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If you intend to engage in adult conversation, kindly cease your condescension.

Sorry about that, most of the links you have ever provided me with are full of tabloid ad-homs about "greedy scientists selling their soul", so I figured snaky catches your attention. ;)

Nothing below the above sarcastic apology is intended to be insulting / snarky / sarcastic / offensive / condescending. I have used "scare quotes" in places where I lack a more descriptive phrase.

Seriously Jane, why do you go to Senator James (coal state) Inhofe's propaganda site to read their interpretation of what "peer-reviewed and/or science-oriented journals" say about climate change? Why not go directly to where the cream of the climate science community hangs out ?

I know you pride yourself on being a skeptic and we've talked about self-skepticism before, so in all seriousness here's the challenge.

Take a random climate depot article about the AR5, take a random climate science article about the AR5. Pick out a few random contradictions between the two articles that can be resolved by checking the AR5. Let me know how you go, no need to respond here if you don't have the time right now, I will remember for next time we cross paths. In the spirit of non-snarkyness. I'm willing to spend an hour or so to do a similar self-assessment on my own claims if you can offer one that you think may help me see "the error of my ways".

Personally I think that if your not concerned about climate change and the current political response then you are simply not paying attention. So use the PRIMARY source Jane, it's more ardours than the myriad he-said-she-said sources but it will free your mind as it did mine in the mid 90's. When/if that happens you will understand why I (unintentionally) haunt your posts. There is no shame in ignorance or falling for corporate propaganda, however refusing to use basic research techniques such referring to primary sources to resolve apparent contradictions, is just another way of saying "wilfully ignorant".

Seriously, I was you in my early 20's, albeit with a different subject, when you try the exercise above your going to get pretty pissed at the people who have "brainwashed" you into doing their bidding. If you want a "mastermind propagandist" to focus you anger then Inhofe is the common thread that runs through the vast majority of links you have thrown at me. When you see one of their victims in the future you will want to shake them like I shake you every now and then (often without realising it's you before I hit submit). So here's a couple of obvious questions you might ask about me...

Why do I care if you or anyone else is "brainwashed" by corporate propaganda?
Why did I spend 30 minutes typing up this reply??

Simple succinct answer from "the greatest polymath of all time" - "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire.

I'm not immune to that law of human behaviour and neither are you, I have no other motive to convince you AGW is a problem other than my 3 grandkids will have to live with our collective decisions. I may "take the piss" every now and then but if you can manage to take a step back from the verbal duelling thing we have going, you might be able to see that I am a

If you intend to engage in adult conversation, kindly cease your condescension.

Sorry about that, most of the links you have ever provided me with are full of tabloid ad-homs about "greedy scientists selling their soul", so I figured snaky catches your attention. ;)

Nothing below the above sarcastic apology is intended to be insulting / snarky / sarcastic / offensive / condescending. I have used "scare quotes" in places where I lack a more descriptive phrase.

Seriously Jane, why do you go to Senator James (coal state) Inhofe's propaganda site to read their interpretation of what "peer-reviewed and/or science-oriented journals" say about climate change? Why not go directly to where the cream of the climate science community hangs out ?

I know you pride yourself on being a skeptic and we've talked about self-skepticism before, so in all seriousness here's the challenge.

Take a random climate depot article about the AR5, take a random climate science article about the AR5. Pick out a few random contradictions between the two articles that can be resolved by checking the AR5. Let me know how you go, no need to respond here if you don't have the time right now, I will remember for next time we cross paths. In the spirit of non-snarkyness. I'm willing to spend an hour or so to do a similar self-assessment on my own claims if you can offer one that you think may help me see "the error of my ways".

Personally I think that if your not concerned about climate change and the current political response then you are simply not paying attention. So use the PRIMARY source Jane, it's more ardours than the myriad he-said-she-said sources but it will free your mind as it did mine in the mid 90's. When/if that happens you will understand why I (unintentionally) haunt your posts. There is no shame in ignorance or falling for corporate propaganda, however refusing to use basic research techniques such referring to primary sources to resolve apparent contradictions, is just another way of saying "wilfully ignorant".

Seriously, I was you in my early 20's, albeit with a different subject, when you try the exercise above your going to get pretty pissed at the people who have "brainwashed" you into doing their bidding. If you want a "mastermind propagandist" to focus you anger then Inhofe is the common thread that runs through the vast majority of links you have thrown at me. When you see one of their victims in the future you will want to shake them like I shake you every now and then (often without realising it's you before I hit submit). So here's a couple of obvious questions you might ask about me...

Why do I care if you or anyone else is "brainwashed" by corporate propaganda?
Why did I spend 30 minutes typing up this reply??

Simple succinct answer from "the greatest polymath of all time" - "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire.

I'm not immune to that law of human behaviour and neither are you, I have no other motive to convince you AGW is a problem other than my 3 grandkids will have to live with our collective decisions. I may "take the piss" every now and then but if you can manage to take a step back from the verbal duelling thing we have going, you might be able to see that I am a

The code for one of the major models, the GISS Model E is here.

Links to other models and both raw and cooked data can be found on this page.

All of what you ask for is out there, you just have to be willing to put in the time to look for it.

The climate models don't get fed much raw data, just starting conditions and whatever scenario they're evaluating for a particular run.

Markott et al 2013 - temperature reconstruction of the Holocene.
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png ...

Dealing with your 'blockquote' style is way too hard. I suspect this is a rathole, and nobody else is reading it, and that you know what you said, so I'll omit the quotes.

So, your assertion is that changes in CO2 levels is NOT caused by human activity, or that the contribution by humans is negligible. Sadly, most authorities disagree with you. I have no way of measuring the effect, so I can't weigh in, other than to mention that I trust folks who do this for a living far more than I trust you. Here are a few links:

EPA
IPCC
NOAA
More IPCC
RealClimate

According to folks that study this, the sea level is rising. Here are some links:

Union of Concerned Scientists
National Geographic
EPA
NASA, scroll down.

