C'mon, tgibbs, you know a sawtooth when you see it, and not all noise looks as regular as the ice core temp record. Hell, if you're going to try to say the ice core record is "noisy" and therefore inappropriate for any sort of predictions, you must have a hell of a time with the modern temperature records:)
1) insurance -> simply turn people away from ERs unless they're headed for surgery. heartless, yes, but it would solve your issue;
2) housing -> bringing down property values can certainly happen with any set of people
3) taxes -> eliminate the income tax and just have a flat sales tax. eliminate welfare, public education and other benefit programs so there is no incentive to come and mooch off the system.
4) H1-Bs -> my experience with them is actually mostly positive. I'd rather have the cream of the crop from some other country decide to come here and make a life (and believe me, a good 99% of them want to stay here permanently), rather than some lazy public school educated american with a chip on their shoulder.
5) free trade -> dude, it might hurt some industries, but it works, and just because other countries may put up tariffs and other barriers does not make them right or prosperous
6) guest workers and unemployment -> if you sent all the H1Bs back, you'd probably also see a massive offshoring of work, with all the inefficiencies that come with it. unemployment here would stay high, and we'd be losing the economic side effects of having H1Bs here, in country, spending money.
What we need to do is put government in its proper place and create incentives for people to come here to work, not leech. I've got no sympathy for natives in the tech fields that can't compete against H1Bs, and I do think we should fast track H1Bs that want citizenship. But I've also got no sympathy for people, any people, living off of government welfare programs.
Clearly free time has more value than $1/hour, at least if you aren't destitute to the point of needing that dollar.
If free time has value, who is getting paid for it? Whether or not I "value" free time in some subjective sense does not mean that a dollar value can be placed on it (unless, of course, you're talking about selling a vacation package to someone, or renting a bowling lane to someone, or offering some other leisure service to them).
I'm not averse to being convinced I'm wrong on this point, since of course I "value" doing things for their own sake rather than renumeration, but I can't see asserting that there is a dollar value that can be placed on it, at least not in any uniform manner.
I wouldn't hire someone who had been held back three times in their K-12 career for office work, but I might hire them to dig a ditch. They would certainly have a better idea of what they were capable of if they were held back, rather than getting a high school diploma and wondering why they can't do anything but dig ditches.
That being said, if it took someone till they were age 30 to get a bachelor's degree, I'd be willing to hire them for an entry level job related to their major just as quickly as a 21 year old. If someone's K-12 career took them till age 30, good for them.
Of course then you've got to ask yourself, should we be paying for public school for 30 year olds, which leads to the question, should we be paying for public schools at all.
But production is the only measure of value. If we all worked 20 hour weeks, we'd all by 50% poorer...which means worse housing, schools, food, education, etc, etc, etc.
Now, that being said, if someone wants to choose to work a 20 hour week, and take the hit, more power to them. But don't expect me to sacrifice my children's education, or standard of living, in order to give someone else half of my job. Root, hog, or die.
...I do not think it means what you think it means.
The reason why we have a "dearth" of college graduates, is because the kids really don't have a choice if they want to survive.
The article is talking about an overabundance of college graduates, "dearth" is the opposite of that.
FWIW, if an immigrant can come here, work hard, and be successful, great. I got no problems with that. The problem is when we have a welfare state government handing out benefits to immigrants who come here and aren't contributors. If everyone who came to the US and everyone who was born in the US had to stand on their own two feet, instead of relying on government redistribution of wealth, the immigrant issue would be a non-issue.
Your second point is driving to the root cause of the problem. Having a system of social promotion and inflated grades is probably *the* ultimate root. If people could actually fail, could actually be told in 2nd grade, "look, you're just not ready for third grade, let's try 2nd again", then maybe this wouldn't be an issue. How you deal with 18 year olds in 2nd grade is another question, but at least you've told them the truth for 12 years, instead of fooling them (and others) into thinking that they're ready for higher education.
The other thing that needs to be addressed is behavior problems in public schools -> with no penalty (either corporal punishment or expulsion), there's no consequence for bad behavior.
If we flunked more kids when they deserved it, and kicked kids out of school when they misbehaved, we might actually have high schools filled with people ready to succeed in college.
If a society finds itself with an overabundance of qualified, educated people, the correct response is not to try and cut down on the overabundance, but to start doing more interesting things.
You're mixing the cause and effect -> having more supply doesn't create more demand. The question should be, "if we have an overabundance of qualified, educated people, what do we have a dearth of?" If we have a dearth of people doing interesting things, great. But if we have a dearth of people picking up trash, or digging ditches, or milling machine parts, the proper adaptation is to fill the existing demand - anything else is just going to create another artificial imbalance.
Not to bang on the libertarian drum too hard, but one might suppose that with a lighter tax burden and less government regulation and intervention, "more interesting things" might be more likely to occur.
His analysis of the saturation point saw tooth of warm periods and ice ages is particularly interesting.
Although probably not applicable to our generation or even thousands of generations down the line, eventually humans are going to have to try to stop the next long ice age.
It is a mathematical causal model that makes hard predictions, global warming being one of them
Hard predictions? Which one? And since when does your statistical model determine causality if any observation fits your model?
Once again, the notion of applying the ideal gas law, which is restricted to the case of a perfectly insulated container of fixed volume, is idiotic.
It is, as you say, a "sanity check", one that generally applies quite well.
Pressure does not produce warming, except briefly when a gas is first compressed, but that heat radiates away quickly unless it is in a perfectly insulating container.
You're playing causality now when you shouldn't be -> pressure is related to temperature. Whether or not you increased pressure with more mass (and it takes a while to radiate the heat out of the atmosphere), or if you heated up the temperature (which therefore increases pressure), is irrelevant to the basic relationship, which well accounts for observations of temperature on Venus. This relationship doesn't assert causality, it simply is.
