Have you read Hansen's 1988 paper? If you're asserting an error range of 20C, I'm guessing the answer is NO.
Pray tell, what is the error range you'd like to claim for Hansen's 1998 paper? How cold would 2012 need to be before you accepted his basic conceit as falsified?
Since he and John Christy were forced to correct their data, they've had to do so 6 more times, giving an overall significant positive increase in their readings.
Forced to correct their data? Forced? John Christy is a real scientist, he doesn't go back and change historical data points willy nilly to make some claim of "hottest year ever", he takes a close, skeptical look at even his own work, and corrects it as necessary: http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/1853/
The fact that John Christy actually fixes errors, rather than blindly defending errors (like Mann, et. al.), is a sign of *strength*:)
The model made 3 predictions that were verified - 1) about 0.5C cooling globally 2) lasting about 2 years 3) affecting primarily southern Europe and America.
First off, I'd wonder more about if they made any predictions, which if wrong, would have falsified their primary conceit - i.e., if they would have said "0.4C cooling globally means we're *wrong*", that would have been stronger. Simply making predictions is trivial - astrologists do that all the time.
So their model predicted a large event, a “three-sigma” cooling from Pinatubo.
"But despite their prediction, it didn’t turn out like that at all. Look at the red line above showing the actual temperature change. If you didn’t know there was a volcano in 1991, that part of the temperature record wouldn’t even catch your eye. Pinatubo did not cause anywhere near the maximum temperature swing predicted by the GISS model. It was not a three-sigma event, just another day in the planetary life."
"Hansen predicted what is called a “three sigma” event. He got about a two sigma event (2.07 sigma). “Sigma” is a measure of how common it is for something to occur. However, it is far from linear."
Be careful playing the "unfalsifiable" trump - since that would mean that the anti-AGW hypotheses are ALSO unfalsifiable.
There is no anti-AGW hypothesis - the null hypothesis is natural climate change. We know that natural climate change happens from observation - it's happened well before humanity existed, much less had a significant CO2 output.
Until you can come up with a clearly stated, necessary and sufficient set of falsifiable hypothesis statements in support of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, you're playing astrology, not science.
A greater concern is the level of chaotic complexity built into global climate as very, very small changes have the potential to cause dramatic shifts ( a real-world butterfly effect, if you will)
The butterfly effect isn't what you think it is - the idea that very small changes can cause very different *specific* outcomes (i.e., a storm that happened at 12:01am, versus a storm that happened at 2:43pm), is not the same thing as the idea that very small changes can cause huge changes in the *quality* of any given outcomes (i.e., a hurricane that is category 5, versus a tropical storm with top winds of 15mph). We do not live in a world where butterflies can create cat5 hurricanes - we live in a chaotic world that has a bunch of negative feedbacks that keeps things surprisingly stable at almost every timescale.
Huh? How do you know it's real if you can't measure it?
We know it's real, we can measure it, but we can't *model* it accurately, nor do we have any proxies that would tell us what it was if we weren't observing it with the modern instruments of today.
You're also going to have to explain the difference between "magnitude" and "quantity" here.
Sorry, typo, I meant "polarity" (as in positive or negative) and "quantity".
Of course, they know that it is not possible to get global warming to go away by fiddling with the magnitude of feedback.
Whoa, hold yer rhetoric there for a moment - we know that there is natural global warming, and natural global cooling. Fiddling with the magnitude of a feedback in a GCM is what gives rise to Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, or leaves things at simply Inconsequential Anthropogenic Global Warming. There is a difference.
They spread the meme that they don't need to come up with a physically realistic model because their model is the "null hypothesis"
Natural climate change isn't a model, it just *is*. It is what happened before humanity existed, and what will happen after humanity disappears. The question at hand is whether or not observed modern temperatures are within natural climate change variations, or if human impacts have discernibly impacted these variations, and, if so, if they have impacted these variations in a way that is proven to be detrimental to humanity.
While you can keep holding onto the "you can't say I'm wrong until you come up with something righter" argument, it simply isn't science.
And they also spread the meme that these models can be "curve fitted" to say anything you want. Of course, that's not true-
Of course, it is true. Don't think for a moment that we have a model of physical processes that we can simply run backwards and recreate historical temperatures - we *started* with those simple models (and maintained the central conceit that CO2 was an overwhelming climate driver, instead of a second order function of temperature), and tweaked things until they gave a close match to historical records.
Of course, anybody who has actually worked with physical models knows this to be quite false.
Ah, another appeal to unnamed authorities:)
Surely, if you actually think this through, you will realize how ridiculous this is.
Wait, it's ridiculous to show you two 50 year temperature anomaly graphs, one that is clearly outside the era of high human CO2 emissions, and ask you to show me the anthropogenic fingerprint?
Your problem is this - modern temperature records aren't unprecedented on any scale. You have no way of excluding the null hypothesis of natural climate change.
Given any trend with random statistical noise riding on top of it, it is always possible to find a period of time short enough so that the noise obscures the trend.
And isn't that also true of your favored CO2 hypothesis? That what you claim is a trend could simply be natural background noise?
Again, you've left yourself with an unfalsifiable hypothesis that is justified by ad hoc special pleadings whenever data suggests you're wrong. This is called climate astrology:)
1) The uncertainties / error bars have not been exceeded for Scenarios B & C
Just how big are we going to assert the error bars? Is a prediction that covers a swath of say, +/-10C really much of a prediction?