The ice core mystery has been explained in such a way that the time differences are in the noise. Here is a link that attempts to explain it: arstechnica. However, one obvious reason why CO2 might follow temperature rises is that lots of CO2 is released in the arctic tundra when the permafrost melts. As solar cycles cause warming CO2 is released. However, it could easily be a situation where small changes in temperature cause CO2 spikes, which then contribute to a feedback loop. Since nobody was there, nobody really knows for sure. However, this article describes a paper in Nature 2012 that describes the feedback loop. Note the paper assumes that excess CO2 causes temperature rises. That is pretty much not contested at this point, I believe, due to a strong theoretical understanding of the interactions. Since there were no excess sources of CO2 in the Pleistocene, the temperature rise precedes the CO2 rise. Since we are artificially increasing CO2, we trigger the warming effect without a requirement for excess solar radiation.

I have read 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' by Taubes. The book is very convincing. The view of nutrition as a power game, with no real science behind it is quite interesting. Sadly for your case, there is LOTS of science to back up the assertions of Global Warming caused by human activity. Too many to simply dismiss.

If there is no problem with CO2 causing global warming, and we are going to be ok despite these emissions, well, that would be wonderful. Due to lobbying by Koch and friends, that is probably what we are going to end up with anyway. However, if there is only a 1% possibility that the worst will happen, and hundreds of millions of people will die because of it, I will still support doing whatever we can to prevent it. Can you really be so sure of your facts, many of which are supported by papers paid for by Koch subsidiaries who have a real financial interest in stopping any action on climate change?

Ok, I tried...

Sure. If carbon levels go up precipitously for, say, 50 years, and the climate does NOT warm, after having corrected for things like solar radiation output, distance from the sun, etc, I would be convinced that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with warming.

Odd, not a single mention of human CO2 emissions

It is clear that humans contribute to the rise of CO2. Even you can't deny that, I think. If you can, please look here. So, the important point is whether there is a correlation between CO2 and warming. So, my experiment is valid, and has already been carried out.

Given a correlation between temperature and CO2, and the fact that human activity is causing a rise in CO2 , there is no doubt that if we continue, there will rising oceans, which will in turn cause massive displacement of humans.

So, hypothesis: CO2 is correlated with Temperature. null hypothesis: CO2 != temperature. Experiment: watch correlations for 50 years. Conclusion, yes, there is a correlation. Experiment: look at ice cores: conclusion: yes, there is a correlation. Experiment: build a computer model that replicates the conditions of the earth, and see what happens. conclusion: CO2 = Temperature.

I can't really say it any more clearly. If you don't believe, well, buy beachfront property.

Can you name *any* set of observations of average global CO2 and average global temperature that would cause you to give up your belief?

Sure. If carbon levels go up precipitously for, say, 50 years, and the climate does NOT warm, after having corrected for things like solar radiation output, distance from the sun, etc, I would be convinced that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with warming. Since human activity is, in fact, increasing CO2 levels, and has been for the last 100 years, and global warming has, in fact been occurring, and temperature spikes in the historical record have in fact been correlated with CO2 rises, then I would say that the null hypothesis that there is no correlation between CO2 rises and global warming has been pretty much disproved. Since observations have supported the claim that human activity increases CO2 in the atmosphere (these are facts, as much as anything can be a fact), the further claim that human activity is causing global warming can be judged to be fairly certain.

In addition to our current long running and dangerous experiment, there is other experimental evidence that human activity is causing global warming. Computer models have been built that, in effect, create a 'new world', that can be used to test these sorts of hypotheses. These sorts of studies are confirming and predicting global warming due to CO2 rises. They predict the sorts of temperature rises, on average, that will occur. They have been going on for 30 years, and predicting the sorts of temperature rises we are seeing. So, they are pretty good evidence that CO2 is causative of global warming. Again, that CO2 rise is caused by human activity is not disputed.

Now, you can call me a believer in the 'religion of science' again, but you need to start someplace. You can't be like Descarte, and deny everything, or you get nowhere, or worse, think you've proved the existence of God. My religion, if it is a religion, is that science gets it right much more often than it gets it wrong. It often will get stuck on issues, mainly due to incorrect theoretical explanations, but those incorrect explanations are mostly due to missing facts. As new facts come in, they figure things out, and create a better theory, and the scientific community comes to accept it (perhaps a funeral at a time, as Max Planck quipped). As more observations come in, the theories get better and better. So, yes, I believe what scientists tell me. I have no way to disprove them, and less inclination to try. Their work has made me very comfortable.

The only real puzzle here is how the Koch brothers have managed to convince so much of the population to disbelieve the science, which is in fact as certain as these sorts of things get. They have connected denial of human caused global warming to political belief in a way that makes people who vote republican disbelieve it on an unprecedented scale. This is similar to the belief, after even Bush had disavowed it, that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. It becomes part of the lore of the tribe, and must be protected as a sort of badge of membership. Very clever, but ultimately the millions of deaths projected in this century (estimates are 150,000 people a year being killed by climate change right NOW) will expose them as the villains that they really are.

I would like to thank you. I was dismissive of your views earlier in the thread, and your responses have caused me to read up on the science a bit, something t

What I heard is the range for sensitivity expanded some but the center hasn't moved much. IIRC it went from 2 - 5.5C in the AR4 to now 1.5 - 6C in the AR5. That doesn't sound like the overestimated it. The change doesn't make much difference.

Of course it's a truism that all models are wrong because it's impossible to fully model the real world. The real question is are the results useful? But climate models are better than any other method we have to predict climate. The scientists who use these models are well aware of their limitations and take that into account when they release the results. Gavin Schmidt, one of the leading scientists in climate modeling just wrote a post on his blog titled On mismatches between models and observations. It's very open about the difficulties of climate modeling. Even if you think RC is climate change propaganda you ought to read it because there's lots of ammunition in there for you to pick at climate models with.

http://realclimate.org/

There is a wealth of real science out there. People just read tabloids like the WSJ and assume they are going to get solid science news out of it. That's like watching Fox News and complaining that there is no journalism alive in America.

