Come on -- predict, and cast in concrete, the average tropospheric temperature from 2013 to 2018, with a low margin of error, and "lock it in".
The problem with that is that climate scientists don't even try to predict temperatures on such a short time scale since natural variability can completely override any long term climate signal over less than around 20 years.
Maybe you're right. I should have made it more clear that volcanic eruptions were responsible for temporary dips in temperatures in their findings and they said nothing about volcanoes having anything to do with the increase in GHGs.
Until sea level rose at the end of the last glaciation Wrangel Island was not an island so they just walked there. It probably didn't get cut off from the mainland until less than 10,000 years ago.
It is falsifiable, just not by the simple tests you'd like to apply. I think 100,000 years from now it will be pretty obvious to anyone with a brain how good the theory of evolution is (whether it proves accurate or not).
It's the difference between the YOYOs* and the WITTs**. The YOYO's are all about personal morality and the WITTs are about public morality. Most people are some of both leaning one way or the other. The things you complained about are mostly pragmatic, improving the society as a whole while perhaps stepping on some individual rights.
Regarding your McCain-Feingold comment, I don't consider money to be the equivalent of free speech. What it is is an amplifier of free speech. I don't consider Bill Gates to have more free speech than I do but he certainly has the ability to get it more widely heard than I do.
* YOYO = You're on your own ** WITT = We're in this together
Of course for our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, their feet are useful for gripping branches. We lost that when we came down out of the trees and our feet evolved to be better for ground locomotion.
That said I read a story a few years ago about a woman who had no arms and she managed to get by fine with just her feet including eating, cooking, writing, driving a car and many of the other things that people normally do with their hands. An amazing and inspiring story.
Mims is awful eager to get the NVAP study in the IPCC AR5 but it's not clear to me that it has anything to offer yet. If they had had anything substantial to say before the cutoff date I'm sure it would have been included. Analysis and evaluation don't necessarily fit anyone's timetable.
I don't know that Michael Mann is a reviewer for the AR5. I don't think they're going to list all of the reviewers until they publish the final report. He may well have decided to sit this one out due to the heat that gets attached to his name. There are others in the field to take up the slack. However, Mann does have the credentials to speak on the subject and over the years no one has yet done more than nitpick some minor errors in his work. He still has tremendous respect from others in the field.
I don't know where you got thee "2500 scientists" thing but if 2500 scientists with credentials in a field get together to say something I'm going to pay attention.
The cut off date for submissions to the AR5 was July 31, 2012. The fact that the NVAP report came out just barely before that and that in effect they're saying they haven't done enough analysis yet to present any findings means that it isn't very useful for this report. Should they hold up the AR5 just for this, especially when it's not clear when the reanalysis results will be ready?
The IPCC reports are always a little behind. For example by the time the AR4 came out its projections of sea level rise were already considered to be way behind current understanding. It's just the nature of the process.
The fact that some years tropical cyclones do not hit populated areas with any ferocity doesn't necessarily make them better than other years either. If and when they hit land is a matter of natural variability. I made my statement based on the number of named storms, nothing else.
Dr. Kerry Emanuel whose field of study is tropical cyclones is quoted in Wikipedia about them:
"Records of hurricane activity worldwide show an upswing of both the maximum wind speed in and the duration of hurricanes. The energy released by the average hurricane (again considering all hurricanes worldwide) seems to have increased by around 70% in the past 30 years or so, corresponding to about a 15% increase in the maximum wind speed and a 60% increase in storm lifetime.
I think you are right. I've been told several times over the years by religious people that I can't be a moral person because I don't believe in God. My response is that if it requires fear of God to make you act morally then you really aren't very moral but just reacting to the threat of punishment. If you do the right thing even though no one's looking (including God) then you can really call yourself a moral person.
The Briffa/Melvin/Grudd paper is specific to the Torneträsk region of northern Sweden. It's a mistake to try an extrapolate it to global temperatures. It's just another datum in the accumulating pile of data and does nothing to refute Mann's work.
Watts is so eager to find something to disprove AGW that he often reads more into something that appears to support his position than it warrants.
The fact that Forrest Mims is an AR5 reviewer doesn't impress me. After all Lord Monckton was able to sign on as a reviewer. If we had wanted to you and I could have probably signed on too.
Mims is saying that the IPCC-AR5 should cite the recent NVAP-M work and quoted a statement from them thusly:
“Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”
But he didn't include the whole paragraph:
"The results of Figures 1 and 4 have not been subjected to detailed global or regional trend analyses, which will be a topic for a forthcoming paper. Such analyses must account for the changes in satellite sampling discussed in the auxiliary material. Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data."
In other words they're saying they haven't completed their work and done enough analysis yet to say anything about global water vapor trends. It would be premature to cite it in the AR5 since at this point it does nothing to confirm or refute other water vapor datasets. Here is the NVAPStatement on Using Existing NVAP Dataset (1988-2001) for Trends.
Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones. The apparent increase in the proportion of very intense storms since 1970 in some regions is much larger than simulated by current models for that period.
