on paper, and apparently Norman agrees. But Lomborg wasn’t denied an opportunity to reply. A few months later, Scientific American published a 1 page Lomborg reply. Holdren’s reply and Lomborg’s complete rebuttal are available on their website.
Again, neither Jane or Lonny provide citations for their nearly identical 1/2 degree C claims. I share Jane and Lonny’s concerns about world hunger, which is why I’m concerned about the fact that rice grows 10% less with every 1°C of night-time warming. Ironically, that’s also why I’m disappointed in Lomborg’s sloppy analysis of food security, which wrongly disputes the existence of an upper limit to rice yields, among other flaws.
Again, no citation for Jane’s 0.5 degrees C claim. Switching to clean energy won’t bankrupt humanity; it will cost about as much as developing our sewer system.
Jane and Norman Rogers have repeatedly claimed that Lomborg bases his claims on the worst-case IPCC scenarios, but that’s just not true. At best, Lomborg misunderstands the IPCC scenarios and tries to downplay the changes in Greenland and Antarctica. He even misrepresented the IPCC by only mentioning their estimate of sea level rise in the B1 scenario, which isn’t worst-case. Also, the IPCC excluded future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow, and they’re already accelerating.
In a BBC interview, Lomborg denied ignoring the worst-case scenarios. Perhaps he’s forgotten his own books? Others might consider doing that too.
Again, no citation for Jane’s 0.5 degrees C claim. Real economists probably have degrees in economics rather than political science.
“… note the immediate conflation between environmentalism and climate science. Dissolving the boundaries between the two allows Lomborg to use the actions of one group to impugn the other and vice versa. It also allows him the freedom to attack from outside the science itself.”
Consider this exchange:
Here’s how Jane quoted that exchange. Notice how Morton’s demon shields Jane from a troublesome phrase by replacing it with “…”:
Woah! Suddenly ending world hunger is about the same as stopping 1 degree C of warming? Jane gives no citation, and doesn’t explain why stopping global warming is suddenly twice as affordable as before. Sadly, Morton’s demon continues to keep Jane et al. from noticing that Lomborg’s bizarre claims have been repeatedly refuted.
In reality, we should reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible. This will create new jobs and improve the food and water security for future generations.
Bjorn Lomborg, Norman Rogers, Alan Caruba, Jane Q. Public, Lonny Eachus, Eric Worrall: please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacies and threatening the future of our civilization.
Update: Jane and Lomborg keep digging.
I (and others) have failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from a CLN discussion about the Heartland Institute’s response to the Next Generation Science Standards.)
Let’s see… the usual Heartland denial that warming has continued over the last 15 years, the usual assertion that warmer equals greener despite everything science has learned about the end-Permian and the PETM, the fact that plants burned in more frequent wildfires aren’t green anymore, blah blah blah.
But this part really frightened me:
My rule of thumb is that anything the Heartland Institute likes is probably harmful to humanity. See tobacco, CFCs, SO2, DDT, CO2, etc. This comment by Taylor alone is a reason to seriously consider returning to the previous draft.
I also found this amusing:
Good grief. Consider this equation: -2 + 1 = -1.
The left hand side could be the larger negative human effect added to a smaller positive human effect to produce the “net” negative human effect on the right hand side.
Taylor doesn’t even seem to understand the meaning of the word “net”. And yet he’s lecturing scientists about how to teach science.
Does the Dunning-Kruger effect explain the Fermi paradox? I guess we’ll find out over the next few decades. What interesting times we live in.
Update: James Taylor keeps digging.
(Ed. note: John Brookes brought this issue to my attention. I also responded in Jo Nova’s article.)
Frezzotti et al. 2013 claim that Antarctica is gaining land ice mass at a rate of +2100 Gt/year? Wow.
I’ve discussed Antarctic land ice mass changes as measured by GRACE, laser altimetry, and the input-output method. Note that GRACE and the input-output method show Antarctica as a whole losing land ice mass. (All methods show West Antarctica losing land ice mass.) Laser altimetry yields a total Antarctic land ice mass change of approximately [-50,+100] Gt/year, which may indicate mass loss. So the Frezzotti et al. 2013 estimate is ~20 times higher than the upper error bar of the next highest estimate.
More importantly, four estimates of global mean sea level (GMSL, on the left hand side) show it rising at ~3 mm/year.
William Llovel explains that sea level rise is the sum of (roughly) ~1.5 mm/year due to thermal expansion, and ~1.5 mm/year ocean mass increase due to land ice loss. Fig. 3 in Chambers et al. 2010 shows that estimates of ocean mass from GRACE agree with those from altimetry, corrected for thermal expansion using Argo data.
If Antarctica gains land ice mass, that would cause sealevel to drop unless land ice mass loss elsewhere (like in Greenland) compensates. Fig. 5.19 here shows that Greenland’s mass loss is accelerating, and my GRACE inversion shows widespread land ice mass loss, but not nearly enough to compensate for the proposed +2100 Gt/year Antarctic ice mass gain.
Fig. 5.19 here shows that a land ice mass loss of ~350 Gt/year = 1.0 mm/year equivalent sea level rise. So Frezzotti et al. 2013 seem to be saying that Antarctica is causing a ~6 mm/year drop in ocean mass. But we know that ocean mass is increasing at ~1.5 mm/year, so other ice sheets must be adding ~7.5 mm/year of mass to the oceans. That’s equal to land ice mass loss of ~2600 Gt/year, which is ~10 times faster than GRACE’s Greenland estimate. That seems unlikely, as does the possibility that other smaller ice sheets or runoff, etc. make up the difference.
Perhaps their statement that “The SMB of the grounded AIS is approximately 2100 Gt/yr” was just a typo, and they actually meant something like 21 Gt/year…
I was wrong. Frezzotti et al. 2013 estimates the surface mass balance, which isn’t the same as the total mass estimates from laser altimetry (ICESat) or GRACE. The surface mass balance only concerns precipitation, evaporation and snowdrift physics. It doesn’t include the glacier discharge or runoff which subtract from the surface mass balance.
Essentially, Frezzotti et al. 2013 only measures the positive parts of the total mass balance. Because ICESat and GRACE also measure the negative parts, they can estimate the total mass balance.
Frezzotti’s estimate is so much higher than ICESat’s estimate because they’re measuring different things. Frezzotti’s estimate of the surface mass balance should be compared to climate models that also ignore losses due to glacier discharge and runoff: the same models used in the input-output method.
Sorry for the confusion.
Incidentally, Frezzotti et al. 2013 doesn’t support Nova’s claim that “the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is growing” because it doesn’t address glacier discharge or runoff. The distinction between surface mass balance and total mass balance is subtle but important.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
I tried to set an example, but no response yet. Nova’s mistake was subtle, but led to unphysical conclusions. It’s kind of like thinking one’s bank account balance must be increasing because income exists, while completely ignoring larger expenses.
I replied to John Brookes, but didn’t point out that the moderator’s suggestion that he see Jaymez’s #11.2 comment was a red herring. Jaymez was manufacturing unwarranted doubt about sea ice, not the land ice which ICESat, GRACE, and the paper in question are talking about.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. Exploring the frontiers of knowledge inevitably results in mistakes. I try very hard to admit my numerous mistakes, and respect those with similar integrity. I think that’s the true test of a scientist.
Because it’s not controversial. Like you said, it agrees with other models. Frezzotti et al. 2013 would only be controversial if compared to the ICESat total mass balance in an article claiming that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing and gaining ice mass. Sadly, I didn’t notice Manicbeancounter’s comment until your update:
“… What this study does show is that by honestly looking at data in different ways, it is possible to reach widely different conclusions. It is only by fitting the data to predetermined conclusions (and suppressing anything outside the consensus) that consistency of results can be achieved.”
It’s unspeakably depressing to watch someone this clever independently go through the same reasoning process as I did (and take it further!), then join the never-ending deluge of baseless accusations that have already buried me.
Neither did my paper, but that’s because (like Frezzotti et al. 2013) I didn’t try to answer any of those questions. Those who have concluded that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to our CO2 emissions.
Not nearly enough, but here’s another. Frezzotti et al. 2013 is the first half of the “input-output method” I mentioned earlier. Notice that the input-output method shows the most ice mass loss, more than GRACE gravimetry. Of course I’m biased (alt) in favor of the GRACE satellite observations but I have no problem with these models you’re supporting.
When @PhysicsGirl meets a climate troll, Lubos Motl calls @PhysicsGirl “… an astroturf of a sort who has clearly no idea about the climate … [who] is just convinced that climatology is almost as proper science as any other science while the ‘troll’, i.e. wise old man, would surely prefer to discuss the topic at a much higher depth.”
Joanne Nova responds: “Thank you Lubos. Update added to the post. I like Hoyt even more. You are right, I’m not even convinced she has read much of the climate debate… perhaps Hoyt trounced her favorite lines, and this 4 minutes was all that was left?”
Nova’s nemesis covered this too. Nova is now relying on the Zwally presentation in an attempt to save face. Of course she’ll find “conspiracy” excuse for ignoring the paper Zwally also co-published which shows Antarctica likely to be losing mass.
Nova now blocks all of my posts since I was persistent about her deceptive hotspot comparison image.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
Presumably you’re referring to “scientists.” Also, I’ve repeatedly said:
… climate is an average over ~20 years … climate is only meaningful when discussing averages over ~20 years. … I’ve repeatedly stressed that we need ~20 years to average out weather noise. … professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages. … It’s also important to remember that a ~20 year timespan is necessary to obtain statistically significant temperature trends…
In fact, I’ve repeatedly told you that ~20 years are needed:
As I’ve explained, climate is the global average over ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2010-02-16]
This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2013-01-21]
I’ve even gone into more detail, showing you a paper that says at least 17 years are required:
… at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2012-12-05]
Of course, you ignored me just like you previously ignored riverat1:
And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise. [riverat1 to Jane Q. Public, 2011-11-19]
For global temperatures, Santer et al. 2011 shows that one needs to average over ~17 years of data to obtain statistically significant climate trends. Here’s another explanation by Tamino. Also, the Skeptical Science trend calculator helps visualize statistical significance. [Dumb Scientist, 2012-08-15]
Perhaps your ode to conspiracy theories distracted you, but I also linked to another method of calculating significance which is even more conservative:
Also, Barton Paul Levenson explains the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) definition of climate, which uses a more scientifically conservative 30 year minimum timespan. [Dumb Scientist, 2012-08-15]
Really? I’ve been repeatedly telling you that climate requires at least ~20 years, as have other scientists. I even linked to an explanation of the WMO definition which requires at least 30 years.
No, you just falsely attributed tabloid nonsense to the IPCC. The tabloid article you’re leaning on was written by Graham Lloyd (who’s misrepresented scientists before), doesn’t directly quote Pachauri, and the IPCC communications office says it “does not accurately represent Pachauri’s thoughts on the subject”.
I calculated the statistical significance of UAH trends at different starting dates, and even shared them with you, at which point you said that you “may take a look”.
If you’d looked at the second page of my PDF, you’d see a black line for the trends of the UAH data up to 2012 for different starting years. The red lines are 95% confidence uncertainty bounds. Notice that the uncertainty bounds of more recent trends overlap with the uncertainty bounds of the longer trends. This means that there hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the warming rate.
Instead of leaning on dubious tabloid articles, why don’t you calculate this yourself, like I did? If you don’t have the programming or statistics background to do that, I’ve also shown you the Skeptical Science trend calculator which would also easily confirm that there hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the warming rate.
Nonsense. You questioned that yourself by cherry-picking a short-term cooling “trend” to wrongly accuse Layzej of “cherry-picking” the long-term warming climate trend. That makes your claim that “people with at least half a brain… know the climate is getting warmer” even more ironic. And now you’re doing it again.
Eric Worrall also regurgitated WUWT nonsense and falsely attributed it to NOAA. WUWT implied that NOAA was referring to the raw trend by “accidentally” ignoring the previous sentence:
“ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2-25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
I bolded the sentence that WUWT “accidentally” omitted, so you can see that NOAA wasn’t referring to the raw temperature trend. I already showed you that the ENSO-adjusted trends are positive and statistically significant over 15 years. I’ve already told you that NOAA’s statement about the ENSO-adjusted trends can also be applied to the raw surface temperature trends.
There hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the warming rate, and there isn’t a statistically significant difference between the projected and observed trends.
No, WUWT publicly disagrees with reality. You just falsely attributed their nonsense to NOAA.
You just mistook NOAA’s ENSO-adjusted trend for the raw trend. NOAA referred to an ENSO-adjusted time series because ENSO is natural, and once again those trends are positive, statistically significant, and statistically indistinguishable from the relevant IPCC projection.
Jane, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacy, and threatening the future of our civilization.
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again.
(Ed. note: Peter Ferrara wrote a horrible op-ed in Forbes, then wrote this reply to a commenterPeter Ferrara: “dallasdunlap, Your participation in this discussion has had a brownshirt quality to it.”.)
Scientists don’t have High Popes. We have a mountain of data showing that global warming continues. This continued warming is confirmed by GRACE, ICESat, InSAR, GPS, and camera observations of ice sheet mass loss, which absorb heat without warming as they melt. The continued warming is also confirmed by global sea ice loss, which absorbs heat without warming as it melts. The continued warming is also confirmed by increasing global ocean heat content, which absorbs heat without warming the surface… until it’s released in an El Niño.
Links to data and a GRACE video are here.
Above, I linked to many observations showing that Antarctica as a whole is losing mass, and that global sea ice is decreasing (and Arctic sea ice is vanishing even faster than predicted).
Also, I’ve shared code showing that there hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the surface warming rate, and linked to an online trend calculator that anyone can use to confirm this fact.
Update: I failedI guess that’s why the moniker is Dumb Scientist. Just to take one of the inaccurate statements in that post, “The continued warming is also confirmed by global sea ice loss…”.
According to Cryosphere Today, the Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly is -0.290 million sq. km.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
The Souther Hemisphere Sea Ice Anomaly is 0.830 million sq. km.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
Simple math reveals the “global sea ice loss” is a net gain of 0.540 million sq. km.
So much for the “global sea ice loss”. [David Holliday]
The “global sea ice loss” link in my SkS article shows that Arctic sea ice loss exceeds modest Antarctic gain, even in extent (and this difference is likely more pronounced in terms of volume). Furthermore, after I shared code to calculate the statistical significance of trends, why do people continue to focus on a single day, month, or year? Might as well join them: I was standing outside yesterday evening and noticed that the temperatures were falling! We’re entering an ice age! to communicate once again.
All short trends have large error bars. More importantly, the trend’s error bars include the projected 0.2C/decade warming rate.
Below, I shared code showing that there hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the surface warming rate. But here’s a direct link to an online calculator everyone can use to confirm this fact.
To clarify, that trend’s error bars overlap with [those of] previous trends, and include the projected “about 0.2C/decade” warming rate to within the number of significant figures provided by the IPCC: 1.
Ironically, all those examples confirm that there’s been no statistically significant change in the surface warming rate. Contrarians myopically stare at the lower error bar while completely ignoring the upper error bar. They also myopically stare at surface temperatures, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that ~90% of the added heat goes into the warming oceans.
I’ve already pointed out that Schmitt and Happer’s opinion piece was fractally wrong. Scientists are actually concerned about the unprecedented rate of our CO2 emissions. The CO2 emissions rate from the Siberian Traps eruption (which lasted a million years) caused warming and ocean acidification that preceded the end-Permian extinction, 250 million years ago. Today, our CO2 emissions rate is ten times faster than that of the Siberian Traps.
Another lesson from the ancient climate is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when rapid CO2 emissions caused warming that preceded marine extinctions, and a spike in leaf damage caused by insects. Kudzu, pine beetles, desert locusts and jellyfish thrive when it warms. Rice doesn’t: it grows 10% less with every 1.8°F of night-time warming.
In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences and a dozen other science academies told world leaders that “the need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.”
Paleoclimate studies show that the Medieval Warm Period probably wasn’t a globally synchronous event.
Furthermore, the Earth’s climate responds similarly to radiative forcings such as increasing CO2 or making the Sun brighter. So even if scientists have underestimated the Medieval Warm Period’s temperatures, that would actually imply that we’d underestimated the climate’s sensitivity to increasing CO2, unless compensating errors had also been independently made in the estimates of radiative forcings.
Your article mocks a “daffy” correspondent who “hysterically” reported on the fact that we just hit 400ppm CO2 for the first time in millions of years, by implying that a trace gas can’t be important. As Admiral Titley explains, that’s why it’s impossible to get drunk.
So if you’re ever pulled over for drunk driving, you can use this excuse and many others. Just explain that your blood alcohol was much higher in the past, and alcohol is just brain food anyway, and your lack of coordination is actually due to cosmic rays, and scientists in the 1970s said alcohol makes us sober, and your blood alcohol hasn’t increased in the last 5 minutes, and Al Gore, and people on Mars are drunk too, and you’d stop drinking if only it wouldn’t kill poor people, etc…
After insisting that alcohol is a minor trace chemical, explain that Coors Light is such a powerful intoxicant that your blood was saturated after your first sip. It’s logarithmic, so there’s a natural limit to how drunk you can get. Therefore, all the empty cans in your lap are irrelevant.
You don’t have to make sense, just spread confusion.
That wasn’t a “learned recitation of the actual facts regarding AGW.” It was a Gish Gallop of baseless accusations and regurgitated misinformation. Ignoring scientists in favor of trolls guarantees that you’ll never improve your understanding of the climate.
I don’t have time to relieve Mr. Williams of all his misconceptions, but it’s important to note that the GRACE satellites and the input-output method show significant land ice mass loss in Antarctica. Even ICESat shows that Antarctica and Greenland combined are losing mass, and doesn’t show statistically significant mass gain in Antarctica.
This rapid ice sheet mass loss hasn’t been happening for 200+ years. For instance, a survey of the scientific literature on Greenland mass loss results in this figure.
Notice that Greenland’s ice mass loss is accelerating. See fig. 5.19 here for the latest GRACE observations.
Looking at a reconstruction of Arctic sea ice extent over the last 1,450 years shows that the current warming is unusual.
Scientists are actually concerned that the minimum Arctic sea ice extent is disappearing faster than predicted.
The sea ice is also getting thinner, so the volume loss is even more pronounced.
John Williams and Peter Ferrara, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It’s staining your legacies and threatening the future of our civilization.
(Ed. note: economart signs his comments as “GM” and Gary Marshall, and leaves similar comments at other sites.)
Economart complains about ad hominems, then asks “Do any of you AGW nutjobs actually discuss the science behind these wretched theories????”
Ironically, he complained after I’d submitted a comment discussing the science. Since my comment still hasn’t appeared, I’ll charitably assume it was eaten by a spam filter because of the number of links required to debunk even a small portion of Mr. Williams’ Gish Gallop. So here’s my comment again, minus the links, which are available here.
Scientists start the satellite data from 1979 because that’s when the satellites were launched. But scientists use many sources of data to reconstruct past sea ice extent in the Arctic, and it’s clear that the current decline is anything but pathetically average. That graph is Fig. 2(a) from Polyak et al. 2010.
It’s obviously pointless to discuss science with someone who complains about ad hominems while calling me and my colleagues nutjobs. So I just have two quick questions:
1. Would you interrupt heart surgery to tell the cardiologist how to perform a triple bypass?
2. How is that scenario different from telling climate scientists how to perform climate science? (Except for the fact that a cardiology contrarian would only put a single person in jeopardy, while climate contrarians are putting all of humanity in jeopardy by regurgitating civilization-paralyzing misinformation.)
As per your next sentence, copied from the NSIDC: “the modern satellite data record for sea ice begins in late 1978”. Previous satellites couldn’t distinguish newly formed sea ice from older multi-year sea ice until Nimbus 7 was launched in late 1978, so most plots of Arctic sea ice extent go back to 1979.
Also, I just explained that many sources of data show that the current decline in Arctic sea ice extent is highly unusual over the last century. I’ve also shown that the current decline in Arctic sea ice extent is highly unusual over the last 1,450 years.
These long-term trends reflect the climate signal, whereas looking at a single year only reflects weather noise. Also, it’s important to note that much of the thicker multi-year sea ice is gone, so the extent doesn’t account for the fact that the average Arctic sea ice is only about half as thick as it was in 1979.
Heh. Well played. But isn’t this actually the point? I’m just a geophysicist, not a cardiologist or a cardiac surgeon. I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to put a patient in jeopardy by pretending that I was. If I really wanted to learn how to perform surgery, I wouldn’t troll on the internet or barge into operating rooms… I’d go to medical school.
There are many scientists like myself who study the climate. I’m a geophysicist, but many of my colleagues are oceanographers, paleoclimatologists, plant pathologists, etc. The climate is a complex system requiring collaboration between many experts with different specialties. That’s why someone who actually wants to learn about climate science should go to climate.nasa.gov or read what the National Academy of Sciences has to say.
Again, how is what you’re doing different from barging into an operating room and telling the doctor how to do his or her job?
I’ve addressed McIntyre’s criticisms with many links here.
McIntyre noticed that Mann’s algorithm used de-centered principle component analysis (PCA). McIntyre changed to centered PCA, but got a reconstruction that wasn’t shaped like a hockeystick because he didn’t retain enough PC’s. While probably easier to interpret, using centered PCA converges slower but otherwise barely changes the resulting hockeystick, as long as enough PC’s are retained.
McIntyre fed ARFIMA persistent red noise into Mann’s algorithm to create 10,000 synthetic temperature reconstructions (still using just 1 PC), and found that “some” looked like Mann’s hockeystick. Of course, McIntyre’s Figure 1 needs a y-axis 6 times larger to show Mann’s hockeystick, confirming that the red noise hockeysticks explain comparatively little variance. Half the red noise hockeysticks were upside-down, but McIntyre only showed an upright one. Prof. Wegman repeated these claims to Congress in the infamous “Wegman Report”, showing 12 upright red noise hockeysticks, all cherrypicked from the top 1% which looked most like Mann’s hockeystick. Wegman’s Figure 4.4 claimed that McIntyre used “red noise [AR(1) with parameter = 0.2]“ which has a decorrelation time of 1.5 years, while McIntyre actually used ARFIMA noise with a decorrelation time of ~350 years.
McIntyre’s claims were all shown to be mistaken or insignificant. So it’s not surprising that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) largely agreed with Mann’s original temperature reconstruction.
“The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years. …”
Yes, we will.
The moon has no oceans and a nearly-nonexistent atmosphere, so its day and night temperatures swing between -290°F and +230°F.
That’s actually one way to see the strength of the greenhouse effect, because it heats a planet even at night so it reduces the day-night temperature swing. The moon’s average surface temperature is about 60°F lower than the Earth’s, which is due to the greenhouse effect.
To really appreciate the strength of the CO2 greenhouse effect, compare Venus to Mercury, which has a daytime surface temperature of 350°C.
That seems hot, right? Astonishingly, Venus has a nighttime surface temperature of ~470°C.
… despite the fact that Venus is 87% farther away from the Sun than Mercury, implying sunlight 3.5x weaker.
… and despite the fact that Mercury’s albedo is 0.1 and Venus’s albedo is 0.65.
… and despite the fact that a “night” on Venus lasts ~58 Earth days, during which the temperature barely changes from that at “high noon”.
