Slashdot Mirror
Followup: Anti-Global Warming Story Itself Flawed
The Bad Astronomer writes "As posted earlier on Slashdot, a Forbes Op/Ed claims there is a 'gaping hole in global warming' theories, based on a recent paper. However, both the Forbes article and the paper on which it's based are themselves seriously flawed. The paper has been excoriated by climate scientists, saying the model used is 'unrealistic' and 'incorrect,' and the author has a track record of using bad models to make incorrect conclusions."
What else did you expect them to say?
You know, whether or not the original article is BS, why is the very first point that the rebuttal piece linked above makes the fact that the original article uses the word 'alarmist' umpteen times? This is like counting the number of times the word 'denier' appears in the rebuttal. Both sides call each other names.
If you really believe that humans are not responsible for climate change in a significant capacity, and you see people running around talking about mass extinction and migration, then you'd probably call them alarmists.
If you really believe that humans are responsible for climate change in a significant capacity, and you see people running around dismissing climate change as nothing more than politics or researchers looking for more grants to keep their jobs in spite of the massive threat to, well, everything we know, love, and take for granted, then 'denier' is probably not even the meanest term you could come up with for them.
But talking about either one hasn't got anything to do with science, just like most schoolyard name-calling hasn't got anything to do with the science. There are industrial interests on both sides and not that many people who both care about solving the problem rather than calling a halt to civilization while also demonstrating the capacity and civility to talk about the issue without resorting to this kind of thing. Consequently, I can't help but wonder how many interested, semi-educated, but very-far-from-climate-experts like me there are out there who look at all this stuff and just scratch their heads.
If you actually read the paper and not the incredibly hyped press releases, the paper basically disclaims the validity of its own results. Note the following paragraph, immediately before the conclusions:
Our preliminary work on this issue suggests no simple answer to the question. We conclude that the fundamental obstacle to feedback diagnosis remains the same, no matter what time lag is addressed: without knowledge of time-varying radiative forcing components in the satellite radiative flux measurements, feedback cannot be accurately diagnosed from the co-variations between radiative flux and temperature.
The entire paper is about to trying to analyze the feedback from the co-variation between radiative flux and temperature-- this sentence basically says that, in their analysis, the analysis cannot be done accurately.
Basically, the paper does not "blow holes in global warming"-- what it does is say that this particular technique is not able to accurately discriminate the feedback function.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You know what? I DO NOT CARE! Seriously, fuck it. If it's that much of a problem, just nuke every god-damn city and be done with it. Otherwise, STFU and live your life. I'm tired of being strung around by a bunch of politics and their nanny-state legislation. Either kill, remove democracy, or shut-up. But I for one will be damned if you boil me like a frog. Give me liberty, or give me death!
You have fudged data from the last century or so and think you've got a model that shows anything whatsoever? This is not to say AGW proponents are right or wrong- just that they haven't the foggiest as they've not honestly done any science with the subject yet.
Sigh... citation needed.
A real citation too. Not just speculation, potential for bias, alleged scientific misconduct. Show me the proof that the entire field is "fudging the data". And when I say proof, I do not mean other researchers trash talking, I mean actual data of fudged data. Because I suspect you are fudging it more than they are.
This guy is a professor at the (not very rigorous*) institution I did my undergraduate work at. (This is the "University of Alabama in Huntsville", not the larger and better-known University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.) I don't remember him specifically, but I know there was a cadre of anti-global-warming "climate scientists" there with a politico-religious axe to grind and who were pretty clearly not doing science for knowledge's sake.
It's notable that if you google this guy's (Spencer's) name, the first couple hits are to "www.drroyspencer.com/".
Nobody that I know who is actually a prominent scientist tries to pimp their public persona to this degree, or (tellingly) makes a big deal about the title "Dr."
*They really do have shitty academic standards. I graduated summa cum laude with a BS in physics, yet had never written $\vec x$ (we never did formal vector algebra), and wound up having to take four "remedial" undergrad classes at the Univ of Arizona where I am finishing up grad school.
Two Wrongs don't make a Right...
This is like counting the number of times the word 'denier' appears in the rebuttal. Both sides call each other names.
But I didn't see the word 'denier' in the rebuttal. All I saw was the footnote:
* Mind you, of course, I use the word "denier" quite a bit when discussing this topic, but in this case the shoe fits. When you deny overwhelming evidence, you’re a denier. Scientists trying to tell people what the science is telling them aren’t alarmists. They’re scientists. And as you can see from what other climate scientists are saying, what the Forbes article is based on apparently isn’t good science.
This two labels are equally dangerous in addressing global warming. This isn't a problem that half the world can solve without the help of the other half. By using either of these two terms, you're invoking a with-us-or-against-us mentality that is dangerous. Since these two labels are diametrically opposed, it does nobody any good to use them. Dismissing studies on global warming as 'alarmist' doesn't allow any information to be garnered from these reports which is really sad. Dismissing opponents as 'denialist' doesn't allow you to differentiate between people who acknowledge climate change but don't think it's man made and people who deny any climate change at all. Which is also very sad, there's people that want to do something about climate change but aren't sold that we're the cause of it. Why shut them out?
... I thought he had made an effective point without resorting to name-calling.
Like most things in life, this isn't black and white. By polarizing everyone involved, you halt the flow of information and push back the date where we can work together to solve this problem. There is a whole spectrum of solutions that lie in front of us, using the terms 'denialist' or 'alarmist' prevents us from selecting one of them as a cohesive group looking to move forward.
I applaud The Bad Astronomer from refraining from using the label 'denialist' as often as the original article used 'alarmist' (easily once per paragraph). I don't know why he included that footnote
My work here is dung.
The only people saying "We have to tax anyone heavily to fight global warming" are people who are opposed to doing anything about global warming. If you're opposed to legislative action, an effective tactic is to paint it in the most extreme terms possible, but doing so is pretty scummy and shameless. "You want to reform patent law? Well you're just going to do away with all patents and all products and we're going to be living in CAVES!!!"
Carbon taxes are necessarily going to be a part of the solution, yes, but the effect could and would be offset by tax breaks elsewhere. Hell, for some reason tax breaks are a part of the debt reduction plans, to think that businesses would fail miserably under a mountain of taxes because we're trying to reduce pollution is nonsense and not backed up by history.
Nice of you to speak up for those poor widdle corporations though against those big, mean treehuggers, by the way.
Also, if you read the article -really closely- (IE, with your eyes) you'll notice that the reasons they give have nothing to do with dogmatic beliefs.
I read this article. But it seems to me, this is Slashdot. We should demand some actual evidence of "wrongness" rather than just taking the words of people whose careers depend on it being wrong.
The Bad Astronomer himself does not exactly have a reputation of being unbiased on this subject.
I noticed the same point being brought up in the recent feed page when the first story was submitted, yet the editors didn't seem to pay any attention to it. Then a day or two later a different story gets posted with the same information.
Uncharitable interpretation: The editors aren't doing their job.
Charitable interpretation #1: A large group of people voted for the first submission, while a different large group of people voted for the second submission. The editors are just being agnostic and giving us what we (collectively) ask for.
Charitable(?) interpretation #2: The editors know that climate stories get lots of discussion, so they figured two different stories on the subject means we get to have twice as much "fun" yelling at each other about it.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The point is that we're using way too much energy and food and pollute our own habitat and nobody cares. :)
Oh well. Evolution will find a way after we're gone
Privacy is terrorism.
I've done a meta-analysis and found that since the number of people using the word "denier" outnumbers the number of people using the word "alarmist" by a significant factor (p<0.05), the deniers must be touching a nerve, and therefore are right (p<pi/e).
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
Now, perhaps this fudging of the data wasn't malicious (in fact, I'll argue that it was done with the best of intentions), and perhaps some of the fudges actually have a reasonable rationale that we can agree upon - but let's not pretend that there is a magical thermometer we can stick in the air, and get the current Global Average Temperature (much less a magical thermometer we can read from 1000 years ago to do the same thing). At best, this is a field over-reliant on proxy data, and *everyone* should be skeptical of that sort of weak science.
This current hoorah is why the research communities are reluctant to release raw data to any and all comers. As one who works a lot with raw data (not climate related, but similar in nature), you really need to take care in how you process the data and interpret the results. There is no such thing as perfect data, it all has warts of one kind or another. A lot of data-related science is focused on how to get supportable results from imperfect data. Any fool with a statistics package can take a couple gigabytes of raw data and make plots. A craft fool can do this and cherry-pick both the data used and the processing used to get the answer they want. It takes someone who knows what they're doing and who DOES NOT HAVE AN AX TO GRIND to get it right. If that climate data release last week were mine, I'd not be happy about sending it off to the loonies.
Let's conveniently ignore the following:
The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling (http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/)
Most climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the "greenhouse effect" (http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/)
Until it says "most scientists agree that we needn't worry about AGW" I'll keep worrying about AGW.
My UID is prime. Hah!
author has a track record of using bad models to make incorrect conclusions
Typical NASA....
Here is the beginning of that paragraph, which you so conveniently left out:
"Determination of whether regression coefficients at various non-zero time lags might provide a more accurate estimate of feedback has been recently explored by [14], but is beyond the scope of this paper. Our preliminary work on this issue suggests no simple answer to the question. ..."
There, fixed that for ya. The first sentence you quoted is clearly referring to the immediately preceding sentence, not to the conclusions that follow.
Further, what the entire paper is about, is how well the climate models being shoved at us reflect reality. Their conclusions are that the climate models cannot predict this phenomenon, as they claim to. These are not the authors' own climate models, they are models taken from the IPCC reports. So there is no contradiction there.
So their conclusion is perfectly valid: if there is no way to "accurately diagnose" the effects of feedback, then the models we are told to believe in are deeply flawed. And that is what this paper shows.
You know, whether or not the original article is BS, why is the very first point that the rebuttal piece linked above makes the fact that the original article uses the word 'alarmist' umpteen times? This is like counting the number of times the word 'denier' appears in the rebuttal. Both sides call each other names.
Because a journalist isn't supposed to take sides. The journalists job is to take the science and communicate what it actually says to the general public. It is not their job to spin science or make it conform to talking points.
The repeated use of the phrase "alarmist computer models" shows that this is not a work of journalism, but one of propaganda.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm not defending the article in question, but this one is just a big a pile of crap as the other.
Granted, the original had a sensationalist headline and the article was distinctly written from a skeptic's perspective.
However - shouldn't we be looking at the raw data and either confirming or debunking it?
To Paraphrase this article: "You don't to need to see the data because people who stand the most to lose if this research is right are telling you it is bull. And you shouldn't ask any questions because the guy who did the research doesn't agree with the people this research doesn't support. Oh, and did we mention he thinks there's a creator? So it's only an *IF* he's right, and we've already explained that we don't need to verify this because, as you can see, he's just some crazy bastard who took funding from an energy company. We don't see any reason to go beyond the *if* and neither should you. Yeah, he's a corrupt, quack job for sure.. nothing to see here..."
I want to see the scientific proof, not the "he doesn't think like most of us so this article is flawed" bullshit.
Give me *real* scientific process.
Seriously - WTF happened to the scientific process? By this measuring stick, both articles are flawed. Can we get back to the real question now?
The goal is to scientifically understand our environment so we can make better predictions and protect it. Nobody I know wants dirty air or polluted water; climate change proponent or skeptic. So can we kindly STFU with that kind of crap and focus on finding the truth instead of trying to gain political points and power?
*sigh* - rant over-
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
That's all the whole damned thing is about.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you think "the weather" and "climate change" are even remotely similar in terms of prediction, you need to learn a bit about scale and statistics.
If you sit still and continually flip a coin, and ask me to call random ones, I'll probably seem "inaccurate." At the same time, if you flip it a thousand times, I'd wager money I can come within 5% of the number of heads and tails you'll get. Climate change is about trends rather than fine details.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the millions of people that think that mankind can spew millions of toxic substances into the environment and possibly think that the earth has the mechanisms to deal with it on a time frame conducive to human life.
It's like a person needed proof that lighting books on fire and flinging them about the house is going to eventually burn it down. Sure, we could spend millions studying it and testing it, but rationality dictates that some things you have to accept. Dumping tons of plastic in our oceans, for instance, even if we can't prove it's directly harmful, even if we can't produce proof of the scientific results of years of doing so because the time frames are just too large, one would think that we are intelligent enough as a species to recognize that even if we can't prove it's a bad thing, there is absolutely no way it could possibly be a good thing.
I feel the same way about the climate change deniers. Maybe we can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that mass burning of fossil fuels is having a deleterious effect on the environment, I would think that enough people have the IQ to recognize that there is no way it could possibly be a good thing at all. As the dinosaurs weren't cruising around in billions of vehicles powered by fossil fuels we don't have direct evidence that it would have been bad for them to do it...but do we honestly need evidence to accept something so fundamental?
I disagree with your premises. Why would we need any carbon tax if global warming is beneficial to the biosphere and humanity as a whole (see: Medieval Warm Period).
Put another way, how would you feel if I demanded that all governments around the world provide massive carbon *subsidies* (on the level of what they put, per MW, to say, solar and wind), because I believe that a warm world is a good world, and that CO2 helps warm the planet?
Frankly, the libertarian position of "leave me alone" works either way - the government intervention position has to be *completely correct* in order for it to be beneficial (and let's take a wild guess about how often that happens).
Yea, that footnote was pretty atrocious. First off, the guy who wrote the paper that the Forbes OpEd was based on was a scientist. And in general, the footnote is pretty much saying "I'm right because I'm right and you're wrong because you disagree with me, so therefore my pejorative term for you is fine but your pejorative term for me is not".
the model used is 'unrealistic' and 'incorrect,' and the author has a track record of using bad models to make incorrect conclusions
...yeah, just about everybody on either side of the Global Warming debate says that about just about everybody they disagree with.
(And very rarely does anyone say why a model is unrealistic or incorrect.)