For insulation purposes, you simply have to quantify the heat radiation from Venus to understand that the temperature/pressure relationship is a good sanity check.
The temperature of a planet ultimately boils down to the amount of energy it receives (primarily from the sun) and how efficiently it is able to radiate that energy away. Lots of CO2 makes a planet an inefficient radiator, which means that it has to be at a higher temperature to radiate away all of the energy it receives.
Agree with the first one with just a few caveats -> primarily from the sun but also a bit form the interior of the planet. The second one is pretty much making my point though -> CO2 is hardly an inefficient radiator compared to say, water vapor. The catastrophic AGW story is that a small adjustment in CO2 causes forcings of water vapor (while ignoring things like cloud formation and negative feedbacks).
You do realize that ppm == parts per million, right?
Scientific theories cannot be proved, only disproved.
Thank you, finally, we've gotten back to Popper. Understanding that idea is very important. Now, explain which observations would disprove your theory. Be specific and include quantities, not just direction.
One way of disproving a model is by mathematical modeling to show that it is inconsistent with observation.
Which has been done. Certainly out of the dozen or so models out there, only one has been "true" for the past 20 years, say, and the others must be "false", right?
Oh wait, if the models don't make any real predictions, then no observation is inconsistent with them, right? So we could have every model "true" for any set of observations! Cool science, huh?:)
Mars does not experience as much warming from CO2 as earth, because the amount of CO2 in its atmosphere, as measured by partial pressure of CO2, is much, much less.
And the same relationship holds between Earth and Venus -> the partial pressure of CO2 on earth is much much less than on Venus. Temperatures as they exist on Venus would be impossible on earth, even if the earth's atmosphere was 100% CO2. Our gravity well will only hold so much atmosphere, and we could never reach the pressures necessary to have the kind of temps Venus has.
So tell me, what's your upper bound of average global temperature if you had a 100% CO2 atmosphere? Pick your favorite model, and walk us through your assertion.
You can see the cloud cover of Venus through a telescope. Venus has 100% cloud cover. Yet Venus is hotter than Mercury, which is closer to the sun and has no clouds.
Wattsupwiththat similarly support the need of its readers to believe in the denialsist plaint, "It's not our faaaaault."
Look, whether or not you're pointing fingers at whattsupwiththat, or realclimate, you've got partisanship and ad hominem enough to go around. The warmist plaint of "the sky is warming! the sky is warming" is just as relevant as your jingoistic example. What you still haven't done is come to grips with your own personal confirmation bias.
there are multiple mechanisms that produce short-term variation around the long-term trend imposed by CO2 increase.
And there are multiple mechanisms that produce long-term variation as well, not to mention the problem of causality. You're hedging your bets again, asserting that you have no need of predictions because you can always point to one model out of several dozen which may have gotten it right (without apparently invalidating the models that got it wrong).
The next step in understanding is to realize that Venus is much warmer than would be expected from solar radiation based upon blackbody physics. To date, nobody has managed to come up with a model consistent with the climate of Venus that does not invoke the CO2 greenhouse effect.
Really? You're still holding onto Venus? It's clear that Venus's temperature is well within the range of temps expected by solar input and atmospheric pressure levels. Your magical "greenhouse effect" (poorly named, since greenhouses actually work by stopping convection) is a red herring.
Do this thought experiment -> turn earth's atmosphere into 100% CO2. According to your theory, temperatures start blazing through the roof (okay, maybe not 100% CO2, since you want to use water vapor as the feedback mechanism, and CO2 is only a "forcer"). Does atmospheric pressure increase at sea level? Does it increase throughout the troposphere and beyond? Does earth gain extra gravity to hold in the higher pressure gases of the atmosphere?
Do this thought experiment -> bring some big huge asteroid onto earth, and convert it all into gas, doubling the amount of gas molecules in the atmosphere while keeping earth's mass constant. Does the atmosphere increase to 2atm at sea level, or does the extra gas escape?
PV = nRT works, and although you may have dynamic equilibrium, it still puts an upper and lower limit on the ranges possible. If you wanted to quantify Venus's surface temp due to CO2, it would be completely dwarfed by the simple relationship of pressure and temperature for gases.
Yes, I can see how one could form that kind of misunderstanding, if you carefully avoid the intellectual discipline of doing the math to see what the models really predict.
Sigh. Look, let's get back to "a model cannot be its own proof". Good. Now, you pretty much said "any model". That's like betting on both red and black on the roulette wheel, without the 00. Tell me again how this is a scientific prediction.
In the ocean? In the satellite measures? (I know...you have different excuses for those, all coincidentally producing a bias in the direction of warming)
The satellite measures are calibrated based on the surface temp record, so UHI can poison the well there too (although, truth be told, sat temps have only been around for 30 or so years, so asserting a trend out of that is weak mojo). For the ocean, you've got an order of magnitude less observation than the surface record.
So, back to the temp record, yes, most if not all of it can be accounted for by UHI and siting issues.
A localized MWP is not in dispute. The question is whether it was global
Now, whether or not this was incompetence or malfeasance could be an open question.
What makes you think the original data still exists when Phil Jones himself testified that they only had the "value-added" data, since losing the original data in the 80s?
When the ability of CO2 to produce global warming was predicted more than a century ago, well before the big rise in CO2 and the warming that accompanied it, it is ridiculous to refer to this as an "unknown driver."
How about "unknown quantity". The common refrain of catastrophic AGW folks is that any "left over" warming after accounting for other natural drivers and their magnitudes is that human created CO2 is therefore responsible for the rest.
