Which, you've admitted, is completely unknown information. And yet, you blithely believe you can discern between natural climate change, and unnatural climate change:)
Geeze, how dumb are you. It's completely unknown information in your hypothetical example which was specifically contrived to only present information about CO2 and temperature. In reality, we know something about natural variability and radiative forcings.
Really? So if all the human CO2 emissions ever made only caused, say, an additional 0.01C warming per century, that's perfectly acceptable for you?
I don't know what you're talking about. All my statements are predicated on the IPCC range of warming. Given that, whether the impacts are going to be "bad" or not is a subjective statement, about which I have my own opinions.
In the world most simple model, that is correct. In reality, we observe significant differences.
I've already explained what's wrong with that claim, so I don't know why you're still repeating it, other than your ideological biases.
Some great comments on that:
Even if I believe some blog's unpublished error analysis, that own analysis still strongly favors a positive water vapor feedback.
If you want to present evidence favoring a small water vapor feedback. go ahead.
So...long story short...they've got no idea what natural climate change looked like in the past, so they can't distinguish it in the present.
Don't be a fool. Just because they don't have natural forcings in the past doesn't mean they don't have them now.
So, we've got data networks that are still in their infancy, by the science is settled?:) Nice.
"Data networks" have nothing to do with it. It's how you use the data to initialize models that's the issue. Furthermore, the inability of models to be initialized only affects their short term predictions, which are obviously strongly initial value dependent, not the long term predictions, which are boundary value dependent. I already explained this.
If an astrologist had 20% accuracy, would that make astrology science? Show me your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement:)
I don't think you understand what a falsifiable hypothesis statement is. You haven't presented any yourself, despite ranting about null hypotheses.
Again, totally irrelevant to the attribution question. It doesn't matter what causes ENSO when ENSO can't cause the recent warming (see ocean heat data again).
And there's your problem - you're claiming certainty where you simply can't. When post-high human CO2 emissions warming is indistinguishable from pre-high human CO2 emissions warming,
Look, this is nonsense. If you can't understand that you can distinguish between scenarios by looking at causes as well as effects (and looking at more effects than a gross quantity like "global average surface temperature"), then you're just willfully ignoring evidence and are scientifically incompetent. I can't help you.
What you need is a falsifiable hypothesis statement.
You don't have a falsifiable hypothesis statement. "Natural variability" isn't even a hypothesis until you start specifying what it is. You're "not even wrong".
The null hypothesis is that all observed climate change in the 1900s was caused by the same mechanisms as all observed climate change before the 1900s.
Nope. That would be a stupid null hypothesis, because we know that there are non-natural effects that weren't present in the 1900s. The null hypothesis is relative to your scientific knowledge. Nobody's going to say that my null hypothesis is "the ball will hover if I let go of it". It's going to fall. Then you can argue about alternate hypotheses regarding how it's going to fall.
Wow. That's bold. You've just boiled down perhaps the most complicated system imaginable, and asserted that you've got a solid lock on every possible influence.
This isn't really that hard, you know. You're playing the "god of the gaps" here. "Sure, we've looked at all the places where heat can enter the atmosphere, but maybe there's some other place, like an extra dimensional portal!!"
To show that you've got a model worth paying attention to, I'll assert you need the following
I've already explained why this is a stupid test of climate models.
You're kidding me, right?
Nope. You're just showing you don't know what a "negative feedback" is.
Greenhouse forcing of butterfly breath leads to more heat, leads to more clouds, which happen to be of the heat reflecting type that makes the world cooler, and you're saying that this will make the world...warmer?
Yes, if it's what climatologists call a negative feedback. A negative feedback is a suppressing feedback, meaning you get less warming than you otherwise would, not cooling. That is, the cooling effect of clouds isn't greater than the total warming. Go ahead, look up some climate papers on linear feedback analysis and see how they define that term. (Oh gee, that would require you to read some real science instead of blog posts.)
The scenario you're describing is an unstable feedback, which don't really exist in nature.