You're right, massive temperature trends over decades are exactly the same as predicting whether it will rain or just be cloudy on Tuesday. We should definitely ignore the massive upward curve (http://www.indorphyn.com/06/2006/global-warming/) showing rising temperatures and sing "la la la la" with our fingers in our ears until global warming hits us in the nuts unawares.
Most climate science on both sides of the argument is on shaky ground. I totally agree with Freeman Dyson.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
The true believers on both sides are way too confident in their beliefs. They (both sides) are closer to religion than they are to real science. There is way too much ad hominem and way too little real science.
If I had to pick a side in the debate, I would tend to side with Henrik_Svensmark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Svensmark His theory about cosmic rays modulating cloud formation has, at least, the advantage of being falsifiable. That stands in stark contrast with Al Gore who takes absolutely anything as proof of anthropogenic global warming. ;-)
You act like it's a complex issue, when it's actually rather simple.
______________
"Is it the sun?"
Sometimes but definently not for the past 40 years or so.
http://i.imgur.com/TSxqy.png
"Are we certain that less and less infrared radiation is exiting out into space, almost entirely in the wavelength we'd expect CO2 and CH4 to block?"
Yes
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm
Is the rate of warming significant?
Yeah, I'd say 100x faster than you'd expect from changes in earth's orbit alone is significant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bftcWQiZPPg
http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-to-explain-Milankovitch-cycles-to-a-hostile-Congressman-in-30-seconds.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5hs4KVeiAU#t=5s
"Do we know that the CO2 is from fossil fuels. i.e. "Manmade CO2"
Yes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dj2yv1T53o
DONE. That's all you need to know.
With absolute certainty, we can say that "manmade CO2" is the main cause the recent increase in heat on earth.
___
Any other questions that aren't on this list of common strawman arguments?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Roy Spencer, the co-author of the "gaping hole" study, is on the board of advisors of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
These folk believe, among other things, that God will not allow the Earth to be harmed by Global Warming:
"The world is in the grip of an idea: that burning fossil fuels to provide affordable, abundant energy is causing global warming that will be so dangerous that we must stop it by reducing our use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost. Is that idea true? We believe not. We believe that idea – we'll call it "global warming alarmism" – fails the tests of theology, science, and economics."
This is not science.
"However - shouldn't we be looking at the raw data and either confirming or debunking it?"
The "raw data" used was the very same data from CRU that the IPCC used in its infamous reports. It wasn't widely available until now... they just released the entirety of the data to the public, because their earlier failure to do so pissed off a lot of people.
But note that this data -- that is to say, the data that CRU used (and supplied, in part, to others) for the creation of those papers and reports is not really "raw data" at all. Rather, it has been highly manipulated to ''adjust" and "statistically fit" the data together.
This data -- or at least the end-result manipulated data -- has been debunked, and the methods used to manipulate it seriously called into question (see the Wegman Report). But the alarmists just keep going along as though that never happened and nothing is wrong.
Further, the climate models used in the paper were the same models used by the IPCC to form its reports on climate. For their set they chose the 3 models most sensitive to radiative forcings, and the 3 least sensitive to radiative forcings. That seems pretty fair to me.
What this report says, in essence, is that it is essentially impossible for the climate models tested to model actual climate, because there are significant variables that they do not -- cannot -- account for.
Whether that is true, we will know in time. But all these attacks on the man's character (not referring to parent here) add nothing to the discussion.
If you do harm to others, even without intent, you should pick up the tab for the damages. Anything less is a handout to *you* from everyone you've harmed, or from those on whom the costs fall. (Usually taxpayers.)
I'm not yet certain of the amount of harm done, nor of how the costs should be apportioned. I do, however, see a great many people trying to avoid responsibility for their own actions, and hoping that if the axe does fall, it will fall on someone else.
I've been driving gasoline and diesel burning vehicles for >25 years, and consuming products and services that require the emission of pollution to produce for longer than that, and having few options will continue to do so for now. When the axe falls, I will pay my share, because I have contributed to this mess. I would like to see more choices available to me to reduce the damage I will cause, and thereby the damages I should pay.
I would also like to see accurate measurements of the damages, with reliable data and unbiased analysis. I do not think I will get that from anyone with ties to corporations, which are motivated solely by profit, and will benefit by shifting the costs to someone else. Nor do I think I will get that from anyone trying to sell popular bestselling books or films, with a different sort of profit motive.
I do think that over time, the science will improve and become more reliable. In the meantime I do what I can to reduce my liabilities, not by blame-shifting, but by riding a bicycle to work when I can, choosing local products when I can (to reduce transportation pollution), using more efficient appliances, recycling and reusing things, and generally doing the best I can and accepting that I will have to pay for the rest.
WALSTIB!
People get so worked up over this shit. This isn't science - the "science" is pretty inconclusive otherwise there wouldn't be so much name calling. Nah, this is politics. And politics has absolutely nothing to do with science.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Power and money, that's all it's about.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Still no statement of a falsifiable hypothesis, although it seems like you're asserting a lesser form of AGW, rather than CAGW (the difference being, AGW could very well be benign, and something we should *encourage*).
Even if we cannot discern any other single factor that would "explain" observed warming does *not* mean that the default explanation *must* be CO2, nor does it prove that the results of warming (any warming) would be catastrophic. Tell me what observations would possibly shake your "absolute certainty" (either about AGW or CAGW) - don't just make four assertions and demand that the simple existence of those four assertions means that you're guaranteed to be right.
No, you see...
When it's a new article against Global Warming, it's ok to use fallacies like "the author has a track record of using bad models"
Either facts stand for themselves or they don't.
It worries me how many legitimate articles on climate change may be hiding because they are against current predictions and models, and researchers are fearing public lynching . It's truly worrying.
Of course by that I don't mean every loony financed by oil companies (such as this case seems to be).
How about we wait for the NASA data, I guess I can trust that.
how long until
Regardless of you believe the study for or against Global Warming, the fact is that 90% of the data used in their models is proxy.. There is no way that the data can be accurately described for temperatures 200 years ago. (For example)...
If you cant see that the whole green push is mainly for the investors to finally get back some of the millions they've pumped into the process, then I feel sorry for you.
Here ya go: http://www.realclimate.org/
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
No nobody could actually have problems with the theory or the huge political movement pushing it. They must be purely selfish!
I have problems with them. I've never owned a V8. I've never even considered buying a V8. I was looking to buy a sports car, and was disgusted that Chevy only gave the real sports package with the V8, nothing smaller, on what I was looking at. I went with another manufacuter with an engine less than half the size.
I've driven vehicles with V8s before and even a 14-liter straight 6, but they had to haul heavy stuff, thus the reason for the big diesels. Or maybe you think I should have been pulling a 30 kW diesel generator with a Prius?
I'd gladly leave you libertarians alone - somewhere where you only can fuck up your own life without dragging down everyone else. But for some reason, you won't move to Somalia. Besides, enjoy the heat and dust in the southwest. It's a sign of more to come, consistent with all models. Fun with the warmer climate.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
How about we start taxing oil companies heavily so we can start preserving precious complex long-chain hydrocarbons for agricultural and industrial processes, instead of almost literally putting them in our pipes and smoking them.
Have you thought of how expensive all those veggies and all those consumer items and pharmaceuticals that use oil derivative products will get when a barrel of crude is $600 or $700?
AGW, in some respects, may be the least of the industrialized world's problems in fifty or sixty years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All I see there is a giant train of thought log from a scientist trying to get a dataset and a program to play nice.
This happens in science. I have a friend who's just completed a Phd in Psychology. She found it necessary to learn how to code in Perl in order to get the datasets she was working with in a useful form. Now, bear in mind this is someone who, whilst very clever, has no prior experience writing code beyond the odd Excel macro. Can you imagine how much of a hack those Perl scripts must be?
Unfortunately, most scientists aren't software engineers. This actually presents a more profound problem in general for any science that relies in large datasets because it introduces a source of random error.
Thankfully AGW models from lots of different sources match up with each other and historical data to a large degree, so overall AGW is good science.
Nick
Frankly, the libertarian position of "leave me alone" works either way - the government intervention position has to be *completely correct* in order for it to be beneficial (and let's take a wild guess about how often that happens).
Wait - why does the libertarian position work either way? Also: one complaint I've had about libertarians in the past is their unwillingness to allow for government regulation of anything ("the market will sort it all out"). When I mention things like pollution, libertarians say that air is a common resource, therefore, the government has to be allowed to regulate it. Then, other times, libertarians want to play the "government never knows best" card and deny government regulation (in this case, of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere). So, if your argument is correct (" the government intervention position has to be *completely correct* in order for it to be beneficial (and let's take a wild guess about how often that happens)"), then how would the government regulate *anything* under a libertarian system? I'm thinking specifically of the regulation of pollution (both air pollusion, sulfur emissions in the air, heavy metals into water, regulation of fishing and hunting to prevent over-fishing and over-hunting, regulation of cancer-causing agents like asbestos, etc)?
Should I read the libertarian position as "the government should be allowed to regulate our common resources, but when you're not looking, we're going to complain that the government never does anything right, so they shouldn't be allowed to regulate anything, have fun playing in our industrial pollution!"?
If there was a Satan and he did buy souls, I'd wager a good chunk of the population of this planet would probably sell it to him for an iPhone 5. The fact of the matter is that people never do the sensible thing, they never consider long-term consequences. Even without well-funded oil-friendly groups like the Heartland Institute, it would be damned hard to convince people that puking hundreds of millions of years worth of CO2 into the atmosphere in the space of a few centuries was a bad thing, and even getting them to that point it would be even harder to convince them that they needed to change their behaviors.
Bring in groups like the Heartland Institute and its small number of well-paid "researchers", and it becomes well-nigh impossible. In a hundred years I guarantee you our great-great grandchildren will be asking "What in the fuck was wrong with people?" By then, it will be too late, of course, on several fronts; not just AGW but peak oil and trying desperately after we've stuck it all in our collective gas tanks to try to find new techniques to overcome our inability to wean ourselves of cheap complex hydrocarbons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unfortunately you are also unlikely to get that from anyone with ties to government grants. That's true of much more rigorous sciences than climatology. It's particularly true of climatology because it has had the misfortune of becoming tied to left-right politics.
Even without such useless baggage, the way government grants for science work is easy to understand. The amount of grant money is finite. Therefore, it is allocated to those research projects which are viewed as reasonably likely to obtain useful results. The criteria for this boils down to whether the research is based on a mainstream theory for which there is significant consensus among scientists. When multiple theories all explain the data, or when there is debate about how to interpret a theory, this ends up being a sophisticated popularity contest. Even this is not a "pure" popularity contest, but is strongly influenced by what the scientists were taught when attaining their degrees and whether their training included a desire to be open to new ideas.
If the mainstream consensus happens to be faulty, this is why it can take a long time for this to become well-known and appreciated. It is why it can take a long time for something better to replace it. Often, the investments in a given status quo are such that the "old guard" has to die of old age and be replaced by new thinkers in the form of a sudden paradigm shift. There is no logical or factual reason why these changes have to take so long. It is entirely a political and social problem. Should the cost of this be measurable, it would be quite high.
Collecting data and performing basic reasoning is relatively easy. Integrating this into a framework of understanding that has both explanatory and predictive power is the truly difficult part. Even more difficult still is to do so while remaining aware of the dangers of entrenchment. I am reminded of the following quote:
-- S.J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
And yet another:
-- C. J. Ransom.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Not sure what libertarians you're talking to, but if you're asserting that libertarians carve out an exception for government regulation of pollution, I think you either misunderstood, or they're libertarian-lite.
That being said, if you can show a direct harm (say, from dumping heavy metals into a stream that is used by someone else downstream), the libertarian position is that the government can intervene to prevent that harm. That being said, a lot of things fall into the fuzzy category of "we're really not sure if there is direct harm" or "we can't definitively attribute any direct harm".
The real problem here is that the precautionary principle used in those fuzzy categories has *serious* consequences if you get it wrong. Imagine you believe that DDT *might* be dangerous (even though it is safe and non-toxic to humans and animals). You've got a fuzzy suspicion, fueled by an activist's book (Rachel Carson), and because of that, you decide that the safe thing to do is to take precaution, and ban DDT.
Now watch as over 40 years, malaria ravages Africa and kills tens of millions of babies, and keeps most of the continent in abject poverty.
Or imagine you're Ancel Keys, and you've got a fuzzy suspicion that fat intake causes heart disease. Your idea finally takes hold as official USDA advice in 1978, and for the next 40 years, as people eat a low-fat/high-carb diet, incidence of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases due to insulin skyrocket and cost trillions in health care costs.
Humans, in general, are terrible at weighing risk, and tend to see their "precautionary" actions as having zero other consequences. Until you can break through that myopia, it's probably best to just leave things alone.
You see, this isn't a matter of belief. We're not talking about the premise of your religion here. All of the range of scientific projections on what the planet will be like if warmed a few degrees, or more, are of a far less comfortable place to live, with far less carrying capacity, leading to a whole lot of death and dislocation for human populations. You may believe that human life is evil, and so all this would please whatever beings you worship. Yes, we have sociopaths among humanity who have no compassion for other human beings. But it's not the majority of us, even if it's a large subset of the self-identified "libertarians" who like to go all Pollyanna about what a few degrees C in rise in average temperature will do to the quality of life - particularly human life.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
You have fudged data from the last century or so and think you've got a model that shows anything whatsoever? This is not to say AGW proponents are right or wrong- just that they haven't the foggiest as they've not honestly done any science with the subject yet.
Sigh... citation needed.
A real citation too. Not just speculation, potential for bias, alleged scientific misconduct. Show me the proof that the entire field is "fudging the data". And when I say proof, I do not mean other researchers trash talking, I mean actual data of fudged data. Because I suspect you are fudging it more than they are.
How about YOU cite a source where there is an actual hypothesis and repeatable experiment?