The prediction that an increase in CO2 would warm the climate long predates the big rise in CO2 and the modern warming.
The prediction doesn't match the observations. Continually increasing CO2 has not been lock step with temperature increases. Furthermore, the ice core record shows a CO2 lag, rather than lead.
Only if you are inside a black hole does gravity prevent heat from escaping in the form of electromagnetic radiation. So the notion that the temperature of Venus can be explained by adiabatic heating is in violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation of Energy).
You're confusing cause and effect here, and ignoring the external heat source. The planet holds its atmosphere, which reaches an equilibrium of temperature based on solar input and escaping radiation (small quantities are probably due to geologic activity as well, but let's put that aside for the moment). The atmosphere, just like any other gas, obeys the law PV=nRT. Fluid dynamics aside of convection and heat transfer intra-atmosphere, the law still holds. The thought that simply the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere is what drives hundreds of degrees of temperature is simply foolish, and falsified by Mars.
Think again, a little harder:)
It's not the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 that determines the warming effect, but the partial pressure. The partial pressure of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere is over four orders of magnitude lower than on Venus, because even Mars's atmosphere is mostly CO2, there is less CO2 than in the Earth's atmosphere.
Okay, pick one and stick with it. You're arguing my point now -> it's about pressure, not ppm of any given gas.
Doesn't really much matter, since they are all based on the actual physics, without the flights of fancy you've been advocating. All have a positive feedback between CO2 and temperature, so that CO2 will follow warming if solar output increases, and warming will follow CO2 if CO2 is added to the atmosphere (e.g. from combustion). And none of them give a runaway greenhouse with anticipated levels of CO2.
Doesn't really matter? Wow, way to hedge your bets:) Look, positive feedback working when CO2 increases following warming if solar output increases will cause further warming, so it should look just like warming caused by "added" CO2 -> in both cases, you're going to see a lead, in fact an ever increasing lead.
plus a large mass of historical and prehistorical data that also is consistent with the theory.
Consistent only because you want it both ways -> if you see a lag, it's "consistent", if you see a lead, it's "consistent". You've made no predictions.
1. There is some, as yet undiscovered, mechanism that limits the warming effect of CO2 on the atmosphere.
It's called negative feedback effects like cloud albedo.
2. The apparent increase in average temperatures that has accompanied the modern rise in CO2 is either
a. The result of multiple separate statistical errors in land measurements, sea measurements, and satellite measurements; the fact that they all seem to show warming is sheer coincidence, or
On the contrary, the observed warming is consistent with the known and modeled effects of CO2 on climate, so it is not unexplained.
BZZZT. Wrong. The modeled effects are derived from the assumption that any unknown drivers must be due to human emitted CO2. Again, the model cannot be its own proof.
Indeed, nobody has yet managed to come up with a model that is consistent with historical climate data and does not predict warming in response to such an increase in CO2.
Historical climate data shows increase of CO2 in response to warming, not the other way around. Your prediction does not match the observations.
there is no way to explain the high temperature of Venus other than the greenhouse effect of CO2.
Regardless if an atmosphere is a insulated container or not, the pressure versus temperature relationship of an atmosphere still holds - gravity acts as your container here. Now, have fun explaining how Mars has 95.2% CO2 atmosphere, but never had any runaway global warming. Have fun, think hard, it helps.
You can inspect the actual models, and run them yourself. You will find that they do include this positive feedback, do not make some sort of magical distinction between "natural" and "human" CO2, and do not necessarily result in "runaway" warming.
Which model is your favorite? And you were the one making the distinction between lags and leads of CO2 based on whether or not it was "added" or "not added", not me.
The major role of modeling in science is not to "be its own proof," but rather to help to provide a sanity check to detect errrors.
Ah, Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. " AGW seems to fit that bill perfectly.
Look, if you can accept that the model is simply a sanity check and not proof, you're half way there. A proof of causality requires a falsifiable proposition, not simply statistical correlations (sketchy or not). Accepting your statement at face value, yes, you may not have a model that proves your theory of catastrophic AGW driven by CO2 emissions wrong, but your model does not give us any confidence that it is right either.
The concern is not "unaccounted for warming," but rather the warming that is accounted for and expected.
That's not true, and you know it. The standard AGW talking point is that after taking all known drivers into consideration, we cannot explain all the observed warming, therefore it must be due to man.
That certainly will have serious consequences, but nothing approaching what you would get with runaway global warming such as is seen on Venus.
PV = nRT. The temperature on Venus has nothing to do with runaway global warming, it has everything to do with atmospheric pressures. Try again.
you can even try them out yourself to verify that the relationship between CO2 and temperature in the model is as described, without the need to postulate absurdities like "CO2 memory"
Again, a model cannot be its own proof. Statistics can tell us a certain number of rocks dropping into a pond will be correlated with a certain number of ripples, but it does not show us that ripples cause dropping rocks.
This is what the creationists do--no matter how many fossils you show them, they always insist that the fossil evidence is not strong enough, because there are "missing links."
Let me continue the analogy for you for warmists - no matter how many natural drivers you show them, they always insist that the evidence is not strong enough, because there is "unaccounted for warming."
So Mann made some techincal errors, but they were largely irrelevant to his basic conclusions, which have since been validated by other studies that do not share those technical flaws. This remains the scientific consensus.
In the model, CO2 has exactly the same effect no matter where it comes from. But if something other than CO2, such as an increase in solar radiation, increases the temperature, then CO2 rises afterwards (and amplifies the increase in temperature).
If CO2 has the same effect no matter where it comes from, you can't have lags -> CO2 emitted, whether from oceans in response to solar changes, or from supervolcanoes or model T fords, always acts as a positive feedback effect and raises temperatures. Lags wouldn't exist if CO2 amplified the increase in temperature, since whatever triggered the initial CO2 release, you'd end up with a positive feedback effect.