If I can take it that you're willing to stipulate that "Catastrophic" is non-falsifiable,
That's a word that you keep inserting. It has nothing to do with the actual scientific predictions.
and that even if there is significant anthropogenic global warming in play, that it will be either benign or neutral, or merely slightly bad,
I don't agree with that. Or at least, I don't agree that this is more likely than the alternative. Of course, all those words are subjective as well and therefore I'm interpreting them as I choose. And the significance of impacts is completely beside the climate science we're discussing, anyway.
So you're going to leap from basic thermodynamics, to a bold assertion that CO2 greenhouse effects get magically amplified by H2O greenhouse effects?
Where's the magic?
Which basic scientific fact do you disagree with?
1. Increased temperature increases the evaporation-precipitation balance of an air-water system, and therefore the water vapor content of the atmosphere.
2. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
What observations would falsify that for you? Perhaps stable H2O levels, with increasing CO2 levels?
The paper does not indicate stable global, vertically integrated (throughout the atmospheric column) H2O levels, which are in fact increasing (see papers by Soden, Dessler, Santer, etc.) That paper considers only 2% of the Earth's surface and only looks at surface humidity, whereas the bulk of the water vapor increase is predicted (and observed) to reside higher in the troposphere. Gee, some people might call that "cherry picking".
Hell, even Miskolczi points out that this paper doesn't say anything about the global average H20 column amount (see the link in the WUWT post). Didn't read that far when you were trolling for references to support your preconceived opinion, did you?
If only you spent a fraction of your time surveying the actual scientific literature rather than getting all your "science" from mangled misinterpretations of pseudoskeptic bloggers. But hey, Anthony Watts says it disproves the water vapor feeback, so it must be true. No need to read any other papers, huh? Some "skepticism" on your part.
Within 1% of the historical temperature record from 40,000BC to 2000AD.
They're not going to be able to do that unless you give them the historical forcings to at least that accuracy, which we don't know. So that's a meaningless test of their skill. But as long as you're making up ridiculous hoops for them to jump through, why not ask them to predict the last 4 billion years to 0.00001% accuracy while you're at it?
We're told GCMs can't predict 3 years, or 5 years out,
They could do some of that if they were initialized with the current climate state, but the data assimilation methods necessary to do that on a global scale are still in their infancy.
but are supernaturally accurate at 100 years or more.
They're not "supernaturally accurate"; their predictions have error bars of about a degree on them, given a fixed forcing. And surely you know the difference between initial value and boundary value problems, don't you?
Prove it by accurately forecasting 42,0000 years worth of temperature with your GCM.
In order to prove that they can forecast warming 100 years to, say, 20% accuracy (about the IPCC range, assuming known forcings, etc.), they have to reproduce 40,000 years of climate to 1% accuracy (given highly uncertain forcings and, for that matter, climate)? Yeah, that's a reasonable requirement.
But if you were to address the central conceit of CO2 driving warming, would you accept it as falsified if say, we saw in the historical record of some ice core rising CO2 for 50 years, but falling temperatures?
Of course not, but you would probably be naive enough to believe this. You'd need to know more about the natural variability and the radiative forcings acting during that period. Which is why I keep telling you that climate science is based on examining the physical origins of temperature responses and not naive correlations.
So, let's take that hypothesis, and counter it with its opposite, that in fact *you* are the intellectually bankrupt dishonest liar. How would one use the scientific method, and falsifiability, to determine which one of us is "intellectually bankrupt", and which one is actually doing science?
Gee, I don't know, which one of you posted a claim that was falsified in the very blog post that inspired it?
How do you distinguish two 50 year periods, with indistinguishable *outcomes*,
Who said they have indisinguishable outcomes? You keep posting your stupid "can you tell these time series apart" "test", which ignores everything else we know about the climate. We know spatial patterns, we know observables other than temperature, we know something about forcings, etc.
Have you ever bothered to read any paper on detection and attribution? Or do you just blindly believe whatever your blog masters tell you about climate science?
What is your falsifiable hypothesis to exclude natural climate change?
What are you talking about? Hypotheses don't exclude natural climate change (which is itself a hypothesis). Data does. I already mentioned some of the data sources that have been used to exclude natural climate change. (Well, not exclude it... it's there... it's just not of the right magnitude / timing / sign to explain the recent warming.)
