Expecting a model to work out what happens at the end before it's known what the starting conditions are is not a reasonable expectation.
Okay, so since we can't ever know the proper starting conditions of any GCM, then we shouldn't expect them to work. If we can't trust the GCMs, then there's certainly no need for alarm. I'm good with that:)
A model does not have to be as utterly perfect as you seem to demand to be useful.
I'm not denying that GCMs should be allowed error bars, I'm asserting that in order to be *scientific* they need falsifiability. One cannot simply tweak the model to come up with ad hoc special pleadings for every observation that can possibly be observed to preserve the central conceit.
Taking the aircraft engineer analogy, if you had a model that started off with the central conceit of "the lower the air pressure, the higher the turbulence" (or any particular conceit you'd like), and no matter what you ended up observing in real life that refuted that, you simply said "oh, well, we'll just add this hard coded value back into the model to make it work", you'd be fighting reality with your model.
So, are GCMs useful? Can they predict regional weather patterns? ENSO/PDO/ADO? Will winters disappear from england? Will snow be a thing of the past? Can you name a *single* useful prediction made by any GCM yet?
Are you kidding me? The NOAA model claimed in 2008 that *ANY* 15 year period of no statistically significant warming would exclude their model at the 95% confidence level.
Is it the confidence level that you're getting hung up on? Are you simply asserting that if I said three decreasing numbers would exclude my die rolling model at the 95% confidence level, "well, there's still a 5% chance that the model is true"?
Really?
As for the null hypothesis, it's quite simple - natural climate change is the driver for all weather and climate observed before humanity, as well as after humanity. It is a novel idea to assert that suddenly, with the advent of humanity, or the industrial age, that natural climate change took a pause, and is now driven completely by emissions of a trace gas measured in parts per million.
Now, if you're still holding on to a 5% chance of being right (probably less since we're now at 16 years), I suppose that's your prerogative, but you're simply not being honest with yourself.
If the climate modelers don't know what the teams are, they're not doing a very good job, are they?:)
Look, we've got the typical warmist argument that "our models account for all natural variables, and can only explain the additional warming with human CO2 emissions". If we can find just one major natural variable that significantly effects global average temperature, that the model can't predict reliably, then we've got no reason to believe that their predictions actually *account* for all natural variables.
ENSO/PDO/ADO are *hugely* impactful to global climate, and are generally understood to be due to complex ocean heat transfer. If, one day, we get to the point where we understand all of the deep ocean currents, and have a sensor network in place that can validate our predictions of these deep ocean currents, they'll be able to model this significant natural driver. Until then, it is simply implausible to believe in the accuracy of GCMs, when they can't even model *well know* natural cycles.
You happen to find the sequence "6, 3, 2", and claim, "Eureka! I've proven your model is wrong because I found the falsification you specified!"
But wait, according to your logic, you're not allowed to cherry pick. If you took a random start point that had three numbers, you'd have only a 1/17 chance of actually finding that falsification.
So, is my model true based on observations, or is it not true? Take your time, make sure you understand it before you answer.
1) Could the trend over that entire data set have been cooling?
Well, what, you're talking about the instrumental record, so no - we've been gradually warming ever since the end of the little ice age. The chance that in fact, the little ice age was a thermal optimum and we just made mistakes measuring temperature, that's hard to believe.
2) Given that we have been predicting global warming since the 70s with consensus emerging in the 80s how is the hypothesis that the temperature will increase not withstood falsification?
We're talking about the specific NOAA model that insists that CO2 drives temperature. By their own criteria, they're falsified. As for the simplistic prediction "there shall be warming from the 70s to the 90s", that's hardly any sort of validation of any GCM.
More particularly, you've created yourself a tidy little loop hole there - say for example, the hypothesis is "human CO2 will cause global warming starting from the 1970s", and every time we fall *cooler* than the 70s, you simply say "oh, but you just have to wait a while longer and it'll get warmer again!" - that's like picking some point on a sine wave, and claiming success when the end points trend up, and begging forgiveness when the end points trend down. It misses the entire point.
Put another way, an astrologist may have asserted in 1970 that the earth was going to warm because of alien leprechauns from pluto. Would 30 years of warming prove the astrologist right?
Okay, I get one random sample...aw shucks, I failed, couldn't find the 16 year period of statistically insignificant warming.