Dropping a rock in a pond will create ripples. Ripples in a pond do not create dropping rocks.
A subsequent review by the NRC concluded that McIntyre & Kitrick's techincal objection was correct, but that it did in fact produce an incorrect result in the case of Mann's data.
You meant "correct result", right?
You seem to be trying to argue that "if one measurment is not enough, then however many you have can't be enough either." That makes no sense.
No, I'm really trying to argue that a model cannot be its own justification. A model which takes measurements from 1000 stations cannot be its own justification, just as a model which takes measurements from 1 station cannot be its own justification. This is why Popper's falsifiability criteria is so crucial to determining causality.
This is an independent peer-review panel of the US National Academies of Science, the most respected independent organization of scientists in the nation, if not the world.
I'm sorry, but the appeal to authority argument falls flat here.
"They accepted our argument that Mann's method is biased towards producing hockey stick-shaped PCs, that uncertainties have been underestimated and that the bristlecone data, on which the famous hockey stick shape depends, should not have been used. They also express very little confidence in the IPCC's claim about the 1990s being the warmest decade in the millennium. But you have to read the report closely to pick all these things up--they bury it in a lot of genteel and deferential prose."
Yes, I know what it is called. I asked you to "Kindly quote the section of the IPCC report that predicts runaway warming as a consequence of anticipated levels of CO2."
And global climate models assume that every molecule of CO2, wherever it came from, has the same physical chemistry and the same impact on climate. No such memory is assumed.
You're contradicting yourself. You asserted that CO2 lags temp changes if the CO2 is not "added", and leads temp changes if it is "added". This is an assertion of different behavior depending upon whether or not the CO2 came from the outgassing of the oceans, volcanoes, or other natural sources, or if they came from the burning of petroleum products by humans. This is an invalid assertion of memory.
If CO2 causes a feedback effect, any addition of CO2 from any source should cause an increase in temperatures. Magical CO2 just does not exist.
Although the resolution isn't close enough to hundreds of years to really see anything comparable to the ice core data we have that shows an 800 year lag, you can get an idea of the lack of temp change after such an enormous amount of CO2 released circa the La Garita Caldera supervolcano. I understand that this is only a preliminary refutation based on your assertion that this kind of data would be a problem for AGW, but it certainly shows it is possible.
insisting that the distribution is not good enough is empty handwaving--unless of course you can support it with a model that demonstrates that a more uniform distribution gives different conclusions.
Isn't that Mcyntre and McKitrick's complaint?
I see no value in such a contrafactual assumption. Perhaps if you have a mathematical model of climate for which you can show that only one station would be sufficient then that would be worthy of discussion.
But that's exactly the problem -> the model is the proof of the model. Any arbitrary model can claim to be its own justification.
If you want to argue that millions of years ago a volcano made a significant contribution to CO2 and climate, I'm willing to look at the evidence, but I don't see the relevance to our discussion of global warming in the modern era.
The relevance is the assertion that the difference between lags and leads of CO2 is due to "added" CO2 (the consequence being that we ignore things like outgassing from the ocean, because it isn't "added"). My supposition would be that millions of years ago a volcano made a signifiant contribution to CO2, which did not have a signifiant impact on climate because of the negative feedback effects not properly modeled yet. This would serve as a contradiction to your assertion that leads in CO2 are due to "added" CO2 - unless you further ad hoc assert that volcanic CO2 is of a different quality than man emitted CO2.
You need to postulate some fairly contrived circumstance to generate an artifactual trend--as evidenced by the fact that you have not yet managed to come up with a scenario that would do it.
So, you are insisting that you cannot possibly find a trend that does not exist. Interesting.
I've read the article. It is a toy model that omits so many of the factors that influence climate in the real world as to be of no relevance.
The whole point of the toy model is to take it to its extreme and show that CO2 models of runaway warming are flawed even in the simplest form. It is, as you say, the "sanity check".
...concluded that Mann's conclusions are essentially correct.
Shame on you. That whitewash should be patently obvious to someone with such a iron grip on statistics.
No, I haven't read anything of the sort in the IPCC report. Kindly quote the section of the IPCC report that predicts runaway warming as a consequence of anticipated levels of CO2.
this behavior is not at hoc, but a necessary consequence of the well established physical chemistry of CO2.
This behavior is of course ad hoc. CO2 has no memory, and the climate system cannot distinguish between "added" CO2 and "non-added" CO2 -> physically, no such animal exists.
You have insisted that there are examples of massive releases of CO2 due to volcanoes. If you can find evidence of this, without a temperature increase following, then this would be a problem for the model.
As devil's advocate, I'll assert that the AGW defense of that would be the assertion that aerosols like SO2 balance it out. But I'll keep in mind that you'll accept that evidence as a falsification of AGW.
I see. So you consider human beings to be supernatural. Not part of nature.
No, I consider human beings to be intelligent, and therefore naturally analogous to God in the intelligent design theory.
That being said, you bring up an interesting point -> why are things that humans do not considered part of nature? Why is a BMW considered any less natural than a spruce tree? Taken to the logical conclusion with catastrophic AGW, the religious statement becomes:
"After understanding all of the natural drivers that we know of, we cannot account for X degrees C of the observed global warming, therefore, changes must be due to man, even though "man" is just one of many possible natural drivers that we don't completely understand."
Your argument is: "If anyone says that humans have done something, he's a creationist."
No, my argument is that "If anyone says that because we are ignorant of certain factors, it must be due to some arbitrary actor, then they are acting like a creationist." Asserting certainty of a theory based upon ignorance is the hallmark of AGW and intelligent design.