How about YOU verify the accuracy and methodology of temperature measurements and estimates throughout Earth's history?
How about YOU certify current temperature measurements?
The claim is that we need to live like hippies and give all our money to Al Gore and friends or THE ENTIRE EARTH WILL BE RUINED FOREVER.
The very foundation of that claim, that the Earth is undergoing any sort of damaging change, needs to proven before you can even discuss what, if anything, can or should be done to stop it. But global warming isn't a scientific issue - it's a political issue, so you've picked your side (democrat) and decided to brand anyone who dares question the base claim as a retarded, selfish, greedy, narrow-minded republican.
The people who realize that the entire fucking thing is all political bullshit are most likely NOT republicans OR democrats, because people with brains hate both parties. They hate both parties because they're filled with mindless morons like you. Morons who want everything to be black or white, right or wrong, and are willing to determine such based on what side they've already chosen, instead of actually deciding on the merits of the issue.
Basically: It's all bullshit, and you'll continue to cry "citation needed" despite plenty of valid citations having been given, and despite the severe lack of valid citations supporting your view. People like you are enabling and encouraging the morons in government. People like you are ruining western countries right and left.
.
How about we wait for the NASA data, I guess I can trust that.
Because government funded scientists are immune to political pressure?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Any study done by human are going to be biased in some way, no matter how you do it, but what if 97% of those working in the field say something is happening, do you believe it? The 97% are the scientists who study climate who believe Global Warming is happening. The Republicans in the US don't believe in Global Warming at a rate of over 60% who don't believe in it, but if you ask the same question and say 'Climate Change' the numbers reverse themselves, 60%+ believe in it. Costs will always be high in the beginning, but they will fall when more people have to do it. Think of computer costs of the 60s compared with today. Why is it so bad to have a clean environment or do you like to live in a garbage dump?
[quote]AGW models from lots of different sources match up with each other and historical data to a large degree[/quote]
But they are looking at each others' results and the historical data as they design their models.
Are you familiar with the concept of curve-fitting?
Why would we need any carbon tax if global warming is beneficial to the biosphere and humanity as a whole (see: Medieval Warm Period).
In skimming the wiki article on the medival warm period I came across a graph that made it look like the Earth had already warmed more than the medieval warm period. And another source pointed that out though I'm not sure how serious to take that website.
At any rate, you seem to be saying that "The weather being warm was good for Vikings hundreds of years ago" and taking that to imply that temperatures going up is always "beneficial to the biosphere and humanity as a whole" which doesn't seem like a sound conclusion. It sounds like mild warming was better for a small subset of people who had to deal with ice more often than tropical diseases, flooding, or droughts.
how would you feel if I demanded that all governments around the world provide massive carbon *subsidies* because I believe that a warm world is a good world, and that CO2 helps warm the planet?
There's nothing really hypothetical about your scenario. That's the situation we have NOW. We're already producing a ton of carbon and doing little about it besides talking about reducing it. We're already getting artificially cheap gas thanks to government subsidies, so I don't see anything really changing.
So I feel that you're wrong and irresponsible. Wear a sweater if you feel the earth isn't warm enough.
Frankly, the libertarian position of "leave me alone" works either way - the government intervention position has to be *completely correct* in order for it to be beneficial
And naturally you just happen to think that government non-intervention is the completely correct position to take. My opinion on environmental matters is "Better safe than sorry."
You guys crack me up.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
How about YOU cite a source where there is an actual hypothesis and repeatable experiment? How about YOU verify the accuracy and methodology of temperature measurements and estimates throughout Earth's history? How about YOU certify current temperature measurements?
I haven't made any accusations to back up with a citation.
The claim is that we need to live like hippies and give all our money to Al Gore and friends or THE ENTIRE EARTH WILL BE RUINED FOREVER.
No part of that statement is in any way accurate.
Okay, Prof. A says the world is a sphere. Prof. B says the world if flat. Prof. A has a extensive list of evidence coalescing on a coherent picture. Prof. B has a large collection of counterarguments against various specific pieces of Prof. A's list. Prof. A believes that, as a society, we'd be best off in working out how to best prosper in a spherical world. Prof. B believes it would be premature to go ahead with that before we've had a debate and opened our minds to the reinterpretation of all of Prof. A's evidence. Indeed, Prof. B cites as further evidence of the wrongness of Prof. A's analysis that so many other scientists agree with Prof. A. How, after all, could so many scientists agree, despite all the counterarguments collected by Prof. B, unless those scientists were conspiring to foist their "spherical earth" interpretation on society?
Ya know, sometimes you've just got to take what the majority of your best scientists suggest is the most successful set of theories and best collected sets of observations and go with that. This is despite that everything and anything is always open to doubt. We're doubt monkeys. That aspect of us is integral to our capacity to do science. But it's not the whole game. And treating it like it's the whole game is as incapacitating as if we lacked all doubt to begin with.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I call BS - show your citations of a warmer world being less comfortable, with less carrying capacity, leading to a whole lot of death and dislocation. Refute the Holocene Optimum and Medieval Warm Period ages of prosperity for humanity. Show me the 50 million missing climate refugees. Refute the statistics regarding more death caused by cold weather than by warm weather.
For any of your scientific projections, tell me what observations would falsify those particular hypotheses - if we saw an increase in temps, but less death and dislocation, over say, 10 years, would that satisfy you that you were wrong? 20 years? 30 years? Make a prediction, and stand by it.
Ah yes, when all else fails, epistemological nihilism will always do nicely. "All knowledge is suspect, so keep puking CO2!!!!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...as opposed to the non-libertarians who are intellectually refined and above petty insults.
What observations would falsify your hypothesis that human emitted CO2 is causing warming of the earth that will have catastrophic consequences for humanity, assuming you exclude all proxy data?
Say, 15 years of no statistically significant warming, but continuously rising CO2 levels?
The moon is surrounded with vacuum, and ranges from -150C to 107C, much greater than the temperature fluctuations on earth. A vacuum only insulates against convection and conduction, not infrared/radiated heat. That is why vacuum mugs are often composed of a reflective material.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Was there anything specific in that mountain of text that you would like to highlight, or is that just some link you pull out whenever you need to "prove" that climate scientists are untrustworthy?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
That's easy. Higher CO2 and lower global temperatures without any other factor (such as increased aerosols) that could explain the discrepancy. I'm sure you could have thought of that yourself.
This is true as long as you understand that in a government context "useful results" are results that either directly or indirectly funnel money to a shell corporation owned by some senator or that result in a bureaucrat landing a lucrative consulting position with some entity affected by the research upon retirement from "public service".
Anthropic principal. We perceive it better because we have modern communications. Do you think we'd hear about Sumatra 200 years ago? Or even Haiti? We have global 24/7 monitoring of the world and instantaneous messaging. Literacy rates are rough the roof. Before if it even got published you'd have to have someone read it to you. No more, no less is happening then as it is now. We just know more about it, instantaneously. Can't read we'll tell and show you on radio and TV.
When taking everything into account, you have to take into account orbital mechanics - orbital distance, axial tilt, solar variation, before you even get to the factors on this planet. The earth has been a snowball, and it has been devoid of ice. We weren't responsible for any of that. Antarctica had plants and animals on it. Is that evidence of cooling or something else?
Weird stuff has always happened. It was just a lot harder until recently to have it survive in the record. Up until everything very recently, it as "god's will". Now we can attribute or wonder about our own consequences. That does not mean it is automatically our fault. Frogs falling from the sky would be attributed to god, but we know how and why now. The rest of your mumbo-jumbo will eventually give way to causality.
In the end, the paper's original observation is correct - that the models are forecasting more heat than is experienced. That is not in debate. What is debatable are the mechanics of why. Somewhere the science is not settled yet. And we've got to figure that out.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Given that the governments would rather that AGW didn't exist, and the scientists state otherwise, it would seem they are reasonably immune.
Maybe he's speaking from first-hand experience.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
There is no satellite equivalent to a thermometer reading. The extrapolation of temperature relies on complex poorly understood models. For that reason, the climate science community to not rely on it for anything, but instead try to improve the models to understand how microwaves leave the surface and clouds. You, sir, are looking at a strawman if you think this has anything to do with the scientific consensus.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I verified these things for myself, to my own satisfaction. (I have a background in the hard sciences, but not climate science.)
This 10 min clip speaks to that questions you bring up. I dare you to sit all the way through it.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I've done an analysis and determined that the more the terms "denier" and "alarmist" are used the more there is an increase in hot air.
as we all know hot air leads to global warming.
So let me try and break that down for you:
1) higher CO2 (check)
2) lower global temperatures (check - or at least half check, since warming has been stalled)
3) without any other factors (ad hoc special pleading - fail)
Your #3 is essentially a "get-out-of-jail-free" card. You could use #3 to show a 10C drop in average temps over 10 years, and still claim AGW (although perhaps not CAGW, which insists that warming of a certain amount must be catastrophic to humanity and the biosphere).
Why can't we use the #3 special pleading to assert that there are simply other natural factors to explain temperature rise, rather than CO2 levels? In fact, why can't we assert that the mechanism is reversed (temperature drives CO2), and discrepancies need to be explained in the *opposite* direction?
It sounds like you've developed a rationale that can survive any refutation, which is the very definition of religious faith.
It worries me how many legitimate articles on climate change may be hiding because they are against current predictions and models, and researchers are fearing public lynching . It's truly worrying.
There is no need to worry. Anti-consensus articles have no trouble seeing the light of day even when they are chock full of specious reasoning. Anti-consensus scientists have no trouble getting funding (e.g. Soon, Baliunas, Spencer, Chritie, McIntyre, McKitrick). These articles are thoroughly examined and debunked every time. (See here for an example of scientific discourse on these issues.)
You can verify all of this YOURSELF, with minimal effort.
The only people who receive death threats are legitimate climate scientists, such as Michael Mann.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
according to you reality is whatever a bunch of spoiled children who don't want to pay for the damage they've caused, tell you it is.
15 years may not be enough. It all depends on the data, and its noise and trend. A weak trend combined with a lot of noise may not be statistically significant over a 15 year period.
Current warming trend is about 0.017 deg C, which means a .26 degree warming in 15 years. Year to year variation (noise) can be 0.4 degrees, so it's easy to see how the noise can swamp the data in such a short period.
Also, if the rising CO2 is combined with other factors, such as increased aerosols, La-Nina effects, or a less active sun, the warming may be less. In order to falsify AGW due to CO2, those effects must not be present at the same time in an amount that would be sufficient to counteract the CO2.
While both parties certainly have huge corrupt elements, people like you are part of an informal, equally dangerous party: the "It's All Bullshit" party. People like you disbelieve everything you hear from any person who might have a political affiliation because none of them could possibly know anything. While you are right to take a politician's words with a grain of salt, people like you take the complete opposite position and assume that any opinion on any important issue cannot be right.
I can't be an expert on everything, so I have to defer to experts on other subjects. When economists say that x is how we fix the economy, I believe them. When a structural engineer says that a bridge is not soundly constructed, I believe him. When climate scientists agree that climate change is happening, I believe them. I don't take it completely blindly, of course--I'll read some of the papers and investigate differing opinions (after all, I'm a scientist too)--but I can't claim to know the reality of the situation any better than those who devote their careers to it.
To say that you know better than an expert is not only profoundly arrogant, but it's how progress in the world is impeded. I am frustrated every time a development occurs in my field and I read the opinions of average people who have no understanding of how it really works. People panic about it, question its utility, or just consider it bunk. Remember Watson (the Jeopardy-playing system)? It was a very impressive achievement in question answering and yet maybe 1 in 10 of of the comments demonstrated any understanding of it. I tried to explain things to the lay folk who thought it was bunk or that it was in some way "fixed", but they just wouldn't believe it. To these people, the accountant or even the burger flipper knows more about question answering than the information retrieval expert.
The Popperian falsification idea isn't so great. You can always add some new hypothesis to explain any discrepancy between the data and your theory. Sometimes you'd be right to. For example, if the orbits of the planets aren't quite what Newtonian gravity seems to predict, have you falsified Newtonian gravity?
In the case of climate change, there's no single piece of evidence that shows it conclusively, and similarly there's unlikely to be a single piece of evidence that disproves it. Collective evidence could, however.
In that much-quoted "no statistically significant warming" example, the data wasn't significantly different from "no warming", but it also wasn't significantly different from the AGW predictions. So by itself, it didn't show anything conclusively either way - but there's plenty of other evidence supporting warming.
Incidentally, with the latest temperature data, that warming is now statistically significant. 15 years is too short to tell, as would have been clear by looking at various 15 year periods in the historical data.
Indeed. I prefer the religion of Roy Spencer (co-author of the study and research scientist), who signed a document stating:
"We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)
There's nothing the least bit scary about the religious view that we don't need to take care of anything because God will take care of it for us. Sometimes, I feel like a passenger in a car being driven by a religious nut who's speeding towards a cliff while telling me that "everything is going to be okay" because God will save us.
There is another religion which says that the earth has endless resources, and that pollution and waste do not matter. We killed or the dodos, but who cares, right? There are /endless/ species of birds for us to kill, and land to ruin, and oceans to pollute.
Ideologies aside, there is a rational discussion about economic concerns, which is what adults are having on this issue.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The guy who wrote that article was misleading people on what the appear said, and the paper being applied to climate change didn't even make sense
Ragardless of your 'stance' the articel in question shoudl be thrown away.
" just that they haven't the foggiest as they've not honestly done any science with the subject yet. "
That's just false.
" To say they do have a picture is being dishonest at best- they don't have enough of a sample set for starters."
Why would you even think that?
"I am a Citizen of the State of Texas"
I see.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How about we wait for the NASA data, I guess I can trust that.
