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Risking a whoosh ...

Relax. Comments as idiotic as AC's make a dull thud, not a whoosh.

Hey AC: Want to hang out with like minded people giggling inanely until they wet themselves? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/29/saving-the-antarctic-scientists-er-media-er-activists-er-tourists-trapped-by-sea-ice/#more-100034.

"The references were utter nonsense that defied basic physics with silly hand waving arguments. "

Sorry. YOU are the one doing the hand-waving here. Can you refute Latour's math or not? If not, your own claim that it is "hand waving" is nothing but hand-waving.

You don't get to dismiss a scientific argument by simply disagreeing with it and calling it hand-waving. You must refute it or concede the point. Otherwise you lose the debate.

Anthony Watts of WUWT, Roy Spencer, and others have tried to refute Latour's arguments, and even performed some experiments to test it. As it turns out, the experiments were ill-conceived and did not test what they thought they were testing.

Those are just two examples. But the point is: nobody has yet successfully refuted Latour's science. And you don't get to dismiss it just because you don't like it.

"Since JQP's erroneous comments were not moderated into oblivion, correcting their spread of grossly unscientific misinformation which cast aspersions on the fine Nature article is about as far from nit-picking as one can get. "

I have provided evidence that you are wrong. You have provided NO evidence that I am wrong. All you've done is name-calling (things like "grossly unscientific misinformation"). Guess what, man? Your saying so doesn't make it so.

It's all about evidence. I have it, you don't. If you want to present some, I'd be happy to look at it. But until then, you have no argument.

More fun: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/22/failed-mirth-earth-day-predictions/

http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now

Here's a joke:

Q: What's the difference between a Bible-Thumper who predicts the Rapture and an Environmentalist who predicts a religious Eco-Apocalypse?

A: There are actually two differences: The Bible-Thumper actually has the decency to predict a firm date, and then admits that he was wrong when the rapture didn't occur.

You only think that the data sets were merged/normalised in arbitrary ways because you don't seem to understand statistics.

No, it was because someone looked at the actual code (the linked example shows data being multiplied by a random looking array of numbers which happens to generate a "hockey stick" shape in the result). The comments are quite entertaining.

Also: if you don't think we should do anything you are insane.

[...]

but if you don't mitigate it at all it'll go way beyond the point where it's possible to adapt.

No evidence has ever been provided for this assertion. Actual predictions indicate relatively small temperature changes less than what the Earth experienced 50 or so million years ago (I see a graph that estimates peak temperature increase was 12 C over present day (the year 1999) for the region (present day arctic ocean). Solar activity hasn't changed that much over that period of time.

This is a standard chicken little threat. What's going to happen now that will be worse than what happened then?

You only think that the data sets were merged/normalised in arbitrary ways because you don't seem to understand statistics.

No, it was because someone looked at the actual code (the linked example shows data being multiplied by a random looking array of numbers which happens to generate a "hockey stick" shape in the result). The comments are quite entertaining.

Also: if you don't think we should do anything you are insane.

[...]

but if you don't mitigate it at all it'll go way beyond the point where it's possible to adapt.

No evidence has ever been provided for this assertion. Actual predictions indicate relatively small temperature changes less than what the Earth experienced 50 or so million years ago (I see a graph that estimates peak temperature increase was 12 C over present day (the year 1999) for the region (present day arctic ocean). Solar activity hasn't changed that much over that period of time.

This is a standard chicken little threat. What's going to happen now that will be worse than what happened then?

What the insurance companies are frightened of are idiots like you and your supporting politicians framing absolutely every natural event as "climate change". When you look at the actual facts, you'll see that the truth is the absolute opposite of what your tiny little brain perceives it to be, conditioned as it is through the lens of your favourite "liberal" (not classical liberal) news source, which itself is informed by activist scientists and NGOs who's budgets are mostly acquired through lobbying the very governments they claim to be trying to influence.

Interesting you say volcanic dust could shut down solar. Despite at least two volcanoes shutting down a large part of air travel I have not seen any indication of solar panels being affected

Thanks for listening. We have not yet experienced a Big One in the industrial age.

The most recent global weather phenomenon that has been ascribed to volcanism was "1816, the year without a Summer", triggered by an eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. "In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil."

Another global climate event of even greater magnitude occurred in 535AD which is presumed to have been an eruption of another Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa. David Keys has researched this extensively and has found many historical references to this event, also see the fascinating PBS documentary Catastrophe! available on-line: Part 1, Part 2. From Cassiodorus [Italy, 536AD] "The sun ... seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun's heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany an eclipse prolonged through almost a whole year.