Now, I get another ten thousand friends to get their one random sample...and I hit. Whee!
Or, does the entire universe only get one random start and end date to find the 15 year or greater period of statistically insignificant warming that falsifies the NOAA model by their criteria?:)
Over the entire contemporary temperature record (the one taken with thermometers so we don't get into a debate about proxies) what has happened to the Earth's temperature?
It has warmed and cooled, and warmed, and cooled, and sometimes stayed the same, but generally trended upward.
Of course leaping from this observation of warming, and asserting that this period of general warming (as opposed to all other periods that we know happened in the pre-historic and pre-human past) must obviously be due to the emissions of a trace gas measured in parts per million...well, that's a stretch:)
It's probably impossible to tell with any individual weather event how much it changed because of anthropogenic climate change.
This I definitely agree with. And I think that's the rub - we might say, well, 5% isn't all that big of a deal - out of the billions of dollars of damage, we probably added a few million, and the benefits of a fully carbonized economy outweigh that few million (as well as any other millions you want to attribute to other bad weather). Maybe 50% turns the cost/benefit around. Maybe 75% is the magic number.
But if the question is impossible to answer, then it's *really* hard to convince people that they should accept a specific prescription for it.
Let me clarify my point for you, since it seems I didn't communicate it effectively -
Map the oxygen available to a human, starting at zero, going to 100%. It's a single variable, and it will affect the entire system, but it doesn't behave *simply*. Yes, drop it to zero, and the human dies. Naively assume that on the opposite end of the scale, the human will be full of life, and BAM, you've got another dead human.
Now, we'll find several ranges of perturbation, and a range of fairly optimal requirement for a human, but I'll note this - we didn't find these ranges by building a GHM (global human model), and tweaking the O2 variable:)
Show me historically that there is a range of "safe" CO2 for the planet, and say, some lower bound of "unsafe" and some upper bound of "unsafe", and maybe we can talk about what we need to do to keep it in the safe range. As it is, we've got wild speculation that anything over 350 is dangerous, with no falsifiable hypothesis statement. There have been times in the past that have been significantly greater in CO2 than today, and times in the past that have been significantly lower - tell me how you're going to assert that those outlying levels were "bad".
Well, if you think that there is a better model for the current climate change, then feel free to tell us, in detail, what that model is, along with working.
So you're going with the "I'm right because you don't have an alternative" meme? Ignoring, once again, the null hypothesis which stands true until excluded by some necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement (which you're unable to provide or quote)?
There is an alternative to my model being right and your model being right - that false dichotomy doesn't include both our models being wrong. Asserting that my ignorance (or anyone else's) somehow means that your *guess* is automatically true is a fallacious argument.
Start the scientific method, and provide your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Then we can start playing the science game:)
A randomly selected 15 year time period with no warming excludes a fair few models, a cherry picked example does no such thing.
So what you're saying is that although the NOAA said in 2008 that *any* 15 year period of statistically insignificant warming would exclude their models, I have to *randomly* select it for it to count?
How many random tries do I get? Ten? Twenty?:)
The idea that a specified falsification must be somehow *randomly* observed, rather than sought out proactively in the data is *really* silly:)
The NOAA claimed that *any* observed period of 15 years of no statistically significant warming excluded their models at the 95% confidence level. They didn't claim that only a neutrally, randomly chosen period of 15 years would falsify it, *any cherry picked 15 years* would satisfy that falsification.
Now, go back to your authority figures, and quote their necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Simply saying "the earth is getting warmer" is hardly sufficient, since by that logic, when the earth got out of the last major ice age (i.e., it got warmer), it was due to non-existent human CO2 emissions.
yes, climate is extremely complicated, but no, that doesn't mean it's not subject to basic thermodynamics
Actually, it means that you can't model it with basic thermodynamics, so making the naive assertion that "CO2 added to a beaker in a lab absorbs more heat means that CO2 added to the atmosphere must also heat it up by the same proportions as happened in the beaker" is, as you put it, willful stupidity:)
Have fun falsifying thermodynamics.