We'll see what the AR5 says about it but recent Atlantic hurricane seasons have mostly been more active than average.
Thanks, I had fun tracking down the stuff on NVAP and learned something. But I got side tracked several times and spent way too much time on it.
I don't understand this assumption that volcanoes emit soot (or more properly black carbon). There is very little soot in volcanic eruptions compared to the other aerosols such as SO2 and volcanic ash.
The ozone hole is still there. We've just reduced the emissions that exacerbated it enough so that it's quite getting worse and is on the way to returning to normal in 50 or 60 years.
It won't effect climate models that much. They already include aerosols in their calculations. There will just be some adjustments for the increased knowledge of that part of the aerosol calculations. I don't expect to see drastic changes in their output.
Volcanoes don't release all that much soot. What they do release is SO2 and fine rock ash which do have a cooling effect that can last for a few years before it washes out of the atmosphere.
Except his statement was in response to a statement claiming that CO2 was the #1 atmospheric greenhouse component.
I think if you read the original paper what they actually said is that CO2 is the #1 forcing agent of greenhouse warming. Water vapor is strictly a feedback effect.
And the level of water vapor is totally dependent on temperature so is can't drive temperatures. The level of water vapor is dependent on other things that drive temperature (like CO2). CO2 is nowhere near being completely saturated.
I see a lot of political statements in your post including the implicit assumption that climate scientists positions are political in nature. What if they are not?
Of course, the upcoming IPCC report retracts many of those predictions, and discusses far less severe consequences than it had projected before.
Don't count on it. My understanding is that it won't be that much different than the previous one and many of the differences will show worse effects than before.
Most of the Co2 crowd isn't really interested in reducing Co2 globally, or curing the problem. They're more interested in redistributing $trillions to the third-world and China.
Bullshit! Just bullshit!
CO2 is the issue and it's just about the only issue worth worrying about until we get it under control. Then we can move on to the lesser things.
How do you think climate scientists would be doing if they had the same PR budget as many of the forces trying to discredit their work do? How would you feel about it if they spent 5 or 10% of their grant money on PR? Should scientists spend more time schmoozing and thereby reduce the amount of science they end up doing? Some scientists are good at that sort of thing but many are not. Scientist's jobs are to study reality and publish their findings and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation of scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on -- predict, and cast in concrete, the average tropospheric temperature from 2013 to 2018, with a low margin of error, and "lock it in".
The problem with that is that climate scientists don't even try to predict temperatures on such a short time scale since natural variability can completely override any long term climate signal over less than around 20 years.
Maybe you're right. I should have made it more clear that volcanic eruptions were responsible for temporary dips in temperatures in their findings and they said nothing about volcanoes having anything to do with the increase in GHGs.
Until sea level rose at the end of the last glaciation Wrangel Island was not an island so they just walked there. It probably didn't get cut off from the mainland until less than 10,000 years ago.
It is falsifiable, just not by the simple tests you'd like to apply. I think 100,000 years from now it will be pretty obvious to anyone with a brain how good the theory of evolution is (whether it proves accurate or not).
It's the difference between the YOYOs* and the WITTs**. The YOYO's are all about personal morality and the WITTs are about public morality. Most people are some of both leaning one way or the other. The things you complained about are mostly pragmatic, improving the society as a whole while perhaps stepping on some individual rights.
Regarding your McCain-Feingold comment, I don't consider money to be the equivalent of free speech. What it is is an amplifier of free speech. I don't consider Bill Gates to have more free speech than I do but he certainly has the ability to get it more widely heard than I do.
* YOYO = You're on your own
** WITT = We're in this together
Of course for our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, their feet are useful for gripping branches. We lost that when we came down out of the trees and our feet evolved to be better for ground locomotion.
That said I read a story a few years ago about a woman who had no arms and she managed to get by fine with just her feet including eating, cooking, writing, driving a car and many of the other things that people normally do with their hands. An amazing and inspiring story.
Yes, it's better that they act morally because of their fear of God than to remove all restraints on their behavior.
What are you talking about? Only 1/3 of Texas Representatives are Democrats, 12 of out 36. Demographics may change that in the future but not yet.
Mims is awful eager to get the NVAP study in the IPCC AR5 but it's not clear to me that it has anything to offer yet. If they had had anything substantial to say before the cutoff date I'm sure it would have been included. Analysis and evaluation don't necessarily fit anyone's timetable.
I don't know that Michael Mann is a reviewer for the AR5. I don't think they're going to list all of the reviewers until they publish the final report. He may well have decided to sit this one out due to the heat that gets attached to his name. There are others in the field to take up the slack. However, Mann does have the credentials to speak on the subject and over the years no one has yet done more than nitpick some minor errors in his work. He still has tremendous respect from others in the field.
I don't know where you got thee "2500 scientists" thing but if 2500 scientists with credentials in a field get together to say something I'm going to pay attention.
The cut off date for submissions to the AR5 was July 31, 2012. The fact that the NVAP report came out just barely before that and that in effect they're saying they haven't done enough analysis yet to present any findings means that it isn't very useful for this report. Should they hold up the AR5 just for this, especially when it's not clear when the reanalysis results will be ready?