What's to wait for? All the data is publicly available.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Reproduce the results? The bulk of it is observational data. This is precisely the kind of ill-informed science illiterate claptrap that pisses me off. You don't know how science works. The data is the data, the explanations of that data certainly can be debated. This is no different than saying "I don't see a videotape of apes evolving into man, so therefore, it isn't falsifiable."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you think all they are doing is curve fitting you're pretty clueless about how GCM's work.
Obviously, in order to use your 'get-out-of-jail-free' card, we must be able to quantify the other factors, and explain exactly how they can overcome the CO2 related warming.
As soon as you can show a realistic, physics-based model, that can explain all of that, sure. Don't forget to run the same model on glacial cycles, and other climate shifts in the earth's history.
By the way, warming has not stalled. Out of the 10 hottest years in our record, 9 were in the last decade.
The Popperian notion of falsification is at best an analogy, useful for teaching school kids basic scientific methodology. In the real world, no science works the way that Popper claimed it did. Between Popper and Kuhn, the two of them have given far too much hope to quacks and pseudoscientists.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Frankly, the libertarian position of "leave me alone" works either way
Your right to wave your fist around ends at my nose.
You can burn as much fossil fuel as you want if you don't put the waste into the atmosphere.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I disagree with your premises. Why would we need any carbon tax if global warming is beneficial to the biosphere and humanity as a whole (see: Medieval Warm Period).
A carbon tax need not be revenue positive (like the proposed Australian model), and thus is not a way for the government to raise money, but rather to bias the economy towards new technology.
/lot/ of arguments.
As for the medieval warm period, that is a well known debunked denialist canard, but for some reason it just keeps coming up over and over again, like someone isn't listening.
There is actually no known denialist argument that has not been resounded debunked, and we are talking about a
The libertarian position does not work in situations where there is going to be a tragedy of the commons -- such as climate change. Pure and simple.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If we follow deniers, and they are right, we will get poor only when we run out of fossil fuels. Before we've burned all coal, we'll be in 22nd century
If we follow deniers, and they are wrong, billions will die, cities will get swallowed up by oceans, and more fun stuff
If we follow alarmists, and they are right, we will be a bit poorer, but still alive
If we follow alarmists, and they are wrong, we will be a bit poorer
And the problem lies in point 2. If global warming is true, and we don't do a thing, we're fucked. If it is however not true, and we do try to prevent it, we probably would end up using renewable energy a bit earlier than strictly necessary.
It is however completely inconsistent to be alarmist and against nuclear energy.
What's the worst that could happen if global warming is real and we do nothing?
What's the worst the could happen if global warming is not true and we do something?
Which outcome is the worst? Avoid doing that one. The precautionary principle.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Not at all. Only 10% of scientists really actually believe this. The next 87% merely followed suit. It was inevitable.
It's because everyone's operational default mode is set to "I am right all of the time". As in, there is no cognition of error at all. Every single one of us on Earth at this exact moment operates under the assumption that everything we see, think, and believe in is "right". No one lives in a state of perpetual error, because error is a reversion of thinking, of being. And it's not a pleasant state to be in.
When you prove someone wrong, from your perspective, you are correcting someone's interpretation of the fact in question. From their perspective, you are rebuking their very existence because up until that moment, they thought they were right. Then they realize that their entire life up until that point was in error. And thus reversion of thinking, and cognitive dissonance.
What you are describing is the attempt of a person who may be wrong to protect his/her ego against the actual accusation of being wrong, by removing the question of whether he/she is wrong to begin with. They will not recognize the authority or the basis of the person making the statement, and like you said, will believe whatever contradictory evidence is offered by someone else regardless of qualification, because they can then retain the belief and thus the existence of being "right".
the problem with the entire AGW argument is that you have two sides motivated to extreme ideological opposition with each other over scientifically gathered factual evidence that is so convoluted and complex that it can sustain multiple different interpretations (much like the competing multiverse hypotheses), and adherents to the different interpretations cannot accept the "Other interpretation" because to do so would mean that their entire invested belief structure, and therefore who they perceive themselves to be, is wrong. And the more you beat down on them, the more fiercely they cling to their beliefs--developing a martyr complex.
Much like how the Millerites of the 1850s watched the repeated failures of their apocalyptic predictions of Judgment day, and then decided to cling to their convictions regardless (becoming the Seventh Day Adventists), we will see further retrenchment of pro- and anti-AGW believers. This has progressed well past the point where anyone can admit their wrong. Now it's dogmatic religion, on both sides. And once it's a religion, it's here to stay.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I think I've always assumed that a single piece of evidence wouldn't be sufficient - a single day, certainly too short, perhaps even 10 years is too short, but eventually, you make a cut off (the argument of what that cut off should be is debatable of course).
But that being said, nobody has made any assertion of what collective evidence could falsify their hypothesis of CAGW or AGW.
In terms of Newtonian gravity and deviations from the theoretical, I think we can agree that those are pretty small deviations. In comparison, the deviations of observation from the AGW models represent huge error bars that were missed. Furthermore the AGW predictions that *did* match observations on the lower end of their predictions are low enough to at the very least refute CAGW.
Because anything that doesn't fall lock step into the religion that says we are on a path to human extinction within this century unless we start taxing corporations heavily, is obviously seriously flawed. If only environmental science had the same rigorous processes as the rest of the sciences...
Another strawman argument. I'm not aware of any climate scientists saying we are on a path to human extinction or that we have to start taxing corporations heavily because of global warming. What makes you think climate sciences are any less rigorous than any other hard science?
And perhaps it is that attitude that helps preserve your faith in the face of any data that may contradict it.
So, you're for killing all but one of each family's kids, right?
Could you guys stop with that tactic already? I know that taking a statement to the furthest extreme in order to make it sound stupid or immoral is a more effecitve and mature than comparing someone to Hitler, but only slightly so.
It is customary in the field to use 30-year periods. But you know, it's a null-hyptothesis thing: You set up a wanted confidence (say 1%) and then the null hypothesis (no link between CO2 and global mean temperature) and then run the numbers. I dare you to get to any other result than the scientific community, and publish the result ;)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Well, provided that Gore and his cabal of evil Democrats push towards AGW on behalf of environmental lobbies, and that Bush and his cabal of evil Republicans push away from AGW on behalf of oil lobbies, I'd wager political pressure is too fragmented and inconsistent to have a significant impact.
Politically, climate change is a very contentious issue, both of the extreme positions being promoted by sides that can win elections. If the science behind it was significantly altered by political pressure, the current scientific consensus would be extremely difficult to reach, because different governments in different countries would push their own researchers in opposite ways. Worse even, a scientist could see his funding cut for showing evidence for AGW, and four years later, see his funding cut for showing evidence against it, because the new guys want different conclusions.
Imagine you believe that DDT *might* be dangerous ... Now watch as over 40 years, malaria ravages Africa and kills tens of millions of babies, and keeps most of the continent in abject poverty.
Mosquitos were already showing DDT resistance (DDT-resistant mosquitoes were first detected in India in 1959), and it wasn't banned in Africa, it was banned from production in the US -- and not until 1972. In short: DDT had basically become useless against mosquitoes by the time it was banned. It doesn't take much math at all to show that once genetic resistance appears in a fast-multiplying organism that it can quickly spread to nearly 100% of the population, rendering DDT useless. (See http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/tutorials/The_theory_of_natural_selection__part_1_13.asp)
I've also seen books that claimed that small amounts of cancer-causing agents actually prime the immune system and improve health. That seemed like an industry's wet dream. Whether it's true or not, it adds enough doubt to the system which (under a libertarian system) requires absolute certainty on the part of the government before doing anything. It sounds to me like a libertarian system automatically results in a world where governments can't do anything because the businesses will be so powerful that they can *always* add enough doubt and uncertainty to prevent any action. (Which reminds me of the decades of denial by tobacco companies about a smoking-cancer link. I remember one claim put out by tobacco companies that people who were nervous were more likely to get cancer, and more likely to smoke - because smoking calms them. That was their way of throwing a wrench into the evidence that smoking causes cancer.)
Humans, in general, are terrible at weighing risk
I agree, but I'd add that individuals are the worst at judging risk because it's often based on anecdotal evidence (e.g. my aunt smoked for 50 years and never got cancer). Studies and research and double-blind tests are far superior to individual judgment. This is why I think the libertarian system of "everyone decides for themselves" ends up being worse-off for society: because it ends up elevating ignorant individual judgment.
What observations would falsify your hypothesis that human emitted CO2 is causing warming of the earth that will have catastrophic consequences for humanity, assuming you exclude all proxy data?
Say, 15 years of no statistically significant warming, but continuously rising CO2 levels?
Nice try. Remember: not statistically significant = inconclusive. Now what observation would falsify AGW? Any observation which conclusively attributes the warming to any other factor than human emitted CO2.
(And very rarely does anyone say why a model is unrealistic or incorrect.)
On the contrary, climate scientists say *exactly* why the model is wrong. (Not that discussion is published on Roy Spencer's website.) Unfortunately the details don't fit between two commercials, and many simply don't want to hear it anyway.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
We are currently running the falsification. If we don't do a thing (and we're not), and the global warming hypothesis is right: the earth will warm up, sea levels will rise, and billions of people will get dislocated. But, on the bright side, if we don't do a thing, and burn all the coal we can find, and don't see a difference, global warming is falsified. Hurray! We are running a scientifically valid experiment of falsification on the one earth we inhabit. That's real hard science.
While I don't follow all of your post, I do want to comment that I don't think opinion polls of scientists sway me very much. I'm partial to accurate data.
Opinion polls of [insert political group here] are just noise. Alas, it's noise that gets people elected to try to vote away the laws of nature.
As best I can tell, the data show an increase in the rate of climate change which correlates with the rapid increase of population and the use of technologies that change the composition of the atmosphere, as well as ongoing change in ecosystems and hydrologic systems largely caused by the agricultural and industrial use of land and sea by the aforementioned increasing population of humans.
The arguments are over whether, or to what degree, that correlation is due to causation. (With a few morons claiming that the climate isn't changing, or the earth is flat, or similar.)
Frankly, I find arguing about other people's opinions to be a waste of energy.
WALSTIB!
In that argument, you are assuming that the probability of AGW being real or not is equal. We know better than that.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
So, 30 year periods. Got it. In another 15 years, if there is no statistically significant warming, you'll finally stop believing in CAGW (or AGW, your choice).
You could also look at the ice core records and find a few 30 year periods where CO2 fell, but temps rose (or CO2 rose, but temps fell). Or hey, maybe we can see a link in the *opposite* direction: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/09/a-study-the-temperature-rise-has-caused-the-co2-increase-not-the-other-way-around/
Both sides call each other names.
The argument of the relative middle ground is *precisely* how astro-turf organisations like Heartland and Marshall spread FUD. They take an extreme position, drum up a lot of noise, and then watch as "reasonable" people say "the truth must be somewhere in-between". This has been documented in history time and time again, and is orchestrated by the same people. It is really fascinating to learn about how this part of the public discourse works.
One of the interesting things about all of this is that key people, such as Frank Luntz freely admit that they are manipulating the discourse on climate change, and it simply makes no difference.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
When there is a "consensus" of scientists and the IPPC committee that we should move to nuclear power (in whatever form) to mitigate the CO2 emissions, then I will know that they truly believe what they are selling.
If they don't have enough confidence in their predictions to go against he wild eyed, antinuke crazies, then I don't think they are serious.
MDsolar and soulskill (if they are different people) can carp all they want about solar, etc. But nuclear is the ONLY viable replacement for fossil fuel.
So put up or shut up. Do you believe what you are preaching or not?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So, there's no historical observations that could possibly shake your faith? Let's say, 30 years of CO2 falling, but temperatures rising? Or 30 years of CO2 rising, but temperatures falling?
My problem is that I'm not convinced that a) warming is a bad thing, b) CO2 is an overwhelming forcing that is not mediated by other mechanisms. It could very well be that we keep burning fossil fuels, find out that the AGW hypothesis is right, but find out that a warmer planet is *better* for humanity (so only CAGW is wrong). Or, it could be that we keep burning fossil fuels, find out that the AGW hypothesis is wrong, and find out that a cooler planet is *worse* for humanity (so it's really Catastrophic Natural Global Cooling we needed to worry about).
This is true as long as you understand that in a government context "useful results" are results that either directly or indirectly funnel money to a shell corporation owned by some senator or that result in a bureaucrat landing a lucrative consulting position with some entity affected by the research upon retirement from "public service".
While such does indeed occur, I'm doubtful that it sways the interpretation of results (or experimental design) as much as the "studies designed to prove our position" promulgated by parties with immediate financial interests. I could be wrong, though. It just seems like there's an additional layer of difficulty in getting the results you want. You have to be really forceful about ignoring any contradictory evidence to get as much spin as, say, the tobacco companies' nicotine studies, or the "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.
WALSTIB!
Here they are, but I doubt you will try to understand them:
First you need to understand this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwave_radiation
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123222295/PDFSTART
http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/philipona2004-radiation.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JD011800.shtml
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html
http://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/service/iso_gas_lab/publications/PG_WB_IJMS.pdf
"The claim is that we need to live like hippies and give all our money to Al Gore and friends or THE ENTIRE EARTH WILL BE RUINED FOREVER."
no one claims that. Only people claiming that people claim that.
" But global warming isn't a scientific issue - it's a political issue, "
No, it's a scientific issue, what to do about it is a political issue.
" so you've picked your side (democrat) "
hahaha, now your boiling it down to the side of the Aisle?
democrats like:
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Jon Huntsman
Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
Chris Smith
Tim Pawlenty
Bob Inglis
oh, wait those are all republicans, my mistake.
In order to support their religious base, The POLITICAL stance of the republicans has been 'no global warming' however if yo look at many of them and there votes, you can see a different picture.
But hey, I actually pay attention to these details, and like researching what different representatives vote for,.
What I don't understand is people like you, who are provably wrong, that keep on spouting your lies. Why?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'll pull it with a Nissan Leaf. I can keep the generator running and plugged into the Leaf so I'll have enough power.
