Climate change "deniers" is a misnomer. Everyone with a lick of sense knows we're in a rising temperature period. We're coming out of an ice age. We all know the climate changes, and may change for the warmer. Remember this next time you use a politically calculated term that doesn't describe most of the people involved.
So all those folks over there on the http://news.slashdot.org/story... arguing that the "warming" is fake and just caused by the "adjustments" to the raw data don't really exist. Or they do exist but they don't have a lick of sense, but you're sure not going to go over and argue with them.
In a normal world, "it's not warming it never was warming", "the warming is caused by the sun", "we can't stop the warming because we can't give up on fossil carbon" and all the other fringe sects would be seen as fringe sects arguing against each other, and not add up to some sort of credible amalgam of theory that represented a realistic alternative to AGW.
NASA has become too political -- I am unable to trust their prediction models.
Isn't this basically the same claim used by those who believe the moon landing was a hoax?
" the moon landing was a hoax". Oh come on. There is no moon! http://www.revisionism.nl/Moon... "But don’t all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon? Indeed, but shouldn’t one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Even a layperson like myself knows that scientists are not supposed to approach issues with preconceived notions. Yet this principle is cast aside when the moon is at stake. You will never see the revisionist perspective on the moon being taught in institutions of higher learning, even as a controversial opposing view. In fact, in order to even become a recognized scientist in the current atmosphere of academic repression, one must pay lip service to the establishment’s orthodoxy. Could you imagine a student who argued the revisionist viewpoint on the question of the moon being awarded a degree? He would be hounded out of the university in an instant! How can one explain such behavior from institutions that are supposed to serve as forums for the free exchange of ideas, except to conclude that the establishment has something to hide? "
The thing about NASA's surface measurements is that they come from sparse temperature stations that are badly compromised by encroached urban heat islands, various other changes, and declining numbers, and the sea observations are way more sparse. Add to this that NASA has made "adjustments" to the data about ten times over the past 30 years and each time, of the six possibilities, they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present.
This urban island effect is well known. This pushed some climate skeptics to do an independent reconstruction of the temperature history and their results match closely the existing reconstructions. So no. No conspiracy there.
If anything, in the last 50 years urban areas have reversed the previous trend and become more green, with more parks, bigger trees, reductions in paved area, etc. At very least, the onus on those relying on urban heat islands to explain the warming is to display particular data rather than handwaving vaguely. And as you say, in fact the hard data has been examined and does not support that.
Plus, the majority of the earth's surface does not happen to be urban. Or even land. And the warming is not by any means isolated or even concentrated in urban areas; in fact, the sea data overwhelmingly demonstrates warming.
Finally, from a more global perspective, the original post is one of those "in reality there is no warming" posts, so popular among rightwingers not that long ago, but today dismissed by them with a curt "Nobody is saying it isn't warming, but we disagree that humans are responsible". Denialists, denying the existence of other denialists.
but what evidence do you have that NASA has manipulated any of their work for political reasons?
The thing about NASA's surface measurements is that they come from sparse temperature stations that are badly compromised by encroached urban heat islands, various other changes, and declining numbers, and the sea observations are way more sparse. Add to this that NASA has made "adjustments" to the data about ten times over the past 30 years and each time, of the six possibilities, they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present. The chance of this happening randomly from correcting random faults in the data is 1 in 6 = 1 in 60-million. In other words, they couldn't me more naked about cooking this data that a great deal of Climate Science depends on to match NASA's agenda (presumably to create an artificial temperature gradient to get more "crisis" funding from the US government). For example, if you compare the raw surface data for the US vs. the cooked data, you will find that the 1930's were actually warmer than today, whereas the cooked data shows the 1930's being cooler:
The thing about the RSS and UAH satellite data is that it is direct, full-coverage, and objective. The satellites whiz around the Earth several times a day, so every spot on the Earth is monitored pretty much in real time. This is most important for the oceans which cover 70% of the Earth where the surface observations are extremely sparse and large areas are extrapolated to conjure up quesionable numbers. Numbers that directly contradict the direct satellite observations. And other surface data sets for that matter.
NASA's cooking of the books for the surface data is generally unknown to the public, but this round of the next, the public might just catch on.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984
1) read this http://judithcurry.com/2014/07...
2) tell us whether Judith Curry is in collusion with the AGW fraud or not.
3) " they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present" "The most significant adjustment around the world, according to NOAA, is actually for temperatures taken over the oceans, and that adjustment acts to lower rather than raise the global temperature trend." http://www.factcheck.org/2015/...
NASA said 2014 was hottest year ever. But are only 38% confident it was 0.01 degree higher when you look at details.
And for the next most likely candidate for hottest year there was only 22% confidence. I think with the El Nino this year we'll probably be able to put to rest all such arguments.
NOAA just this week got caught manipulating historical data to remove the 18 year pause in global warming that keeps being brought up.
Or they were doing proper scientific analysis by normalizing the data from two disparate methods of data collection so they could combine them into one long term data set.
NOAA made an announcement 2014 was hottest year ever, then quietly corrected their web site when it was pointed out 1938 was hotter.
I think you'll find that is only for the contiguous US which is about 2% of the Earth's surface.
All the claims from IPCC have been 100% wrong every single time, and instead of admitting it they make more claims and ignore their previous failures.
If that's true how come I've never seen any scientifically valid debunking of them. Why don't you give some specifics with links to IPCC report in question and the evidence that shows it's wrong? (God, am I channeling mi now?) I'll admit that they've been wrong about some things. For instance observed sea level rise has always outpaced the IPCC predictions of it.
Exactly. If you're 38% sure of one year out of several hundred, that's pretty damn sure. Given that random chance would be on the order of one tenth of a percent, that's a good lift, as they say in the stats biz.
