I firmly disagree. The precautionary principle only works if you assume that your intervention is completely harmless, which one simply cannot assert. Damaging the economic well-being of the poorest of the poor by forcing them to use non-carbon based energy sources they cannot afford arguably causes *more* damage than any amount of CO2 dumping we could imagine.
Warmists need to come up with a concise falsifiable hypothesis statement if you actual want this to be a *scientific* debate. The philosophical debate about the precautionary principle may be interesting, but it's certainly not science.
I welcome you to present us with your falsifiable hypothesis statement, so we can continue the debate on scientific terms.
Mod parent up. This whole discussion needs to start with a succinct statement of a falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. If we're playing the science game, we need to play by the rules of the scientific method, and that is *not* simply redefining the null hypothesis, or claiming that every possible observation is "consistent with" a hypothesis.
Once we can elicit said falsifiable hypothesis, *then* we can start talking science. Until then, we're simply arguing about the dogmatic tenets of an irrational belief system.
Isn't the idea of holding blacks (or any other ethnic group) to lower standards with Affirmative Action *implicit* with the assumption that those people who need the extra help are inferior?
I'll argue that Black people are just as capable as any other ethnic group, but if we bias our sample to include people who are held to a lower standard, we'll always see a bias in the end result. End Affirmative Action, and treat all people equally, and you won't see this kind of outcome bias.
I wonder what the results would be if they controlled for people who benefitted from affirmative action policies that let them into schools with lower grades and test scores.
It seems plausible to posit that regardless of ethnic or racial background, people who are held to lower standards might not fare so well in real life competition.
yet we are at a stage where it is impossible to explain warming in the last 50 years without it.
That's an odd statement. I doubt we're at a stage where we can explain the climate in the last 50 years, in terms of all the variables that effect it, and we may *never* get to that level of certainty. This is the argument of ignorance - "we can't think of anything else, therefore it must be CO2". I still don't buy that one.
As for fire insurance -- it costs you money, and isn't what all the AGW-opposition is about? Really it is a question of cost-benefit analysis.
Fire insurance is a fraction of a fraction of total income. AGW mitigation "cap and trade" or other subsidies for inefficient energy is an order of magnitude higher.
Would you buy fire insurance if it cost 50% of your paycheck? 75% of your paycheck? *That* is the kind of economic impact you'll have if you pursue policies that increase real energy prices by subsidizing inefficient forms of energy, and restricting cheap forms of energy.
Everybody who actually knows something about climate science agree on the major details, except for a handful of people.
Is 31,000 not enough? Or are we simply going to denigrate their POV because they don't agree with our Unnamed Authorities?
I am not insisting that any change is due to human activity. I am insisting that there is a strong argument that some change is due to human activity.
I can agree with your second proposition, until it is asserted that this "some change" is "catastrophic change". We certainly have an effect (both up and down in temp) - but we are simply noise compared to natural drivers. Perhaps your definition of "some" is different than mine:)
As for temperature driving CO2 -- this is a often repeated denialist argument, that has been studied and responded to over a decade ago.
I'd be interested in your reaction to the latest study coming out this year that makes the case for that rationale.
. The oil price jumped, and everybody ran for foreign cars which are sometimes twice as efficient. Then GM screamed for a government bailout. That is what laissez-faire economics gives you.
Um, no, that's what socialist policies give you - laissez-faire economics would let GM fail, have its resources liquidated to other companies that would pursue economically profit driven activity.
The bottom line on the economics is that cheap energy is what brings people out of poverty. Your average person on this planet isn't affected by US subsidies to hybrid vehicles, a country that apparently has money to burn on unprofitable pursuits. They are, however, affected by the cost of energy, and if that goes up, their lives get incredibly worse. If we cared about the plight of most of humanity, we'd be drilling as much cheap petroleum as we can, from wherever we can, to provide the lowest cost energy for the most amount of people. Imagining high tech "clean" solutions unaffordable to the billions of people on this planet is simply fantasy.
CO2 has almost doubled since the industrial revolution, and is increasing exponentially. What type of measurement do you want?
A measurement that shows that the heat trapping ability of CO2 is a dominant driver of climate. Leaping from the spectral behavior of CO2 in a lab, to how it would react in the complex real world is not a straightforward step.
Onto probability of CAGW: even though your house has a 1% chance of burning down, you probably have fire insurance.
Having fire insurance isn't going to cause me harm. Radically shrinking the energy available to humanity is. The precautionary principle only works if the proposed remedy has *zero* chance of harm. I'm not convinced that working towards a cooler world, much less increasing the real price of energy, has a zero chance of harm (in fact, I'll bet it's got a very high probability of harm).
So even though your house has a 1% chance of burning down, you probably won't remove every electric or gas powered appliance in your house, and eat all your food raw and unrefrigerated.
AGW was established by consensus in 1979
Science is not consensus.
+ More powerful storms (warm the oceans, and storms get worse) + Changes in nature (plant hardiness zones, bird migrations, glacial retreats, melting ice-caps) + Temperature record + Rising sea level
+ no evidence of more powerful storms (in fact, global cyclonic activity has *dropped*) + nature *always* changes - head's I win tails you lose isn't a valid argument + a temperature record may show correlation, not causality + seas always rise and fall
You've limited your vision to what you feel confirms your position, when in fact, you've essentially insisted that any change can be attributed to man's actions.