If you want clarity in climate science then try browsing the articles on realclimate. Of course you could just read the IPCC reports, they are easy to find on the net too.

Thing is, I can't tell if you're a) trying to be funny, b) being sarcastic, or c) trolling.

My people meter must be out of whack today...

If you want clarity in climate science then try browsing the articles on realclimate. Of course you could just read the IPCC reports, they are easy to find on the net too.

Despite all the vitriol directed at him Michael Mann's infamous hockey stick graph is still standing

Are you suggesting that because people keep using his graph, his graph is therefore correct? Just wait and see if it appears again in the next IPCC report. I guarantee you it won't be seen for dust.

I'm suggesting that other researchers have done the same work Mann did to produce his graph using different sets of proxies than Mann used and using different techniques and they produce graphs unrelated to the original hockey stick graph that are in close agreement with it.

They probably won't use Mann's original graph in the upcoming IPCC report since it's 15 years old now but they may use one produced more recently that will show essentially the same thing. For instance they may refer to this graph from the Marcott et. al. 2013 paper which supports Mann's graph.

Primary sources, do us all a favour and start using them!

The deviation from reality, though, seems systematic. Nearly all the models predicted warming greatly exceeding what we've witnessed over the past 15 years or so.

Here is a graph comparing the CMIP3 model output (the basis of the IPCC AR4 chapter on model projections in 2007) to the actual temperatures of the 3 major instrumental temperature records including the 95% confidence range. You'll notice that while a bit below the central projection temperatures are still well within the expected range. The full article is here.

The deviation from reality, though, seems systematic. Nearly all the models predicted warming greatly exceeding what we've witnessed over the past 15 years or so.

Here is a graph comparing the CMIP3 model output (the basis of the IPCC AR4 chapter on model projections in 2007) to the actual temperatures of the 3 major instrumental temperature records including the 95% confidence range. You'll notice that while a bit below the central projection temperatures are still well within the expected range. The full article is here.

I generally don't respond to rude ACs, so if you want another response, you can either be less rude or post as non-AC (yes, you can be a rude non-AC :)

Those trees have been there for MILLIONS OF YEARS. Seems they do just fine without people fertilizing them and all that. Those trees can also live over 2,000 years, not just "hundreds".. Hundreds of years is many, many different trees.

Obviously. There are a lot more trees that lives for "hundreds" of years than trees that live for "thousands" of years, however.

What is sad is your assumption that researchers are just as ignorant about plant growth as yourself.

I have very few assumptions, because I know very little! From the little that I know, tree ring growth is NOT a simple issue.

See, e.g., http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/07/tree-rings-and-climate-some-recent-developments/

40 years ago we were going into a deep freeze according to our climate "scientists"

Aw, geez, not this shit again.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a well-known group of leftist activists who consistently advocate for greater govt control over people's lifestyles. Anything the organization says must be weighed against its known ideological biases.

I pretty much should have stopped reading at the ad hominem attack, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

The fact that their document uses the phrase "higher global warming emissions" immediately indicates that the document assumes that humans are causing the climate to change, an assumption for which there is no proof only hand-waving fear mongering based on nothing more than dubious computer models.

The relationship between concentrations thermal infrared-absorbing gasses in the atmosphere and the amount of solar energy retained by the atmosphere is very, very basic physics. The fact that these gasses are on the rise in the atmosphere is very simple to track and has been tracked well for the past several decades.

As for whether this represents a deviation from the historical record, then you have to start getting to the reams of data from ice core, tree rings, O16/O18 ratios in corals, sediment layers, etc. The long and short of it is that we can get pretty solid estimates on both temperature and CO2 levels going back millions of years, and the theorem that CO2 levels cause changes in temperature seems very solid. We are soon to see CO2 levels not seen since the mid-Pliocene, and we're getting there faster than any other major change in CO2 levels in the geological record. (Frankly it's not how much CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere that's dangerous -- it's how fast we're doing it, without giving Earth's species enough time to evolve, adapt, and naturally sequester.)

I recommend you start here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/

Any legitimate analysis of the environmental impact of switching to EVs must include all the factors involved including the costs of electricity production, EV materials production, EV materials disposal, electricity losses due to transmission, distribution and charging, the cost of battery replacement, the economic cost of waiting for vehicles to charge, the economic cost of capital investment in EV production, etc.

Oh, I agree. And they must be compared against the existing infrastucture and its costs: the emissions costs of the vehicle's use of gasoline, the costs of transporting it, the costs of materials used to construct the car (e.g. catalytic converters), losses and damage due to spills, evaporation at the pump, etc., the energy costs and emissions and other pollution from drilling, extraction, and refinement (including the varying costs of techniques like fracking and material like tar sands oil), the costs of continued capital investment in gasoline vehicle production and fuel supply infrastructure, pipeline losses, community risks from pipeline spills or oil tanker crashes, etc.

I mean, fair's fair.

Right now the developed nations are THIS CLOSE to an irreversible tipping point beyond which civilization collapses and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/temperaturevariations-in-past-centuries-and-the-so-called-hockey-stick/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/23/scienceandnature.climatechange

Before that happens , people will begin to realize that it's going to happen. At that point, far before it actually happens, people will begin to act as if it's already happening.

  Mass uncontrollable immigration as millions of desperate people ignore international law, barbed wire and guns in a desperate bid for potable water and food under the pressure of world-wide crop failures.

Total economic breakdown as every penny is spent in either desperate remediation, law enforcement or moon-shoot attempts to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

World wide wars destabilizing Western-friendly nations as radical Islam hitches itself to global warming and the virulent most anti-social forms of fundamentalism becomes a majority viewpoint .

Focusing their angst against the West, they topple Pakistan, get hold of their nukes and do not miss a beat in using them against India and the US, adding fallout and mass panic to the witches brew of the hell life on earth has become.