You cannot simply claim "thermodynamics is true, therefore human emissions of a gas measured in parts per million in the atmosphere must definitively be the cause of catastrophic global warming". Why not just say that your hypothesis is obviously certain because the speed of light has a maximum, or because hydrogen has a single proton - deriving your conclusion from the mere existence of a basic law is a jump of another sort entirely:)
I'm not implying anything - I'm stating flatly that no GCM in existence can either forecast or hindcast ocean oscillations with any skill at all beyond the immediate and very short term. Assuming that they can make predictions 10, 20 and 100 years out without being able to accurately model ENSO/PDO/ADO is silly at best, given the enormous impact those ocean oscillations have on global climate.
It's not a shift of the goalposts, its an exhibition of the complete failure of GCMs to accurately model *known* natural global climate drivers.
Whoa. Local climactic effect? As in ocean temperatures in the pacific effecting the entire north american continent, and beyond? Perhaps your definition of "local" differs from mine:)
Both pacific and atlantic sea surface temperatures cycle in ways that significantly effect *global* climate, in all kinds of regions in significant and fairly predictable ways (once we've observed the cycle in effect). However, not a single GCM have any sort of skill at predicting upcoming PDO/ENSO/ADO cycles, nor do any GCMs have any sort of skill at hindcasting them. Missing such a huge portion of climate influence cuts these GCMs to the core.
Understanding the climate is like understanding the human body, which is also a system.
I agree entirely. Fun fact about the human body, it has a complex system of negative feedbacks to maintain homeostasis...and I'll warrant that the same thing *must* be true about climate, given the narrow range of climate the earth has gone through (even between ice ages and thermal optimums, you're talking a fairly narrow band).
Now, if you were to try to apply a simple physics model (like CO2's greenhouse effect in a laboratory), and apply it to the human body, you'd run into real problems. Yes, the application of heat to a solid should warm that entire solid, starting from the point of heating, and progressing outward from there. But if you put your hand in a tub of hot water, how long will it take before your other hand has warmed because of that?
When you study a system, especially a complex system, it defies imagination that you can tweak a single variable and control the entire system. So climate science, as practiced by those proponents of AGW who believe that human CO2 emissions are now the thermostat of the planet, is more like homeopathy than pharmacology.
I certainly know enough to recognise the thoroughness of climate scientists in general, and substance to their arguments.
Their arguments are empty if they're arguing a non-falsifiable hypothesis. And when you get someone like Michael Mann who uses data *upside down*, and then brushes off the correction as being meaningless to the final conclusions of his paper, you *know* they're on thin ice:)
Yes, there are some definite whacko skeptics, but there are also a bunch of whacko warmists too:)
All of those things change over time, both up and down. Climate always changes, and it always has. Even more unfortunately, it always will:)
Of course, more problematic is deciding what particular percentage of blame human CO2 emissions should be assigned. Maybe SuperUltraMegaStorm Sandy was 2cm higher because of humans, or maybe it was only.002mm higher because of humans. Can we blame 100% of the storm surge on humanity? Probably not.
Now name a single GCM that can model PDO/ENSO. Yes, you can look at the oceans and predict the weather from the short to even medium term, but until a GCM can actually predict El Nino/La Nina before they happen, we've got no reason to believe they can make any climate claims on any time range.
I mean, think about it - El Nino/La Nina is one of the most famously studied and observed effects that has *incredible* climactic effect. If we can't even model that one accurately, how can we possibly hope that we've accounted for every other major natural driver of climate?
For the past 16 years, the earth has *not* been changing in temperature in any statistically significant way.
If you want to pick any particularly arbitrary points, you can assert that the earth is getting warmer, the earth is getting cooler, and the earth is staying the same temperature.
1900-2012? Getting warmer.
1998-2012? Staying the same.
Fun fact, 1998-2012, we've been dramatically increasing global CO2 levels. The NOAA stated in 2008 that 15 years of no statistically significant warming would exclude their models at the 95% confidence level.
So, if the falsifiable claim is simply "the earth is getting warmer", well, that's trivial - it happens all the time. The thing you missed from your falsifiable hypothesis is "human CO2 emissions are *causing* the earth to get X degrees warmer over Y amount of time" and "getting X degrees warmer over Y amount of time is going to cause catastrophic destruction that we must avoid by doing Z amount of economic damage to ourselves today".
there is no statistical trend in extreme weather events that correlates to human CO2 emissions, or heck, even to global CO2 levels in general. In fact, cyclonic activity has *dropped* (which, if you read some AGW papers, is expected because the temperature gradient between the poles and equator is reduced...of course others expect more cyclonic activity, so no matter what happens, someone can pull a paper out and say "see, global warming!").
