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Global Warming Debunked?
limbicsystem writes, "I'm a scientist. I like Al Gore. I donate to the Sierra club, I bicycle everywhere and I eat granola. And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong? Because it seems to be solid, well researched, and somewhat damning of a host of authorities (the UN, the editors of Nature, the Canadian Government) who seem to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence." The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton, a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher.
"Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?"
/. buddy, what you'll get is a bunch of reasons why its right or wrong from people that didn't read the article.
This is
From the blurb: Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?
I'm sure we got a couple thousand people here who will tell you why it's wrong... the question is; are they right?
I'm afraid that you're probably going to get a lot of shoddy answers to a legitimate question here.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon. We just need to turn the United States into a temperate rain forest- with enough variety to ensure tree survival and food production from the rain forest itself. Lock up that carbon in wood- and then use the wood to build houses- locking up the carbon for decades, maybe centuries...
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
...but I don't look to newspapers for serious scientific research, I look to peer-reviewed scientific journals. But, that aside, the accusations in the article all seem to be things (relative role of solar forcing, the "medieval warm period", etc.) that have been discussed and dealt-with repeatedly in the literature, both as to their accuracy and their impact, there doesn't seem to be anything, on the first impression, new here.
Give me any conclusion on a topic involving a really complex process, and I'll find a way to poke a bunch of holes in it. I'll examine the process of investigation and nit-pick it to death, because no process is complete or fault-free. If necessary, I'll just go to the core assumptions and attack their validity. Easy enough.
Since none of the conclusions can be "proven", all we can do is go with our "best guess". In this case, the general concensus among scientists in the field is our best guess.
Granted I haven't had a chance to read the entire article yet, but it sounds like it's in line with what the climate scientists at my University have been saying for a while. Two things actually.
The first is that funding shapes science whether you want it to or not. If the general consensus is that global warming is happening, you're much more likely to get funded if you decide to do research on "why global warming is going on" or "what are the major contributors to global warming" etc. However, if you were to submit a proposal along the lines of "what if any effect has global warming had on climate change", good luck.
Therefore there's going to be a lot of science out there saying "Yes, global warming is happening and is the reason for climate change!", since that's what pays the bills, gets you published, and gets you invited to all sorts of posh international conventions on global warming. No one wants to invite the guy/gal that says "yes it's happening but it's not the cause, or certainly not the only cause behind global climate change".
Just my two cents. Keep and open mind, even when reading "science". At the end of the day scientists are human beings too, they have to pay the bills, report to a boss, have a reputation among their peers. Science is rarely about pure facts. The facts usually need to be teased out of the agenda, aggrandizing and ego of those doing the work.
This is the very first paragraph:
" Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." [Emphasis mine]
OK, so not only is the American right-wing co-opting Evangelical Christians and 'values voters' to take away our civil liberties and conduct mass surveillance on the American public, but now hippies, greenies, and environmental scientists are also going to take away our freedoms by reducing greenhouse emissions, raising vehicle fuel efficiency, and sequestering carbon!?
Man, things are getting really weird when people on both sides of the aisle are starting to agree with Alex Jones.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
whether global warming is happening. We know it is. We're recording it as it happens.
What is the issue is is this a natural process, a man-made process or a combination?
While we have evidence that warming and cooling cycles have happened in the past, this is the first time (that we know of) that the cycle has been recorded by man. If nothing else, it behooves us to study this phenomenon as critically as possible and determine if we are influencing things by our activities.
So no, global warming is not debunked. It is real and it is happening. The real question is why.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you're a scientist, why not give them the raw data & your conclusions?
Good point. What I'd like to see is a place where I can download the state-of-the-art models. That is, I want to be able to review their code, all assumptions going into the model, all justifications for the assumptions, and all historical evidence so I can replicate the predictions myself.
Since this is science, that information *should* be publicly available somewhere.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The article referenced goes through several studies and papers and points out poor methodologies and statistical analysis that is likely fraudulent. From this you can conclude, these studies are possibly flawed. So where does that leave you? Can you logically conclude from this that global warming is not occurring or even not occurring faster than any time in the past? Of course not. Discrediting a study does not prove the opposite of that study is true. It simply provides you a reason to place more weight on other, more credible, studies.