OTOH, that's not far from reality. Nissan had diesel trucks with large diesel generators on the back to charge the Leafs used for promos.
Al Gore, calling Al Gore!
Nancy Pelosi, calling Nancy Pelosi!
Calling Barack Obama, Calling Barack Obama!
Please report to the Governments Don't care about Global Warming room for an attitude readjustment.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
no. State lies, get marked troll.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Let me set your worry aside: None.
Science does not work that way in general, and specifically in this case if you could show the enormous amount of data we have is wrong, you would get a ton of money, and probably a Nobel Prize.
NASA Data:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080514/ [nasa.gov]
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Rosenzweig_etal_1.html [nasa.gov]
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2005/Hansen_etal_1.html [nasa.gov]
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Too bad we have dwarfed the medieval warming period.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
no. it's just a statement about a sub group of all people. A group that is either one of the meanest groups every seen, or short sighted as all fuck..
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In terms of Newtonian gravity and deviations from the theoretical, I think we can agree that those are pretty small deviations.
I chose that example carefully. Those deviations *were* statistically significant. Being small doesn't change that, and it needs an explanation. There were are least two notable examples of this happening - one time, it did indeed falsify Newtonian gravity and led to general relativity. The other, it didn't - the deviations were due to an as yet undetected planet. So was Newtonian mechanics falsifiable? You can always postulate new planets. A similarly situation exists for dark matter which hasn't been resolved yet. The point is that "falsification" is a simplistic view of science which doesn't match up very well with the way it actually operates. And orbital motion is almost a trivial case. The climate is vastly more complex, so the scope for a simple falsification is correspondingly lower.
Nevertheless, a simple test is to keep emitting lots of CO2 and measure the effects on a much longer timescale (say 40 years from now, compare a 15 year average temperature with one from the 20th century). If no warmer, there's a problem with the theory. So it's definitely falsifiable by any reasonable definition. Of course, if AGW is right, by then it'll be too late to do anything.
In reality, most of the things that could easily falsify the idea sooner than that have already been thoroughly investigated and ruled out to high probability, which is why the scientists are so confident in asserting that climate change has a human contribution.
It really comes down to a balance of evidence combined with Ockham's razor, which is the way science tends to work in practice. Given the evidence we've gathered so far, the idea of no human contribution to warming is by far the less credible idea. And ultimately, you can't falsify a true hypothesis.
You are correct that a nerve has been hit -- there is plain old bloody-mindedness at play. But your analysis is wrong. Read the book, and learn the history of how the politically savvy bully scientists who are generally just interested in the facts of their domain.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You don't seem to understand. The fact that governments, or persons from the government accept the bad news and try to come up with a mitigation strategy is perfectly logical.
However, what is claimed is that the government will actually pay scientist to come up with bad news. There is absolutely no proof for that, and honestly, it makes no sense at all.
Why can't peopel get that there is a FUCKING RANGE of optimal habitability? And that we are going ABOVE that range. If you want to see an example of run away greenouse event, look at Venus.
well, this soup tastes good at 100 degrees, therefore it must be better at 200 degrees. THAT is the line of reasoning you are using.
Falsify? easy, a lowering of temps while in increase in greenhouse gases. Sadly* when other natural cycles are such that the temperature should go down, they don't return to where you would expect them, they stay higher. .11C per decade. Even when other event would indicate a cooling.
Look at the constant increase trend in the last 15 years.
*and I mean the literally
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and by saying that it is not possible to track this function, this blows a hole in the previous theories.
Nobody uses the satellite temperature record for the very reasons that Roy Spencer talks about in his paper. Never have, and maybe never will.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Given that the governments would rather that AGW didn't exist, and the scientists state otherwise, it would seem they are reasonably immune.
Hardly... it depends on whether or not you believe that some governments would love the idea of AGW since AGW would justify massive control of economic and other systems by said governments. It could also be used to justify increased investment in nuclear power, for those governments who want that, and probably a few other things I haven't thought of yet. So, why would governments want to argue on whole that AGW doesn't exist? I would think it is in their interests.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
Interesting links, thanks, but I guess the whole CO2 discussion is somewhere inside them
I'll take a look later
how long until
Pascal's wager? Really? If we're going that route, why not assume that global climate change is both more drastic than we assume (e.g. positive feedback processes like Methane Hydrate releases), and non-anthropogenic (i.e. if we suddenly stopped all CO2 emission RIGHT NOW then global temperature would continue to change as before), and conclude that we must instead put our effort into geoengineering efforts to artificially control the global climate?
Am I the only one who misses the old days when a post like this would reliably contain an obfuscated Goatse link within the first three comments?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Well, I am 70 and during September of my freshman year in college (1962), the afternoon temps were 105 and dropped down into the 80s at night. Without AC we had to take cooling showers 3 or 4 times a day. It was so hot in the 1930s that my wife's mother remembered people leaving their homes and sleeping out under the stars in a park near her home. She laid on a blanket and let her feet lay in a stream which flowed through the park in order to keep cool. In 1905 it was so hot and dry that the Platte River dried up between Kearney and the Missouri. There is a photo in the York News Times showing folks forking Carp in drying pools of what used to be a river which was a mile wide and a foot deep.
Very few records have been made in the last 10 years. Almost every high temperature reported today is prefaced with "It hasn't been this hot since ...." and some date in the previous century is cited.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
But global warming isn't a scientific issue - it's a political issue, so you've picked your side (democrat) and decided to brand anyone who dares question the base claim as a retarded, selfish, greedy, narrow-minded republican.
The people who realize that the entire fucking thing is all political bullshit are most likely NOT republicans OR democrats, because people with brains hate both parties. They hate both parties because they're filled with mindless morons like you. Morons who want everything to be black or white, right or wrong, and are willing to determine such based on what side they've already chosen, instead of actually deciding on the merits of the issue.
Basically: It's all bullshit, and you'll continue to cry "citation needed" despite plenty of valid citations having been given, and despite the severe lack of valid citations supporting your view. People like you are enabling and encouraging the morons in government. People like you are ruining western countries right and left.
So just because a bunch of greedy politicians turned good science into political bandwagon and gravy train, we should trash the good science along with the political crap? Are you nuts?
Because government funded scientists are immune to political pressure?
Who'd bother with putting political pressure on actual scientists when you can much more easily take care of the issue by PR campaign in the mass media?
So, 30 year periods. Got it. In another 15 years, if there is no statistically significant warming, you'll finally stop believing in CAGW (or AGW, your choice).
No, it would also have to be statistically significantly different from the AGW prediction. A result can be statistically insignificant because it's a poor or inadequate measurement. A short term measurement will generally be compatible with both models, once errors are taken into account - this is because over a short time scale, natural fluctuations in temperature are large compared to the effect of global warming.
You could also look at the ice core records and find a few 30 year periods where CO2 fell,but temps rose
Of course you can, if you cherry pick. Toss a coin 10000 times you'll find a few streaks of 10 heads in a row. Probability of throwing ten heads http://xkcd.com/882/.
Since the theory of AGW is more than 100 years old, and we still haven't seen examples of massive control of economic systems, it seems that hypothesis is flawed.
Because ignoring AGW is better for the economy, at least on the short term. Economic growth has been strongly tied to energy growth for a long time, and reducing fossil fuel usage without a good, readily available, alternative will have a negative impact on total energy consumption, and thus economic growth.
Besides, there are many governments around the world, and they aren't aligned in their interests or policies. For instance, the Chinese government already seems to be in good control of their economic system, and they are choosing to rapidly grow their coal plants and freeway system populated by oil consuming cars. In the US, for instance, quite a few politicians are strongly opposed to any kind of tax raise, and in favor of free market solutions. The need to deal with AGW only gets in their way.
You can start here if you really are interested in learning something. There are plenty of falsifiable hypotheses.
By not studying this material, you would be protecting your ignorance in order to hold onto your beliefs -- more commonly known as that river in egypt.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Referencing realclimate as a source is like asking the Fox channel about political news. Do you really expect to get an unbiased story out of them?
OK, the ending got mangled somewhere along the line. The probability of getting 10 heads in a row is 0.001 - highly statistically significant. So seeing a few cases of this means the coin is biased, right?
That xkcd link explains it nicely.
Hey man, both churches are out in full force, having been primed by the article yesterday.
This is easily the most volatile moderation I've seen. Be nice to make a graph of moderation points. Anyone know why all of a sudden I can't see the comment history on posts? It used to have things like "30% troll, 30% funny, 30% underrated" when I clicked on the score. Now it just brings up settings. Is there some way I can still see the proportion of mods, or see the actual numbers?
Nevertheless, a simple test is to keep emitting lots of CO2 and measure the effects on a much longer timescale (say 40 years from now, compare a 15 year average temperature with one from the 20th century). If no warmer, there's a problem with the theory. So it's definitely falsifiable by any reasonable definition. Of course, if AGW is right, by then it'll be too late to do anything.
Actually, no. You didn't take into account additional factors. No matter how much CO2 we pump into atmosphere, a big enough drop in energy inputs will cause cooling anyway.
Yep, which comes back to the whole "falsification is simplistic" argument I was making earlier. I was assuming the other factors would be unchanged from what we already expect. But these could be measured, data assessed all over again, and the end result could be that "humans aren't contributing significantly to global warming". This is certainly a very unlikely outcome given what we already know, but it does satisfy the naive falsifiablity requirement as much as anything else in science does.
which they cannot come close to proving
Climate science was pretty much proven in 1979 by any reasonable objective scientific standard. You can learn learn about the history of the "debate" here. This is a short 10 minute clip on what we know about climate change.
It is easy to see anti-AGW arguments fall flat on their face when you look into the history of each claim, and read the sources of each claim and the responses. It is surprisingly little work.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
See, you don't know shit. I know that because your statement is a provable lie.
No, it isn't. It isn't a statement of fact, so it cannot be a lie. It was a question. The question was, what measurements WOULD you view as disproof of the hypothesis that human artifacts were the cause of global warming. Would "15 years of no statistically significant warming, but continuously rising CO2 levels" be sufficient?
I will point out that your claim that "it's [for some unknown antecedant of "it"] raised over .11 C per decade" doesn't prove the hypothesis, only that there may be a correlation.
Get your head out of your ass and start ...
reading the posting you are replying to before knee-jerk defending a theory. And realize that telling someone to "get your head out of your ass" isn't recognizable science in any form and is no way to have a civilized debate.
I'll start believing in CAGW when *any* alarmist makes a clear, concise list of observations that would falsify their hypothesis, and then we all try *really hard* to look for those observations, and are completely unable to find any. That's called science.
This is obviously prone to moving the goal-posts, which we have already seen. A few scientists investigated global cooling in the 70s, and found that their falsifiable hypothesis didn't stack up. This is purely the scientific method in process. By 1979, a consensus had been built on warming, and nobody has been able to make a cogent argument against it despite numerous attempts.
What you really want is to increase the burden of proof everytime more proof becomes available.
Having some personal training in statistics, physics and chemistry, (but not climate science) I was able to grok the science and follow the academic discourse personally. I also have training in psychology, and that is much more useful in understanding the "debate".
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Actually, nuclear is not a viable replacement for fossil fuel because it does not follow load. The electricity grid is complicated and relies on being able to balance supply and demand during operation. Nuclear is incapable of doing that. Only natural gas turbines and hydro can follow load. Nuclear is probably the best choice to replace coal for base load operation overall but it becomes less competitive in areas where there are geothermal resources or good supplies of biomass. No one energy source can supply all our needs. I'm not preaching, just being practical.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
modern weather predicition are mostly accurate, actually. Over 70% accuracy for 3 daya, for reasonable expectation of accurate.
IF the say it's going to be 76 degrees, and it's off be 2 degree, big deal.
If you want to keep rounding till failure, then your an unreasonable ass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since "non-libertarians" means "almost everyone" I think it's fair to say that there are definitely some who are intellectually refined and above petty insults.
But at issue is not most everyone, but the small sub-group known for some reason as "libertarians". A group so incoherent and ineffective that they are more the punch-line of jokes than influential.
And, like the question that is often asked about autistism, where are all the adult libertarians? Seriously, have you ever found any over the age of say, 35? Why are all the libertarians dying so young? Now that's a mystery.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The NASA report pretty clearly stated that there is opportunity for further research due to insufficiencies in predicting short-term cyclic changes in weather, such as cold-snaps and heat waves in certain areas of the globe, especially over weater, but that the long term models appear to be primarily unchanged by these findings.
Certain "skeptics" turned this into "ZOMG SKY IS COLD!!!! SCIENCE IS BUNK!! BWAHAHAHA" :-D
Wouldn't it be the other way around? People tend to use more extreme, inflammatory and aggressive dialogues when they are losing the debate.
The people who tend to remain calm and balanced are usually more credible.
Actually, no. You didn't take into account additional factors. No matter how much CO2 we pump into atmosphere, a big enough drop in energy inputs will cause cooling anyway.
But would it have cooled more if there were no increase in atmospheric CO2?
It looks to me like they're looking at other results to compare the output of their programmes for correctness and trying their best to discard junk data (i.e. fields with no sane values, etc).
Basically, from scanning it I got:
1. Run programme
2. Encounter error
3. Resolve error in programme / dataset / system
4. Repeat
So basically the classic shotgun debugging pattern of amateur developers.
A lot of it is discussion about how to process secondary data files, so presumably some datasets that were generated from original sources and would be a giant pain to recompile. Other stuff is talking about how hard it is to merge certain datasets. Mainly it seems to be about trying to keep datasets in sync across various runs of programmes.
When they're talking about their programmes producing crazy outputs, it seems fairly clear they're saying that they're getting garbage and not simply results they don't like.
These guys could clearly do with a professional developer and a better workflow, but that doesn't invalidate the basic science they're doing.
Nick
because we're here, and can take measurements, we assume it must be us causing a global disaster.