Tell you what, offer me up your falsifiable hypothesis, and then we can talk science. Until then, feel free to worship at the Church of Global Warming.
If you have a model, then you have a basis for judging what density of recording stations you need to detect a trend.
Shouldn't distribution count as well as density? And what about the model of just one temperature station -> that model is pretty simple, and based on that model you could judge that it is of sufficient density. Here's your problem -> your claims are simply assertions, not proofs. Give us something falsifiable, and you might actually be doing science. Asserting the existence of a model is it's own proof is just circular reasoning.
You miss the point--the impact of the volcanic eruptions on atmospheric CO2 is so small as to be undetectable
That's simply not true. Although average volcanic activity is usually very low, catastrophic events that occur on the range of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, can certainly quantifiably influence atmospheric CO2.
What you describe will increase the mean, but the slope will still be within error of zero. And the more points you create like that, the closer it will get to zero.
Riddle me this -> is it possible to find a trend where none exists? You seem to postulate that any set of measurements, if they are large enough, will be perfectly accurate and precise. You still haven't answered the resolution problem either.
It is assuming a fixed and unalterable greenhouse layer made of steel! It has nothing to contribute to the topic at hand. If that is the closest thing to a model that anti-AGW advocates can muster, it is truly pathetic.
Read the article and the comments -> it's a thought experiment that reduces the theory of AGW down to its conceptual limits.
You assert that the models would cause runaway warming, yet the existing models do not exhibit this effect, and they don't have to assume "magical negative feedback" to prevent it--only careful modelling of known physical mechanisms.
Have you seen Mann's hockey stick? Have you heard the IPCC fear-mongering about runaway warming and tipping points? And have you seen the ridiculous gaps in the models...for example, cloud cover (a strong negative feedback that we simply don't have proxy data for)?
You're still avoiding the issue with the ad hoc nature of your rationalizations, and fail to offer any opportunity for observations to possibly contradict your theory. If you see a historic record where CO2 is leading, you'll assert that it's due to some sort of "added" CO2. If you see a historic record where CO2 is lagging, you'll assert that it's not due to some sort of "added" CO2. These are assertions, not proofs.
"After understanding all of the fossils that we know of, we cannot account for the gaps between the observed fossils, therefore, changes must be due to naturalistic processes."
Let me finish this for you, so you understand where the real science is being done:
"After understanding all of the natural drivers that we know of, we cannot account for X degrees C of the observed global warming, therefore, changes must be due to naturalistic processes."
The default reason for something, when doing science, is as you say, "naturalistic processes". Attributing unknowns to some intelligent designer or actor (be it man or God), is what creationists do.
The warmists are the ones who are making the creationist argument - tell me if you've heard this one before:
"After understanding all of the natural drivers we know of, we cannot account for X degrees C of the observed global warming, therefore, changes must be due to man emitted CO2."
"After understanding all of the fossils that we know of, we cannot account for the gaps between the observed fossils, therefore, changes must be due to the Hand of God."
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C'mon, tgibbs, you know a sawtooth when you see it, and not all noise looks as regular as the ice core temp record. Hell, if you're going to try to say the ice core record is "noisy" and therefore inappropriate for any sort of predictions, you must have a hell of a time with the modern temperature records :)
So taking your issues one at a time:
1) insurance -> simply turn people away from ERs unless they're headed for surgery. heartless, yes, but it would solve your issue;
2) housing -> bringing down property values can certainly happen with any set of people
3) taxes -> eliminate the income tax and just have a flat sales tax. eliminate welfare, public education and other benefit programs so there is no incentive to come and mooch off the system.
4) H1-Bs -> my experience with them is actually mostly positive. I'd rather have the cream of the crop from some other country decide to come here and make a life (and believe me, a good 99% of them want to stay here permanently), rather than some lazy public school educated american with a chip on their shoulder.
5) free trade -> dude, it might hurt some industries, but it works, and just because other countries may put up tariffs and other barriers does not make them right or prosperous
6) guest workers and unemployment -> if you sent all the H1Bs back, you'd probably also see a massive offshoring of work, with all the inefficiencies that come with it. unemployment here would stay high, and we'd be losing the economic side effects of having H1Bs here, in country, spending money.
What we need to do is put government in its proper place and create incentives for people to come here to work, not leech. I've got no sympathy for natives in the tech fields that can't compete against H1Bs, and I do think we should fast track H1Bs that want citizenship. But I've also got no sympathy for people, any people, living off of government welfare programs.
If free time has value, who is getting paid for it? Whether or not I "value" free time in some subjective sense does not mean that a dollar value can be placed on it (unless, of course, you're talking about selling a vacation package to someone, or renting a bowling lane to someone, or offering some other leisure service to them).
I'm not averse to being convinced I'm wrong on this point, since of course I "value" doing things for their own sake rather than renumeration, but I can't see asserting that there is a dollar value that can be placed on it, at least not in any uniform manner.
I wouldn't hire someone who had been held back three times in their K-12 career for office work, but I might hire them to dig a ditch. They would certainly have a better idea of what they were capable of if they were held back, rather than getting a high school diploma and wondering why they can't do anything but dig ditches.
That being said, if it took someone till they were age 30 to get a bachelor's degree, I'd be willing to hire them for an entry level job related to their major just as quickly as a 21 year old. If someone's K-12 career took them till age 30, good for them.
Of course then you've got to ask yourself, should we be paying for public school for 30 year olds, which leads to the question, should we be paying for public schools at all.
When leisure time can pay rent, buy food, or otherwise be traded for services and goods, I'll value it > $0.
Will you pay me $10/hour to stay at home and enjoy myself?
