Thus far, there has been no good proof that there's any sort of reality in it.
Pretty much all the studies in your link conclude that there is reality to "nuclear winter", if by that you mean "significant cooling as a result of a large nuclear exchange". What's contested is mostly how much smoke there would actually be. Compared to that, the climatic effects of particulate matter in the atmosphere are relatively well understood. A few people criticized the early models which assumed that the atmospheric doesn't respond dynamically (note your link was published 20 years ago). Modern models which have dynamical circulation bear out the same results (e.g., here). The weak link remains assumptions about what gets injected into the air, not the models themselves. You can get very large variations in particulate emissions if you tweak your assumptions about how the war plays out.
Don't confuse scientists speculating on things with real empiricism. There's lots of interesting ideas and theories, something with mathematical or computer models to back them up. That doesn't mean any of it has a thing to do with reality.
Large climatic effects from particulate emissions are pretty much undeniable. You don't need a fancy theory or model to know that. Particles of that size reflect sunlight. And lo, we see it happen from volcanoes. We even know how much particulate matter the volcanoes emit. The models reproduce the observed volcanic climate effects.
The main uncertainty, as I said, is in how much burning will take place.
String theory would be a good example.
Sigh.
String theory is not a good analogy. While there may be uncertainty about nuclear winter, there is still vastly more experimental evidence underlying our understanding of particulate emissions and atmospheric circulation models than there is about string theory. Comparing the former to the most theoretical of all theoretical physics is grossly exaggerating for effect. The two levels of uncertainty are not comparable.
It is, in fact, not a theory. It makes no testable prediction.
Both those statements are false.
People always try to compare string theory to a model of particle physics like the Standard Model. That's not the right comparison. String theory is a theoretical framework. The correct comparison is to quantum field theory in general.
"Quantum field theory" makes very few testable predictions, because it makes no assumptions about what particles exist or how they interact. To make predictions, you have to construct a specific model within QFT, such as the Standard Model. That is, you have to say that quarks and leptons exist, there are three forces whose interactions take a particular form, etc.
String theory is a theory in the same sense quantum field theory is: they are both frameworks in which you can write down predictive models. String theory by itself doesn't say much other than particles are made of strings. To make predictions, you have to write down a specific model. And you can write down something like the Standard Model (or one of its GUT generalizations) in string theory. It will make the same predictions as the SM in low energy regimes.
The problem with string theory is not that it doesn't make testable predictions. It's just as predictive as QFT is; in fact, QFT is just a limiting case of string theory, so any prediction you make in low energy QFT, you can make in string theory. And its predictions are certainly testable, because you can write down string models that are demonstrably false (the same is true of QFT models, such as all models before the Standard Model). It's hard to think of an experiment that could falsify all possible string models, but the same is true of one that could falsify all possible quantum field theories.
Also from the most recent material I have read the threat of a "nuclear winter" was a gross beat up. We have had multiple volcanic events that discharged more particles into the atmosphere than would happen with optimal usage of warheads to cause a "nuclear winter"
In a serious nuclear war you can get a lot more material into the air than that. Here is some very recent analysis on the subject, using one of the latest climate models. (Try this paper and this one.) This research group also does work on volcanic events, which the model's response has been tested on. They find that even a regional Indian-Pakistan exchange, each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs, can have pretty significant global climate impacts (almost 1.5 C cooling). They do assume an "optimal" scenario, where the bombs are aimed at the highest population centers, causing maximum burning and thus particulate emission. The "winter" only hangs around for a decade or two, but it's worse for a "full scale" MAD scenario.
For the full "global thermonuclear war" scenario, they see cooling of up to 30 C (~ 60 F) over some regions! The global temperature drops by 8 C, which is colder than an ice age. It doesn't last long enough to form continental ice sheets, of course. But sticking around for a decade or two is Very Bad for plant life and the animals which depend on it. (And this is just the temperature effect, not counting the reduced sunlight for photosynthesis, any burned vegetation outside cities, effects of fallout, etc.)
A full nuclear exchange during the Cold War would have involved up to 10 gigatons of explosives. Even very large volcanic eruptions like Thera were only 0.5-1 gigatons (and I suspect that burning cities would emit more particulate matter). World War III wouldn't have been a Dinosaur Killer, and it wouldn't have sterilized the planet, but it would have had damn large effects on the biosphere.
He's probably talking about Markov chain Monte Carlo, not the simple Monte Carlo where you just draw random numbers. You can run a bunch of Markov chains in a parallel manner with no communication, so MCMC is perfectly parallelizable in that sense. However, that often doesn't help you, since the main problem is usually a slowly mixing chain. Running N poorly-mixed chains isn't much better than running one. What you'd really like is to speed up a single chain. There are parallel MCMC algorithms out there that try to swap members from parallel chains to speed up each individual chain, but they're not always worth the effort.
If you do that, I think you're turning Computer Science from having been a branch of Mathematics into some completely different animal.
Algorithmic complexity theory has always depended on what you define a "computer" to be. An algorithm is an algorithm, but its space and time requirements require assumptions about what is executing the algorithm. That doesn't mean that the algorithm is non-mathematical. It means it uses different assumptions about what a computer is. That doesn't make quantum computing any less mathematical than classical computing. It just makes the mathematics different.
It is not mathematically proven or provable (beyond the proof that the most probable state is the desired result).
Non-deterministic algorithms have probabilistic correctness guarantees, not absolute guarantees. That's one of the reasons why they're theoretically interesting to computer scientists.
And while that's perfectly good and useful for doing calculations and getting results, it is not a new kind of math, or any kind of math.
Of course it is math; just read any paper on the subject, or the lecture notes I linked. The mathematics of quantum algorithms is different from the mathematics of classical algorithms. That's why they have different computational complexities.
It's not a 'new toy' for computer science. Computer science has pretty much nothing to do with it. Mostly, it's a toy, or rather, academic persuit for theoretical physicists.
No, it's of real interest to theoretical computer science. Quantum computing defines a new class of algorithmic complexity: there are, for instance, sub-exponential quantum algorithms for problems which have only exponential-time classical solutions. There is a whole subindustry of algorithmic complexity theory devoted to exploring the differences between algorithms that can be executed on quantum computers and those which are executed on classical computers. Scott Aaronson's lecture notes are a good introduction to this subject.
I know quantum is the 'new toy' in computer science, but seriously, until these quantum computers exist and are cheap enough to fill datacentres with, no-one outside of academia is going to get any useful work from them.
Er, yes. If there aren't any quantum computers then quantum computers aren't useful. That's not the point of this work. The point of this work is primarily to present a new algorithm for which quantum computing shows exponential speedup, which is an interesting theoretical issue in computer science. If quantum computers ever become practical, then this algorithm will be too, but no one has claimed that this algorithm is useful today. (The submitter noted explicitly that it is not.)
There you go with your emotional problems again. I knew you couldn't make a single rational post about science without snide and unsupported references to zealotry.
Take your very first point for instance: CO2 time lags. It's absolutely irrational to assume that increased concentrations of CO2 800 yrs after the fact are the cause of warming rather than a consequence of it.
It's not "absolutely irrational", it's basic feedback physics. Feedbacks which were known to exist long before anyone ever actually measured the lag.
Furthermore, you engage in a classic logical fallacy: correlation equals causation.
Nope. I made no references to correlation at all. We have far more than correlational evidence between CO2 and temperature, we have basic physics which describes the quantitative effect of CO2 on temperature.
By taking a vanishingly small slice of Earth's geologic history,
I haven't taken a vanishingly small slice of Earth's history. You get substantially positive CO2 sensitivity estimates whether you look at the whole Phanerozoic, including the PETM, the Cenozoic, the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, the Holocene, or the modern instrumental record.
lining up CO2 and temp and then claiming that it is proof that CO2 invariably causes warming,
Once again, it's not correlation, it's physics.
The cult then proceeds to call a 100ppm rise to 370ppm a planetary emergency.
A 100 ppm rise is not a planetary emergency. The problem is the possible future 500-1000 ppm rise (or even greater, if we really extract and combust everything available).
yet computer models are completely incapable of explaining an ice age with atmospheric CO2 in excess of 4000ppm.