2) We still don't know as much as we'd like about the contributions of aerosols
And we still don't know as much as we'd like about cloud cover, or plant growth, or any number of other natural factors. If our ignorance is so great on so many fronts, what makes you think we should be so sure about how we've modeled CO2?
3) Hansen's estimate of climate sensitivity was too high - which was the most significant problem with his scenarios
And to date, there still isn't evidence that there is any sort of climate sensitivity that would cause catastrophe.
None of that discredits either his overall work or the AGW theory.
And apparently, *nothing* would. A hypothesis which is unfalsifiable, and can integrate any contrary evidence into its central conceit is called "religion".
In a word, no. It is more the rule than the exception in physical processes for causality to be able to run in either direction, depending upon boundary conditions.
Really? So, we can heat a pot of water with fire, and also cause a fire with a heated pot of water?
Let's have an actual example.
The reason that they are not sure of the sign is that the evidence indicates that net cloud feedback is close to zero.
Hardly. They have no idea about the magnitude *or* the quantity.
And no, nobody has managed to come up with a model that creates the modern warming through cloud feedback and that is at all consistent with the known climate records.
Again, you're trying to take a failure of the GCMs you have so much faith in, and then assert that this failure must somehow represent an entire solution for the problem at hand? We know cloud feedback is real. We don't have any model that accurately deals with cloud feedback. How can we rely on a model that ignores reality?
every model that is consistent with the known climate record
Models are consistent with the known climate record because they've been curve fitted. Understand this isn't one of their strengths.
You can't tell much of anything from a graph in which the axes are unlabeled. Warming arising from "natural" sources can be distinguished because "natural" does not mean magic.
The graphs are the same period of time, and the same vertical scale, simply unlabeled as to the absolute value. You cannot discern from either of them which one is supposed to be "natural" as per your AGW hypothesis, and which one is supposed to be CO2 driven.
Given that such a similar period of 50 years exists within the climate record, before any proposed CO2 impact should have even existed, shows great weakness, don't you think?
For example, warming due to an increase in solar output predicts that the upper atmosphere will warm more than the lower (in fact, the upper atmosphere has cooled).
Schmidt swings again: ”that the stratosphere is not cooling as expected (this is a cleaner test than the surface temperatures because there are less extraneous factors)”
Considering the limited models and relatively weak computing power of the time, his predictions were pretty darn good.
What observations would have made you question his basic conceit? How far off would he have had to be in order for you to hold him strictly accountable?
It sounds like no matter what reality showed, you'd still be defending his hypothesis. We call this astrology:)
only showed the most extreme of Hansen's scenarios
Hansen's oral testimony called Scenario A the "Business as Usual" scenario.
Try these critiques of Hansen, if you don't like Michaels:
So your argument is that if we can't stink up the place and dump our waste wherever we want we cannot be competitive?
No, my argument is that you cannot blindly try to fix a hypothetical problem with an incredible waste of resources without hurting the poorest of the poor. "Green" jobs, funded by government subsidies, waste resources and cause measurable harm to humanity, and even by the most optimistic of appraisals, will do *nothing* significant to combat future climate change.
Energy is life, and if you make it more expensive because you imagine that one day, bad things will happen because of a gas measured in parts per million, used by plants to grow, is going to kill us all, what you'll end up doing is harming more people, and of course harming those that are the most vulnerable.
The first step in establishing whether there is a causal connection between two variables is excluding the null hypothesis of no correlation.
Okay, say for a moment we stipulate to that, and agree that there is a correlation between CO2 and global average temperature. Doesn't causality require that CO2 change first *then* temperature? Doesn't the ice core record show the opposite...doesn't it *always* show the opposite over any significant timescale?
Actually, real climate scientists have tested models with different cloud feedbacks
And they're not even sure of the *sign* of this feedback, much less the magnitude. That's a hole you can drive 100 years of warming right through.
But think about this: clearly, global climate has been warming. So if this is due to some "natural" mechanism involving cloud feedbacks, that implies that cloud feedbacks have been changing.
No, it doesn't at all. The problem with the modeled cloud feedbacks (where they don't even know what *direction* it goes in), is that it essentially leads to error bars an order of magnitude larger than the effect we're trying to observe.
Clearly, global climate has been warming. Clearly, global climate has warmed in the past. We assume that in the past, before CO2 emissions by humanity increased dramatically, this was due to natural causes. Can you tell from these two graphs, which one is the "natural" warming and which one is the anthropogenic CO2 warming?
So according to you, if the interaction between temperature and atmospheric CO2 displays the well understood dynamics of a positive feedback (i.e. if you increase one, the other will follow, and you can get it to go either way depending upon where you start), that means that it explains everything?
Listen to yourself carefully here - you're asserting that the dynamics of CO2 both lead and lag temperature changes. The ice core record shows that it lags, and has consistently lagged for hundreds of thousands of years.
Now, what you're asserting now is that historical, present, and future observations of either a lag, or a lead, supports your hypothesis. So, no matter what we observe, you're asserting you're correct. The entire universe of observations is consistent with your hypothesis.
Hey, if someone is going to make the blanket claim that "if global average temperatures continue to rise, despite increasing CO2 concentrations, then the theory is disproven", I'll take whatever time period I like, and whatever data set I like.
Would you like to be more specific? Perhaps state a required starting year? Perhaps a required length of time? GISS, or RSS instead of Hadcrut3?
Or are you yet another troll without a falsifiable hypothesis:)
I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion of this from a risk management position.