My pet theory? None in particular...I'm not convinced that the null hypothesis of natural climate change has been excluded.
Now, if you're asking me the question "why do you think all these climate scientists who believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have fooled themselves", I think that's the whole point of this study - motivated reasoning. AGW promoting climate scientists are intelligent enough to fool themselves.
Mod parent up - I don't agree with microbox on AGW, but he's hit the nail on the head when he notes that rhetoric cuts both ways.
Of course, I'm a particular fan of Popper, so I've got at least some framework I'd use to discern between which side to land on, but I'm sure other people of differing opinions have convinced themselves they have as well. While it might be an extreme view, I can't consider something unfalsifiable as science - even if it might be true. I mean, I believe in monogamy as the highest pinnacle of what a healthy relationship should be. It's not a falsifiable belief, so I won't consider it science, but I'll assert there's a very good chance it's true.
Now, maybe if an AGW proponent actually made *that* argument ("look, I know this isn't scientific, but there's a good chance it's true"), we could start grabbing expert statisticians to help mediate the dispute on probability, but let's face it, there isn't a single climatologist out there who is truly a master of statistics and probability theory (lord knows you can't get by nowadays without specializing).
Isn't your response also a perfect example of the Dunning Kruger effect?:)
I mean, really, there are people out there who *actually believe* that we have sophisticated enough GCMs to accurately model all major natural climactic influences...I mean, they *really* believe that they have got a good bead on all the myriad possible natural influences...can you imagine such hubris?:)
That's the beauty of this whole study - it applies to *both* sides of intelligent zealots:)
Here's the rub, though, we can discern the science from the pseudo-science by looking for the falsifiable hypothesis:)
Hrm...funny, I would've thought that keynesian economics fails every single time it is tried anywhere, yet people still believe in it:)
Here's the thing about science that you don't quite get - it isn't science unless you have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis. Thanks to Karl Popper, we've got a way of discerning between astrology and astronomy.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so since we can't ever know the proper starting conditions of any GCM, then we shouldn't expect them to work. If we can't trust the GCMs, then there's certainly no need for alarm. I'm good with that :)
I'm not denying that GCMs should be allowed error bars, I'm asserting that in order to be *scientific* they need falsifiability. One cannot simply tweak the model to come up with ad hoc special pleadings for every observation that can possibly be observed to preserve the central conceit.
Taking the aircraft engineer analogy, if you had a model that started off with the central conceit of "the lower the air pressure, the higher the turbulence" (or any particular conceit you'd like), and no matter what you ended up observing in real life that refuted that, you simply said "oh, well, we'll just add this hard coded value back into the model to make it work", you'd be fighting reality with your model.
So, are GCMs useful? Can they predict regional weather patterns? ENSO/PDO/ADO? Will winters disappear from england? Will snow be a thing of the past? Can you name a *single* useful prediction made by any GCM yet?
Are you kidding me? The NOAA model claimed in 2008 that *ANY* 15 year period of no statistically significant warming would exclude their model at the 95% confidence level.
Is it the confidence level that you're getting hung up on? Are you simply asserting that if I said three decreasing numbers would exclude my die rolling model at the 95% confidence level, "well, there's still a 5% chance that the model is true"?
Really?
As for the null hypothesis, it's quite simple - natural climate change is the driver for all weather and climate observed before humanity, as well as after humanity. It is a novel idea to assert that suddenly, with the advent of humanity, or the industrial age, that natural climate change took a pause, and is now driven completely by emissions of a trace gas measured in parts per million.
Now, if you're still holding on to a 5% chance of being right (probably less since we're now at 16 years), I suppose that's your prerogative, but you're simply not being honest with yourself.
If the climate modelers don't know what the teams are, they're not doing a very good job, are they? :)
Look, we've got the typical warmist argument that "our models account for all natural variables, and can only explain the additional warming with human CO2 emissions". If we can find just one major natural variable that significantly effects global average temperature, that the model can't predict reliably, then we've got no reason to believe that their predictions actually *account* for all natural variables.
ENSO/PDO/ADO are *hugely* impactful to global climate, and are generally understood to be due to complex ocean heat transfer. If, one day, we get to the point where we understand all of the deep ocean currents, and have a sensor network in place that can validate our predictions of these deep ocean currents, they'll be able to model this significant natural driver. Until then, it is simply implausible to believe in the accuracy of GCMs, when they can't even model *well know* natural cycles.