Actually there are a number of papers showing that they are capable of that. Google Scholar search for late Ordovician glaciation and CO2 ought to turn them up.
In fact, as Monckton pointed out, all you need to do is look a little further back into history and the correlation between CO2 and temperature falls apart completely.
That's because Monckton fails to grasp that CO2 isn't the only thing that affects temperature. Go to my very first post at the top of this thread and you'll find that the relationship between CO2 and temperature is more subtle than a correlation analysis implies. Anyone who claims that mere correlation either proves or disproves the link is wrong. You need to control for other aspects of the climate as well. Even modern climate models are not driven by CO2 only.
Frankly, I have better things to do with my time than point out the flaws in your logic.
I understand. It must be very frustrating for you to fail to do so time after time.
...and there you again are failing to address my point.
You didn't have a point. You merely stated that comparing models and observations is part of science, which was MY point.
And assuming you know who it or isn't a scientist.
Your profile says you're an EE. And certainly nothing you've ever said here has demonstrated any knowledge of science.
Sorry to interrupt your religious service with logic and reason.
Ah, the last refuge of the incompetent. Accuse your opponent of zealotry.
Sorry, but the only logic and reason in this exchange is what I've posted. Your comments in this thread have been entirely free of actual scientific content, coupled with a persistent refusal to read anything scientific to which I've referred you. I predict your next response will be exactly the same. It would be kind of interesting to see just how many totally vacuous posts you're willing to make before you realize that your posts have zero information content.
... and he comes back with more retarded content-free remarks. But it's always amusing to watch non-scientists lecture me on what science is.
So what happened to hypothesis, experimentation, and comparing hypothesis to empirical results?
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Models are hypotheses, and all science, including climate science, is based on comparing models to observations.
Now run along and come back when you have something useful to add to the discussion.
You sure know how to uncritically parrot things you read on skeptic web sites, don't you? You must be proud.
Al Gore's cartoons notwithstanding, C02 levels follow warming trends rather than precede them.
That's observed in the natural glacial-interglacial cycle, but not in other geological periods, such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, Cenozoic cooling, etc.
So any linkage cannot be attributed to cause.
Your logic is broken. What happens in the glacial-interglacial cycle is that orbital variations trigger a temperature change, which produces a CO2 change, which in turn amplifies the original temperature change. The magnitude of the temperature change cannot be explained without appealing to the extra effect of CO2.
And, remember, that the observed lag only occurs in the glacial-interglacial cycle, not everywhere in the geological record.
Furthermore, we have not seen any further warming since 2001. That's a 7 year pause in warming that cannot possibly be attributed to decreases in fossil fuel consumption.
There is rather large natural variability in the system, as is obvious if you look at the temperature record. A few years of noisy data don't prove or disprove anything about long term trends. The global warming trend is based on over a century of data. If that trend has changed, it will take several decades of data to determine that, not 7 years.
So, no there is nothing even close to irrefutable much less insinuating a human-caused warming trend.
Of course there is, you just choose to get your science from skeptics instead of from scientists.
In the previous post I gave a rather long list of observational evidence in favor of human-caused warming. You chose to ignore all of it in favor of (1) remarking on the glacial temperature-CO2 lag which is irrelevant to the magnitude of the CO2 forcing and (2) claiming that 7 years of data overturns all the other evidence which you ignored. Good job there.
Personally, I find it absurd that anyone could put their faith in a global cooperative government solution to global warming.
If you favor the free market, you should favor methods which correct the market distortion that is the negative externality of CO2, such as a harmonized carbon tax. Read, for instances, Nordhaus's new book. Correcting market externalities is one of the legitimate uses of regulation.
You're still proving my point for me. You engage in asinine polarizing comparisons to religion instead of arguing the science. Probably because that's all you've got.
He was invited to participate, and then they slapped a big red label on his submission saying his work was incorrect.
He was invited to participate by one of their newsletter editors. The APS itself has the full right to note that his submission, and that newsletter, does not agree with their stated views on the subject. They did note state his work was incorrect, merely that it disagrees with them and with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. Which is a completely factual statement.
They dismissed his work without providing anything concrete that would cast doubt on its credibility?
That's not the APS's place, which is yet another reason why the newsletter editor had no business publishing a faux "debate" in the first place. The proper venue is to submit it for peer review to a climate journal, where it can receive critique by someone who studies climate sensitivity for a living. Instead it was rubber-stamped for publication in a newsletter by a physicist. As I said, it's the usual creationist strategy.
You don't need silly facts to prove Monckton wrong, you're a believer.
I already listed a number of specific errors with Monckton's science, which you chose to ignore in favor of making false comparisons to religious cults. And then have the hypocrisy to claim that I ignore the science.
Nah, we'll just give his paper to some acolytes... er, students, and see how much rhetoric we can produce.
As I said, it would be a good exercise for students, since the errors are glaring enough that even they could find some of them.
I'm sure you say that to all the people who disagree with you.
No, just hypocritical ignoramuses like yourself who ignore the science in favor of polarizing rhetoric. You can see examples of me disagreeing with other people elsewhere in this thread who are civilly discussing the science.
For you, there's no need to question cult leader James Hansen's results.
Your hypocrisy continues. You're so emotionally invested in your position that you can't even discuss the science without using the word "cult".
And who said I never question Hansen? Another example of you rushing to judgement based on your zealotry. As a matter of fact, I question his latest "Target CO2" paper, because its estimate of slow feedbacks don't take into account the difference in ice sheet sizes between glacial and interglacial periods.
As for the article, neither NASA or Hansen "announced" that October was the warmest month on record. There were no announcements, papers, speeches, or press releases. Just the usual monthly data dump. As for the "hotspot" in the Arctic, that was from surface stations that hadn't reported in by the last data dump, and you can see it in the satellite record as well.
Sadly for you, despite your skeptical masturbatory fantasies, global warming isn't going to turn out to be a data artifact. The surface stations, satellites, and shipborne surface measurements all agree that the globe is warming, as do the ship and float measurements of ocean heat uptake, and indirect proxies such as Arctic sea ice, glacial retreat, species population shifts, and so on. Like I said in a previous message, this isn't where the real debate is about. It's mostly over the magnitude of climate sensitivity necessary to explain the observed warming.
In short, your response has done nothing but reiterate what I already observed: Cry censorship when there's no censorship, whine about "cults" when scientific organizations have a legitimate right to determine what their organization publishes, conflate ignorant opinion pieces by unqualified authors with scientific research by skeptical scientists, and promote your general ignorance of what's actually going on in order to further polarize the debate.
We have evidence of net positive climate feedback on scales from years to millions of years, ranging from volcanic estimates of climate sensitivity to papers like Royer's Phanerozoic analysis.
Similarly, the climate changes, ice ages occur, droughts occur, but it tends to stay within certain bands.
That's true, but "staying within certain bands" is a function of both feedback and forcing, and we're dramatically adding to the forcing. The reasons why interglacial temperatures tend to stabilize at around the same value is because (1) the Milankovitch forcing stabilizes, and (2) the greenhouse gas feedback stabilizes. We're overriding (1) and (2) in the natural cycle by forcing the system with additional CO2.
Right, so the negative feedbacks are dominant.
They're only dominant when you get to certain extremes, and don't add additional forcing, as we are.
As I mentioned previously, the evidence is that positive feedbacks are currently dominant, and have been for much of geological history.
The problem is when people claim to KNOW that there's a tipping point, and that they know where it is, and what causes it.
We know there are tipping points because they've happened in the past. We also largely know what causes many of them. (Greenland ice sheet: surface warming. Antarctic ice shelves: surface warming and ocean warming, and in glacial periods possibly mechanical weakness from overgrowth. MOC: surface warming and freshwater flux, shifts in wind patterns.) This gives us a rough idea of where they are. We don't know exactly where they are, but that doesn't mean that we don't need insurance against them. Nor are tipping points the only part of climate change that can have a negative impact.
"What the hell I'm talking about" is that you're making unwarranted assumptions that X will lead to Y and you're excluding all possibility of other factors that may mitigate this assumed causal relationship.
"Freshwater forcing in the North Atlantic will lead to an MOC weakening" is both predicted by all oceanographic theory (from the simplest of box models to modern AOGCMs) and is supported by the climate record, including current observations of the MOC structure and past records of MOC collapses; the latter indicate both the freshwater source, the change in ocean circulation, and the temperature response.