The President of the United States , the CIA and all other government agencies and agents don't just have the legal right to prevent that scenario from ever materializing, they have a sworn duty to do so.

If that means silencing the psychopaths like Koch and Ailes and Murdoch and Hannity and Forbes and Limbaugh and Watts and all of the other engineers of denialism, then that's what that means. Their lives and greed and sociopathic lifestyles are not more important than the lives of the billions of people thew world over they have chosen to exterminate.

This country right now is arguably in a slow motion civil war with rational people who base their actions on empirical evidence and science on one side and Ayn Randian societal rapists, apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists and sociopaths on the other.

The fact that it's a slow motion bomb the other side is determined to set off means nothing. They will, if they're not stopped, exterminate not just us, but all future generations for all time. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb and a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower.

Every nation on this earth should treat deniers and polluters as the clear and present danger to their national security that they are.

If you shout "no fire" in a burning theater and work to make people believe there is no fire when any reasonable person working in good conscience would conclude form the same evidence that there is , then that's murder.

If you think the government isn't going to take the accumulated evidence of what you said, what you posted what you tried to get others to believe and use it to prosecute you as an agent of denial in a near future Crimes Against Humanity trial. then you haven't read history very carefully.

The legitimate government of any sovereign nation has a right to stop the actions of terrorists whose actions are provably a threat to their national security and the security of their people.

This has been affirmed even in the United States, which itself has unilaterally sought and killed people it deems terrorists in foreign nations.

By this reasoning, citizens of the United States whose actions threaten the national security of other nations can legally be subject to executive action on the part of those nations.

In fact, every nation has a right to ensure the national security of its peoples against terrorists, wherever those terrorist may reside and whatever device those terrorists may chose as a weapon.

Denier = terrorist.

It will probably happen if temperature starts falling significantly again. Even then they will probably find explanations to prolong their beliefs, as is they way of all true believers ;-)

How about you, if temperatures continue to rise as expected will you give up on your rationalization and accept maybe they were right?

Raw data is more available today than ever before. I don't know what raw data you're looking for but there are links to a lot of it here.

With all of the eyes that have been on this subject for the past 20-30 years it's hard for me to believe that anyone can get away with hiding anything in the field.

I haven't seen any models for myself

Realclimate's FAQ is a good place to start looking if you're interested in climate models (data sources are on the strip menu at the top of the page). The site is run by people who are internationally recognized as being at the top of their field, the articles are both understandable to the layman and highly regarded in the climate science community. You could also try the IPCC data center. The IPCC don't do science, they periodically gather a mountain of recently published research on the subject in one place and condense it into reports, the ~2500 scientists who do this are not paid by the IPCC, they (or their university) donate the time and effort spent on this rigorous and tedious task. The "working group 1" report is the scientific meat but it requires a lot of chewing.

How exactly is the surface temperature which is insulated from the magnetic core by quite a large layer of crust changing the orientation of the earths magnetosphere? I thought that the movement of the pole was caused mostly by an increase in seismic activity over recent times (as in we've had more severe incidents which have been said to shift the pole) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Magnetic_Pole It has been known ALL MY LIFE that the magnetic poles wander, and in fact have undergone complete pole reversal on average once every 450,000 years. This is not a linear process, and will experience times of acceleration and deceleration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal in fact there were articles on how the magnetic north has been shifting further and faster each year all over the place and something about runways having to repaint the north indicator on runways. (you look it up) Anyway.. to throw some tinder onto this fire.. I've always believed that our period of climate change (bear in mind we are always in a period of climate change as climate is NOT static and its stupid to think it is) may more directly influenced by cloud formation than we are lead to believe. Hence changing the magnetic north will change the distribution of Cosmic Carged Particles and this in turn will affect local climate areas. Not to mention that since the mass adoption of Jet engines (the time scale on this matches with a lot of the accelerating climate change graphs too by the way) on aircraft we have noticed artificial coalescence of clouds by compression of the water vapour through the engine.. this causing Contrails or whathaveyou which if you watch over the course of a day (anecdotal - take with a grain of salt) seem to cascade into larger cloud formations.. this plus the location of clouds in respect to the land mass I believe needs more studying before we can make any solid claims on the trends that cause/indicate/influence global climate.. and further than that local weather. ALSO it is very important to note that in a warmer environment that there will be increase in atmospheric CO2 as the ocean will not be able to absorb as much CO2 at higher temperatures (check out solubility of CO2 in water). http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/09/cosmic-rays-and-clouds-potential-mechanisms/ So in summary while I strongly believe most of these types of reports are funding seeking scare mongering nonsense, I do believe that we are in a state of climate change, people do have an effect, and we should all be doing our part to plan for a better future.. but please.. please.. base decision and actions on an accurate model. if the model doesnt work with more data, fix the model. Im not a denialist.. I just dont believe we have an accurate model yet.

... demands scientists share data and methods.

That argument stopped being useful 5 or more years ago. All of the important data, both raw and cooked is online now. Try here.

Methods have always been described in scientific papers but you need a certain level if scientific literacy in order to understand them.

DFW

As I'd posted Beck's link to a number of threads on AGW, I wanted to post my response to some other links as well:

I just want to say thanks to some /. posters, in particular for the realclimate links (Rabett is a little too snarky for me) - specifically http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/650000-years-of-greenhouse-gas-concentrations/ [realclimate.org] [realclimate.org] .
The article is interesting, as is especially the commentary, in which people raise a number of well-informed questions and get well-informed answers.

I'm trying to honestly evaluate the claims of AGW as best I can as a layman. I'm not a climate scientist, and I'll admit, I have been made suspicious by the quasi-religious tone of the exercise (starting with Mr Gore) and the unquestioning adulatory tenor of its supporters (a Nobel and Academy Award for him, really?).

Anyway, I sincerely appreciate anything that increases my understanding of the science and details.

As a layman, it seems irrefutable that there is warming taking place. It seems that CO2 has recently spiked, and that makes anecdotal sense given the intense and constant consumption of hydrocarbons since industrialization.