Because the precautionary principle mistakenly assumes that their precautionary action has no risk. Ancel Keys did this to us with low-fat diets, moving forward with the vilification of dietary fat despite the lack of evidence - he wanted to save people from the risk he knew was there but couldn't prove. Instead, we got 40 years of low-fat/high-carb living, with more obesity, cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases than ever.
Lowering CO2 emissions is dangerous, and quite reasonably one can assert that it is much more dangerous than any possible climate impact it might have. In fact, since we *know* so many *absolutely certain* problems with lowering CO2 emissions (increasing mortality as poverty increases, inability to cope with natural disasters as standard of living falls), it's the most fanciful thing to think that we'd be doing the *safe* thing by destroying our economy.
Church of Global Warming mods are apparently on the loose - simply question how one would exclude natural climate change as the reason for our modern observations, and it's a troll? Really?
Imagine, for a moment, that all observed climate change is simply natural variability. We'll call this the null hypothesis. Now how would you exclude our observations from natural variability?
Mod parent up. Peer review and unnamed, unaccountable "authorities" is not what makes something scientific. The scientific method, and its foundation, the falsifiable hypothesis statement, is what matters.
Depends on the advice. If it's the "low-fat/low-calorie/exercise" advice of the past 40 years, yeah, I ignore it. If it's carbohydrate restriction, I'll go with it. Why? Because while a doctor may speak with *authority* about the low-fat dogma, there has never been any proof that it is effective in preventing heart attacks. In fact, the opposite is quite true - low-fat/high-carbohydrate diets have dramatically increased the incidence of obesity, cancer, heart disease and other chronic diseases over the past 40 years.
Creationism doesn't have a falsifiable hypothesis. Evolution does.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming doesn't have a falsifiable hypothesis.
CAGW is simply pseudo-scientific astrology, which makes wildly inaccurate predictions (Hansen 1988), and then when things don't come to pass, they claim some ad hoc special pleading. They assert that CO2 can both lead and follow temperature change, much like an astrologist might say that Cancers are trustworthy, but sometimes dishonest. The "heads I win, tails you lose" attitude, which prevents any critique of their central conceits, is a hallmark of creationism.
The scientific method, played honestly, means clearly identifying the evidence that, if found, would prove your hypothesis wrong, and if *not* found, would strongly suggest that your hypothesis is right. CAGW has none of this.
"A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
"There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change"
"The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados"
"The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses"
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
"Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.""
How do we get from "their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research" to "climate change to drive weather disasters"?
I note that although you have clearly been looking, you have found no example of a null hypothesis that mentions causality.
You didn't read the cite, did you?:)
""The Null Hypothesis is the hypothesis that there is no relationship between two variables. Establishing that there is a relationship between two variables is the first step in establishing whether there is a causal connection between two variables. ""
Note the word *causal*. Go ahead, I'll wait for you to read it again:)
Yes, climate scientists have considered every physically realistic mechanism that could potentially account for the rise in temperatures, including the ones that were likely responsible for past episodes of (what you call "natural") climate change.
"In spite of this undeniable progress, the amplitude and even the sign of cloud feedbacks was noted in the TAR as highly uncertain"
What kind of magical mystical process have your unnamed climate scientists used to determine the paleo cloud cover? Hint: we call it "curve fitting".
It predicts that increases in CO2 can either lead or follow warming,
Bullshit detectors up to 13, needle is bending. A hypothesis that predicts *everything* predicts *nothing*. Astrology predicts that Cancers are trustworthy, but sometimes dishonest.
There is no relationship whatsoever between the physical mechanisms responsible for climate change and the economic and psychological mechanisms that determine movements of the stock market.
On the contrary, if we can take a simple model of supply and demand, just as we take a simple model of greenhouse gases, we should be able to gloss over all the gory details of psychology (and cloud cover), and come to conclusions that are "settled", right?:)
You really don't understand the limitations of computer models, do you?
2. The "null hypothesis" applies solely to statistical significance testing, and thus relates only to correlation, never to causality. 3. Hence, any statement with the word "cause" in it can never be a null hypothesis.
Wrong on both counts.
"The null hypothesis typically corresponds to a general or default position. For example, the null hypothesis might be that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena or that a potential treatment has no effect."
"The Null Hypothesis is the hypothesis that there is no relationship between two variables. Establishing that there is a relationship between two variables is the first step in establishing whether there is a causal connection between two variables. "
So in considering causes of temperature fluctuations over a period of time, you must consider all factors: volcanic eruptions, solar radiance, time of year and time of day of measurement, short-term ocean current cycles like El Nino, particulate and CO2 pollution, etc.
So, are you asserting that you've considered every possible cause for every temperature fluctuation? Your assertion of complexity here is *exactly* the problem with taking GCMs, and asserting that they represent science. We already *know* our information is proxied, limited, and full of holes. To take us from a state of incredibly lacking knowledge, then plugging in fudge factors to predict what temperatures will be 50 years from now, much less pinning it mostly on a *single* molecule measured in parts per million sets bullshit detectors off to 11.
By appropriate statistical analysis and physical modeling, it is possible to dissect which factors affected temperature over a given period of time.
No, it simply isn't. Put another way, if we had any sort of ability to do accurate modeling at that level, we'd be able to create a model for the stock market that will tell us, to the nearest hundred, what the Dow Jones Industrial Average will be in 100 years. Humans are arguably *less* complicated than global climate, and you'd never go so far as to assume you could model markets with any sort of reasonable accuracy...or do you?