Now, I’m not saying that the Earth will turn into Venus. That would be absurd. We have no reason to think that the “runaway greenhouse” on Venus is even possible on Earth. But the greenhouse effect is very real, very powerful, and our sister planet shows that it scales enormously.
Many paleoclimate studies have confirmed MBH98. In fact, a recent paper not only confirmed it but extended the temperature reconstruction 11,000 years back in time.
Also:
“… there is no reasonable evidence of a fundamental disagreement between tropospheric temperature trends from models and observations when uncertainties in both are treated comprehensively.” [Thorne et al. 2010]
I’ve already shown you fig. 2(a) from Polyak et al. 2010 which shows that Arctic sea ice extent in 1979 was less than the average value during the 1960s.
This review paper assimilated many observations, including ship records going back more than a century.
Since I’ve already made these points and you ignored me, this conversation is obviously pointless. Please have the last word.
Update: I’ve failedHello Dumb Scientist,
I think we can toss your remarkable claim of Geophysicist into the garbage where it so obviously belongs.
So why is the moon without those GHGs so much warmer in sunlight than the earth?
If GHGs warmed the earth, then the earth would be so much warmer in sunlight than the moon? Right?
It seems the GHGs keep the earth much cooler in the daytime and much warmer at night in comparison with the moon, which has no GHGs. This is the extent of the greenhouse effect.
As for Venus, it is a question of pressure. Why is Death Valley the hottest place in North America? Is it because it has more CO2 above it? Or perhaps its because there is a greater column of air above it.
The great geophysicist should know the easy resolution to the question posed by himself. But he doesn’t.
At times the sea ice of the 70’s was less than that of the 60’s and at times more. It depends on the year chosen as the reference. And I am sure that the sea ice extent in the 60’s was just so much more than it was in the 30’s.
So where is all that data that NASA really doesn’t want to talk about? That’s right. It only begins in 1979.
GM [economart]
Dumb Scientist: If Venus’s high temperatures are caused by pressure, that explains why basketball players dribble: the ball is pressurized, so it’s got to be very hot! to communicate once againLooks like the faux geophysicist has to think a little about his next offering! Its about time.
GM [economart]
Dumb Scientist: Apparently I failed to communicate when I said “this conversation is obviously pointless. Please have the last word.”. Poptech accuses people of stalking, and joins economart as he keeps spreading misinformation which Cara Hernandez deftly counters. In response, economart calls her a moron, an “intransigeant hag” and a “silly little girl”, then suggests that she “go bake some cookies”! Who ordered the misogyny?
Peter Ferrara: “… I say the result of the experiment will be the world getting cooler over the next few DECADES, and we should track down the identities and locations of these fraudulent commenters play acting at science to hold them personally accountable when that happens.”
Another update: Forbes lets James Taylor keep digging, and economart joins him again.
(Ed. note: This is a response to jdixon1980’s interesting comment about funding conspiracy theories.)
jdixon1980 @77: Stephen Schneider and Marshall Shepherd both pointed out that scientists who are only motivated by funding would deny that the science is solid. That would keep the gravy train coming: “the science is so uncertain; we need more funding.”
Also, the recent consensus project shows that most papers in Web of Science containing the phrase “global climate change” don’t bother to address human causation, just like most astronomy papers don’t bother to address the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun.
If scientists were as motivated by funding as the conspiracy theorists suggest, more papers would take positions on human causation in order to hop on the gravy train.
CNBC anchor Joe Kernen recently compared climate scientists to “high priests” whose work should not be trusted. He tweets misinformation as @JoeSquawk.
Update: Joe Kernen refers to his twitter feed, calling us a “bona fide cult”.
Joe Kernen helps Dr. Schmitt and Dr. Happer manufacture doubt.
No, most of the rise came after 1930.
This tweet was reposted by a contrarian who praised Joe Kernen for his misinformation.
Obviously, we’ve all failed to communicate once again:
Ironically, even the Flat Earth Society acknowledges that humans are warming the climate. Anthony Watts reports this without seeming to realize that adding the word “hoax” makes him even nuttier than the Flat Earth Society.
Presumably, Joe Kernen refers to the “cult” led by 13 National Science Academies and at least 45 national and international science organizations.
That chart originated here, where they’d fixed the abbreviation RSS to HC3, which stands for HadCRUT3. The original version @JWSpry showed was advertised on WUWT. Oddly, the “fixed” chart still has a vertical axis that refers to “Atmosphere Temperature Anomalies” which would be true for RSS but HadCRUT3 is a surface temperature dataset.
HadCRUT3 was replaced by HadCRUT4 because the obsolete HadCRUT3 doesn’t include the Arctic, which is warming faster than the rest of the globe. Thus HadCRUT3 trends are lower than trends from other datasets. Let’s use the SkS trend calculator to match their timespan (1998.0 – 2013.0):
NOAA Trend: 0.036 ± 0.136°C/decade (2 sigma)
HadCRUT3 Trend: -0.007 ± 0.147°C/decade (2 sigma)
HadCRUT4 Trend: 0.042 ± 0.140°C/decade (2 sigma)
RSS(sat) Trend: -0.050 ± 0.245°C/decade (2 sigma)
UAH(sat) Trend: 0.052 ± 0.249°C/decade (2 sigma)
Note that the error bars on the trends are all large due to the short timespan, so none of these datasets show statistically significant cooling. In other words, all of their upper error bars include warming.
Also, HadCRUT3 and the RSS satellite estimate are the only global datasets with a central estimate below 0.0°C/decade, and they just so happen to be the datasets originally listed on @JWSpry’s chart.
Furthermore, HadCRUT3 is the only global dataset with an upper error bar that falls below the IPCC’s relevant projection of ~0.2°C/decade, and it just so happens to be the dataset shown in the fixed version of @JWSpry’s chart. And we know why it’s too low: HadCRUT3 doesn’t include the rapidly warming Arctic.
And once again, surface and atmospheric temperatures represent only a few percent of the climate’s total energy. Many independent measurements confirm that the Earth continues to gain heat.
A very good point, as the large error bars above confirm. Increasing to 20 or 30 year timespans reveals the statistically significant warming trends. Try it!
Joe’s confused response to Jennifer rhymes with his earlier confused response to me.
No, you’ve rambled about 4 billion years of variability without citing any research and simply asserting that it supports your contrarian views. I cited 420 million years of variability and showed how it supports mainstream climate science, but you just ignored me. I’ve also discussed what we can learn from 4 billion years of paleoclimate records. I’ve also repeatedly explained that the Earth keeps gaining heat, even over the last 15 years.
As noted above, I already did that. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t actually make all the research vanish.
Joe Kernen: biology expert, climate expert, multiverse expert.
This goes on for a while. Joe Kernen and Eric Worrall both use the singularity as an excuse to ignore climate change.
I wonder how Kernen is preparing for the singularity. How is this not being a “true believer”?
Again, I already did that as noted above. Again, sticking your head in the sand doesn’t actually make all the research vanish.
Of course it’s not heresy to doubt that increasing CO2 10x faster than before the end-Permian extinction is dangerous. You’re just incorrect. Calling it heresy implies dogma, which explains why you think climate science is somehow a cult.
You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. (Notice how Kernen uses 30% only when talking about the last 15 years, but 0.01% in any other context.)
Huh? HadCRUT3 has problems, but it’s obsolete.
For once Joe almost makes sense. Hopefully he’s referring to the modern HadCRUT4 dataset instead of the obsolete HadCRUT3 dataset like last time. Plus, there are actually at least 4 surface temperature datasets, and at least 2 atmosphere temperature datasets, and datasets like ARGO which actually measure the ~90% of the added heat that’s going into the oceans.
What a great suggestion: let’s turn the entire Earth into an artificial greenhouse with carefully controlled water, nutrients, and no pests. Piece of cake after the singularity, right?
Again, you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. And nobody thinks their opinion is based on ignorance.
That’s better, but still overstated in my opinion.
… says Joe, who sees a dogmatic Eco Taliban cult who lie about their credentials on a jihad to crush dissent, root out, excommunicate or even kill heretics, and assumed I intended to call him a creationist. He also assumes that people will be devastated if the world doesn’t end, and assumes that climate scientists only say humans warm the climate to get grants, which might be why they love scaring with apocalyptic nonsense.
I wasn’t the only one to notice Joe’s psychological projection:
I was just thinking the same thing…
It’s almost like the jet stream is getting weaker.
Must be frustrating to be surrounded by all those haters…
Anthony Watts piles on, and Eric Worrall revives his zombie argument once again.
I can’t watch this depressing trainwreck any more.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from James Taylor’s horrible Forbes op-ed.)
It’s bizarre to accuse scientists of ignoring past climate changes when many papers like Royer et al. 2007 examine paleoclimate records and conclude that “a climate sensitivity greater than 1.5°C has probably been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate system over the past 420 million years”.
Scientists know that Earth’s climate changes naturally, usually in response to gradual changes in the amount of energy entering or leaving the climate. The problem is that many papers like Honisch et al. 2012 conclude that our fossil fuels are releasing CO2 at an unprecedented rate. In fact, our current CO2 emissions rate is ten times faster than that preceding the end-Permian extinction… otherwise known as the Great Dying.
You might enjoy this introduction to the greeenhouse effect by the American Institute of Physics. Note that theoretical physics was used to develop the well-established greenhouse effect in the 1800s. It was then extended using quantum physics by Dr. Hulburt in 1931, and confirmed by physicists like Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Plass in the 1950s while studying the atmosphere for unrelated reasons.
I already addressed this talking point:
The rate of warming from 1910 to 1940 was about 0.13°C/decade compared to about 0.18°C/decade from 1975 to 2005. But scientists don’t simply compare the rates; they examine natural and human radiative forcings which change the global climate’s total energy, which is indeed an average over at least several decades. In the early 20th century there was a lull in volcanic eruptions which usually cool the climate by blocking sunlight for a few years. Early human CO2 emissions and a slight increase in the Sun’s brightness also played small roles. Internal variability modes, which shift energy from one part of the globe to another (i.e. climate cycles) are also important. Temperatures measured in the 1940s were warmer than the models; this discrepency is thought to be due in part to Arctic decadal variability.
Actually, the sun’s power at the top of the atmosphere is ~1360 W/m^2 when measured in a plane perpendicular to the sun. The fact that Earth isn’t flat (and thus the sun doesn’t shine on both sides simultaneously) is exactly why the average power is divided by a factor of 4. That’s the difference between the area of a flat circle, and the surface area of a sphere with the same radius.
Again, the average power over the Earth’s surface is 4 times less than that measured in a plane perpendicular to the Sun, precisely because the Earth isn’t flat. Your accusations that climate scientists use a flat earth model are completely baseless. For instance, I process GRACE data using an open-source program that models the Earth as an ellipsoid with parameters taken from NASA satellites.
Again, when radiative forcings increase the Earth’s climate gains energy. That happened in the early 1900s (for the reasons discussed above) and recently (mainly because of our greenhouse gas emissions).
Here’s a figure from Meehl et al. 2004, showing that the cooling in the mid-1900s was accounted for by mainstream science. Natural factors and increasing human sulfate emissions temporarily cooled the Earth until our sulfate emissions dropped and CO2 emissions kept growing.
Nonsense. Scientists in the 19th century did their best without quantum mechanics and airborne spectroscopes. You might want to keep reading, the advances of physicists like Dr. Hulburt, Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Plass were just the beginning.
Update: economart appears again; I’ve failedHello Dumb Scientist,
So the cooling was accounted for? Then why do all these AGW nutjobs show massive warming over the predictive period?
When do you morons give it up?
There is no science to AGW. The supposed AGW climate scientists are nothing but liars, as well as all those who follow them.
No one has ever heard of cold heating warm except an AGW dunce.
And the world is abandoning the AGW idiocies of green technology.
Face it losers, you’re done.
GM [economart] to communicate once again.
Again, your flat earth accusations are completely baseless. I shared my code which models the earth as an ellipsoid because I’m very familiar with it, and because that’s a common way to model the shape of the earth. I’ve also provided links to source code for many Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) which certainly aren’t based on a flat earth. How could they be? Among myriad other problems, a flat earth model couldn’t exhibit a polar vortex or an Antarctic Circumpolar Current because those phenomena depend on the unbounded nature of a sphere/ellipsoid. They literally couldn’t exist on a flat earth.
Look through the CMIP archives I linked and try to find an AOGCM (GISS ModelE, NCAR CCSM, MIT GCM, etc.) which uses a flat earth model. Then tell us its name and quote the part of the source code that proves your flat earth point. Otherwise you’re just baselessly accusing scientists of unbelievably ridiculous incompetence.
Again, that AIP introduction explains that Fourier and Tyndall performed measurements in the 19th century which showed that CO2 traps heat. Even then, scientists were aware that the Earth isn’t encased in glass. But since heat can’t conduct or convect to space, thermal radiation is crucially important. That’s why physicists like Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Plass confirmed the greenhouse effect by performing measurements using airborne spectrometers. And, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, many paleoclimate measurements like Royer et al. 2007 confirm that “a climate sensitivity greater than 1.5°C has probably been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate system over the past 420 million years”.
My op-ed’s point was that “the need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.” That’s also a quote from the National Academy of Sciences, so I seem to be in good company.
I’ve obviously failedDearest Dumb,
Are you able to comprehend the English language? For the fourth time, the “flat earth” models I am referring to are used for computations of the earths annual global mean energy balance. The IPCC AR4 report uses the model established by Kiehl and Trenberth (1997), which is a flat earth, cold sun model, as do ALL do. These models have no basis in reality.
The AIP introduction was a Spencer Weart authored piece of historical scientific revisionism. Fourier did not perform CO2 measurements. Fourier did not even propose the GHE. Fourier’s works were translated by Burgess and can be examined online. Furthermore, CO2 does not trap heat. As a physicist you should know better. Tyndale confused absorptivity with opacity, and measured opacity instead of absorptivity. Read his treatise.
Please explain how airborne measurements with a spectrometer would confirm the GHE.
Action is needed when there is a crisis. There is no climate crisis. Our current climate is mild in comparison with the past four interglacial periods. Per historical and proxy measurements, the Medieval Warm Period was as warm or warmer than today, despite the fraudulent claims by Mann and his ilk. Marcott et al 2013 is the latest piece of scientific fraud to make claim our current climate is unprecedented.
You stated, “That’s also a quote from the National Academy of Sciences, so I seem to be in good company“. Need I remind you that science is not conducted by consensus, or by a popularity poll. Those are illogical non-scientific arguments. You should also go back and read all the Climategate files for a dose of reality.
Richard Feynman stated:
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
[thephysicsguy] to communicate once again. Have a nice day.
Update: Cara Hernandez is puzzled by thephysicsguy.
Kevin Lawrence has been @KFYRTV 4-Time Emmy Award winning Chief Meteorologist since 1998.
Behold Joe Bastardi, “distinguished met.“.
That’s the second time Kevin “joked” that I was “hung on” 1950. The last time I didn’t get his joke, I dumbly gave two reasons why 45 science societies (including the AMS) use a starting point of 1950. I also need to “lighten up” so I can enjoy Delingpole’s and Jane’s “jokes”.
Presumably another joke. Also applies to “debates” about evolution, Big Bang, shape of the earth, vaccines, etc. Those darn universities!
The first link has been fixed:
Oops, I meant 44 here:
Update: This reminds me of Bob Tisdale.
I think he’s asking you to include AMS facts in your forecasts.
Bastardi’s “fantastic” article plots CO2 and temperature over the last 4 billion years, without showing error bars or mentioning that the young sun was fainter. His CO2 record also has very low temporal resolution, because the end-Permian and PETM CO2 increases aren’t visible.
Bastardi implies that this graph “disapproves” the fact that increasing CO2 warms the climate, without bothering to calculate anything. In contrast, here’s a figure from Royer et al. 2007 (PDF) which concludes that “a climate sensitivity greater than 1.5°C has probably been a robust feature of the Earth’s climate system over the past 420 million years”.
For another example, skip to 19:17 in Richard Alley’s 2009 AGU talk, where he shows CO2 and glaciation records over the last 400 million years. References are listed on Alley’s slides.
Bastardi also includes a graph from Humlum et al. 2013 without providing a citation, perhaps because that would make it easier for readers to find out how cartoonishly flawed it was.
Then Bastardi accuses climate scientists of “… advocating draconian solutions that cut down the lifeline of the economy … suppress the chance for society as a whole to thrive … even survive … destroy the chance for people to make a better life for themselves. … handcuffing the economy … it’s unethical.”
Those unethical climate scientists! Burn, strawman, burn!
In reality, the Citizens Climate Lobby endorses a revenue neutral carbon tax which will grow the economy by creating more jobs.
Then Bastardi notes that he’s nuttier than the Flat Earth Society, and baselessly claims that the scientific consensus has somehow been “debunked” right before saying that doesn’t matter anyway. Been there, done that. Bastardi continues: “It was obviously meant to make us feel like outcasts.”
Actually, scientists study the consensus to communicate the overwhelming scientific consensus about human-caused climate change to the public, not to make Bastardi feel like an outcast. Newsflash: the Earth doesn’t revolve around Bastardi.
Then Bastardi links to a document Dr. William Gray wrote for the Heartland Institute’s 7th International Conference. I’ll consider it if and when it gets through peer review.
Then Bastardi links to Abdussamatov 2012 which predicts a new ice age if the Sun enters another Maunder minimum.
Feulner and Rahmstorf 2010 already concluded that a new Maunder minimum would have global climate effects “much smaller than the warming expected from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century.” Here are explanations for the general public.
Feulner and Rahmstorf compared the drop in radiative forcing due to a Maunder minimum (<1 W/m^2) to several projections of CO2 forcing (>6 W/m^2). Abdussamatov doesn’t do this, but he estimates the drop in radiative forcing due to the Maunder minimum as ~6 W/m^2 based on Shapiro et al. 2011 which Feulner 2011 (PDF) argues is inconsistent with temperature reconstructions.
Even if Shapiro et al. are right that a Maunder minimum would result in a radiative forcing drop of ~6 W/m^2, the new RCP scenarios are easy to interpret. In RCP6, our CO2 emissions result in +6 W/m^2 by 2100, which would approximately cancel Shapiro’s Maunder minimum. In RCP8.5, the world would continue to warm. Only by reducing emissions would long-term cooling even be possible, even if Shapiro et al. are right and even if a Maunder minimum is actually going to happen (which is extremely speculative).
Bizarrely, Bastardi claims to be suppressed after over 26,000 unsuppressed tweets. Behold Joe Bastardi, “distinguished met.“.
It’s ironic how many contrarians quote Feynman to support views that contradict over a century’s worth of experiments.
So many layers of cynical insinuations, so little time.
If Kevin really wanted to “take the politics out of the AGW debate,” he wouldn’t keep retweeting WUWT misinformation.
In the 1970s they were just called fires for about 75 fewer days each year, and all 11 western states have seen increases in large wildfires. Obviously I still need to “lighten up” because I don’t think this is funny.
If they’re that ignorant, maybe you should lecture them about the seasons.
No, it’s a sobering and relevant example of climate impacts.
I think it’s a disgrace that widespread misinformation has delayed action so long that we got to this point.
Really, “all global warming”? I didn’t see that quote. In fact, his comment that you laughed at was “Climate change is here, you can’t deny it. Why do you think we are having all these fires?”
The words “all these” imply that Reid was talking about the increase in large wildfires that all 11 western states are experiencing. Scientists aren’t the only ones to notice. After CBS News told federal fire chief Tom Boatner that there are a lot of people who don’t believe in climate change, Boatner replied: “You won’t find them on the fire-line in the American West anymore… We know what we’re seeing and we’re dealing with a period of climate in terms of temperature and humidity and drought that’s different than anything people have seen in our lifetimes.”
Oh, the irony.
Nowhere… everywhere. Who’s counting?
Apparently the 4% increase in atmospheric water vapor since 1970 is just a propaganda device, and can’t change the weather.
Why did Watts refer to pictures rather than his peer-reviewed paper? Oh, that’s right: Watts repeatedly claimed that sites classified as urban would show more warming than rural sites because of urban heat pollution. But when actual scientists helped Watts get his paper through peer review, it grudgingly conceded that “overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.”
Ryan Maue then mocked Dr. Francis for “rather weak” hand waving and for being too humble while pointing out that AGW doesn’t magnetically attract hurricanes to land.
Oddly, neither Ryan or Kevin point out that Dr. Spencer said “evolutionary theory is mostly religion” but Ryan did notice Dr. Spencer speaking because he says Dr. Spencer helpfully pointed out some irrelevant trivia.
I can’t watch this depressing trainwreck any more.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
This is what scientists claim. The central estimates of the warming since 1950 due to humans are around or above 100%. The first link in that comment explains this issue in more detail. Immediately below that graph, I’ve listed 45 scientific organizations endorsing that conclusion from the IPCC, and linked to the same Royal Society statement you quoted and called very reasonable:
“There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has been caused largely by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, including agriculture and deforestation.”
Notice that the Royal Society statement also says this:
“This document draws upon recent evidence and builds on the Fourth Assessment Report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007, which is the most comprehensive source of climate science and its uncertainties.”
So the Royal Society builds on the same IPCC report described above, where the central estimates of the warming since 1950 due to humans are around or above 100%.
I’ve explained that land use changes like agriculture and deforestation have had a slight albedo cooling effect, and a warming effect primarily because clearing jungles releases carbon stored in the vegetation. Note that my comment links to the IPCC radiative forcings chart (2.20) and discusses other greenhouse gases and other forcings. Also notice that CO2 is the largest individual forcing on that chart.
Instead of quoting scientific organizations and peer-reviewed papers, you linked web articles making claims like these:
“… methane accounts for about 27 percent of the man-made warming so far, largely because of how it interacts with atmospheric aerosols …”
Wrong. Methane warms the planet because it’s a powerful greenhouse gas, not because of any interactions with aerosols. I’ve explained that methane oxidizes into CO2 within about a decade, so the methane problem quickly becomes a CO2 problem.
Dumb Scientist you left out an important part of that quote:
As they reported last week in Science—findings that Gore got hold of last spring—methane accounts for about 27 percent of the man-made warming so far, largely because of how it interacts with atmospheric aerosols.
The source for that claim is:
Improved Attribution of Climate Forcing to Emissions
Drew T. Shindell et al.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1174760
Science 326 , 716 (2009)
They clearly make the claim that methane’s contribution to warming was largely underestimated previously because how it interacts with atmospheric aerosols wasn’t included.
If you disagree take it up with them or cite more recent research.
The IPCC report shows that methane accounts for about 15% of warming (radiative forcing of 0.48 W/m2 out of 3.06 W/m2) but that doesn’t include the increased radiative forcing of methane interacting with atmospheric aerosols.
Thanks for pointing out Shindell et al. 2009; it was interesting. They find that methane emissions change atmospheric ozone and sulfate concentrations, etc. Their Fig. 1 shows that most of methane’s radiative forcing happens because it’s a greenhouse gas, and that induced changes in ozone contribute more to the increased forcing than changes in sulfates. Also:
“… Our value for the 100-year GWP of methane when including only the responses of methane, ozone, and stratospheric water vapor is almost identical to the comparable AR4 value. The GWP is substantially larger when the direct radiative effects of the aerosol responses are included, however. It becomes larger still, including aerosol-cloud interactions, although uncertainties increase as well. Although results are not statistically different at the 95% confidence level, the best estimate is nonetheless substantially larger when gas-aerosol interactions are included. …”
Although I haven’t seen the latest IPCC AR5 draft, what I’ve seen suggests that indirect aerosol effects have been substantially reduced. So the increase in methane’s radiative forcing due to methane-aerosol interactions is likely to remain statistically insignificant.