Both events are accompanied by reports of unusual weather besides the dimming, massive crop failure. They should send a shiver through anyone who envisions that the United States might some day rely on solar or wind for base load energy. It's a slate wiper

And those are just garden-variety volcanic eruptions, though severe. Yellowstone has erupted on average every 600,000 years and the last one was 630,000 years ago. A flock of geologist-birds will descend to peck my eyes out if I should whisper "any day now", but at least, a Yellowstone event of some magnitude should be part of anyone's 100-year plan. BBC did a great two hour docudrama depicting possible effects, Supervolcano [2006] along with companion program Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone

And that's not even bringing up the possibility of a significant sized meteor impact, which would be certain to generate a global plume of aerosols. So a bad day for plants is a bad day for solar energy and history has recorded these events as lasting for months and years.

How can they be sure the sun reduction will not lead to an Ice age?
They have looked at how much the reduction is predicted (in the worse case) to be and how much the CO2 increase is predicted to be.

There are so many effectors besides pure chemical CO2 that are emerging as factors. Some of them like Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays effecting cloud formation, after years of deliberate marginalization (see this documentary). And some long-suspected avenues which have not been explored enough (my opinion) such as study of aerosol particulates like carbon black and their effect on climate, which suffered a setback with the tragic loss of the Glory satellite. Just two serious, possibly game changing factors. Until I see more of these angles play out to my own satisfaction -- a period in which they are rationally explored and not just 'rebutted', dismissed or ignored by pure-CO2 ca

Talk to Dr. Benjamin Santer, noted AGW proponent, who stated that 17 years was needed to identify a climate signal, those "cherry pickers" are just using the criteria set forth by the pro-AGW group. Seventeen years, no increase in temperature? According to one of the leading AGW proponents, that is a clear signal about the climate.

The postulated AGW effect, far from being uniquely rapid, is in fact, much more gradual than some naturally caused pronounced climate effects. By orders of magnitude.

The Younger Dryas of just 12 thousand years ago caused a mini ice age lasting 1300 years. It had long been thought to be about a decade in onset (still much more rapid than AGW effect), but recent evidence now suggests that it transformed a warm and sunny Europe into an icy, near-glacial freeze in only six months.

Thee were several dramatically rapid such climatic changes during the period from 17,000 to 8000 years ago. Note on the chart (Figure 1) the difference in degree between these changes and "present global warming". The latter is all but invisible in comparison.

Let me help you more: the AC post directly above yours "cites" http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/14/curry-on-the-cowtan-way-pausebuster-is-there-anything-useful-in-it/ Please translate into your own words.

Incorrect on all points. Germany STILL depends on its nuclear reactors, they are NOT yet shutdown. But they already have a dangerous amount of grid instability that already causes very real problems for consumers: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/instability-in-power-grid-comes-at-high-cost-for-german-industry-a-850419.html

And to combat this, they're building 25 new coal-burning power plants. Some of them just came online: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/23/germany-to-open-six-more-coal-power-stations-in-2013/ (sorry for a link to Wattsup, but it has a really nice table).

Oh, and electricity prices in Germany already cause energy-intensive production to move elsewhere.

The escape velocity of a neutron star is about 1/3 the speed of light --- and getting mass to 1/3 the speed of light is absolutely impossible.

Actually, you can get mass to within a whisker of the speed of light right on your desk:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/21/desktop-sized-atom-smasher-demonstrated/

I am automatically contending that "climate is constant", is more than a little silly. The idea of nature conservation is as

of course it isnt. But currently it is changing faster than in the last 65 million years. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/01/claim-climate-change-is-10x-faster-than-ever-before/
nature and earth will be fine in the long term, when humans have wiped themselves out
--> We're doing it for ourselves: water is projected to rise up to 70 meters, that would be an economic DISASTER.

"If only there were some. . .natural mechanism by which to explain variations in global temperature.
It would have to be massive, though. On the scale of our own Sun."

The idea that, just because I find the "Anthropogenic Global Climate Warming Change" club is tantamount to a religious cult armed with a computer model means that
I am automatically contending that "climate is constant", is more than a little silly. The idea of nature conservation is as conservative as conservare.
If the last decade of ManBearPiggery has taught anything, it is the imperative to reject categorically all appeals to guilt & fear. Make the argument, put the raw data and the model out there for calm reflection, or understand that you've completely undercut your point.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/02/electric-cars-in-alaska/
So if our neighbors in the crispy cool north do it without an issue, what makes it impossible or insane in the rest of the country? This is not only possible, but we have a sort of prototype out there already. Next up is to start doing Nuc plants again.

The utter lack of "possiblenous" in so many slashdotters makes me think that it would be impossible to have any more than 64 K of Ram in computers.