Are you kidding me? You think we've actually got a lock on *every* single natural source and sink of heat?
Pretty much. There are, as I said, only a handful possibilities that can lead to significant radiative imbalance. It comes from space, it comes from the ocean, it comes from the atmosphere. It's not the ocean (ocean heat). It's not the Sun (solar variability, cosmic rays, etc.). It's not atmospheric constituents (aerosols, etc.). It's very likely not clouds (no mechanism for long-range variability, and no long-term trend in clouds over the satellite era), but the error bars on that are big enough that there's still a little wriggle room, assuming you can come up with a plausible and observably verified physical mechanism for long-term variability.
Either way, there's certainly a hell of a lot less support for that than there is for the greenhouse effect. So what is you scientific basis for ignoring all of this physics in favor of vague handwaving about unspecified natural variability without observational support? The null hypothesis is the greenhouse effect, not vague handwaving.
"the amplitude and even the sign of cloud feedbacks was noted in the TAR as highly uncertain"
You're confusing cloud feedbacks with natural variability. (Note that even negative cloud feedbacks still lead to warming in response to a greenhouse forcing.)
If I can take it that you're willing to stipulate that "Catastrophic" is non-falsifiable,
That's a word that you keep inserting. It has nothing to do with the actual scientific predictions.
and that even if there is significant anthropogenic global warming in play, that it will be either benign or neutral, or merely slightly bad,
I don't agree with that. Or at least, I don't agree that this is more likely than the alternative. Of course, all those words are subjective as well and therefore I'm interpreting them as I choose. And the significance of impacts is completely beside the climate science we're discussing, anyway.
So you're going to leap from basic thermodynamics, to a bold assertion that CO2 greenhouse effects get magically amplified by H2O greenhouse effects?
Where's the magic?
Which basic scientific fact do you disagree with?
1. Increased temperature increases the evaporation-precipitation balance of an air-water system, and therefore the water vapor content of the atmosphere.
2. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
What observations would falsify that for you? Perhaps stable H2O levels, with increasing CO2 levels?
The paper does not indicate stable global, vertically integrated (throughout the atmospheric column) H20 levels, which are in fact increasing (see papers by Soden, Dessler, Santer, etc.) That paper considers only 2% of the Earth's surface and only looks at surface humidity, whereas the bulk of the water vapor increase is predicted (and observed) to reside higher in the troposphere. Gee, some people might call that "cherry picking".
Hell, even Miskolczi points out that this paper doesn't say anything about the global average H20 column amount (see the link in the WUWT post). Didn't read that far when you were trolling for references to support your preconceived opinion, did you?
If only you spent a fraction of your time surveying the actual scientific literature rather than getting all your "science" from mangled misinterpretations of pseudoskeptic bloggers. But hey, Anthony Watts says it disproves the water vapor feeback, so it must be true. No need to read any other papers, huh? Some "skepticism" on your part.
Within 1% of the historical temperature record from 40,000BC to 2000AD.
They're not going to be able to do that unless you give them the historical forcings to at least that accuracy, which we don't know. So that's a meaningless test of their skill. But as long as you're making up ridiculous hoops for them to jump through, why not ask them to predict the last 4 billion years to 0.00001% accuracy while you're at it?
We're told GCMs can't predict 3 years, or 5 years out,
They could do some of that if they were initialized with the current climate state, but the data assimilation methods necessary to do that on a global scale are still in their infancy.
but are supernaturally accurate at 100 years or more.
They're not "supernaturally accurate"; their predictions have error bars of about a degree on them, given a fixed forcing. And surely you know the difference between initial value and boundary value problems, don't you?
Prove it by accurately forecasting 42,0000 years worth of temperature with your GCM.
In order to prove that they can forecast warming 100 years to, say, 20% accuracy (about the IPCC range, assuming known forcings, etc.), they have to reproduce 40,000 years of climate to 1% accuracy (given highly uncertain forcings and, for that matter, climate)? Yeah, that's a reasonable requirement.