Thanks again for the reference, though. I learned something new.
By the way, after Willis Eschenbach compared Shindell et al. 2009 to the IPCC AR4 WG1 Fig. 2.21, he said this:
“… An addition of 0.08 W/m2 to the total methane forcing, from sulfate and nitrate interactions, doesn’t “substantially alter” anything. I am amazed that this trivial change, in the hundredths of a watt/metre squared, merited a scientific paper. How does this make any difference to anything? When I mistakenly thought that they were saying the methane forcing was doubled, “substantially alter” made sense … but a scientific paper for a 0.08 W/m2 difference? On what planet is this meaningful? …”
That result from Shindell et al. 2009 expressed methane forcing in terms of emissions, so it should be compared to Fig. 2.21. An exact number can be obtained by summing the values in Table 2.13. Result: 0.856 W/m^2, just like Marcus said. So Shindell et al. 2009 increased methane’s forcing by 0.14 W/m^2. Compare that to their emissions-based methane uncertainty of 0.14 W/m^2.
That press release appears to be incorrect.Oops, see below. Remember that scientists often don’t write the press releases, which appears to be the case here. That’s why a careful examination of the actual papers is often more productive.Willis Eschenbach eventually admitted that this comparison was mistaken. A proper apples-to-apples comparison shows that the increase is only ~16%, and it’s about as large as Shindell et al.’s uncertainty. Incremental improvements are how science works, but nothing here changes the facts: CO2 is the largest radiative forcing, and we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible.
Oops, the NASA press release isn’t wrong. It’s just from 2005, talking about an earlier GRL paper Shindell et al. 2005 which was repeatedly cited in the 2007 IPCC report’s table 2.13– the one that I just linked to. So the 2007 IPCC report actually included the results from the paper mentioned in the NASA press release, and Shindell et al. 2009 only incrementally changed those values.
Nonsense. I’ve already shown that the human contribution to warming over the last 50-65 years has a central estimate that’s around or above 100%. Click on the graph I linked to see a breakdown of the human contribution over the last 50-65 years into greenhouse gas warming and SO2 cooling. The central greenhouse gas warming estimates hover around 150% of the observed warming over the last 50-65 years. Thus, as long as CO2 contributes at least 1/3 of the total greenhouse gas warming, it is responsible for at least 50% of the observed warming over the last 50-65 years all by itself.
Of course, nobody is claiming that CO2 is the sole problem. That’s the entire reason that scientists talk about “CO2-equivalents” of other radiative forcings. But CO2 is obviously the biggest problem, and it has the longest lifetime in the atmosphere.
I actually wear shorts and sandals to work, not a uniform. If you meant to accuse me of being uninformed, you might want to check my “about” page before you keep digging that particular hole.
No worries.
I’ve already linked to my own words:
“Notice that humans release four significant greenhouse gases, and that methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons have forced the climate by a total of about +1.0 W/m2 since 1750. This is a large fraction of the roughly +1.6 W/m2 due to CO2 alone, which is one reason why climatologists don’t focus solely on CO2.”
So, no. I don’t disagree with Shindell. My previous posts and links have explained that there’s no contradiction between Shindell’s statement and a claim that “ALL (or at least the vast majority) of warming is due solely to increased atmospheric CO2.”
Unfortunately I have a lot of programming to do, so I’ll have to bid you good night.
I already showed you that the comparable 2007 IPCC estimate was 0.856 W/m^2, which also rounds to 0.9 W/m^2. That’s why you were wrong to make these claims:
“… methane has a much greater impact than accounted for by the IPCC. … as you should know the IPCC indicates the radiative forcing of methane is 0.48 W/m2. This chart from the press release for the Shindell paper shows the total methane radiative forcing is 0.99 W/m2. … Even you should be able to understand the increase over the IPCC chart.”
Again, the small (~16%) increase from the IPCC report to Shindell et al. 2009 was within the uncertainties.
Look at the IPCC’s Fig. 2.20. Notice that the CO2 forcing estimate lines up with the peak of the total radiative anthropogenic forcing estimate at the bottom. In other words, all the non-CO2 forcings approximately cancel out, so CO2 is responsible for ~100% of the anthropogenic forcing. Advancements since 2007 (weaker indirect aerosols, etc.) probably lower this percentage slightly, but “a vast majority” is still a reasonable description.
I’ve already explained that you’re referring to the wrong graphic. The 0.99 W/m^2 value from Shindell et al. 2009 was emission-based, not abundance-based, so it should be compared to Fig. 2.21, which is quantified in Table 2.13 as 0.856 W/m^2. I’ve also already explained that all the other anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcings would have to be about twice as large as CO2’s to falsify the statement that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for most of the observed warming over the last 50-65 years.
And yet you keep repeating the same mistaken comparison. Why? Even Willis Eschenbach had the integrity to admit that the Shindell et al. 2009 paper doesn’t substantially alter anything relative to the 2007 IPPC report.
… says Bill, after repeatedly comparing Shindell apples to IPCC oranges. Even after being corrected. Even when there’s an IPCC apple in the very next figure.
As I’ve said before, the scientific consensus is actually that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to our greenhouse gas emissions. Do you agree with that? If not, you don’t really agree with the scientific consensus.
No, you also said “only an uniformed person would claim that CO2 is responsible for most of the observed warming. It’s more complicated than that.”
As I’ve shown, the vast majority of the scientific community is endorsing that “uninformed” claim, including NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, 43 other science societies, and me.
If you really do agree with the vast majority of scientists, you might want to mention that to the denizens of WUWT. Let us know how that goes, eh?
All competent scientists recognize the importance of reducing all our greenhouse gas emissions. Again, that’s why scientists calculate “CO2-equivalents” for other greenhouse gases. But again CO2 is by far the largest and longest-lived, and is very likely responsible for most of the observed warming over the last 50-65 years all by itself. I’ve also explained that methane oxidizes into CO2 after about a decade, so in the long term even methane is actually a CO2 problem.
Is there some point to this repetition, or are you just another troll wasting my time?
Because climatology is a mature science, so even incremental improvements are significant. Especially to the scientists who work for years to achieve them.
Why 1850? The IPCC chart goes back to 1750 and distinguishes between all greenhouse gases. Most publications don’t bother with that distinction. Of the 0.8C increase since 1850, Fig. 3b of Huber and Knutti 2011 attributes roughly 0.9C to 1.8C of that increase to greenhouse gases. Most of that warming is likely due to CO2, so even if the lower error bar is true and even if CO2 is only 50% of the greenhouse gas forcing, it would still be responsible for 0.45C out of 0.8C, which is 56%.
Again, most of the warming since 1850 is likely due to CO2.
You’ve shifted from calling NASA “uninformed” to baselessly accusing us of misleading the public because you mistook a 2005 press release (which did say “twice”) with a 2009 press release (which did not say “twice”).
Because WUWT denizens see “mistakes” all over climate science, they’re probably inclined to assume that scientifically “significant” results must be groundbreaking. In reality, climatology is over a century old. It’s older than plate tectonics! Thus improvements that climate scientists consider “significant” probably don’t seem like a huge deal to the crowd at WUWT.
Since I never said that, I don’t think you do. Read my comments again.
When the 2005 press release said “twice previous estimates,” the previous estimate was the 2001 IPCC report. Go to section 6.3.2 “Radiative Forcing of Climate Change – Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gases – Methane and Nitrous Oxide”. It says this:
“… After updating for a small increase in concentration since the SAR, the radiative forcing due to CH4 is 0.48 Wm-2 since pre-industrial times. This estimate for forcing due to CH4 is only for the direct effect of CH4; for radiative forcing of the indirect effect of CH4, see Sections 6.5 and 6.6. …”
No instances of “CH4” appear in section 6.5. Section 6.6 said:
“… In addition to the direct forcings caused by injection of radiatively active gases to the atmosphere, some compounds or processes can also modify the radiative balance through indirect effects relating to chemical transformation or change in the distribution of radiatively active species. As previously indicated (IPCC, 1992, 1994; SAR), the tropospheric chemical processes determining the indirect greenhouse effects are highly complex and not fully understood. The uncertainties connected with estimates of the indirect effects are larger than the uncertainties of those connected to estimates of the direct effects. Because of the central role that O3 and OH play in tropospheric chemistry, the chemistry of CH4, CO, NMHC, and NOx is strongly intertwined, making the interpretation of the effects associated with emission changes rather complex. … One of the primary species affected by possible changes in photodissociation rates is the hydroxyl radical OH, which regulates the tropospheric lifetime of a large number of trace gases such as CH4…”
So the 2001 IPCC report acknowledged that the indirect effects later explored in Shindell et al. 2005 were too uncertain to include in 2001. Again, your accusation that NASA was misleading the public is completely baseless. Please retract it.
Also, you could’ve easily found this information yourself. Again, are you just a troll wasting my time?
I already pointed out that this quote doesn’t contradict the scientific consensus, which you’ve called “uninformed”.
Again, the scientific consensus is actually that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to our greenhouse gas emissions. Do you agree with that? Yes or no.
I don’t agree with your baseless accusation that Shindell was somehow confused. Again, significant improvements in mature sciences probably don’t seem like a huge deal to the public. Again, please stop accusing scientists of incompetence.
I’ve already pointed out that if CO2 is responsible for even 33% of the total LLGHG radiative forcing over the last 50-65 years, it’s likely responsible for at least 50% of the observed warming over the last 50-65 years. So we agree that this position isn’t “uninformed” after all?
Again, nobody’s suggesting ignoring other greenhouse gases. That’s just a strawman you keep reanimating to waste my time. Congratulations, you succeeded.
I derived “56%” of the warming since 1850 due to CO2 by picking the lower bound, and postulating that only 50% of the LLGHG forcing was due to CO2 alone. Both of those are likely underestimates. For instance, 50% of the upper bound would imply that CO2 caused 112% of the warming since 1850. The midpoint is 84%, which seems to qualify as a vast majority.
It’s also unlikely that CO2 only makes up 50% of the total LLGHG forcing. I didn’t bother to address your earlier claim:
You didn’t provide a citation or specify what time period you were talking about. Regardless, 1.8/2.63 = 68%, and 1.8/2.89 = 62%. Those are both over 50%, even using your own uncited numbers.
But I prefer science with citations, so please refer to the 2007 IPCC Fig. 2.20. Notice that the radiative forcing since 1750 due to CO2 is greater than that of all other LLGHG’s combined. That’s also true in emissions-based calculations like Fig. 2.21. So once again, CO2 makes up more than 50% of the total LLGHG forcing. A ~16% increase in methane forcing isn’t going to change that.
And 45 science societies have agreed that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to our greenhouse gas emissions. Because our emissions accelerated after 1950, CO2 played a larger role after 1950 than in those estimates starting in 1750 or 1850.
You’re baselessly implying that I’ve moved closer to your position. I’ve already explained that the quotes you provided were incorrect. I recommend learning science from peer-reviewed journals, not politicians.
Seriously, you’re just trolling, right? You still haven’t answered my simple question: the scientific consensus is actually that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to our greenhouse gas emissions. Do you agree with that? Yes or no.
Okay, that confidence level is consistent with the 2001 IPCC report’s attribution statement. If you really believe that, please try to explain why to the denizens of WUWT, most of whom are much more than 12 years behind the science.
Your statement is in the 97% because it echoedThis originally said “You’re in the 97% because you just echoed…” which was sloppy on my part. Cook’s survey classified abstracts, not people. Contrarians occasionally make statements that agree with the majority of scientists even if most of their other statements remain well outside the consensus. This sloppiness continues throughout this comment, where I’m actually trying to refer to most of the statements made by Eric Worrall and Dr. Spencer. the 2001 IPCC report’s attribution statement, “most of the warming is likely due to increased GHGs.”
However, contrarians like Eric Worrall and Dr. Roy Spencer wrongly claim to be part of the 97% consensus. For instance, Dr. Spencer recently testified before the U.S. Senate. 16 minutes before he says “evolutionary theory is mostly religion” at 03:23:10, Dr. Spencer says this:
“There’s a recent paper by John Cook and co-authors who looked at thousands of research papers which have been published in the scientific literature to see what fraction support the scientific consensus on global warming. Well, it turns out that the 97% consensus that they found, I am indeed part of and Senator Sessions mentioned he would agree with it too. And my associate John Christy, he agrees with it. In fact, all skeptics that I know of that work in this business. All are part of that 97% because the 97% includes people who think humans have some influence on climate. …”
Once again, Dr. Spencer is comically misinformed. Table 2 in Cook et al. 2013 rated abstracts and queried authors on a 7 point scale:
1. Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+%
2. Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimise
3. Implicitly endorses AGW without minimising it
4a. No Position
4b. Undecided
5. Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW
6. Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify
7. Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%
Only the first three categories are counted as part of the consensus, and Dr. Spencer is not in them. His blog shows that he minimizes AGW, and in the past he’s even tried to argue that “The long-term increases in carbon dioxide concentration that have been observed at Mauna Loa since 1958 could be driven more than by the ocean than by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels.”
This is incredibly, fractally wrong. As recently as 2012 he’s tried to claim that “most of the warming we’ve seen could well be natural”.
These claims place Dr. Spencer somewhere in categories 5-7. He’s definitely not part of the consensus, and neither is Dr. Christy. They’re part of the very loud 3% of contrarian scientists who have managed to confuse the public into thinking that they’re much more numerous.
There are many contrarians like Dr. Spencer and Eric Worrall wrongly trying to claim that they’re part of the 97% consensus. But a quick glance at Cook et al. 2013 shows that they’re just contrarians doing what contrarians do best: spreading confusion.
Dr. Curry and Bishop Hill also play this game.
I failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: These comments were copied from here.)
Dr. Spencer’s outrage presumes that the first stage of grief is “Holocaust denial” and not “denial”. However, some accusations of denial are more explicit:
“While most environmentalists continue to insist that there is no connection between international bans on DDT and human deaths, such protestations really are like denying that the Holocaust ever happened.” [Dr. Roy Spencer, 2008]
Because I deny Dr. Spencer’s DDT conspiracy theory, Dr. Spencer referred to me using a more explicit version of the “repulsive, extremist” comparison that pushed his buttons. But I won’t call Dr. Spencer names, because that seems unproductive and incredibly unprofessional.
(h/t to Kilby at Hot Whopper and Tim Lambert.)
Update: Seen at WUWT:
Does Dr. Spencer’s “global warming Nazi” label also apply to famous contrarian Dr. Fred Singer?
Does Dr. Singer’s “denier” label apply to Dr. Spencer? “Roy Spencer on how Oceans are Driving CO2” was incredibly, fractally wrong.
I’ve shown three hypothetical CO2 emissions curves which all have the same chance of keeping the equilibrium warming at “only” 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. These curves can vary based on the immediate transient response, the Charney sensitivity, and the long-term Earth system sensitivity which includes slow feedbacks. These feedbacks aren’t hypothetical; they’re based on millions of years of paleoclimate evidence. Even though there’s a range of possible sensitivities, I think the following description of those CO2 emissions curves is qualitatively accurate:
If we had peaked in 2011, we could slowly reduce emissions along the green curve. If you were to ski the green curve, it would be the bunny slope.
Note that if we’d peaked in 2011, future generations would have the choice of emitting some CO2 after the 2040s. By waiting just a few years, we’ve already taken that choice away from them.
If we wait until 2020 to peak, we’d have to reduce emissions 9% per year afterwards. That’s not a bunny slope, it’s more like a black diamond.
We need to address the CO2 problem right now.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Stan Sholar accuse climate scientists of fraud.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) lectures about computer models and misrepresents the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Ocean heat content isn’t uniformly distributed, so it requires measurements at multiple locations. Atmospheric CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere so it and ocean acidification are constrained better using measurements at one location.
You might be interested in Ken Caldeira’s 2012 AGU lecture on ocean acidification. Here’s an excerpt from 44 minutes in, referring to saturation levels of aragonite (CaCO3) which decrease as atmospheric CO2 increases:
“… if it was possible for reefs to adapt, and thrive and compete ecologically at lower saturation levels, they would’ve been doing that at the edge of their range today… there’s been pressure for them to adapt to lower saturation conditions throughout geologic time and they haven’t succeeded in competing in that, and so I think the idea that they’re going to somehow undergo some kind of massive evolutionary leap and suddenly be able to live in waters that they’ve never lived in before is a bit unrealistic… under a business as usual scenario it’s at least likely that coral reefs will not be sustainable… “
At 35 minutes in, he references Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF) showing that during the end-Permian extinction, ~85% of genuses like coral with aragonite skeletons went extinct, but only ~5% of genuses like fish with other skeletons went extinct.
Ironically, sea level rise over the past few decades is greater than projected by the IPCC models. You might be referring to the fact that the last time Earth’s climate had 400ppm CO2, sea level was ~20m higher than today. That’s not a model, and it’s yet another reason to be concerned about future sea level rise.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Presumably you’re referring to these sentences:
“Rising temperatures cause silicate weathering rates to increase, increasing CO2 draw-down, lowering CO2 levels in the atmosphere. This results in conditions that are increasingly unsuited to (higher) plant life (Lovelock & Whitfield 1982; Caldeira & Kasting 1992). During the CO2 decline, rapid ocean evaporation would not yet have begun. From Henry’s Law, a reduction in atmospheric CO2 would lead to a reduction in the CO2 levels in the surface ocean, while increased silicate weathering could potentially lead to increased carbonate deposition.”
There’s no error here. As the Earth warms, more ice melts which exposes more silicate rocks. As the temperature increases, these rocks react faster with CO2. This sequesters carbon in the rocks, decreasing the partial pressure of atmospheric CO2, which decreases CO2 in the ocean via Henry’s Law, as the text mentions.
Lgw correctly pointed out that on geological timescales, rock weathering is Earth’s thermostat:
Warm the Earth and rock weathering speeds up, reducing atmospheric CO2 which slows the warming. (Of course, the end-Permian shows that this feedback takes millions of years to kick in.)
Cool the Earth and rock weathering slows down, eventually stopping when Earth turns into a snowball where all rocks are covered by ice. Eventually, enough CO2 builds up to thaw the snowball. (Of course, Snowball Earth shows that this feedback takes millions of years to kick in.)
Update: Lgw resumes digging.
Oh, I see. You were responding to the Slashdot summary which wrongly claims that “the first major effect of warming, about 1 billion years from now, will be a dramatic drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide as the oceans absorb more of it.”
You were right to point out this error. The summary should say land, not ocean. Sorry for the interruption.
Update: Jane starts digging again.
I left comments on two Climate Audit posts.
After Eric Worrall mentioned debating a “JPL climate seantist” I responded on 2013-03-10 that he was probably referring to this debate. I left this comment by clicking the twitter icon that’s available on many wordpress blogs. My comment was visible until at least 2013-04-23.
Months later, after noticing a strange glitch in WUWT’s twitter feed, I clicked the same twitter icon to comment, but a WUWT mod snipped my comment and told me to resubmit with a valid email address. So I resubmitted with a “valid” email address and a link to Dumb Scientist.
My comment’s link still worked on 2013-11-09. Strangely, right after I pointed dbstealey to that comment on another WUWT thread, my link retroactively disappeared because an anonymous mod said “[‘Dumb Scientist’ link to screen name removed due to admittedly profane commentary. This is a family blog. ~mod.]”.
Presumably dbstealey, RACookPE1978, David M. Hoffer, ATheoK and Janice Moore are also subject to this strict moderation policy. If WUWT allows them to post personal attacks, maybe WUWT moderation policy is a hypocritical farce.
Even though my original WUWT reply to Eric Worrall had been visible for at least a month after I posted it, by 2013-12-13 it had been retroactively snipped.
When I pointed out that Anthony Watts was wrong to call John Cook a liar, Watts snipped my comments, which I’ve copied here:
After Anthony gave me a “24 hour time-out” I was able to continue debunking misinformation in a WUWT post written by Sky Dragon Slayer Dr. Tim Ball.
WUWT policy discourages sockpuppetry, so they might ponder why Steven R. Vada’s comments are so similar to those of Bill from Nevada and Allen Eltor, who calls me an astroturfer hick. Perhaps dbstealey can help stop sockpuppetry on WUWT?
Update: To his credit, Watts bans Vada for sockpuppetry.
Here are the snipped comments I tried to post right before Anthony Watts banned me:
Anthony Watts later said this:
And yet Anthony Watts keeps lending his soapbox to Sky Dragon Slayer Dr. Ball.
Local backups: CA1, CA2, WUWT1, WUWT2, WUWT3, WUWT4.
Lonny Eachus: “Mann‘s work has been pretty thoroughly discredited.“
Bjorn Lomborg says to Peter Gleick: “When climate ineffective way to help & poverty very effective, you say ‘let’s spend $xbn on each’? $2xbn on poverty is better”
Lomborg’s “better” approach leaves $0 for addressing climate change, which almost gives the impression he’s switched sides again.
Steve Goddard et al. deny that increasing CO2 raises sea level.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Cowtan and Way 2013 compensated for missing HadCRUT4 surface temperature measurements in places like the Arctic and Africa by using the spatial pattern of satellite data to produce a hybrid satellite/surface dataset. Jane and Lonny ponder the differences between Cowtan and Way’s hybrid dataset and HadCRUT4:
Jane and Lonny’s basic premise wrongly ignores the large error bars on these noisy, short-term trends. The SkS trend calculator can calculate the trends and error bars from 1997 through (and including) 2012 for both HadCRUT4 and Cowtan and Way’s hybrid dataset:
1997-2013 HadCRUT4 hybrid Trend: 0.119 ± 0.150 °C/decade
The hybrid dataset’s central estimate is inside the error bars of the original HadCRUT4 estimate.
I calculated error bars on UAH trends. The black line on the second page shows the UAH trend ending in 2012, for different starting years. The error bars are shown in red; they’re 95% confidence uncertainty bounds. Note that error bars on longer trends are smaller than the large error bars on shorter trends.