Do you really not believe that CO2 concentrations have risen?
In particular, most of our cities are at sea level, and all of that investment in infrastructure will come under a cloud in the next 100 years.
Off the top of your head, how old is the city of Venice:)
Working on infrastructure, great. Destroying our economy and driving people into abject poverty with high cost energy on a *guess* about a gas that is measured in parts per million? Not so great.
How can I be more clear. 1 degree difference will increate the heat-difference.
You may say that 1 degree global average temperature increase *may* create a heat difference, but that is not guaranteed, nor necessarily even likely (given that the temp record shows generally higher lows driving up the average, rather than higher temps.
You must use kelvin in thermodynamic equations.
Well gee, when you look at the amount of temperature increase century by century in terms of kelvin, it's a *really* small fraction, now isn't it:) By that calculation, temperature changes (in K) over the centuries are fractions of a fraction of a percent:)
Your thought experiment fails to account for the period of time when we know the sun rose, but the electronic rooster wasn't invented yet, or had broken down:)
Of course, if you'd like to posit an electronic rooster that existed before the sun did, that will last longer than the sun does, I suppose that's just as likely as anthropogenic CO2 having a significant effect on global average temperature:)
If you are talking about the average temperature of the earth's surface, then there is a straight-forward definition.
Hardly:) You've got adjustments for spatial location, time of measurements, and a choice of several types of mathematical "averages" (see the McKittrick ref again).
As for heat *distribution*, that is not what global temperature is meant to measure. Apples and oranges.
My point exactly. Heat distribution *matters* to life and humanity. Global temperature does not.
Doesn't effect the premise of my argument, that there *is* a global average temperature, and that is *is* useful.
You have yet to specify a use for global average temperature. What decisions can be made knowing global average temperature? What predictions? Since it doesn't map to heat distribution, which is what is actually experienced by people and things, what use is it?
I should have mentioned that the main driver of violent weather is warm oceans.
Wrong. The main driver of violent weather is large heat differentials between atmospheric systems. A warm ocean, and a warm atmosphere, without any cold atmosphere to impact, is not going to create any violent weather. You have mistaken a superficial correlation as a useful causality:)
When you say people shouldn't be listened to, then you are in shaky territory.
Mea culpa - you're right on that one. What I should do is simply cite the host of research that has shown Mann's work to be incorrect - I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I subscribe to AGW. CAGW is a possibility, but warming may not be so bad either. Mind you, most of our cities will be in trouble, so it will be catastrophic from an economic point of view.
It sounds like you're not quite sure - I'm going to assume that you believe that it is *possible* that "most of our cities will be in trouble", in the same way you think CAGW is a *possibility*. I'm also assuming that by "possible" you mean low single-digits (i.e., not "probable"). If either of those assumptions are incorrect, please let me know.
To be clear on my position, I don't subscribe to AGW or CAGW because I haven't heard of any observations of temperature and CO2 that would falsify either. I understand the rationale, but it's too cleverly defended against adverse data to count as useful science to me.
That being said, I do believe that a minor period of natural global warming has occurred over the past 150 years (with a few minor natural cooling periods interspersed), even if the utility of the "global average temperature" is particularly suspect. I further believe that we're in store for a period of natural global cooling, till probably about 2050 - so far the sunspot predictions of another Maunder minimum look *probable*, even if they aren't guaranteed. As for the impact on humanity and the biosphere, I'm fairly convinced that a warmer world (as defined by global average temperature) would in general be a better world, mostly because higher temperatures generally cause higher CO2, and higher CO2 means more plant life, and more plant life means more food and resources for humanity and the biosphere in general.
Now, I could be convinced that a warmer world would be worse for the biosphere, if for example, there wasn't a positive correlation between CO2 and temperature, or if the polar biospheres were more vibrant than tropical ones, or if we had paleo data indicating that during interglacials the biosphere was less vibrant than during glacial periods, so I consider that a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm sure there are probably other falsifications that would also fit. Coming up with standard measures of biosphere vibrancy would probably be the trickest part of doing research into that hypothesis.
Occam's razor denies you that assertion - there can be a myriad number of alternative explanations, and rule of thumb favors the one that makes the least novel assertions.
As for the perennial rooster's call, I'll note that there are plenty of times when the effect occurs (the sun rises) when the cause does not occur (the rooster is sick, or dead).
Note that at least one of the authors is forthright in stating that the world is warming. If there is no global temperature, what could he mean?
In the most technical sense of the matter, one can state that the artificial statistic of "global temperature", defined as a specific and arbitrary use of averages, is warming - one cannot state that the artificial statistic of "global temperature", defined as *all* uses of averages, is warming. A subtle distinction, but an important one.
For example, the equator could be -20C and the poles +40C. Would you agree that this is absurd given our understanding (i.e.: *model*) for how heat is distributed across the globe?
Absolutely that is absurd - and there are many heat distributions that we can clearly throw out of consideration. I would suggest another absurd distribution we can throw out of consideration are any models that show increases will always increase the energy heat difference between the tropics and the poles - we've clearly observed more warming at the poles than in the tropics (at least over the instrumental record), which would *decrease* the energy heat difference.