Sorry, but if you'd read any of the real science, you would know that this is a laughable argument, because it is exactly what climate science predicts.
So you're now asserting climate science predicts a time travel effect, where future CO2 can effect present temperatures?
All models are wrong. The question is whether it is wrong in a way that matters.
Well, cite any GCM that can properly model clouds, hind cast PDO/ENSO, or establish any regional predictions of any accuracy. Surely clouds and ocean oscillations matter in significant ways, right?
Global average temperature affects nobody. Regional weather does.
which is, of course, why every major elite scientific society in the world, and something like 97% of scientists with any kind of published track record in a relevant field, accept climate theory and its predictions regarding CO2 and climate change.
They said that about geocentrism, alchemy, creationism, and even the flat earth. Argument from unnamed authorities is a big red flag - show me your falsifiable hypothesis statement (or set of falsifiable hypothesis statements), or you're simply pushing astrology.
Zero correlation means that on average, when one variable changes, the other does not. Neither of your series shows statistically significant correlation
Neither of my series shows statistically significant correlation, yet *both* of them change. So the null hypothesis of natural climate change is clearly still the null hypothesis (we know climate naturally *changes*, and doesn't have to remain static compared to CO2 levels). In fact, the observed historical record shows a time lagged correlation, with CO2 *following* temperature. If we were going to propose a causality based on the majority of the data, it would go *from* temperature *to* CO2.
So how are you now going to exclude our modern industrial age observations from natural climate change?
One is 1957-present. The other is 1895-1946. One of them is clearly "natural" (since our CO2 emissions were minimal during the 1895-1946 period), and the other is proposed to be "anthropogenic" (since our CO2 emissions were incredibly huge from 1957 to present).
I hope you're not talking about the ice age CO2/heat lag thing because that's been discussed to death.
Well, one of the possible falsifiable predictions that could have been made is "if historically CO2 levels *lead* temperature changes, then we're right - if historical CO2 levels *lag* temperature changes then we're wrong". Instead, it's asserted "in the past CO2 is allowed to lag temperature changes, and post-industrial era CO2 is allowed to lead temperature changes".
That's astrology.
And this leads back to the vain quest for a single scientific hypothesis to cover the entire theory.
I'll settle even for a clearly linked set of falsifiable hypotheses...but I think you're right, the quest is in vain - it simply doesn't exist.
And the difference between a useful falsifiable prediction, and a silly one, is that a useful one (or set) will contain all necessary and *sufficient* components to imply that the proposition is true. Saying that anthropogenic global warming can be falsified by showing that humans don't exist is silly, because surely the mere fact that humans exist doesn't imply any measure of anthropogenic global warming.
Yet no critic has been able to come up with a climate model that is based on valid physics and is equally consistent with the existing climate data and that does not predict a worrisome degree of warming as a consequence of CO2 emissions.
In science, a critic doesn't need to replace an existing conceit with one of their own, they only need to show that the proposed conceit is false. We do that by establishing all of the necessary and sufficient falsifications, and then searching hard for those falsifications.
What you're proposing is that absent a model of heliocentrism, nobody could possibly have refuted the idea that the universe revolved around the earth. Or that absent a model of natural selection, nobody could possibly have refuted the idea that the species were created by an intelligent designer.
Arguing that your non-falsifiable hypothesis is right simply because nobody has come up with a better explanation is daft.
The null model is the zero model--zero change or zero correlation. I didn't pick it; that's how it's defined.
What is it? Zero change or zero correlation? You seem to believe that zero change and zero correlation are the same...let me demonstrate with some series again. First, zero change:
"Null hypothesis. The null hypothesis, denoted by H0, is usually the hypothesis that sample observations result purely from chance. "
But the theory of natural selection is a causal model, not a statistical model, and hence can never be a null model.
So I bring up the point that creationists toy with the null hypothesis in order to reject the null and place their hypothesis in point of preference, and you decide that the relevant question is what is a causal model and what is a statistical model?
I can't help being amused when amateurs try to tell scientists how to do science
So you amuse yourself by telling me how science is done?:) Hey, Einstein was an amateur, there's no fault in that:)
"necessary and sufficient" is not even wrong--it's impossible based on elementary logic.
Ah, the truth finally emerges! You admit that it is impossible to come up with the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis elements for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming! Progress!
If there were a long-term global trend of atmospheric and oceanic temperature decline despite increasing CO2 concentrations for example (other factors being roughly stable).
Well, we've seen this in the ice core records, but of course, you've left yourself great big loopholes there (define "long-term", and "other factors being roughly stable").
Would you like to quantify your loopholes (and whatever required due diligence is necessary to defend them against the n+1 and n-1 cases), or would you like to try a different tack?
In the end, a hypothesis which responds to any refutation with yet another excuse is simply another version of astrology.
Well then I assume you're a creationist too, because evolution has many of the same complexities.
Well, you're wrong on both points:)
Creationism is clearly not science, because it has no falsifiable hypothesis. Any historical (and even future) evidence can be explained away by a supernatural power that can do anything.
Evolution, while certainly more complex than most people give it credit for, actually is quite simple to assert falsifications for. Find a modern rabbit fossil in the pre-cambrian. Observe a spontaneous change in one generation from say, a crab, giving birth to cow. All evolution requires us to believe is that natural selection can have an effect on what organisms survive, eventually causing enough genetic drift to stop breeding.
CAGW, on the other hand, fails because it has no falsifiable hypothesis. Any historical (and even future) evidence can be explained away by the tweaking of a model or the assertion of some ad hoc special pleading.