But production is the only measure of value. If we all worked 20 hour weeks, we'd all by 50% poorer...which means worse housing, schools, food, education, etc, etc, etc.
Now, that being said, if someone wants to choose to work a 20 hour week, and take the hit, more power to them. But don't expect me to sacrifice my children's education, or standard of living, in order to give someone else half of my job. Root, hog, or die.
...I do not think it means what you think it means.
The article is talking about an overabundance of college graduates, "dearth" is the opposite of that.
FWIW, if an immigrant can come here, work hard, and be successful, great. I got no problems with that. The problem is when we have a welfare state government handing out benefits to immigrants who come here and aren't contributors. If everyone who came to the US and everyone who was born in the US had to stand on their own two feet, instead of relying on government redistribution of wealth, the immigrant issue would be a non-issue.
Your second point is driving to the root cause of the problem. Having a system of social promotion and inflated grades is probably *the* ultimate root. If people could actually fail, could actually be told in 2nd grade, "look, you're just not ready for third grade, let's try 2nd again", then maybe this wouldn't be an issue. How you deal with 18 year olds in 2nd grade is another question, but at least you've told them the truth for 12 years, instead of fooling them (and others) into thinking that they're ready for higher education.
The other thing that needs to be addressed is behavior problems in public schools -> with no penalty (either corporal punishment or expulsion), there's no consequence for bad behavior.
If we flunked more kids when they deserved it, and kicked kids out of school when they misbehaved, we might actually have high schools filled with people ready to succeed in college.
You're mixing the cause and effect -> having more supply doesn't create more demand. The question should be, "if we have an overabundance of qualified, educated people, what do we have a dearth of?" If we have a dearth of people doing interesting things, great. But if we have a dearth of people picking up trash, or digging ditches, or milling machine parts, the proper adaptation is to fill the existing demand - anything else is just going to create another artificial imbalance.
Not to bang on the libertarian drum too hard, but one might suppose that with a lighter tax burden and less government regulation and intervention, "more interesting things" might be more likely to occur.
More on the saturation limit of any greenhouse effect on earth:
http://met.hu/idojaras/IDOJARAS_vol111_No1_01.pdf
Enjoy tgibbs!
Here's a post you might like tgibbs:
http://www.ianschumacher.com/greenhouse_effect_maximum.html
His analysis of the saturation point saw tooth of warm periods and ice ages is particularly interesting.
Although probably not applicable to our generation or even thousands of generations down the line, eventually humans are going to have to try to stop the next long ice age.
Hard predictions? Which one? And since when does your statistical model determine causality if any observation fits your model?
It is, as you say, a "sanity check", one that generally applies quite well.
You're playing causality now when you shouldn't be -> pressure is related to temperature. Whether or not you increased pressure with more mass (and it takes a while to radiate the heat out of the atmosphere), or if you heated up the temperature (which therefore increases pressure), is irrelevant to the basic relationship, which well accounts for observations of temperature on Venus. This relationship doesn't assert causality, it simply is.
For insulation purposes, you simply have to quantify the heat radiation from Venus to understand that the temperature/pressure relationship is a good sanity check.
Agree with the first one with just a few caveats -> primarily from the sun but also a bit form the interior of the planet. The second one is pretty much making my point though -> CO2 is hardly an inefficient radiator compared to say, water vapor. The catastrophic AGW story is that a small adjustment in CO2 causes forcings of water vapor (while ignoring things like cloud formation and negative feedbacks).
You do realize that ppm == parts per million, right?
Thank you, finally, we've gotten back to Popper. Understanding that idea is very important. Now, explain which observations would disprove your theory. Be specific and include quantities, not just direction.
Which has been done. Certainly out of the dozen or so models out there, only one has been "true" for the past 20 years, say, and the others must be "false", right?
Oh wait, if the models don't make any real predictions, then no observation is inconsistent with them, right? So we could have every model "true" for any set of observations! Cool science, huh? :)
And the same relationship holds between Earth and Venus -> the partial pressure of CO2 on earth is much much less than on Venus. Temperatures as they exist on Venus would be impossible on earth, even if the earth's atmosphere was 100% CO2. Our gravity well will only hold so much atmosphere, and we could never reach the pressures necessary to have the kind of temps Venus has.
So tell me, what's your upper bound of average global temperature if you had a 100% CO2 atmosphere? Pick your favorite model, and walk us through your assertion.
And no atmosphere -> like I
Look, whether or not you're pointing fingers at whattsupwiththat, or realclimate, you've got partisanship and ad hominem enough to go around. The warmist plaint of "the sky is warming! the sky is warming" is just as relevant as your jingoistic example. What you still haven't done is come to grips with your own personal confirmation bias.
And there are multiple mechanisms that produce long-term variation as well, not to mention the problem of causality. You're hedging your bets again, asserting that you have no need of predictions because you can always point to one model out of several dozen which may have gotten it right (without apparently invalidating the models that got it wrong).
Really? You're still holding onto Venus? It's clear that Venus's temperature is well within the range of temps expected by solar input and atmospheric pressure levels. Your magical "greenhouse effect" (poorly named, since greenhouses actually work by stopping convection) is a red herring.
Do this thought experiment -> turn earth's atmosphere into 100% CO2. According to your theory, temperatures start blazing through the roof (okay, maybe not 100% CO2, since you want to use water vapor as the feedback mechanism, and CO2 is only a "forcer"). Does atmospheric pressure increase at sea level? Does it increase throughout the troposphere and beyond? Does earth gain extra gravity to hold in the higher pressure gases of the atmosphere?
Do this thought experiment -> bring some big huge asteroid onto earth, and convert it all into gas, doubling the amount of gas molecules in the atmosphere while keeping earth's mass constant. Does the atmosphere increase to 2atm at sea level, or does the extra gas escape?