An increase in global temperature is about the total energy in the climate system, which drives weather patterns.
You're contradicting yourself. You said "An average increase of 1 degree across the globe will increase that energy heat-difference (between the tropics and poles)." - a energy heat difference is *not* about the total energy in the climate system.
The problem is that battling Global Warming is not necessarily a good thing. There's no evidence that a warmer planet is a more dangerous planet for humanity or the biosphere...in fact, evidence shows pretty much the opposite.
When we don't agree on some of the basic premises (catastrophe in a warmer world), even if we agree on others (a global warming over the past century), we can hardly expect to agree on what kinds of actions we should take.
Using the carbon in a fossil, or other evidence from the geology around a fossil, to decide how old it is, is a proxy dating technique. The fossil itself, as a representative of the complexity of the organism is not a proxy except in the most trivially technical sense. A subtle distinction, but one that matters.
As for merging different formats in different databases -> sure, might not be an error, but you don't know that if you're not maintaining proper version control and traceability. The real problems HARRY points out are about mysterious, arbitrary and undocumented adjustments.
But the thing is, if you scratch anthropogenic CO2 from the model and stick with just natural levels of CO2, whatever changes you do to the equations, you'll always be left with a gaping hole in the shape of anthropogenic CO2.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say - you can keep anthropogenic CO2 in the models...heck, your models shouldn't even *care* where the CO2 came from (a human emitted molecule of CO2 doesn't have different spectral properties than a naturally emitted CO2 molecule).
Furthermore, the models only show correlation, not causality, so no matter what the accuracy of a model, it cannot prove that CO2 drives temperature, rather than temperature drives CO2.
A non-trivial part of this evidence are experiments which go along the lines of "what would the climate look like if we left anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation".
Running a model is not the same as running an experiment. Run your model, then compare it to observations. Then, you've got two choices when you find discrepancies -> find an ad hoc special pleading, or revisit your premises.
"Tropics warming more than poles" doesn't prove that CO2 is THE culprit, but it rules out solar forcing as a possibility.
No it doesn't. Why can't the sun warm the poles more than the tropics due to cloud formation and albedo differences? You're making an assertion without substance there.
If you can come up with a climate model which has much tighter confidence intervals than current AGW models but with real measurements still fitting in, you might win the Nobel Prize.
I think you hit the nail on the head right there - with such sloppy confidence intervals in the *actual* science, the alarmist claims of accuracy are are highly exaggerated. This might just be a communication problem (dumbing things down until they lose their original meaning), or it could be that it is an intentional misleading. I leave that decision as an exercise for the reader.
And another thing you're forgetting, one of those "toys" helped put man on the Moon and space probes in orbit of various planets in our solar system, hundreds of millions of kilometers away.
Orbital mechanics are orders of magnitude simpler than weather and climate predictions. Newtonian Gravity is only 43 arcseconds off *per century* for predicting the orbit of Mercury, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problems_with_Newton.27s_theory)
Also note, that the hockey stick supports the AGW theory, but the AGW theory does not rest on the hockey stick.
Granted. The hockey stick is used to support the CAGW theory, and the CAGW theory clearly rests on the hockey stick. The lesser claim of AGW can very well be true, but at such a low level that it makes no catastrophic impact on humanity or the globe.
Speaking of which, do you ascribe to CAGW or just AGW? I'm not sure if I've ever asked you that question straight out.
"There are three conditions that must be present to show causality: 1) there must be a strong correlation between the proposed cause and effect, 2) the proposed cause must precede the effect in time, and 3) the cause has to be present whenever the effect occurs (Burns & Grove, 2001, p. 791)."
I'll give you #1 to a degree, but #2 is problematic because of the ice core record. #3 is completely out, since if the "effect" is warming, and the "cause" is human CO2, to show causation you must show that warming *always* happens when humans emit CO2. You already know that's not true, and I'm sure you can think of several ad hoc pleadings as to why that isn't always true (volcanoes, cosmic rays affect cloud albedo, solar output, aerosols, etc).
You keep on using this word, "science". I do not think it means what you think it means.
That was *exactly* what you stated: "An average increase of 1 degree across the globe will increase that energy heat-difference (between the tropics and poles)."
That is an assertion, not proof. There are any number of temperature distributions that have an average increase of 1C across the globe that do *not* increase the energy heat-difference between the tropics and the poles.
The global average temperature tells you something about the energy in the system. Apples and oranges.
Read the paper. A global average temperature doesn't tell you anything useful about the energy in the system because you can have the the *same* system considered as both cooling and warming at the same tiem, depending on what average you use. (See Figure 1. for more details).
Now, please verify you've read it by summarizing the argument, and I'll help you correct your misunderstandings:)
There are hundreds of falsifiable hypotheses in the AGW argument.
There are hundreds of falsifiable hypotheses in the Christian Creation argument too - simply stringing a bunch of independent falsifiable hypotheses together *doesn't* make for another bigger and better hypothesis. What you're looking for (and apparently unable to find), is the concise and precise statement of a falsifiable hypothesis that links up all of your other uncontested, independent falsifiable hypotheses together. *Each link counts*. For example, the CAGW argument depends on CO2 being a greenhouse gas, the world getting warmer, *and* a warmer planet being worse for the biosphere and humanity. In that case, the weakest link with the least clear falsification is that a warmer planet is worse for the biosphere and humanity.