No conspiracy, no fraud. Just humans doing what humans do and responding to incentives. Money comes in when you support climate change, it doesn't if you don't. This isn't difficult to see.
Difficult for me to see. Demonstrate, please. Who has been defunded because of not supporting climate change?
Slashdot ran a recent post [slashdot.org] about this exact issue, where Ebola models predicted much higher numbers than actually occurred.
As soon as people know about the "model" they start acting against it, so in the end the model is wrong: always.
Considering we don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow, or whether it will rain at my house, I'm pretty sure we don't know what the climate will be in 100 years. So, not settled...
The weather tomorrow has nothing to do with the climate in 100 years. So yes, settled!
Think about your bank account. What is there tomorrow has nothing to do with what might be there in 100 years. And that is even fully under YOUR OWN CONTROL!
So, if I predict that the average temp in the US next January will be lower than the average temp today, I'm just talking out of my hat, you would certainly bet I'm wrong?
Anyone who has taken thermodynamics also knows that if you reduce the rate at which energy leaves a system then the total energy in the system will go up over time.
Anybody who understands complexity theory knows that this is absolutely guaranteed to cause feedback loops in a complex system which accelerates the effect.
That's the problem with climate change denial - the evidence you would need to disprove climate change would also disprove all of physics AND chemistry.
Sure there is a chance it's wrong - but in a universe where it IS wrong, cars and powerplants don't work so the question is never asked - after all, why would anybody build CO2 producing engines in a universe where they don't serve any useful purpose ?
Denialists operate on the extreme pragmatic principle; e,g, "I haven't died yet, therefore the most likely prediction is that I will never die"
>Considering we don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow, or whether it will rain at my house, I'm pretty sure we don't know what the climate will be in 100 years. So, not settled in my book.
That's a ridiculously stupid claim to make. Climate is a LOT simpler than weather. Many, many orders of magnitude simpler. Why ? Because climate is an average.
If I ask you to predict the final results of a high school student randomly chosen, odds are you'd get it wrong almost every time.
If I give you a bunch of background information on him and his grades up until now, you'll get it right more often but almost never 100% for all subjects and there will still be outliers that surprize you.
Predicting a kid's final results is HARD -even with lots of data.
On the other hand - if I ask you to predict the average grade distribution for the state of New York for an entire high-school senior class and you say "It will be a normal-distribution" you will be right almost every time ! In fact, we're so confident in that outcome that if it's anything else that is - in and off itself - legally considered proof that there was large-scale cheating in the exam !
Same principle - even when it's VERY hard to predict a single data point, predicting an AVERAGE of those data points is far easier.
Climate is an average of weather over long periods (30 years typically). That's a LOT simpler to predict than the individual weather points that make it up.
indeed. the very simplest layer of the model is that in the steady state, energy in from the sun = energy radiated out from the earth. not much room for argument. the next layer is that energy radiated out depends on the black body temperature and radiation equation. Again, anybody arguing with that can be dismissed. Now the particulars; atmospheric CO2 absorbs IR, interferes with its radiation, and requires an additional term added to the black body/temperature radiation equation. Used to be a lot of denialists here arguing how that doesn't necessarily work in the atmosphere only in the lab, but lately even the official denialists have thrown them under the bus. At any rate, Arrhenius proved them wrong a priori a hundred years ago and his calculation is proved accurate for the value of CO2 prior to the industrial revolution. finally, most people would agree that burning fossil carbon raises the CO2 in the air. again, used to be more denial, but the head denialists have cut the diehard "it could be natural sources like volcanoes" guys loose. so what does that leave for discussion? the magnitude of the effect. the argument that the clouds or something yet to be specified will put a ceiling on the effect right exactly now, after it's been raising temp up to the famous 18 years ago, by just our dumb luck. once you've determined that energy is rising in the system, the only question is where is it ending up. atmospheric temp obviously, but where else? deep ocean temp? storm energy? melted ice? nowhere good, as a general rule. and of course, energy pretty much always ends up as heat at the end of its travels. so let's be optimistic, let's say the models are wrong and the long term overall warming is 1 degree per doubling of CO2 rather than 2.5 or whatever. that's not something to celebrate, as though it were a close call with an asteroid collision. it's more of a "good news; the cancer has slowed its growth and won't kill you for two years, not just one. of course, you will have a tough time until then" better outcome than the models predict.
More data is always good, but presenting any uncertainty and conditions on predictions is vital. Not only so we make properly informed decisions, but also so we don't tarnish trust by misrepresented predictions.
Climate models are really great science, but are also really ripe for this sort of problematic viewing from the public. Not just the laymen, but informed and educated public as well. To just quickly read and peruse climate model summaries you'd get the impression that confidence in models is really high. The reality is that confidence in PORTIONS of the models is really high. The whole however still has a long ways to go.
The IPCC fifth assessment report in chapter 9 notes the following:
Model tuning aims to match observed climate system behaviour and so is connected to judgements as to what constitutes a skilful representation of the Earth’s climate. For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
That's taken context and backed up by over a dozen citations to relevant journal articles on model tuning. The short version is that tuning Top Of Atmosphere energy is still a required step to avoid climate models running out to unrealistic states. The journal articles all confirm this. With TOA energy being the ultimate overall driving force behind climate change, our predictions are still subject to the fact we aren't yet able to predict TOA energy. Without that we can make guesses what TOA energy might do, but the confidence in them is nothing like the confidence in other components of climate. Failing to qualify this though could leave us 20 years from now pointing at the AR5 projections and asking what went so terribly wrong with them, and the answer is that they had things largely right, save that TOA energy rose faster or slower than anticipated. That's in essence already the conversation over the IPCC First assessment projections from the 20+ years ago.