However...the point of the AGW creed is not merely to prove warming or CO2. It is, in fact, to assert:
1) that the sole (or at least dominant cause) for global warming (later amended to 'changing climate' - hah) is human activity, AND
2) that this is an unmitigated catastrophe, AND
3) the only solution is expanding government control of the activities of individuals "for their own good".

#1 seems at least partially true.
#2 may certainly be true in the short run for people in coastal cities, but let's be honest, these very-human things were never established in their current locations based on their durability/safety, and in long enough timescales the survivability of anything approaches zero. Nothing is permanent, not even stuff that we deem "really important or inconvenient to change". That it's true in the medium- or long-terms is absolutely not proved, particularly not in the case of the most adaptable species this planet has ever seen (AFAIK).
#3 certainly doesn't logically follow either of the others, particularly considering some of the people volunteering (out of their own good nature) to be the ones making the decisions.

As I'd posted Beck's link to a number of threads on AGW, I wanted to post my response to some other links as well:

I just want to say thanks to some /. posters, in particular for the realclimate links (Rabett is a little too snarky for me) - specifically http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/650000-years-of-greenhouse-gas-concentrations/ [realclimate.org] .
The article is interesting, as is especially the commentary, in which people raise a number of well-informed questions and get well-informed answers.

I'm trying to honestly evaluate the claims of AGW as best I can as a layman. I'm not a climate scientist, and I'll admit, I have been made suspicious by the quasi-religious tone of the exercise (starting with Mr Gore) and the unquestioning adulatory tenor of its supporters (a Nobel and Academy Award for him, really?).

Anyway, I sincerely appreciate anything that increases my understanding of the science and details.

As a layman, it seems irrefutable that there is warming taking place. It seems that CO2 has recently spiked, and that makes anecdotal sense given the intense and constant consumption of hydrocarbons since industrialization.

However...the point of the AGW creed is not merely to prove warming or CO2. It is, in fact, to assert:
1) that the sole (or at least dominant cause) for global warming (later amended to 'changing climate' - hah) is human activity, AND
2) that this is an unmitigated catastrophe, AND
3) the only solution is expanding government control of the activities of individuals "for their own good".

#1 seems true.
#2 may certainly be true in the short run for people in coastal cities, but let's be honest, these very-human things were never established in their current locations based on their durability/safety, and in long enough timescales the survivability of anything approaches zero. Nothing is permanent, not even stuff that we deem "really important or inconvenient to change".
#3 certainly doesn't logically follow either of the others, particularly considering some of the people volunteering (out of their own good nature) to be the ones making the decisions.

I just want to say thanks, in particular for the realclimate links (Rabett is a little too snarky for me) - specifically http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/650000-years-of-greenhouse-gas-concentrations/ .
The article is interesting, as is especially the commentary, in which people raise a number of well-informed questions and get well-informed answers.

I'm trying to honestly evaluate the claims of AGW as best I can as a layman. I'm not a climate scientist, and I'll admit, I have been made suspicious by the quasi-religious tone of the exercise (starting with Mr Gore) and the unquestioning adulatory tenor of its supporters (a Nobel and Academy Award for him, really?).

Anyway, I sincerely appreciate anything that increases my understanding of the science and details.

As a layman, it seems irrefutable that there is warming taking place. It seems that CO2 has recently spiked, and that makes anecdotal sense given the intense and constant consumption of hydrocarbons since industrialization.

This is what counts as evidence for you. Did you ever find some counter evidence? Almost certainly not, right?

For those who are interested, you can read about Beck 2008 here, here, and here.

For the full effect, make sure you actually read through Beck 2008.

Proof that you only need a few bits of junk our there, and that's enough for politics.

If it were so trivially obvious that the CO2 effect is saturated, it follows that lots of scientists are either too stupid to understand this or they understand it but are deliberately ignoring it or 'covering it up'. Alternatively, maybe there actually is a bit more to it than there seems. As a sceptic, my instinct is to favour the latter.

This article explains it quite nicely and even goes into the history of why some of the 'obvious' conclusions turned out to be faulty.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/

PS: Looked into the monitoring networks a bit deeper. A good data source with some excellent visualizations of this sort of thing can be found at the US DOE, the link comes from the excellent compendium of climate data archives at realclimate.

As a personal anecdote I first became interested in climate science in the early eighties, in that time it has gone from 340 to 400. OTOH, millions (if not billions) of people like myself have come to accept that it is a genuine problem. Same thing happened with "pea-soup" fog and acid rain, the economy won't die but unless the coal industry really can produce "clean coal" it will rapidly become obsolete, they read the writing on the wall 25yrs ago but what does that mean to an industry that held back "clean air" legislation for almost a century, stalling that cost 10's if not 100's of thousands of premature deaths across Europe?

It's not really clear at this point whether climate is truly chaotic or not on the large scale. I found this post on the subject that is quite interesting. As well as the post some of the comments are quite pertinent.

And maybe because there are plenty of educated people here who don't drink the Kool Aid like you. If you'd bother to pay attention, there are plenty of scientists, who are uniformly smarter that your sorry ass, who also don't drink the Kool Aid.

And there are also plenty of smart scientists who do, in your words, "drink the Kool-Aid".

Fun fact: Water vapor makes up 98% of the greenhouse effect.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=142

Once they have the grant money, why would they care?

Do you think the researchers are paying themselves from the grants? No, they pay for instruments or instrument time to collect data, transportation to the data collection sites, research assistants to help collect the data, computer time to analyze the data and all other things necessary to their research . The researchers are for the most part paid by the institution that employes them and not from the grant. Do you think they're getting rich? PhD's are generally well paid in the low 6 figures but they're not really rich. If they wanted to get rich they're smart enough they could have gone into finance.

In some sense they are always wrong in that they're seldom precisely right. You paraphrase George Box's aphorism that "Models are always wrong but some are useful". You measure the success of a model by comparing it to reality and so far they're holding up pretty well. Climate models are far from perfect but I challenge you to find something that works better.

