I think every model output graph should include uncertainty ranges. Frankly, seeing the wild amounts of uncertainty there, both with model averages, and between models, would be very informative to viewers.
Many of the ones I see do. For instance Figure 12.5 on page 1054 of the IPCC AR5 WG1 [PDF] report on long term climate change does.
Every time you see a grey patch to the right and down from a diagonal line, it's beating that length of time. On the right hand side of the graph you'll see 1, 7, 13, 19, and 25 diagonals to help guide you.
It's not the color that denotes significance, it's the relative saturation of the color compared to the trend only graph. Flip between the two and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I'm doubtful that we've got even a smidgen of understanding of all the causes of natural variation, or the interdependencies between these drivers. Even identifying a few very big drivers, given a chaotic climate, where digits far, far, far to the right of the decimal place can become significant, you can't assert useful predictions from there. Frankly, it is very likely that climate is a non-computable problem.
Again sez you. You're making big assumptions with no evidence to back them up. What qualifies you to make that judgement better than a scientist working in the field?
Asking me to prove a negative?:) Are you honestly asserting that climate scientists understand the minutiae of all the possible interactions between climate drivers?:)
The minutiae is called minutiae for a reason. In any complex system there are things that have large effect on down to things that just tweak those larger effects but don't make for a significant difference in the final outcome. For your supposition to work your mystery effect(s) would have to be one of the larger ones. Anything that large would cause the observations to not match the projections in a systematic way.
Actually, the longer periods of time are in the lower right corner -> the lower left corner is 1989-1990. The lower right corner is 1989-2014. The upper right corner is 2013-2014.
You're right. I never have been very good with the right/left thing.
GCM divergence from observations isn't actual evidence?
Not as long as they're still within the uncertainty ranges of the model projections and as long as the projections use a scenario (the current lingo is RCP for Representative Concentration Pathway) to drive their modeling that's relatively close to what really happened. Ideally it would be good to rerun the climate models after the fact with the real world observations fed into them to see how skillful they really are but when it takes several weeks of time on a supercomputer and a lot of work by scientists to do that it's not really very practical. I've seen it done with a few smaller, simpler models and their output gets closer to observations when you do that.
The link allows you to choose "trend+significance" on any data set you wish. Any greyed out areas in that mode represent periods of time of statistically insignificant change. It clearly shows large periods of time with statistically insignificant change.
By "greyed out" you mean where the colors are faded as compared to the simple trend graph, right? No matter which dataset you choose clearly as you move toward the lower left corner of the triangle graph (IOW longer time periods for the trend) there is greater significance.
Isn't it possible that over a period of three decades or four they can override an individual climate forcing? Or five decades or six? Or seven decades or eight?
The further out you go the less likely that is to be true. Given the magnitude of known causes of natural variation* climatology says 3 decades is enough and I'll accept that until someone shows otherwise.
*Excluding consideration of rare events like a supervolcano eruption or an asteroid striking the Earth and excluding the things that operate on millennial time scales such as Milankovitch Cycles and changes to the morphology of the planet.
Climate scientists don't have nearly enough knowledge about the interconnected nature of climate drivers to model them with any sort of accuracy.
Sez you. Care to back that up with some real evidence?
Again, look at the moyhu link again - there are statistically significant pauses even when you don't use 1998.
Again as you move toward longer time periods for the trend the statistical significance increases.
Science of course is always subject to revision pending new information. But at the same time to assume that there is something missing when there is no actual evidence that something is missing is not useful. Find some actual evidence for that missing factor then I'll start listening.
I did play around with the moyhu link but since it only goes back to 1990 it still doesn't cover enough time to be sure there is significance. Did you read my link to the Uncertain-T post?
The current "pause" is unsurprising to scientists.
That's quite a bold statement:)
Climate scientists are well aware of the vagaries of natural variation and understand that over a period of a decade or two they can override the underlying climate signal. They don't expect temperatures in the short term to rise in lock step with rises in CO2.
The reason "pause" is shown in quotes is that it really hasn't been a pause at all. The only thing that makes it look like a pause at all is the extraordinary El Nino year of 1998. The Argo floats show that the oceans (where over 90% of the warming goes) continue to warm. The only thing that's slowed down a bit is the rise in surface temperatures. I don't expect that to last much longer (but who knows at this point).