But isn't the TOA energy budget one of the most nailed down parameters, given that it is directly measured all over the place at all times by satellites? Unlike all the murky atmospheric transactions which have to be inferred and estimated and calculated from spotty measurements of varying characteristics?
No fucking way i would ever use this Vacuum shit... it sounds like a very dangerous chemical.
I'm pretty sure they're why they banned incandescent bulbs.
Oh no, they quietly retired wholesome natural vacuum from incandescent light bulbs long ago and replaced it with deadly nitrogen, the same element found in explosives.
Oh... then we should make sure they are free of any chemicals.
I have some of that right here for you.....yes sir, I call it Vacuum.
No fucking way i would ever use this Vacuum shit... it sounds like a very dangerous chemical.
Vacuum is not toxic, it's a normal natural product present in every living thing in between the molecules. The fact that dogs and cars are afraid of it is because of their limited cognitive capacity.
It turns out to be part of the foundation of Science. In Mathematics, you *can* prove things. Done. That's the difference between math and science. You can never prove anything in Science, you can only *disprove* things. "Our earlier hypothesis turned out to be wrong. It turns out that the Earth is not flat. Also domestic sheep have evolved into a new species, they can no longer mate with wild-type sheep. Who knew? Well, some people did. Just not you."
Nonsense, of course you can prove stuff in science...
The Earth isn't flat, it is:
"The shape of Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator. This bulge results from the rotation of Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 kilometres (27 mi) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter. Thus the point on the surface farthest from Earth's center of mass is the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador or HuascarÃn in Peru. The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 kilometres (7,918 mi), which is approximately 40,000 km/Ï, because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris, France."
This is not "The Earth is Flat" or "The Earth is a round ball", it is neither, but we know exactly what shape it is, this fact is not in dispute. (at least not by 99.99999% of the people standing on Earth)
You or anybody else does not know exactly what shape the earth is; and I can assure you it is not exactly an oblate spheroid. It is, according to your own statement, APPROXIMATELY an oblate spheroid. It is also APPROXIMATELY a sphere. And on a local level, it is approximately flat. Oblate spheroid approximates it better than a sphere, and sphere approximates it better than flat; but it's obviously not exactly an oblate spheroid; it has lumps and bumps and hollows and notches, and I doubt you know the exact shape, precisely, with 0 error.
And AGW theory does not exactly tell you what the global temperature is doing; but it approximates it better than any theory that does not have an AGW term in it.
This latest attempt to shore up the crumbling global warming agenda is another obvious attempt to manipulate the data and create momentum for the Paris meeting later this year.
This new study (or mangling the data to get the conclusion you want) is full of holes.
They have extrapolated land temps to sea areas where no data exists.
They have adjusted (the favorite warmists method, warm new temperature while adjusting old temperature data down to create a trend) sea surface temperatures to agree with a less reliable data set instead of the other way around.
are two critiques of this tendentiously timed data mangling.
Indeed, our best temperature data in the USA (I know, not the whole world) the USCRN (US climate reference network) uses triple redundant aspirated platinum temp sensors in pristine rural locations. It has been operating for >10 years, and shows NO warming at all. This data is not adjusted like so much of the surface record.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
The satellite temp record (also with no hokey adjustments to create warming like GISS) also shows NO warming for the past 15-20 years.
So, this new data mangling is just another last ditch attempt to ram through the UNIPCC agenda, of controlling the energy infrastructure of the world for a green socialist fantasy.
"(I know, not the whole world)" Knowing it isn't enough. You have to understand why the behavior of less than 7% of the planet's surface is completely useless as evidence for your bias, much as you'd love it to be really really really convincing; never mind that only one piece of that 7% lies in the polar regions which AGW predicts are the most affected.
If those "95% of competent EEs" provided experimental and straightforward proof (very easy to do and has likely been done numerous times already), no problem at all. The EEs have solid and widely-provable theory on their side; the results are *very* reproducible by anyone at a 8-grade education level using nothing more than a decent multimeter and a cheap calculator. It also helps that EE as a science has been around for well over a century now, with the basic frameworks and mathematics pretty well hashed out.
It also helps that electronics doesn't have a shitload of politically powerful interests hanging and haranguing on both sides of the 'Batteriser' debate, not are there liberties, trillions of dollars, or millions of livelihoods at stake in the debate.
Now AGW on the other hand still depends mostly on flawed/incomplete computer models, and very imperfect (oftentimes wildly inaccurate) actual measurements taken over a very short timespan of maybe 150 years or so (that is, very short relative to the speed of climate change in general). Sure there's ice cores, tree rings, etc, but those are not hard data, but merely assumptions based on general principles. Finally, climate scientists rely far too heavily on statistics to extrapolate what little hard data they do have, because what they're trying to measure is too large, too complex, and too dynamic to accurately measure or predict (at least at this time). Mind you, this particular field of science is still way too embryonic in structure and nature, yet the cultists still point at it and hotly claim that it's "settled".
I don't have to tell you what all is hanging on the whole 'Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Disruption/Catchphrase-of-the-month' debate, I trust.
All models are flawed and incomplete; some are useful. As quoted by a zillion people. F=MA is famously incomplete and flawed, yet that has proved to be a very useful model for hundreds of years, and even now a good approximation.
The question is not the absolute accuracy of a model, which we can never know outside a small set of data; but rather the relative accuracy of a model with respect to other models. For instance, although F=MA is inaccurate as far as relativistic corrections are concerned, it is a better model than F=MA^2.
And that brings us to AGW; for all the complaints about inaccuracy, models with NO AGW term are completely incompetent of modeling recent global temperatures; and, tellingly, they do quite well at modeling global temperature until the 1900s, which is when we started raising atmospheric CO2, then predict a temperature too low by a much much larger factor than the famous "overprediction" of AGW models. What this means is not that models with AGW terms are wrong; it's that AGW is correct, but there are additional terms we haven't put into the model.