Wait, you're asserting that during the *entire* Holocene, russia never had a heat wave like in 2010? Never?
And during the *entire* Holocoene, there was never a polar vortex around antarctica with any sort of ozone hold? Really? Never?
Exactly what proxies did you use to decide to definitively that russia never had heat waves, and the ozone hole never existed?
You're really quite completely lost here, aren't you?
Let's work through a simple example for you, so you can understand the brutal flaw in your reasoning.
I have a model that says if you roll a six-sided die, you will never get three decreasing numbers in a row. We roll some dice.
1, 2, 2, 3, 1, 2, 5, 6, 5, 6, 4, 6, 3, 2, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 5
You happen to find the sequence "6, 3, 2", and claim, "Eureka! I've proven your model is wrong because I found the falsification you specified!"
But wait, according to your logic, you're not allowed to cherry pick. If you took a random start point that had three numbers, you'd have only a 1/17 chance of actually finding that falsification.
So, is my model true based on observations, or is it not true? Take your time, make sure you understand it before you answer.
Well, what, you're talking about the instrumental record, so no - we've been gradually warming ever since the end of the little ice age. The chance that in fact, the little ice age was a thermal optimum and we just made mistakes measuring temperature, that's hard to believe.
We're talking about the specific NOAA model that insists that CO2 drives temperature. By their own criteria, they're falsified. As for the simplistic prediction "there shall be warming from the 70s to the 90s", that's hardly any sort of validation of any GCM.
More particularly, you've created yourself a tidy little loop hole there - say for example, the hypothesis is "human CO2 will cause global warming starting from the 1970s", and every time we fall *cooler* than the 70s, you simply say "oh, but you just have to wait a while longer and it'll get warmer again!" - that's like picking some point on a sine wave, and claiming success when the end points trend up, and begging forgiveness when the end points trend down. It misses the entire point.
Put another way, an astrologist may have asserted in 1970 that the earth was going to warm because of alien leprechauns from pluto. Would 30 years of warming prove the astrologist right?
Okay, I get one random sample...aw shucks, I failed, couldn't find the 16 year period of statistically insignificant warming.
Now, I get another ten thousand friends to get their one random sample...and I hit. Whee!
Or, does the entire universe only get one random start and end date to find the 15 year or greater period of statistically insignificant warming that falsifies the NOAA model by their criteria? :)
It has warmed and cooled, and warmed, and cooled, and sometimes stayed the same, but generally trended upward.
Of course leaping from this observation of warming, and asserting that this period of general warming (as opposed to all other periods that we know happened in the pre-historic and pre-human past) must obviously be due to the emissions of a trace gas measured in parts per million...well, that's a stretch :)
This I definitely agree with. And I think that's the rub - we might say, well, 5% isn't all that big of a deal - out of the billions of dollars of damage, we probably added a few million, and the benefits of a fully carbonized economy outweigh that few million (as well as any other millions you want to attribute to other bad weather). Maybe 50% turns the cost/benefit around. Maybe 75% is the magic number.
But if the question is impossible to answer, then it's *really* hard to convince people that they should accept a specific prescription for it.
Let me clarify my point for you, since it seems I didn't communicate it effectively -
Map the oxygen available to a human, starting at zero, going to 100%. It's a single variable, and it will affect the entire system, but it doesn't behave *simply*. Yes, drop it to zero, and the human dies. Naively assume that on the opposite end of the scale, the human will be full of life, and BAM, you've got another dead human.
Now, we'll find several ranges of perturbation, and a range of fairly optimal requirement for a human, but I'll note this - we didn't find these ranges by building a GHM (global human model), and tweaking the O2 variable :)
Show me historically that there is a range of "safe" CO2 for the planet, and say, some lower bound of "unsafe" and some upper bound of "unsafe", and maybe we can talk about what we need to do to keep it in the safe range. As it is, we've got wild speculation that anything over 350 is dangerous, with no falsifiable hypothesis statement. There have been times in the past that have been significantly greater in CO2 than today, and times in the past that have been significantly lower - tell me how you're going to assert that those outlying levels were "bad".