Until then, you've got no reason to believe that modern observations aren't within the bounds of natural variation.
You keep repeating this fallacy. You seem to believe that just because the climate varied naturally in the past, present variation cannot be distinguished from natural variation. Natural variation isn't some unexplained statistical process, and attributing climate change doesn't arise from comparing current ranges of variation to past ranges of variation. Natural variation comes from physics. There aren't very many places where atmospheric heat can come from, and we can look in those places. Natural variability is due to specific mechanisms such as solar variations, ocean cycles, volcanism, etc. We have observed all those things during the modern global warming period, and all of them fail to explain the warming during that period, regardless of what past variations they can explain.
So no matter how far off he was, you'd have an ad hoc special pleading to explain it. That's a non-falsifiable hypothesis, just like astrology.
I repeat point (5), you're an idiot. I never said that, but you just can't help fantasizing about the irrationality everyone but yourself.
I merely pointed out that there are hypotheses other than the false dichotomy you presented. Sure you, as an infallibly rational skeptic, can accept this fact.
The central conceit isn't the greenhouse effect, the central conceit is that human CO2 emissions are *driving*, past all natural variation, an increase in global average temperature that will be catastrophic.
"Catastrophic" is a non-falsifiable statement. I thought you were scientific?
We don't, however, have any reason to believe that the greenhouse effect of CO2 triggers a feedback effect in H2O, that overwhelms all other natural factors.
No reason to believe that, other than basic thermodynamics and observations of the water vapor content of the atmosphere. You haven't disproven thermodynamics, have you?
Tell you what. Take your GCM. Start the clock at 40000BC. Run it for 42000 years. Get to within 1%, without hard coding or curve fitting, and maybe you've got something.
Get to within 1% of what? And why is arbitrary request this a relevant test of anything?
The quote at the end is from David Kyvig, a historian at Northern Illinois University. I'm not going to debate economics or politics, but it disturbs me to see a scholar coming out and saying "This data will show X" before having analyzed it. It's assuming your conclusion and is just biased.
Now I'll tell you why I think conservatives don't like AGW. It is because every solution to it that has been floated so far is a bigger government, tighter regulation, less-then-free market solution.
The funny thing is, economists think of solutions like carbon pricing as free market solutions.
The problem is that when the real cost of something (like the environmental impact of carbon consumption) isn't internalized into the economic system, there is a negative externality resulting in market failure. To correct this, the market has to be made aware of the real cost, in this case by imposing an additional price on carbon. Then the market can efficiently do its work, as people and corporations respond to this price signal. No need for the government to "pick winners and losers" via regulation or other means. And a policy instrument like a carbon tax can be made revenue neutral, returning the money to the citizens (either as direct rebates, or a compensating tax shift like decreasing the income tax).
Anyway, even if conservatives don't like this free market approach, they ought to spend their time coming up with what they think of as conservative solutions, rather than finding reasons to disbelieve the underlying science.
We all know that a biased experimenter often produces the results he is looking for; that is why we usually insist on double blind experiments in areas where bias is a factor. A liberal scientist will thus have a significantly higher burden of proof, which, in my experience with politically charged subjects such as AGW, has not yet been met.
You're part of the problem. You're basically dismissing an entire field of science, on the presumption that everyone in that field is liberal (because they're scientists), and therefore untrustworthy. And it's not the scientists who made the subject politically charged. It's, well, people like you, who apply politically motivated presumptions of bias to automatically dismiss or downgrade the findings of the scientific community.
Post your code and brag about how it's superior to everything else out there. This will enrage all the "someone is WRONG on the Internet" types and you'll get tons of feedback about your code's flaws.
This was also an effective strategy to get the attention of experts on Usenet groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Which, you've admitted, is completely unknown information. And yet, you blithely believe you can discern between natural climate change, and unnatural climate change :)
Geeze, how dumb are you. It's completely unknown information in your hypothetical example which was specifically contrived to only present information about CO2 and temperature. In reality, we know something about natural variability and radiative forcings.
Really? So if all the human CO2 emissions ever made only caused, say, an additional 0.01C warming per century, that's perfectly acceptable for you?