The problem I have with that is the price of gas is quite volatile and it would take the tax amount along with it. It makes more sense to me set it at a certain amount then index it to inflation.
I think the price of gas is way to volatile to make that reasonable. The price I pay has changed by over 20% in the past year. To me it makes more sense to peg the tax to the amount of wear and tear you cause to the roads and the amount of gas you burn is a pretty good analog of that.
Since the cost of gas is not anywhere close to 100% of the cost of goods and services sold the inflation a gas tax increase would cause would asymptotically reduce to zero inflation pretty shortly.
Probably over 90% of bike riders also use motor vehicles so they're already paying the tax. The amount of wear a bicycle puts on a road is so miniscule it would probably be more expensive to collect the tax than it would cost to fix the damage they cause.
Of course not - I don't have the hubris to assume I know every single natural factor or how they interact with each other.
We can assume these things exist because a) we know climate changed before humanity, and b) the advent of humanity cannot logically have eliminated those non-anthropogenic drivers.
Yet you have the hubris to assume that scientists are missing something big enough to cause the current change we are seeing without distorting the observational data enough make it obvious they are missing something that big. That's a pretty big assumption.
Scientist of course know that climate has changed in the past and that those non-anthropogenic drivers are still operating. They have never said that they aren't. They include them in their models. They can't effectively study climate without including them.
The current predictions don't match observations. There must be something we don't understand at work. Q.E.D.:)
In your link you conveniently choose the RSS temperature record cherry picking the one among several that most closely fits your narrative. I think you need to justify what you think makes it more valid than the others.
Current observations are within the uncertainty range of model projections so you can't say they don't match. The length of time of the "pause" is not long enough to be statistically significant yet. Here is a statistical analysis that shows it isn't long enough. The model results that get presented to the public are combinations of many model runs that smooth out the variability of individual model runs but some of the individual runs do show "pauses" like the current period. The current "pause" is unsurprising to scientists.
When you get right down to it there is no "Theory of Global Warming".
Agreed. There is the specious hypothesis that humans control the global climate through the emissions of CO2, but it's hardly worth calling a "theory":)
How conveniently you ignore the rest of what I wrote in that paragraph.
You say "*some* natural factors" but you offer nothing about what those other things we're not factoring in are. You're just assuming they exist without any evidence that they do exist. You're assuming scientists are so stupid they're missing something significant in a field that's been studied for nearly 200 years and intensely studied since the 1950's*. You're going to have to do better than that if you want to get any scientific traction. Provide some scientifically valid evidence for some unknown factor(s). Otherwise it's just magical thinking that has no place in science.
*I'm not saying we know everything there is to know about climate but if we were missing something as big as what would be required to be a natural cause of the current change it would be observed in data that doesn't match what our current theory predicts. But the data does fit current theory within the uncertainty ranges. It's highly unlikely that is an accident.
When you get right down to it there is no "Theory of Global Warming". What there is is a theory of how our climate system works in concert with the rest of Earth's geophysical systems and external influences such as the Sun. It's similar to evolution in that it's a large complex system with a lot of moving parts. What we know about the climate system leads us to understand that the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are a major factor in thermodynamically elevated temperatures on the Earth. Fourier discovered that in 1824 when he understood that thermodynamically the Earth was warmer than solar radiation alone could account for. Tyndall quantified the radiative properties of various gases including greenhouse gases in the 1850's. When you significantly change the level of the 2nd most significant greenhouse gas you would expect the climate to change (especially when the level of the most significant greenhouse gas is totally driven by feedback).
I suppose your null hypothesis is that the change is caused by natural factors. But even when natural variation occurs there is a physical mechanism behind those changes. It's not just magic. We've studied those natural factors (the Sun, volcanoes, orbital cycles, etc.) and alone or in combination they aren't enough to account for the increase in temperatures that's occurred over the past century. So for you to be right there must be some natural factor that we're totally clueless about. Given that we've studied the energy balance of the Earth and the numbers add up it seems unlikely that such an unknown factor exists. So while the null hypothesis (that I presume you are using) can't be absolutely disproven the weight of evidence leans hard away from it. Scientists say they're at least 95% sure. That's good enough for me.