It's always possible that some different theory will be able to explain the same body of evidence, but so far none of them have. There are several different theories about the freshwater sources in past abrupt events, but they all involve changes in the MOC.
I understand this confuses and angers you, since if you're honest about it it prevents you from continuing to pretend you know (or even can know) exactly what will happen to climate in the future given a starting point and some number of the factors that may have an impact.
No one has ever claimed they will know "exactly what will happen". They can, however, make predictions based on theories which have been supported by evidence.
The fact is neither you nor anyone else has any evidence other than conjecture to support your supposed chain of events
I already described the kind of evidence which supports this chain of events, which you ignored. I even told you where to find a bibliography of the papers in which that chain of evidence is developed, which you also ignored.
I guess while we're appealing to authority: I've read all of the major papers, attended dozens of talks (and even given a few,) and read everything in the IPCC report and its bibliography.
The difference between you and me is that you're lying. Which doesn't really help your case.
The simple fact remains: none of it supports your claims.
Ooh, wow, you put it in bold. That's really convincing.
The IPCC concludes otherwise, and cites supporting references. Try reading them.
You can't even honestly assert that none of it supports my claims, because you've already admitted that you don't know the citations to the papers which develop this evidence. Nevertheless, not having read any of it, you assert the "simple fact" that this evidence doesn't support my claims. You know, that evidence that you haven't read.
So unless you can cite page numbers
I could go and dig up all the references and post them one by one, but I already told you where to find them. The IPCC report is pretty much nothing but lists of the main papers with references to them. They have several sections which discuss the MOC, paleoclimate evidence, and so on.
(that actually support every link in your made up causal chain, not just ONE!) then you should sit down and learn some more before piping up. Fool.
You're the one who's making a fool of yourself. In this whole thread you haven't made a single scientific argument. Every post consists of nothing but "I am ignorant of all the scientific work in this field and refuse read any of it anyway".
I think they're just saying that it's interesting to explore which bits of mathematics end up being relevant to physics and which don't. For instance, I doubt anyone in the early 20th century expected number theory to crop up in a physical theory, but it did. Likewise, few people anticipated that quantum computing had interesting theoretical properties to it that differ from classical computing.
It's Dansgaard-Oeschger and all we know about them is that we think they happened about 25 times during the last glacial period because of what we see in the Greenland ice cores.
We know a lot more about them than that.
We do not, however, have any evidence that leads to more fresh water,
DO events don't lead to more fresh water. They're caused by an influx of fresh water.
or that more fresh water disrupts circulation
A freshwater-disrupted circulation is what causes DO events in the first place. We have direct evidence of freshening in the North Atlantic at the same time as DO events, as well as other evidence such as drainage of glacial lakes such as Agassiz, and the isotopic record from sediment cores shows simultaneous changes in the ocean circulation.
(without any other factor disrupting the disruption,)
What the hell are you talking about?
or that the result will be any kind of a problem.
There is a literature on the negative impacts of MOC collapse too, which includes shifts in precipitation patterns, adaptation to rapid temperature change, impacts on fisheries, and so on.
You just made all that up, or are parroting someone else who just made it all up.
That's an amusing accusation coming from you, considering that everything you've posted here is profoundly ignorant.
I've read a number of the main papers on the subject and have attended five or six talks specifically on MOC collapse given by researchers in the field. There's a nice bibliography in the IPCC report on this subject if you ever feel inclined to stop making a fool out of yourself.
Climate is dominated by negative feedback mechanisms.
This is inconsistent with everything we know. Pretty much all theoretical and observational evidence supports climate sensitivities larger than the no-feedback sensitivity, i.e., a positive feedback. See any of the observational or model climate sensitivity estimates in the IPCC report, for example. For paleoclimate evidence, see e.g. Zachos et al. (2001) in Science, the work of Richard Alley, the PalaeoQUMP project, and so on. And there sure as hell is plenty of paleo evidence for the existence of climate thresholds (see MOC collapse, continental ice sheet formation and disintegration, etc.), as well as plenty of theory behind it (going all the way back to, say, Stommel's box model). See Lenton et al. (2008) in PNAS. The question is not whether those thresholds exist, but whether we're close to crossing any of them.
It's true that the climate system doesn't have a runaway positive feedback: when the response is large enough, the positive feedbacks weaken and the negative feedbacks strengthen. But all evidence is that, in our current climate state or even in fairly different climate states such as glacial periods, the net feedback is positive.
Um, what? The thermohaline cycle is when the wind-driven surface currents, like the Gulf Stream, move water from the equator to the poles, during which it cools and sinks and heads back to start the cycle over.
The Gulf Stream is one of the wind-driven components of the meridional overturning circulation. The thermohaline circulation is the density-driven component. See here, here, here, and here.
I did neglect to mention that stopping the Gulf Stream would also stop the cool water flowing back in the opposite direction, which could cause various Atlantic islands to get rather more tropical.
The cold water is deep water. If islands get more tropical it's because less surface heat is being transported northward, not because less cold water is being transported southward.
But, regardless, saying the Gulf Stream would shut down is exactly correct.
It's exactly wrong, according to what oceanographers mean by the term "Gulf Stream".
'Europe', no. Northern Europe, yes.
As I said, see Gregory et al., which is one of the main model intercomparison studies. I quote: "Although THC weakening mitigates the CO2 warming in the Atlantic region (see also section 3), there is no cooling over any substantial region in any of the TRANSIENT experiments, because the CO2 effect is larger." When you see those scary temperature anomaly maps with huge cooling, what you're looking at is generally a freshwater hosing experiment which doesn't have CO2 forcing in it, just a freshwater response which is supposed to be analogous to the true warming-induced response.
A northern European "ice age" is not really the main concern with an MOC slowdown/collapse. The main impact is probably shifts in regional precipitation patterns.
And anyone who says we need a 'large amount' of warming to collapse the current is just, essentially, guessing.
That may be a "guess", but it's an informed one, based on oceanographic modeling and paleoclimate evidence. As such, it's at least more credible than someone who says that we need little warming to collapse the current.
We don't know how much it will take, and it's probably very dependent on Greenland glaciers, which are currently melting faster than expected.
See Jungclaus et al., GRL (2006). They find that even in a high Greenland melt rate scenario, the MOC weakening in the 21st century (under a fairly high-forcing SRES A1B BAU scenario) increases from 30% to 42% by 2100. That's not insignificant, but it's not a collapse either, and they predict a recovery in the 22nd century.
It's not the last word on the subject by any means, but most researchers in this field are converging on the opinion that it's hard to collapse the MOC in a modern interglacial period. If you've just come out of an interglacial and still have some of the bigger continental ice sheets lying around, that's different.
If you want to assert it won't happen until the earth heats up that much, well, that's kinda silly.
It's backed up by highly cited published research. It's kinda silly to ignore that research, unless you're aware of any new work which I'm not. If you are, what is the citation?
But, yes, without the Gulf Stream clearing out the warm water, it would essentially keep building up in the Gulf of Mexico, and any hurricane that made it past Florida would get a giant energy boost.
Likewise: what scientific papers back up your claim that every
I mean total solar irradiance, which is what actually warms the Earth. If you're a cosmoclimatologist you could also argue solar-modulated cosmic rays, but they too disagree with the observed climate response. You could start by looking at the two papers I mentioned, and there are more.
Wow, thanks for so eloquently proving my points. Specifically, these two:
"It's so easy to label someone as a zealot. If somebody says, "Hey, your arguments are wrong for thus and such reason, and you shouldn't go around misleading people like that", just reply "Stop oppressing me you zealot!! You're trying to SILENCE THE DEBATE! Teach the controversy!!1!" Yet it contributes nothing to the actual debate. In fact, it shuts down debate by helping to polarize the issue."
and
"What they relish, however, is honest debate by an informed opponent. As opposed to 95% of the so-called "skeptics" out there -- like Plimer -- who do little but repeat long-discredited misleading or wrong arguments."
Funny you should mention real debate over climate sensitivity. That too has been censored by the Cult of Climate Change.
"Cult of Climate Change". Yeah, let's try to polarize things a little more.