From my reading I have little doubt that global warming is occurring. Just look in peer reviewed journals and other credible sources. It may not be as dramatic as some would like, and the dramatic, but ill-concieved, doomsday scenarios painted by the popular media are entertainment, not fact. The truth is, there are very real indications of climactic problems, which will probably be gradual, but may be practically irreversible by the time they are apparent to skeptics.
Just be careful of your sources and pay attention. Both industrial concerns and people working for government grant dollars have incentive to obtain particular results. Look for peer reviewed results from experiments and observations that have been repeated by numerous scientific studies. Be cautious of interpretations of this data by the popular media, who are more interested in selling ads than presenting the truth.
Dear Submitter,
The reason the article seems correct and insightful is because of the limited scope. It doesn't take issue with the scientific consensus on global climate change, just with the recent report issued by the UN.
Oddly, though, instead of just pointing out why this report is wrong, it concludes that since the report is poorly written, then that proves there is no climate catastrophe.
I've actually come across other criticisms of the "hockey stick" graph that used it as a starting point for a discussion on good science vs. bureaucracy and the disadvantages of pegging all your arguments on a single "visual". (the biggest disadvantage? disprove the "visual" and that disproves your whole argument). Unfortunately that's not what we've got in this UK Telegraph article.
I'm hoping that was a joke, because I thought it was fairly common knowledge (amongst those interested in this kind of thing, anyway) that JunkScience is maintained by someone in the employ of ExxonMobil and Philip Morris, a Mr. Steven Milloy, who also works for Fox News. Hardly a neutral point of view, or an authoritative source.
There are plenty more reputable sources to find your debunkings, most of them far preferable than "JunkScience".
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
If you think about it the whole premise of any prediction is gouing to be wrong: "If we carry on as we're going now..." is not possible. China is industrialising. The price of oil will react to its scarcity. The percieved importance of rainforest is increasing as it becomes scarcer. Regional climatic shifts like what started the 1997 Indonesian smog will become more (or maybe less) common as ocean currents shift.
We can (and probably will) argue ad nauseum about the relative importance of the historical CO2 and temperature records, sunspots, methane from the tundra, oceanic absorption etc. but the basic fact is that we're releasing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere whilst destroying the ecosphere's long-established buffers. Whether the system is stable unstable, metastable or whatever is probably impossible to predict with certainty. I would rather err on the side of caution. Those with a vested interest with us carrying on as we are would rather we ignore the doomsayers until it's too late^W^Wscientifically proven.
Every year the evidence for global warming gets more convincing.
The scientific evidence just builds and builds.
And when youve just gone through a summer in northern europe
when the tempreture never went below 30c for 8 weeks who needs
scientists.
The really scary bit is this:
The classic argument against global warming is that the climate
has always varied wildly -- sometimes it gets warmer sometimes
it gets colder, shit happens.
However historians have been patiently examining all the cool
spells and they all correlate to drop offs in human activity.
The last really big dip in temperature happened just after the
Black Death when approx. one third of humanity died.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I am a global warming believer. I personally have been concerened about the possibility of global warming since the 80's. A good site on the subject is http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics It contains a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by: * Stages of Denial, * Scientific Topics, * Types of Argument, and * Levels of Sophistication.
San Francisco Photographers
Comment removed based on user account deletion
in anything." - G.K. Chesterton.
There ya go. From his preface. People believe in climate change because they have lost their faith.
If that's not his argument...why is this one of the first things he says?
Also, he cites the concept that all climate scientists are saying there's a problem so they'll keep their jobs...before he gets to any actual numbers.
Then he says this...This is not true.
Then he says.Which is a classic mistake of mistaking weather for climate..and local for global.
Then he says it's not greenhouse gases...but the sun that is getting hotter.So, uh, it's not even that it's "global warming" that has been debunked...it's that the U.N. is wrong about what is causing it.
(yes, the headline is wrong).
Then he goes into the calculations...none of which is data he personally gathered (because if he did, that would be he is a climate scientist...which would mean he couldn't be trusted...as he would then be being paid to study the climate).