I don't know what you're talking about. All my statements are predicated on the IPCC range of warming. Given that, whether the impacts are going to be "bad" or not is a subjective statement, about which I have my own opinions.
In the world most simple model, that is correct. In reality, we observe significant differences.
I've already explained what's wrong with that claim, so I don't know why you're still repeating it, other than your ideological biases.
Some great comments on that:
Even if I believe some blog's unpublished error analysis, that own analysis still strongly favors a positive water vapor feedback.
If you want to present evidence favoring a small water vapor feedback. go ahead.
So...long story short...they've got no idea what natural climate change looked like in the past, so they can't distinguish it in the present.
Don't be a fool. Just because they don't have natural forcings in the past doesn't mean they don't have them now.
So, we've got data networks that are still in their infancy, by the science is settled? :) Nice.
"Data networks" have nothing to do with it. It's how you use the data to initialize models that's the issue. Furthermore, the inability of models to be initialized only affects their short term predictions, which are obviously strongly initial value dependent, not the long term predictions, which are boundary value dependent. I already explained this.
If an astrologist had 20% accuracy, would that make astrology science? Show me your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement :)
I don't think you understand what a falsifiable hypothesis statement is. You haven't presented any yourself, despite ranting about null hypotheses.
P.S.
How's this for a surprise for you:
Again, totally irrelevant to the attribution question. It doesn't matter what causes ENSO when ENSO can't cause the recent warming (see ocean heat data again).
And there's your problem - you're claiming certainty where you simply can't. When post-high human CO2 emissions warming is indistinguishable from pre-high human CO2 emissions warming,
Look, this is nonsense. If you can't understand that you can distinguish between scenarios by looking at causes as well as effects (and looking at more effects than a gross quantity like "global average surface temperature"), then you're just willfully ignoring evidence and are scientifically incompetent. I can't help you.
What you need is a falsifiable hypothesis statement.
You don't have a falsifiable hypothesis statement. "Natural variability" isn't even a hypothesis until you start specifying what it is. You're "not even wrong".
The null hypothesis is that all observed climate change in the 1900s was caused by the same mechanisms as all observed climate change before the 1900s.
Nope. That would be a stupid null hypothesis, because we know that there are non-natural effects that weren't present in the 1900s. The null hypothesis is relative to your scientific knowledge. Nobody's going to say that my null hypothesis is "the ball will hover if I let go of it". It's going to fall. Then you can argue about alternate hypotheses regarding how it's going to fall.
Wow. That's bold. You've just boiled down perhaps the most complicated system imaginable, and asserted that you've got a solid lock on every possible influence.
This isn't really that hard, you know. You're playing the "god of the gaps" here. "Sure, we've looked at all the places where heat can enter the atmosphere, but maybe there's some other place, like an extra dimensional portal!!"
To show that you've got a model worth paying attention to, I'll assert you need the following
I've already explained why this is a stupid test of climate models.
You're kidding me, right?
Nope. You're just showing you don't know what a "negative feedback" is.
Greenhouse forcing of butterfly breath leads to more heat, leads to more clouds, which happen to be of the heat reflecting type that makes the world cooler, and you're saying that this will make the world...warmer?
Yes, if it's what climatologists call a negative feedback. A negative feedback is a suppressing feedback, meaning you get less warming than you otherwise would, not cooling. That is, the cooling effect of clouds isn't greater than the total warming. Go ahead, look up some climate papers on linear feedback analysis and see how they define that term. (Oh gee, that would require you to read some real science instead of blog posts.)
The scenario you're describing is an unstable feedback, which don't really exist in nature.
Should have previewed ...
If I can take it that you're willing to stipulate that "Catastrophic" is non-falsifiable,
That's a word that you keep inserting. It has nothing to do with the actual scientific predictions.
and that even if there is significant anthropogenic global warming in play, that it will be either benign or neutral, or merely slightly bad,
I don't agree with that. Or at least, I don't agree that this is more likely than the alternative. Of course, all those words are subjective as well and therefore I'm interpreting them as I choose. And the significance of impacts is completely beside the climate science we're discussing, anyway.