Monckton is in no way, shape, or form part of the real debate over climate sensitivity. The real debate exists in the peer reviewed scientific literature, and real skeptics like Lindzen, Spencer, Shaviv, etc. do get published in that literature. Hell, even Schwartz and Chylek got published, and any halfway decent peer review would have shown the glaring errors in those papers. (Both papers were published in a journal edited by Chylek, so I imagine the reviewers he picked were not particularly rigorous.) By contrast, Monckton doesn't do any scientific research and doesn't publish anything in scientific journals. Nor is he even a scientist, climatologist or otherwise.
I'm a physicist. I followed the discussion of Monckton on the APS mailing list thread concerning the APS's energy efficiency report. The APS has every right to determine what gets published in their newsletters, and whether that reflects the considered opinion of their organization. The APS already has an official statement on climate change which has nothing to do with Monckton. The APS forums are not supposed to be the personal soapboxes of their respective editors. You'd see the same response from them if one of their editors decided to start publishing creationist literature or astrology. The APS can object to what a rogue editor is doing without being a "Cult".
If Monckton has a real argument, he can submit it to peer review by climate scientists and get it published. Bypassing peer review and going straight to the media is, as I said earlier, the creationist strategy employed when you realize you don't have a real argument. Of course, as I said, when lousy work gets rejected, you can always cry censorship there too. It's easy! Doesn't matter if it's crap or not, if it gets rejected for publication by somebody then they're "censoring" you. Funny, my Great American Novel got "censored" by the evil publishing house cult.
At the very minimum, American Physical Society newsletters are supposed to publish science editorials by physicists, or at least scientists. They could have invited a guest climate scientist who favors a low climate sensitivity value. But they didn't. They had no place inviting an opinion piece from a self-promoting journalist.
All that being said, the APS didn't even censor Monckton. They let his article be published, with a disclaimer that it disagrees with their own position. And you STILL whine about "censorship" and "the Cult of Climate Change".
As it is, they got exactly what they deserved for publishing it: a bunch of uneducated nonsense. It took me about 60 seconds flat to see how bad the "analysis" was. For example:
Question the methodology of the one paper that ALL of the IPCC's global warming theory is based upon... and be shouted down.
That's the very first error I noticed. Global warming theory is not based on one paper. The subfield of global warming theory which is climate sensitivity research isn't based on one paper either. I can think of at least a dozen published observational estima
Warming is to our advantage. Cooling is to our detriment.
Another absurdly over-generalized claim. There are plenty of disadvantages to warming, many of which are detailed in the IPCC report you keep claiming to have read.
"And the current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles (that takes place over tens of thousands of years) nor variance in solar radiation (whose measured history in the 20th century does not agree with the actual changes we've observed)"
The facts disagree.
The facts you cite do not contradict my statement.
As you note, there are Milankovitch cycles which take place over tens of thousands of years. As I noted, they are far too slow (and in the wrong direction) to account for the recent warming.
So while it is unknown whether human-induced CO2 level changes are currently influencing global temperature,
That is not unknown. You just choose to discount all the evidence which supports it.
it is well-known that "oribtal wobbles" are doing so.
It is equally well known that "orbital wobbles" don't predict the modern warming in its timing, rate, or magnitude.
In the last million years, at least, there is nothing in the factual record that suggests CO2 forcing.
As I already noted, the last million years of the glacial-interglacial cycle rather strongly supports CO2 forcing as a feedback effect of the Milankovitch cycles.
But my point is, your statement, "current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles" is utterly unsupportable.
It's not only supportable, it's completely obvious to anyone who can look at a graph for longer than 5 seconds.
A vast amount of work doesn't imply a vast amount (or even any) supporting evidence.
Nevertheless, that evidence exists.
It's absolutely true that a vast amount of work has been put in to formulating a model by which a CO2 level that trails temperatures by 800 years is actually triggering the changes that it then follows.
You imply that models were somehow fudged to have a CO2 feedback from temperature after Caillon et al. was published. This is more nonsense. The lead of temperature was predicted by Milankovitch theory long before any such lead-lag was observed, and climate-carbon cycle models have likewise had temperature feedbacks in them well before Caillon.
As for the PETM, the data is so sparse that it would be a big mistake to confuse the content of current theories on it with actual likely causes.
The data is not that sparse, and both the carbon excursion and the d18O temperature response are EXTREMELY obvious in the geological record.
Regardless, the relationship between the PETM and the modern climate is remote.
Sort of. The climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases during the PETM was likely somewhat different than the modern climate sensitivity. However, the link between the greenhouse effect and climate change during the PETM is very clear.
If it turns out that the PETM was actually caused by changes in the greenhouse effect, it doesn't really add a lot of insight into what causes temperature changes in the current climate.
It gives a ballpark estimate of how much climate change you can expect from a very large carbon excursion, which is useful since we don't have any other analogs for our current carbon excursion.
Yes... except that dissenting climatologists are persecuted. They get fired if they do not adopt the "consensus view".
Hardly. There have been a few examples of "state climatologists" abusing their title by making statements to the media that don't agree with their employer's views. Academic scientists can pretty much do what they want, which is why dissen
I defy you to reference ANY such data that suggests a causal link from CO2 to temperature change!
What a joke.
I already gave a number of such examples, which are all cited in the IPCC report you claim to have read. Not to mention the basic atomic physics of the greenhouse effect.
I've read nearly everything the IPCC has published, and there is nothing there on this central point except assumptions and models based on assumptions.
Yeah, duh.
All of science is based on assumptions. Then you test the predictions of those assumptions and see whether they agree with what you observe. Then you test the predictions of alternate assumptions and see if they agree.
CO2 change rate FOLLOWS temperature change rate, after a varying lag that averages around 800 years.
... in the specific case of the glacial-interglacial cycle. You can't say the same for other paleoclimate events, such as the PETM, Cenozoic cooling, etc.
Nor does the glacial-interglacial cycle contradict a causal link from CO2 to temperature change (as noted in the Caillon et al. paper which first described this lag). And you cannot explain the magnitude and warming/cooling rate of the glacial-interglacial cycle without the CO2 greenhouse effect.
The IPCC is an organization established for the purpose of influencing public policy and public opinion.
The IPCC is charged with providing a thorough summary of mainstream research, and is specifically forbidden from making policy recommendations.
I'm not saying that the IPCC is necessarily a bad thing in itself. But incorporating IPCC products in a scientific endeavor is a bad thing.
The IPCC does not conduct scientific research. It summarizes existing scientific research. If you want to know what the state of climate science is, the IPCC report is a primary index into the literature.
The probable effects of an Atlantic ocean circulation collapse are not as severe as you describe.
By the way, it's not the Gulf Stream — that's the primarily wind-driven component of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. What you're referring to is the thermohaline component.
Although Europe would cool, it probably won't cool to lower than pre-industrial temperatures, because of the large amount of warming necessary to collapse the current in the first place. See Gregory et al.'s GRL paper from 2005 (section 4).
I am unaware of any scientific support for the claim that an MOC collapse would turn every hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico into a Cat 5 storm headed for the midwest.
Warming will cause an ice age. Because of "crucial heat exchanging currents." Got it.
Although that's an oversimplification, that has in fact happened many times in the past (e.g., Dansgaard-Oescher events). What happens is that warming causes more fresh water to be added to the North Atlantic, due to increased precipitation and ice melt, or freshwater pulses from draining inland bodies of water (e.g., Lake Agassiz and the Younger Dryas event). This disrupts the Atlantic thermohaline circulation which carries heat from the tropics to northern Europe. That region will experience strong cooling, although not all regions do. Numerous such cooling events are recorded in the geologic record, including plunging the regional climate back into an ice age shortly after recovery from one. However, it is thought that glacial climates are more susceptible to such events than is the current interglacial. Current estimates are that even if the thermohaline circulation shuts down, Europe will still warm, since the cooling there is counteracted by the large amount of warming necessary to trigger such a collapse.
Some of you have bought so heavily into this crap that you can't even tell how ridiculous you sound.
Some of you are so pathetically unaware of everything we know about climate that you can't even tell how ignorant you sound.
Slashdot Mirror
Sagan did make that prediction. He died in 1996, after the war.