Actually, it's less about the fact that we're here taking measurements, and more about the fact of what those measurements are. It's odd that you're willing to use such back-of-the-envelope numbers to arrive at your conclusion - Water vapor's potency as a greenhouse gas vs. methane's, vs. CO2's, without any mention of the relative volumes of those substances we're pouring into the atmosphere (btw, we produce a fair amount of water and methane emissions too...) - but you figure atmospheric scientists with advanced degrees and lifetimes of study under their belts are being so informal with their data as to have missed one of the facts you tossed in here? Now that's egocentric.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Thankfully AGW models from lots of different sources match up with each other and historical data to a large degree, so overall AGW is good science.
maybe that's because of code like this, ;
function mkp2correlation,indts,depts,remts,t,filter=filter,refperiod=refperiod,$
datathresh=datathresh
;
; THIS WORKS WITH REMTS BEING A 2D ARRAY (nseries,ntime) OF MULTIPLE TIMESERIES
; WHOSE INFLUENCE IS TO BE REMOVED. UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate
; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE
; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION AND THEN USE THE
; USUAL correlate FUNCTION ON THE RESIDUALS.
;
pro maps12,yrstart,doinfill=doinfill
;
; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
actually Climatologists should left real programmers do the programming, real statisticians do the statistics, and real librarians keep the original data cataloged and stored.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It would, and that's the point. It's not about cooling itself, it's about cooling inconsistent with AGW models. When the climate cools a bit but exactly as AGW models predict, then there's no contradiction.
The point is that you're talking to scientific illiterates who'll try anything to prove that this particular field of science is one big conspiracy. If you don't word your arguments very carefully and pay attention to technical correctness, your argument might backfire on semantics.
University of East Anglia (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU) claims to only keep “value added data” and destroyed raw data (I can get a 2 TB drive for $70)
Back when they discarded the raw data that they did you couldn't get a 2 TB drive for any amount of money. If you tried to build on it might have been the size of a semi-trailer.
Seriously? A shitty paper using bad models written by a creationist was picked up by Forbes, and you're wondering how many legitimate articles are in hiding because they're against the consensus?
Look, if Roy Spencer's paper got published and was picked up by a major magazine, you can be damn sure that a better paper arguing the same thing would have also been published, and would have been picked up by Forbes or Fox News or pretty much any media outlet.
The fact that no such papers are in evidence makes it pretty convincing that no such papers exist. After all, there is a shitload of money to be made writing and publicizing such a paper; it's not like there's any incentive at all to keep something like that under wraps.
To answer your questions, for the first, we lose lots of high value land, food production goes to hell and we starve off much of the population.
For the second, we spend a bunch of money improving efficiency, developing alternative energy sources, etc. Oil executives forced to spend years in therapy to recover from the lasting emotional scars of sailing last year's yacht and only eating caviar sandwiches 4 days a week for lunch. The EPA, forced to find new work for itself turns it's attention to other obnoxious emissions and imposes a tax on beans.
I'm not going make a statement one way or the other on fudged data. If his actions were clearly inappropriate there are plenty of scientific bodies whose only reason for existence is managing scientific professional integrity. If he has done something truly inappropriate, he will be dealt with.
What I will respond to is THE VAST body of work pointing to dramatic changes in global climate. I ask those with an ideological position to defend, to stop for just a moment look at the remarkable amount of indisputable evidence that is now available. Its positively mind numbing.
Your comment about temperature is both uninformed and ludicrous. Scientists have taken wood samples from redwoods and bristlecone pines and with that information they can give you precise climatic information for specific areas including annual rainfall, temperature, and occurrence of catastrophic events. By analyzing human dwelling all over the world we can accurately determine climate through fauna and flora for those regions, spores, seeds and pollen. They tell us precisely what grew, and tell what the climatic conditions were there and when. We have antarctic ice cores with trapped atmospheric samples, we have ocean cores with samples of everything from diatoms to volcanic ash, we have fossils and minerals with trapped air and water going back millions of years, we have rock cores which elegantly give us clear records of temperature over centuries. The body of evidence is overwhelming and rich. Thousands of different sources from hundred of different fields of study, all forming a clear and cohesive picture. Whatever you've been reading, its inaccurate, incomplete, and puts ideology before simple fact and truth. You can absolutely criticize one or two individuals for their poor performance, but that doesn't even begin to indict the work of tens of thousands of scientist all over the world who work in vastly different fields but have all come to the same inescapable conclusion.
The models and theories make specific predictions. Many of those predictions have come to pass. Here are just a few recent facts which are completely incontestable:
The precautionary principle
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I asked "where are all the adult libertarians". You described "fully grown", not adult.
My questions still stands.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you truly believe AGW exists, then being against using the known technology to reduce what you think is causing that AGW [is] disingenuous.
Hardly. You're silently asserting that nuclear power is the only known or realistically achievable technology to "solve" AGW. That is a matter of debate. Even assuming, for the moment, that you're right, it's still hardly disingenuous behavior, merely conflicted. If you think using nuclear power has dire consequences AND you think further emissions will have dire consequences AND nuclear power is the only way to reduce emssions, you're in a dilemma.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Because a journalist isn't supposed to take sides.
On the contrary, taking sides is exactly what the Op/Ed section of the paper is for.
maybe that's because of code like this
Since that code didn't make it into 'production', I very much doubt it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
but let's not pretend that there is a magical thermometer we can stick in the air, and get the current Global Average Temperature
Who is pretending? HARRY_READ_ME clearly demonstrates how difficult it is to consolidate disparate historical records. Jones and his crew have spent the last 20yrs sorting it out, if you can spot a genuine error I'm sure they would be glad to hear from you.
At best, [evolution is] over-reliant on proxy data, and *everyone* should be skeptical of that sort of weak science.
'nuff said.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Basically, from scanning it I got:
1. Run programme
2. Encounter error
3. Resolve error in programme / dataset / system
4. Repeat
So basically the classic shotgun debugging pattern of amateur developers.
Professionals developers call that procedure 'testing', ideally the tester and the developer are not the same person. Any developer who think his code does not need testing is in my view an amateur.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You just chose to focus on an irrelevant piece of the text, and doing exactly what you claim he did.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Wow, just Wow. Are you seriously saying that because people you don't like use ideas in ways you do not consider valid, that those ideas are no longer legitimate?
Um, yeah.. That's really scientific of you. Let's step away from the alter and think about this some more.
Depends on how you define poorer I suppose. Different for sure, but not necessarily worse off.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
You may not consider RealClimate unbiased and it isn't. It's biased by real science rather than politics. If you want to know what climate scientists are saying instead of what others say they are saying it's the place to get it straight from the horses mouth.
Here is a comment on Spencer's paper. Make up your own mind.
Or obscuring it... Those who cast doubt on the human origin of increased CO2 are no better than those who deny that climate change exists.
This IS NOT a point of controversy among actual climate scientists. Measuring of CO2 output has been done for decades now, and the picture is clear - human activity accounts for the vast majority of the increase.
I have read repeated posts from denialists attached to any news report on volcanic activity, saying how insignificant human activity must be compared to such a huge natural event. In fact, exactly the opposite is true - the CO2 output of all the world's volcanoes is insignificant next to the human output, constituting less than 0.4%.
Parent post assumes that the article in question-- and presumably the large number of similar articles that have been published over the years-- are part of a debate.
A debate is a way of throwing a couple of arguments at each other to determine their strengths and weaknesses and thus move more closely toward the truth. In this sense, there are never any losers in an honest debate since both parties and their audience leave with a better appreciation of the issues.
Propaganda, though, has nothing to do with the search for truth; its sole purpose is to get the audience to behave in a certain way. The behavior sought might be to raise a lot of confusion about public policies and laws that are based on scientific foundations.
When propaganda calls itself a debate, when it takes on the form of a debate, it does not become a debate. It remains propaganda.
Will
That's what it boils down to, isn't it? You dislike the political consequences some people draw from a frankly undisputable fact, and, therefore, the fact has to be wrong. And then you dare accuse the other side of unscientific behavior, and for the icing on the top of "ruining western countries." You are the one putting politics over facts, you are the raving mad ideologue.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
And here goes the last shred of your credibility. You are a DDT nutter. Wow. Those are still around? You are aware that Malaria prevention is the remaining allowed use of DDT? You are aware that indiscriminate use of DDT would breed resistance? Well, I guess you are, but because the hippies, "activists" and the evil gubbermint are behind it, it OUGHT NOT BE! You are a libertarian, a paragon of freedom, and as a free man, you got the goddamn right to MAKE YOUR OWN REALITY! Sticking to facts is oppression!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Did you *read* HARRY_README? He points out a system that is *rife* with genuine errors. I mean, you're talking people who didn't even bother archiving their damn data for traceability!
As for evolution and proxy data, I'll make the snarky assertion that fossilized bodies aren't proxies, they're just *dead*. Using a tree stump to decide what the world temperature average was in 1692 isn't the same thing as using a petrified tree stump to show that there was once a certain tree somewhere.
Of course code needs testing, I was just making the point that, from the notes, their testing procedure seems to be a little cack handed. Of course they are just notes. It could be that the notes are just messy due to the writing style of the author.
The point is that it's not evidence of fraud, fudging data or any other misconduct.
Nick
You don't have a falsifiable hypothesis. Without that, your "indisputable evidence" is simply a sideshow. If you're positing that all swans are white, I'm not going to be impressed by you showing me a million white swans. I'm not going to be impressed by two million white swans. What will impress me is if you look *really hard* for a black swan, and fail to find it.
As for each of your "incontestable" facts, I'll note that every single one of them could happen *without* CO2, much less human CO2, being responsible. Yes, climate changes. Yes, recent changes have been towards the warmer (except, of course, for the past 15 years). That doesn't mean that we have to buy, hook, line and sinker, that your unfalsifiable explanation of it is true.
Your mountains of data mean nothing until you can succinctly state what data will make you change your mind. If there is no data that can possibly change your mind, then you're playing religion, not science.
"According to a report in the British Medical Journal, use of DDT in Mozambique "was stopped several decades ago, because 80% of the country's health budget came from donor funds, and donors refused to allow the use of DDT." Roger Bate asserts, "many countries have been coming under pressure from international health and environment agencies to give up DDT or face losing aid grants: Belize and Bolivia are on record admitting they gave in to pressure on this issue from [USAID].""
As for resistance: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/79127.php
"A study published by the Public Library of Science (PloS) One found that three out of five DDT-resistant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, carriers of human diseases like dengue and urban yellow fever, avoided huts sprayed with DDT. The chemical's unique spatial repellent action, combined with its moderate irritant and toxic properties, reduced the risk of disease transmission by nearly three-quarters. "
Care to alter your reality to fit the real world a bit? :)
Show me a single Creationist which has stated a falsifiable hypothesis of creation. And if they ask you for a falsification of evolution, just remember, "rabbit in the pre-cambrian".
After that, show me a single CAGW (or AGW) believer who has stated a falsifiable hypothesis of CAGW or AGW.
Having several dozen falsifiable hypothesis that *aren't* about CAGW or AGW, does not mean you've built a falsifiable hypothesis of CAGW or AGW. Those falsifiable hypotheses may be *necessary* for CAGW or AGW to be true, but they are simply not sufficient.
State for me your concise falsifiable hypothesis of CAGW or AGW, and then we can start learning something.
What is the "AGW prediction"? I've seen dozens of models, which actually significantly differ from each other - are there any AGW models we can now throw out because they've been falsified?
My problem is that every observation which is statistically different from any specific AGW prediction is explained away with an ad hoc special pleading. "It was aerosols." or "It was El Nino." Pile special pleading upon special pleading, and pretty soon you're dealing with something that is hardly a hypothesis worthy of note, because it is chock full of special cases.
When you treat contrary observations as obstacles to be overcome, you're doing pseudo-science. When you search high and low for observations that would refute your hypothesis, then you're doing real science.
So far, I haven't heard anyone, anywhere, who believes in CAGW or AGW state a categorical and concise list of observations they would accept as falsifying their hypothesis. If they could at least get that far, then we might be able to get past all the baggage that comes along with belief and faith.
Obligatory xkcd link about a different argument on the precautionary principle: http://xkcd.com/925/
I've done a meta-analysis and found that since the number of people using the word "denier" outnumbers the number of people using the word "alarmist" by a significant factor (p<0.05), the deniers must be touching a nerve, and therefore are right (p<pi/e).
Meta-alarmist or meta-denier-which are you? Lao-Tzu said " to know the truth of any one thing one must compare it to it's opposite ", in other words-the truth is somewhere in-between. Everyone has a personal view of the truth and all truth is a product of perspective.
I'm not sure that follows - Newtonian gravity has predictive properties, beyond any small yet statistically significant differences from observations on very very large, and very very small scales - as such, you've at least got some idea of what observations would represent a falsification (though perhaps not enough of a falsification to make it useless as a rule of thumb).
CAGW (and AGW for that matter), have no particular predictive properties, and there are large statistically significant differences between various models, and observations, each of which essentially brings out an ad-hoc special pleading. The fact that the scope for of CAGW or AGW is so complex, makes it even *more* obvious that a simple explanation based on a single molecule that is counted in the atmosphere in parts per *million* is unlikely to have much predictive power.
First off, "no human contribution" is a strawman. There very well may be human contribution, and in fact, one is almost guaranteed that there is human contribution - the problem comes in determining the sign and magnitude of that contribution, and then, deciding that such a contribution is catastrophic.
As for credibility, the world had climate change long before humanity ever existed, and we can observe similar changes as we have in the past century and a half all throughout the climate history. Why is it *incredible* to think that climate changes naturally? Now, if the climate record showed 4 billion years of completely stable climate, and after the industrial revolution started and humans started pumping out CO2 it changed for the first time *ever*, okay, I'm with you. But that's not the case at all - change in the climate system, be it warming, cooling, or just staying the same for a while, is the *natural* state of things.