PV = nRT works, and although you may have dynamic equilibrium, it still puts an upper and lower limit on the ranges possible. If you wanted to quantify Venus's surface temp due to CO2, it would be completely dwarfed by the simple relationship of pressure and temperature for gases.
Sigh. Look, let's get back to "a model cannot be its own proof". Good. Now, you pretty much said "any model". That's like betting on both red and black on the roulette wheel, without the 00. Tell me again how this is a scientific prediction.
The satellite measures are calibrated based on the surface temp record, so UHI can poison the well there too (although, truth be told, sat temps have only been around for 30 or so years, so asserting a trend out of that is weak mojo). For the ocean, you've got an order of magnitude less observation than the surface record.
So, back to the temp record, yes, most if not all of it can be accounted for by UHI and siting issues.
And here's the answer again, RTFL: http://ww
Yes, the data was destroyed and the originals no longer exist. See:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
Now, whether or not this was incompetence or malfeasance could be an open question.
What makes you think the original data still exists when Phil Jones himself testified that they only had the "value-added" data, since losing the original data in the 80s?
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/availability/
"We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added data."
How about "unknown quantity". The common refrain of catastrophic AGW folks is that any "left over" warming after accounting for other natural drivers and their magnitudes is that human created CO2 is therefore responsible for the rest.
The prediction doesn't match the observations. Continually increasing CO2 has not been lock step with temperature increases. Furthermore, the ice core record shows a CO2 lag, rather than lead.
You're confusing cause and effect here, and ignoring the external heat source. The planet holds its atmosphere, which reaches an equilibrium of temperature based on solar input and escaping radiation (small quantities are probably due to geologic activity as well, but let's put that aside for the moment). The atmosphere, just like any other gas, obeys the law PV=nRT. Fluid dynamics aside of convection and heat transfer intra-atmosphere, the law still holds. The thought that simply the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere is what drives hundreds of degrees of temperature is simply foolish, and falsified by Mars.
Think again, a little harder :)
Okay, pick one and stick with it. You're arguing my point now -> it's about pressure, not ppm of any given gas.
Doesn't really matter? Wow, way to hedge your bets :) Look, positive feedback working when CO2 increases following warming if solar output increases will cause further warming, so it should look just like warming caused by "added" CO2 -> in both cases, you're going to see a lead, in fact an ever increasing lead.
Consistent only because you want it both ways -> if you see a lag, it's "consistent", if you see a lead, it's "consistent". You've made no predictions.
It's called negative feedback effects like cloud albedo.
Actually, it's most likely due to UHI.
BZZZT. Wrong. The modeled effects are derived from the assumption that any unknown drivers must be due to human emitted CO2. Again, the model cannot be its own proof.
Historical climate data shows increase of CO2 in response to warming, not the other way around. Your prediction does not match the observations.
BZZZT. Wrong. RTFA again: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/
And another one if you dislike WUWT: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/05/hyperventilating-on-venus.html
Regardless if an atmosphere is a insulated container or not, the pressure versus temperature relationship of an atmosphere still holds - gravity acts as your container here. Now, have fun explaining how Mars has 95.2% CO2 atmosphere, but never had any runaway global warming. Have fun, think hard, it helps.
Which model is your favorite? And you were the one making the distinction between lags and leads of CO2 based on whether or not it was "added" or "not added", not me.
Ah, Mencken, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. " AGW seems to fit that bill perfectly.
Look, if you can accept that the model is simply a sanity check and not proof, you're half way there. A proof of causality requires a falsifiable proposition, not simply statistical correlations (sketchy or not). Accepting your statement at face value, yes, you may not have a model that proves your theory of catastrophic AGW driven by CO2 emissions wrong, but your model does not give us any confidence that it is right either.
That's not true, and you know it. The standard AGW talking point is that after taking all known drivers into consideration, we cannot explain all the observed warming, therefore it must be due to man.
PV = nRT. The temperature on Venus has nothing to do with runaway global warming, it has everything to do with atmospheric pressures. Try again.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/
Again, a model cannot be its own proof. Statistics can tell us a certain number of rocks dropping into a pond will be correlated with a certain number of ripples, but it does not show us that ripples cause dropping rocks.
Let me continue the analogy for you for warmists - no matter how many natural drivers you show them, they always insist that the evidence is not strong enough, because there is "unaccounted for warming."
Of course science != consensus. But here's a refutation of the whitewash:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf
So you didn't look at any of their graphs? Here, try page 792-793. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter19.pdf
If CO2 has the same effect no matter where it comes from, you can't have lags -> CO2 emitted, whether from oceans in response to solar changes, or from supervolcanoes or model T fords, always acts as a positive feedback effect and raises temperatures. Lags wouldn't exist if CO2 amplified the increase in temperature, since whatever triggered the initial CO2 release, you'd end up with a positive feedback effect.
Dropping a rock in a pond will create ripples. Ripples in a pond do not create dropping rocks.
You meant "correct result", right?
No, I'm really trying to argue that a model cannot be its own justification. A model which takes measurements from 1000 stations cannot be its own justification, just as a model which takes measurements from 1 station cannot be its own justification. This is why Popper's falsifiability criteria is so crucial to determining causality.
I'm sorry, but the appeal to authority argument falls flat here.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
"They accepted our argument that Mann's method is biased towards producing hockey stick-shaped PCs, that uncertainties have been underestimated and that the bristlecone data, on which the famous hockey stick shape depends, should not have been used. They also express very little confidence in the IPCC's claim about the 1990s being the warmest decade in the millennium. But you have to read the report closely to pick all these things up--they bury it in a lot of genteel and deferential prose."