So you're going to leap from basic thermodynamics, to a bold assertion that CO2 greenhouse effects get magically amplified by H2O greenhouse effects?
Where's the magic?
Which basic scientific fact do you disagree with?
1. Increased temperature increases the evaporation-precipitation balance of an air-water system, and therefore the water vapor content of the atmosphere.
2. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
What observations would falsify that for you? Perhaps stable H2O levels, with increasing CO2 levels?
The paper does not indicate stable global, vertically integrated (throughout the atmospheric column) H2O levels, which are in fact increasing (see papers by Soden, Dessler, Santer, etc.) That paper considers only 2% of the Earth's surface and only looks at surface humidity, whereas the bulk of the water vapor increase is predicted (and observed) to reside higher in the troposphere. Gee, some people might call that "cherry picking".
Hell, even Miskolczi points out that this paper doesn't say anything about the global average H20 column amount (see the link in the WUWT post). Didn't read that far when you were trolling for references to support your preconceived opinion, did you?
If only you spent a fraction of your time surveying the actual scientific literature rather than getting all your "science" from mangled misinterpretations of pseudoskeptic bloggers. But hey, Anthony Watts says it disproves the water vapor feeback, so it must be true. No need to read any other papers, huh? Some "skepticism" on your part.
Within 1% of the historical temperature record from 40,000BC to 2000AD.
They're not going to be able to do that unless you give them the historical forcings to at least that accuracy, which we don't know. So that's a meaningless test of their skill. But as long as you're making up ridiculous hoops for them to jump through, why not ask them to predict the last 4 billion years to 0.00001% accuracy while you're at it?
We're told GCMs can't predict 3 years, or 5 years out,
They could do some of that if they were initialized with the current climate state, but the data assimilation methods necessary to do that on a global scale are still in their infancy.
but are supernaturally accurate at 100 years or more.
They're not "supernaturally accurate"; their predictions have error bars of about a degree on them, given a fixed forcing. And surely you know the difference between initial value and boundary value problems, don't you?
Prove it by accurately forecasting 42,0000 years worth of temperature with your GCM.
In order to prove that they can forecast warming 100 years to, say, 20% accuracy (about the IPCC range, assuming known forcings, etc.), they have to reproduce 40,000 years of climate to 1% accuracy (given highly uncertain forcings and, for that matter, climate)? Yeah, that's a reasonable requirement.
But if you were to address the central conceit of CO2 driving warming, would you accept it as falsified if say, we saw in the historical record of some ice core rising CO2 for 50 years, but falling temperatures?
Of course not, but you would probably be naive enough to believe this. You'd need to know more about the natural variability and the radiative forcings acting during that period. Which is why I keep telling you that climate science is based on examining the physical origins of temperature responses and not naive correlations.
So, let's take that hypothesis, and counter it with its opposite, that in fact *you* are the intellectually bankrupt dishonest liar. How would one use the scientific method, and falsifiability, to determine which one of us is "intellectually bankrupt", and which one is actually doing science?
Gee, I don't know, which one of you posted a claim that was falsified in the very blog post that inspired it?
How do you distinguish two 50 year periods, with indistinguishable *outcomes*,
Who said they have indisinguishable outcomes? You keep posting your stupid "can you tell these time series apart" "test", which ignores everything else we know about the climate. We know spatial patterns, we know observables other than temperature, we know something about forcings, etc.
Have you ever bothered to read any paper on detection and attribution? Or do you just blindly believe whatever your blog masters tell you about climate science?
What is your falsifiable hypothesis to exclude natural climate change?
What are you talking about? Hypotheses don't exclude natural climate change (which is itself a hypothesis). Data does. I already mentioned some of the data sources that have been used to exclude natural climate change. (Well, not exclude it ... it's there ... it's just not of the right magnitude / timing / sign to explain the recent warming.)
Are you kidding me? You think we've actually got a lock on *every* single natural source and sink of heat?