Fail. You're asking to prove a negative. What observation would falsify the hypothesis that finding my keys this morning was the work of God? Any observation which conclusively attributes it to any other factor besides God. Have fun with that one. Or if you like, how about attacking the hypothesis of Natural Global Warming. Simply show me any observation that conclusively attributes the warming to any other factor than natural ones.
Unless you can concisely state an observation or set of observations which would be so inconsistent with AGW or CAGW as to falsify them, you're playing religion, not science. Trying to redefine the null hypothesis, and shift the burden of proof, is a clever argument, but not a compelling one.
The argument doesn't backfire on semantics, it backfires on rationale. If any observation, over any time period, can be explained way with an ad hoc special pleading (energy inputs dropped, aerosols increased, undersea volcanic activity stalled, etc, etc, etc), then your hypothesis is not a very useful one.
I think that part of the problem here is that you think you're talking to scientific illiterates. If you can step back for a moment, and imagine that you just may be talking to someone who is very scientifically literate, and probably more educated and perhaps even more expert than you (say, Lindzen), then maybe you can start concentrating more on the problems you're having with rationale.
One doesn't have to believe in conspiracies in order to ask for a simple statement of a falsifiable hypothesis. One doesn't have to attribute evil intentions to AGW activists in order to question the accuracy or logic of their work.
Round 1: Reductive Science
Winner by KO over four centuries: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Lagrange, to name just a few.
Round 2: Voodoo Science
Winner by KO over two centuries: Maxwell, Michelson, Heisenberg, SchrÃdinger, Einstein, Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonga.
Round 3: Giant Messy Dynamic Systems Science
Losing on points in the first round, but rallying furious when pressed to the ropes, the IPCC alliance of funding activists.
It's a big job. Given a century of progressive refinement, we'll soon have something to crow about.
Nobody seriously doubts the climate scientists will ultimately come up with a story that jives with reality. The debate here is whether we should shift a trillion dollars worth of present-day economic activity on an alpha 0.1 quality model somewhere around the Windows 3.0 turning point.
Given the complexity of the earth's climate system, there's no reason to think this model has converged to reality over such a short time frame, any more than we should expect our rocket scientists to build a fully functional Star Wars spaced-based laser system in under 30 years if we could return CERN for a full money-back refund.
Our rocket scientists put a man on the moon, and sent space probes to the most distant reaches of the solar system. I have some reason to trust them. Name *one* climate system the IPCC has ever got right.
Boyle's law and the triple point of water and the greenhouse effect on Venus, with a partial pressure of CO2 at the planet's surface of just under 9MPa. Did I miss any other illustrious accomplishments?
Or do we believe them simply because the IPCC has more scientists than their model has free variables? One scientist per variable, they've got the entire system covered. If only we managed software development half as well.
Using a fossil to determine when the animal was alive is a proxy dating technique. Also merging different formats in different databases is a problem not an error.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The point is that it's not evidence of fraud, fudging data or any other misconduct.
Agreed, it looks like an unremarkable chronicle of the problems that one would expect to encounter when merging disparate databases.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I should add that the opponents of climate change have intent of being right on any time frame that exceeds their present day vested interests.
On one side we have no credible agenda whatsoever, on the other side we have a credible agenda trying to take credit for an accomplishment we won't see for many decades yet, and telling us to take radical action, with no reliable metric for cost effectiveness, except that the grants keep flowing.
As software people, we ought to know what a premature declaration of victory looks like. You know, the 30 year lag between when a technology first is announced as "just around the corner" and when it's mature and cost effective for mass consumption.
On that score, I don't see much difference between the IPCC and the AI people from the 1960s. Slowly the AI people are winning the battle. Their system is only mildly more difficult than the climate system.
In some ways, the IPCC is less testable than string theory. If we had a handy inventory of Genesis planets, we could really put them in their place.
But no, they get special dispensation to effectively claim, "if the planet warms up catastrophically, we were right all along". Even if their present model is 100% certifiable bullshit applied to any Genesis planet.
To satisfy the lameness filter while my coloured correction card chases my original post.
Celebrating Richard Feynman at TEDxCaltech
This is quite possibly the most succinct and intelligent post I have seen on this subject in a long time.
Sadly, I believe that there is a scientific debate going on about this subject - but we never get to see it, as the meaningful content is drowned out by the media noise.
ignorance.
The argument doesn't backfire on semantics, it backfires on rationale. If any observation, over any time period, can be explained way with an ad hoc special pleading (energy inputs dropped, aerosols increased, undersea volcanic activity stalled, etc, etc, etc), then your hypothesis is not a very useful one.
This is where you're completely wrong. There isn't a single magic silver-bullet factor that beats all the others. The AGW model takes into account dozens of factors. Many of those factors may have significant impact on the result. The hypothesis holds as long as there's no significant discrepancy between results of the model and actual measurements. When you get a decade of cooling and the AGW model says that there's supposed to be a decade of cooling, there's nothing interesting to report.
I think that part of the problem here is that you think you're talking to scientific illiterates. If you can step back for a moment, and imagine that you just may be talking to someone who is very scientifically literate, and probably more educated and perhaps even more expert than you (say, Lindzen), then maybe you can start concentrating more on the problems you're having with rationale.
You've already proven elsewhere in the discussion that you have no idea what "statistically significant" means so excuse me if I don't take your word for it.
I simply deny the basis of your argument. - Nationalized health care is should not automatically be assumed as better health care. - Raising taxes is good for GDP growth? Give me a break...the corollary you're trying to make is non-existent. Any macro-economic professor worth the pants he wears will tell you that, "this is all theory." - If you believe tax increases are the formula to success, why not just keep raising them? Do you have a limit? Do you not acknowledge any negative impact on an economy to increased taxes? Do you believe that a centrally controlled economy creates wealth somehow? - How does it feel to be a part of a political philosophy that demagogues success and appeals to the black emotions of envy and class warfare?
but do we honestly need evidence to accept something so fundamental?
You just played the "AGW is a fundamentally true and as such needs no proof card." we call that religion (or perhaps you do believe in the,magic sky pixie who made the Universe - after all, "do we honestly need evidence to accept something so fundamental?"
Ironically, I'm pretty sure that wasn't your intent...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Pick any major factor in the climate model and ask the question what would be evidence that this particular factor is responsible for warming instead of CO2? Let's take for example solar forcing (more heat coming from the sun). If sun was responsible, we'd see much higher warming in tropical regions than in polar regions. If CO2 was responsible, we'd see the exact opposite. Now head to nasa.gov and see for yourself which of these two factors is responsible.
BTW, supernatural forces are not an acceptable scientific explanation for anything. If you can't show that it exists, it doesn't.
>What's the worst that could happen if global warming is real and we do nothing?
We have relatively happy lives for the next 100 years or so, and then the people at that time have developed the technology to fight the problem with geo-engineering because they have a prosperous economy unfettered by wild-eyed envirowackos trying to force them to live in caves and read by candlelight.
>What's the worst the could happen if global warming is not true and we do something?
We spend an estimated 50 trillion dollars for nothing, bankrupt the world, and end up living in tar-paper shacks and dying of things that could have been cured, but were not for lack of money that was shoved down a rathole trying to solve a non-problem.
>Which outcome is the worst?
Spending all our wealth on a wild goose chase.
actually Climatologists should left real programmers do the programming
They tried. I was recently asked to help my local geography department with this exact issue. They believe in transparency, and they've released all of their climate modelling code under the GPL (v2). They have lots of collaborators in other geography departments around the world, all working on the same codebase (or disposable forks), but there's little interest from anyone outside the subject. People would much rather tell them they're wrong without evidence than actually look at the models.
So, here's a challenge for all of the AGW-sceptics: download the models, review the code, and send bug reports or fixes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you can stop deforestation, reduce the amount of cattle and stop the release of greenhouse gases the predictions will be wrong. Actually, the amount of greenhouse gases would need to be lowered to the state where they were before the excessive human interaction with Earth's ecosystem.
Deforestation (half ot the tropical rainforests gone already) and cattle keeping amplify the greehouse effect by themselves already - the processes of human society add to the totality. The processes and methods need to be advanced.
You're offering a false dichotomy. By constraining your imagination to only those factors in climate models, you prejudge the question (and frankly, you can tweak the model however you want, say by hard coding unjustified feedback from CO2 to H2O). The opposite of "Anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for observed recent warming" is not "The Sun is primarily responsible for observed recent warming", it's "natural forces are primarily responsible for observed recent warming".
You cannot say "I assert human CO2 is responsible. To refute me, you must prove that something else is specifically responsible, otherwise, I win by default." The null hypothesis cannot be so cleverly avoided. Your placement of human CO2 on the pedestal of supernatural primacy that must be disproved, rather than in its proper place as a hypothesis that must compete against the primacy of natural climate change, is unjustifiable.
Furthermore, why would you assert that we'd have higher warming in tropical regions if the sun was driving warming? The transfer of heat throughout the globe seems to have more to do with ocean currents - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6033/1076.abstract
That all being said, given the prediction of the CO2 hotspot, would you accept that the lack of such a hotspot represents a solid refutation of your hypothesis? http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
If you don't accept that as a solid refutation, are you willing to make other specific predictions about what kinds of patterns we could observe that would prove your hypothesis incorrect? I'm assuming you would have a longer list than "if the tropics warm more than the poles" - that seems like a pretty broad inclusionary criteria that doesn't logically lead to human CO2 based warming exclusively (especially if we could observe similar warming patterns before human CO2 was significant in the *same* pattern).
When you can't refute the science going after the reputation of the writer is almost always the next desperation move...
None of the current computer "models" are capable of taking data up to, say, 1975 and giving predictions of 1980 weather using KNOWN results as a test... OR at least no one had demonstrated that ability to date...
The "ASSUMPTIONS" included in them discount (or consider constant) the effects of H2O... known to be the most influential of "Greenhouse Gasses", ESTIMATE CO2 effects that haven't been proven, and, in many cases, are still using data sets that have proven inaccuracies (or worse yet data that can't be duplicated as it was lost, sources forgotten, or other interesting, but non scientific excuses resembling "the dog ate my homework")
Out of the 5,000 some weather stations used to measure "average temperatures" about 2/3 of them are in the most urban areas of the Northern Hemisphere... Growing nations where urban sprawl has surrounded existing "reference" sites with increasing heat sources...
I challenge the reader to find out what their nearest urban weather station adds/subtracts as a "correction factor" that supposedly accounts for the surrounding air conditioning, heating, industry, and traffic patterns... (hint: this is considered a "constant" to account for dynamic conditions, is that a problem for anyone???)
AGW may well exist in some form... but the arguments used to "prove" that it threatens the world ignore the fact that we're looking at increased crop yields with longer growing seasons, and might even get to see what the English vintages of wine taste like... Something that hasn't existed since the Medieval Warm when Roman tax records show vintners producing in their northern most territory...
Finally, for the non-scientists like myself... look at the solar output charts with a handy copy of the "Global Temperature" trends... you might observe an interesting correlation independent of ANY other factors... Something that gets less noticed than it probably ought to be...
After all, if it is all just the sun's influence and can't be affected by human efforts... how would anyone change society into their own image, gain power over people's lives, and divert billions of dollars toward the agenda of those 'believers" (had to get a disparaging word in at least once) who will determine what happens to the rest of us as a consequence of this "threat"
You're offering a false dichotomy. By constraining your imagination to only those factors in climate models, you prejudge the question (and frankly, you can tweak the model however you want, say by hard coding unjustified feedback from CO2 to H2O). The opposite of "Anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for observed recent warming" is not "The Sun is primarily responsible for observed recent warming", it's "natural forces are primarily responsible for observed recent warming".
Who said anything about constraining imagination? For what it's worth, you're free to add any factor you want or a combination of factors as long as you can provide mathematical description of its effect and accurate measurements of the factor in action, including the number of active sea pirates.
But the thing is, if you scratch anthropogenic CO2 from the model and stick with just natural levels of CO2, whatever changes you do to the equations, you'll always be left with a gaping hole in the shape of anthropogenic CO2. No matter how much you try to make the model fit the past records, it won't be able to recreate or predict new events as well as AGW models do.
You cannot say "I assert human CO2 is responsible. To refute me, you must prove that something else is specifically responsible, otherwise, I win by default." The null hypothesis cannot be so cleverly avoided. Your placement of human CO2 on the pedestal of supernatural primacy that must be disproved, rather than in its proper place as a hypothesis that must compete against the primacy of natural climate change, is unjustifiable.
I don't. I'm saying that right now, we have a pile of evidence as high as Empire State Building which points at anthropogenic CO2 as the main culprit as opposed to purely natural forces. A non-trivial part of this evidence are experiments which go along the lines of "what would the climate look like if we left anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation". And vast majority of those experiments come to the conclusion that it'd be completely different from what it looks like in reality.
Furthermore, why would you assert that we'd have higher warming in tropical regions if the sun was driving warming? The transfer of heat throughout the globe seems to have more to do with ocean currents - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6033/1076.abstract
Ummm... because that's where the the most heat enters our atmosphere and where those ocean currents take heat from? If you don't pump more heat into ocean currents in tropical regions, where do they take the extra heat that they're supposed to deliver into polar regions?
That all being said, given the prediction of the CO2 hotspot, would you accept that the lack of such a hotspot represents a solid refutation of your hypothesis? http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
I have a question for you: where did the purple region above 16km in the "no hotspot" picture come from? The patterns on page 8 list it under "an increase in non-water-vapor greenhouse gases" and there's no other cause of such cold pattern anywhere else in the list. As for the hotspot itself, the measurements are within confidence intervals of IPCC models (link taken from your article).
If you don't accept that as a solid refutation, are you willing to make other specific predictions about what kinds of patterns we could observe that would prove your hypothesis incorrect? I'm assuming you would have a longer list than "if the tropics warm more than the poles" - that seems like a pretty broad inclusionary criteria that doesn't logically lead to human CO2 based warming exclusively (especially if we could observe similar warming patterns before h
Hypothesis: CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The problem is that the shotgun approach of asserting, say, three dozen models, and then having actual measurements that have significant discrepancies with 75% of them, doesn't really say much. If your model isn't making predictions of any utility, and furthermore, cannot separate correlation from causality.