Thus far, there has been no good proof that there's any sort of reality in it.
Pretty much all the studies in your link conclude that there is reality to "nuclear winter", if by that you mean "significant cooling as a result of a large nuclear exchange". What's contested is mostly how much smoke there would actually be. Compared to that, the climatic effects of particulate matter in the atmosphere are relatively well understood. A few people criticized the early models which assumed that the atmospheric doesn't respond dynamically (note your link was published 20 years ago). Modern models which have dynamical circulation bear out the same results (e.g., here). The weak link remains assumptions about what gets injected into the air, not the models themselves. You can get very large variations in particulate emissions if you tweak your assumptions about how the war plays out.
Don't confuse scientists speculating on things with real empiricism. There's lots of interesting ideas and theories, something with mathematical or computer models to back them up. That doesn't mean any of it has a thing to do with reality.
Large climatic effects from particulate emissions are pretty much undeniable. You don't need a fancy theory or model to know that. Particles of that size reflect sunlight. And lo, we see it happen from volcanoes. We even know how much particulate matter the volcanoes emit. The models reproduce the observed volcanic climate effects.
The main uncertainty, as I said, is in how much burning will take place.
String theory would be a good example.
Sigh.
String theory is not a good analogy. While there may be uncertainty about nuclear winter, there is still vastly more experimental evidence underlying our understanding of particulate emissions and atmospheric circulation models than there is about string theory. Comparing the former to the most theoretical of all theoretical physics is grossly exaggerating for effect. The two levels of uncertainty are not comparable.
It is, in fact, not a theory. It makes no testable prediction.
Both those statements are false.
People always try to compare string theory to a model of particle physics like the Standard Model. That's not the right comparison. String theory is a theoretical framework. The correct comparison is to quantum field theory in general.
"Quantum field theory" makes very few testable predictions, because it makes no assumptions about what particles exist or how they interact. To make predictions, you have to construct a specific model within QFT, such as the Standard Model. That is, you have to say that quarks and leptons exist, there are three forces whose interactions take a particular form, etc.
String theory is a theory in the same sense quantum field theory is: they are both frameworks in which you can write down predictive models. String theory by itself doesn't say much other than particles are made of strings. To make predictions, you have to write down a specific model. And you can write down something like the Standard Model (or one of its GUT generalizations) in string theory. It will make the same predictions as the SM in low energy regimes.
The problem with string theory is not that it doesn't make testable predictions. It's just as predictive as QFT is; in fact, QFT is just a limiting case of string theory, so any prediction you make in low energy QFT, you can make in string theory. And its predictions are certainly testable, because you can write down string models that are demonstrably false (the same is true of QFT models, such as all models before the Standard Model). It's hard to think of an experiment that could falsify all possible string models, but the same is true of one that could falsify all possible quantum field theories.
The
Also from the most recent material I have read the threat of a "nuclear winter" was a gross beat up. We have had multiple volcanic events that discharged more particles into the atmosphere than would happen with optimal usage of warheads to cause a "nuclear winter"
In a serious nuclear war you can get a lot more material into the air than that. Here is some very recent analysis on the subject, using one of the latest climate models. (Try this paper and this one.) This research group also does work on volcanic events, which the model's response has been tested on. They find that even a regional Indian-Pakistan exchange, each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs, can have pretty significant global climate impacts (almost 1.5 C cooling). They do assume an "optimal" scenario, where the bombs are aimed at the highest population centers, causing maximum burning and thus particulate emission. The "winter" only hangs around for a decade or two, but it's worse for a "full scale" MAD scenario.
For the full "global thermonuclear war" scenario, they see cooling of up to 30 C (~ 60 F) over some regions! The global temperature drops by 8 C, which is colder than an ice age. It doesn't last long enough to form continental ice sheets, of course. But sticking around for a decade or two is Very Bad for plant life and the animals which depend on it. (And this is just the temperature effect, not counting the reduced sunlight for photosynthesis, any burned vegetation outside cities, effects of fallout, etc.)
A full nuclear exchange during the Cold War would have involved up to 10 gigatons of explosives. Even very large volcanic eruptions like Thera were only 0.5-1 gigatons (and I suspect that burning cities would emit more particulate matter). World War III wouldn't have been a Dinosaur Killer, and it wouldn't have sterilized the planet, but it would have had damn large effects on the biosphere.
He's probably talking about Markov chain Monte Carlo, not the simple Monte Carlo where you just draw random numbers. You can run a bunch of Markov chains in a parallel manner with no communication, so MCMC is perfectly parallelizable in that sense. However, that often doesn't help you, since the main problem is usually a slowly mixing chain. Running N poorly-mixed chains isn't much better than running one. What you'd really like is to speed up a single chain. There are parallel MCMC algorithms out there that try to swap members from parallel chains to speed up each individual chain, but they're not always worth the effort.
If you do that, I think you're turning Computer Science from having been a branch of Mathematics into some completely different animal.
Algorithmic complexity theory has always depended on what you define a "computer" to be. An algorithm is an algorithm, but its space and time requirements require assumptions about what is executing the algorithm. That doesn't mean that the algorithm is non-mathematical. It means it uses different assumptions about what a computer is. That doesn't make quantum computing any less mathematical than classical computing. It just makes the mathematics different.
It is not mathematically proven or provable (beyond the proof that the most probable state is the desired result).
Non-deterministic algorithms have probabilistic correctness guarantees, not absolute guarantees. That's one of the reasons why they're theoretically interesting to computer scientists.
And while that's perfectly good and useful for doing calculations and getting results, it is not a new kind of math, or any kind of math.
Of course it is math; just read any paper on the subject, or the lecture notes I linked. The mathematics of quantum algorithms is different from the mathematics of classical algorithms. That's why they have different computational complexities.
It's not a 'new toy' for computer science. Computer science has pretty much nothing to do with it. Mostly, it's a toy, or rather, academic persuit for theoretical physicists.
No, it's of real interest to theoretical computer science. Quantum computing defines a new class of algorithmic complexity: there are, for instance, sub-exponential quantum algorithms for problems which have only exponential-time classical solutions. There is a whole subindustry of algorithmic complexity theory devoted to exploring the differences between algorithms that can be executed on quantum computers and those which are executed on classical computers. Scott Aaronson's lecture notes are a good introduction to this subject.
I know quantum is the 'new toy' in computer science, but seriously, until these quantum computers exist and are cheap enough to fill datacentres with, no-one outside of academia is going to get any useful work from them.
Er, yes. If there aren't any quantum computers then quantum computers aren't useful. That's not the point of this work. The point of this work is primarily to present a new algorithm for which quantum computing shows exponential speedup, which is an interesting theoretical issue in computer science. If quantum computers ever become practical, then this algorithm will be too, but no one has claimed that this algorithm is useful today. (The submitter noted explicitly that it is not.)
There you go with your emotional problems again. I knew you couldn't make a single rational post about science without snide and unsupported references to zealotry.
Take your very first point for instance: CO2 time lags. It's absolutely irrational to assume that increased concentrations of CO2 800 yrs after the fact are the cause of warming rather than a consequence of it.
It's not "absolutely irrational", it's basic feedback physics. Feedbacks which were known to exist long before anyone ever actually measured the lag.
Furthermore, you engage in a classic logical fallacy: correlation equals causation.
Nope. I made no references to correlation at all. We have far more than correlational evidence between CO2 and temperature, we have basic physics which describes the quantitative effect of CO2 on temperature.
By taking a vanishingly small slice of Earth's geologic history,
I haven't taken a vanishingly small slice of Earth's history. You get substantially positive CO2 sensitivity estimates whether you look at the whole Phanerozoic, including the PETM, the Cenozoic, the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, the Holocene, or the modern instrumental record.
lining up CO2 and temp and then claiming that it is proof that CO2 invariably causes warming,
Once again, it's not correlation, it's physics.
The cult then proceeds to call a 100ppm rise to 370ppm a planetary emergency.
A 100 ppm rise is not a planetary emergency. The problem is the possible future 500-1000 ppm rise (or even greater, if we really extract and combust everything available).
yet computer models are completely incapable of explaining an ice age with atmospheric CO2 in excess of 4000ppm.
Actually there are a number of papers showing that they are capable of that. Google Scholar search for late Ordovician glaciation and CO2 ought to turn them up.