Who sort of misses the point of the article that the engines need heating to make sure they start.

What I said is that it's not feasible to put charging stations in every parking spot. It is insane.

I cannot say for sure if they are at all parking spaces, but in Alaska....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doc100/7396598454/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/02/electric-cars-in-alaska/

So if our neighbors in the crispy cool north do it without an issue, what makes it impossible or insane in the rest of the country? This is not only possible, but we have a sort of prototype out there already. Next up is to start doing Nuc plants again.

The utter lack of "possiblenous" in so many slashdotters makes me think that it would be impossible to have any more than 64 K of Ram in computers.

"... except that you almost certainly have no clue what you're talking about."

And why would you make that claim? Have YOU seen the report? I have. If you'd like to, you can download the final draft chapter-by-chapter HERE.

I would like to make it clear that I am not trying to weasel-word anything. But I meant "weather extremes" in the sense of greater storm energy, as I mentioned up above in this thread. Section 2.6.3 of the report, Tropical Storms:

"In summary, this assessment does not revise the SREX conclusion of low confidence that any reported long- term (centennial) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. More recent assessments indicate that it is unlikely that annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have increased over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin. Evidence however is for a virtually certain increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s in that region."

But please note that even though there are periods of higher cyclonic energy in the North Atlantic, it was lower elsewhere, with the net being LOWER than before, not higher. Even for the periods of high cyclonic energy in the North Atlantic, We have been in a 30-year-long slump in total global cyclonic energy.

2.6.4, Extratropical Storms

"In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low. There is also low confidence for a clear trend in storminess proxies over the last century due to inconsistencies between studies or lack of long-term data in some parts of the world (particularly in the SH). Likewise, confidence in trends in extreme winds is low, due to quality and consistency issues with analysed data."

NOTE: ALL of these summaries report a lower incidence or lower confidence of increased incidence, than prior IPCC ARs. And there are more.

FAQ 2.2:

"There is strong evidence that warming has lead to changes in temperature extremesâ"including heat wavesâ" since the mid-20th century. Increases in heavy precipitation have probably also occurred over this time, but vary by region. However, for other extremes, such as tropical cyclone frequency, we are less certain, except in some limited regions, that there have been discernable changes over the observed record."

(The "observed record" in this context means since 1850.)

"... except that you almost certainly have no clue what you're talking about."

And why would you make that claim? Have YOU seen the report? I have. If you'd like to, you can download the final draft chapter-by-chapter HERE.

I would like to make it clear that I am not trying to weasel-word anything. But I meant "weather extremes" in the sense of greater storm energy, as I mentioned up above in this thread. Section 2.6.3 of the report, Tropical Storms:

"In summary, this assessment does not revise the SREX conclusion of low confidence that any reported long- term (centennial) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. More recent assessments indicate that it is unlikely that annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have increased over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin. Evidence however is for a virtually certain increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s in that region."

But please note that even though there are periods of higher cyclonic energy in the North Atlantic, it was lower elsewhere, with the net being LOWER than before, not higher. Even for the periods of high cyclonic energy in the North Atlantic, We have been in a 30-year-long slump in total global cyclonic energy.

2.6.4, Extratropical Storms

"In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low. There is also low confidence for a clear trend in storminess proxies over the last century due to inconsistencies between studies or lack of long-term data in some parts of the world (particularly in the SH). Likewise, confidence in trends in extreme winds is low, due to quality and consistency issues with analysed data."

NOTE: ALL of these summaries report a lower incidence or lower confidence of increased incidence, than prior IPCC ARs. And there are more.

FAQ 2.2:

"There is strong evidence that warming has lead to changes in temperature extremesâ"including heat wavesâ" since the mid-20th century. Increases in heavy precipitation have probably also occurred over this time, but vary by region. However, for other extremes, such as tropical cyclone frequency, we are less certain, except in some limited regions, that there have been discernable changes over the observed record."

(The "observed record" in this context means since 1850.)

What a load of utter tripe. Antarctic ice sheet gains exceed losses. I would link to NASA but due to budget difficulties, their website appears to be down.

Listen, here's the deal: You lost. Your narrative of catastrophic climate change due to man emitting Co2 into the atmosphere is a busted flush. Get over it.

Ok, let's posit that very few of us are climate scientists or in positions to evaluate the raw data.

Except that we do have raw data. And when we compare it to the adjusted data, we discover that the adjustment introduces an apparent increase in temperatures.

That doesn't mean the adjustments by scientists are improper. But it is interesting that the adjustment process tends to diminish rural stations while increasing the significance of stations in more populated areas.

It is clear that humans contribute to the rise of CO2.