Not a single AGW model predicted the previous decade of lack of warming, and not a single AGW model can accurately hindcast all previous decades of climate.
Really? I'd say that IPCC AR4 did pretty well predicting the past decade.
Let's say I have a hypothesis that says that global climate change is caused by software piracy, and the predictions of that model I build show a strong correlation to our observed temperatures, within a huge range of error that I build into my model. Does my hypothesis hold? Sure, in the strictest sense of the word. Is my hypothesis really all that useful? Absolutely not.
The sad part, of course, is that so many people do see models as more than what they really are - they assume that these models represent evidence, when in reality, they're simply toys. Especially when you design them to withstand direct refutation by opening their error bars so wide that nearly *any* possible outcome is covered.
You're forgetting that range of error is the measure of how accurate your model is. If you can come up with a climate model which has much tighter confidence intervals than current AGW models but with real measurements still fitting in, you might win the Nobel Prize.
And another thing you're forgetting, one of those "toys" helped put man on the Moon and space probes in orbit of various planets in our solar system, hundreds of millions of kilometers away. Another one of those "toys" made it possible to build most of modern electronics, including the computer you're using right now. Those too are just inaccurate models. But they're accurate enough to be useful.
Yeah, I guess you are pretty ignorant.
The granularity of ice core records is more on the order of centuries rather than 30 years.
It's true that a feedback of rising temperatures is increased atmospheric CO2 regardless of the source of the warming. But the opposite of that statement is that rising temperatures don't cause increased atmospheric CO2. It says nothing about whether increasing atmospheric CO2 through some cause other than feedback from warming can cause warming.
And, of course (as always happens), we now get the unctuous complaint about the rhetorical device as a way to avoid addressing the actual consequences of the position you're supporting.
Imagine that, imply that addressing climate change is similar to killing children and you fail to get a good discussion. How odd.
if you are looking at "trends", then you aren't actually predicting anything. Predicting requires physical models, not data.
Are you sure about those records?
From NOAA's National Climate Data Center list of temperature records in July 2011: "Out of a possible 173,311 records: 1,564 (Broken) + 1,086 (Tied) = 2,650 Total"
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
imply that addressing climate change is similar to killing children and you fail to get a good discussion
No, imply that politicians should be given a blank check to do highly questionable things, redistribute income, and fund billions in programs that are mostly pork, and you get push back. Why? Because you think it's safer to do those things than it is to do (or at least articulate) things that might actually matter. Your willingness to spend other people's daily labors on things that have no bearing on reality - to enslave someone else for some portion of their waking hours, under the direction of polticians with absolutely no idea what they're talking about or buying with the taxes levied in the name of a perfectly static climate - is indeed awful. And your blythe dismissal of being called on it just reinforces the fact that you're willing to do anything, as long as if feels like "something" is being done. Why not fund magicians who will sacrifice specific breeds of chickens to appease the sun? Oh, because you draw the line somewhere, right? So "better safe than sorry" isn't your actual position, in reality, but nor will you be specific about what it actually is.
And that wouldn't be so bad, except that people who spout such empty platitudes are heard by other people, including many morons who none the less vote. So, you want to have a "good" discussion? Actually say something beyond hollow aphorisms, and be specific. Include, in your specificity, your understanding of the causality behind your observations, and the funding mechanisms you propose, and whether/why you think that poor developing nations like China should be required to do the same "safe" things you're suggesting that your own citizens do, and what (exactly) you'd propose we do if they refuse. Then you'll have a discussion.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Since morally bankrupt failures like yourself will screw over any and everyone when it is cheaper for you to do so, we will simply make it more expensive for you to fuck over others. the more you get off on fucking over people, the more you will pay. Either you will learn how to pretend to be a respectable human being, or you will go broke.
So simply proving that CO2 is a greenhouse gas means that human CO2 *must* be the primary driver of global climate?
That is not what is being stated.
That CO2 is a greenhouse gas is a falsifiable hypothesis (correct?). It is proven. If you disprove it, then you disprove AGW.
There are hundreds of falsifiable hypotheses in the AGW argument.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Huh?
Even if your analysis is accurate, it doesn't mean what you think it means. Assume both sides actually believe they are right (and aren't trying to alter reality for financial gain either by selling solar panels or by selling coal). What names might you give to a proponent of the position that AGW exists and is dangerous? You might use AGW alarmist, which is a tight phrase. But you also might use AGW proponent, AGW advocate, AGW disciple, AGW etc. Basically any term that argues the for side of an argument can be used in conjecture with AGW to get a reasonable label. In a discussion which is clearly about AGW, you drop the AGW part and you get alarmist, proponent, evangelist, etc.
But, the English language does not provide the same wealth of terms for people who argue that a position is not just false, but doesn't actually exist. It's similar to how atheists get labeled as "believing in no god" (affirmation in the no god theology) when they in fact "do not believe in any gods" (rejection of all god theologies). So, what terms can you have on the negative side? AGW denialist and AGW skeptic are the only two that come to my mind which are succinct. You might call them AGW opponents, but they don't actually oppose it so much as they believe it's a hoax. You could say they are AGW hoaxists, but that's making up a word. And really, even the term "skeptic" should probably be dropped in this case, because these people don't appear to be waiting for sufficient evidence so much as simply rejecting the evidence that exists.
Maybe AGW rejectionists is better?
It is possible that it was science, and then a whole bunch of name callers joined in. That would be a historical question, which has been researched. There is a book on it (which also explains the science of the name calling), but this one hour talk sums up the history concisely.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Your willingness to spend other people's daily labors on things that have no bearing on reality - to enslave someone else for some portion of their waking hours
Wow, you're just full of hyperbole, aren't you?
You forget the third potential result: if "global warming" is true but AGW is not, then we will need to take increasingly drastic action as we attempt to solve a problem by removing something that is not a causal factor. What, returning the US to pre-2000 levels of energy use and CO2 emission didn't stop the warming? Then we must reduce even more, and tax CO2 emissions even more. It isn't a case of being "a bit poorer", it a case of destroying major economic systems as unforseen consequences of increasingly strict limits overrun common sense.
I don't think this is necessary at all. You're assuming here that if we are going to battle AGW, that we're going to go all out, not stopping until we're either broke or got the whole thing under control. The science tells us that we will only see the effects of battling CO2 in 20 to 30 years. So, according to AGW, we're already late to the game and all we can do is try to make it not kill us. This means we need a healthy economy, otherwise we will not be able to do this.
And, to avoid destroying major economic systems we probably should first shoot the bankers.
I've done a meta-analysis and found that since the number of people using the word "denier" outnumbers the number of people using the word "alarmist" by a significant factor (p<0.05), the deniers must be touching a nerve, and therefore are right (p<pi/e).
That's what a "sceptic" would say. Somebody using Occam's Razor would say that the number of "deniers" is simply much smaller than the number of "alarmists", despite the claim of the "deniers".
Fandroids hate facts.
There are hundreds of falsifiable hypotheses in the Christian Creation argument too - simply stringing a bunch of independent falsifiable hypotheses together *doesn't* make for another bigger and better hypothesis. What you're looking for (and apparently unable to find), is the concise and precise statement of a falsifiable hypothesis that links up all of your other uncontested, independent falsifiable hypotheses together. *Each link counts*. For example, the CAGW argument depends on CO2 being a greenhouse gas, the world getting warmer, *and* a warmer planet being worse for the biosphere and humanity. In that case, the weakest link with the least clear falsification is that a warmer planet is worse for the biosphere and humanity.
So here's my question to you, to help you narrow things down - out of all the myriad falsifiable hypotheses you use in the AGW argument, *which one is the weakest link* do you think?
It may be *necessary* for CO2 to be a greenhouse gas in order for AGW to be true, but it is not *sufficient*.
I call BS. Your cited graph claims a forecast from 2000, but IPCC AR4 was from 2007. And did you note the huge error bars?
Let's hear your response to this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/09/comparing-ipcc-1990-predictions-with-2011-data/
I think you hit the nail on the head right there - with such sloppy confidence intervals in the *actual* science, the alarmist claims of accuracy are are highly exaggerated. This might just be a communication problem (dumbing things down until they lose their original meaning), or it could be that it is an intentional misleading. I leave that decision as an exercise for the reader.
Orbital mechanics are orders of magnitude simpler than weather and climate predictions. Newtonian Gravity is only 43 arcseconds off *per century* for predicting the orbit of Mercury, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problems_with_Newton.27s_theory)
As for the utility of models that predict the statistic "global average temperature", I'll refer you to this: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/globaltemp/GlobTemp.JNET.pdf
Perhaps you can suggest what useful information I can get if I knew that next year the global average temperature would be .01C greater than this year.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say - you can keep anthropogenic CO2 in the models...heck, your models shouldn't even *care* where the CO2 came from (a human emitted molecule of CO2 doesn't have different spectral properties than a naturally emitted CO2 molecule).
Furthermore, the models only show correlation, not causality, so no matter what the accuracy of a model, it cannot prove that CO2 drives temperature, rather than temperature drives CO2.
Running a model is not the same as running an experiment. Run your model, then compare it to observations. Then, you've got two choices when you find discrepancies -> find an ad hoc special pleading, or revisit your premises.
No it doesn't. Why can't the sun warm the poles more than the tropics due to cloud formation and albedo differences? You're making an assertion without substance there.
Using the carbon in a fossil, or other evidence from the geology around a fossil, to decide how old it is, is a proxy dating technique. The fossil itself, as a representative of the complexity of the organism is not a proxy except in the most trivially technical sense. A subtle distinction, but one that matters.
As for merging different formats in different databases -> sure, might not be an error, but you don't know that if you're not maintaining proper version control and traceability. The real problems HARRY points out are about mysterious, arbitrary and undocumented adjustments.
The problem is that battling Global Warming is not necessarily a good thing. There's no evidence that a warmer planet is a more dangerous planet for humanity or the biosphere...in fact, evidence shows pretty much the opposite.
When we don't agree on some of the basic premises (catastrophe in a warmer world), even if we agree on others (a global warming over the past century), we can hardly expect to agree on what kinds of actions we should take.
The weakest link would be temperature records and proxies. If climate is changing, then we should see changes in seasonal pattens, glaciers, bird migrations, etc., and they should pretty much all trend the same way. That is indeed what we see.
Watch this short 10 minute clip on what we know about climate change. It directly addresses this notion that somehow there should be a *single* hypothesis and *single* magic paper that seals climate change.
btw, it is typical for AGW-opponents to slip from "there is no warming", and "you cannot be confident enough that it is warming", to "warming isn't bad". This merely shows that they had no interest in understanding the topic in the first place.
As for warming the biosphere being somehow good for the environment -- almost all our cities are in jeopardy.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say - you can keep anthropogenic CO2 in the models...heck, your models shouldn't even *care* where the CO2 came from (a human emitted molecule of CO2 doesn't have different spectral properties than a naturally emitted CO2 molecule).
Models don't care where CO2 came from, they only care about how much of it is in the atmosphere. And by "scratching anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation" I mean artificially setting CO2 variable to preindustrial levels. If what you claim is true, the correct model should show no difference in simulating current climate with preindustrial levels of CO2 and with actual historic levels. Current models show 2C temperature difference between those two runs with all other inputs exactly the same.
Furthermore, the models only show correlation, not causality, so no matter what the accuracy of a model, it cannot prove that CO2 drives temperature, rather than temperature drives CO2.
Wrong. Models don't show just correlation because unlike climate observations, we can run them as many times as we want with whatever inputs we want. If you fix all the parameters but one and then run the simulation several times for different values of that single parameter, differences in results are directly caused by changes of that single parameter.
Running a model is not the same as running an experiment. Run your model, then compare it to observations. Then, you've got two choices when you find discrepancies -> find an ad hoc special pleading, or revisit your premises.
What special pleading? Something like "our simulation mispredicted some inputs so the forecast results are off, but when we feed it the actual inputs, its hindcast is accurate"? I don't see any special pleading in that. If the inputs are garbage, there's no surprise that the results will be garbage too. And we still can't predict some climate inputs.
No it doesn't. Why can't the sun warm the poles more than the tropics due to cloud formation and albedo differences? You're making an assertion without substance there.
Because one square meter of ground at the Equator receives on average 3 times as much energy from Sun as one square meter of ground at 70 degrees latitude. Not to mention that ice and snow has much higher albedo than vegetation or bare land. If you wanted to level the field on albedo, you'd have to cover all of tropical land surface by clouds from dusk till dawn all year long.
I call BS. Your cited graph claims a forecast from 2000, but IPCC AR4 was from 2007. And did you note the huge error bars?
Tell me, what's the difference between hindcast and forecast when you run a computer simulation?
Huge error bars? I see 0.2 degrees in either direction up to 2000 and then it slowly fans out to 0.4 degrees in 2011. If there was just 0.4 degree cooling since 2000, it'd still drop out of the confidence interval.
Let's hear your response to this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/09/comparing-ipcc-1990-predictions-with-2011-data/
My only response is that when you click through to clivebest.com, figure 1 doesn't look so impressive. BTW, what exactly was I supposed to see on the picture? Put the meaning of that graph into more specific terms.
Orbital mechanics are orders of magnitude simpler than weather and climate predictions. Newtonian Gravity is only 43 arcseconds off *per century* for predicting the orbit of Mercury, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problems_with_Newton.27s_theory)
So? It's still just a model, a "toy" as you say. And what about electronics?
Perhaps you can suggest what useful information I can get if I knew that next year the global average temperature would be .01C greater than this year.
For instance, it might tell you which crop you want to sow next year if you're a farmer. If you can get a more localized prediction from the model, even better.