Climate science is very complex so while it is in principle falsifiable in practice it is difficult if not impossible to come up with a relatively simple practical test that would falsify it in a short period of time. In the long run if the temperature/energy content of the Earth's geosystems doesn't continue to increase that would falsify AGW. Here is a blog post on the subject that contains a list of 10 things that could falsify AGW. But I expect you will reject it for some reason or another.
Oh please! There are thousands of things in climate science that are falsifiable. It's going to take falsifying more than a few of them to discredit AGW. I suggest you get started.
I don't know that I want the government to own the conduit but I want the conduit to be treated as a public utility too valuable to allow it to be monopolized.
There are 2 stable isotopes of carbon 12C and 13C. Carbon 14 has too short a half life to be significant in this case. The lighter 12C carbon atom is preferred by photosynthesis so biomass has less 13C than there is in general on the Earth. Since fossil fuels have a mostly biological origin the CO2 emissions from them have less 13C than purely geologic sources like volcanic emissions. It's not all that difficult to measure those things.
This has actually been studied and when the salmon die they supply a surprising amount of nutrients not only to the streams but to the surrounding forest. As was pointed out by the two other replies to you the dead salmon get eaten by bears, racoons, otters and other critters that then do what a bear does in the surrounding forest. Here's what looks to be a lesson plan on the subject: Fish as Fertilizer: The Impacts of Salmon on Forest Ecosystems [PDF]
No, Muller was a true skeptic in the scientific tradition in that he was willing to adjust his views when he looked at the scientific evidence in depth. There's a lot of fake skeptics running around in the climate contrarian community that won't change their mind regardless of the evidence presented.
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I think every model output graph should include uncertainty ranges. Frankly, seeing the wild amounts of uncertainty there, both with model averages, and between models, would be very informative to viewers.
Many of the ones I see do. For instance Figure 12.5 on page 1054 of the IPCC AR5 WG1 [PDF] report on long term climate change does.
Every time you see a grey patch to the right and down from a diagonal line, it's beating that length of time. On the right hand side of the graph you'll see 1, 7, 13, 19, and 25 diagonals to help guide you.
It's not the color that denotes significance, it's the relative saturation of the color compared to the trend only graph. Flip between the two and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I'm doubtful that we've got even a smidgen of understanding of all the causes of natural variation, or the interdependencies between these drivers. Even identifying a few very big drivers, given a chaotic climate, where digits far, far, far to the right of the decimal place can become significant, you can't assert useful predictions from there. Frankly, it is very likely that climate is a non-computable problem.
Again sez you. You're making big assumptions with no evidence to back them up. What qualifies you to make that judgement better than a scientist working in the field?
Asking me to prove a negative? :) Are you honestly asserting that climate scientists understand the minutiae of all the possible interactions between climate drivers? :)
The minutiae is called minutiae for a reason. In any complex system there are things that have large effect on down to things that just tweak those larger effects but don't make for a significant difference in the final outcome. For your supposition to work your mystery effect(s) would have to be one of the larger ones. Anything that large would cause the observations to not match the projections in a systematic way.
Actually, the longer periods of time are in the lower right corner -> the lower left corner is 1989-1990. The lower right corner is 1989-2014. The upper right corner is 2013-2014.
You're right. I never have been very good with the right/left thing.
GCM divergence from observations isn't actual evidence?
Not as long as they're still within the uncertainty ranges of the model projections and as long as the projections use a scenario (the current lingo is RCP for Representative Concentration Pathway) to drive their modeling that's relatively close to what really happened. Ideally it would be good to rerun the climate models after the fact with the real world observations fed into them to see how skillful they really are but when it takes several weeks of time on a supercomputer and a lot of work by scientists to do that it's not really very practical. I've seen it done with a few smaller, simpler models and their output gets closer to observations when you do that.
The link allows you to choose "trend+significance" on any data set you wish. Any greyed out areas in that mode represent periods of time of statistically insignificant change. It clearly shows large periods of time with statistically insignificant change.
