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Engaging With Climate Skeptics
In the wake of the CRU "climategate" leak, reader Geoffrey.landis sends along a New York Times blog profile of Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech. "Curry — unlike many climate scientists — does not simply dismiss the arguments of 'climate skeptics,' but attempts to engage them in dialogue. She can, as well, be rather pointed in criticizing her colleagues, as in a post on the skeptic site climateaudit where she argues for greater transparency for climate data and calculations (mirrored here). In this post she makes a point that tribalism in science is the main culprit here —- that when scientists 'circle the wagons' to defend against what they perceive to be unfair (and unscientific) attacks, the result can be damaging to the actual science being defended. Is it still possible to conduct a dialogue, or is there no possible common ground?"
The claims of evolution skeptics and round-earth skeptics is not backed up by observation and evidence. On the other hand, the more extreme claims of anthropogenic global warming _proponents_ are not backed up with sufficient observation and are extrapolated from very small datasets.
Given all of this, to say the "science is settled" is a travesty, and all those who said so fully deserve what's come so far and is undoubtedly coming as there's greater public and scientific scrutiny of their methods:
a) the Yamal tree-ring data - data from 10 trees is extrpolated into a 'trend' and finds its way into a number of papers
b) CRU emails - won't say much more, too much said about this already.
c) New Zealand average temperature graphs - high-school style 'cooking the graph' to match expectations
At this point, climate scientists who don't open up their raw data, modelling code and assumptions/decision-making are going to look as sleazy as PHB managers who forecast self-serving weird shit to make themselves look good to their bosses.
Go somewhere random
How about
"Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/13/tech/main3613698.shtml
Or is that to anecdotal for you?
Yeah, you're right.
None of that melting ice caps, record glacial melts, and lack of ozone layer above the Antartic stuff means anything. All of it's BS.
I'll grant you that transparency hasn't been very good. But you can ignore that little passage between Thule and Vancouver that's nearly ice free now.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Quite Anecdotal to me. The Antarctic has 90% of the earth's ice anyway. The eastern half of Antarctica is 4x the size of the western half, and is cooling/growing.
You may want to update the facts that you were trained to regurgitate.
Normal cycles, should not be made into an international crisis.
I've never studied climatology or even oceanography but if you're going to make such statements, I hope you have the credentials to back it up and tell me without any doubt what a 'normal cycle' constitutes.
My work here is dung.
Your 'point' is is not factually correct. Nothing in the CRU email and data indicates scientists who subscribe to an anthropogenic cause of climate change have not been systematically lying or engaging in unethical practices to support their work. There already are *mountains* of evidence from a huge array of sciences supporting both climate change and an anthropogenic cause. And nothing on Wikileaks invalidates any of the work done at CRU or any other climate research institute.
The reality of all that hoopla is the people doing the agitating had long since decided that not only can the climate not change but even if it did man couldn't possibly have an impact.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Marketing. Greenland was named such to attract settlers.
Well, of the 54 prominent skeptics on the record, only eight of them have any relevant scientific qualification: Tim Ball, Robert C Balling, Bill Gray, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, Garth Paltridge, Roy Spencer and Wolfgang Thune. So I guess they could fit in one New York Yankees box seat.
Wah!
>Greenland is not called GREENland because it's covered by glaciers.
Greenland is called Greenland because Lief Erikson wanted to convince/trick Icelandic settlers to go to this glacier-covered land that he had discovered.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
1. What is the decline being hidden? What is the trick? I ask because I know, let's see if you do.
2. Peer review hasn't been redefined. Perhaps you never knew what it was in the first place. Peer review is not equivalent to supplying open, raw data nor supplying random "skeptics" with data they want. Look up Lenski's dealing with Schlafly for an example of how silly this is.
3&4: Haven't heard of the FOIA request stuff, but given the track record so far I don't doubt that when looking into it, the picture is different than you imply. The first two may not count as a smear campaign, but they do imply outright falsehoods, so who cares? Lazy, ignorant, knee-jerk responses to out-of-context quotes used against climate scientists and global warming proponents only undermine your "skepticism".
How can you be a good scientist without being able to trace your data all the way from its source? How can your results be valid if they are not reproducible?
There is more information that you should be aware of. Read about the attempts of one man to independently verify the CRU findings. They consistently obstruct him, even after he resorts to the FOIA. And now we know why. It's not just because they thought he was just making trouble for them: it's because the raw data is an impossible mess. The CRU staff knew that and it didn't bother them in the slightest because they were getting the results they expected.