So here's my question to you, to help you narrow things down - out of all the myriad falsifiable hypotheses you use in the AGW argument, *which one is the weakest link* do you think?
It may be *necessary* for CO2 to be a greenhouse gas in order for AGW to be true, but it is not *sufficient*.
Find me a human being who can figure out each one of his spelling errors without external references.
Well, a spell checker is for someone *else's* errors, so what you're really looking for is a human being to can figure out someone *else's* spelling errors without external references, and I'll argue that that *is* possible with human intelligence, since a human may simply look for consistency with other parts of the text. So take a text, with a dozen words that I don't know how to spell. Mispell half of them. I'll do *way* better than any computer.
What if I insist that the human being correcting a spam filter's errors is acting like a teacher watching over a child who is trying to learn?
The best teachers don't actually tell the child "wrong, this is how you do it". Most of them will approach it with "are you sure?" or "show me that part again", and let the *child* lead the learning, rather than do by rote memorization.
A lizard wouldn't expect a sun to come up just because he's seen it many times. Such an expectation is unique to intelligence.
So are you trying to assert that a spam filter *anticipates* things? I can see how it may seem that way (I've marked Target and Walmart as spam, so it anticipates that I would also mark Walgreens as spam), but isn't that just a lookup table? Now, maybe if the spam filter anticipated something like you *wanting* spam after you reached a certain age (anticipating a desire for Viagra information, for example), *that* would be intelligence - an anticipation without an explicit table lookup of similarity.
Since spam filters do have hypothesis-forming ability and they do adapt their behavior based on the observed data and the oversight correction
I'm not sure if I quite believe that. I mean, I think there are different levels of hypothesis-forming ability - you've got your spell checker which may hypothesize, until you tell it otherwise, that a misspelled word in lower case is a mistake, but in uppercase, it's fine because it's probably an acronym. Then you've got your child which may laugh at a joke they don't understand because they hypothesize from speech style and body language that someone was *trying* to be funny. I'm not sure where the bright line is there, but it seems that it's not a very clear demarcation.
So simply proving that CO2 is a greenhouse gas means that human CO2 *must* be the primary driver of global climate? We can jump from the simple chemical properties of a single gas molecule measured in parts per million in the atmosphere, and now human activity is primarily to blame for any observations of warming across the globe?
How about this?
Hypothesis: CH4 is a greenhouse gas.
Have I now proved that bovine CH4 *must* be the primary driver of global climate?
You've mistaken, once again, *necessary* for *sufficient*.
An average increase of 1 degree across the globe will increase that energy heat-difference (between the tropics and poles). It is really very simple.
Wrong. You can have an increase in the energy heat difference between the tropics and the poles without *any* average increase. Simply cool one, and warm the other. You can also have a decrease in the energy heat difference between the tropics and the poles with a significant average increase. Simply warm the poles more than tropics (which, I believe some other AGW proponent has recently claimed is a signature of CO2 based warming rather than solar based warming).
As for *zero* utility for a global average temperature -- you really don't believe that do you?
Actually, I do. Global Average Temperature, is really a useless metric. It can't tell you what temperature it is going to be anywhere in the realm of terrestrial experience. Now, perhaps, if the earth was being used by some alien civilization as a thermometer to decide on when certain holidays were, then you'd have *something* that was affected by Global Average Temperature, but as it stands, it is as useful as calculating the Global Average Phone Number.
Put another way, would a average daily temperature be useful at all (say, temperature on every hour, for 24 hours, then divided by 24)? We generally get told what the high and low will be in a weather report, and intuit that the high will occur sometime after noon, and that the lows happen sometime in the middle of the night, but what would you decide to wear out to work if you were told the average temperature of the day was going to be 65F? It could mean that the low was somewhere at 60, and the high somewhere at 70, evenly distributed. Or it could mean that the high was at 90, and the low was at 40 - definitely a very different scenario, with very different consequences.
For *any* global average temperature, there are a myriad of possible temperature distributions. It is those distributions that have real meaning, and thus far, no climate models have given us *any* hope of predicting those distributions. It may very well be that those distributions simply cannot be predicted by models because of their stochastic nature, but if you wanted to study something that could actually *matter*, that would be it.
First off, I think you misstated yourself - you state that observing "CO2 is a greenhouse gas" would falsify AGW - I'm assuming you didn't mean that, and instead meant that if any of those items were *not* observed, that would be a falsification. Continuing on...
No alternative explanations exist to explain warming without reference to increased CO2
That's a cop out, not a falsifiable hypothesis. Simply stating that we don't have an alternative specific explanation (say, warming is explained by cloud albedo change), does *not* suddenly turn a model of CO2 based warming (and overestimated positive feedback effects) into the null hypothesis. Again, a clever argument, but not a scientific one.
Put more bluntly, say for example we observe "Climate is not warming" (as we have over several time scales, most recently up to 15 years) - you've listed (in a roundabout way) that as a falsification, but I'm sure you have an ad hoc special pleading to deal with that case. You've listed a set of things that may be *necessary* for your AGW (or CAGW, if you go that way) to be true, but they are simply not *sufficient*.