Anyone can reproduce my results by downloading the free “R” programming language used by professional statisticians. Then save this code as “significance.r”:
# outputs to Rplots.pdf and significance.r.Rout
# load custom functions
# for generalised least squares
library(nlme)
# options
xunits="year"
textsize=1.4
titlesize=1.8
colfit="red"
pch1=20#points
# read basin data
indata = read.table("greenland2013/GIS_climate.nasa.txt",header=T)
title="Greenland mass"
yunits="gigatons"
tlims=c(-350,-190)
alims=c(-60,0)
#indata = indata[which(indata$x>2002.0),]
# remove mean
indata$y = indata$y - mean(indata$y)
n = length(indata$x)
n
midpoint=(indata$x[n]+indata$x[1])/2.0
# fit model
fit=gls(y~x,data=indata,corr=corARMA(p=1,q=1))
#fit=gls(y~x+sin(2*pi*x)+cos(2*pi*x),data=indata,corr=corARMA(p=1,q=1))
#fit=gls(y~x+I(x^2)+sin(2*pi*x)+cos(2*pi*x),data=indata,corr=corARMA(p=1,q=1))
fitsummmary=summary(fit)
slope = fitsummmary$tTable[2,1]
slopeerror = 2*fitsummmary$tTable[2,2]#2 sigma
plot(indata$x,indata$y,type="o",pch=pch1,lwd=2,cex.main=titlesize,cex.axis=textsize,cex.lab=textsize,xlab=xunits,ylab=yunits,main=title)
points(indata$x,fit$fit,type="l",lwd=2,lty=2,col=colfit)
lowerbound=fit$fit-slopeerror*indata$x
lowerbound=lowerbound - mean(lowerbound) + mean(fit$fit)
points(indata$x,lowerbound,type="l",lwd=3,lty=1,col=colfit)
upperbound=fit$fit+slopeerror*indata$x
upperbound=upperbound - mean(upperbound) + mean(fit$fit)
points(indata$x,upperbound,type="l",lwd=3,lty=1,col=colfit)
confint(fit,digits=6)
midpoint=(indata$x[n]-indata$x[1])/2.0+indata$x[1]
top=(indata$y[which.max(indata$y)]-indata$y[which.min(indata$y)])*0.99+indata$y[which.min(indata$y)]
text(midpoint,top,sprintf("%+.3f+-%.3f %s/%s",slope,slopeerror,yunits,xunits),cex=2,col=colfit)
Just download temperature data (from WoodForTrees, Skeptical Science, Cowtan and Way, or any other climate data source). Then redirect the read.table command to that file, and save the data in this format:
2003.04 1184.10
2003.12 1006.97
Then run it using the command “R CMD BATCH significance.r”
Notes: The second page here uncommented the “which” command and used a for-loop to cycle through different starting years. Here’s another R script that automatically downloads the latest HadCRUT4 annual data.
Lesser scientists would feel obliged to point out some of the “creativity” in Cowtan and Way’s open source code and data before implying that they fabricated evidence. Motl has apparently transcended that obligation, but others should at least ponder the validations Cowtan and Way explain in this 4 minute video.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
I’ve just shared a new significance.zip (backup copies) which contains my R statistics folder, including many data sets and the R code which produced this sea level acceleration PDF.
The new significance.r (backup copies) can load many datasets, one (and only one) of which should be selected by changing “2==1” to “1==1”.
At the end of significance.r, the chosen dataset is analyzed using functions defined in functions.r (backup copies).
Residuals should be carefully examined, and a noise model should be chosen that minimizes either the AIC or BIC.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Jane isn’t smearing CRU.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane: “… Even creationists have some facts that support their position…”
At “And Then There’s Physics” I described my visit to WUWT, which geronimo found difficult to believe, and unintentionally ruined Dilbert for some.
Told Greg Egan’s tale of Inoshiro and shamelessly promoted my AGU poster.
Discussed Tamsin, BBD, Foxgoose’s “warming pause”, accusations of scheming, Lomborg, food is really 100% of GDP, how to outlive the stars. Geoff Chambers tries out different ways of misunderstanding Honisch et al. 2012.
Contrarians outnumber climate scientists by 1000:1, mentioned CCL trip to DC.
Discussed autocorrelation, provided code, pointed out that natural variability means climate sensitivity isn’t 0, defended contrarian morality.
Discussed megaton hydrogen bombs, CCL’s solution, asked Steve Fitzpatrick restaurant questions, suggested plotting trends only to avoid baseline issues.
Discussed paleoclimate estimates of sensitivity, IPCC Box 10.2, oops Anders is consistent with IPCC.
Discussed Manabe 1991, Worrall’s JPL links, my dissertation, tides during Pangea, lattice QCD, and reincarnation.
At Hot Whopper, I also shamelessly promoted my research after Watts braved the AGU “lion’s den”, defended Abby Winters and responded to David M. Hoffer.
More discussions at ATTP regarding event horizons, peer review, Haseler’s 1910-1940 talking point, 2011 La Nina, statistical uncertainties, rewriting the past, ENSO noise, Hanlon’s razor, sea level rise and “skeptics”, Profs. Curry and John N-G.
At ATTP, discussed how El Ninos warm the surface, mitigation is like a college fund, Manabe et al. 1991, Antarctic sea ice vs. land ice, greenhouse effect, lifeless universe, CCL’s plan, regressive dividends, no need for global agreements, droughts, floods, error bars, WUWT discourse, regressive dividends, nuclear power, waste heat, microgrids inspired by USB standardization, PETM, ENTO, Little Herds, fisheries, driving in fog, genuine skeptics, greenhouse effect, Years of Living, and the abyss.
At Hot Whopper, discussed Prof. Curry, Eric Worrall’s double standards, GRACE, Lewandowsky and more of Worrall’s double standards, Dana Rohrabacher, post-1950 sensitivity constraints, cosmic rays, logarithms, Salby, sharing code with Worrall, Greenland’s ice sheet, left an anonymous comment showing that Tom Harris had indeed called climate science a hoax, Evan Jones, paleoclimate, OHC, etc.
At ATTP, discussed plumbers, the Fermi paradox and the singularity, agreeing with Dr. Pielke Sr., the AMO, Antarctic ice and GRACE, sealevel rise acceleration, Prof. Tol, the 97% consensus and #FreeTheTol300, PALAEOSENS, Dr. Tamsin Edwards, Louisiana and beards, the uncertainty principle, FTL neutrinos, and inflation.
At Hot Whopper, discussed aerosols, climate efficacy, “Steven Goddard”, President Eisenhower, Dr. Spencer, Dr. Motl, Prof. Curry, palindrom, anonymously corrected Eric Worrall and the Slayers.
Elsewhere, discussed being banned from WUWT and anonymously asked the script kiddie who hacked SkS if there was a word for his behavior. His wrong answer is ridiculously ironic. I also anonymously asked him what he would do after telling others to shut up.
At Hot Whopper, discussed Llovel et al. 2014, oxygen, José Duarte, the Younger Dryas, oxygen, demon-proof moat, water, rain, magical alloys and Asimov reference, Bryans, etc.
At ATTP, discussed ocean acidification, solutions, unpleasantness, the happiness engineer strikes again, gravity, tides, the Fermi paradox, fire makes us human, Tamsin Edwards on Newsnight, Tamino’s posts about Hansen’s climate dice, Genghis, solar power in Africa, GPS and relativity, geoengineering, precipitation, climate efficacies, precipitation, Llovel et al. 2014, #FreeTheTol300, political liability, oxygen, Fermi paradox, PALAEOSENS, solar and lunar tidal locks.
At Science of Doom, discussed Bryans and the first stage of grief.
At Retraction Watch, commented on legal threats.
At ATTP, discussed the resilient near future, the Fermi paradox, seepage and GOCE, seepage and continued warming, “lukewarmers” and ocean acidification, Dr. Pielke Sr., Dr. Sardeshmukh, GRACE, Dr. Zwally, urgency, Prof. Tol and a carbon tax, Rep. Lamar Smith, shell games, and being hated.
Discussed The Auditor’s accusations at David Appell’s, Hot Whopper and ATTP.
At Tamino’s, discussed el Nino’s and John N-G’s graph.
At Hot Whopper, discussed Dr. Spencer, Rep. E. B. Johnson, and Manabe et al.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
As Tom Curtis noted:
“There is an irony about the various sailors, scientist, reporters and tourists currently being trapped in sea ice. They are not trapped because of the growth of Antarctic Sea Ice. Although the current Antarctic SI is 1.5 million square kilometers greater than 1979-2008 mean for this time of year, it is nonetheless melting rapidly, including just north of Commonwealth Bay where the Shokalskey is trapped. Rather, it is trapped as a consequence of portions of ice shelves breaking of the Antarctic coast line. Specifically, in 2010, Iceberg B-9B, a remnant of a calving event on the Ross Ice Shelf in 1987, collided with the tongue of the Metz Glacier, breaking it of. The debris from that collision, it appears, has remained more or less in situe for the last three years, until b winds shifted out from the terminus of the Metz Glacier towards Commonwealth Bay, trapping the Shokalskey. This is described in more detail on the mission blog.”
Tom also noted that the mission’s 2nd goal was to “explore changes in ocean circulation caused by the growth of extensive fast ice and its impact on life in Commonwealth Bay.”
For some strange reason, the CFACT link Jane provided tells a different story.
Update: I’ve failed to communicateDec 27, 2013 It is really too bad that the scientists studying GLOBAL WARMING in Antarctica got stuck on their icebreaker because of massive ice and cold
Dec 28, 2013 The rescue icebreaker, trying to free the ship of the GLOBAL WARMING scientists, has turned back-the ice is massive (a record). IRONIC!
Dec 28, 2013 The global warming scientists don’t want to be airlifted off the ship-they are having too much fun and that is too simple a solution-FAME!
Dec 29, 2013 Temperature at record lows in many parts of the country. 50 degrees below zero with wind chill in large area. Global warming folks iced in!
Dec 30, 2013 What the hell is going on with GLOBAL WARMING. The planet is freezing, the ice is building and the G.W. scientists are stuck-a total con job
Jan 1, 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice
Jan 2, 2014 “@ShadeTreeGambla: @realDonaldTrump irony is…. Imagine all the fossil fuels required to rescue that ship of idiots!” once again.
Lonny Eachus complains about rude, aggressive comments.
Here we go again. Jane’s comments on sea level, UAH and surface temperatures follow a pattern. First, Jane plucks a short term trend from the noise and waves it around. Scientists then point out that Jane’s trend is so short that it just represents weather noise, not climate signal. Jane then insists that waving around short term trends isn’t meant to imply anything about the long term trend. Rinse, repeat.
So, consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 page 811: “… sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
The last point on NOAA’s MEI index is -0.312, which is on the La Nina side but effectively neutral.
No link and no name = argument from inscrutable authority. In reality, we might have an El Nino by July which will serve as the basis for the talking point I mentioned at WUWT.
Yes, many contrarians operate under the premise that climate change is natural and not driven by human CO2 emissions. In contrast, scientists measure contributions from many natural factors, and many human factors. Scientists don’t start from either biased premise, but obviously contrarians do. Thanks for finally being honest, Jane.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Exactly what who’s been saying all along? Aside from all your short term “cooling/recovery” trends, you’ve smeared paleoclimate studies while making these uncited claims about the paleoclimate:
“NOBODY in their right minds has — and I certainly have not — been arguing that the globe has not been getting warmer! That is not the issue and never was. The globe has been trending warmer for the last 6,000 years! The data are clear. Someone would have to be an idiot or totally uninformed to make such a claim.” [Jane Q. Public, 2007-10-24]
“Not quite 0.74 degrees, but yes it has warmed. So what? The earth has been trending steadily warmer for the last 6,000 years!!!” [Jane Q. Public, 2008-06-22]
“The trend over 5 or 6 THOUSAND years has been warmer.” [Jane Q. Public, 2008-06-22]
“I do not disagree that the globe is warming. That would be denying facts… the earth has been trending warmer for over 6,000 years!” [Jane Q. Public, 2008-06-22]
“Trying to prove to me that the globe is warming was a pretty silly thing to do. I do not dispute that the earth has been getting warmer, and never did! It has been trending warmer for the last 6,000 years!” [Jane Q. Public, 2009-04-18]
“We know the earth has been warming. It has been doing so for approximately 6,000 years.” [Lonny Eachus, 2009-07-02]
“Certainly the globe has been warming… it has been trending warmer for thousands of years.” [Jane Q. Public, 2010-02-03]
“First, people with at least half a brain — including in the U.S. — know the climate is getting warmer. It has been trending warmer for roughly 6,000 years, industry or not.” [Jane Q. Public, 2011-07-17]
Jane and Lonny Eachus are wrong. According to Marcott et al. 2013 (PDF), the world has actually been cooling for most of the last 6,000 years.
Update: Jane and Lonny keep digging.
I like Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, so I bought The Goliath Stone by Larry Niven and Matthew Joseph Harrington. Here are some quotes:
Wow. Myths about lethal DDT bans, murdered grantsuckers with agendas of increasing control, and gratuitous nonsense about massive neutrinos. This apparent ode to Michael Crichton and the Merchants of Doubt isn’t new; here are some older quotes by Matthew Joseph Harrington:
In The Goliath Stone the end-Permian temperature rise happens because “dust and soot from the [comet] impact had covered the world, absorbing more sunlight” (p18). Around 65 million BC an asteroid hits:
This could be a reference to a 1991 book Eric Worrall promoted at WUWT called Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn.
Prof. Richard Tol lectures about the impacts of global warming and ocean acidification, and disputes the 97% scientific consensus.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus wrongly imply that NASA and dozens of scientific organizations display total ignorance of science.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
No, my links show that scientists understand the difference between correlation and causation. Here’s another document by the National Academy of Sciences which may interest anyone who actually wants to understand the science. See page 5.
I’d already told Lonny Eachus that the National Academy of Sciences said “the need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.” So Lonny Eachus does seem to imply that the NAS displays total ignorance of science.
My links show that this isn’t just about the NAS, it’s also NASA and dozens of other scientific organizations who agree that most of the warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Since you aren’t calling NAS “alarmist”, it’s great that we can all agree with the National Academy of Sciences when they said that “the need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.”
My links show that NASA, the NAS, and dozens of other scientific organizations accept the mainstream climate science that Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus dismiss as “alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist, alarmist.”
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
False. Antarctic land ice mass is decreasing, and reliable estimates of Antarctic sea ice volume (or mass) aren’t available.
Even if you meant to refer to Antarctic sea ice extent (not mass), you already ignored me when I told you that this is consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 page 811: “… sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
But maybe you’ll listen to the National Academy of Sciences, if you honestly don’t think the National Academy of Sciences is “alarmist”. Again, their recent report is educational. They address Antarctic sea ice in question 12.
Jane and Lonny Eachus have repeatedly ignored me whenever I’ve told you that there’s been no statistically significant change in the surface warming rate. But if you honestly don’t think the NAS is alarmist, you might learn something from their answers to questions 9 and 10. This point is particularly relevant: “More than 90% of the heat added to Earth is absorbed by the oceans and penetrates only slowly into deep water. A faster rate of heat penetration into the deeper ocean will slow the warming seen at the surface and in the atmosphere, but by itself will not change the long-term warming that will occur from a given amount of CO2.”
No, that’s not science the way it’s practiced by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Meteorological Society, the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Scientists, the American Quaternary Association, the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, the American Astronomical Society, the American Chemical Society, the Geological Society of America, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Society for Microbiology, the Society of American Foresters, the Australian Institute of Physics, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, the Geological Society of Australia, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, the Australian Coral Reef Society, the Royal Society of the UK, the Royal Meteorological Society, the British Antarctic Survey, the Geological Society of London, the Society of Biology (UK), the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Royal Society of New Zealand, NIWA, MetService, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the European Science Foundation, the European Geosciences Union, the European Physical Society, the European Federation of Geologists, the Network of African Science Academies, the International Union for Quaternary Research, the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, the Wildlife Society (International), and the World Meteorological Organization.
However, as the NAS explained, you’re restricting your study to relatively isolated phenomena (ignoring the 90% of the heat added to the Earth which goes into the ocean in favor of myopically staring at surface temperatures over short timespans), and ignoring the bigger picture. In both time and space.
“NOBODY in their right minds has — and I certainly have not — been arguing that the globe has not been getting warmer! That is not the issue and never was. The globe has been trending warmer for the last 6,000 years! The data are clear. Someone would have to be an idiot or totally uninformed to make such a claim.” [Jane Q. Public, 2007-10-24]
“I do not disagree that the globe is warming. That would be denying facts… the earth has been trending warmer for over 6,000 years!” [Jane Q. Public, 2008-06-22]
“Trying to prove to me that the globe is warming was a pretty silly thing to do. I do not dispute that the earth has been getting warmer, and never did! It has been trending warmer for the last 6,000 years!” [Jane Q. Public, 2009-04-18]
“We know the earth has been warming. It has been doing so for approximately 6,000 years.” [Lonny Eachus, 2009-07-02]
“We know the Earth is warming, you idiot. That’s not the issue here.” [Lonny Eachus, 2010-07-01]
“First, people with at least half a brain — including in the U.S. — know the climate is getting warmer. It has been trending warmer for roughly 6,000 years, industry or not.” [Jane Q. Public, 2011-07-17]
“My comment had nothing to do with warming per se. We know that is going on, and anybody who denies it is probably foolish. My comment had to do only with “anthropogenic” warming. Which I could have made more clear. …” [Jane Q. Public, 2011-11-19]
“… AGW skeptics (the subject under discussion) do not generally deny that global warming is happening at all. Instead, they are merely skeptical about whether it is being caused by man, and CO2 in particular. So no, it is not an accurate term for the vast majority of AGW skeptics, and it has nothing to do with what’s “in front of their face”, because they aren’t denying what’s in front of their face. You are confusing skepticism about scientific warming models with denial that warming is happening at all…” [Jane Q. Public, 2012-05-02]
“… I have not, at any time, been denying that the climate is changing. The only thing that is even remotely in dispute, as far as I am concerned, is how much of it, if any, is due to CO2.” [Jane Q. Public, 2012-07-16]
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Fig. 2(a) from Polyak et al. 2010 shows that the reconstructed Arctic sea ice extent in the 1930s was comparable to that in 1979, and the modern decline is quite clear.
Kinnard et al. 2011 reconstructed Arctic sea ice over the past 1,450 years. Again, the modern decline is quite clear.
One person named “Leonid Polyak, Richard B. Alley, John T. Andrews, Julie Brigham-Grette, Thomas M. Cronin, Dennis A. Darby, Arthur S. Dyke, Joan J. Fitzpatrick, Svend Funder, Marika Holland, Anne E. Jennings, Gifford H. Miller, Matt O’Regan, James Savelle, Mark Serreze, Kristen St. John, James W.C. White, Eric Wolff.”
That seems like a really long name. Are you sure it’s one person?
The HCN records surface temperatures, not Arctic sea ice extent.
Are you implying that the U.S. government’s own records are reliable?
Jane on Dr. Bengtsson’s paper.
If atmospheric CO2 increases slowly, ocean pH doesn’t change significantly because it’s buffered by carbonates and land weathering on long time scales. See Fig. 2 in Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF):
“When CO2 dissolves in seawater, it reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which then dissociates to bicarbonate, carbonate, and hydrogen ions. The higher concentration of hydrogen ions makes seawater acidic, but this process is buffered on long time scales by the interplay of seawater, seafloor carbonate sediments, and weathering on land.”
It’s incredibly ironic that Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus both point to paleoclimate evidence to support their dismissal of ocean acidification. Honisch et al. 2012 also discusses the observed consequences of releasing CO2 more quickly, such as during the end-Permian and PETM.
Paleoclimate evidence shows that ocean acidification depends on the rate of CO2 emissions, not the amount in the atmosphere.
Daily temperature variations can be ~10°C or more, but during the end-Permian a ~10°C rise in the long term global average temperature coincidentally happened when ~90% of all species went extinct. Furthermore, the marine extinction pattern has ocean acidification’s fingerprints on it. Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF) showed that during the end-Permian extinction, ~85% of genuses like coral with aragonite (CaCO3) skeletons went extinct, but only ~5% of genuses like fish with other skeletons went extinct. The rapid CO2 increase during the PETM also led to a similar albeit less severe marine extinction pattern. Again by coincidence?
No Lonny, it’s not a scam. Extremely rapid CO2 emissions like ours lower the saturation level of aragonite (CaCO3) in the oceans, but these saturation levels are also higher in the tropics. Comparing these spatial variations to locations of coral reefs is another way to see how sensitive reefs are to aragonite saturation levels. Here’s an excerpt from 44 minutes into Ken Caldeira’s 2012 AGU lecture:
“… if it was possible for reefs to adapt, and thrive and compete ecologically at lower saturation levels, they would’ve been doing that at the edge of their range today… there’s been pressure for them to adapt to lower saturation conditions throughout geologic time and they haven’t succeeded in competing in that, and so I think the idea that they’re going to somehow undergo some kind of massive evolutionary leap and suddenly be able to live in waters that they’ve never lived in before is a bit unrealistic… under a business as usual scenario it’s at least likely that coral reefs will not be sustainable… “
Get an education like Lonny’s associates degree in web development, or Jane Q. Public’s associates degree in web development? Those degrees don’t seem very related to the chemistry and paleoceanography that Lonny and Jane are dismissing.
Before you check the educations of Honisch et al. and Knoll et al. and Ken Caldeira, maybe you’d like to make it interesting? Would Jane and/or Lonny Eachus like to bet, say, $100 that these authors’ educations are less relevant to chemistry and paleoceanography than Jane’s and Lonny’s associates degrees in web development? (No peeking!)
They do work against each other, but our CO2 emissions are so rapid that they overwhelm the solubility effect. Once again, what you’re dismissing as “alarmism” is actually mainstream science. Temperatures are going up, and dissolved CO2 is also going up.
I tried to explain this point at WUWT, to no avail: Use Henry’s Law to calculate the ∆CO2 due to the ~0.8C surface warming since the Industrial Revolution. You’ll find that only ~20ppm of the actual ~100ppm rise could even hypothetically be explained by the ocean outgassing.
So the reason CO2 in the ocean can increase at the same time surface temperatures increase is because that CO2 comes from our use of fossil fuels, not ocean outgassing. And we’re adding CO2 to the atmosphere much faster than the warming oceans can lose their dissolved CO2 due to Henry’s Law.
Update: Jane keeps digging.
(Ed. note: Khallow’s done this before.)
Rapid Acidification of the Ocean During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Ocean acidification and surface water carbonate production across the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum
Extinction and recovery of benthic foraminifera across the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum at the Alamedilla section (Southern Spain)
Most extinctions are caused by multiple stresses; rapid CO2 emissions stress ecosystems via rapid warming and ocean acification. Rapid warming during the PETM stressed the land, causing turnover and causing insects to proliferate but causing no major extinctions. Rapid warming and ocean acidification induced by rapid CO2 emissions affected the oceans, causing the benthic extinction event that Alagret et al. 2009 attributed mainly to the rapid warming due to rapid CO2 emissions. Since ocean acidification affected benthic species but not land species, it’s either responsible for the fact that the PETM affected benthic species worse than on land… or something else is. Regardless, we can agree that the most significant stresses leading to PETM benthic extinctions are CO2-induced rapid warming and CO2-induced ocean acidification.
Update: Jane et al. keep digging.
Quoting 3″ for the Marshalls makes it clear that Jane is talking about the total sea level rise, not the annual rise. Total global average sea level rise over the last century (1914-2014) is more like ~6 inches (see fig. 5 of Church and White 2011). Jane obviously doesn’t remember the exact figure, because the rise Jane’s memory provides is ~24x smaller than the actual observed rise.
Anyway, sea level rise can vary regionally due to factors like the gravity of thinning ice sheets.
So instead of researching actual historical data by simply clicking on the link I provided, you ignored the uncertainties on 4 years of data and project a highly uncertain short term “trend” backwards over 100 years? Wow.
The linked NOAA article certainly did provide maps of May temperature anomalies and May temperature percentiles. Far from showing “world record cold virtually everywhere” they show absolutely no “record coldest” grids, and quite a few “record warmest” grids.