Your understanding of what the models have projected is lacking. Here is a comparison of model output to observations through 2012. The models are doing that bad.

I don't see any actual facts in your post either. And having checked a wide range of predictions and statements by AGW activists, I can say that a large fraction of them are scientifically either unsupported or plain wrong.

He didn't post any facts or references to the peer-reviewed main-line climate research because doing so would be a huge task. You see the evidence is overwhelming both in quantity and quality. But I see your problem. You say that you've checked the predictions of activists. Activists are not scientists. Activists are typically more adept at getting press attention that scientists but at best they may have a passing understanding of science. Under the heading of activist you could include an unwashed hippy, a doom and gloom end of the world author, TV bloviators, big-oil PR hacks, the Koch brothers, and this Donor's Trust.

The predictions of the peer-reviewed main line climate scientists over the last 30 years have been quite good, and in fact as time has gone by the data suggests that the predictions are typically on the cautious side. Please review the conclusions of the Hansen Paper from 1981. There is a link to the actual paper on this page:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/

if you are too lazy to read the paper you can just skim the story linked above.

So you think they build the results into the models but you don't really present any evidence other than saying humans are always biased. That may be true but how do we get any science done if it's not possible to overcome that? What makes you think climate scientists are worse than any other scientists? Maybe you have some confirmation bias of your own.

Most models do a decent job, better than any other method so far. Here is a comparison of model results to observations (the 2012 update will be out shortly). Here is a discussion of Hansen's 1981 results compared to observations. As you can see it actually underestimates what has been observed and what later models project.

Yes, you can't predict things that have already happened but you can certainly start any model's run at any point in time and let it run then compare the results to the observations. The only thing you would need to feed them is the observed changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases (except water vapor which is a feedback of temperature changes and built into the models), changes in solar radiation and major volcanic eruptions. The output would be mostly temperatures.

My point about the global cooling thing still stands, far more scientists were looking at global warming even back then.

I am a computer programmer/sys admin but I took through 200 level courses and some 300 level courses in college for physics, chemistry and biology. Science is something I've had a lifelong interest in and I think I know a thing or two about how to conduct it. Science is always subject to revision pending new results but someone has to come up with the new results first. If climate scientist are so biased that their results are wrong it shouldn't be that hard to come up with those new results but no one has so far.

Einstein overturned Newtonian physics but didn't prove them wrong, just a special case of the Einsteinian universe.

I read that other post and debated responding. I'll just say you bring up a lot of things like deforestation that scientist are not ignoring. It looks to me like you haven't read deeply enough in the literature to know what they've already covered on those subjects. One error you made is that the polarity of the Sun's magnetic field flips at the solar minimum, not the maximum. Also, sunspots, total solar irradiance and solar flares all track together fairly well. You seem to be saying that maximum luminosity occurs when the sunspot count is lowest. That doesn't give me confidence in the rest of what you say.

On the reflectivity of plants, that is easily measured with a spectroscope and it has been. Another thing that has not been ignored. In fact they measure the spectrum of the incoming solar radiation in orbit and at the surface and the outgoing radiation at the surface and from orbit. All of that constantly to see how it's changing.

I saw the article about cities downwind temperature effects but from what I've read so far it appears that it is at best a minor factor in the overall equation and is unlikely to overturn the larger picture.

I don't think I said you were unscientific specifically and apologize if you think I did. But as I have pointed out you've said a lot of things that don't fit well with what I know about the subject. I'll continue to believe what climate scientists say until someone comes up with a better explanation and I don't think they are ignoring things because they don't fit with their narrative. Time will certainly tell whether they are right or not but so far they've done pretty well.

So you think they build the results into the models but you don't really present any evidence other than saying humans are always biased. That may be true but how do we get any science done if it's not possible to overcome that? What makes you think climate scientists are worse than any other scientists? Maybe you have some confirmation bias of your own.

Most models do a decent job, better than any other method so far. Here is a comparison of model results to observations (the 2012 update will be out shortly). Here is a discussion of Hansen's 1981 results compared to observations. As you can see it actually underestimates what has been observed and what later models project.

Yes, you can't predict things that have already happened but you can certainly start any model's run at any point in time and let it run then compare the results to the observations. The only thing you would need to feed them is the observed changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases (except water vapor which is a feedback of temperature changes and built into the models), changes in solar radiation and major volcanic eruptions. The output would be mostly temperatures.

My point about the global cooling thing still stands, far more scientists were looking at global warming even back then.

I am a computer programmer/sys admin but I took through 200 level courses and some 300 level courses in college for physics, chemistry and biology. Science is something I've had a lifelong interest in and I think I know a thing or two about how to conduct it. Science is always subject to revision pending new results but someone has to come up with the new results first. If climate scientist are so biased that their results are wrong it shouldn't be that hard to come up with those new results but no one has so far.

Einstein overturned Newtonian physics but didn't prove them wrong, just a special case of the Einsteinian universe.

I read that other post and debated responding. I'll just say you bring up a lot of things like deforestation that scientist are not ignoring. It looks to me like you haven't read deeply enough in the literature to know what they've already covered on those subjects. One error you made is that the polarity of the Sun's magnetic field flips at the solar minimum, not the maximum. Also, sunspots, total solar irradiance and solar flares all track together fairly well. You seem to be saying that maximum luminosity occurs when the sunspot count is lowest. That doesn't give me confidence in the rest of what you say.

On the reflectivity of plants, that is easily measured with a spectroscope and it has been. Another thing that has not been ignored. In fact they measure the spectrum of the incoming solar radiation in orbit and at the surface and the outgoing radiation at the surface and from orbit. All of that constantly to see how it's changing.

I saw the article about cities downwind temperature effects but from what I've read so far it appears that it is at best a minor factor in the overall equation and is unlikely to overturn the larger picture.