No, let's be specific - it's clear that humans emit CO2. Butterflies emit CO2 as well. These are *facts*.

The rise of CO2 on a global level, however, is quite possibly *independent* of individual contributing factors due to the complexity of the carbon cycle. I had mentioned buffer solutions earlier, and I'm not sure if you picked up on that, but go back to some basic chemistry - you can have some systems (say, a buffer solution), which in fact, react to both the addition of acid and the addition of base in the same way with neutralization.

So imagine for a moment that in our global system, the buffer for CO2 is the ocean, and the temperature of the ocean (primarily determined by how much sunlight gets to the surface layer, mediated by the albedo of clouds, which unfortunately our GCMs aren't good at), is what truly controls CO2 levels. If humans, say, *stole* CO2 from the atmosphere on a massive scale, this buffer would simply replace that CO2 to get back to the partial pressure determined by temperature. If humans *emit* CO2 into the atmosphere on a massive scale, this buffer would simply absorb that CO2 to get back to the partial pressure determined by temperature.

Of course, this is a simplified example (although not nearly as simple as the dumb bathtub of water analogy CAGW zealots believe in), but a constructive one - many natural systems work this way, with emergent phenomena maintaining a surprisingly narrow band.

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.

Okay, now you've taken one reasonable assertion, on doubtful one, and jumped onto a crazy conclusion. Yes, there is a correlation between temperature and CO2 - although you apparently haven't figured out the causality there. It's *possible* human activity can cause a rise in CO2, but given the nature of the oceans and how they buffer atmospheric CO2, the rise would be almost indistinguishable from other factors.

And oceans. My my, the oceans :)

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/20/sea-level-rise-climate-change-and-an-ocean-of-natural-variability/

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2007, “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 mm per year.” This translates to a 100-year rise of only 7 inches and 12 inches, far below the dire predictions of the climate alarmists.

But three millimeters is about the thickness of two dimes. Can scientists really measure a change in sea level over the course of a year, averaged across the world, which is two dimes thick?"

So, hypothesis: CO2 is correlated with Temperature. null hypothesis: CO2 != temperature.

That makes no mention of humanity's CO2 emissions, nor does it determine causality. Please, try again.

Experiment: look at ice cores: conclusion: yes, there is a correlation.

Again, correlation isn't causality :)

If you'll note, the ice cores show temperature changing *first*, followed by CO2 changes. This is literally indisputable.

Here's another correlation/causality for you - people who consume more calories than they utilize or excrete correlate to the accumulation of fat.

Would you believe that in fact, the causality actually *starts* with fat accumulation, which *causes* the consumption of more calories than they utilize or excrete?

If you're interested in learning about other scientific blunders of "consensus", check out http://garytaubes.com/lectures/ - he's got a great history lesson on nutrition, obesity and chronic diseases.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/17/ridleys-riposte-to-john-abraham/

Guest essay by Dr. Matt Ridley

On a blog called Desmog Blog, John Abraham has criticized my recent article in the Wall Street Journal on climate sensitivity. Here’s my piece http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579067532485712464.html
And here’s his piece: http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/16/john-abraham-slams-matt-ridley-climate-denial-op-ed-wall-street-journal.

It’s a poor response, characterized by inaccurate representation of what I said, even down to actual misquoting. In the whole article, he puts just four words in quotation marks as written by me, yet in doing so he misses out a whole word: 20% of the quotation. Remarkable. If I did that, I would be very embarrassed.

He directly contradicts the IPCC’s report on extreme weather, which found no link between current storms and man-made climate change; he is apparently unaware that the rising costs of extreme weather are entirely caused by rising investment and insurance values, not rising quantities of extreme weather, as even a small amount of research would have told him ( http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/follow-up-q-from-senate-epw.html ); he falsely claims that I say rising sea levels will be beneficial, when I wrote no such thing; and he wholly ignores the benefits of mild climate change, even though I was careful to say that the key thing is to compare costs and benefits. It is possible that he does not know the meaning of the word “net”: he certainly shows no understanding of the concept.

“General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

Mr Abraham’s main point is that up to 2 degrees C of warming is likely to do net harm. For this surprising claim, he produces noevidence. None. The evidence suggest the opposite – that less than two degrees of warming will cut excess winter deaths, increase average rainfall, extendgrowing seasons and increase rates of photosynthesis in wild and agricultural ecosystems. “A global warming of less than 2.5C could have no significant effect on overall food production,” says the UNFCC website.

http://unfccc.int/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/climate_change_information_kit/items/288.php

See links here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188913000092%00 and here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/.