Again, no. I’ve previously told you that we’re not experiencing El Nino yet, but obviously you ignored NOAA in favor of your uncited “neighborhood meteorologist”. NOAA still states that “ENSO-neutral conditions continue” but forecasts a 70% chance of an El Nino this summer.
And again, May temperature percentiles show that only Louisiana and south Texas were even “cooler than average” (not “much cooler than average” or “record coldest”). The rest of the continental U.S. was either near average, warmer than average, or much warmer than average (especially Alaska).
I see your habit of attempting self-aggrandizement at the expense of others hasn’t changed over time. I also find it amusing how (your 06/24 comment for example) you continue to use methods of argument such as trying to use the very set of data being disputed as proof of itself.
I would like to clarify another point: my comments that you characterize as “complaining” are nothing of the sort. I simply pointed out where your behavior was out of line, and apparently INTENDED to irritate and aggravate. I have no need to “complain”… when all is said and done, others will decide. But I did have reason to point it out.
I point out that Jane Q. Public is Lonny Eachus.
… And yet again, you neglect to post the comment to which you were replying:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5334673&cid=47334247
… but I have to say I am glad you did link to that exchange. because in that exchange you make it abundantly clear that your beef with me is PERSONAL. And apparently quite obsessive.
Which makes any pretense of objectivity about me on this blog appear to be a pathetic joke.
Continued here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Charming, as usual. It’s strange that you ask for real science to support the “alarmist” fact that humans caused the rise in CO2 because we’re burning carbon to release CO2 faster than the warming oceans can outgas their dissolved CO2. Is anyone we know of disputing that? Is it even part of the “debate”?
The misinformation campaign masquerading as a “debate” certainly does include people disputing the fact that humans caused the ~40% increase in CO2 since the Industrial Revolution.
Since Jane asked:
Jane agrees with Michael’s claim that we don’t know what caused CO2 levels to rise. Jane’s “0.28%” meme disputes the fact that simple accounting (PDF) shows our carbon emissions (mostly from burning fossil fuels) are responsible for ~200% of the modern rise in atmospheric CO2. This is possible because the oceans (and land) are absorbing roughly half of our CO2 emissions, which causes ocean acidification.
Sadly, many people are confused about this fact because they pull the wrong numbers from crackpot websites.
Again, we’ve already increased CO2 by ~40%, and our carbon emissions are responsible for ~200% of this rise. Sadly, many people mistakenly claim we’re only contributing a small percentage (transcript) because they ignore half of the natural carbon cycle.
For instance, Lord Monckton has repeatedly endorsed Dr. Murry Salby’s denial that humans are causing the rise in CO2.
I’ve repeatedly failed to communicate that a plumber who understood plumbing as well as Monckton understands the carbon cycle would confuse a pool’s circulation pump with a hose filling up the pool. They both pump water! The circulation pump even pumps more gallons per minute. So obviously the circulation pump is why the pool is filling up.
A surgeon who understood surgery as well as Monckton understands the carbon cycle would confuse a severed artery with the patient’s heartbeat. They both pump blood! The heart even pumps more gallons per minute. So obviously the heart is responsible for that inexplicable long-term decreasing trend in blood pressure.
Jane and Lonny know of Lord Monckton. Jane’s even linked to a “Principia Scientific International” blog post accusing scientists of fraud because Dr. Salby said accumulation of human emitted CO2 is somehow unphysical. Jane also knows of Prof. Curry, who infamously said “If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science.”
Dr. Tim Ball and others also promoted Dr. Salby’s misinformation, which is why scientists have been overwhelmed explaining that Dr. Salby is wrong to deny the fact that our carbon emissions are responsible for ~200% of the CO2 rise.
John Nielsen-Gammon notes: “Eventually I realized that if 0.8C of warming is sufficient to produce an increase of 120 [ppm] CO2, as Salby asserted, then the converse would also have to be true. During the last glacial maximum, when global temperatures were indisputably several degrees cooler than today, the atmospheric CO2 concentration must have been negative. That was enough for me.”
Maybe Jane missed all the ironic accusations that have come to be known as the “Salby Storm”. But Jane advertises “Steven Goddard’s” accusations of fraud, and “Goddard” joined “carbongate” when he disputed the cause of rising CO2 using this zombie solubility argument.
Jane also knows of someone else who’s used the zombie solubility argument to deny that we’re causing the rise in CO2. In 2008, Dr. Roy Spencer wrote Oceans are Driving CO2 which claims that “The long-term increases in carbon dioxide concentration that have been observed at Mauna Loa since 1958 could be driven more than by the ocean than by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels.” In 2009, he wrote Global Warming Causing Carbon Dioxide Increases: A Simple Model.
Dr. Spencer seems to have claimed that the ~200% anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 increase could actually be less than 50%. How is that significantly different from item #7 on his list of “skeptic” arguments that don’t hold water?
Those old blog posts still haven’t been retracted. Has Dr. Spencer retracted his incorrect claim that “oceans are driving CO2” elsewhere? Maybe not. It wasn’t too unusual when Tom Stone almost accepted that argument #7 was wrong, but reverted just two minutes later. However, it was unusual for Dr. Spencer to say argument #7 was wrong, then say he likes that last quote from Richard Courtney’s article: “The existing data is such that the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration can be modeled as being entirely natural, entirely anthropogenic, or some combination of the two. And there is no data which resolves the matter.”
Those flip-flops might be why mpainter said Dr. Spencer got clobbered regarding argument #7, which even famous contrarian Dr. Singer refers to using the d-word.
One reason nobody talks about oxygen pollution is that atmospheric oxygen is decreasing. Why? CO2 outgassed from the oceans comes out as complete CO2 molecules, so that doesn’t decrease atmospheric oxygen. But burning carbon uses up oxygen.
At WUWT, Ferdinand Engelbeen cites TAR Fig 3.4 (p206) which plots atmospheric O2 vs. CO2 from 1990-2000. If the rise in CO2 were due to ocean outgassing (or volcanoes) the line would be horizontal because O2 wouldn’t decrease. If 100% of the rise in atmospheric CO2 were due to burning carbon, the line would point down at a 45 degree angle because each added CO2 molecule removes an O2 molecule from the atmosphere.
However, notice that the actual line points down at an even steeper angle than 45 degrees. This shows that we’re responsible for ~200% of the rise in atmospheric CO2, and that dissolved CO2 (which causes ocean acidification) is increasing despite the warming oceans.
In other words, one way to tell that the CO2 rise is primarily due to burning fossil fuels is precisely that we’re burning carbon instead of simply adding CO2 like ocean outgassing or volcanoes would.
I’ve repeatedly failed to communicate this point, over and over.
Nonsense. John O’Sullivan showed the part of Figure 3 with the net fluxes in July 2009 but “forgot” to show the fluxes for the rest of the year. Since July is summer in the northern hemisphere, those trees grow leaves which temporarily removes CO2 from the atmosphere. But this reverses during winter, which might be why John O’Sullivan “forgot” to show those fluxes. “Principia Scientific International” and several others repeated O’Sullivan’s misinformation.
Lonny linked to Humlum et al. 2013 which mistakenly claimed that “Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.”
A real skeptic would wonder why Humlum et al. analyzed the long-term increase in atmospheric CO2 by taking its time derivative. Differentiation is a high-pass filter because it amplifies high frequency variations and attenuates slow, long-term variations.
Here’s why. If A(w) is the amplitude at angular frequency “w”, its time dependence is A(w)*exp(i*w*t). Its time derivative is i*w*A(w)*exp(i*w*t). So taking the time derivative multiplies the amplitude by a large “w” for fast frequencies, and multiplies it by a small “w” for slow, long-term frequencies. This amplifies high frequency variations and attenuates slow, long-term variations.
Since our CO2 emissions increase atmospheric CO2 over the long term, Prof. Humlum’s analysis can’t even detect the rise he claims to be analyzing. However, his method amplifies the faster annual carbon cycle. Prof. Humlum “discovered” summer and winter.
Ferdinand and I and many others failed to communicate that “discovering” the seasons isn’t the groundbreaking discovery that many contrarians seem to think.
“Principia Scientific International” (which Anthony Watts calls a “cult” led by John O’Sullivan) is responsible for Humlum et al. 2013. Prof. Humlum is a PSI member with an imaginative website. I agree with Lonny Eachus that he could use a calculus refresher. Prof. Humlum might want to tag along.
Jane and Lonny aren’t the only ones so confused about why CO2 levels are rising that they worry scientists are somehow trying to tax the very air they breathe. Other examples include Rep. John Boehner (R), Sen. James Inhofe (R), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R), Prof. Richard Tol, “Steven Goddard”, and Steve Lonegan (video).
I’ve failed to communicate that breathing is like the circulation pump in a pool. It simply can’t raise CO2 levels.
This clown car still isn’t empty yet. Lord Monckton also uses carbon-14 isotopes to deny that our carbon emissions are causing the rise in CO2. Again, Ferdinand Engelbeen debunks Lord Monckton at WUWT. The crackpot “Not-the-IPCC” report cites Prof. Robert Essenhigh’s residence time argument to deny that our carbon emissions are causing the rise in CO2, even though that argument is so wrong that even WUWT author Willis Eschenbach gets it. Heck, Pete Ridley, Burt Rutan and others support Beck’s CO2 “record” which denies the CO2 rise entirely! In fact, contrarians use so many silly and self-contradictory arguments to dispute the cause of rising CO2 that the last satirical “Denial Depot” post is a guide to disputing the cause of rising CO2.
One clown left. After WUWT repeatedly claimed that insects caused the CO2 rise, Anthony Watts couldn’t remember those posts. He’s not necessarily dishonest. Watts could simply be suffering from amnesia, as in this strangely familiar example:
“Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.” [Anthony Watts, 2010-01-29]
“Sure we’ve seen an increase in temperature in the last century, I’ve NEVER said we haven’t.” [Anthony Watts, 2012-07-07]
Jane, will you retract your misinformation and acknowledge that our carbon emissions are responsible for the CO2 rise, rather than dismissing it as disingenuous? If not, will you at least acknowledge that many people you know of have disputed this fact, including you and Lonny Eachus? Recursively denying your own denial doesn’t make the evidence or your misinformation disappear.
I just love how above you juxtapose something I wrote one day right next to things I wrote 2 and 3 years later, both in a different forum and in different contexts, in a blog post you wrote another year after that, and appear to be trying to present it as some kind of coordinated “misinformation” campaign.
You do post the dates, but you present these things in a manner that suggests I would still make the same argument if asked today. But of course the only place that 3- or 4-year-old arguments of mine can easily be found anywhere these days are right here on your blog. One might almost think you have some kind of fetish about me. Just an impression I get.
Do you honestly think people don’t learn over time? If so, how did you get your degree if you didn’t learn something over 3-4 years? (Actually I’m wondering about that one anyway, given the nature of these little “speeches” of yours.) And I’m not even going to go into into the context thing again except to point out that you have thoroughly mixed and conflated them, improperly.
The important part here is: yet again you demonstrate your habit of “arguing” here on your personal blog with something someone else said years ago, in a different forum and about which they might have changed their minds (or they might have even learned something in the interim). And you (apparently deliberately) juxtapose them with more recent statements about something else, giving the impression that the various comments somehow go together, in some context that you have purely invented.
I see no way to interpret this as anything but yet another attempt at self-aggrandizement at the expense of your victims.
Here’s another little “gem”:
“(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)”
You copied it from another quote of YOURS which was quoting me. Which again does contain a link, but again, you are forcing people to follow links to links to see the actual exchange, when you could have just linked to it directly.
What is your motive for doing this? When I pointed it out to you before, you complained about time, blog space, etc. but that doesn’t explain why you seem to have done it pretty much whenever it makes you look better, but not at other times.
Most of these observations about what I consider to be grossly unprofessional behavior are not new. I have mentioned them to you before at various times. I have seen no noticeable improvement.
I honestly think people define “learning” differently. For instance, you became educated by repeating “Steven Goddard’s” accusations that scientists were somehow fraudulently manipulating temperature data to argue that the globe isn’t warming, after saying only totally uninformed idiots with “half a brain” hurl those baseless accusations. Here’s another example where I have seen no noticeable improvement:
Jane and Lonny Eachus’s conspiracy theory ignores all the evidence showing that our carbon pollution is responsible for ~200% of the rise in atmospheric CO2. Let’s review:
One reason nobody talks about oxygen pollution is that atmospheric oxygen is decreasing. Why? CO2 outgassed from the oceans comes out as complete CO2 molecules, so that doesn’t decrease atmospheric oxygen. But burning carbon uses up oxygen.
At WUWT, Ferdinand Engelbeen cites TAR Fig 3.4 (p206) which plots atmospheric O2 vs. CO2 from 1990-2000. If the rise in CO2 were due to ocean outgassing (or volcanoes) the line would be horizontal because O2 wouldn’t decrease. If 100% of the rise in atmospheric CO2 were due to burning carbon, the line would point down at a 45 degree angle because each added CO2 molecule removes an O2 molecule from the atmosphere.
However, notice that the actual line points down at an even steeper angle than 45 degrees. This shows that we’re responsible for ~200% of the rise in atmospheric CO2, and that dissolved CO2 (which causes ocean acidification) is increasing despite the warming oceans.
In other words, one way to tell that the CO2 rise is primarily due to burning fossil fuels is precisely that we’re burning carbon instead of simply adding CO2 like ocean outgassing or volcanoes would.
That’s why I asked if you’d retract your misinformation and acknowledge that our carbon emissions are responsible for the CO2 rise, rather than dismissing it as disingenuous. If not, will you at least acknowledge that many people you know of have disputed this fact, including you and Lonny Eachus? I’m trying to see if you’re actually learning, rather than backsliding like with the warming you’re now denying.
I will also add — just to prevent the possibility of someone DELIBERATELY misconstruing my words again — that I was referring to carbon pollution not being a problem FOR MOST COUNTRIES, TODAY.
It CAN be… if for example fine particulates are spewed into the air in large quantities. But first, that is a rather special case (it’s not the same, for example, as just dumping it in a pile outside), and second, our current pollution controls have it well under control in most industrialized nations.
So, I say again: under NORMAL, EVERYDAY modern circumstances, carbon is simply not considered a pollutant.
BURNING organic substances can create CO2. So much is clear. But that still doesn’t make carbon a pollutant. Burning is a chemical process, and many, many chemical processes that use carbon can create polluting chemicals. That still doesn’t make carbon a pollutant. Via reductio ad absurdum, the argument that it is leads to YOU being a pollutant.
As I have mentioned before, the only other way that carbon is NORMALLY considered a pollutant to any significant degree is when it is turned into fine particulates and dispersed into the air in large quantities. That kind of pollution USED TO BE a big problem in many industrialized areas. But today’s stack scrubbers and other such procedures have generally rendered it far less of a problem today.
But even if it is somewhat of a problem in some areas, the point is that it is a “special case”, and does not support the argument that carbon is a “pollutant” because almost anything that can be turned into fine particulates and dispersed into the air in large quantities can be a pollutant. Sulfur compounds are one example, but it even applies to common rocks… which anyone who has ever experienced volcanic fallout can tell you first-hand. And in fact, in many ways its worse than carbon. So carbon is nothing special in that regard, and I’d like to see someone try to argue that most common rocks are “pollutants”.
You make a good point about Humlum. Or at least you seem to. It’s hard to tell, and the reason for that deserves a comment:
Not only the Humlum paper itself, but all the criticisms I have found that claim to be actually substantive are behind paywalls. So how does one who does not have academic or professional access to these publications access them and properly evaluate them without spending a fortune?
So people “on the outside” — who will ultimately decide on these issues — have no choice but to take someone else’s word on the credibility of the papers.
You say:
A real skeptic would try to read the paper, in order to personally evaluate the methodologies used. That avenue was not available to me (and many others) at the time. Or even now. Unless I want to spend a good bit of money.
So… who to believe in that case? I am not inclined to accept the word of SkepticalScience. Their credibility was rather damaged recently when they attempted to pass off that “97%” nonsense as truth, when it was actually such a heap of statistical garbage that a middle-schooler could refute it. That’s putting it mildly. They have demonstrated that they are not committed to honestly presenting their own statistics, so I am perfectly justified in distrusting their comments about the mathematics of others.
The point I am getting at here is that this reflects the oft-lamented lack of openness in science today. That is a situation that is in sore need of improvement.
As a side note, you mention Watts and his characterization of PSI as “a cult”. I was aware of this and find it rather amusing, since Watts tried to perform the thermodynamic experiment challenge posed by Latour and O’Sullivan, and completely botched both attempts. Because HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND the principles the challenge was intended to demonstrate.
(Ed. note: I distorted Jane’s words by fixing his blockquotes.)
So, you are pretending here that I meant something OTHER THAN the simple fact that carbon and CO2 are different things? But if so, where did I say that? By now you seem incapable of doing anything BUT distorting my meanings.
My point — as I made very clear — was that putting CARBON (not CO2) into the environment has not caused a significant global pollution problem. You are proving beyond doubt now that you have distorted my meaning. I was referring to the POLITICAL MOTIVATION for conflating carbon with CO2.
Do you deny that regulating CO2 output would be a significant increase in governmental control of private industry? Yes or no?
Do you also deny that our progressive government would love to have this control? Yes or no?
I was discussing two: [A] that carbon is not CO2. [B] that there is a clear motivation for this administration’s habitual conflation of carbon and CO2: simple political exigency. Conspiracy was YOUR word, not mine. I neither said it or meant it.
THEN, you kind of non-sequitur straw-man my point about “oxygen pollution”. No, the reason people don’t talk about oxygen pollution is not because oxygen concentration is decreasing (because most people have no idea whether it is). People don’t talke about oxygen pollution because under normal everyday circumstances, oxygen isn’t considered a pollutant. Just as under normal everyday circumstances, carbon isn’t considered a pollutant. Even if YOU consider CO2 to be.
Your comment is in fact a great example of how you distort other people’s words to fit your own ego. And I have no reason to think it was accidental. (Especially since it was a reply to a comment about something else altogether.) It appears to be nothing more than a very transparent attempt at ad-hominem, as a response to a legitimate criticism.
Which has — alas — backfired. It merely served to prove my point yet again.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Thank you. All progress is admirable. The ability to admit a mistake and move on is the mark of a true scientist.
Googling the title along with “PDF” leads to a free PDF of Humlum et al. 2013.
Only Jane/Lonny Eachus could quote my explanation that oxygen is decreasing because the CO2 rise is due to our burning carbon rather than ocean outgassing, then ask if I deny that elemental or molecular carbon is different from CO2. I deny that “carbon” always has to refer to fine particulates of elemental or molecular carbon, instead of the carbon in CO2.
JPL’s new Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) studies CO2 rather than fine particulates of elemental or molecular carbon, and it’s nearly identical to OCO-1 which was lost in a failed launch just over a month after Obama was sworn in. So the first Orbiting Carbon Observatory was built and named before Obama took office.
Obama clearly travelled back in time to force JPL to “incorrectly” name OCO-1, then decades into the past to force scientists to discuss the “carbon cycle” which refers to atmospheric CO2 rather than fine particulates of elemental or molecular carbon in the atmosphere. After reading Jane’s endless comments, it’s clear that Jane/Lonny Eachus can’t admit he’s advocating a conspiracy theory. But that conspiracy is even bigger. Obama also clearly travelled into the past to force Jane to refer to carbon when Jane was actually referring to CO2 rather than fine particulates of elemental or molecular carbon in the atmosphere.
That’s another reason to worry that Jane is backsliding further from reality. Ideally, learning curves point up.
I pointed out decreasing oxygen for three reasons. First, it answers Jane’s questions about ocean solubility. It’s another independent way to see that our carbon emissions overwhelm ocean outgassing.
Second, decreasing oxygen is another independent way to see that Humlum et al. 2013 was wrong to claim that “Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.”
Again, Humlum et al. made a calculus mistake. But if Lonny Eachus doesn’t find that point convincing or doesn’t have access to the papers, consider this. If Humlum et al. were right, their “substantial” ocean outgassing would increase CO2 without using up oxygen. If this were happening, the O2 vs. CO2 measurements on p206 would be “substantially” horizontal. They’re not.
Third, the fact that the O2 vs. CO2 measurements actually point down at such a steep angle is yet another independent way (in addition to simple accounting, etc.) to see that our carbon emissions are responsible for ~200% of the rise in atmospheric CO2. Not a “few percent” like Jane and many others have claimed.
Again, I first asked that question after debunking misinformation you and Lonny Eachus have been spreading.
Do you still dismiss flat statements like “the CO2 increase is attributable to human activity” as disingenuous and claim that we’re only contributing a small percentage despite the fact that ~200% of the CO2 increase is attributable to human activity? Will you retract your comment, or do you still think it was honest, true and correct?
Do you still link to “PSI” blog posts accusing scientists of fraud because Dr. Salby said accumulation of human emitted CO2 is somehow unphysical? Do you acknowledge these “PSI” accusations of fraud are baseless, or do you think they’re honest, true and correct?
Do you still repeat O’Sullivan’s “PSI” misinformation about CO2 emissions now that you know he “forgot” to show the winter fluxes? Will you retract your comment, or do you still think it was honest, true and correct?
Do you still repeat Humlum’s “PSI” misinformation about CO2 lags now that you know he ignored decreasing O2 and made a calculus mistake which caused him to “discover” summer and winter? Will you retract your comment, or do you still think it was honest, true and correct?
Addressing more complex questions would be pointless unless we can agree on the fundamental fact that our carbon emissions are responsible for ~200% of the CO2 rise.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Okay, so we can never agree on the fundamental fact that our carbon emissions are ~200%
larger thanas large as the rise in atmospheric CO2.As I’ve said, we’ve increased CO2 by ~40% but your link refers to the CO2 rise between 1900 (290 ppm) to 2000 (369 ppm) which is an increase of ~27.24%. But we’re actually living in 2014, and CO2 in real life is now at ~400 ppm because we’re increasing it so rapidly that even NOAA websites rapidly go out of date. That’s a ~37.93% increase even if you take “1900” to be the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Also, climate sensitivity is logarithmic, not geometric. But it’s hard to remember that our CO2 emissions are probably more rapid than any events in the last 300 million years. Even logarithmic climate sensitivity allows for accelerating warming if the CO2 concentration rises faster than exponentially. Since 1960, atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen faster than exponentially. Tamino showed this by taking the logarithm of the Mauna Loa measurements and noting a statistically significant acceleration.
Why do we need to keep that in mind, any more than we need to keep in mind the very small percentage of alcohol or LSD in the bloodstream? The same percentage increase of ~40% also occurs when we notice that before 1850 there were ~4 kg of CO2 over each square meter of Earth’s surface. Now there are ~6. We did that.
Just in case this is an exercise in pedantry, I should correct my statement to say that our carbon emissions are ~200% as large as the rise in atmospheric CO2.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
I already did: “John O’Sullivan showed the part of Figure 3 with the net fluxes in July 2009 but “forgot” to show the fluxes for the rest of the year.”
Click on “Figure 3” then scroll down to Figure 3 to verify, but this shouldn’t be necessary because a comment by truegoogle on your original “PSI” link already made that point.
Can we agree that our carbon emissions are ~200% as large as the rise in atmospheric CO2?