By "greyed out" you mean where the colors are faded as compared to the simple trend graph, right? No matter which dataset you choose clearly as you move toward the lower left corner of the triangle graph (IOW longer time periods for the trend) there is greater significance.
Isn't it possible that over a period of three decades or four they can override an individual climate forcing? Or five decades or six? Or seven decades or eight?
The further out you go the less likely that is to be true. Given the magnitude of known causes of natural variation* climatology says 3 decades is enough and I'll accept that until someone shows otherwise.
*Excluding consideration of rare events like a supervolcano eruption or an asteroid striking the Earth and excluding the things that operate on millennial time scales such as Milankovitch Cycles and changes to the morphology of the planet.
Climate scientists don't have nearly enough knowledge about the interconnected nature of climate drivers to model them with any sort of accuracy.
Sez you. Care to back that up with some real evidence?
Again, look at the moyhu link again - there are statistically significant pauses even when you don't use 1998.
Again as you move toward longer time periods for the trend the statistical significance increases.
But bikes don't cause much wear-and-tear on the roads or emit toxins into the air.
Maybe that depends on the bikers diet :)
Science of course is always subject to revision pending new information. But at the same time to assume that there is something missing when there is no actual evidence that something is missing is not useful. Find some actual evidence for that missing factor then I'll start listening.
I did play around with the moyhu link but since it only goes back to 1990 it still doesn't cover enough time to be sure there is significance. Did you read my link to the Uncertain-T post?
The current "pause" is unsurprising to scientists.
That's quite a bold statement :)
Climate scientists are well aware of the vagaries of natural variation and understand that over a period of a decade or two they can override the underlying climate signal. They don't expect temperatures in the short term to rise in lock step with rises in CO2.
The reason "pause" is shown in quotes is that it really hasn't been a pause at all. The only thing that makes it look like a pause at all is the extraordinary El Nino year of 1998. The Argo floats show that the oceans (where over 90% of the warming goes) continue to warm. The only thing that's slowed down a bit is the rise in surface temperatures. I don't expect that to last much longer (but who knows at this point).
The problem I have with that is the price of gas is quite volatile and it would take the tax amount along with it. It makes more sense to me set it at a certain amount then index it to inflation.
Not raising the gas tax by 12 cents might affect you in the further deterioration of our roads.
I think the price of gas is way to volatile to make that reasonable. The price I pay has changed by over 20% in the past year. To me it makes more sense to peg the tax to the amount of wear and tear you cause to the roads and the amount of gas you burn is a pretty good analog of that.
Inflation (up to a point) is a sign of a healthy economy. You want to see an economic disaster consider what deflation would do.
It would cost more to collect such a tax than the cost of providing for bike and foot paths.
Since the cost of gas is not anywhere close to 100% of the cost of goods and services sold the inflation a gas tax increase would cause would asymptotically reduce to zero inflation pretty shortly.
Probably over 90% of bike riders also use motor vehicles so they're already paying the tax. The amount of wear a bicycle puts on a road is so miniscule it would probably be more expensive to collect the tax than it would cost to fix the damage they cause.
In effect a gas tax is already a tax on engine size in that in general the bigger your engine the more gas you will burn.
Of course not - I don't have the hubris to assume I know every single natural factor or how they interact with each other.
We can assume these things exist because a) we know climate changed before humanity, and b) the advent of humanity cannot logically have eliminated those non-anthropogenic drivers.
Yet you have the hubris to assume that scientists are missing something big enough to cause the current change we are seeing without distorting the observational data enough make it obvious they are missing something that big. That's a pretty big assumption.
Scientist of course know that climate has changed in the past and that those non-anthropogenic drivers are still operating. They have never said that they aren't. They include them in their models. They can't effectively study climate without including them.
The current predictions don't match observations. There must be something we don't understand at work. Q.E.D. :)
In your link you conveniently choose the RSS temperature record cherry picking the one among several that most closely fits your narrative. I think you need to justify what you think makes it more valid than the others.
Current observations are within the uncertainty range of model projections so you can't say they don't match. The length of time of the "pause" is not long enough to be statistically significant yet. Here is a statistical analysis that shows it isn't long enough. The model results that get presented to the public are combinations of many model runs that smooth out the variability of individual model runs but some of the individual runs do show "pauses" like the current period. The current "pause" is unsurprising to scientists.