The IPCC reports are always a little behind. For example by the time the AR4 came out its projections of sea level rise were already considered to be way behind current understanding. It's just the nature of the process.
The fact that some years tropical cyclones do not hit populated areas with any ferocity doesn't necessarily make them better than other years either. If and when they hit land is a matter of natural variability. I made my statement based on the number of named storms, nothing else.
Dr. Kerry Emanuel whose field of study is tropical cyclones is quoted in Wikipedia about them:
"Records of hurricane activity worldwide show an upswing of both the maximum wind speed in and the duration of hurricanes. The energy released by the average hurricane (again considering all hurricanes worldwide) seems to have increased by around 70% in the past 30 years or so, corresponding to about a 15% increase in the maximum wind speed and a 60% increase in storm lifetime.
I think you are right. I've been told several times over the years by religious people that I can't be a moral person because I don't believe in God. My response is that if it requires fear of God to make you act morally then you really aren't very moral but just reacting to the threat of punishment. If you do the right thing even though no one's looking (including God) then you can really call yourself a moral person.
The Briffa/Melvin/Grudd paper is specific to the Torneträsk region of northern Sweden. It's a mistake to try an extrapolate it to global temperatures. It's just another datum in the accumulating pile of data and does nothing to refute Mann's work.
Watts is so eager to find something to disprove AGW that he often reads more into something that appears to support his position than it warrants.
The fact that Forrest Mims is an AR5 reviewer doesn't impress me. After all Lord Monckton was able to sign on as a reviewer. If we had wanted to you and I could have probably signed on too.
Mims is saying that the IPCC-AR5 should cite the recent NVAP-M work and quoted a statement from them thusly:
“Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”
But he didn't include the whole paragraph:
"The results of Figures 1 and 4 have not been subjected to detailed global or regional trend analyses, which will be a topic for a forthcoming paper. Such analyses must account for the changes in satellite sampling discussed in the auxiliary material. Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data."
In other words they're saying they haven't completed their work and done enough analysis yet to say anything about global water vapor trends. It would be premature to cite it in the AR5 since at this point it does nothing to confirm or refute other water vapor datasets. Here is the NVAP Statement on Using Existing NVAP Dataset (1988-2001) for Trends.
To quote the IPCC AR4 report:
Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea surface temperatures. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones. The apparent increase in the proportion of very intense storms since 1970 in some regions is much larger than simulated by current models for that period.
We'll see what the AR5 says about it but recent Atlantic hurricane seasons have mostly been more active than average.
Thanks, I had fun tracking down the stuff on NVAP and learned something. But I got side tracked several times and spent way too much time on it.
Have you considered getting help for your obsessive/compulsive disorder?
I don't understand this assumption that volcanoes emit soot (or more properly black carbon). There is very little soot in volcanic eruptions compared to the other aerosols such as SO2 and volcanic ash.
This article is about climate change science. That the discussion devolves into politics is not the fault of the article.
The ozone hole is still there. We've just reduced the emissions that exacerbated it enough so that it's quite getting worse and is on the way to returning to normal in 50 or 60 years.
It won't effect climate models that much. They already include aerosols in their calculations. There will just be some adjustments for the increased knowledge of that part of the aerosol calculations. I don't expect to see drastic changes in their output.
Volcanoes don't release all that much soot. What they do release is SO2 and fine rock ash which do have a cooling effect that can last for a few years before it washes out of the atmosphere.
Except his statement was in response to a statement claiming that CO2 was the #1 atmospheric greenhouse component.
I think if you read the original paper what they actually said is that CO2 is the #1 forcing agent of greenhouse warming. Water vapor is strictly a feedback effect.
And the level of water vapor is totally dependent on temperature so is can't drive temperatures. The level of water vapor is dependent on other things that drive temperature (like CO2). CO2 is nowhere near being completely saturated.
I see a lot of political statements in your post including the implicit assumption that climate scientists positions are political in nature. What if they are not?
Of course, the upcoming IPCC report retracts many of those predictions, and discusses far less severe consequences than it had projected before.
Don't count on it. My understanding is that it won't be that much different than the previous one and many of the differences will show worse effects than before.
Don't forget to include the raw materials in the form of fossil fuels that you have to continuously feed a FF power plant to keep it going.
Most of the Co2 crowd isn't really interested in reducing Co2 globally, or curing the problem. They're more interested in redistributing $trillions to the third-world and China.
Bullshit! Just bullshit!
CO2 is the issue and it's just about the only issue worth worrying about until we get it under control. Then we can move on to the lesser things.
How do you think climate scientists would be doing if they had the same PR budget as many of the forces trying to discredit their work do? How would you feel about it if they spent 5 or 10% of their grant money on PR? Should scientists spend more time schmoozing and thereby reduce the amount of science they end up doing? Some scientists are good at that sort of thing but many are not. Scientist's jobs are to study reality and publish their findings and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation of scientists.