And yet it is he who accuses me of “non-science nonsense”. It’s truly disgraceful that a tenured academic, as I assume Mr Abraham to be, should make so many mistakes and yet feel free to hurl unsubstantiated abuse at another human being, however desperate he may be. In writing about climate change I am careful not to make unprovoked ad-hominem attacks – until attacked in this way.

I always play the ball, not the man. Mr Abra

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/17/ridleys-riposte-to-john-abraham/

Guest essay by Dr. Matt Ridley

On a blog called Desmog Blog, John Abraham has criticized my recent article in the Wall Street Journal on climate sensitivity. Here’s my piece http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579067532485712464.html
And here’s his piece: http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/16/john-abraham-slams-matt-ridley-climate-denial-op-ed-wall-street-journal.

It’s a poor response, characterized by inaccurate representation of what I said, even down to actual misquoting. In the whole article, he puts just four words in quotation marks as written by me, yet in doing so he misses out a whole word: 20% of the quotation. Remarkable. If I did that, I would be very embarrassed.

He directly contradicts the IPCC’s report on extreme weather, which found no link between current storms and man-made climate change; he is apparently unaware that the rising costs of extreme weather are entirely caused by rising investment and insurance values, not rising quantities of extreme weather, as even a small amount of research would have told him ( http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/follow-up-q-from-senate-epw.html ); he falsely claims that I say rising sea levels will be beneficial, when I wrote no such thing; and he wholly ignores the benefits of mild climate change, even though I was careful to say that the key thing is to compare costs and benefits. It is possible that he does not know the meaning of the word “net”: he certainly shows no understanding of the concept.

“General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”

Mr Abraham’s main point is that up to 2 degrees C of warming is likely to do net harm. For this surprising claim, he produces noevidence. None. The evidence suggest the opposite – that less than two degrees of warming will cut excess winter deaths, increase average rainfall, extendgrowing seasons and increase rates of photosynthesis in wild and agricultural ecosystems. “A global warming of less than 2.5C could have no significant effect on overall food production,” says the UNFCC website.

http://unfccc.int/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/climate_change_information_kit/items/288.php

See links here http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188913000092%00 and here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/06/winter-kills-excess-deaths-in-the-winter-months/.

And yet it is he who accuses me of “non-science nonsense”. It’s truly disgraceful that a tenured academic, as I assume Mr Abraham to be, should make so many mistakes and yet feel free to hurl unsubstantiated abuse at another human being, however desperate he may be. In writing about climate change I am careful not to make unprovoked ad-hominem attacks – until attacked in this way.

I always play the ball, not the man. Mr Abra

The logical fallacy of that should be obviously: whether a particular solution is right or wrong has no logical bearing on whether the science-- that human-generated carbon dioxide contributes to temperature according to well-known models-- is correct.

I don't believe I have seen anyone argue that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. The arguments are over the "feedbacks" and the "forcing factors" in the models, which predict dire heating from CO2, and yet we are about to bust out of the 95% confidence level from the models. CO2 is much higher than 15 years ago but temperatures remain pretty flat.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294560/The-great-green-1-The-hard-proof-finally-shows-global-warming-forecasts-costing-billions-WRONG-along.html

Also, according to this, the warming contribution of CO2 tails off asypmtotically.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to back them up, and the claims that global warming due to CO2 will be catastrophic don't seem to be proven. For example, the "hot spot" seems to be missing.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/16/about-that-missing-hot-spot/

I am not a climate scientist, but I am open to explanations of why any or all of the above sources are not correct.

Of course I hope global warming is overrated, because the world is still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. If the consequences really will be dire, we will find out.

The logical fallacy of that should be obviously: whether a particular solution is right or wrong has no logical bearing on whether the science-- that human-generated carbon dioxide contributes to temperature according to well-known models-- is correct.

I don't believe I have seen anyone argue that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. The arguments are over the "feedbacks" and the "forcing factors" in the models, which predict dire heating from CO2, and yet we are about to bust out of the 95% confidence level from the models. CO2 is much higher than 15 years ago but temperatures remain pretty flat.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294560/The-great-green-1-The-hard-proof-finally-shows-global-warming-forecasts-costing-billions-WRONG-along.html

Also, according to this, the warming contribution of CO2 tails off asypmtotically.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to back them up, and the claims that global warming due to CO2 will be catastrophic don't seem to be proven. For example, the "hot spot" seems to be missing.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/16/about-that-missing-hot-spot/

I am not a climate scientist, but I am open to explanations of why any or all of the above sources are not correct.

Of course I hope global warming is overrated, because the world is still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. If the consequences really will be dire, we will find out.

Oh, is that based on the Time news cover back then? That's cute. I also get all my knowledge of those devious "hackers" from the mainstream media as well.