Add to that the fact that every step in the AGW mechanism that leads from burning fossil carbon to the temperature of the troposphere being raised is completely scientifically without question, so in fact the onus is on denialists to explain where the extra energy absorbed by the extra CO2 is going. So in the face of this, to suggest that AGW is questionable because the models aren't accurate, or too complex, or too new is a violation of anything resembling scientific methodology.
Well, here's the thing. You've got to take the best you've got. I'm not an expert, so I'm going to defer to those that are.
(This is not specifically to you, just a general response)
I'm reasonably scientifically literate, and I'm a fairly good problem solver. So are lots of people. The problem is, people can run through any random train of thought they want to reach some conclusion that sounds logical as hell, and still with no real background in what they're talking about, they can be wildly wrong because... big surprise... they don't actually know what they're talking about. While a lot of stuff sounds simple most things actually aren't.
So, if you don't know the background, you generally should not offer an opinion. Sure, in the west everyone thinks they're fully entitled to their opinion (maybe), and that their opinion is as valid as anyone else's (dead wrong). Seriously, you're just screwing everybody around you by taking respect in your analytical skill and offering an opinion. If a problem SEEMS simple to you, and you're wondering why the experts are so damn wrong... that's a warning sign not that there's some global conspiracy, but that you're missing some big part of the puzzle.
Really.. if there were huge holes in the science, you can bet a lot of scientists (not pundits or armchair theorists) would be screaming about it. Scientists aren't 100% going to get behind "protecting their interests" by towing a line.... if you're a scientist and you can offer credible reasons why most everyone else is full of crap, you're going to be set for life on funding from companies and organizations who REALLY want climate change to go away as a topic. The fact that the huge amount of money spent looking for problems in the science is only able to show results that are easily disputed as mistaken or cherry picking is telling. The science is looking reasonably solid to me on just that basis. At least, solid enough to be considering what can be done if it's right and doing something.
Of course the models are going to be inaccurate. A big part of the problem is the intuitive reaction for lots of otherwise quite rational people is to think "How can they know what the weather will be in 100 years when they can't even get next weekend's forecast right?"... and that becomes the core to their skepticism.
You have to actually look at the science, the feeds to the models, and the processes involved to understand there's probably something there. It's not the same type of forecasting.
To me, this is very much like saying "How can electronics possibly work if you idiots can't even predict exactly where an electron is going to be?" Guess what, you don't need to. Perfectly reasonable science can be built even if the discrete elements of that science are buried in uncertainty.
As soon as anybody starts saying that scientists in some field, who are all competing with each other for grant money, have all agreed to fake something so they all get more grant money; that's time to turn the page.
Impress us all by publishing a full rebuttal of global warming in the journal of your choice.
Alternately, explain how atmospheric knows to raise the earth's temperature above its black body equilibrium temperature to exactly the correct temperature ano no more, even if more CO2 is pumped out. That oughta be worth a Nobel.
"potentially moving fertile crop zones hundreds of miles"
It is always bemusing to see people think that because global warming will create higher temperatures in previously colder places that food crops can simply be grown in these newly warmed environments. The fact is that much of the reason food crops grow where they do in addition to evolutionary adaptation to specific habitats, is the fact that sufficient moisture and adequate quality soils are also available. Good quality soils can take hundreds or even thousands of years to develop. Many high latitude environments have very poor soils, often having been scoured by glaciers for thousands of years. Likewise, flowering and consequently pollination is affected by day/night length as well as by temperature, so simply because high latitude environments may become warm enough for crops to grow doesn't mean that flowering or pollination will be possible in these newly warmed environments.
The threat from human induced global warming is not simply that humans are warming the planet by burning fossil fuels, but rather very much about how fast we are warming the planet. We are currently warming the planet between 100 and 1000 times faster than would occur naturally and as a consequence we are disrupting the very ecological relationships upon which humans depend for their survival. Although its probably true that a few humans will survive and linger in the kind of Mad Max world we are creating for current and subsequent generations, but the vast majority of humanity is already on the road to extinction within a few hundred years at the current rate of change.
And crops are evolutionarily tuned to specific combinations of circumstances; you can't just move them to another zone. For instance, many plants are tied to the correct seasons not by temperature, which is way too variable, but by length of daylight, which is pretty reliable as a standard. Onions are a good example. Moving such a plant north to cope with higher temps will just result in a plant which doesn't recognize the end of summer correctly and never matures.
Maybe you should take a different view that actually fits the data:
That the fluctuations are normal for earth, and stop trying to fix a problem that has not been proven.
People use to ice skate on the Themes as well, during the little ice age. Neither time period had enough humans to create those conditions, so humans are not a significant part of the equation.
Unless you think medieval industry caused the mini ice age.
Yeah; and forest fires occurred before human beings ever appeared, so Smokey the Bear is just a liar trying to take away your freedoms and get more grant money,
Slashdot Mirror
Climate change "deniers" is a misnomer. Everyone with a lick of sense knows we're in a rising temperature period. We're coming out of an ice age. We all know the climate changes, and may change for the warmer. Remember this next time you use a politically calculated term that doesn't describe most of the people involved.
So all those folks over there on the http://news.slashdot.org/story... arguing that the "warming" is fake and just caused by the "adjustments" to the raw data don't really exist. Or they do exist but they don't have a lick of sense, but you're sure not going to go over and argue with them.
In a normal world, "it's not warming it never was warming", "the warming is caused by the sun", "we can't stop the warming because we can't give up on fossil carbon" and all the other fringe sects would be seen as fringe sects arguing against each other, and not add up to some sort of credible amalgam of theory that represented a realistic alternative to AGW.