Bad, bad science. Pons and Fleischmann. Condemn the bad science. I agree with George Monbiot: credibility is lost and resignations are needed.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
The mountains of research done on this is pretty clear about why
it's happening. But I don't expect facts to get in the way of beliefs
anytime soon. Be that as it may, why is not the important. The
important questions, and the ones the climate scientists spend a lot of
time working out, are how it's going to affect us and what we can do to
prepare for it.
There are no mountains of research that show why any climate change is
happening or even IF climate change is happening. Arctic ice cover has increased
every year since 2007, for example, while the AGW models pushed by the NSIDC and IPCC
don't allow for any such increase. Carbon dioxide is
routinely pushed by politicians as the cause of global warming and yet
it is a simple calculation to show that there is already more
than sufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to absorb ALL of the
IR radiation radiating from Earth that is in the wavelength where it
can be absorbed by carbon dioxide... within the first few hundred
meters of the atmosphere. It is even easier to show
that gas-phase H2O in the atmosphere (commonly referred to as humidity)
is present in much higher concentrations in the atmosphere than CO2 and
is a far more potent 'greenhouse' gas than CO2...and yet the planet is
obviously still able to radiate sufficient heat to space in the
non-absorbable IR wavelengths to cool itself. Finally,
supposing for argument's sake that atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentration really was: 1) a problem and 2) correctable, why
would it be the 'climate scientist's' job (read IPCC and NSIDC) to tell
us how to prepare for it's impact? They seem even less qualified
for that job than they are for the investigation of global
warming.
I've collected dozens of independent, peer-reviewed articles in my article devoted to engaging with climate skeptics. I even described my own personal research which independently confirms Greenland and Alaskan glacier melt through their effects on time-variable gravity. Just last month at the most recent GRACE Science Team Meeting, my advisor displayed the most recent GRACE results over Greenland, showing that the mass loss is accelerating and spreading from the southeast coast to the entire western coast.
There most certainly is a mountain of evidence showing that abrupt climate change is happening, and that it's due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
As I keep repeating, 2007 was the steepest drop in ice cover on record. It scared a lot of us when the extent of the drop was shown at the 2007 AGU conference because the climate models weren't predicting such a huge drop. The subsequent increases actually confirm that this decrease was due to weather, not climate, which tends to validate the models.
Completely wrong. Global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. Please remember that weather is different than climate, which is an average over at least several years.
When studying any science, it's best to ignore politicians and only focus on peer-reviewed scientific articles. In this case, you should be paying attention to the fact that scientists are saying CO2 is causing abrupt climate change.
Again, I've discussed this in detail many times. You're neglecting to consider pressure broadening, which forces any realistic climate model to treat each layer of the atmosphere differently. CO2 isn't saturated in the highest layer of the atmosphere, which is what really matters.
Yet again, I need to repeat that water vapor is a feedback in the climate, not a forcing. We can't change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere because it establishes equilibrium with the oceans in a matter of weeks. However, because we're increasing the temperature of the planet by increasing CO2 concentrations, water vapor will tend to provide positive feedback which will make the problem worse.
Also, water vapor isn't well-mixed to t
I've already discussed this issue:
Surfacestations.org is saying that the surface temperature record is contaminated by the "urban heat island" effect-- that temperatures are only rising around cities because of economic growth. One example he shows is that exhaust vents have been placed closer and closer to the sensors over the years.
This is a superficially compelling argument, but it's also one that scientists have considered and rejected. One test is that the urban heat island effect should be less pronounced on windy days than calm days. That's because if this warming is just caused by local exhaust vents, wind should carry that heat away whereas calm weather won't. This doesn't happen: calm and windy days have the same warming trend. This conclusion is from an article published in Nature by Dr. Parker in 2004; here's a BBC article quoting it. Other studies have confirmed this result using different methods and data in 2003, 2006, and 2008.
NOAA recently published an answer to that specific website. They took the 70 stations that surfacestations.org designated "best" or "good" and created a time series based on them. Then they used all 1218 stations to create another time series. Both of those time series are plotted on page 3. They're practically identical.
Also, scientists don't have to blindly trust these sensors because surface temperature measurements are also confirmed by satellite measurements and proxies such as ice cores, boreholes, coral growth, tree rings, stalactites, fossil beds, ocean sediments and glacial deposits.