Now for real science:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

Survey of 68 Scientific Studies from 1965 to 1979, 10% predicted cooling, 62% predicted warming, 28% had no stance. Today, more than 97% scientist agree on warming.

Oh yes, that 97% consensus study from Cooks that is really just 0.3% consensus. Great appeal to an imaginary authority!

It was not an ad hominem, just a statement of fact.

You are a flagrant liar. This is going into my book of all-time favorite quotes:

mvdwege: You're wrong, because You're an idiot.
Me: Anyone who has to stoop so low, to an ad hominem remark or "criticism against the person", has no leg to stand on.
mvdwege: It was not an ad hominem, just a statement of fact.

Everything I have stated can be backed up by scientific, verifiable sources

If you're so confident of that, then why didn't you bother to do so?

There are plenty of wrong things that can be backed up by scientific, verifiable sources. Hell; there are peer-reviewed articles showing humans have ESP.

And I can show you verified sources suggesting man-made CO2 is not a driver of global warming.

The theory that humans cause global warming cannot be taken as a serious theory, until it is shown in a reliable manner, using basic science: that does not require a stretch of the imagination, or a more complicated explanation of a phenomenon than necessary -- that human activity, and not possibly anything more common and widespread in nature, is a predominant source of climate change.

It's not necessary to come up with the complicated explanation that these human activities relate to climate change; when much simpler more believable explanations are available.

Random graphs from random blogs proves your point how?

More data with sources from Government labs and such. Arctic ice levels are within historical 30 year norms, and antarctic ice is above historical 30 year norms.

The actual data says differently. We're within the normal range for arctic ice - and above normal for antarctic ice.

60% increase. Yet no relevant data for scale to understand the shift. No wonder someone else called it 'technically true'.

An interesting look at the data. Note that 2013 is within 2 standard deviations of the last 30 years' moving average. In other words - we're at "normal".

Also note that antarctic ice (the big ice sheet) is ABOVE historical norms and above the 2 s.d. window...

An interesting take on the Kosaka and Xie study.

Not very interesting:

Tisdale: Anyone with a little common sense who’s reading the abstract and the hype around the blogosphere and the Meehl et al papers will logically now be asking: if La Niña events can stop global warming, then how much do El Niño events contribute? 50%? The climate science community is actually hurting itself when they fail to answer the obvious questions.

On average (as Xie points out to Curry) La Niña / El Niño contribute nothing to global warming - they can't, they don't make heat, they just move it around.

Also check out what Tamino has to say about Curry's misinterpretation of the results.

And note that, at this time, it's simply a fit of data, it is NOT a model as it is much too new to actually have been used for a prediction. Unlike the other dozens and dozens of studies I linked to further up the chain.

Nope, it's a model.

Kosaka and Xie don’t have a tunable parameter. They used a full-blown coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model (GFDL CM2.1).

http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2013/08/learning-from-the-hiatus/

http://nomads.gfdl.noaa.gov/nomads/forms/deccen/

Yay for Fortran!

An interesting take on the Kosaka and Xie study. And note that, at this time, it's simply a fit of data, it is NOT a model as it is much too new to actually have been used for a prediction. Unlike the other dozens and dozens of studies I linked to further up the chain.

Is that considered extreme weather? If so, which half is it in?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/30/a-head-scratcher-no-atlantic-hurricane-by-august-in-first-time-in-11-years/#more-92771

Strike 1: You linked to WUWT, a nutter/tin-foil hat site which has about as much scientific credibility as a hooker has chastity.
Strike 2: You don't seem capable of making the distinction between weather (a hurricane season) and climate (20 years of hurricane seasons).
Strike 3: Long term climate projections actually predict a decrease in tropical activity, so a season such as this would, if anything, lend credence to climate change.

However, since you do apparently truck with WUWT I don't expect any of this will make difference in your opinion. Carry on.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/03/cooks-97-consensus-disproven-by-a-new-paper-showing-major-math-errors/#more-92998

Well, good thing then that there has been no warming over the last 200 months! Of course, we also wouldn't want to talk about the fact that none of the climate models predicted that current, long-term pause...

Consensus? Oh, you mean that report by Cooks that erroneously claimed 97% consensus when in fact it was 0.3%? That consensus?

Is that considered extreme weather? If so, which half is it in?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/30/a-head-scratcher-no-atlantic-hurricane-by-august-in-first-time-in-11-years/#more-92771

And I mean that literally. The CAGW folks are saying we must take drastic steps to prevent disaster: shut down coal plants even if it means blackouts on the Eastern Seaboard, capture all the emissions from smokestacks and pump the CO2 underground, spend and/or lose trillions of dollars on the projects. The problem with this is that people don't think the alleged threat of CAGW is worth that level of pain.