I don't think I said you were unscientific specifically and apologize if you think I did. But as I have pointed out you've said a lot of things that don't fit well with what I know about the subject. I'll continue to believe what climate scientists say until someone comes up with a better explanation and I don't think they are ignoring things because they don't fit with their narrative. Time will certainly tell whether they are right or not but so far they've done pretty well.

* is the World is warmer than it has been for the last two thousand years? Why is the answer to this question relevant? There are many variables that affect climate (forcing factors). It's entirely possible that we've experienced cooling over the first 1700 of the last 2000 years; that has nothing to do with what degree (ha!) of change we should expect from our cranking CO2 up past any level we've seen in the last 15 million years. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/last-time-carbon-dioxide-levels-111074.aspx * is the warning of the last three hundreds years (which is undeniable) human induced? You quote Watts. He (unsurprisingly) gets the science wrong: http://grist.org/climate-energy/co2-doesnt-lead-it-lags/ * why are scientists who use the Scientific Method and go against the narrative being vilified? and 1. Who is being vilified? Names, please, of climate scientists who have been vilified for arguing against AGW. I know of very few -- Lindzen and Singer, perhaps, the latter being entirely deserving of vilification to the point of outright dismissal from the conversation, given his enthusiastic and utterly disingenuous defense of the asbestos and tobacco industries and the former appearing to simply be a contrarian in general. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/03/misrepresentation-from-lindzen/ Meanwhile, climate scientists who report that we're headed in a dangerous direction are receiving death threats. No, really: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-06/battle-over-climate-change 2. Controversial research results are a dream. Anybody who could come up with a data-driven defensible argument disproving AGW would have their career made for them. * global climate models "Much of the global warming information is based on 'extrapolations' (projections) of short-term trends." Hm. Seems like lots of folks are running tests of current GCMs against paleo data, which undermines if not invalidates your point. http://www.research.noaa.gov/climate/t_modeling.html#figure4 http://www.giss.nasa.gov/projects/gcm/ http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf I know that climate change, as a global problem, is painful for libertarians to consider. However, as Feynman said, nature cannot be fooled. In a battle between physics and philosophy, I bet on physics. Apologies if the formatting is broken in this post; apparently Safari on a Mac doesn't want to insert line breaks.

Responding to your points:

Global temperature increase data: Don't make the mistake of extrapolating the results of one study from Lapland to the whole globe. Unless you can present corroborating evidence from reasonably globally spread sites it's more about local conditions than global conditions.

Human induced warming: Of course there is nothing "supposed" about the warming. It has been measured. Where is your evidence that CO2 rise has to follow the rise in temperature? If that it true then where is the temperature rise that caused the current rise in CO2 to a level 40% greater than has been seen for at least 800,000 years (from ice cores) and probably greater than it has been for over 15 million years (from other CO2 proxies)? Are you confusing correlation with causation?

Global warming models: If you think global warming models are just based on curve fitting extrapolations of "short term trends" you really have no idea of what they do. They are fundamentally based on the physics of the climate system. Observational data such at temperature trends are only used to compare to model output. See the FAQs here and here for more information about how climate models work. Since the period of the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is approximately a 100,000 year cycle it is not a significant effect on a scale of a few thousand years let along a couple hundred years. Other elements of the Milankovitch cycles have periods as short as around 25,000 years, still not particularly significant on century scales.

Vilification of scientists: Here you just start making political arguments that don't have much to do with science. Well known skeptical scientists such as Roy Spencer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry have not lost their positions because of their views. Once you get outside of scientific circles there is vilification going on but it occurs on both sides of the argument. Examples on the "global warming side": Michael Mann, Phil Jones, James Hansen.

The reason CO2 followed temperature in past deglacitions is because CO2 is a feedback of warming. I believe the primary source of CO2 during these periods is outgasing from the oceans. Colder water holds more dissolved CO2 and as it warms up it will release it*. Another smaller factor could be CO2 trapped in the continental ice sheets that is released as they melt. None of this means that CO2 can't also force changes in temperature. In fact the temperatures reached during interglacial periods can't be fully explained without including the added warming from increased CO2 and methane.

* The reason oceans are still absorbing CO2 despite the fact that they are warming is because the dissolved CO2 in water is a function of both temperature and the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere above it. We've added enough CO2 to the atmosphere that the oceans are still sinking it but that can't last forever.

Responding to your points:

Global temperature increase data: Don't make the mistake of extrapolating the results of one study from Lapland to the whole globe. Unless you can present corroborating evidence from reasonably globally spread sites it's more about local conditions than global conditions.

Human induced warming: Of course there is nothing "supposed" about the warming. It has been measured. Where is your evidence that CO2 rise has to follow the rise in temperature? If that it true then where is the temperature rise that caused the current rise in CO2 to a level 40% greater than has been seen for at least 800,000 years (from ice cores) and probably greater than it has been for over 15 million years (from other CO2 proxies)? Are you confusing correlation with causation?

Global warming models: If you think global warming models are just based on curve fitting extrapolations of "short term trends" you really have no idea of what they do. They are fundamentally based on the physics of the climate system. Observational data such at temperature trends are only used to compare to model output. See the FAQs here and here for more information about how climate models work. Since the period of the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is approximately a 100,000 year cycle it is not a significant effect on a scale of a few thousand years let along a couple hundred years. Other elements of the Milankovitch cycles have periods as short as around 25,000 years, still not particularly significant on century scales.

Vilification of scientists: Here you just start making political arguments that don't have much to do with science. Well known skeptical scientists such as Roy Spencer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry have not lost their positions because of their views. Once you get outside of scientific circles there is vilification going on but it occurs on both sides of the argument. Examples on the "global warming side": Michael Mann, Phil Jones, James Hansen.

The reason CO2 followed temperature in past deglacitions is because CO2 is a feedback of warming. I believe the primary source of CO2 during these periods is outgasing from the oceans. Colder water holds more dissolved CO2 and as it warms up it will release it*. Another smaller factor could be CO2 trapped in the continental ice sheets that is released as they melt. None of this means that CO2 can't also force changes in temperature. In fact the temperatures reached during interglacial periods can't be fully explained without including the added warming from increased CO2 and methane.