In fact, as Monckton pointed out, all you need to do is look a little further back into history and the correlation between CO2 and temperature falls apart completely.
That's because Monckton fails to grasp that CO2 isn't the only thing that affects temperature. Go to my very first post at the top of this thread and you'll find that the relationship between CO2 and temperature is more subtle than a correlation analysis implies. Anyone who claims that mere correlation either proves or disproves the link is wrong. You need to control for other aspects of the climate as well. Even modern climate models are not driven by CO2 only.
Frankly, I have better things to do with my time than point out the flaws in your logic.
I understand. It must be very frustrating for you to fail to do so time after time.
...and there you again are failing to address my point.
You didn't have a point. You merely stated that comparing models and observations is part of science, which was MY point.
And assuming you know who it or isn't a scientist.
Your profile says you're an EE. And certainly nothing you've ever said here has demonstrated any knowledge of science.
Sorry to interrupt your religious service with logic and reason.
Ah, the last refuge of the incompetent. Accuse your opponent of zealotry.
Sorry, but the only logic and reason in this exchange is what I've posted. Your comments in this thread have been entirely free of actual scientific content, coupled with a persistent refusal to read anything scientific to which I've referred you. I predict your next response will be exactly the same. It would be kind of interesting to see just how many totally vacuous posts you're willing to make before you realize that your posts have zero information content.
... and he comes back with more retarded content-free remarks. But it's always amusing to watch non-scientists lecture me on what science is.
So what happened to hypothesis, experimentation, and comparing hypothesis to empirical results?
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Models are hypotheses, and all science, including climate science, is based on comparing models to observations.
Now run along and come back when you have something useful to add to the discussion.
You sure know how to uncritically parrot things you read on skeptic web sites, don't you? You must be proud.
Al Gore's cartoons notwithstanding, C02 levels follow warming trends rather than precede them.
That's observed in the natural glacial-interglacial cycle, but not in other geological periods, such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, Cenozoic cooling, etc.
So any linkage cannot be attributed to cause.
Your logic is broken. What happens in the glacial-interglacial cycle is that orbital variations trigger a temperature change, which produces a CO2 change, which in turn amplifies the original temperature change. The magnitude of the temperature change cannot be explained without appealing to the extra effect of CO2.
And, remember, that the observed lag only occurs in the glacial-interglacial cycle, not everywhere in the geological record.
Furthermore, we have not seen any further warming since 2001. That's a 7 year pause in warming that cannot possibly be attributed to decreases in fossil fuel consumption.
There is rather large natural variability in the system, as is obvious if you look at the temperature record. A few years of noisy data don't prove or disprove anything about long term trends. The global warming trend is based on over a century of data. If that trend has changed, it will take several decades of data to determine that, not 7 years.
So, no there is nothing even close to irrefutable much less insinuating a human-caused warming trend.
Of course there is, you just choose to get your science from skeptics instead of from scientists.
In the previous post I gave a rather long list of observational evidence in favor of human-caused warming. You chose to ignore all of it in favor of (1) remarking on the glacial temperature-CO2 lag which is irrelevant to the magnitude of the CO2 forcing and (2) claiming that 7 years of data overturns all the other evidence which you ignored. Good job there.
Personally, I find it absurd that anyone could put their faith in a global cooperative government solution to global warming.
If you favor the free market, you should favor methods which correct the market distortion that is the negative externality of CO2, such as a harmonized carbon tax. Read, for instances, Nordhaus's new book. Correcting market externalities is one of the legitimate uses of regulation.
You're still proving my point for me. You engage in asinine polarizing comparisons to religion instead of arguing the science. Probably because that's all you've got.
He was invited to participate, and then they slapped a big red label on his submission saying his work was incorrect.
He was invited to participate by one of their newsletter editors. The APS itself has the full right to note that his submission, and that newsletter, does not agree with their stated views on the subject. They did note state his work was incorrect, merely that it disagrees with them and with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. Which is a completely factual statement.
They dismissed his work without providing anything concrete that would cast doubt on its credibility?
That's not the APS's place, which is yet another reason why the newsletter editor had no business publishing a faux "debate" in the first place. The proper venue is to submit it for peer review to a climate journal, where it can receive critique by someone who studies climate sensitivity for a living. Instead it was rubber-stamped for publication in a newsletter by a physicist. As I said, it's the usual creationist strategy.
You don't need silly facts to prove Monckton wrong, you're a believer.
I already listed a number of specific errors with Monckton's science, which you chose to ignore in favor of making false comparisons to religious cults. And then have the hypocrisy to claim that I ignore the science.
Nah, we'll just give his paper to some acolytes... er, students, and see how much rhetoric we can produce.
As I said, it would be a good exercise for students, since the errors are glaring enough that even they could find some of them.
I'm sure you say that to all the people who disagree with you.
No, just hypocritical ignoramuses like yourself who ignore the science in favor of polarizing rhetoric. You can see examples of me disagreeing with other people elsewhere in this thread who are civilly discussing the science.
For you, there's no need to question cult leader James Hansen's results.
Your hypocrisy continues. You're so emotionally invested in your position that you can't even discuss the science without using the word "cult".
And who said I never question Hansen? Another example of you rushing to judgement based on your zealotry. As a matter of fact, I question his latest "Target CO2" paper, because its estimate of slow feedbacks don't take into account the difference in ice sheet sizes between glacial and interglacial periods.
As for the article, neither NASA or Hansen "announced" that October was the warmest month on record. There were no announcements, papers, speeches, or press releases. Just the usual monthly data dump. As for the "hotspot" in the Arctic, that was from surface stations that hadn't reported in by the last data dump, and you can see it in the satellite record as well.
Sadly for you, despite your skeptical masturbatory fantasies, global warming isn't going to turn out to be a data artifact. The surface stations, satellites, and shipborne surface measurements all agree that the globe is warming, as do the ship and float measurements of ocean heat uptake, and indirect proxies such as Arctic sea ice, glacial retreat, species population shifts, and so on. Like I said in a previous message, this isn't where the real debate is about. It's mostly over the magnitude of climate sensitivity necessary to explain the observed warming.
In short, your response has done nothing but reiterate what I already observed: Cry censorship when there's no censorship, whine about "cults" when scientific organizations have a legitimate right to determine what their organization publishes, conflate ignorant opinion pieces by unqualified authors with scientific research by skeptical scientists, and promote your general ignorance of what's actually going on in order to further polarize the debate.
But only in the short term.
We have evidence of net positive climate feedback on scales from years to millions of years, ranging from volcanic estimates of climate sensitivity to papers like Royer's Phanerozoic analysis.
Similarly, the climate changes, ice ages occur, droughts occur, but it tends to stay within certain bands.
That's true, but "staying within certain bands" is a function of both feedback and forcing, and we're dramatically adding to the forcing. The reasons why interglacial temperatures tend to stabilize at around the same value is because (1) the Milankovitch forcing stabilizes, and (2) the greenhouse gas feedback stabilizes. We're overriding (1) and (2) in the natural cycle by forcing the system with additional CO2.
Right, so the negative feedbacks are dominant.
They're only dominant when you get to certain extremes, and don't add additional forcing, as we are.
As I mentioned previously, the evidence is that positive feedbacks are currently dominant, and have been for much of geological history.
The problem is when people claim to KNOW that there's a tipping point, and that they know where it is, and what causes it.
We know there are tipping points because they've happened in the past. We also largely know what causes many of them. (Greenland ice sheet: surface warming. Antarctic ice shelves: surface warming and ocean warming, and in glacial periods possibly mechanical weakness from overgrowth. MOC: surface warming and freshwater flux, shifts in wind patterns.) This gives us a rough idea of where they are. We don't know exactly where they are, but that doesn't mean that we don't need insurance against them. Nor are tipping points the only part of climate change that can have a negative impact.
"What the hell I'm talking about" is that you're making unwarranted assumptions that X will lead to Y and you're excluding all possibility of other factors that may mitigate this assumed causal relationship.
"Freshwater forcing in the North Atlantic will lead to an MOC weakening" is both predicted by all oceanographic theory (from the simplest of box models to modern AOGCMs) and is supported by the climate record, including current observations of the MOC structure and past records of MOC collapses; the latter indicate both the freshwater source, the change in ocean circulation, and the temperature response.