People will buy a Prius, and feel good about it. But that is a rational decision, since a Prius costs less to feed than other cars. People will not, in general, sell their cars and start bicycling to work to Save The Planet, because that's a pain and they don't take the threat seriously.

I personally am a Climate Change Denier (oh no!). I don't think the CAGW guys have proven their case to the level required for me to take it seriously.

The "hockey stick" turns out to be much less robust than originally claimed. And the "hockey stick" model can make an alarming hockey stick graph out of random input data.

There are serious questions that the CAGW folks have not adequately answered, such as "CO2 levels are higher than ever so why is the warming flat?" "CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we have had enough for decades and additional CO2 does little, so why should additional CO2 matter?" "Where is the hot spot?"

And the ClimateGate emails showed collusion to tamper with or suppress evidence the CAGW guys didn't like, collusion to keep skeptical papers out of the peer-reviewed journals and then point at those papers and say "Hah, those were never published in the peer-reviewed journals", "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline".

Worst of all, some of the top CAGW guys massaged and massaged the data, and destroyed the original data making it impossible to fact-check.

Extraordinary propositions require extraordinary proof. I don't think the CAGW idea has been proven to the level that I am comfortable with the extreme measures that have been proposed to fight it.

They took a survey of the membership of the IPCC.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/08/95-percent-confidence-in-hep-vs-ipcc.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/the-ipccs-new-certainty-is-95-what-not-97/
"Your article asks “Were those numbers calculated, or just pulled out of some orifice?” They were not calculated, at least if the same procedure from the fourth assessment report was used. In that prior climate assessment, buried in a footnote in the Summary for Policymakers, the IPCC admitted that the reported 90% confidence interval was simply based on “expert judgment” i.e. conjecture. This, of course begs the question as to how any human being can have “expertise” in attributing temperature trends to human causes when there is no scientific instrument or procedure capable of verifying the expert attributions."

Are you sure?

And don't be a pussy and whine about the source...look at the data...if you dare.

According to this electricity prices have risen 61% since 2000 making it the most expensive electricity in Europe. That rise is blamed on renewable. It is cool to break records but at what price?

"And you can't repeat the experiment to see if it would have supported the conclusion, you just have to trust the original researcher's models." as in astrophysics, and yet it is highly predictive since it is based on physics.

Sure, you can. For example, for stellar physics you have something like 100 or more billion stars to study just in our galaxy. That gives you a vast population of objects to study, in various stages of the lifespan of a star and a variety of mass, composition, companion objects, etc. While for climatogy you have one climate with roughly 30 years of good data, another century of so so surface data, and progressively worsening temperature proxy data as you go back further in time.

As to being based on physics, they can't nail the temperature sensitivity of carbon dioxide beyond a factor of two (usual estimate is 2-4 C mean global temperature increase per doubling of CO2 concentration and that might be too high). Sure, it's physics, but it's physics that we don't understand very well.

The 'emotion and rhetoric' comes when some people don't like the consequences of the answers.

Or because actual science isn't being done. Keep in mind that there's a lot of money riding on anthropogenic global warming being a sufficiently urgent threat that governments can be convinced to spend vast amounts of public funds - more than the entire fossil fuels industry takes in as profit. I think that money buys a lot of favorable and biased climatology research.

And there's an interesting example of faulty research which blames the shifting population of a particular butterfly on climate change:

Parmesan tactfully offered lip service to altered landscapes, but stated that her âoeprobabilistic modelâ accurately separated the effects of land use from climate change. To demonstrate her modelâ(TM)s power, she wrote, âoeConsider the case of the silver-spotted skipper butterfly (Hesperia comma) that has expanded its distribution close to its northern boundary in England over the past 20 years. Possible ecological explanations for this expansion are regional warming and changes in land use. Comparing the magnitudes and directions of these two factors suggests that climate change is more likely than land-use change to be the cause of expansion.â That was a very odd claim.

This was the very same Silver-spotted Skipper that Jeremy Thomasâ(TM) detailed studies and subsequent conservation prescriptions had saved from extinction along with the Large Blue. Parmesan was hijacking a conservation success story to spin a tale of climate disruption. Her âoeproofâ that climate change was driving the Silver-spotted Skipper northward came from the work of her old friend C.D. Thomas, known for predicting that rising CO2 levels had committed 60% of the worldâ(TM)s species to extinction.5 Using a mesmerizing statistical model, C.D. Thomas argued that because the Silver-spotted Skipper âoeneeds warmth,â only global warming could account for its recent colonization of a few cooler north-facing slopes of Englandâ(TM)s southern hills.