When you get right down to it there is no "Theory of Global Warming".
Agreed. There is the specious hypothesis that humans control the global climate through the emissions of CO2, but it's hardly worth calling a "theory" :)
How conveniently you ignore the rest of what I wrote in that paragraph.
Slight correction - we've studied *some* natural factors, ...
You say "*some* natural factors" but you offer nothing about what those other things we're not factoring in are. You're just assuming they exist without any evidence that they do exist. You're assuming scientists are so stupid they're missing something significant in a field that's been studied for nearly 200 years and intensely studied since the 1950's*. You're going to have to do better than that if you want to get any scientific traction. Provide some scientifically valid evidence for some unknown factor(s). Otherwise it's just magical thinking that has no place in science.
*I'm not saying we know everything there is to know about climate but if we were missing something as big as what would be required to be a natural cause of the current change it would be observed in data that doesn't match what our current theory predicts. But the data does fit current theory within the uncertainty ranges. It's highly unlikely that is an accident.
When you get right down to it there is no "Theory of Global Warming". What there is is a theory of how our climate system works in concert with the rest of Earth's geophysical systems and external influences such as the Sun. It's similar to evolution in that it's a large complex system with a lot of moving parts. What we know about the climate system leads us to understand that the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are a major factor in thermodynamically elevated temperatures on the Earth. Fourier discovered that in 1824 when he understood that thermodynamically the Earth was warmer than solar radiation alone could account for. Tyndall quantified the radiative properties of various gases including greenhouse gases in the 1850's. When you significantly change the level of the 2nd most significant greenhouse gas you would expect the climate to change (especially when the level of the most significant greenhouse gas is totally driven by feedback).
I suppose your null hypothesis is that the change is caused by natural factors. But even when natural variation occurs there is a physical mechanism behind those changes. It's not just magic. We've studied those natural factors (the Sun, volcanoes, orbital cycles, etc.) and alone or in combination they aren't enough to account for the increase in temperatures that's occurred over the past century. So for you to be right there must be some natural factor that we're totally clueless about. Given that we've studied the energy balance of the Earth and the numbers add up it seems unlikely that such an unknown factor exists. So while the null hypothesis (that I presume you are using) can't be absolutely disproven the weight of evidence leans hard away from it. Scientists say they're at least 95% sure. That's good enough for me.
Climate science is very complex so while it is in principle falsifiable in practice it is difficult if not impossible to come up with a relatively simple practical test that would falsify it in a short period of time. In the long run if the temperature/energy content of the Earth's geosystems doesn't continue to increase that would falsify AGW. Here is a blog post on the subject that contains a list of 10 things that could falsify AGW. But I expect you will reject it for some reason or another.
Oh please! There are thousands of things in climate science that are falsifiable. It's going to take falsifying more than a few of them to discredit AGW. I suggest you get started.
This just underscores the tribal nature of human beings. We're not so different from the homo sapiens of 50,000 years ago.
Free as in liberty.
I don't know that I want the government to own the conduit but I want the conduit to be treated as a public utility too valuable to allow it to be monopolized.
I use my semicolon when I don't have a full shitload.
There are 2 stable isotopes of carbon 12C and 13C. Carbon 14 has too short a half life to be significant in this case. The lighter 12C carbon atom is preferred by photosynthesis so biomass has less 13C than there is in general on the Earth. Since fossil fuels have a mostly biological origin the CO2 emissions from them have less 13C than purely geologic sources like volcanic emissions. It's not all that difficult to measure those things.
This has actually been studied and when the salmon die they supply a surprising amount of nutrients not only to the streams but to the surrounding forest. As was pointed out by the two other replies to you the dead salmon get eaten by bears, racoons, otters and other critters that then do what a bear does in the surrounding forest. Here's what looks to be a lesson plan on the subject: Fish as Fertilizer: The Impacts of Salmon on Forest Ecosystems [PDF]
No, Muller was a true skeptic in the scientific tradition in that he was willing to adjust his views when he looked at the scientific evidence in depth. There's a lot of fake skeptics running around in the climate contrarian community that won't change their mind regardless of the evidence presented.