It is indeed ironic that some of the most stalwart defenders of the scientific method nowadays are creationists, while darwinists are busy defending the religion of CAGW:)
All of the numerous predictions made from climate theory would have falsified the theory if the observations had come out other than predicted: If the nights were not warming more than the days, if the stratosphere were warming rather than cooling, etc., etc.
You're talking about perhaps *necessary* requirements, but surely not sufficient requirements. UHI effects warm nights more than days, and stratospheres can cool even without CO2 driven warming. You've given us no reason to believe that your predictions are indicative that your hypothesis is correct.
After all, "no correlation" merely means zero average change in one variable when the other one changes.
No, you've got it wrong again. "No correlation" (as opposed to "no causation", which is requires correlation, but then it also needs a bit more), doesn't mean *zero* average change in one variable when the other one changes. That's daft. Here, take these two series:
3 1 4 1 5 9 1 2 4 5 3 6 3 2 1 7 3 1 1 2 8 7 1 0
Both series change. Neither correlates to the other.
Once the null (zero) hypothesis has been excluded, it is gone forever--there is not a new, causal null hypothesis.
Again, you're playing a trick on yourself - you cannot simply prove your hypothesis by picking a trivial null to disprove, asserting that once it is gone nothing replaces it, and BAM, your magic hypothesis is now true until someone comes up with something else. That's the kind of argument you get from creationists who insist that BAM, once you discard the null hypothesis of evolution, which breaks the 2nd law since it goes from disorder to order, that the only reasonable explanation is an intelligent designer.
You've managed to write a lot, but you've still failed the most basic test of science - the existence of the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis. Playing games with the definition of "null" (and terribly misunderstanding it to boot), isn't helping your argument:)
Slashdot Mirror
Pray tell, what is the error range you'd like to claim for Hansen's 1998 paper? How cold would 2012 need to be before you accepted his basic conceit as falsified?
http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/Hansen_GlobalTemp.htm
Forced to correct their data? Forced? John Christy is a real scientist, he doesn't go back and change historical data points willy nilly to make some claim of "hottest year ever", he takes a close, skeptical look at even his own work, and corrects it as necessary: http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/1853/
The fact that John Christy actually fixes errors, rather than blindly defending errors (like Mann, et. al.), is a sign of *strength* :)
First off, I'd wonder more about if they made any predictions, which if wrong, would have falsified their primary conceit - i.e., if they would have said "0.4C cooling globally means we're *wrong*", that would have been stronger. Simply making predictions is trivial - astrologists do that all the time.
That being said:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/29/prediction-is-hard-especially-of-the-future/
So their model predicted a large event, a “three-sigma” cooling from Pinatubo.
"But despite their prediction, it didn’t turn out like that at all. Look at the red line above showing the actual temperature change. If you didn’t know there was a volcano in 1991, that part of the temperature record wouldn’t even catch your eye. Pinatubo did not cause anywhere near the maximum temperature swing predicted by the GISS model. It was not a three-sigma event, just another day in the planetary life."
"Hansen predicted what is called a “three sigma” event. He got about a two sigma event (2.07 sigma). “Sigma” is a measure of how common it is for something to occur. However, it is far from linear."
There is no anti-AGW hypothesis - the null hypothesis is natural climate change. We know that natural climate change happens from observation - it's happened well before humanity existed, much less had a significant CO2 output.
Until you can come up with a clearly stated, necessary and sufficient set of falsifiable hypothesis statements in support of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, you're playing astrology, not science.
The butterfly effect isn't what you think it is - the idea that very small changes can cause very different *specific* outcomes (i.e., a storm that happened at 12:01am, versus a storm that happened at 2:43pm), is not the same thing as the idea that very small changes can cause huge changes in the *quality* of any given outcomes (i.e., a hurricane that is category 5, versus a tropical storm with top winds of 15mph). We do not live in a world where butterflies can create cat5 hurricanes - we live in a chaotic world that has a bunch of negative feedbacks that keeps things surprisingly stable at almost every timescale.
We know it's real, we can measure it, but we can't *model* it accurately, nor do we have any proxies that would tell us what it was if we weren't observing it with the modern instruments of today.
Sorry, typo, I meant "polarity" (as in positive or negative) and "quantity".
Whoa, hold yer rhetoric there for a moment - we know that there is natural global warming, and natural global cooling. Fiddling with the magnitude of a feedback in a GCM is what gives rise to Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, or leaves things at simply Inconsequential Anthropogenic Global Warming. There is a difference.
Natural climate change isn't a model, it just *is*. It is what happened before humanity existed, and what will happen after humanity disappears. The question at hand is whether or not observed modern temperatures are within natural climate change variations, or if human impacts have discernibly impacted these variations, and, if so, if they have impacted these variations in a way that is proven to be detrimental to humanity.
While you can keep holding onto the "you can't say I'm wrong until you come up with something righter" argument, it simply isn't science.
Of course, it is true. Don't think for a moment that we have a model of physical processes that we can simply run backwards and recreate historical temperatures - we *started* with those simple models (and maintained the central conceit that CO2 was an overwhelming climate driver, instead of a second order function of temperature), and tweaked things until they gave a close match to historical records.
Ah, another appeal to unnamed authorities :)
Wait, it's ridiculous to show you two 50 year temperature anomaly graphs, one that is clearly outside the era of high human CO2 emissions, and ask you to show me the anthropogenic fingerprint?