Pretty much. There are, as I said, only a handful possibilities that can lead to significant radiative imbalance. It comes from space, it comes from the ocean, it comes from the atmosphere. It's not the ocean (ocean heat). It's not the Sun (solar variability, cosmic rays, etc.). It's not atmospheric constituents (aerosols, etc.). It's very likely not clouds (no mechanism for long-range variability, and no long-term trend in clouds over the satellite era), but the error bars on that are big enough that there's still a little wriggle room, assuming you can come up with a plausible and observably verified physical mechanism for long-term variability.
Either way, there's certainly a hell of a lot less support for that than there is for the greenhouse effect. So what is you scientific basis for ignoring all of this physics in favor of vague handwaving about unspecified natural variability without observational support? The null hypothesis is the greenhouse effect, not vague handwaving.
"the amplitude and even the sign of cloud feedbacks was noted in the TAR as highly uncertain"
You're confusing cloud feedbacks with natural variability. (Note that even negative cloud feedbacks still lead to warming in response to a greenhouse forcing.)
If I can take it that you're willing to stipulate that "Catastrophic" is non-falsifiable,
That's a word that you keep inserting. It has nothing to do with the actual scientific predictions.
and that even if there is significant anthropogenic global warming in play, that it will be either benign or neutral, or merely slightly bad,
I don't agree with that. Or at least, I don't agree that this is more likely than the alternative. Of course, all those words are subjective as well and therefore I'm interpreting them as I choose. And the significance of impacts is completely beside the climate science we're discussing, anyway.
So you're going to leap from basic thermodynamics, to a bold assertion that CO2 greenhouse effects get magically amplified by H2O greenhouse effects?
Where's the magic?
Which basic scientific fact do you disagree with?
1. Increased temperature increases the evaporation-precipitation balance of an air-water system, and therefore the water vapor content of the atmosphere.
2. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
What observations would falsify that for you? Perhaps stable H2O levels, with increasing CO2 levels?
The paper does not indicate stable global, vertically integrated (throughout the atmospheric column) H20 levels, which are in fact increasing (see papers by Soden, Dessler, Santer, etc.) That paper considers only 2% of the Earth's surface and only looks at surface humidity, whereas the bulk of the water vapor increase is predicted (and observed) to reside higher in the troposphere. Gee, some people might call that "cherry picking".
Hell, even Miskolczi points out that this paper doesn't say anything about the global average H20 column amount (see the link in the WUWT post). Didn't read that far when you were trolling for references to support your preconceived opinion, did you?
If only you spent a fraction of your time surveying the actual scientific literature rather than getting all your "science" from mangled misinterpretations of pseudoskeptic bloggers. But hey, Anthony Watts says it disproves the water vapor feeback, so it must be true. No need to read any other papers, huh? Some "skepticism" on your part.
Within 1% of the historical temperature record from 40,000BC to 2000AD.
They're not going to be able to do that unless you give them the historical forcings to at least that accuracy, which we don't know. So that's a meaningless test of their skill. But as long as you're making up ridiculous hoops for them to jump through, why not ask them to predict the last 4 billion years to 0.00001% accuracy while you're at it?
We're told GCMs can't predict 3 years, or 5 years out,
They could do some of that if they were initialized with the current climate state, but the data assimilation methods necessary to do that on a global scale are still in their infancy.
but are supernaturally accurate at 100 years or more.
They're not "supernaturally accurate"; their predictions have error bars of about a degree on them, given a fixed forcing. And surely you know the difference between initial value and boundary value problems, don't you?
Prove it by accurately forecasting 42,0000 years worth of temperature with your GCM.
In order to prove that they can forecast warming 100 years to, say, 20% accuracy (about the IPCC range, assuming known forcings, etc.), they have to reproduce 40,000 years of climate to 1% accuracy (given highly uncertain forcings and, for that matter, climate)? Yeah, that's a reasonable requirement.
Until then, you've got no reason to believe that modern observations aren't within the bounds of natural variation.