Then maybe it isn’t unreasonable to assert that all the “PSI” misinformation from Lord Monckton, Dr. Salby, Prof. Humlum, and John O’Sullivan is… misinformation. If you notice someone repeating those claims, please consider pointing out that they’re ignoring simple accounting, decreasing oxygen, calculus, the seasons, increasing CO2 in the oceans, isotope ratios, etc.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
LOL! What a funny way to describe Jane/Lonny’s
exercise in pedantryabsurd vendetta against terms like “carbon cycle” and “carbonated”.I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Ocean acidification is independent of climate sensitivity, and it’s another reason to be concerned about the unprecedented rapidity of our CO2 emissions.
Lonny Eachus also linked to that misinformation from Matt Ridley, a journalist with a long history of distorting climate science.
In contrast, I quoted from Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF), Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF), and Ken Caldeira’s 2012 AGU lecture. That last link was from my videos section which also includes:
I’m not a chemist or a marine biologist/ecologist, so I read peer-reviewed papers and go to conferences like the AGU to watch lectures by scientists who do specialize and publish in those fields. For instance, consider that 2011 AGU panel on declining reef health. Nina Keul observed one species of foramanifera Glas et al. 2012 (PDF) growing faster as carbonate ion concentration decreases (which happens when CO2 increases). She provided context by noting that this is one species from one experiment, noting that this is like looking at one puzzle piece of a big puzzle.
Then Adina Paytan provides further context by noting that most species aren’t like this. She shows Fig. 2 from Crook et al. 2012 (PDF) which shows that only ~3 out of 9 species of coral are present in locations with naturally low pH and notes that “Because these three species are rarely major contributors to Caribbean reef framework, these data may indicate that today’s more complex frame-building species may be replaced by smaller, possibly patchy, colonies of only a few species along the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.”
Finally, Robert Riding provides a paleo perspective. Note that he admitted a mistake during questions. Contrast this with Matt Ridley’s misinformation which repeats many arguments scientists had already tried to correct. Instead of correcting his mistakes, Ridley just recycled the same talking points propped up with different studies.
For instance, Ridley vaguely refers to Jury et al. 2010 (PDF). Ridley and others wrongly imply that Jury et al. 2010 shows that corals in general and other species build their shells using bicarbonate (HCO3–) instead of carbonate (CO32-).
In reality, after a long list of studies, Jury et al. 2010 says “While the studies above show drastic reductions in coral calcification in response to ocean acidification, there are indications that such responses are not ubiquitous.”
So Jury et al. 2010 acknowledges that most coral species show drastic calcification reduction, and simply notes that some species don’t. So Jury et al. 2010 is consistent with that 2011 AGU panel, which also showed that most (but not all) species of coral are sensitive to the reduced carbonate concentrations caused by our CO2 emissions (i.e. ocean acidification). It’s also consistent with Comeau et al. 2012: “[CO32-] played a significant role in light and dark calcification of P. rus, whereas [HCO3–] mainly affected calcification in the light. Both [CO32-] and [HCO3–] had a significant effect on the calcification of H. onkodes, but the strongest relationship was found with [CO32-].”
Chris Langdon had even previously told Matt Ridley: “Empirical studies have shown that many calcifying organisms, including corals, only use CO32- (carbonate) to build their skeletons. The HCO3–, while, 7-times more abundant than the CO32-, does not seem to be available for calcification. A drop in pH from 8.1 to 7.8 has been shown to reduce the ability of many species of coral to build their skeletons by 30 to 40 per cent. This same small reduction in pH has been shown to adversely affect coral reproduction as well by decreasing larval settlement success and post-settlement growth of the juvenile coral. Matt is correct that the skeleton and shell building of some species is unaffected or even increases under reduced pH. However, there is no free lunch. The reduction in pH makes it thermodynamically more difficult to precipitate calcium carbonate. While an organism can chose to overcome the increased expense of producing their skeleton or shell, it generally comes at a cost because less energy is now available for some other life process. Loss of muscle mass in some invertebrates and a reduced growth rate in the case of a coccolithophorid are examples of the tradeoffs that some species have made.”
Fabricius et al. 2011 (PDF): Losers and winners in coral reefs acclimatized to elevated carbon dioxide concentrations
“Experiments have shown that ocean acidification due to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations has deleterious effects on the performance of many marine organisms[1,2,3,4]. However, few empirical or modelling studies have addressed the long-term consequences of ocean acidification for marine ecosystems[5,6,7]. Here we show that as pH declines from 8.1 to 7.8 (the change expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from 390 to 750 ppm, consistent with some scenarios for the end of this century) some organisms benefit, but many more lose out. We investigated coral reefs, seagrasses and sediments that are acclimatized to low pH at three cool and shallow volcanic carbon dioxide seeps in Papua New Guinea. At reduced pH, we observed reductions in coral diversity, recruitment and abundances of structurally complex framework builders, and shifts in competitive interactions between taxa. However, coral cover remained constant between pH 8.1 and ~7.8, because massive Porites corals established dominance over structural corals, despite low rates of calcification. Reef development ceased below pH 7.7. Our empirical data from this unique field setting confirm model predictions that ocean acidification, together with temperature stress, will probably lead to severely reduced diversity, structural complexity and resilience of Indo-Pacific coral reefs within this century.”
Pandolfi et al. 2011 (PDF): Projecting Coral Reef Futures Under Global Warming and Ocean Acidification
“Many physiological responses in present-day coral reefs to climate change are interpreted as consistent with the imminent disappearance of modern reefs globally because of annual mass bleaching events, carbonate dissolution, and insufficient time for substantial evolutionary responses. Emerging evidence for variability in the coral calcification response to acidification, geographical variation in bleaching susceptibility and recovery, responses to past climate change, and potential rates of adaptation to rapid warming supports an alternative scenario in which reef degradation occurs with greater temporal and spatial heterogeneity than current projections suggest. Reducing uncertainty in projecting coral reef futures requires improved understanding of past responses to rapid climate change; physiological responses to interacting factors, such as temperature, acidification, and nutrients; and the costs and constraints imposed by acclimation and adaptation.”
IPCC Breakout Group I-2: Reconciling apparently contradictory observations
“This Breakout Group report summarizes participant discussions on divergent observations of the effects of ocean acidification for marine organisms. For calcification in zooxanthellate corals and in plankton, as well as for other processes, the Breakout Group considered examples of contradictory observations, the level of disagreement among data sets, and possible explanations for apparently conflicting results. From this evaluation, the Breakout Group investigated the complexity and species-specific nature of the coral calcification response to ocean acidification, the importance of clarifying present uncertainty about the responses of coccolithophores to ocean acidification, and the large inherent variability in the effects of ocean acidification for other processes considered.”
McCulloch et al. 2012 (PDF): Coral resilience to ocean acidification and global warming through pH up-regulation
“Rapidly rising levels of atmospheric CO2 are not only causing ocean warming, but also lowering seawater pH hence the carbonate saturation state of the oceans, on which many marine organisms depend to calcify their skeletons[1,2]. Using boron isotope systematics[3], we show how scleractinian corals up-regulate pH at their site of calcification such that internal changes are approximately one-half of those in ambient seawater. This species-dependent pH-buffering capacity enables aragonitic corals to raise the saturation state of their calcifying medium, thereby increasing calcification rates at little additional energy cost. Using a model of pH regulation combined with abiotic calcification, we show that the enhanced kinetics of calcification owing to higher temperatures has the potential to counter the effects of ocean acidification. Up-regulation of pH, however, is not ubiquitous among calcifying organisms; those lacking this ability are likely to undergo severe declines in calcification as CO2 levels increase. The capacity to up-regulate pH is thus central to the resilience of calcifiers to ocean acidification, although the fate of zooxanthellate corals ultimately depends on the ability of both the photosymbionts and coral host to adapt to rapidly increasing ocean temperatures[4].”
So Ridley was told that even though some species are tolerant to lower pH, most aren’t. Ridley then cites Hendriks et al. 2010 (PDF) claiming “there was no significant mean effect” from lower pH in 372 studies of 44 marine species. But if the Hendriks et al. 2010 meta-study were inadvertently biased towards studies of the few tolerant species, they’d cancel the more numerous vulnerable species. Averages across seasons can also mask vulnerabilities, as in Rosa et al. 2013 which showed different impacts in summer and winter. Here’s another problem:
Dupont et al. 2010 (PDF): What meta-analysis can tell us about vulnerability of marine biodiversity to ocean acidification?
“Ocean acidification has been proposed as a major threat for marine biodiversity. Hendriks et al. … proposed an alternative view and suggested, based on a meta-analysis, that marine biota may be far more resistant to ocean acidification than hitherto believed. However, such a meta-analytical approach can mask more subtle features, for example differing sensitivities during the life-cycle of an organism. Using a similar metric on an echinoderm database, we show that key bottlenecks present in the life-cycle (e.g. larvae being more vulnerable than adults) and responsible for driving the whole species response may be hidden in a global meta-analysis. Our data illustrate that any ecological meta-analysis should be hypothesis driven, taking into account the complexity of biological systems, including all life-cycle stages and key biological processes. Available data allow us to conclude that near-future ocean acidification can/will have dramatic negative impact on some marine species, including echinoderms, with likely consequences at the ecosystem level.”
Hendriks and Duarte’s reply (PDF) includes: “… Conveying scientific evidence along with an open acknowledgment of uncertainties to help separate evidence from judgment should not harm the need to act to mitigate ocean acidification and should pave the road for robust progress in our understanding of how ocean acidification impacts biota of the ocean.”
Other papers have explored bottlenecks in early development:
Melzner et al. 2009 (PDF): Physiological basis for high CO2 tolerance in marine ectothermic animals: pre-adaptation through lifestyle and ontogeny?
“Future ocean acidification has the potential to adversely affect many marine organisms. A growing body of evidence suggests that many species could suffer from reduced fertilization success, decreases in larval- and adult growth rates, reduced calcification rates, and even mortality when being exposed to near-future levels (year 2100 scenarios) of ocean acidification. Little research focus is currently placed on those organisms/taxa that might be less vulnerable to the anticipated changes in ocean chemistry; this is unfortunate, as the comparison of more vulnerable to more tolerant physiotypes could provide us with those physiological traits that are crucial for ecological success in a future ocean. Here, we attempt to summarize some ontogenetic and lifestyle traits that lead to an increased tolerance towards high environmental pCO2. … while some of these taxa are adapted to cope with elevated pCO2 during their regular embryonic development, gametes, zygotes and early embryonic stages, which lack specialized ion-regulatory epithelia, may be the true bottleneck for ecological success – even of the more tolerant taxa. …”
Albright 2011 (PDF): Reviewing the Effects of Ocean Acidification on Sexual Reproduction and Early Life History Stages of Reef-Building Corals
“The studies reviewed here demonstrate that ocean acidification has the potential to affect sexual reproduction and multiple early life history stages of corals that are critical to reef persistence and resilience. While further studies are essential, available information indicates that affected processes may include sperm motility and fertilization success, larval metabolism, larval settlement, and postsettlement growth and calcification. … Although ocean acidification is now recognized as a substantial threat to marine calcifiers and their ability to secrete calcium carbonate shells and/or skeletons, the studies reviewed here demonstrate that increasing pCO2 has the potential to impact multiple life history stages of corals, including critical processes independent of calcification. … Negative impacts on successive life history stages may cumulate in such a way that the overall effect on recruitment is severe. For example, results of studies conducted with the threatened Caribbean elkhorn coral, Acropora palmata, indicate that ocean acidification has the potential to reduce fertilization success by 12-13% (averaged across all sperm concentrations) and to decrease settlement success by 45–69% at pCO2 concentrations expected for the middle and end of this century. The compounding effect of ocean acidification on these early life history stages translates into a 52–73% reduction in the number of larval settlers on the reef. The net impact on recruitment will likely be even greater, given that depressed postsettlement growth may translate into elevated rates of postsettlement mortality [28]. …”
This is how scientists learn about research outside of their own fields. Contrast that with Lonny Eachus, who later linked to and retweeted more of Ridley’s misinformation where Ridley ignored Tamsin Edwards and other scientists who tried to correct his obvious error. Ridley also advertised a flawed paper by Prof. Richard Tol, who also has problems admitting his mistakes. Instead, anyone interested in ocean acidification should read the peer-reviewed literature and/or watch freely available lectures from scientists who publish in that field.
Regarding other comments, I’ve repeatedly noted that the PETM’s rapid warming stressed ecosystems. So it’s not goalpost moving to note that rapid GHG emissions cause rapid warming and ocean acidification, and that these both stress ecosystems. In fact, only a Sky Dragon Slayer would argue that rapidly increasing CO2 wouldn’t cause rapid warming, and only someone unfamiliar with past extinctions would argue that rapid warming wouldn’t stress ecosystems. Lectures about CO2 vs. methane also aren’t necessary; I’ve noted: The PETM happened ~55 million years ago, and was a rapid spike of about 5C warming over about 200,000 years. It’s not clear if CO2 or CH4 caused the distinct warming and carbon isotope excursion spikes, but it’s clear that ocean outgassing can’t explain the carbon isotope excursion spike: “Atmospheric pCO2 increases from 834 ppm to either 1,500 ppm (CH4 scenario) or 4,200 ppm (Corg scenario) during the main phase of the PETM (Fig. 4d). The corresponding global ocean surface temperature increase during the peak PETM is 2.1C (CH4 scenario) and 6.5C (Corg scenario) respectively. (Fig. 4e).”
This PETM CO2/methane debate is genuine, unlike many baseless claims. For instance, I asked for citations of PETM warming not due to GHG like CO2/methane because of mistaken claims it was due to H2O and/or volcanoes heating the oceans. Let’s explore the literature…
Thomas and Shackleton 1996 (PDF): The Paleocene-Eocene benthic foraminiferal extinction and stable isotope anomalies
“In the late Paleocene to early Eocene, deep sea benthic foraminifera suffered their only global extinction of the last 75 million years and diversity decreased worldwide by 30-50% in a few thousand years. At Maud Rise (Weddell Sea, Antarctica; Sites 689 and 690, palaeodepths 1100 m and 1900 m) and Walvis Ridge (Southeastern Atlantic, Sites 525 and 527, palaeodepths 1600 m and 3400 m) post-extinction faunas were low-diversity and high-dominance, but the dominant species differed by geographical location. … The species-richness remained very low for about 50,000 years, then gradually increased. The extinction was synchronous with a large, negative, short-term excursion of carbon and oxygen isotopes in planktonic and benthic foraminifera and bulk carbonate. The isotope excursions reached peak negative values in a few thousand years and values returned to pre-excursion levels in about 50,000 years. … The oxygen isotope excursion was about -1.5%o for benthic foraminifera at Walvis Ridge and Maud Rise, -1%o for planktonic foraminifera at Maud Rise. The rapid oxygen isotope excursion at a time when polar ice-sheets were absent or insignificant can be explained by an increase in temperature by 4-6C of high latitude surface waters and deep waters world wide. …”
Scheibnera and Speijerb 2008 (PDF): Late Paleocene–early Eocene Tethyan carbonate platform evolution — A response to long- and short-term paleoclimatic change
“… The onset of the latter prominent larger foraminifera-dominated platform correlates with the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum. The causes for the change from coral-dominated platforms to larger foraminifera-dominated platforms are multilayered. The decline of coralgal reefs in low latitudes during platform stage II is related to overall warming, leading to sea-surface temperatures in the tropics beyond the maximum temperature range of corals. The overall low occurrence of coral reefs in the Paleogene might be related to the presence of a calcite sea. At the same time larger foraminifera started to flourish after their near extinction at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary. The demise of coralgal reefs at all studied paleolatitudes in platform stage III can be founded on the effects of the PETM, resulting in short-term warming, eutrophic conditions on the shelves and acidification of the oceans, hampering the growth of aragonitic corals, while calcitic larger foraminifera flourished. In the absence of other successful carbonate-producing organisms, larger foraminifera were able to take over the role as the dominant carbonate platform inhabitant, leading to a stepwise Tethyan platform stage evolution around the Paleocene/Eocene boundary. This szenario might be also effective for threatened coral reef sites.”
Payne and Clapham 2012 (PDF): End-Permian Mass Extinction in the Oceans: An Ancient Analog for the Twenty-First Century?
“The greatest loss of biodiversity in the history of animal life occurred at the end of the Permian Period (~252 million years ago). This biotic catastrophe coincided with an interval of widespread ocean anoxia and the eruption of one of Earth’s largest continental flood basalt provinces, the Siberian Traps. Volatile release from basaltic magma and sedimentary strata during emplacement of the Siberian Traps can account for most end-Permian paleontological and geochemical observations. Climate change and, perhaps, destruction of the ozone layer can explain extinctions on land, whereas changes in ocean oxygen levels, CO2, pH, and temperature can account for extinction selectivity across marine animals. These emerging insights from geology, geochemistry, and paleobiology suggest that the end-Permian extinction may serve as an important ancient analog for twenty-first century oceans.”
Kiessling and Simpson 2010: On the potential for ocean acidification to be a general cause of ancient reef crises
“Anthropogenic rise in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere leads to global warming and acidification of the oceans. Ocean acidification (OA) is harmful to many organisms but especially to those that build massive skeletons of calcium carbonate, such as reef corals. Here, we test the recent suggestion that OA leads not only to declining calcification of reef corals and reduced growth rates of reefs but may also have been a trigger of ancient reef crises and mass extinctions in the sea. We analyse the fossil record of biogenic reefs and marine organisms to (1) assess the timing and intensity of ancient reef crises, (2) check which reef crises were concurrent with inferred pulses of carbon dioxide concentrations and (3) evaluate the correlation between reef crises and mass extinctions and their selectivity in terms of inferred physiological buffering. We conclude that four of five global metazoan reef crises in the last 500 Myr were probably at least partially governed by OA and rapid global warming. However, only two of the big five mass extinctions show geological evidence of OA.”
Since Ridley also seems to think that rapid pH swings make coral insensitive to ocean acidification, it’s worth pointing out that these rapid swings have been happening since the oceans formed. But they didn’t prevent past instances of ocean acidification from stressing ecosystems. Here’s more modern research:
Okazaki et al. 2013: Stress-tolerant corals of Florida Bay are vulnerable to ocean acidification
“In situ calcification measurements tested the hypothesis that corals from environments (Florida Bay, USA) that naturally experience large swings in pCO2 and pH will be tolerant or less sensitive to ocean acidification than species from laboratory experiments with less variable carbonate chemistry. The pCO2 in Florida Bay varies from summer to winter by several hundred ppm roughly comparable to the increase predicted by the end of the century. Rates of net photosynthesis and calcification of two stress-tolerant coral species, Siderastrea radians and Solenastrea hyades, were measured under the prevailing ambient chemical conditions and under conditions amended to simulate a pH drop of 0.1–0.2 units at bimonthly intervals over a 2-yr period. Net photosynthesis was not changed by the elevation in pCO2 and drop in pH; however, calcification declined by 52 and 50 % per unit decrease in saturation state, respectively. These results indicate that the calcification rates of S. radians and S. hyades are just as sensitive to a reduction in saturation state as coral species that have been previously studied. In other words, stress tolerance to temperature and salinity extremes as well as regular exposure to large swings in pCO2 and pH did not make them any less sensitive to ocean acidification. These two species likely survive in Florida Bay in part because they devote proportionately less energy to calcification than most other species and the average saturation state is elevated relative to that of nearby offshore water due to high rates of primary production by seagrasses.”
Finally, calcification isn’t everything. Hamilton et al. 2013 shows that ocean acidification increases fish anxiety, and Simpson et al. 2011 (PDF) shows that it erodes crucial auditory behaviour in a marine fish. Munday et al. 2014 shows that fish stop avoiding predator odor, possibly because of the added stress of using bicarbonate in lower pH waters. Naturally, this doesn’t work out well. A billion people depend on seafood.
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
… I (and others) have failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
… and again…
… and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
… and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
(Ed. note: Here are prologue links and here are links to this never ending “conversation” 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33. BACKUP 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31.)
The 2010 fantasy novel Slaying the Sky Dragon – Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory claims the second law of thermodynamics disproves the greenhouse effect. At first this seemed like a parody of creationists who claim the second law disproves evolution, but the Slayers seem very serious. They claim warm surfaces can’t absorb back-radiation (*) from cold atmospheres because they mistakenly think heat can’t be transferred from cold to warm objects at all. In fact, this is only true for net heat transfer. Cold objects can slow the rate at which warm objects lose heat without transferring more heat to warm objects than vice versa. That’s how the greenhouse effect works.
(*) Also called downwelling longwave irradiance.
Again, Dr. Latour’s Slayer fan fiction is fractally wrong:
If Dr. Latour understood the second law refers to net heat, he’d agree that adding a cold plate makes the heated plate lose heat slower. That’s okay because net heat still flows from hot to cold, i.e. more heat moves from hot to cold than vice versa. But Dr. Latour disagrees, wrongly claiming that hot objects can’t absorb any radiation from colder objects. He’s not alone:
Then how do uncooled IR detectors see cooler objects? How did we detect the 2.7K cosmic microwave background radiation with warmer detectors?
The second law only prevents net heat flow from warm to cold. It doesn’t prevent warm objects from absorbing radiation emitted by cool objects. On the atomic scale, absorption of radiation doesn’t depend on temperature because individual atoms don’t have temperatures. Only very large groups of atoms have temperatures.
Individual photons also don’t have temperatures. Very large groups of photons from a 10°C warm object have slightly different average wavelength curves than a -10°C cold object, but they’re very similar. This means that even if temperature somehow applied at the atomic scale of absorbing individual photons, an atom couldn’t tell if a photon came from the 10°C warm object or the -10°C cold object.
Griffiths derives Einstein’s “B coefficient” governing photon absorption on p311 of the 1st edition. It conserves energy and momentum, and depends only on matching the photon’s wavelength to the atom’s intrinsic energy levels. Not temperature. More general approaches apply to complex moving molecules, where photon absorption and re-emission always conserve energy and momentum.
Nonsense. The greenhouse effect is based on the Stefan-Boltzmann law. As I’ve explained: greenhouse gases re-emit some of [the upwelling long-wave IR], and it bounces around the troposphere until it gets to a height known as the “effective radiating level”. Above this height (roughly 7km), there aren’t enough greenhouse gases to keep “most” of the IR from escaping to space altogether. This effective radiating level controls the outflow of heat from the Earth. Stefan-Boltzmann tells us that power radiated is proportional to temperature4, and temperature decreases with height in the troposphere. Adding greenhouse gases raises the height of this effective radiating level, where it is cooler, which therefore decreases the outflow of heat from the Earth. This is the greenhouse effect, and it isn’t saturated because the effective radiating level can just keep getting higher (e.g. Venus).
Andrew Dessler also explains how the greenhouse effect depends on the Stefan-Boltzmann law. He even explains that an isothermal atmosphere wouldn’t have a greenhouse effect: the Slayers’ holy grail! Ironically, the greenhouse effect disappears if the upper troposphere isn’t colder than the surface. The cold upper troposphere isn’t a problem for the greenhouse effect. It’s a fundamental requirement, along with the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
Radiation is proportional to T4, so the magnitude of actual transfer is only related to because hot objects absorb radiation from cooler objects. That’s consistent with the second law because hot objects radiate more power to cold objects than vice versa.
Nonsense. Start with conservation of energy just inside the chamber walls at equilibrium: power in = power out.