Now, global cooling - it's interesting you should mention that. How would you have stated a "global cooling hypothesis"? I'm assuming you're talking about Anthropogenic Global Cooling, which hypothesized that human generated aerosols would cool the globe...isn't that currently the favored explanation by people who purport that the past 15 years of no warming was caused by Anthropogenic Global Cooling? If you're asserting that the cooling of the earth by human aerosols was *falsified* in the 70s, isn't that a poor argument to make to explain temperatures over the past 15 years?
I think you've hit on an important point you may not have realized - what climate alarmists really want to assert is that we have Anthropogenic Climate Change - that is, any changes in climate, be it cooling or warming, are based primarily on human activity. Warming? Must be human CO2? No warming? Well, the original warming was cancelled out by human aerosols. A nice, neat, tidy package that can explain *any* observation - the hallmark of religious faith:)
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I firmly disagree. The precautionary principle only works if you assume that your intervention is completely harmless, which one simply cannot assert. Damaging the economic well-being of the poorest of the poor by forcing them to use non-carbon based energy sources they cannot afford arguably causes *more* damage than any amount of CO2 dumping we could imagine.
Warmists need to come up with a concise falsifiable hypothesis statement if you actual want this to be a *scientific* debate. The philosophical debate about the precautionary principle may be interesting, but it's certainly not science.
I welcome you to present us with your falsifiable hypothesis statement, so we can continue the debate on scientific terms.
Mod parent up. This whole discussion needs to start with a succinct statement of a falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. If we're playing the science game, we need to play by the rules of the scientific method, and that is *not* simply redefining the null hypothesis, or claiming that every possible observation is "consistent with" a hypothesis.
Once we can elicit said falsifiable hypothesis, *then* we can start talking science. Until then, we're simply arguing about the dogmatic tenets of an irrational belief system.
Isn't the idea of holding blacks (or any other ethnic group) to lower standards with Affirmative Action *implicit* with the assumption that those people who need the extra help are inferior?
I'll argue that Black people are just as capable as any other ethnic group, but if we bias our sample to include people who are held to a lower standard, we'll always see a bias in the end result. End Affirmative Action, and treat all people equally, and you won't see this kind of outcome bias.
I wonder what the results would be if they controlled for people who benefitted from affirmative action policies that let them into schools with lower grades and test scores.
They've already noted this with law degrees: http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/morel/04/disaffirmation.html
It seems plausible to posit that regardless of ethnic or racial background, people who are held to lower standards might not fare so well in real life competition.
That's an odd statement. I doubt we're at a stage where we can explain the climate in the last 50 years, in terms of all the variables that effect it, and we may *never* get to that level of certainty. This is the argument of ignorance - "we can't think of anything else, therefore it must be CO2". I still don't buy that one.
Fire insurance is a fraction of a fraction of total income. AGW mitigation "cap and trade" or other subsidies for inefficient energy is an order of magnitude higher.
Would you buy fire insurance if it cost 50% of your paycheck? 75% of your paycheck? *That* is the kind of economic impact you'll have if you pursue policies that increase real energy prices by subsidizing inefficient forms of energy, and restricting cheap forms of energy.
Appeal to Unnamed Authority. I've certainly found well more than a handful of people here: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3214
Is 31,000 not enough? Or are we simply going to denigrate their POV because they don't agree with our Unnamed Authorities?
I can agree with your second proposition, until it is asserted that this "some change" is "catastrophic change". We certainly have an effect (both up and down in temp) - but we are simply noise compared to natural drivers. Perhaps your definition of "some" is different than mine :)
I'd be interested in your reaction to the latest study coming out this year that makes the case for that rationale.
Um, no, that's what socialist policies give you - laissez-faire economics would let GM fail, have its resources liquidated to other companies that would pursue economically profit driven activity.
The bottom line on the economics is that cheap energy is what brings people out of poverty. Your average person on this planet isn't affected by US subsidies to hybrid vehicles, a country that apparently has money to burn on unprofitable pursuits. They are, however, affected by the cost of energy, and if that goes up, their lives get incredibly worse. If we cared about the plight of most of humanity, we'd be drilling as much cheap petroleum as we can, from wherever we can, to provide the lowest cost energy for the most amount of people. Imagining high tech "clean" solutions unaffordable to the billions of people on this planet is simply fantasy.
That being said, I can imagine that having these expensive policies to destroy 1st world economies (while allowing unchecked development in impoverished countries) is a form of wealth distribution, so if you're into that, it might sit well with your proclivities. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/07/worldwide-co2-emissions-and-the-futility-of-any-action-in-the-west/
A measurement that shows that the heat trapping ability of CO2 is a dominant driver of climate. Leaping from the spectral behavior of CO2 in a lab, to how it would react in the complex real world is not a straightforward step.
Having fire insurance isn't going to cause me harm. Radically shrinking the energy available to humanity is. The precautionary principle only works if the proposed remedy has *zero* chance of harm. I'm not convinced that working towards a cooler world, much less increasing the real price of energy, has a zero chance of harm (in fact, I'll bet it's got a very high probability of harm).