So you're going with the "I'm right because you don't have an alternative" meme? Ignoring, once again, the null hypothesis which stands true until excluded by some necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement (which you're unable to provide or quote)?
There is an alternative to my model being right and your model being right - that false dichotomy doesn't include both our models being wrong. Asserting that my ignorance (or anyone else's) somehow means that your *guess* is automatically true is a fallacious argument.
Start the scientific method, and provide your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Then we can start playing the science game :)
Um, no there isn't:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/extreme-weather-page/
As pointed out, a single outlying year (even if we accept the dubious anecdotes from SS) doesn't show a trend.
So what you're saying is that although the NOAA said in 2008 that *any* 15 year period of statistically insignificant warming would exclude their models, I have to *randomly* select it for it to count?
How many random tries do I get? Ten? Twenty? :)
The idea that a specified falsification must be somehow *randomly* observed, rather than sought out proactively in the data is *really* silly :)
The NOAA claimed that *any* observed period of 15 years of no statistically significant warming excluded their models at the 95% confidence level. They didn't claim that only a neutrally, randomly chosen period of 15 years would falsify it, *any cherry picked 15 years* would satisfy that falsification.
Now, go back to your authority figures, and quote their necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Simply saying "the earth is getting warmer" is hardly sufficient, since by that logic, when the earth got out of the last major ice age (i.e., it got warmer), it was due to non-existent human CO2 emissions.
Try harder!
Actually, it means that you can't model it with basic thermodynamics, so making the naive assertion that "CO2 added to a beaker in a lab absorbs more heat means that CO2 added to the atmosphere must also heat it up by the same proportions as happened in the beaker" is, as you put it, willful stupidity :)
You cannot simply claim "thermodynamics is true, therefore human emissions of a gas measured in parts per million in the atmosphere must definitively be the cause of catastrophic global warming". Why not just say that your hypothesis is obviously certain because the speed of light has a maximum, or because hydrogen has a single proton - deriving your conclusion from the mere existence of a basic law is a jump of another sort entirely :)
I'm not implying anything - I'm stating flatly that no GCM in existence can either forecast or hindcast ocean oscillations with any skill at all beyond the immediate and very short term. Assuming that they can make predictions 10, 20 and 100 years out without being able to accurately model ENSO/PDO/ADO is silly at best, given the enormous impact those ocean oscillations have on global climate.
It's not a shift of the goalposts, its an exhibition of the complete failure of GCMs to accurately model *known* natural global climate drivers.
Whoa. Local climactic effect? As in ocean temperatures in the pacific effecting the entire north american continent, and beyond? Perhaps your definition of "local" differs from mine :)
Both pacific and atlantic sea surface temperatures cycle in ways that significantly effect *global* climate, in all kinds of regions in significant and fairly predictable ways (once we've observed the cycle in effect). However, not a single GCM have any sort of skill at predicting upcoming PDO/ENSO/ADO cycles, nor do any GCMs have any sort of skill at hindcasting them. Missing such a huge portion of climate influence cuts these GCMs to the core.
I agree entirely. Fun fact about the human body, it has a complex system of negative feedbacks to maintain homeostasis...and I'll warrant that the same thing *must* be true about climate, given the narrow range of climate the earth has gone through (even between ice ages and thermal optimums, you're talking a fairly narrow band).
Now, if you were to try to apply a simple physics model (like CO2's greenhouse effect in a laboratory), and apply it to the human body, you'd run into real problems. Yes, the application of heat to a solid should warm that entire solid, starting from the point of heating, and progressing outward from there. But if you put your hand in a tub of hot water, how long will it take before your other hand has warmed because of that?
When you study a system, especially a complex system, it defies imagination that you can tweak a single variable and control the entire system. So climate science, as practiced by those proponents of AGW who believe that human CO2 emissions are now the thermostat of the planet, is more like homeopathy than pharmacology.
Their arguments are empty if they're arguing a non-falsifiable hypothesis. And when you get someone like Michael Mann who uses data *upside down*, and then brushes off the correction as being meaningless to the final conclusions of his paper, you *know* they're on thin ice :)
Yes, there are some definite whacko skeptics, but there are also a bunch of whacko warmists too :)
All of those things change over time, both up and down. Climate always changes, and it always has. Even more unfortunately, it always will :)
Of course, more problematic is deciding what particular percentage of blame human CO2 emissions should be assigned. Maybe SuperUltraMegaStorm Sandy was 2cm higher because of humans, or maybe it was only .002mm higher because of humans. Can we blame 100% of the storm surge on humanity? Probably not.