The plate is heated by constant electrical power flowing in. The cold walls at 0°F (Tc = 255K) also radiate power in. The heated plate at 150°F (Th = 339K) radiates power out. Using irradiance (power/m2) simplifies the equation:
(1)
Sage solves Eq. 1 for a constant electric input of 509 W/m2.
As Dr. Spencer said, now imagine that the second plate completely surrounds the heated plate. This simpler problem is a closer analogy for the greenhouse effect which completely surrounds Earth.
Electric input of 509 W/m2 is constant and the walls are held at 0°F (255K). Therefore, the second plate has to radiate the same power out as the heated plate did before it was enclosed. So energy conservation at equilibrium requires that the second plate be at 150°F (339K).
But the second plate also radiates the same power in, toward the enclosed heated plate. Just like the cold chamber walls do. Now consider conservation of energy just inside the second plate (but outside the first) at equilibrium. We can solve for the insulated heated plate’s temperature using Eq. 1 by setting Tc = 150°F (339K). That yields an insulated heated plate temperature of 235°F (386K).
So Dr. Latour was wrong to claim that mainstream physics predicts the heated plate warms infinitely. In reality, insulating the heated plate only warms it by a finite amount. Energy is conserved, and the second law is satisfied because net heat flows from hot to cold.
Why do Slayers think this is a problem? If we kept the same electric input but took those walls (and everything else) away to reveal the cosmic microwave background radiation at -454.8°F (2.7K), the heated plate would cool to 95°F (308K). Even before the heated plate was surrounded by a second plate, it was still (finitely!) heated by radiation from the cold walls. Again, this is okay because net heat flows from hot to cold.
This is an important point. Greenhouse gases can insulate Earth’s surface because they’re warmer than the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Nonsense. But this violates the first law:
That’s not simple thermodynamics or well-known laws of physics. It violates the first law because some energy is not inevitably given up in the process of absorption and re-radiation. Energy is always conserved. Jane’s wrong to claim that the re-radiated photon must be at lower energy than the original because Doppler broadening is just as likely to re-radiate a higher energy photon by reducing the water molecule’s kinetic energy.
Only Jane could type that, then type this:
No, that’s a Slayer fantasy.
That diagram also shows the surface warming the atmosphere at 350 W/m2, which is bigger than 324 W/m2. The second law is satisfied because net heat flows from surface to atmosphere.
Since you asked, these are all examples where you miss the point in subtle ways and argue endlessly, never quite coming to grips with reality, while always retreating to some absurd evasion that seems to acknowledge the obvious while, in fact, concluding the exact opposite.
Nonsense. The Sun warms Earth’s surface, which transfers net heat to its insulating atmosphere. In each case, net heat flows from hot to cold.
Again, if Dr. Latour understood the second law refers to net heat, he’d agree that adding a cold plate makes the heated plate lose heat slower. That’s okay because net heat still flows from hot to cold, i.e. more heat moves from hot to cold than vice versa.
Again, this is an example where you miss the point in subtle ways and argue endlessly, never quite coming to grips with reality, while always retreating to some absurd evasion that seems to acknowledge the obvious while, in fact, concluding the exact opposite. Again, if Slayers understood the second law refers to net heat, y’all would agree that adding a cold plate makes the heated plate lose heat slower. That’s okay because net heat still flows from hot to cold, i.e. more heat moves from hot to cold than vice versa.
Again, if you understood the second law refers to net heat, you’d just admit that the 10 joules are absorbed by the source. That’s okay because net heat still flows from hot to cold, i.e. more heat moves from hot to cold than vice versa.
Again with this infinite warming nonsense. Radiation shields allow for more accurate measurements of gas temperatures using thermocouples:
“The greatest problem with measuring gas temperatures is combatting radiation loss. … surround the probe with a radiation shield … The thermocouple bead radiates to the shield which is much hotter than the surrounding walls. Thus the radiative loss and hence temperature error is significantly reduced. The shield itself radiates to the walls.”
These radiation shields have been used since at least Daniels 1968 (PDF), and they work like Dr. Spencer’s insulating plate. They slow radiative heat loss from the hotter thermocouple without violating the first law, the second law, or the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Just like the greenhouse effect.
“@NaomiOreskes How do you live with yourself? Do you sleep well, knowing the pseudo-science you have tried to pull off? Just curious.” [Lonny Eachus, 2014-07-20]
I’ve crossed swords with JQP over this before as well. I have this fantasy where I win the lottery and I find a vacuum chamber to actually run the thought experiment of Spencer’s in real life. I’d pay JQP to come witness the experiment and ask him to explain what just happened. It would be interesting.
Yes, I’ve been impressed with your patient responses. I’d also pay to see if there’s a limit to the grip his Morton’s demon can exert, and what that looks like in real life.
I’d also like to thank you for the long response you made to JQP. It filled in some details for me that I was only generally aware of in the big picture and pointed out some paths for further study for me. Although I haven’t followed your blogging closely over the years I’ve always appreciated your work when I’ve been led to it.
Thanks. That’s one reason I debunk: it often leads me to a deeper and/or broader understanding.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
A real skeptic would be checking my calculations but Jane can’t even acknowledge them. If the Slayers are right, why is Venus hotter than Mercury?
Mercury’s daytime surface temperature is 350°C while Venus has a nighttime surface temperature of ~470°C.
… despite the fact that Venus is 87% farther away from the Sun than Mercury, implying sunlight 3.5x weaker.
… and despite the fact that Mercury’s albedo is ~0.1 and Venus’s albedo is ~0.65.
… and despite the fact that a “night” on Venus lasts ~58 Earth days, during which the temperature barely changes from that at “high noon”.
Riiiight. That’s why the stratosphere doesn’t exist. I’ve explained that long-term equilibrium surface temperature is determined by conservation of energy, not the ideal gas law. (If scientists were wrong, basketball players would have to dribble with gloves because the pressurized ball would have to be very hot.)
Many Slayers blame equilibrium surface temperature on pressure, which I call the basketball player glove fantasy. None of the Slayers at WUWT would answer this question: would Venus have the same surface temperature if its atmosphere were pure nitrogen, which isn’t a greenhouse gas?
I’ve even seen a Slayer convince himself that all objects have the same albedo, which I call the gray Oreo fantasy.
Will Jane explain the fact that Venus is hotter than Mercury using basketball player gloves, gray Oreos, or truly original groundbreaking science?
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Since it has little to do with arguments I have actually made, I don’t try to explain it at all, nor do I have any reasonable obligation to do so. But I will briefly mention refutations by other people anyway, simply because you asked. Isn’t that nice of me?
How about this? (This is someone else’s work, not my own, so if you don’t like it, argue with him.)
(From Idso, S.B. 1998: CO2-induced global warming Climate Research, 10, 69-82. K is Kelvin, NOT thousands.)
It took me about 30 seconds to find that. Spending another 30 seconds or so found this. Are you suggesting that if I spent more time I would not find more and better?
Again: if you have problems with their figures, I strongly suggest you argue with THEM. Because arguing with me isn’t going to take their pages down. Is this support of Latour’s argument? Probably not. But on the other hand it rather invalidates yours.
You cited a non-peer-reviewed crackpot website which claims:
“…the fact that the CO2 increase is linear, while at the same time the amount of CO2 released by humans has grown exponentially, is the primary proof that humans are NOT responsible for the change in CO2 concentration…” [Robert Clemenzi]
I tried to tell you that humans are responsible for the change in CO2 concentration. You even seemed to agree, calling Clemenzi’s claim “ridiculous”.
Before I waste time debunking the rest of that nonsense you cited, I’m wondering if you’re regressing again. Hopefully I don’t have to prove we’re responsible for the CO2 rise again. If you still consider it “ridiculous” to deny that basic fact, do you see how Clemenzi might not be the best source of science education?
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Once again, if Dr. Latour understood the second law refers to net heat, he’d agree that adding a cold plate makes the heated plate lose heat slower. That’s okay because net heat still flows from hot to cold, i.e. more heat moves from hot to cold than vice versa.
He must have forgotten this nebulous unlinked correction because his blog post is still live and still contains all these badly worded sentences:
“… the absorption rate of real bodies depends on whether the absorber T (radiating or not), is less than the intercepted radiation T, or not. If the receiver T > intercepted T, no absorption occurs; if the receiver T < intercepted T the absorption rate may be as great as proportional to (T intercepted – T absorber), depending on the amounts reflected, transmitted or scattered. What actually happens is the chiller radiates to the hot plate, but the plate cannot absorb any of it because it is too cold. The hot plate reflects, transmits or scatters colder radiation, just like my roof does for cold radio waves. … Energy from colder cannot heat hotter further because the second law of thermodynamics says so, because nature says so; always and everywhere. … Conclusion, the hot plate remains at 150. All physics I know supports it; no physics offered refutes it. Spencer mistakenly assumed the 150 plate absorbs incident 100 radiation … The generalized claim that a cooler object placed near a warmer object cannot result in a rise in temperature of the warmer object stands. …”
In fact, he did more than suggest that warmer objects absorb no radiation: “k is the fraction of re-radiation from the second bar absorbed by the first hotter bar… k must be identically zero, so no cold back-radiation is absorbed and T remains 150. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, QED.”
That’s why I refuted Dr. Latour by showing that a completely enclosed heated plate reaches an equilibrium temperature of 235°F (386K), which is less than infinity.
Again, if Dr. Latour and the Slayers are right, why is Venus hotter than Mercury? Hint: the Slayers are wrong. Venus is hotter than Mercury because of the greenhouse effect.
No, I didn’t ignore those variables. In fact, I pointed out differences that should make Venus cooler than Mercury in the absence of Venus’s greenhouse effect. For instance:
I’ve also explained that a planet with no atmosphere is a simple case where the effective radiating level is at the surface, so the equilibrium surface temperature can be determined using the planet’s albedo and distance from the Sun. The greenhouse effect modifies this simple case, which is why Venus is hotter than Mercury.
After I explained that Venus is hot because of its greenhouse effect, you replied by quoting a paper saying “Such an amount of CO2 causes greenhouse warming by 500 K there. On the other hand, the mere 0.006 bars of CO2 on Mars cause warming by 5.5K.”
How do Slayers explain 500K of greenhouse warming on Venus, other than basketball player gloves and gray Oreos?
You also linked a crackpot website claiming that on Venus “the solar energy simply does not reach the surface.”
I’ve explained that Venera 9 landed on the surface of Venus and found “surface light levels comparable to those at Earth mid-latitudes on a cloudy summer day.” Check out the panorama.
Again, if the Slayers are right, why is Venus hotter than Mercury? Instead of regurgitating bad arguments you find in 30 seconds and which you don’t even read carefully, please read carefully before regurgitating even more misinformation for me to debunk.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
We’ve determined equilibrium temperatures in a simple example, so let’s solve a more general example.
Jane’s concerned that the enclosing plate is bigger than the heated plate. But Earth’s mean radius is 6371 km, and the effective radiating level is ~7 km higher, so these surface areas are only ~0.2% different. Of course, in a thought experiment this difference can be made arbitrarily smaller. Despite Jane’s protests, this doesn’t change the fact that enclosing the heated plate makes it warmer.
More importantly, I treated the plates as blackbodies where absorptivity and emissivity . This is a reasonable approximation for plates made of carbon nanotube arrays (PDF) which have . But more conventional plates have and considerably less than 1.
The next step is to treat the plates as graybodies where absorptivity and emissivity are independent of wavelength, so they appear gray. Kirchhoff’s Law states that absorptivity = emissivity for graybodies.
MIT calculates heat transfer between graybody plates using an infinite sum of emission, reflection and absorption. Using my variable names, their final expression is:
(2)
At equilibrium, net heat flow equals the electrical input. Note that MIT’s Eq. 2 reduces to my Eq. 1 for blackbodies where .
Suppose the plates and chamber walls are made of oxidized aluminum with emissivity = 0.11. In this case, Sage solves Eq. 2 for a constant electric input of 29.6 W/m2, which is lower than before because aluminum doesn’t radiate as well as a blackbody.
Using Eq. 2 and the same reasoning as before, fully enclosing the heated plate warms it to the same equilibrium temperature of 235°F (386K). Fully exposing the plate to the cosmic microwave background radiation cools it to 13°F (263K), which is lower than before because the CMBR is a blackbody and aluminum chamber walls aren’t.
So even for graybody plates, MIT’s mainstream physics refutes Dr. Latour’s nonsensical claim that the enclosed heated plate remains at 150°F. They also use this equation to explain how thermos bottles insulate drinks, and describe the same radiation shields used since at least Daniels 1968 (PDF). Again, these shields work like Dr. Spencer’s insulating plate.
If you won’t listen to MIT physicists, note that their final expression is consistent with these equations and Eq. 1 in Goodman 1957.
Energy is conserved, which means that if you draw a boundary around some system (like the heated plate), the power going in minus the power going out must equal the rate at which energy inside that boundary changes. At equilibrium, the system isn’t changing so its energy is constant. Therefore, at equilibrium power in = power out.
That’s the basis of all these calculations, which is why I repeatedly asked if we could agree on it.
Jane’s still talking about plate areas, but he’s definitely not concerned.
Let’s see how a 0.2% larger enclosing plate affects equilibrium temperatures. The heated plate is a sphere with radius 6371 mm and surface area Ah. The enclosing plate is a 1 mm thick concentric shell with an inner radius of 6378 mm, surface area Ac1 on the inside, and Ac2 on the outside. The chamber is also a concentric sphere with inner radius 6386 mm, so there’s a 7 mm gap on both sides of the enclosing shell. Again, the plates and walls are oxidized aluminum.
At equilibrium, the enclosing shell radiates the same power out as the heated plate did before it was enclosed. But its area is 1.0025 times larger, so its outer temperature is 149.6°F (338.5K) instead of 150.0°F (338.7K):
(3)
For the moment, let’s pretend the enclosing shell is a thermal superconductor, so its inner temperature Tc1 is also 149.6°F (338.5K). Energy conservation at equilibrium just inside the enclosing shell shows that the heated sphere will warm to an equilibrium temperature of 233.8°F (385.3K)
Note that 233.8°F is warmer than the heated sphere’s original 150.0°F equilibrium temperature.
We could keep making this thought experiment more realistic, but that wouldn’t change the fact that enclosing the heated plate makes it warmer. For instance, instead of correcting the temperature manually as I did in Eq. 3, we could use Wikipedia’s equation which includes areas. Or we could account for the enclosing shell’s finite conductivity, but that would just make the heated plate even hotter.
Again, Dr. Latour and the Sky Dragon Slayers are wrong.
Jane’s insistence that “a non-zero difference is all we need” between the heated plate’s initial temperature of 150°F and the enclosing plate’s final temperature of ~150°F was interesting. In this thought experiment, the enclosing plate was initially cooler than 100°F.
Jane continues to focus on the difference between the heated plate’s initial temperature of 150°F and the enclosing plate’s final temperature of ~150°F, while the enclosing plate’s initial temperature was below 100°F. For all the thought experiments we’ve discussed, the heated plate at time “t” has always been warmer than the enclosing plate at the same time.
As long as it’s warmer than the chamber walls, the exact final equilibrium temperature of the enclosing plate is completely irrelevant to the fact that enclosing the heated plate warms it.
Nonsense. T(p) (which I call Tc) at time “t” has always been less than T(s) (which I call Th) at the same time in all the thought experiments we’ve discussed. That’s why I called them Tc and Th!
Constant electrical power flows in, and at equilibrium equal power radiates out. Enclosing the heated plate with a plate that’s warmer than the chamber walls initially decreases that power out. Just as if the chamber walls were suddenly warmed. So the plates are no longer in equilibrium and build up heat until they radiate enough power via Stefan-Boltzmann to reach a warmer equilibrium.
That’s why I solved for equilibrium temperatures using the principle that power in = power out. Once again, can we agree that in equilibrium, power in = power out?
These open source Sage worksheets show my work for these thought experiments. Clicking “Try Sage Online” would let you upload my third worksheet, and hitting shift-enter a few times would recalculate all its answers. But in case you don’t want to do that, here’s a formatted copy of that worksheet and its answers:
var('sigma T_c T_h electricity epsilon_h epsilon_c')
eq1 = electricity == sigma*(T_h^4 - T_c^4)/(1/epsilon_h + 1/epsilon_c - 1)
soln1 = solve(eq1.subs(T_c=255.372,T_h=338.706, sigma=5.670373E-8,epsilon_h=0.11,epsilon_c=0.11),electricity)
soln1[0].rhs().n()
ANSWER = 29.3986743761843
6379^2/6371^2.n()
ANSWER = 1.00251295644620
338.706*1.00251295644620^(-.25).n()
ANSWER = 338.493545219805
#Completely surrounded by 2nd plate
soln2 = solve(eq1.subs(T_c=338.493545219805,electricity=29.3986743761843, sigma=5.670373e-8,epsilon_h=0.11,epsilon_c=0.11),T_h)
soln2[0].rhs().n()
ANSWER = 385.286813818721*I
This could also be done on a calculator, which is why I explained how to derive the equations using the principle that at equilibium, power in = power out.
No, I said both sides of a thermal superconductor enclosing shell are at 149.6°F. Accounting for aluminum’s finite conductivity would mean its inner temperature would be higher than its outer temperature. If you’d like, we could see how an aluminum plate warms the enclosed heated plate higher than the 233.8°F it would be at with a superconducting plate. Just let me know, and I’ll do the calculations.
But I don’t think that would be helpful yet, because I didn’t realize we have a fundamental disagreement:
Energy is conserved, which means that if you draw a boundary around some system (like the heated plate), power going in minus power going out equals the rate at which energy inside that boundary changes. At equilibrium, that rate is zero because the system doesn’t change. So at equilibrium, power in = power out.
That’s the basis of all these calculations, which is why I’ve repeatedly asked if we could agree on it.
Once again, can we agree that in equilibrium, power in = power out?
For the moment, I’ll assume we can. If not, please explain why you don’t agree that in equilibrium, power in = power out.
I’m sorry that I didn’t realize earlier that we have such a fundamental disagreement. I should’ve been building a common understanding of equilibrium and conservation of energy rather than solving increasingly complicated thought experiments. So let’s take this step by step and see if we can agree on anything.
Let’s start with conservation of energy just inside the chamber walls at equilibrium: power in = power out.
A blackbody plate is heated by constant electrical power flowing in. Blackbody cold walls at 0°F (Tc = 255K) also radiate power in. The heated plate at 150°F (Th = 339K) radiates power out. Using irradiance (power/m2) simplifies the equation:
(1)
Yes/No: can we agree that Eq. 1 is based on the Stefan-Boltzmann law and correctly describes conservation of energy just inside the chamber walls at equilibrium?
If yes, the next step is to solve Eq. 1 for the constant electrical input using a calculator or the Sage worksheet I provided.
If no, could you please write down the equation you think correctly describes conservation of energy just inside the chamber walls at equilibrium?
Instead of saying “an aluminum plate warms the inner plate” perhaps I should’ve said “an aluminum plate warms the enclosed heated plate.” Maybe this will help distinguish between the inner surface of the enclosing plate and the enclosed heated plate. I’m sorry for any confusion this caused, and corrected it at Dumb Scientist.
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
I’ve explained that in equilibrium, power in = power out.
A blackbody plate is heated by constant electrical power flowing in. Blackbody cold walls at 0°F (Tc = 255K) also radiate power in. The heated plate at 150°F (Th = 339K) radiates power out. Using irradiance (power/m2) simplifies the equation:
(1)
Suppose the chamber walls are suddenly warmed from Tc = 0°F to 149°F. What will happen to the heated plate if the electrical power heating the plate remains constant?
Note that this problem doesn’t have multiple steps or confusing area changes. It’s just one equation. Tc just increased and electricity is constant. Continuing to insist that Th stays constant would just make it harder for posterity to believe Jane/Lonny Eachus is honestly confused, rather than deliberately spreading civilization-paralyzing misinformation.
If we increase the left hand side of Eq. 1, how could the right hand side not increase?
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Continued here.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Lonny’s link claims that:
“… Most discussion on the science of AGW revolves around the climatic effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. How it got there in the first place- the assumption being that increased carbon dioxide arises overwhelmingly from human activities- is often taken for granted. Yet Salby believed that he had uncovered clear evidence that this was not the case, as his trip to Europe was designed to expose. … the IPCC declared in its fourth assessment report, in 2007: “The increase in atmospheric CO2 is known to be caused by human activities.” Salby contends that the IPCC’s claim isn’t supported by observations. … In Salby’s view, the evidence actually suggests that the causality underlying AGW should be reversed. Rather than increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere triggering global temperatures to rise, rising global temperatures come first- and account for the great majority of changes in net emissions of CO2… temperature appears more likely to be the cause, rather than the effect, of observed atmospheric changes. Further, Salby presents satellite observations showing that the highest levels of CO2 are present not over industrialized regions but over relatively uninhabited and nonindustrialized areas, such as the Amazon. … Salby also contends that temperature alone can largely account for the rise in atmospheric CO2 through the earlier part of the twentieth century… University of Oslo geosciences professor Ole Humlum published a landmark 2012 paper demonstrating that changes of CO2 follow changes of temperature, implying the same cause and effect. …”
I told Jane that humans are responsible for the change in CO2 concentration. Jane even seemed to agree, calling contrary claims “ridiculous”. But today Jane/Lonny regressed again, linking to an article making these ridiculous claims even after Jane said:
“I haven’t intentionally disputed this. Not for many years, anyway. I suppose I might have, 4-5 years ago, when I knew next to nothing about the subject. So who are you arguing with? … not only arguing with yourself (since I was not present), but also (again as usual) arguing about something I didn’t even say. I wasn’t arguing with you about those things. So why did you try to make it appear I did? Why were you trying to give the impression I said something I did not in fact say? … it’s doubly hilarious that you’re trying to argue with me about something I told you in plain English I wasn’t even arguing. Only you.”
But Jane/Lonny Eachus is still arguing about the fact that we’re responsible for the CO2 rise by linking to that absurd rant and claiming it makes climate science “very Unsettled”. The rant Jane/Lonny linked repeats Salby’s ridiculous argument, Humlum’s ridiculous calculus mistake, and John O’Sullivan’s ridiculous misinformation about satellite observations. I’ve told Jane that they’re ignoring simple accounting, decreasing oxygen, calculus, the seasons, increasing CO2 in the oceans, isotope ratios, etc.
And yet Lonny Eachus keeps spreading civilization-paralyzing misinformation by linking to these ridiculous claims, even after acknowledging they’re ridiculous. Jane/Lonny has either betrayed humanity, or he has the memory and scientific literacy of a goldfish.
“If an honest man is wrong, after it is demonstrated that he is wrong, he either stops being wrong or he stops being honest.” — Anonymous [Lonny Eachus, 2013-09-27]
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
Energy is conserved, which means that if you draw a boundary around some system (like the heated plate), power going in minus power going out equals the rate at which energy inside that boundary changes. At equilibrium, that rate is zero because the system doesn’t change. So at equilibrium, power in = power out. Jane replied:
Jane claims he needs no such lesson because he said:
No, the fundamental principle used to determine equilibrium temperatures isn’t irrelevant. Anyone making that claim either needs a lesson about conservation of energy, or is deliberately spreading misinformation.