Because if we can process it we do something about it and it is no longer a threat?
See also: why so few humans die by forgetting to eat anything.
Isn't this basically the same claim used by those who believe the moon landing was a hoax?
" the moon landing was a hoax". Oh come on. There is no moon! http://www.revisionism.nl/Moon...
"But don’t all qualified scientists and astronomers agree that there is a moon?
Indeed, but shouldn’t one be suspicious of such unanimity, when universities are supposed to be forums for open debate of controversial issues. Even a layperson like myself knows that scientists are not supposed to approach issues with preconceived notions. Yet this principle is cast aside when the moon is at stake. You will never see the revisionist perspective on the moon being taught in institutions of higher learning, even as a controversial opposing view. In fact, in order to even become a recognized scientist in the current atmosphere of academic repression, one must pay lip service to the establishment’s orthodoxy. Could you imagine a student who argued the revisionist viewpoint on the question of the moon being awarded a degree? He would be hounded out of the university in an instant! How can one explain such behavior from institutions that are supposed to serve as forums for the free exchange of ideas, except to conclude that the establishment has something to hide? "
The thing about NASA's surface measurements is that they come from sparse temperature stations that are badly compromised by encroached urban heat islands, various other changes, and declining numbers, and the sea observations are way more sparse. Add to this that NASA has made "adjustments" to the data about ten times over the past 30 years and each time, of the six possibilities, they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present.
This urban island effect is well known. This pushed some climate skeptics to do an independent reconstruction of the temperature history and their results match closely the existing reconstructions. So no. No conspiracy there.
If anything, in the last 50 years urban areas have reversed the previous trend and become more green, with more parks, bigger trees, reductions in paved area, etc. At very least, the onus on those relying on urban heat islands to explain the warming is to display particular data rather than handwaving vaguely. And as you say, in fact the hard data has been examined and does not support that.
Plus, the majority of the earth's surface does not happen to be urban. Or even land. And the warming is not by any means isolated or even concentrated in urban areas; in fact, the sea data overwhelmingly demonstrates warming.
Finally, from a more global perspective, the original post is one of those "in reality there is no warming" posts, so popular among rightwingers not that long ago, but today dismissed by them with a curt "Nobody is saying it isn't warming, but we disagree that humans are responsible". Denialists, denying the existence of other denialists.
The thing about NASA's surface measurements is that they come from sparse temperature stations that are badly compromised by encroached urban heat islands, various other changes, and declining numbers, and the sea observations are way more sparse. Add to this that NASA has made "adjustments" to the data about ten times over the past 30 years and each time, of the six possibilities, they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present. The chance of this happening randomly from correcting random faults in the data is 1 in 6 = 1 in 60-million. In other words, they couldn't me more naked about cooking this data that a great deal of Climate Science depends on to match NASA's agenda (presumably to create an artificial temperature gradient to get more "crisis" funding from the US government). For example, if you compare the raw surface data for the US vs. the cooked data, you will find that the 1930's were actually warmer than today, whereas the cooked data shows the 1930's being cooler:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/noaanasa-dramatically-altered-us-temperatures-after-the-year-2000/
The thing about the RSS and UAH satellite data is that it is direct, full-coverage, and objective. The satellites whiz around the Earth several times a day, so every spot on the Earth is monitored pretty much in real time. This is most important for the oceans which cover 70% of the Earth where the surface observations are extremely sparse and large areas are extrapolated to conjure up quesionable numbers. Numbers that directly contradict the direct satellite observations. And other surface data sets for that matter.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/noaancdcs-new-pause-buster-paper-a-laughable-attempt-to-create-warming-by-adjusting-past-data/
NASA's cooking of the books for the surface data is generally unknown to the public, but this round of the next, the public might just catch on.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984
1) read this http://judithcurry.com/2014/07...
2) tell us whether Judith Curry is in collusion with the AGW fraud or not.
3) " they have always managed without fail to cool the past and warm the present"
"The most significant adjustment around the world, according to NOAA, is actually for temperatures taken over the oceans, and that adjustment acts to lower rather than raise the global temperature trend." http://www.factcheck.org/2015/...
NASA said 2014 was hottest year ever. But are only 38% confident it was 0.01 degree higher when you look at details.
And for the next most likely candidate for hottest year there was only 22% confidence. I think with the El Nino this year we'll probably be able to put to rest all such arguments.
NOAA just this week got caught manipulating historical data to remove the 18 year pause in global warming that keeps being brought up.
Or they were doing proper scientific analysis by normalizing the data from two disparate methods of data collection so they could combine them into one long term data set.
NOAA made an announcement 2014 was hottest year ever, then quietly corrected their web site when it was pointed out 1938 was hotter.
I think you'll find that is only for the contiguous US which is about 2% of the Earth's surface.
All the claims from IPCC have been 100% wrong every single time, and instead of admitting it they make more claims and ignore their previous failures.
If that's true how come I've never seen any scientifically valid debunking of them. Why don't you give some specifics with links to IPCC report in question and the evidence that shows it's wrong? (God, am I channeling mi now?) I'll admit that they've been wrong about some things. For instance observed sea level rise has always outpaced the IPCC predictions of it.
Exactly. If you're 38% sure of one year out of several hundred, that's pretty damn sure. Given that random chance would be on the order of one tenth of a percent, that's a good lift, as they say in the stats biz.
No conspiracy, no fraud. Just humans doing what humans do and responding to incentives. Money comes in when you support climate change, it doesn't if you don't. This isn't difficult to see.
Difficult for me to see. Demonstrate, please. Who has been defunded because of not supporting climate change?
If I put a bottle in the ocean, I don't know how far it will travel by tomorrow. I also don't know how far it will have traveled in 100 years.
If you don't know that the bottle will have travelled less than a thousand miles by tomorrow, you need remedial education.