So even though your house has a 1% chance of burning down, you probably won't remove every electric or gas powered appliance in your house, and eat all your food raw and unrefrigerated.
Science is not consensus.
+ no evidence of more powerful storms (in fact, global cyclonic activity has *dropped*)
+ nature *always* changes - head's I win tails you lose isn't a valid argument
+ a temperature record may show correlation, not causality
+ seas always rise and fall
You've limited your vision to what you feel confirms your position, when in fact, you've essentially insisted that any change can be attributed to man's actions.
Sure they've risen - temperature drives CO2.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/05/the-emily-litella-moment-for-climate-science-and-co2/
Off the top of your head, how old is the city of Venice :)
Working on infrastructure, great. Destroying our economy and driving people into abject poverty with high cost energy on a *guess* about a gas that is measured in parts per million? Not so great.
You may say that 1 degree global average temperature increase *may* create a heat difference, but that is not guaranteed, nor necessarily even likely (given that the temp record shows generally higher lows driving up the average, rather than higher temps.
Well gee, when you look at the amount of temperature increase century by century in terms of kelvin, it's a *really* small fraction, now isn't it :) By that calculation, temperature changes (in K) over the centuries are fractions of a fraction of a percent :)
Your thought experiment fails to account for the period of time when we know the sun rose, but the electronic rooster wasn't invented yet, or had broken down :)
Of course, if you'd like to posit an electronic rooster that existed before the sun did, that will last longer than the sun does, I suppose that's just as likely as anthropogenic CO2 having a significant effect on global average temperature :)
Fun pending paper showing temp drives CO2, not the other way around: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/05/the-emily-litella-moment-for-climate-science-and-co2/
After all, maybe the infallible eternal electronic rooster only crows because the sun rose the day before :)
Hardly :) You've got adjustments for spatial location, time of measurements, and a choice of several types of mathematical "averages" (see the McKittrick ref again).
My point exactly. Heat distribution *matters* to life and humanity. Global temperature does not.
You have yet to specify a use for global average temperature. What decisions can be made knowing global average temperature? What predictions? Since it doesn't map to heat distribution, which is what is actually experienced by people and things, what use is it?
Wrong. The main driver of violent weather is large heat differentials between atmospheric systems. A warm ocean, and a warm atmosphere, without any cold atmosphere to impact, is not going to create any violent weather. You have mistaken a superficial correlation as a useful causality :)
Mea culpa - you're right on that one. What I should do is simply cite the host of research that has shown Mann's work to be incorrect - I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
It sounds like you're not quite sure - I'm going to assume that you believe that it is *possible* that "most of our cities will be in trouble", in the same way you think CAGW is a *possibility*. I'm also assuming that by "possible" you mean low single-digits (i.e., not "probable"). If either of those assumptions are incorrect, please let me know.
To be clear on my position, I don't subscribe to AGW or CAGW because I haven't heard of any observations of temperature and CO2 that would falsify either. I understand the rationale, but it's too cleverly defended against adverse data to count as useful science to me.
That being said, I do believe that a minor period of natural global warming has occurred over the past 150 years (with a few minor natural cooling periods interspersed), even if the utility of the "global average temperature" is particularly suspect. I further believe that we're in store for a period of natural global cooling, till probably about 2050 - so far the sunspot predictions of another Maunder minimum look *probable*, even if they aren't guaranteed. As for the impact on humanity and the biosphere, I'm fairly convinced that a warmer world (as defined by global average temperature) would in general be a better world, mostly because higher temperatures generally cause higher CO2, and higher CO2 means more plant life, and more plant life means more food and resources for humanity and the biosphere in general.
Now, I could be convinced that a warmer world would be worse for the biosphere, if for example, there wasn't a positive correlation between CO2 and temperature, or if the polar biospheres were more vibrant than tropical ones, or if we had paleo data indicating that during interglacials the biosphere was less vibrant than during glacial periods, so I consider that a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm sure there are probably other falsifications that would also fit. Coming up with standard measures of biosphere vibrancy would probably be the trickest part of doing research into that hypothesis.
Occam's razor denies you that assertion - there can be a myriad number of alternative explanations, and rule of thumb favors the one that makes the least novel assertions.
As for the perennial rooster's call, I'll note that there are plenty of times when the effect occurs (the sun rises) when the cause does not occur (the rooster is sick, or dead).
In the most technical sense of the matter, one can state that the artificial statistic of "global temperature", defined as a specific and arbitrary use of averages, is warming - one cannot state that the artificial statistic of "global temperature", defined as *all* uses of averages, is warming. A subtle distinction, but an important one.
Absolutely that is absurd - and there are many heat distributions that we can clearly throw out of consideration. I would suggest another absurd distribution we can throw out of consideration are any models that show increases will always increase the energy heat difference between the tropics and the poles - we've clearly observed more warming at the poles than in the tropics (at least over the instrumental record), which would *decrease* the energy heat difference.
You're contradicting yourself. You said "An average increase of 1 degree across the globe will increase that energy heat-difference (between the tropics and poles)." - a energy heat difference is *not* about the total energy in the climate system.
The problem is that battling Global Warming is not necessarily a good thing. There's no evidence that a warmer planet is a more dangerous planet for humanity or the biosphere...in fact, evidence shows pretty much the opposite.