* The reason oceans are still absorbing CO2 despite the fact that they are warming is because the dissolved CO2 in water is a function of both temperature and the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere above it. We've added enough CO2 to the atmosphere that the oceans are still sinking it but that can't last forever.

You need to read these FAQs so you understand better what goes in to making a climate model. They don't do curve fitting.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/faq-on-climate-models-part-ii/

You need to read these FAQs so you understand better what goes in to making a climate model. They don't do curve fitting.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/faq-on-climate-models-part-ii/

Given the recent observations of massive arctic methane releases, I think we're really well-and-truly-(in a lot of trouble already, sir).

maybe not. We are obviously nudging against/toppling some tipping points in the arctic, but look at these posts from one of the folks at realclimate.org for another perspective. Both more or less conclude that:

"The methane hydrates in the ocean, in cahoots with permafrost peats (which never get enough respect), could be a significant multiplier of the long tail of the CO2, but will probably not be a huge player in climate change in the coming century."

Given the recent observations of massive arctic methane releases, I think we're really well-and-truly-(in a lot of trouble already, sir).

maybe not. We are obviously nudging against/toppling some tipping points in the arctic, but look at these posts from one of the folks at realclimate.org for another perspective. Both more or less conclude that:

"The methane hydrates in the ocean, in cahoots with permafrost peats (which never get enough respect), could be a significant multiplier of the long tail of the CO2, but will probably not be a huge player in climate change in the coming century."

Climate models are built on the underlying physics of the climate, not curve fitting to the data. As such the real world data doesn't matter to the models except as something to compare the results of model runs to in order to see how well they did. There are some somewhat minor aspects of climate models where the physics are not as well understood as would be desirable or they work on too small a scale to be captured in the grid scale climate models are run on so they are parametrized but for the most part they encompass the underlying physics. Here a a couple of FAQs on them from one of they guys that works on climate models:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/faq-on-climate-models-part-ii/

Climate models are built on the underlying physics of the climate, not curve fitting to the data. As such the real world data doesn't matter to the models except as something to compare the results of model runs to in order to see how well they did. There are some somewhat minor aspects of climate models where the physics are not as well understood as would be desirable or they work on too small a scale to be captured in the grid scale climate models are run on so they are parametrized but for the most part they encompass the underlying physics. Here a a couple of FAQs on them from one of they guys that works on climate models:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/faq-on-climate-models-part-ii/

Of course they are falsifiable, just not on the short time scale you would prefer that they be. So far the temperature predictions of climate models have been reasonably accurate. Every year there is an update of model-data comparisons that shows this. There should be a new one that includes 2012 data within a month.

Oh look, I found an interesting discussion about that very post from John Christy of UAH, posted on notorious denier Roger Pielke Jr's blog. The great thing about blogs as compared to scientific journals is that you get to choose your "pal review"! Who will notice if you mis–represent the original data, and use a flawed dataset?

One comment really nails it, and I can't link to it individually, so I'll just include it here:

The first thing I noticed when looking at Christy’s graph was that Hansen’s scenario B had been replotted to make it appear that it tracks scenario A very closely. It doesn’t, it never has. The graph on Real Climate uses the original data http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen

The next thing that was obvious was that the RSS and UAH temperature graph shows very little warming. I thought this issue was supposed to have been rectified after Spencer and Christy corrected the errors relating to orbital drift (meaning the temps were taken at progressively later times each day).

After making the corrections (version 5.2) the data now correlates with other global temperature records such as those of NASA and the CRU (remember when the skeptics always relied on the RSS / UAH temperature records, until it came to light that it was wrong).
Detail - http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/fu
Summary - http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_descrip
UAH Data - http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2l
RSS Data - http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2l
Comparison Data - http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temper
Hansen’s Data - http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988

It appears that Christy has chosen to use the old data in his comparison. In effect, what he’s done is to exaggerate the warming predicted in Hansen’s Scenario B (the one Hansen always said was most likely) and then downplay the true amount of warming that has occurred.

When the real data are used it becomes apparent how accurate Hansen’s scenario B projections have actually been – not exact but pretty close. Considering Jim’s 1988 projections were based on single inputs then this is quite impressive.

It was probably a valid critique of the contemporary model predictions of the time. Hansen was really the first to do a good job, first in 1981 and later in 1988 (links are to reviews of those predictions, with empirical observations conveniently overlaid).

There's a good write up on realclimate for anyone interested in what "the scientists" have to say. The write up is by the lead scientist who did the earlier 2009 study. Despite the pile of posts below decrying the "one station" thing, the new study used several lines of evidence. Also both papers were published in Nature, which is not really well known for publishing sloppy statistical papers.

The 2009 study questioned the assumption that WA was neither warming or cooling. This new study extends and refines the first, it has a steeper trend and better confidence levels.
This is good old fashioned, plodding, science that evolved something like this....
Stage 1 - "That's odd" - why is everywhere warming except WA?
Stage 2 - We looked more closely at the numbers for WA, it is warming so the assumption is incorrect.
Stage 3 - We looked again in a different way with cleaner data, we now have a better estimate of how fast it's warming that is at the upper bound of the previous error bars (error bars that IIRC were mercilessly ridiculed by anti-science types as "study shows anything can happen").

Speaking of climate trends, I've personally noticed (as opposed to measured ;) a change in the slashdot climate over the last few years, there is much less outright AGW denial on slashdot, my hypothesis is that "teaching the controversy" works against the "teacher" on a site full of amateur and professional nerds. The post with a barrage of well rehearsed talking points is slowly byt surely being replaced with a sort of insolent shrug, almost like as surly teenager's "whatever" when they just lost an argument to a parent, lets hope that in the new year they get over their embarrassment at being duped by amoral lobbyists, drop the defensive behavior, and get angry at the people who deliberately mislead them.