It's always possible that some different theory will be able to explain the same body of evidence, but so far none of them have. There are several different theories about the freshwater sources in past abrupt events, but they all involve changes in the MOC.
I understand this confuses and angers you, since if you're honest about it it prevents you from continuing to pretend you know (or even can know) exactly what will happen to climate in the future given a starting point and some number of the factors that may have an impact.
No one has ever claimed they will know "exactly what will happen". They can, however, make predictions based on theories which have been supported by evidence.
The fact is neither you nor anyone else has any evidence other than conjecture to support your supposed chain of events
I already described the kind of evidence which supports this chain of events, which you ignored. I even told you where to find a bibliography of the papers in which that chain of evidence is developed, which you also ignored.
I guess while we're appealing to authority: I've read all of the major papers, attended dozens of talks (and even given a few,) and read everything in the IPCC report and its bibliography.
The difference between you and me is that you're lying. Which doesn't really help your case.
The simple fact remains: none of it supports your claims.
Ooh, wow, you put it in bold. That's really convincing.
The IPCC concludes otherwise, and cites supporting references. Try reading them.
You can't even honestly assert that none of it supports my claims, because you've already admitted that you don't know the citations to the papers which develop this evidence. Nevertheless, not having read any of it, you assert the "simple fact" that this evidence doesn't support my claims. You know, that evidence that you haven't read.
So unless you can cite page numbers
I could go and dig up all the references and post them one by one, but I already told you where to find them. The IPCC report is pretty much nothing but lists of the main papers with references to them. They have several sections which discuss the MOC, paleoclimate evidence, and so on.
(that actually support every link in your made up causal chain, not just ONE!) then you should sit down and learn some more before piping up. Fool.
You're the one who's making a fool of yourself. In this whole thread you haven't made a single scientific argument. Every post consists of nothing but "I am ignorant of all the scientific work in this field and refuse read any of it anyway".
I think they're just saying that it's interesting to explore which bits of mathematics end up being relevant to physics and which don't. For instance, I doubt anyone in the early 20th century expected number theory to crop up in a physical theory, but it did. Likewise, few people anticipated that quantum computing had interesting theoretical properties to it that differ from classical computing.
It's Dansgaard-Oeschger and all we know about them is that we think they happened about 25 times during the last glacial period because of what we see in the Greenland ice cores.
We know a lot more about them than that.
We do not, however, have any evidence that leads to more fresh water,
DO events don't lead to more fresh water. They're caused by an influx of fresh water.
or that more fresh water disrupts circulation
A freshwater-disrupted circulation is what causes DO events in the first place. We have direct evidence of freshening in the North Atlantic at the same time as DO events, as well as other evidence such as drainage of glacial lakes such as Agassiz, and the isotopic record from sediment cores shows simultaneous changes in the ocean circulation.
(without any other factor disrupting the disruption,)
What the hell are you talking about?
or that the result will be any kind of a problem.
There is a literature on the negative impacts of MOC collapse too, which includes shifts in precipitation patterns, adaptation to rapid temperature change, impacts on fisheries, and so on.
You just made all that up, or are parroting someone else who just made it all up.
That's an amusing accusation coming from you, considering that everything you've posted here is profoundly ignorant.
I've read a number of the main papers on the subject and have attended five or six talks specifically on MOC collapse given by researchers in the field. There's a nice bibliography in the IPCC report on this subject if you ever feel inclined to stop making a fool out of yourself.
Climate is dominated by negative feedback mechanisms.
This is inconsistent with everything we know. Pretty much all theoretical and observational evidence supports climate sensitivities larger than the no-feedback sensitivity, i.e., a positive feedback. See any of the observational or model climate sensitivity estimates in the IPCC report, for example. For paleoclimate evidence, see e.g. Zachos et al. (2001) in Science, the work of Richard Alley, the PalaeoQUMP project, and so on. And there sure as hell is plenty of paleo evidence for the existence of climate thresholds (see MOC collapse, continental ice sheet formation and disintegration, etc.), as well as plenty of theory behind it (going all the way back to, say, Stommel's box model). See Lenton et al. (2008) in PNAS. The question is not whether those thresholds exist, but whether we're close to crossing any of them.
It's true that the climate system doesn't have a runaway positive feedback: when the response is large enough, the positive feedbacks weaken and the negative feedbacks strengthen. But all evidence is that, in our current climate state or even in fairly different climate states such as glacial periods, the net feedback is positive.
Um, what? The thermohaline cycle is when the wind-driven surface currents, like the Gulf Stream, move water from the equator to the poles, during which it cools and sinks and heads back to start the cycle over.
The Gulf Stream is one of the wind-driven components of the meridional overturning circulation. The thermohaline circulation is the density-driven component. See here, here, here, and here.
I did neglect to mention that stopping the Gulf Stream would also stop the cool water flowing back in the opposite direction, which could cause various Atlantic islands to get rather more tropical.
The cold water is deep water. If islands get more tropical it's because less surface heat is being transported northward, not because less cold water is being transported southward.
But, regardless, saying the Gulf Stream would shut down is exactly correct.
It's exactly wrong, according to what oceanographers mean by the term "Gulf Stream".
'Europe', no. Northern Europe, yes.
As I said, see Gregory et al., which is one of the main model intercomparison studies. I quote: "Although THC weakening mitigates the CO2 warming in the Atlantic region (see also section 3), there is no cooling over any substantial region in any of the TRANSIENT experiments, because the CO2 effect is larger." When you see those scary temperature anomaly maps with huge cooling, what you're looking at is generally a freshwater hosing experiment which doesn't have CO2 forcing in it, just a freshwater response which is supposed to be analogous to the true warming-induced response.
A northern European "ice age" is not really the main concern with an MOC slowdown/collapse. The main impact is probably shifts in regional precipitation patterns.
And anyone who says we need a 'large amount' of warming to collapse the current is just, essentially, guessing.
That may be a "guess", but it's an informed one, based on oceanographic modeling and paleoclimate evidence. As such, it's at least more credible than someone who says that we need little warming to collapse the current.
We don't know how much it will take, and it's probably very dependent on Greenland glaciers, which are currently melting faster than expected.
See Jungclaus et al., GRL (2006). They find that even in a high Greenland melt rate scenario, the MOC weakening in the 21st century (under a fairly high-forcing SRES A1B BAU scenario) increases from 30% to 42% by 2100. That's not insignificant, but it's not a collapse either, and they predict a recovery in the 22nd century.
It's not the last word on the subject by any means, but most researchers in this field are converging on the opinion that it's hard to collapse the MOC in a modern interglacial period. If you've just come out of an interglacial and still have some of the bigger continental ice sheets lying around, that's different.
If you want to assert it won't happen until the earth heats up that much, well, that's kinda silly.
It's backed up by highly cited published research. It's kinda silly to ignore that research, unless you're aware of any new work which I'm not. If you are, what is the citation?
But, yes, without the Gulf Stream clearing out the warm water, it would essentially keep building up in the Gulf of Mexico, and any hurricane that made it past Florida would get a giant energy boost.
Likewise: what scientific papers back up your claim that every
If by "Solar Record" you mean the sunspot cycle
I mean total solar irradiance, which is what actually warms the Earth. If you're a cosmoclimatologist you could also argue solar-modulated cosmic rays, but they too disagree with the observed climate response. You could start by looking at the two papers I mentioned, and there are more.
Wow, thanks for so eloquently proving my points. Specifically, these two:
"It's so easy to label someone as a zealot. If somebody says, "Hey, your arguments are wrong for thus and such reason, and you shouldn't go around misleading people like that", just reply "Stop oppressing me you zealot!! You're trying to SILENCE THE DEBATE! Teach the controversy!!1!" Yet it contributes nothing to the actual debate. In fact, it shuts down debate by helping to polarize the issue."
and
"What they relish, however, is honest debate by an informed opponent. As opposed to 95% of the so-called "skeptics" out there -- like Plimer -- who do little but repeat long-discredited misleading or wrong arguments."
Funny you should mention real debate over climate sensitivity. That too has been censored by the Cult of Climate Change.
"Cult of Climate Change". Yeah, let's try to polarize things a little more.