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch4s4-references.html
Check out the page, and text search for "runaway". You'll find it somewhere towards the middle of the page.
RTFL: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch4s4-references.html
You're contradicting yourself. You asserted that CO2 lags temp changes if the CO2 is not "added", and leads temp changes if it is "added". This is an assertion of different behavior depending upon whether or not the CO2 came from the outgassing of the oceans, volcanoes, or other natural sources, or if they came from the burning of petroleum products by humans. This is an invalid assertion of memory.
If CO2 causes a feedback effect, any addition of CO2 from any source should cause an increase in temperatures. Magical CO2 just does not exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Garita_Caldera
http://www.junkscience.com/images/paleocarbon.gif
Although the resolution isn't close enough to hundreds of years to really see anything comparable to the ice core data we have that shows an 800 year lag, you can get an idea of the lack of temp change after such an enormous amount of CO2 released circa the La Garita Caldera supervolcano. I understand that this is only a preliminary refutation based on your assertion that this kind of data would be a problem for AGW, but it certainly shows it is possible.
Isn't that Mcyntre and McKitrick's complaint?
But that's exactly the problem -> the model is the proof of the model. Any arbitrary model can claim to be its own justification.
The relevance is the assertion that the difference between lags and leads of CO2 is due to "added" CO2 (the consequence being that we ignore things like outgassing from the ocean, because it isn't "added"). My supposition would be that millions of years ago a volcano made a signifiant contribution to CO2, which did not have a signifiant impact on climate because of the negative feedback effects not properly modeled yet. This would serve as a contradiction to your assertion that leads in CO2 are due to "added" CO2 - unless you further ad hoc assert that volcanic CO2 is of a different quality than man emitted CO2.
So, you are insisting that you cannot possibly find a trend that does not exist. Interesting.
The whole point of the toy model is to take it to its extreme and show that CO2 models of runaway warming are flawed even in the simplest form. It is, as you say, the "sanity check".
Shame on you. That whitewash should be patently obvious to someone with such a iron grip on statistics.
They call it the "runaway greenhouse effect" -
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch4s4-references.html
And here's the refutation:
http://www.examiner.com/x-32936-Seminole-County-Environmental-News-Examiner~y2010m2d9-New-research-into-greenhouse-effect-challenges-theory-of-manmade-global-warming
This behavior is of course ad hoc. CO2 has no memory, and the climate system cannot distinguish between "added" CO2 and "non-added" CO2 -> physically, no such animal exists.
As devil's advocate, I'll assert that the AGW defense of that would be the assertion that aerosols like SO2 balance it out. But I'll keep in mind that you'll accept that evidence as a falsification of AGW.
No, I consider human beings to be intelligent, and therefore naturally analogous to God in the intelligent design theory.
That being said, you bring up an interesting point -> why are things that humans do not considered part of nature? Why is a BMW considered any less natural than a spruce tree? Taken to the logical conclusion with catastrophic AGW, the religious statement becomes:
"After understanding all of the natural drivers that we know of, we cannot account for X degrees C of the observed global warming, therefore, changes must be due to man, even though "man" is just one of many possible natural drivers that we don't completely understand."
No, my argument is that "If anyone says that because we are ignorant of certain factors, it must be due to some arbitrary actor, then they are acting like a creationist." Asserting certainty of a theory based upon ignorance is the hallmark of AGW and intelligent design.
Tell you what, offer me up your falsifiable hypothesis, and then we can talk science. Until then, feel free to worship at the Church of Global Warming.
Shouldn't distribution count as well as density? And what about the model of just one temperature station -> that model is pretty simple, and based on that model you could judge that it is of sufficient density. Here's your problem -> your claims are simply assertions, not proofs. Give us something falsifiable, and you might actually be doing science. Asserting the existence of a model is it's own proof is just circular reasoning.
That's simply not true. Although average volcanic activity is usually very low, catastrophic events that occur on the range of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, can certainly quantifiably influence atmospheric CO2.
Riddle me this -> is it possible to find a trend where none exists? You seem to postulate that any set of measurements, if they are large enough, will be perfectly accurate and precise. You still haven't answered the resolution problem either.
Read the article and the comments -> it's a thought experiment that reduces the theory of AGW down to its conceptual limits.
Have you seen Mann's hockey stick? Have you heard the IPCC fear-mongering about runaway warming and tipping points? And have you seen the ridiculous gaps in the models...for example, cloud cover (a strong negative feedback that we simply don't have proxy data for)?
You're still avoiding the issue with the ad hoc nature of your rationalizations, and fail to offer any opportunity for observations to possibly contradict your theory. If you see a historic record where CO2 is leading, you'll assert that it's due to some sort of "added" CO2. If you see a historic record where CO2 is lagging, you'll assert that it's not due to some sort of "added" CO2. These are assertions, not proofs.
Let me finish this for you, so you understand where the real science is being done:
"After understanding all of the natural drivers that we know of, we cannot account for X degrees C of the observed global warming, therefore, changes must be due to naturalistic processes."
The default reason for something, when doing science, is as you say, "naturalistic processes". Attributing unknowns to some intelligent designer or actor (be it man or God), is what creationists do.
Think harder, it might help.
Ah, argumentum ad linkium. Here's a few for you:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
http://climateaudit.org/
http://www.junkscience.com/
The warmists are the ones who are making the creationist argument - tell me if you've heard this one before:
"After understanding all of the natural drivers we know of, we cannot account for X degrees C of the observed global warming, therefore, changes must be due to man emitted CO2."
"After understanding all of the fossils that we know of, we cannot account for the gaps between the observed fossils, therefore, changes must be due to the Hand of God."