The basis of all my calculations is the very relevant principle that in equilibrium, power in = power out. I’ve never even mentioned the power used by the cooler of the chamber walls, so Jane either needs a lesson about conservation of energy or Jane’s deliberately spreading misinformation. Which is it?
Remember that conservation of energy at equilibrium let us calculate the 233.8°F equilibrium temperature of a heated plate enclosed by a superconducting shell. But we can also account for the finite thermal conductivity of an aluminum shell using this same relevant principle by drawing a boundary within the enclosing shell.
The same relevant principle applies: in equilibrium, power in = power out. Again, electrical power flows in. But all the other boundaries we drew were in vacuum, so heat transfer was by radiation. This time the boundary is inside aluminum, so heat transfer out is by thermal conduction.
(4)
Update: I made a mistake by forgetting to divide by the 1mm thickness “x” of the enclosing shell. I’m sorry for any confusion this caused; I’ve corrected the equation and results.
For aluminum, thermal conductivity k = 215 W/(m*K). Sage solves this equation for an equilibrium inner shell temperature of
149.9°F149.6°F rather than 149.6°F for a superconducting shell. This warms the enclosed plate to234.0°F233.8°F rather than 233.8°F for a superconducting shell.Hopefully this exercise shows how useful it is to start with the widely applicable principle that in equilibrium, power in = power out. Hopefully it’s also clear that none of these equations has anything to do with the power used by the cooler. Hopefully it’s also clear that Jane’s also wrong to claim that the power used by the cooler is required to be constant. The chamber wall temperature is held constant, so the power used by the cooler temporarily decreases after the enclosing plate is added, until it reaches equilibrium.
Why does Jane wrongly claim that the fundamental principle used to determine equilibrium temperatures is “irrelevant”? Does Jane need a lesson about conservation of energy, or is he deliberately spreading misinformation?
“If you don’t think that’s relevant, then you don’t know what’s relevant.” [Jane Q. Public, 2014-06-09]
Once again, a blackbody plate is heated by constant electrical power flowing in. Blackbody cold walls at 0°F (Tc = 255K) also radiate power in. The heated plate at 150°F (Th = 339K) radiates power out. Using irradiance (power/m2) simplifies the equation:
(1)
Suppose the chamber walls are suddenly warmed from Tc = 0°F to 149°F. What will happen to the heated plate if the electrical power heating the plate remains constant?
Note that this problem doesn’t have multiple steps or confusing area changes. It’s just one equation. Tc just increased and electricity is constant. Continuing to insist that Th stays constant would just make it harder for posterity to believe Jane/Lonny Eachus is honestly confused, rather than deliberately spreading civilization-paralyzing misinformation.
If we increase the left hand side of Eq. 1, how could the right hand side not increase?
I’ve failed to communicate once again.
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
It’s fascinating that you’d wrongly implied my previous calculations had units confused somewhere, but haven’t pointed out the actual units confusion in the eq. 4 I posted yesterday.
I made a mistake by forgetting to divide by the 1mm thickness “x” of the enclosing shell:
(4)
Here’s the corrected Sage worksheet; the old wrong worksheet is here. I’m sorry for any confusion this caused, and I’ve corrected the equation at Dumb Scientist.
The corrected temperatures with the aluminum enclosing shell are so close to those with the superconducting shell that the differences don’t show up with the four significant figures I’m using. So my original thermal superconductor approximation was even more accurate than I thought.
Jane, instead of typing all those charming statements, have you considered that it might be quicker and easier to just write down the equation describing conservation of energy around the heated plate at equilibrium? You’d quickly see that adding a passive enclosing plate reduces the net heat flow out, which warms the heated plate.
Again, your telepathy isn’t working correctly. I don’t think you’re being stupid. I just think you either haven’t thought deeply enough about the equation describing conservation of energy at equilibrium, or that you’ve betrayed humanity by deliberately spreading civilization-paralyzing misinformation.
That’s why I wanted to stress that admitting mistakes isn’t the end of the world. I just admitted a mistake in my most recent calculation, and I’m okay. In fact, one way to convince posterity that you’re honestly confused rather than deliberately spreading civilization-paralyzing misinformation would be to show that you have the courage to stop being wrong.
“If an honest man is wrong, after it is demonstrated that he is wrong, he either stops being wrong or he stops being honest.” — Anonymous [Lonny Eachus, 2013-09-27]
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
… and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
… and again and again and again and again.
Jane isn’t an Obama Birther or a 9/11 Truther.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
… and again and again and again and again and again and again…
Jane/Lonny Eachus on Rossi‘s E-Cat LENR hoax.
We’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane: What makes you think “Steve Goddard’s” blog is “anti-science”?
Jane: “The IPCC was not created to determine whether AGW exists. It was created to promote AGW and tell everybody that it DOES exist.”
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane lectures about GPS.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
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Jane misrepresents Llovel et al. 2014.
Jane: “I’m sure as hell not willing to pay to clean up some CO2 demon which science says is largely imaginary.”
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane: “climate science, to date, has been poor at prognostication“.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
Jane on the “Greatest Generation”.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Jane on the “1970s global cooling scare”.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Ed. note: no thanks. Programmers tend to doubt the current crop of models predict the future of climate with 95% reliability within a few degrees for 100 years because programmers understand the limitations of computer programs, especially with regards to modelling complex phenomena — the first thing we would do is ask about the history of such predictions, which is quite poor.
And in fact, polling finds even most climate scientists do not believe atmosopheric dynamics are understood well enough to accurately predict future temperatures.
Proponents of emissions controls based on the climate models are promoting pseudoscience.
Ed. note: no thanks. I’ll just leave this here.
“In fact I can define science in another way: science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Richard Feynman
Much of the weight of AGW arguments rests on the authority of the major climate institutes, but those same institutions were once quite confident global cooling was a serious problem. Here’s the most comprehensive list (as of yet) of articles claiming global cooling is a serious problem, citing director-level climate scientists at institutions like NASA, CRU, NOAA, etc: http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
And in fact, as late as 1990, the IPCC did not find any global warming signal. In 1995, IPCC scientists concluded in their drafts in five separate places that human influence was not discernible (some dispute this claim with unresponsive anecdotes, but no one disputes the actual drafts included those five statements) but these caveats were removed from the final draft.http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/1990-ipcc-report-showed-no-global-warming-for-the-past-700-years/ http://www.traditioninaction.org/Cultural/E042_Global-2.htm
Here’s a pretty comprehensive debunking of all the “97% of scientists totally endorse every bit of unfounded speculation about how awful global warming will be” claims (note Legates 2013 and Storch 2010 are cited, see also Tol 2014): http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136
The scientific method tests theories by their predictions. Here’s the most comprehensive list of failed climate predictions. Note that some of these are arguably not yet falsified, or made offhand, and a lot are local/regional, but there’s still plenty of embarassment and falsification to go ’round: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/02/the-big-list-of-failed-climate-predictions/
Here’s a number of posts about the highly questionable handling of GISS data. Note that despite Gavin claiming GISS is accurate to .1 degrees, most (if not all) past temperatures have been changed by more than that since he said that: https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/thirteen-years-of-nasa-data-tampering-in-six-seconds/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/23/a-question-for-zeke-hausfather/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/18/hansens-nasa-giss-cooling-the-past-warming-the-present/ http://junkscience.com/2012/07/12/steven-goddard-the-odds-of-the-ushcn-adjustments-being-correct-one-out-of-infinity/
Here’s some classic examples of how badly the models (that are the basis for policy recommendations) have failed — they cannot even outperform random walks, and the older they are the more they predicted too much warming: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/14/climate-models-outperformed-by-random-walks/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/15/james-hansens-climate-forecast-of-1988-a-whopping-150-wrong/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/09/comparing-ipcc-1990-predictions-with-2011-data/
Here’s Matt Ridley on the very strong consensus that warming in the likely ranges is net beneficial, something that was uncontroversial until recently. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-probable-net-benefits-of-climate-change-till-2080.aspx
And last but not least, here’s about 1400 more peer-reviewed papers that also suggest AGW will not be all that serious a problem. Note that some of these are impact studies. http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
Ed. note: no thanks. NOAA statement on models in 2008: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.” There have now been 17 years without warming.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/15/noaas-15-year-statement-from-2008-puts-a-kibosh-on-the-current-met-office-insignificance-claims-that-global-warming-flatlined-for-16-years/
“A leaked copy of the world’s most authoritative climate study reveals scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong…. the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that over the past 15 years, recorded world temperatures have increased at only a quarter of the rate of IPCC claimed when it published its last assessment in 2007…the new report says the observed warming over the more recent 15 years to 2012 was just 0.05C per decade – below almost all computer predictions. ” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420783/Worlds-climate-scientists-confess-Global-warming-just-QUARTER-thought–computers-got-effects-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html#ixzz3JYOpacoV
The publication of the Lewis and Curry paper, along with another by Ragnhild Skeie and colleagues, brings the number of recent low-sensitivity climate publications to 14, by 42 authors from around the world (this doesn’t count our 2002 paper on the topic, “Revised 21st Century Temperature Projections”). Most of these sensitivities are a good 40% below the average climate sensitivity of the models used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) http://www.cato.org/blog/collection-evidence-low-climate-sensitivity-continues-grow
As we have been reporting, the research now dominating the scientific literature indicates that the equilibrium climate sensitivity is around 2.0°C. This value is about 40% lower than the average climate sensitivity value of the climate models used by the IPCC to make their future projections of climate change, including among other projections, those for temperature and sea level rise. http://www.cato.org/blog/ipcc-chooses-option-no-3
“All 73 models’ predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world,” Christy pointed out. “The closest was a Russian model that predicted a one-degree increase… “I am baffled that the confidence increases when the performance of your models is conclusively failing. I cannot understand that methodology”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/climate-scientist-73-un-climate-models-wrong-no-global-warming-17
Hansen 1988 prediction vs UAH satellite temperature readings
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/HansenvUAH.png
santer 17 years http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/04/rss-reaches-santers-17-years/
Climate model simulations generally predict a future with more frequent and more severe floods in response to carbon dioxide–induced global warming….Thus, rather than trending toward more extreme conditions, annual peak streamflow throughout the southeastern and mid-Atlantic United States over the past 30 years has become less extreme and more representative of average conditions. http://www.cato.org/blog/global-warming-not-influencing-annual-streamflow-trends-southeast-mid-atlantic-united-states
But hey, don’t take the forecasting scientists’ word for it, ask the modellers themselves. Read chapter 8 of AR4 , 8.1.2.2 Metrics of Model Reliability:
“The above studies show promise that quantitative metrics for the likelihood of model projections may be developed, but because the development of robust metrics is still at an early stage, the model evaluations presented in this chapter are based primarily on experience and physical reasoning, as has been the norm in the past.”
What this says by obfuscation is that if errors were computed they would be so large to make the projections to future meaningless. This is enough, in my books, to throw the whole IPCC thing in wastepaper basket.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/14/climate-models-outperformed-by-random-walks/
Fildes, R. and N. Kourentzes, 2011: Validation and forecasting accuracy in models of climate change. International Journal of Forecasting. doi 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2011.03.008
Jane says I’m “rude and insulting” and Rujiel repeatedly tells me to kill myself.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again.
Lgw spreads misinformation and accuses scientists of fraud over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Jane: “$106 BILLION (GAO rpt.) by 2010 for AGW was wasted.”
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane on the “dumbass Charon moniker.”
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again.
Jane: “Billy Nye DEMONSTRATED that he knows squat about AGW”.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again.
Jane on the KKK and Lincoln.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
… and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane: “your precious warmism sources consistently start THEIR charts in 1979, and if that isn’t cherry-picking, nothing is.”
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Lonny: “SCIENCE ISN’T SETTLED. PERIOD. Only people who don’t understand science say so.”
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again.
Jane/Lonny Eachus on Shawyer’s “EmDrive” hoax, etc., etc..
Jane on sea ice, cherry-picking, and baselines.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane on the PETM and end-Permian, ocean acidification, solar thermal and hydro power, ice core “lags”, etc.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again.
Jane keeps lecturing about cosmic rays.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Why does Jane/Lonny insist on accusing scientists of fraud?
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Jane on the Maunder Minimum.
Jane/Lonny and GiordyS on Karl et al. 2015, 1937 temperatures, TOBS adjustments, etc.
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
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Jane on pollutants.
Jane/Lonny accuses John Cook of dressing as a Nazi and impersonating others.
Sure, but once again GISP2 stopped in 1855 so the graph you and “NJSnowFan” keep regurgitating is wrong and can’t show that.
Of course, NASA scientists have already explained that Greenland was much warmer than today. For instance, during the Pliocene ~3 million years ago NATURAL variability pushed CO2 to ~400 ppm, and the entire globe was “around 3°C warmer, sea level: +20m?”. Greenland was almost certainly warmer then, and during many other periods in the remote past when atmospheric CO2 was even higher than it is today.
But of course, none of this has anything to do with my original point: Polyak et al. 2010 and Kinnard et al. 2011 have Arctic sea ice stats going back before 1979. Again: “There is medium confidence from reconstructions that over the past three decades, Arctic summer sea ice retreat was unprecedented and sea surface temperatures were anomalously high in at least the last 1,450 years.”
Or if you think they’re a big bad foreign organization, just ask the American National Academy of Sciences (set up by Abraham Lincoln): “Estimates of past sea ice extent suggest that this decline may be unprecedented in at least the past 1,450 years.”
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again.
Ironically, I just showed you that papers predicting warming vastly outnumbered those predicting cooling, even in the 1970s.
Once again, the Russian Academy of Sciences said “the need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.”
Why are you doing this, Dana? I don’t lecture surgeons about surgery. Why do you keep wrongly lecturing scientists about science, and accusing scientists of lying dishonest fraud? Can you please find it in your heart to stop?
Please?
The same man who keeps accusing scientists of lying dishonest fraud doesn’t appreciate the “personal jab” of being told he’s repeating a talking point.
Yes:
Again, you’ve also spent years accusing scientists who endorse mainstream climate science of lying dishonest fraud. Again, this includes me, NASA, the US NAS, AGU, AIP, APS, NOAA, ASA, AMS, etc.
I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
(Ed. note: this comment was copied from here.)
No. When Hausfather et al. 2017 was published (long after it was submitted) the most current available NOAA data ended in November 2016. Nick Stokes showed that even if Hausfather et al. had used a time machine to include those data when submitting their paper, it would have showed more warming. Even the silly opinion piece Lonny linked notes that “climate models will more closely match observations once 2016 data is included”.
Ironically, Zeke Hausfather showed that including all the 2016 data available at publication actually increases the observed warming trends compared to their paper’s conclusions using data through 2015. This is still true using the full 2016 NOAA data which just became available on January 18. Lonny could verify this by repeating these least squares trend estimates with the monthly data, or just noticing that the annual ocean average was even higher in 2016 than in 2015. Zeke Hausfather challenged Anthony Watts to find an ocean temperature record that was cooler on average in 2016 than in 2015. Watts couldn’t name one or bring himself to retract his claim. Can Lonny?
Watts accuses Hausfather et al. of ignoring the most current data and missing an ENTIRE YEAR’s worth of data. Since Hausfather et al. 2017 was submitted in early 2016, they’d have needed a time machine to include the ENTIRE YEAR’s worth of data that Watts accused them of ignoring and missing. In contrast, Sou notes that Anthony Watts presented an AGU poster in 2015 without data from 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, or 2009.
Nonsense. The Earth continues to warm. I’d already told Jane/Lonny Eachus that his very ironic accusation is wrong. I’d even shared code and data showing that there hasn’t been a statistically significant change in the warming rate, and there isn’t a statistically significant difference between the projected and observed trends.
But more importantly, I’d also already told Jane/Lonny that ~90% of Earth’s added heat goes into ocean heat content (OHC) measured by Argo, etc. Why are Lonny Eachus and “FriendsOScience” ignoring the fact that OHC keeps rising when they keep wrongly claiming that there hasn’t been any global warming for 18 years? Are they ignoring Argo data because Argo data show that Earth continues to warm, which doesn’t agree with their preconceptions?
(Ed. note: This comment was copied from here.)
You can trace what Hausfather et al. 2017 did by downloading the code they made freely available at bit.ly/2jXSy7G. You can confirm their methods by reading the full paper and following the links at the end which lead to all the data they used. Interested members of the public can read or watch the background they shared.
Read the paper to see if Lonny’s “translation” is reasonable: “… Two of the three Argo near-SST records assessed, APDRC and H2008, agree well with the buoy-only and satellite-based records and suggest a cool bias in ERSSTv3b during the 2005-2015 period, when sufficient Argo data are available (Fig. 3). The RG2009 series is more ambiguous, with trends that are not significantly different (P > 0.05) from either ERSSTv3b or ERSSTv4. …”
Lonny Eachus is wrong to claim that Hausfather et al. “simply don’t use 1/3 of the ARGO datasets” (presumably a reference to RG2009). They used 3 independent Argo near-SST (near sea surface temperature) datasets, and reported the results from all 3 datasets. Anyone who reads the full paper will see that they mention RG2009 a total of 17 times while reporting the results of using that dataset.
Wrong. Hausfather et al. didn’t “throw out” or “ignore” 1/3 of the Argo datasets. Look at figure 3 (backup). They show the results of all three Argo datasets, including four instances using the RG2009 dataset which Lonny baselessly accuses them of “arbitrarily throwing out” and “ignoring”.
Again, Hausfather et al. didn’t “leave out” or “ignore” the RG2009 dataset. Look at figure 4 (backup). They show the results of all 3 Argo datasets, including the RG2009 dataset which Lonny baselessly accuses them of “ignoring”.
Figure 4 examines four composite SST records: ERSSTv4, ERSSTv3b, HadSST3, and COBE-SST. These composite SST records are compared to instrumentally homogenous datasets (which just means “from a single type of instrument”): buoys, CCI (satellite), and all three Argo near-SST datasets. Figure 4 subtracts all those datasets from each composite SST record, then calculates the trend. If a differenced trend includes “zero” inside its 95% confidence interval, scientists say that particular instrument’s trend agrees with that particular composite SST record’s trend at the 95% confidence level.
For both examined timespans, buoys and CCI agree with ERSSTv4 at the 95% confidence level, and disagree with all the other composite SST records. The H2008 Argo dataset disagrees with all composite SST records because it shows more warming than all composite SST records, although ERSSTv4 is the closest match. The APDRC Argo dataset agrees with ERSSTv4 and COBE-SST. The RG2009 Argo dataset (which Lonny wrongly claims they “ignored”) is in fact the last dataset shown in figure 4. RG2009 agrees with all four composite SST records at the 95% confidence level. That’s what Hausfather et al. meant when they said RG2009 is “more ambiguous”.
Presumably Lonny’s “new contrived data set” is ERSSTv4, which Jane/Lonny has complained about ad nauseam. Look at figure 4 again. Buoys and CCI satellite datasets agree with ERSSTv4. The Argo APDRC and RG2009 datasets agree with ERSSTv4, but they also agree with other composite SST records so those results are more ambiguous. The Argo H2008 dataset disagrees with all composite SST records because H2008 shows more warming than all of them including ERSSTv4, though ERSSTv4 is the best match.
In other words, they didn’t ignore any data, and most of the data matches ERSSTv4. In fact, the RG2009 dataset which Lonny wrongly claims they “simply don’t use” is “more ambiguous” precisely because it does match ERSSTv4 (and all the other tested composite SST records). The Argo H2008 dataset is the only one which doesn’t have a trend matching ERSSTv4 at the 95% confidence level (because H2008 shows more warming than ERSSTv4) and it also shows that ERSSTv4 is a closer match than any other tested composite SST record.
No, what Lonny described really isn’t what Hausfather et al. 2017 did. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how Lonny’s description could have been more wrong. See above. Or just read the paper to see that they didn’t ignore data and made their methodology 100% clear by making their code freely available.
Again, Lonny’s delusional narrative where “scientists crowed” about satellite data before “omitting” them is completely baseless. And even though he probably won’t ever admit it, deep down Lonny should realize that his new delusional narrative about Hausfather et al. “omitting” data was also just shown to be completely baseless.
Again, Lonny’s just projecting. Jane/Lonny previously cited ocean heat content (OHC) measurements based on Argo and satellite data until I showed him that those data doesn’t support his incorrect claims that there hasn’t been any global warming for 18 years. For years, Lonny has shown a pattern of behavior where he ignores the “best measure” of global warming: OHC data from Argo which reveal ~90% of Earth’s added heat. Maybe Lonny omits those data because they don’t fit his preconceptions?
Update: I’ve failed to communicate once again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
I replied.
Good grief. I replied once to your initial tweet about “nut job” professors, then after you linked my tweets 6 times I replied… 6 times.
Also, sarcasm doesn’t translate well on the internet. It was obvious that the words “completely objective” in your tweet were sarcastic, because many people baselessly accuse scientists who receive government funding of not being completely objective. But if someone asks you an “If so, why?” question and you respond with “Because…” you should expect that people might think you were at least sarcastically answering their question rather than simply ignoring it and making a sarcastic remark that doesn’t even answer the question.
But since it now seems you ignored my initial question, what I meant here was: could you replace the “NIPCC” in your argument with the Discovery Institute, or Principia Scientific International, or The Flat Earth Society?
Even if you don’t think those other groups are credible scientific organizations, they’d disagree with you. They’d say that whether you agree with their findings or not, their group exists and disagrees. But does that mean we should teach students that “intelligent design” is science, the radiative greenhouse effect doesn’t exist, and the Earth is flat?
We need a credibility threshold. If scientists have a different credibility threshold than you, please consider that this might be due to a different explanation than the common and baseless accusation that scientists are pushing agendas fed to them by money and partisan politics.
I failed to communicate with “VictorB123” and “GerryMorrow” and “omnologos” and “TheEndisFar” and “hockeyschtick1” and others again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Metal roofs are on its strategy to popularity.
I suspect that the title to this website is predictive of the author’s opinions. While climate change may be happening, anthropogenic climate change is a farce. There are plenty of good and reliable scientists out there who disagree with the alarmists. Besides, when has the mob’s opinions been something we should bet the world on?
I wrote this recently about so-called Carbon Taxation. This is the nonsense we have to put up with from the ignorant Chicken-Littles.
If carbon dioxide produced by human activity was a real cause of theoretically harmful climate change, Carbon taxation might, be a reasonable thing to do. However, greedy, ignorant and untrustworthy politicians and governments are always grabbing more money from taxpayers for their often corrupt, wasteful and goofy projects and undeserved pensions. Because of this, taxation of carbon dioxide production by motor vehicles, home and building heating in our near Arctic climate, and industrial activities is not an acceptable measure. Moreover, since Canada’s contribution to world carbon dioxide production is so inconsequential and miniscule compared to the so-called carbon dioxide ‘footprints’ of India, China, the USA and other massive industrialized economies, going nuts to create a Carbon Tax is not only unnecessary, but stupid, and only amounts to virtue signalling how marvellous in their own minds our politicians are. Unfortunately, even conservatives, like Selley, have drunk the poisoned coolaid spread by the UN IPCC, Al Gore, Suzuki and the other loony priests of climate change. The methods adopted by the Saskatchewan government and other non-Liberal players to sequester carbon dioxide is a fairer and more effective way to do the job, if it must be done.
How cute!