Monckton is in no way, shape, or form part of the real debate over climate sensitivity. The real debate exists in the peer reviewed scientific literature, and real skeptics like Lindzen, Spencer, Shaviv, etc. do get published in that literature. Hell, even Schwartz and Chylek got published, and any halfway decent peer review would have shown the glaring errors in those papers. (Both papers were published in a journal edited by Chylek, so I imagine the reviewers he picked were not particularly rigorous.) By contrast, Monckton doesn't do any scientific research and doesn't publish anything in scientific journals. Nor is he even a scientist, climatologist or otherwise.
I'm a physicist. I followed the discussion of Monckton on the APS mailing list thread concerning the APS's energy efficiency report. The APS has every right to determine what gets published in their newsletters, and whether that reflects the considered opinion of their organization. The APS already has an official statement on climate change which has nothing to do with Monckton. The APS forums are not supposed to be the personal soapboxes of their respective editors. You'd see the same response from them if one of their editors decided to start publishing creationist literature or astrology. The APS can object to what a rogue editor is doing without being a "Cult".
If Monckton has a real argument, he can submit it to peer review by climate scientists and get it published. Bypassing peer review and going straight to the media is, as I said earlier, the creationist strategy employed when you realize you don't have a real argument. Of course, as I said, when lousy work gets rejected, you can always cry censorship there too. It's easy! Doesn't matter if it's crap or not, if it gets rejected for publication by somebody then they're "censoring" you. Funny, my Great American Novel got "censored" by the evil publishing house cult.
At the very minimum, American Physical Society newsletters are supposed to publish science editorials by physicists, or at least scientists. They could have invited a guest climate scientist who favors a low climate sensitivity value. But they didn't. They had no place inviting an opinion piece from a self-promoting journalist.
All that being said, the APS didn't even censor Monckton. They let his article be published, with a disclaimer that it disagrees with their own position. And you STILL whine about "censorship" and "the Cult of Climate Change".
As it is, they got exactly what they deserved for publishing it: a bunch of uneducated nonsense. It took me about 60 seconds flat to see how bad the "analysis" was. For example:
Question the methodology of the one paper that ALL of the IPCC's global warming theory is based upon... and be shouted down.
That's the very first error I noticed. Global warming theory is not based on one paper. The subfield of global warming theory which is climate sensitivity research isn't based on one paper either. I can think of at least a dozen published observational estima
Warming is to our advantage. Cooling is to our detriment.
Another absurdly over-generalized claim. There are plenty of disadvantages to warming, many of which are detailed in the IPCC report you keep claiming to have read.
"And the current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles (that takes place over tens of thousands of years) nor variance in solar radiation (whose measured history in the 20th century does not agree with the actual changes we've observed)"
The facts disagree.
The facts you cite do not contradict my statement.
As you note, there are Milankovitch cycles which take place over tens of thousands of years. As I noted, they are far too slow (and in the wrong direction) to account for the recent warming.
So while it is unknown whether human-induced CO2 level changes are currently influencing global temperature,
That is not unknown. You just choose to discount all the evidence which supports it.
it is well-known that "oribtal wobbles" are doing so.
It is equally well known that "orbital wobbles" don't predict the modern warming in its timing, rate, or magnitude.
In the last million years, at least, there is nothing in the factual record that suggests CO2 forcing.
As I already noted, the last million years of the glacial-interglacial cycle rather strongly supports CO2 forcing as a feedback effect of the Milankovitch cycles.
But my point is, your statement, "current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles" is utterly unsupportable.
It's not only supportable, it's completely obvious to anyone who can look at a graph for longer than 5 seconds.
A vast amount of work doesn't imply a vast amount (or even any) supporting evidence.
Nevertheless, that evidence exists.
It's absolutely true that a vast amount of work has been put in to formulating a model by which a CO2 level that trails temperatures by 800 years is actually triggering the changes that it then follows.
You imply that models were somehow fudged to have a CO2 feedback from temperature after Caillon et al. was published. This is more nonsense. The lead of temperature was predicted by Milankovitch theory long before any such lead-lag was observed, and climate-carbon cycle models have likewise had temperature feedbacks in them well before Caillon.
As for the PETM, the data is so sparse that it would be a big mistake to confuse the content of current theories on it with actual likely causes.
The data is not that sparse, and both the carbon excursion and the d18O temperature response are EXTREMELY obvious in the geological record.
Regardless, the relationship between the PETM and the modern climate is remote.
Sort of. The climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases during the PETM was likely somewhat different than the modern climate sensitivity. However, the link between the greenhouse effect and climate change during the PETM is very clear.
If it turns out that the PETM was actually caused by changes in the greenhouse effect, it doesn't really add a lot of insight into what causes temperature changes in the current climate.
It gives a ballpark estimate of how much climate change you can expect from a very large carbon excursion, which is useful since we don't have any other analogs for our current carbon excursion.
Yes... except that dissenting climatologists are persecuted. They get fired if they do not adopt the "consensus view".
Hardly. There have been a few examples of "state climatologists" abusing their title by making statements to the media that don't agree with their employer's views. Academic scientists can pretty much do what they want, which is why dissen
I defy you to reference ANY such data that suggests a causal link from CO2 to temperature change!
What a joke.
I already gave a number of such examples, which are all cited in the IPCC report you claim to have read. Not to mention the basic atomic physics of the greenhouse effect.
I've read nearly everything the IPCC has published, and there is nothing there on this central point except assumptions and models based on assumptions.
Yeah, duh.
All of science is based on assumptions. Then you test the predictions of those assumptions and see whether they agree with what you observe. Then you test the predictions of alternate assumptions and see if they agree.
CO2 change rate FOLLOWS temperature change rate, after a varying lag that averages around 800 years.
... in the specific case of the glacial-interglacial cycle. You can't say the same for other paleoclimate events, such as the PETM, Cenozoic cooling, etc.
Nor does the glacial-interglacial cycle contradict a causal link from CO2 to temperature change (as noted in the Caillon et al. paper which first described this lag). And you cannot explain the magnitude and warming/cooling rate of the glacial-interglacial cycle without the CO2 greenhouse effect.
The IPCC is an organization established for the purpose of influencing public policy and public opinion.
The IPCC is charged with providing a thorough summary of mainstream research, and is specifically forbidden from making policy recommendations.
I'm not saying that the IPCC is necessarily a bad thing in itself. But incorporating IPCC products in a scientific endeavor is a bad thing.
The IPCC does not conduct scientific research. It summarizes existing scientific research. If you want to know what the state of climate science is, the IPCC report is a primary index into the literature.
The probable effects of an Atlantic ocean circulation collapse are not as severe as you describe.
By the way, it's not the Gulf Stream — that's the primarily wind-driven component of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. What you're referring to is the thermohaline component.
Although Europe would cool, it probably won't cool to lower than pre-industrial temperatures, because of the large amount of warming necessary to collapse the current in the first place. See Gregory et al.'s GRL paper from 2005 (section 4).
I am unaware of any scientific support for the claim that an MOC collapse would turn every hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico into a Cat 5 storm headed for the midwest.
Warming will cause an ice age. Because of "crucial heat exchanging currents." Got it.
Although that's an oversimplification, that has in fact happened many times in the past (e.g., Dansgaard-Oescher events). What happens is that warming causes more fresh water to be added to the North Atlantic, due to increased precipitation and ice melt, or freshwater pulses from draining inland bodies of water (e.g., Lake Agassiz and the Younger Dryas event). This disrupts the Atlantic thermohaline circulation which carries heat from the tropics to northern Europe. That region will experience strong cooling, although not all regions do. Numerous such cooling events are recorded in the geologic record, including plunging the regional climate back into an ice age shortly after recovery from one. However, it is thought that glacial climates are more susceptible to such events than is the current interglacial. Current estimates are that even if the thermohaline circulation shuts down, Europe will still warm, since the cooling there is counteracted by the large amount of warming necessary to trigger such a collapse.
Some of you have bought so heavily into this crap that you can't even tell how ridiculous you sound.
Some of you are so pathetically unaware of everything we know about climate that you can't even tell how ignorant you sound.
The consensus is based on both models and observations. Clue: all science is based on models and observations.