Your problem is this - modern temperature records aren't unprecedented on any scale. You have no way of excluding the null hypothesis of natural climate change.
And isn't that also true of your favored CO2 hypothesis? That what you claim is a trend could simply be natural background noise?
Again, you've left yourself with an unfalsifiable hypothesis that is justified by ad hoc special pleadings whenever data suggests you're wrong. This is called climate astrology :)
Just how big are we going to assert the error bars? Is a prediction that covers a swath of say, +/-10C really much of a prediction?
And we still don't know as much as we'd like about cloud cover, or plant growth, or any number of other natural factors. If our ignorance is so great on so many fronts, what makes you think we should be so sure about how we've modeled CO2?
And to date, there still isn't evidence that there is any sort of climate sensitivity that would cause catastrophe.
And apparently, *nothing* would. A hypothesis which is unfalsifiable, and can integrate any contrary evidence into its central conceit is called "religion".
Really? So, we can heat a pot of water with fire, and also cause a fire with a heated pot of water?
Let's have an actual example.
Hardly. They have no idea about the magnitude *or* the quantity.
Again, you're trying to take a failure of the GCMs you have so much faith in, and then assert that this failure must somehow represent an entire solution for the problem at hand? We know cloud feedback is real. We don't have any model that accurately deals with cloud feedback. How can we rely on a model that ignores reality?
Models are consistent with the known climate record because they've been curve fitted. Understand this isn't one of their strengths.
The graphs are the same period of time, and the same vertical scale, simply unlabeled as to the absolute value. You cannot discern from either of them which one is supposed to be "natural" as per your AGW hypothesis, and which one is supposed to be CO2 driven.
Given that such a similar period of 50 years exists within the climate record, before any proposed CO2 impact should have even existed, shows great weakness, don't you think?
Funny you should mention that:
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=2019Note
“what would FALSIFY [linking CO2 to ‘warming’]?”
Schmidt swings again:
”that the stratosphere is not cooling as expected (this is a cleaner test than the surface temperatures because there are less extraneous factors)”
And it’s a miss! The stratosphere hasn’t been cooling in over a decade:
http://www.acd.ucar.edu/Research/Highlight/stratosphere.shtml
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/temp-and-precip/upper-air/uahncdc.ls
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/documents/JournalPDFs/RandelEtal.JGR2009.pdf
Ah, back to the pots of heated water than can create fires :)
What observations would have made you question his basic conceit? How far off would he have had to be in order for you to hold him strictly accountable?
It sounds like no matter what reality showed, you'd still be defending his hypothesis. We call this astrology :)
Hansen's oral testimony called Scenario A the "Business as Usual" scenario.
Try these critiques of Hansen, if you don't like Michaels:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/16/thoughts-on-hansen-et-al-1988/
http://climateaudit.org/2008/07/28/hansen-update/
No, my argument is that you cannot blindly try to fix a hypothetical problem with an incredible waste of resources without hurting the poorest of the poor. "Green" jobs, funded by government subsidies, waste resources and cause measurable harm to humanity, and even by the most optimistic of appraisals, will do *nothing* significant to combat future climate change.
Energy is life, and if you make it more expensive because you imagine that one day, bad things will happen because of a gas measured in parts per million, used by plants to grow, is going to kill us all, what you'll end up doing is harming more people, and of course harming those that are the most vulnerable.
Okay, say for a moment we stipulate to that, and agree that there is a correlation between CO2 and global average temperature. Doesn't causality require that CO2 change first *then* temperature? Doesn't the ice core record show the opposite...doesn't it *always* show the opposite over any significant timescale?
And they're not even sure of the *sign* of this feedback, much less the magnitude. That's a hole you can drive 100 years of warming right through.
No, it doesn't at all. The problem with the modeled cloud feedbacks (where they don't even know what *direction* it goes in), is that it essentially leads to error bars an order of magnitude larger than the effect we're trying to observe.
Clearly, global climate has been warming. Clearly, global climate has warmed in the past. We assume that in the past, before CO2 emissions by humanity increased dramatically, this was due to natural causes. Can you tell from these two graphs, which one is the "natural" warming and which one is the anthropogenic CO2 warming?
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/periodb.gif
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/perioda_3.gif
Listen to yourself carefully here - you're asserting that the dynamics of CO2 both lead and lag temperature changes. The ice core record shows that it lags, and has consistently lagged for hundreds of thousands of years.
Now, what you're asserting now is that historical, present, and future observations of either a lag, or a lead, supports your hypothesis. So, no matter what we observe, you're asserting you're correct. The entire universe of observations is consistent with your hypothesis.
We call this astrology :)
Hey, if someone is going to make the blanket claim that "if global average temperatures continue to rise, despite increasing CO2 concentrations, then the theory is disproven", I'll take whatever time period I like, and whatever data set I like.
Would you like to be more specific? Perhaps state a required starting year? Perhaps a required length of time? GISS, or RSS instead of Hadcrut3?
Or are you yet another troll without a falsifiable hypothesis :)
Because the precautionary principle mistakenly assumes that their precautionary action has no risk. Ancel Keys did this to us with low-fat diets, moving forward with the vilification of dietary fat despite the lack of evidence - he wanted to save people from the risk he knew was there but couldn't prove. Instead, we got 40 years of low-fat/high-carb living, with more obesity, cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases than ever.