When we don't agree on some of the basic premises (catastrophe in a warmer world), even if we agree on others (a global warming over the past century), we can hardly expect to agree on what kinds of actions we should take.
Using the carbon in a fossil, or other evidence from the geology around a fossil, to decide how old it is, is a proxy dating technique. The fossil itself, as a representative of the complexity of the organism is not a proxy except in the most trivially technical sense. A subtle distinction, but one that matters.
As for merging different formats in different databases -> sure, might not be an error, but you don't know that if you're not maintaining proper version control and traceability. The real problems HARRY points out are about mysterious, arbitrary and undocumented adjustments.
Go ahead - decide which Global Average Temperature methodology we should be using after reading this: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/globaltemp/GlobTemp.JNET.pdf
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say - you can keep anthropogenic CO2 in the models...heck, your models shouldn't even *care* where the CO2 came from (a human emitted molecule of CO2 doesn't have different spectral properties than a naturally emitted CO2 molecule).
Furthermore, the models only show correlation, not causality, so no matter what the accuracy of a model, it cannot prove that CO2 drives temperature, rather than temperature drives CO2.
Running a model is not the same as running an experiment. Run your model, then compare it to observations. Then, you've got two choices when you find discrepancies -> find an ad hoc special pleading, or revisit your premises.
No it doesn't. Why can't the sun warm the poles more than the tropics due to cloud formation and albedo differences? You're making an assertion without substance there.
I call BS. Your cited graph claims a forecast from 2000, but IPCC AR4 was from 2007. And did you note the huge error bars?
Let's hear your response to this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/09/comparing-ipcc-1990-predictions-with-2011-data/
I think you hit the nail on the head right there - with such sloppy confidence intervals in the *actual* science, the alarmist claims of accuracy are are highly exaggerated. This might just be a communication problem (dumbing things down until they lose their original meaning), or it could be that it is an intentional misleading. I leave that decision as an exercise for the reader.
Orbital mechanics are orders of magnitude simpler than weather and climate predictions. Newtonian Gravity is only 43 arcseconds off *per century* for predicting the orbit of Mercury, for example. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation#Problems_with_Newton.27s_theory)
As for the utility of models that predict the statistic "global average temperature", I'll refer you to this: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/globaltemp/GlobTemp.JNET.pdf
Perhaps you can suggest what useful information I can get if I knew that next year the global average temperature would be .01C greater than this year.
I'm sorry, but Mann, and frankly Jones for that matter, simply aren't reliable sources.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/a_regional_approach_to_the_medieval_warm_period_and_the_little_ice_age.pdf
http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/05/ipcc-and-the-law-dome-graphic/
Look at the graph again in http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Ste2009a.pdf - you'll note the MWP clearly in the upper left of the graphs on page 154. Here it is with it pointed out: http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0134849d3d3f970c-pi
Granted. The hockey stick is used to support the CAGW theory, and the CAGW theory clearly rests on the hockey stick. The lesser claim of AGW can very well be true, but at such a low level that it makes no catastrophic impact on humanity or the globe.
Speaking of which, do you ascribe to CAGW or just AGW? I'm not sure if I've ever asked you that question straight out.
That's the argument from ignorance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
"There are three conditions that must be present to show causality: 1) there must be a strong correlation between the proposed cause and effect, 2) the proposed cause must precede the effect in time, and 3) the cause has to be present whenever the effect occurs (Burns & Grove, 2001, p. 791)."
I'll give you #1 to a degree, but #2 is problematic because of the ice core record. #3 is completely out, since if the "effect" is warming, and the "cause" is human CO2, to show causation you must show that warming *always* happens when humans emit CO2. You already know that's not true, and I'm sure you can think of several ad hoc pleadings as to why that isn't always true (volcanoes, cosmic rays affect cloud albedo, solar output, aerosols, etc).
You keep on using this word, "science". I do not think it means what you think it means.
That was *exactly* what you stated: "An average increase of 1 degree across the globe will increase that energy heat-difference (between the tropics and poles)."
That is an assertion, not proof. There are any number of temperature distributions that have an average increase of 1C across the globe that do *not* increase the energy heat-difference between the tropics and the poles.
Read the paper. A global average temperature doesn't tell you anything useful about the energy in the system because you can have the the *same* system considered as both cooling and warming at the same tiem, depending on what average you use. (See Figure 1. for more details).
Now, please verify you've read it by summarizing the argument, and I'll help you correct your misunderstandings :)
There are hundreds of falsifiable hypotheses in the Christian Creation argument too - simply stringing a bunch of independent falsifiable hypotheses together *doesn't* make for another bigger and better hypothesis. What you're looking for (and apparently unable to find), is the concise and precise statement of a falsifiable hypothesis that links up all of your other uncontested, independent falsifiable hypotheses together. *Each link counts*. For example, the CAGW argument depends on CO2 being a greenhouse gas, the world getting warmer, *and* a warmer planet being worse for the biosphere and humanity. In that case, the weakest link with the least clear falsification is that a warmer planet is worse for the biosphere and humanity.
So here's my question to you, to help you narrow things down - out of all the myriad falsifiable hypotheses you use in the AGW argument, *which one is the weakest link* do you think?