Slashdot ran a recent post [slashdot.org] about this exact issue, where Ebola models predicted much higher numbers than actually occurred. As soon as people know about the "model" they start acting against it, so in the end the model is wrong: always.
Considering we don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow, or whether it will rain at my house, I'm pretty sure we don't know what the climate will be in 100 years. So, not settled ...
The weather tomorrow has nothing to do with the climate in 100 years. So yes, settled!
Think about your bank account. What is there tomorrow has nothing to do with what might be there in 100 years. And that is even fully under YOUR OWN CONTROL!
So, if I predict that the average temp in the US next January will be lower than the average temp today, I'm just talking out of my hat, you would certainly bet I'm wrong?
Anyone who has taken thermodynamics also knows that if you reduce the rate at which energy leaves a system then the total energy in the system will go up over time. Anybody who understands complexity theory knows that this is absolutely guaranteed to cause feedback loops in a complex system which accelerates the effect.
That's the problem with climate change denial - the evidence you would need to disprove climate change would also disprove all of physics AND chemistry. Sure there is a chance it's wrong - but in a universe where it IS wrong, cars and powerplants don't work so the question is never asked - after all, why would anybody build CO2 producing engines in a universe where they don't serve any useful purpose ?
Denialists operate on the extreme pragmatic principle; e,g, "I haven't died yet, therefore the most likely prediction is that I will never die"
>Considering we don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow, or whether it will rain at my house, I'm pretty sure we don't know what the climate will be in 100 years. So, not settled in my book.
That's a ridiculously stupid claim to make. Climate is a LOT simpler than weather. Many, many orders of magnitude simpler. Why ? Because climate is an average.
If I ask you to predict the final results of a high school student randomly chosen, odds are you'd get it wrong almost every time. If I give you a bunch of background information on him and his grades up until now, you'll get it right more often but almost never 100% for all subjects and there will still be outliers that surprize you. Predicting a kid's final results is HARD -even with lots of data.
On the other hand - if I ask you to predict the average grade distribution for the state of New York for an entire high-school senior class and you say "It will be a normal-distribution" you will be right almost every time ! In fact, we're so confident in that outcome that if it's anything else that is - in and off itself - legally considered proof that there was large-scale cheating in the exam !
Same principle - even when it's VERY hard to predict a single data point, predicting an AVERAGE of those data points is far easier. Climate is an average of weather over long periods (30 years typically). That's a LOT simpler to predict than the individual weather points that make it up.
indeed. the very simplest layer of the model is that in the steady state, energy in from the sun = energy radiated out from the earth. not much room for argument.
the next layer is that energy radiated out depends on the black body temperature and radiation equation. Again, anybody arguing with that can be dismissed.
Now the particulars; atmospheric CO2 absorbs IR, interferes with its radiation, and requires an additional term added to the black body/temperature radiation equation. Used to be a lot of denialists here arguing how that doesn't necessarily work in the atmosphere only in the lab, but lately even the official denialists have thrown them under the bus. At any rate, Arrhenius proved them wrong a priori a hundred years ago and his calculation is proved accurate for the value of CO2 prior to the industrial revolution.
finally, most people would agree that burning fossil carbon raises the CO2 in the air. again, used to be more denial, but the head denialists have cut the diehard "it could be natural sources like volcanoes" guys loose.
so what does that leave for discussion? the magnitude of the effect. the argument that the clouds or something yet to be specified will put a ceiling on the effect right exactly now, after it's been raising temp up to the famous 18 years ago, by just our dumb luck.
once you've determined that energy is rising in the system, the only question is where is it ending up. atmospheric temp obviously, but where else? deep ocean temp? storm energy? melted ice? nowhere good, as a general rule. and of course, energy pretty much always ends up as heat at the end of its travels.
so let's be optimistic, let's say the models are wrong and the long term overall warming is 1 degree per doubling of CO2 rather than 2.5 or whatever. that's not something to celebrate, as though it were a close call with an asteroid collision. it's more of a "good news; the cancer has slowed its growth and won't kill you for two years, not just one. of course, you will have a tough time until then" better outcome than the models predict.
More data is always good, but presenting any uncertainty and conditions on predictions is vital. Not only so we make properly informed decisions, but also so we don't tarnish trust by misrepresented predictions.
Climate models are really great science, but are also really ripe for this sort of problematic viewing from the public. Not just the laymen, but informed and educated public as well. To just quickly read and peruse climate model summaries you'd get the impression that confidence in models is really high. The reality is that confidence in PORTIONS of the models is really high. The whole however still has a long ways to go.
The IPCC fifth assessment report in chapter 9 notes the following: Model tuning aims to match observed climate system behaviour and so is connected to judgements as to what constitutes a skilful representation of the Earth’s climate. For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
That's taken context and backed up by over a dozen citations to relevant journal articles on model tuning. The short version is that tuning Top Of Atmosphere energy is still a required step to avoid climate models running out to unrealistic states. The journal articles all confirm this. With TOA energy being the ultimate overall driving force behind climate change, our predictions are still subject to the fact we aren't yet able to predict TOA energy. Without that we can make guesses what TOA energy might do, but the confidence in them is nothing like the confidence in other components of climate. Failing to qualify this though could leave us 20 years from now pointing at the AR5 projections and asking what went so terribly wrong with them, and the answer is that they had things largely right, save that TOA energy rose faster or slower than anticipated. That's in essence already the conversation over the IPCC First assessment projections from the 20+ years ago.
But isn't the TOA energy budget one of the most nailed down parameters, given that it is directly measured all over the place at all times by satellites? Unlike all the murky atmospheric transactions which have to be inferred and estimated and calculated from spotty measurements of varying characteristics?