So...yea..that's why it's wrong.
+&x
..which is generally pretty levelheaded:
"Sir Nicholas may well err on the gloomy side. And it is certainly impossible to predict precisely what effect climate change will have had on the world economy in a century's time. But neither point invalidates Sir Nicholas's central perception -- that governments should act not on the basis of the likeliest outcome from climate change but on the risk of something really catastrophic..."
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Community Climate System Model. Enjoy.
If there wasn't such a huge incentive for industry to fund research that "debunks" the theory of global warming, I might be a little more willing to listen. But the fact is, you've got researchers on one side, and believe me, there's absolutely no upside to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect, so researchers on one side who are going where the data takes them and researchers on the other who are paid handsomely to find out that there's absolutely no problem with spewing ever-growing quantities of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.
Who you gonna believe?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, but where did the UN actually say that CO2 ended the ice ages? How is the author reading their minds? Such a view would certainly be contrary to must of mainstream science, of course, so where's the evidence that the author isn't setting up a strawman?
The Co2 graphs show the reliability of ice core CO2 data as a proxy for finding out historical temperature levels, and also the potential for positive feedback effects if temperatures rise. They give an idea as to the sensitivity of the situation to perturbations.
So how does the author know, then?
This is pure and simply a lie. It's a lie, because all of these critics have ever show is the tendency for hockey sticks in PV01. But PV01 is a certain statistical consequence that is not the same as the actual reconstruction. Studies searching for the hockey stick tendency in the full reconstruction have come up with nothing, because there are other components in the full reconstruction that cancel out the first term.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/
This graph is comparing apples to oranges. The top graph is a global temperature anomaly graph. The bottom is the temperature of a relatively small continent, dominated by a warm ocean current. One is a average data over the world, and the other is strongly affected by local effects - such as the medieval warm period. The top graph is what global warming is talking about. The bottom graph is not relevant to the debate at all.
From wikipedia:
Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?
And so on and so forth.
So they have to believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show.
The media nowadays will publish whatever sells more advertising. That means: whatever sounds most sensational. Forecasting climate catastrophe sounds pretty sensational. It attracts more readers, generates more controversy, and (most important!) sells more advertising. So the media will go for it.
You not only don't have to "believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show"; you're an idiot if you do.
You can look at the prediction track record of the people who are quoted. And understanding Monckton's criticisms is not rocket science. He says the graphs produced by the global-warming doomsayers in 2001 suppress the medieval warm period. By golly, he's right. The graph makes it look as though the current warming is exceptional, but it isn't. Fluctuations happen. The warming between 1000 and about 1400 AD was more than the current warming, and it's mentioned in many historical sources (e.g. Wikipedia) and has been confirmed by many studies. You don't need calculus to understand stuff like this.
It is prudent to be alert to risks of changing the climate. Modest measures to reduce our gross waste of fossil fuels would be sensible. For example, if the US raised its gasoline taxes to European levels, Americans might be less inclined to buy SUVs. But extreme and costly measures seem foolish.
Obviously. Anything nuclear is evil. That's why I've proposed legislation to ban anything with a nucleus to end this threat to the American way of life once and for all.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I posted this in the "Snowball Earth" thread, but it applies here too.
At the moment the question seems to be "Are humans having a serious negative impact on the global climate?" This is used to reinforce the status quo, right? It's not our fault, what we're doing isn't the problem, so why bother changing what we're doing?
Shouldn't the questions be:
"Is the climate changing?"
"Is it changing in a way that will benefit humanity?"
"If not, how do we manufacture the change we desire?"
These questions should be framed with the idea that the climate is changing and will eventually wipe life as we know it off the face of the Earth. Eventually, something will replace all that biodiversity. But mankind won't be around to see it, so it behooves us as a species to guarantee our own survival by making sure the climate changes in a manner that allows us to continue to thrive.
The policy changed because the party that took power gets most of its wealth from its Alberta base. This province's economy is entirely driven by resource extraction, especially oil revenues. The leading strategists of the Conservative party come straight from the US neo-con fold. The influence of Straussian thought is remarkably strong, because their lead strategist (who cut his teeth contesting indigenous land rights) actually studied under Levi Strauss at the University of Chicago, then took a professor-ship there for years. The right-wing, corporate industrialist agenda is to debunk climate change data in order to block moves that would affect their hegemony. It's perfectly understandable, but don't for a minute believe that it has anything to do with science, or even common sense.