Lowering CO2 emissions is dangerous, and quite reasonably one can assert that it is much more dangerous than any possible climate impact it might have. In fact, since we *know* so many *absolutely certain* problems with lowering CO2 emissions (increasing mortality as poverty increases, inability to cope with natural disasters as standard of living falls), it's the most fanciful thing to think that we'd be doing the *safe* thing by destroying our economy.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2012/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2012/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/to:2012/normalise
Are you ready to accept your theory has been falsified, now that you've been presented with the falsification you asked for?
Church of Global Warming mods are apparently on the loose - simply question how one would exclude natural climate change as the reason for our modern observations, and it's a troll? Really?
Imagine, for a moment, that all observed climate change is simply natural variability. We'll call this the null hypothesis. Now how would you exclude our observations from natural variability?
Here's a quick quiz:
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/periodb.gif
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/perioda_3.gif
Which 50 year period is "natural" (since humans weren't pumping out vast amounts of CO2 then), and which 50 year period is "unnatural"?
Mod parent up. Peer review and unnamed, unaccountable "authorities" is not what makes something scientific. The scientific method, and its foundation, the falsifiable hypothesis statement, is what matters.
Depends on the advice. If it's the "low-fat/low-calorie/exercise" advice of the past 40 years, yeah, I ignore it. If it's carbohydrate restriction, I'll go with it. Why? Because while a doctor may speak with *authority* about the low-fat dogma, there has never been any proof that it is effective in preventing heart attacks. In fact, the opposite is quite true - low-fat/high-carbohydrate diets have dramatically increased the incidence of obesity, cancer, heart disease and other chronic diseases over the past 40 years.
Here's how science should be done: http://garytaubes.com/lectures/
Creationism doesn't have a falsifiable hypothesis. Evolution does.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming doesn't have a falsifiable hypothesis.
CAGW is simply pseudo-scientific astrology, which makes wildly inaccurate predictions (Hansen 1988), and then when things don't come to pass, they claim some ad hoc special pleading. They assert that CO2 can both lead and follow temperature change, much like an astrologist might say that Cancers are trustworthy, but sometimes dishonest. The "heads I win, tails you lose" attitude, which prevents any critique of their central conceits, is a hallmark of creationism.
The scientific method, played honestly, means clearly identifying the evidence that, if found, would prove your hypothesis wrong, and if *not* found, would strongly suggest that your hypothesis is right. CAGW has none of this.
Those silly trees - why won't they just stay cut down!? :)
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/03/handy-bullshit-button-on-disasters-and.html
"A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
"There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change"
"The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados"
"The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses"
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
"Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.""
How do we get from "their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research" to "climate change to drive weather disasters"?
Really?
You didn't read the cite, did you? :)
""The Null Hypothesis is the hypothesis that there is no relationship between two variables. Establishing that there is a relationship between two variables is the first step in establishing whether there is a causal connection between two variables. ""
Note the word *causal*. Go ahead, I'll wait for you to read it again :)
Bullshit detectors redlining to 12 now. From the IPCC: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch1s1-5-2.html
"In spite of this undeniable progress, the amplitude and even the sign of cloud feedbacks was noted in the TAR as highly uncertain"
What kind of magical mystical process have your unnamed climate scientists used to determine the paleo cloud cover? Hint: we call it "curve fitting".
Bullshit detectors up to 13, needle is bending. A hypothesis that predicts *everything* predicts *nothing*. Astrology predicts that Cancers are trustworthy, but sometimes dishonest.
On the contrary, if we can take a simple model of supply and demand, just as we take a simple model of greenhouse gases, we should be able to gloss over all the gory details of psychology (and cloud cover), and come to conclusions that are "settled", right? :)
You really don't understand the limitations of computer models, do you?
Wrong on both counts.
"The null hypothesis typically corresponds to a general or default position. For example, the null hypothesis might be that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena or that a potential treatment has no effect."
Here's some basic statistics review for you: https://www.msu.edu/user/sw/statrev/strv46.htm
"The Null Hypothesis is the hypothesis that there is no relationship between two variables. Establishing that there is a relationship between two variables is the first step in establishing whether there is a causal connection between two variables. "
So, are you asserting that you've considered every possible cause for every temperature fluctuation? Your assertion of complexity here is *exactly* the problem with taking GCMs, and asserting that they represent science. We already *know* our information is proxied, limited, and full of holes. To take us from a state of incredibly lacking knowledge, then plugging in fudge factors to predict what temperatures will be 50 years from now, much less pinning it mostly on a *single* molecule measured in parts per million sets bullshit detectors off to 11.
No, it simply isn't. Put another way, if we had any sort of ability to do accurate modeling at that level, we'd be able to create a model for the stock market that will tell us, to the nearest hundred, what the Dow Jones Industrial Average will be in 100 years. Humans are arguably *less* complicated than global climate, and you'd never go so far as to assume you could model markets with any sort of reasonable accuracy...or do you?
So you're now asserting climate science predicts a time travel effect, where future CO2 can effect present temperatures?
Review Feynman, and try again :) http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
Well, cite any GCM that can properly model clouds, hind cast PDO/ENSO, or establish any regional predictions of any accuracy. Surely clouds and ocean oscillations matter in significant ways, right?
Global average temperature affects nobody. Regional weather does.
They said that about geocentrism, alchemy, creationism, and even the flat earth. Argument from unnamed authorities is a big red flag - show me your falsifiable hypothesis statement (or set of falsifiable hypothesis statements), or you're simply pushing astrology.