No fucking way i would ever use this Vacuum shit... it sounds like a very dangerous chemical.
I'm pretty sure they're why they banned incandescent bulbs.
That was an overreaction - o.k., i don't want Vacuum in my food, but for incandescent bulbs they could just add a "contains Vacuum" warning.
And yet, they are trying to get you to eat food which has been vacuum sealed.
No fucking way i would ever use this Vacuum shit... it sounds like a very dangerous chemical.
I'm pretty sure they're why they banned incandescent bulbs.
Oh no, they quietly retired wholesome natural vacuum from incandescent light bulbs long ago and replaced it with deadly nitrogen, the same element found in explosives.
Oh... then we should make sure they are free of any chemicals.
I have some of that right here for you.....yes sir, I call it Vacuum.
No fucking way i would ever use this Vacuum shit... it sounds like a very dangerous chemical.
Vacuum is not toxic, it's a normal natural product present in every living thing in between the molecules. The fact that dogs and cars are afraid of it is because of their limited cognitive capacity.
The data is useful, but it's only valuable if it can be put into some kind of meaningful context and converted into information.
Well it's useful because now all the folks who warn us about WARMIST FRAUD in capital letters can find the smoking gun in the data, right?
The nation builders dropped $12 billion in Iraq, and built ISIS. http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Contrasting it against a white stormtrooper outfit, yes, even if I was some dumbass who didn't know what a stormtrooper was.
I'd have to say, a Nazi stormtrooper outfit would be more worrisome.
It turns out to be part of the foundation of Science. In Mathematics, you *can* prove things. Done. That's the difference between math and science. You can never prove anything in Science, you can only *disprove* things. "Our earlier hypothesis turned out to be wrong. It turns out that the Earth is not flat. Also domestic sheep have evolved into a new species, they can no longer mate with wild-type sheep. Who knew? Well, some people did. Just not you."
Nonsense, of course you can prove stuff in science...
The Earth isn't flat, it is:
"The shape of Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator. This bulge results from the rotation of Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 kilometres (27 mi) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter. Thus the point on the surface farthest from Earth's center of mass is the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador or HuascarÃn in Peru. The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 kilometres (7,918 mi), which is approximately 40,000 km/Ï, because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris, France."
This is not "The Earth is Flat" or "The Earth is a round ball", it is neither, but we know exactly what shape it is, this fact is not in dispute. (at least not by 99.99999% of the people standing on Earth)
You or anybody else does not know exactly what shape the earth is; and I can assure you it is not exactly an oblate spheroid. It is, according to your own statement, APPROXIMATELY an oblate spheroid. It is also APPROXIMATELY a sphere. And on a local level, it is approximately flat. Oblate spheroid approximates it better than a sphere, and sphere approximates it better than flat; but it's obviously not exactly an oblate spheroid; it has lumps and bumps and hollows and notches, and I doubt you know the exact shape, precisely, with 0 error.
And AGW theory does not exactly tell you what the global temperature is doing; but it approximates it better than any theory that does not have an AGW term in it.
This latest attempt to shore up the crumbling global warming agenda is another obvious attempt to manipulate the data and create momentum for the Paris meeting later this year.
This new study (or mangling the data to get the conclusion you want) is full of holes. They have extrapolated land temps to sea areas where no data exists. They have adjusted (the favorite warmists method, warm new temperature while adjusting old temperature data down to create a trend) sea surface temperatures to agree with a less reliable data set instead of the other way around.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/a-first-look-at-possible-artifacts-of-data-biases-in-the-recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus-by-karl-et-al-science-4-june-2015/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
are two critiques of this tendentiously timed data mangling.
Indeed, our best temperature data in the USA (I know, not the whole world) the USCRN (US climate reference network) uses triple redundant aspirated platinum temp sensors in pristine rural locations. It has been operating for >10 years, and shows NO warming at all. This data is not adjusted like so much of the surface record. http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
The satellite temp record (also with no hokey adjustments to create warming like GISS) also shows NO warming for the past 15-20 years.
So, this new data mangling is just another last ditch attempt to ram through the UNIPCC agenda, of controlling the energy infrastructure of the world for a green socialist fantasy.
"(I know, not the whole world)" Knowing it isn't enough. You have to understand why the behavior of less than 7% of the planet's surface is completely useless as evidence for your bias, much as you'd love it to be really really really convincing; never mind that only one piece of that 7% lies in the polar regions which AGW predicts are the most affected.
Depends:
If those "95% of competent EEs" provided experimental and straightforward proof (very easy to do and has likely been done numerous times already), no problem at all. The EEs have solid and widely-provable theory on their side; the results are *very* reproducible by anyone at a 8-grade education level using nothing more than a decent multimeter and a cheap calculator. It also helps that EE as a science has been around for well over a century now, with the basic frameworks and mathematics pretty well hashed out.
It also helps that electronics doesn't have a shitload of politically powerful interests hanging and haranguing on both sides of the 'Batteriser' debate, not are there liberties, trillions of dollars, or millions of livelihoods at stake in the debate.
Now AGW on the other hand still depends mostly on flawed/incomplete computer models, and very imperfect (oftentimes wildly inaccurate) actual measurements taken over a very short timespan of maybe 150 years or so (that is, very short relative to the speed of climate change in general). Sure there's ice cores, tree rings, etc, but those are not hard data, but merely assumptions based on general principles. Finally, climate scientists rely far too heavily on statistics to extrapolate what little hard data they do have, because what they're trying to measure is too large, too complex, and too dynamic to accurately measure or predict (at least at this time). Mind you, this particular field of science is still way too embryonic in structure and nature, yet the cultists still point at it and hotly claim that it's "settled".
I don't have to tell you what all is hanging on the whole 'Global Warming/Climate Change/Climate Disruption/Catchphrase-of-the-month' debate, I trust.