No, economists aren't scientists.
Now name a single GCM that can model PDO/ENSO. Yes, you can look at the oceans and predict the weather from the short to even medium term, but until a GCM can actually predict El Nino/La Nina before they happen, we've got no reason to believe they can make any climate claims on any time range.
I mean, think about it - El Nino/La Nina is one of the most famously studied and observed effects that has *incredible* climactic effect. If we can't even model that one accurately, how can we possibly hope that we've accounted for every other major natural driver of climate?
Well, let's be a bit more specific.
For the past 16 years, the earth has *not* been changing in temperature in any statistically significant way.
If you want to pick any particularly arbitrary points, you can assert that the earth is getting warmer, the earth is getting cooler, and the earth is staying the same temperature.
1900-2012? Getting warmer.
1998-2012? Staying the same.
Fun fact, 1998-2012, we've been dramatically increasing global CO2 levels. The NOAA stated in 2008 that 15 years of no statistically significant warming would exclude their models at the 95% confidence level.
So, if the falsifiable claim is simply "the earth is getting warmer", well, that's trivial - it happens all the time. The thing you missed from your falsifiable hypothesis is "human CO2 emissions are *causing* the earth to get X degrees warmer over Y amount of time" and "getting X degrees warmer over Y amount of time is going to cause catastrophic destruction that we must avoid by doing Z amount of economic damage to ourselves today".
Sorry, still at step 1! :)
Hrm...interesting.
How big of an area, and how long of a time?
Can we define "climate" as the weather conditions prevailing over my house, for a month?
Can we define "climate" as the weather conditions prevailing over the earth, for a million years?
Bonus points - when we talk about the global "climate", is that anything that any organism ever experiences?
decade on decade cooling *is* climate
decade on decade staying the same *is* climate
there is no statistical trend in extreme weather events that correlates to human CO2 emissions, or heck, even to global CO2 levels in general. In fact, cyclonic activity has *dropped* (which, if you read some AGW papers, is expected because the temperature gradient between the poles and equator is reduced...of course others expect more cyclonic activity, so no matter what happens, someone can pull a paper out and say "see, global warming!").
As for record breaking, check this out: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/07/a-brief-history-of-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-record-breaking/
My pet theory? None in particular...I'm not convinced that the null hypothesis of natural climate change has been excluded.
Now, if you're asking me the question "why do you think all these climate scientists who believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have fooled themselves", I think that's the whole point of this study - motivated reasoning. AGW promoting climate scientists are intelligent enough to fool themselves.
Mod parent up - I don't agree with microbox on AGW, but he's hit the nail on the head when he notes that rhetoric cuts both ways.
Of course, I'm a particular fan of Popper, so I've got at least some framework I'd use to discern between which side to land on, but I'm sure other people of differing opinions have convinced themselves they have as well. While it might be an extreme view, I can't consider something unfalsifiable as science - even if it might be true. I mean, I believe in monogamy as the highest pinnacle of what a healthy relationship should be. It's not a falsifiable belief, so I won't consider it science, but I'll assert there's a very good chance it's true.
Now, maybe if an AGW proponent actually made *that* argument ("look, I know this isn't scientific, but there's a good chance it's true"), we could start grabbing expert statisticians to help mediate the dispute on probability, but let's face it, there isn't a single climatologist out there who is truly a master of statistics and probability theory (lord knows you can't get by nowadays without specializing).
Isn't your response also a perfect example of the Dunning Kruger effect? :)
I mean, really, there are people out there who *actually believe* that we have sophisticated enough GCMs to accurately model all major natural climactic influences...I mean, they *really* believe that they have got a good bead on all the myriad possible natural influences...can you imagine such hubris? :)
That's the beauty of this whole study - it applies to *both* sides of intelligent zealots :)
Here's the rub, though, we can discern the science from the pseudo-science by looking for the falsifiable hypothesis :)
Hrm...funny, I would've thought that keynesian economics fails every single time it is tried anywhere, yet people still believe in it :)
Here's the thing about science that you don't quite get - it isn't science unless you have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis. Thanks to Karl Popper, we've got a way of discerning between astrology and astronomy.