Neither of my series shows statistically significant correlation, yet *both* of them change. So the null hypothesis of natural climate change is clearly still the null hypothesis (we know climate naturally *changes*, and doesn't have to remain static compared to CO2 levels). In fact, the observed historical record shows a time lagged correlation, with CO2 *following* temperature. If we were going to propose a causality based on the majority of the data, it would go *from* temperature *to* CO2.
So how are you now going to exclude our modern industrial age observations from natural climate change?
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/periodb.gif
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/perioda_3.gif
One is 1957-present. The other is 1895-1946. One of them is clearly "natural" (since our CO2 emissions were minimal during the 1895-1946 period), and the other is proposed to be "anthropogenic" (since our CO2 emissions were incredibly huge from 1957 to present).
Can you pick the "natural" one?
Well, one of the possible falsifiable predictions that could have been made is "if historically CO2 levels *lead* temperature changes, then we're right - if historical CO2 levels *lag* temperature changes then we're wrong". Instead, it's asserted "in the past CO2 is allowed to lag temperature changes, and post-industrial era CO2 is allowed to lead temperature changes".
That's astrology.
I'll settle even for a clearly linked set of falsifiable hypotheses...but I think you're right, the quest is in vain - it simply doesn't exist.
And the difference between a useful falsifiable prediction, and a silly one, is that a useful one (or set) will contain all necessary and *sufficient* components to imply that the proposition is true. Saying that anthropogenic global warming can be falsified by showing that humans don't exist is silly, because surely the mere fact that humans exist doesn't imply any measure of anthropogenic global warming.
In science, a critic doesn't need to replace an existing conceit with one of their own, they only need to show that the proposed conceit is false. We do that by establishing all of the necessary and sufficient falsifications, and then searching hard for those falsifications.
What you're proposing is that absent a model of heliocentrism, nobody could possibly have refuted the idea that the universe revolved around the earth. Or that absent a model of natural selection, nobody could possibly have refuted the idea that the species were created by an intelligent designer.
Arguing that your non-falsifiable hypothesis is right simply because nobody has come up with a better explanation is daft.
What is it? Zero change or zero correlation? You seem to believe that zero change and zero correlation are the same...let me demonstrate with some series again. First, zero change:
a) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
b) 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1
Now, zero correlation:
a) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
b) 1, 5, 2, 3, 6, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3
Can you tell the difference? Do you understand why the null hypothesis of climate change *isn't* that global average temperatures never change?
You clearly don't understand statistics. You can have non-correlation with change in both variables, as clearly shown with my series above.
Further reading for you:
http://stattrek.com/hypothesis-test/hypothesis-testing.aspx
"Null hypothesis. The null hypothesis, denoted by H0, is usually the hypothesis that sample observations result purely from chance. "
So I bring up the point that creationists toy with the null hypothesis in order to reject the null and place their hypothesis in point of preference, and you decide that the relevant question is what is a causal model and what is a statistical model?
So you amuse yourself by telling me how science is done? :) Hey, Einstein was an amateur, there's no fault in that :)
Ah, the truth finally emerges! You admit that it is impossible to come up with the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis elements for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming! Progress!
Well, we've seen this in the ice core records, but of course, you've left yourself great big loopholes there (define "long-term", and "other factors being roughly stable").
Would you like to quantify your loopholes (and whatever required due diligence is necessary to defend them against the n+1 and n-1 cases), or would you like to try a different tack?
In the end, a hypothesis which responds to any refutation with yet another excuse is simply another version of astrology.
Well, you're wrong on both points :)
Creationism is clearly not science, because it has no falsifiable hypothesis. Any historical (and even future) evidence can be explained away by a supernatural power that can do anything.
Evolution, while certainly more complex than most people give it credit for, actually is quite simple to assert falsifications for. Find a modern rabbit fossil in the pre-cambrian. Observe a spontaneous change in one generation from say, a crab, giving birth to cow. All evolution requires us to believe is that natural selection can have an effect on what organisms survive, eventually causing enough genetic drift to stop breeding.
CAGW, on the other hand, fails because it has no falsifiable hypothesis. Any historical (and even future) evidence can be explained away by the tweaking of a model or the assertion of some ad hoc special pleading.
It is indeed ironic that some of the most stalwart defenders of the scientific method nowadays are creationists, while darwinists are busy defending the religion of CAGW :)
You're talking about perhaps *necessary* requirements, but surely not sufficient requirements. UHI effects warm nights more than days, and stratospheres can cool even without CO2 driven warming. You've given us no reason to believe that your predictions are indicative that your hypothesis is correct.
No, you've got it wrong again. "No correlation" (as opposed to "no causation", which is requires correlation, but then it also needs a bit more), doesn't mean *zero* average change in one variable when the other one changes. That's daft. Here, take these two series:
3 1 4 1 5 9 1 2 4 5 3 6
3 2 1 7 3 1 1 2 8 7 1 0
Both series change. Neither correlates to the other.
Again, you're playing a trick on yourself - you cannot simply prove your hypothesis by picking a trivial null to disprove, asserting that once it is gone nothing replaces it, and BAM, your magic hypothesis is now true until someone comes up with something else. That's the kind of argument you get from creationists who insist that BAM, once you discard the null hypothesis of evolution, which breaks the 2nd law since it goes from disorder to order, that the only reasonable explanation is an intelligent designer.
You've managed to write a lot, but you've still failed the most basic test of science - the existence of the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis. Playing games with the definition of "null" (and terribly misunderstanding it to boot), isn't helping your argument :)