It may be *necessary* for CO2 to be a greenhouse gas in order for AGW to be true, but it is not *sufficient*.
Well, a spell checker is for someone *else's* errors, so what you're really looking for is a human being to can figure out someone *else's* spelling errors without external references, and I'll argue that that *is* possible with human intelligence, since a human may simply look for consistency with other parts of the text. So take a text, with a dozen words that I don't know how to spell. Mispell half of them. I'll do *way* better than any computer.
The best teachers don't actually tell the child "wrong, this is how you do it". Most of them will approach it with "are you sure?" or "show me that part again", and let the *child* lead the learning, rather than do by rote memorization.
So are you trying to assert that a spam filter *anticipates* things? I can see how it may seem that way (I've marked Target and Walmart as spam, so it anticipates that I would also mark Walgreens as spam), but isn't that just a lookup table? Now, maybe if the spam filter anticipated something like you *wanting* spam after you reached a certain age (anticipating a desire for Viagra information, for example), *that* would be intelligence - an anticipation without an explicit table lookup of similarity.
I'm not sure if I quite believe that. I mean, I think there are different levels of hypothesis-forming ability - you've got your spell checker which may hypothesize, until you tell it otherwise, that a misspelled word in lower case is a mistake, but in uppercase, it's fine because it's probably an acronym. Then you've got your child which may laugh at a joke they don't understand because they hypothesize from speech style and body language that someone was *trying* to be funny. I'm not sure where the bright line is there, but it seems that it's not a very clear demarcation.
So simply proving that CO2 is a greenhouse gas means that human CO2 *must* be the primary driver of global climate? We can jump from the simple chemical properties of a single gas molecule measured in parts per million in the atmosphere, and now human activity is primarily to blame for any observations of warming across the globe?
How about this?
Hypothesis: CH4 is a greenhouse gas.
Have I now proved that bovine CH4 *must* be the primary driver of global climate?
You've mistaken, once again, *necessary* for *sufficient*.
Wrong. You can have an increase in the energy heat difference between the tropics and the poles without *any* average increase. Simply cool one, and warm the other. You can also have a decrease in the energy heat difference between the tropics and the poles with a significant average increase. Simply warm the poles more than tropics (which, I believe some other AGW proponent has recently claimed is a signature of CO2 based warming rather than solar based warming).
Actually, I do. Global Average Temperature, is really a useless metric. It can't tell you what temperature it is going to be anywhere in the realm of terrestrial experience. Now, perhaps, if the earth was being used by some alien civilization as a thermometer to decide on when certain holidays were, then you'd have *something* that was affected by Global Average Temperature, but as it stands, it is as useful as calculating the Global Average Phone Number.
Put another way, would a average daily temperature be useful at all (say, temperature on every hour, for 24 hours, then divided by 24)? We generally get told what the high and low will be in a weather report, and intuit that the high will occur sometime after noon, and that the lows happen sometime in the middle of the night, but what would you decide to wear out to work if you were told the average temperature of the day was going to be 65F? It could mean that the low was somewhere at 60, and the high somewhere at 70, evenly distributed. Or it could mean that the high was at 90, and the low was at 40 - definitely a very different scenario, with very different consequences.
Obligatory reference for you:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/globaltemp/GlobTemp.JNET.pdf
For *any* global average temperature, there are a myriad of possible temperature distributions. It is those distributions that have real meaning, and thus far, no climate models have given us *any* hope of predicting those distributions. It may very well be that those distributions simply cannot be predicted by models because of their stochastic nature, but if you wanted to study something that could actually *matter*, that would be it.
First off, I think you misstated yourself - you state that observing "CO2 is a greenhouse gas" would falsify AGW - I'm assuming you didn't mean that, and instead meant that if any of those items were *not* observed, that would be a falsification. Continuing on...
That's a cop out, not a falsifiable hypothesis. Simply stating that we don't have an alternative specific explanation (say, warming is explained by cloud albedo change), does *not* suddenly turn a model of CO2 based warming (and overestimated positive feedback effects) into the null hypothesis. Again, a clever argument, but not a scientific one.
Put more bluntly, say for example we observe "Climate is not warming" (as we have over several time scales, most recently up to 15 years) - you've listed (in a roundabout way) that as a falsification, but I'm sure you have an ad hoc special pleading to deal with that case. You've listed a set of things that may be *necessary* for your AGW (or CAGW, if you go that way) to be true, but they are simply not *sufficient*.
Now, global cooling - it's interesting you should mention that. How would you have stated a "global cooling hypothesis"? I'm assuming you're talking about Anthropogenic Global Cooling, which hypothesized that human generated aerosols would cool the globe...isn't that currently the favored explanation by people who purport that the past 15 years of no warming was caused by Anthropogenic Global Cooling? If you're asserting that the cooling of the earth by human aerosols was *falsified* in the 70s, isn't that a poor argument to make to explain temperatures over the past 15 years?
I think you've hit on an important point you may not have realized - what climate alarmists really want to assert is that we have Anthropogenic Climate Change - that is, any changes in climate, be it cooling or warming, are based primarily on human activity. Warming? Must be human CO2? No warming? Well, the original warming was cancelled out by human aerosols. A nice, neat, tidy package that can explain *any* observation - the hallmark of religious faith :)