All models are flawed and incomplete; some are useful. As quoted by a zillion people.
F=MA is famously incomplete and flawed, yet that has proved to be a very useful model for hundreds of years, and even now a good approximation.
The question is not the absolute accuracy of a model, which we can never know outside a small set of data; but rather the relative accuracy of a model with respect to other models. For instance, although F=MA is inaccurate as far as relativistic corrections are concerned, it is a better model than F=MA^2.
And that brings us to AGW; for all the complaints about inaccuracy, models with NO AGW term are completely incompetent of modeling recent global temperatures; and, tellingly, they do quite well at modeling global temperature until the 1900s, which is when we started raising atmospheric CO2, then predict a temperature too low by a much much larger factor than the famous "overprediction" of AGW models. What this means is not that models with AGW terms are wrong; it's that AGW is correct, but there are additional terms we haven't put into the model.
Add to that the fact that every step in the AGW mechanism that leads from burning fossil carbon to the temperature of the troposphere being raised is completely scientifically without question, so in fact the onus is on denialists to explain where the extra energy absorbed by the extra CO2 is going.
So in the face of this, to suggest that AGW is questionable because the models aren't accurate, or too complex, or too new is a violation of anything resembling scientific methodology.
Well, here's the thing. You've got to take the best you've got. I'm not an expert, so I'm going to defer to those that are.
(This is not specifically to you, just a general response)
I'm reasonably scientifically literate, and I'm a fairly good problem solver. So are lots of people. The problem is, people can run through any random train of thought they want to reach some conclusion that sounds logical as hell, and still with no real background in what they're talking about, they can be wildly wrong because... big surprise... they don't actually know what they're talking about. While a lot of stuff sounds simple most things actually aren't.
So, if you don't know the background, you generally should not offer an opinion. Sure, in the west everyone thinks they're fully entitled to their opinion (maybe), and that their opinion is as valid as anyone else's (dead wrong). Seriously, you're just screwing everybody around you by taking respect in your analytical skill and offering an opinion. If a problem SEEMS simple to you, and you're wondering why the experts are so damn wrong... that's a warning sign not that there's some global conspiracy, but that you're missing some big part of the puzzle.
Really.. if there were huge holes in the science, you can bet a lot of scientists (not pundits or armchair theorists) would be screaming about it. Scientists aren't 100% going to get behind "protecting their interests" by towing a line.... if you're a scientist and you can offer credible reasons why most everyone else is full of crap, you're going to be set for life on funding from companies and organizations who REALLY want climate change to go away as a topic. The fact that the huge amount of money spent looking for problems in the science is only able to show results that are easily disputed as mistaken or cherry picking is telling. The science is looking reasonably solid to me on just that basis. At least, solid enough to be considering what can be done if it's right and doing something.
Of course the models are going to be inaccurate. A big part of the problem is the intuitive reaction for lots of otherwise quite rational people is to think "How can they know what the weather will be in 100 years when they can't even get next weekend's forecast right?"... and that becomes the core to their skepticism.
You have to actually look at the science, the feeds to the models, and the processes involved to understand there's probably something there. It's not the same type of forecasting.
To me, this is very much like saying "How can electronics possibly work if you idiots can't even predict exactly where an electron is going to be?" Guess what, you don't need to. Perfectly reasonable science can be built even if the discrete elements of that science are buried in uncertainty.
As soon as anybody starts saying that scientists in some field, who are all competing with each other for grant money, have all agreed to fake something so they all get more grant money; that's time to turn the page.
Impress us all by publishing a full rebuttal of global warming in the journal of your choice.
Alternately, explain how atmospheric knows to raise the earth's temperature above its black body equilibrium temperature to exactly the correct temperature ano no more, even if more CO2 is pumped out. That oughta be worth a Nobel.
"potentially moving fertile crop zones hundreds of miles"
It is always bemusing to see people think that because global warming will create higher temperatures in previously colder places that food crops can simply be grown in these newly warmed environments. The fact is that much of the reason food crops grow where they do in addition to evolutionary adaptation to specific habitats, is the fact that sufficient moisture and adequate quality soils are also available. Good quality soils can take hundreds or even thousands of years to develop. Many high latitude environments have very poor soils, often having been scoured by glaciers for thousands of years. Likewise, flowering and consequently pollination is affected by day/night length as well as by temperature, so simply because high latitude environments may become warm enough for crops to grow doesn't mean that flowering or pollination will be possible in these newly warmed environments.
The threat from human induced global warming is not simply that humans are warming the planet by burning fossil fuels, but rather very much about how fast we are warming the planet. We are currently warming the planet between 100 and 1000 times faster than would occur naturally and as a consequence we are disrupting the very ecological relationships upon which humans depend for their survival. Although its probably true that a few humans will survive and linger in the kind of Mad Max world we are creating for current and subsequent generations, but the vast majority of humanity is already on the road to extinction within a few hundred years at the current rate of change.
And crops are evolutionarily tuned to specific combinations of circumstances; you can't just move them to another zone. For instance, many plants are tied to the correct seasons not by temperature, which is way too variable, but by length of daylight, which is pretty reliable as a standard. Onions are a good example. Moving such a plant north to cope with higher temps will just result in a plant which doesn't recognize the end of summer correctly and never matures.
Maybe you should take a different view that actually fits the data:
That the fluctuations are normal for earth, and stop trying to fix a problem that has not been proven.
People use to ice skate on the Themes as well, during the little ice age. Neither time period had enough humans to create those conditions, so humans are not a significant part of the equation.
Unless you think medieval industry caused the mini ice age.
Yeah; and forest fires occurred before human beings ever appeared, so Smokey the Bear is just a liar trying to take away your freedoms and get more grant money,