If you meant to imply that there is consensus in Canada concerning this policy turn-around, perhaps you could explain why the New Democratic Party threatened to topple the minority government unless the Clean Air Act was sent back to committee for readjustment.
The recent policy change has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the political imperatives driving the Conservative party. And that is exactly what the submitter should be considering, too: when it comes to debunking Climate Change, qui bono? Who benefits from this kind of attack?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
There's also some discussion of it on a recent thread at RealClimate.
Monckton's rant is just the usual background noise. It's not hard to make up a story by selecting evidence carefully. The hard job is finding a story that is consistent with all the evidence. While we eagerly await the fourth IPCC assessment, the third IPCC assessment, the consensus of leading scientists in the relevant fields from 2001, is the best big picture we've got.
What some gadfly has to say should always be given due consideration, not less, but certainly not more. In the present case, not much.
mt
There are vast amounts of data available from the NOAA, from tree rings, to coral, to pollen, to ice cores, complete with search engines and mapping systems to help you locate the dataset you want. All of it is freely available for download and analysis. As for modelling - a quick search pulled up this page which provides R code for the MBH graph. Feel free to grab that, check their assumptions, and redo whatever you wish.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Because science adheres to the method of changing when new evidence comes out. This is not an attribute of religion. The end of the Christian Bible pretty much goes like this: "Anybody who changes this will not be going to Heaven."
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
... can somebody "debunk" the results from the EPICA ice cores? You know, the ones that record CO2 levels for at least the past 650 kYears, and conclude that current CO2 levels are nearly 2 times higher than they have ever been over the last 8 ice ages?
And then there was another set of results that showed how CO2 levels and global temperature are very closely related.
Before I'm willing to believe that global warming is bunk, somebody is going to have to convincingly refute the above evidence to the contrary.
http://outcampaign.org/
You started well, so I'll just stick to what I know.
* Monckton mentions that there is a direct correlation between number of sunspots and grain prices falling, attributing it to the fact that more sunspots mean that the sun is hotter. Actually, that's wrong. Sunspots are cooler regions on the surface of the sun (3800 K vs 5400K on the rest of the surface), which means that the sun is actually radiating *less* energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. So his entire point completely falls apart with this basic item of astrophysics.
* Monckton categorically states that the temperature of the oceans has decreased, without using sources. From what I know though, temperatures have increased. Can't find a bullet proof link for it (was looking for NOAA timelines, but no luck), but you can use coral-reef die-offs as a good proxy. There was also a lot of hubbub when people tried to tie the increase in surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico to the increased strength and number of Hurricanes that hit the US coast.
These are the two things that I categorically to be false. As for the rest of his arguments, they lack the data support I would expect from a debunking report. For example, why exactly did the ICCP remove the old temperature graph that showed in extreme fashion the warm and cold periods of the middle-ages? Besides, the temperature differences are still there - they are just not as blatant as before. There are also his 10 points which he thinks needs to be proven for Global Climate Change to be true, and what he thinks of them. Point 1 is a nice straw man, as someone pointed out already. Point 3 is another one, as people aren't arguing that the sun doesn't influence temperatures. They are arguing that the sun is less important than greenhouse gases. For the other points, I can give him the benefit of the doubt, even though all have significant problems with their wordings and his assessment of them.
In short, he might not be a shill - but there are enough problems in his "debunkation" to make me doubt the sincerity of his approach and his intentions. This might still be ok, if there weren't some massive errors in some of his arguments, which completely invalidate the points he is trying to make. As a result, I'm filing this under "waiting without bated breath to be properly ripped apart by people who know more".
Quite frankly, one reason I'm confident that we are in the beginning of Global Climate Change is that the only counter-arguments I see are poorly thought out, rife with personal attacks, lack data and make lots of statements without supporting data. If a group arguing for a position sounds like a bunch of idiots, I tend to take the opposite view.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.