The Skipper is indeed fond of hotter south-facing slopes. However, the butterfly had historically inhabited cooler northern slopes if those slopes had been grazed. Like the Large Blue, the Skipper had disappeared from both cool north-facing slopes and warm south-facing slopes whenever the turf grew too high.6,7 C.D. Thomasâ(TM) model was statistically significant only if he ignored recent conservation efforts to promote warmer, short-turf habitat. At the end of his paper, relegated to his methods sections, he quietly stated, âoewe assumed that grazing patterns were the same in 1982 as in 2000.â4 Parmesan and C.D. were guilty of grave sins of omission.

I'm also surprised at the number of stories that appear on /. half a week after being on :WUWT!

Well, I retract my original statement. Apparently energy is up slightly in the last few years, with the result that we are now in a 30-year low, no longer a 40-year slump.

Here is one source, and here is another.

Just two examples. It is pretty easy to google that, and the information is not somebody's "opinion", it is what the science says. BUT... while those particular sources are often attacked, keep in mind that they are presenting someone else's scientific studies, they are not "the source". You aren't likely to find that information on sites about "climate change" because they don't want to point it out to you; it weakens their arguments and apocalyptic prognostications.

Yes, it is possible to estimate how well a climate model models reality.

It's possible to make a climate model, then wait for reality to happen, then see how well they matched, yes. But you can't run experiments to see if your model is sound. And climate models do diverge from reality as reality happens, see this graph for example.

The parameters that vary in climate models are not unconstrained, but constrained by physics (experimental evidence). If your climate model accurately hindcasts the climate developments of the 20th century (say), but the parameters are at the extreme range of what's plausible from experimental physics, then it probably isn't a very good model.

That hasn't stopped astronomers from positing ridiculous things such as dark matter and dark energy.

A better article...

From what I can gather, although the code was well scrubbed so that the single processor, threaded and message passing (MPI) versions produce the same binary result indicating no vectorization errors, machine rounding differences caused problems.

Since all the platforms were IEEE754 compliant and the code was mostly written in Fortran 90, I'm assuming that one of the main contributor to this rounding is the evaluation order of terms and perhaps the way that double fourier series and spherical harmonics where written.

Both SPH and DFS operations use sine/cosine evaluation which vary a great deal from platform to platform (since generally they only round within 1ulp, not within 1/2ulp of an infinitely precise result).

I remember many moons ago, when I was working on fixed-point FFT accelerators, we were lazy and generated sine/cosine tables using the host platform (x86) and neglected to worry about the fact that using different compliers and different optimization levels on the same platform we got twiddle-factor tables that were different (off-by-one).

With one bug report, we eventually tracked it down to different intrinsics (x87 FSIN w/ math or FSINCOS) were used and sometime libraries were used. Ack... Later library releases we complied in a whole bunch of pregenerated tables to avoid this problem.

Of course putting in a table or designing your own FSIN function for a spherical harmonic or fourier series numerical library solver might be a bit out of scope (not to mention tank the performance), so I'm sure that's why they didn't bother to make the code platform independent w/ respect to transcendental functions, although with Fortran 90, it seems like they could of fixed the evaluation order issues (with appropriate parenthesis to force a certain evaluation order, something you can't do in C).

Seriously, every statement you made there was an outright lie. Including the "No warming for 17 years" lie. Current temperatures are will withing the 95% confidence limits of the AR4 model assemblage.

Seems "No warming for 17 years" is pretty solid;

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who for some reason chairs the IPCC’s climate “science” panel, has been compelled to admit there has been no global warming for 17 years.

The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4), and the RSS satellite dataset shows no warming for 23 years (h/t to Werner Brozek for determining these values).

IPCC Railroad engineer Pachauri acknowledges ‘No warming for 17 years’

AR5 is due out soon, it's likely to be a game changer.

... (aka www.wattsupwiththat.com) has some comments on the good parts of Obama plan, but has some comments about the bad and ugly parts too:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/25/the-presidents-climate-action-plan-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

The Alarmists have made many predictions in the last 20-30 years.

Here are the resulta.

Oh, if you refuse to look because it's from Mr. Watts, then you have no interest in Science; you are nothing but a Face Painting Homer.

You put far too much faith in peer review, without examining the substance of the arguments. Peer review is a dodge. At most it means that the reviewers didn't produce any damning critiques of it OR the editor chose to publish anyways.

Consider that three of the authors of a paper that was claimed to endorse AGW thinks their papers do not endorse AGW. Does that cause you to question the validity of the consensus claim at all? 3 papers out of 65 is roughly a 5% difference.