You keep repeating this fallacy. You seem to believe that just because the climate varied naturally in the past, present variation cannot be distinguished from natural variation. Natural variation isn't some unexplained statistical process, and attributing climate change doesn't arise from comparing current ranges of variation to past ranges of variation. Natural variation comes from physics. There aren't very many places where atmospheric heat can come from, and we can look in those places. Natural variability is due to specific mechanisms such as solar variations, ocean cycles, volcanism, etc. We have observed all those things during the modern global warming period, and all of them fail to explain the warming during that period, regardless of what past variations they can explain.
Hmm, just saw the above was posted as AC. I'm the "AC".
So no matter how far off he was, you'd have an ad hoc special pleading to explain it. That's a non-falsifiable hypothesis, just like astrology.
I repeat point (5), you're an idiot. I never said that, but you just can't help fantasizing about the irrationality everyone but yourself.
I merely pointed out that there are hypotheses other than the false dichotomy you presented. Sure you, as an infallibly rational skeptic, can accept this fact.
The central conceit isn't the greenhouse effect, the central conceit is that human CO2 emissions are *driving*, past all natural variation, an increase in global average temperature that will be catastrophic.
"Catastrophic" is a non-falsifiable statement. I thought you were scientific?
We don't, however, have any reason to believe that the greenhouse effect of CO2 triggers a feedback effect in H2O, that overwhelms all other natural factors.
No reason to believe that, other than basic thermodynamics and observations of the water vapor content of the atmosphere. You haven't disproven thermodynamics, have you?
Tell you what. Take your GCM. Start the clock at 40000BC. Run it for 42000 years. Get to within 1%, without hard coding or curve fitting, and maybe you've got something.
Get to within 1% of what? And why is arbitrary request this a relevant test of anything?
The first thing I thought when I read the last paragraph of the summary was "the comments thread is going to be useless" ...
The quote at the end is from David Kyvig, a historian at Northern Illinois University. I'm not going to debate economics or politics, but it disturbs me to see a scholar coming out and saying "This data will show X" before having analyzed it. It's assuming your conclusion and is just biased.
Now I'll tell you why I think conservatives don't like AGW. It is because every solution to it that has been floated so far is a bigger government, tighter regulation, less-then-free market solution.
The funny thing is, economists think of solutions like carbon pricing as free market solutions.
The problem is that when the real cost of something (like the environmental impact of carbon consumption) isn't internalized into the economic system, there is a negative externality resulting in market failure. To correct this, the market has to be made aware of the real cost, in this case by imposing an additional price on carbon. Then the market can efficiently do its work, as people and corporations respond to this price signal. No need for the government to "pick winners and losers" via regulation or other means. And a policy instrument like a carbon tax can be made revenue neutral, returning the money to the citizens (either as direct rebates, or a compensating tax shift like decreasing the income tax).
Anyway, even if conservatives don't like this free market approach, they ought to spend their time coming up with what they think of as conservative solutions, rather than finding reasons to disbelieve the underlying science.
We all know that a biased experimenter often produces the results he is looking for; that is why we usually insist on double blind experiments in areas where bias is a factor. A liberal scientist will thus have a significantly higher burden of proof, which, in my experience with politically charged subjects such as AGW, has not yet been met.
You're part of the problem. You're basically dismissing an entire field of science, on the presumption that everyone in that field is liberal (because they're scientists), and therefore untrustworthy. And it's not the scientists who made the subject politically charged. It's, well, people like you, who apply politically motivated presumptions of bias to automatically dismiss or downgrade the findings of the scientific community.
I was expecting an Earth-shattering kaboom!
Anyone know how he did functions like logarithms, trig, etc.? I didn't watch the whole video.
Yeah, seriously. In Python it would be just 11 bytes, 'import tron'.
It's not really a game of Tron without a competing lightcycle. (Without fruit, it's not really a game of Snake either.)
Abstruse Goose
If it's a sizable company they would tie you up with their lawyers until the day you would die.
Until the day you die? Oh, it wouldn't stop there. They'd counter-sue your estate.
Post your code and brag about how it's superior to everything else out there. This will enrage all the "someone is WRONG on the Internet" types and you'll get tons of feedback about your code's flaws.
This was also an effective strategy to get the attention of experts on Usenet groups.
+1 thumb up
Abstruse Goose