I think you are missing the point. All models are wrong, but we use them very successfully for a wide array of tasks. We used models to discover Neptune for instance. The models that we used were wrong (as are ALL models), but they successfully predicted the location of Neptune based on the orbit of Uranus.
Or perhaps "If we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time."
Best line: "Models are not right or wrong. They are always wrong. They are always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it is skillful."
Antarctic ice is losing mass. That is what we care about because it causes sea level to rise. Not sure what, if anything is affecting wave size, but you know what causes ice to melt?
Perhaps a decade from now, when the vaccine is available, the poor folks living in these areas can stop cursing at the western do-gooders who got DDT banned.
Likely they are already aware that DDT was never banned (and is still in use) in areas with malaria. There's no stopping the frothing of the anti-environment types though - vaccine or no.
Complete nonsense. Please show me the graph of how Venusian global mean surface temperature has changed over the last few decades. None exists. We have a few data points from which to infer (and these lead us to believe it was warmer in 1990 than in 2009 (Kostiuk 2011) which would seem to invalidate your theory).
The rest of your post is a little too nutty to parse although you seem to be implying that there is a global conspiracy to fake the temperature tends.
which can mean whatever straw man you want it to mean since this phrase is never found in the literature and 'catastrophic' is a pretty subjective word.
Those aren't exactly doomsday predictions, and it is not clear that they have been proven wrong, so I'm not sure they are especially good examples of doomsday scenarios that have been proven wrong. To me they just look like incremental improvements to our understanding of their subject matters.
To put it bluntly, even the phrase "global cooling" doesn't pass muster.
How many papers with the phrase "global cooling" can you find that show that the current warming trend is not primarily caused by humans? None of course. Any papers with the phrase "global cooling" are looking at periods millions of years ago. Why would slogging through thousands more papers that are not focused on the current warming be expected to have any thoughts on whether the current warming is caused by humans? Please find me even one paper with the phrase "global cooling" that takes a negative stance on the human contribution to the current warming.
biased evaluators
The papers were also evaluated by the people who wrote them. The authors themselves found greater consensus (98%) than the third party reviewers. So if the reviewers had a bias, it was towards non-consensus.
We have an array of temperature sensors scattered across our planet. Even still, some doubt that our planet has warmed. Surely we cannot measure the global mean surface temperature changes on other planets (where we have possibly one or two data points) to determine with any confidence whether they have warmed, cooled, or by how much.
The IPCC, normally the bastion of global warming alarmism
Bullshit. The IPCC reports are a synthesis of the existing science. If you are alarmed by the findings of the IPCC reports then you are alarmed by the science.
I notice you are being pretty selective on what you quote (Watts is probably the worst place to go for science reporting). For instance, you quote "There is low confidence that the rate of Antarctic ice loss has increased over the last two decades" (BTW, this means that evidence is sparse but indicates that the rate of mass loss has in fact increased over the last two decades.), but you did not quote the next line "however, GRACE data gives medium confidence of increasing loss over the last decade."
So yes, we have observed that it is currently losing mass. All evidence indicates that the rate of mass loss has been accelerating over the last decade or more. Our confidence in this finding is increasing as newer instrumentation is developed and deployed.
You should also understand that SMB can increase (reducing sea level rise), but if outflow also increases then you will still end up losing mass and increasing sea level overall. This is exactly what they find: "Overall, increased snowfall seems set to only partially offset sea level rise caused by increased outflow," Again, Watts doesn't seem to understand that SMB is not total mass balance and somehow glossed over everything else.
They also presciently warn that tipping points could be hit (and that have since been observed): "outflow from an ice sheet
resting on bedrock below sea level increases if ice at the grounding line is thicker and, therefore, faster flowing.
On bedrock that slopes downward towards the ice-sheet interior, this creates a vicious cycle of increased outflow,
causing ice at the grounding line to thin and go afloat. The grounding line then retreats down slope into thicker
ice that, in turn, drives further increases in outflow. This feedback could potentially result in the rapid loss of parts
of the ice sheet, as grounding lines retreat along troughs and basins that deepen towards the ice sheet’s interior. Future climate forcing could trigger such an unstable collapse, which may then continue independently of climate.
You get a 20% or so increase in maximum humidity at the levels we are talking about. That is the MAXIMUM level of humidity. It isn't always 100% humid.
According to earlier you: "the world is on average more humid by perhaps 1% than it was 100 years ago. Which would be more than enough to account for ALL observed warming."
CO2 doesn't cause significant warming in Earth's atmosphere, and anyone who tells you it does is just lazy and takes it on faith.
As you noted before, you can: "put pen to paper and make the calculations yourself". If you do so, you will find we have already caused 0.57C warming before feedbacks. We have observed ~0.8C. How close do you get to that when you account for the observed water vapour feedback?
The site you have linked shows that atmospheric moisture holding capacity increases dramatically with increasing temperature. The increase is exponential across the curve. That is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to claim. Further, oceanic lower-tropospheric water vapour has increased by about 4% since the 1970's, which is consistent with what we should expect given temperature increases over the period.
"Observations of oceanic lower-tropospheric water vapour reveal substantial variability during the last two decades. This variability is closely tied to changes in surface temperatures, with the water vapour mass changing at roughly the same rate at which the saturated vapour pressure does. " - www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-2-1.html
So you are right. "AGW "denial" would be reasonable if there were an argument that the amount of CO2 we have put and are putting into the atmosphere won't cause a feedback loop."...and... Water vapor is a very powerful greenhouse gas that "has a gigantic broad "peak" that swamps most other signals". Increased water vapour is an expected result of global warming from CO2, and one of the more powerful feedback mechanisms. You are also right that all this can all be derived from first principles without any need for climate models. You can use "pen to paper and make the calculations yourself, assuming you understand a little physical chemistry."
Until the models are refined to the point that they make useful (and correct) predictions, how can we rely upon them to produce environmental policies with serious economic impacts?
This is one reason why mitigation is a lot cheaper than adaptation. Predicting how climate change will impact each city is more difficult than predicting that temperatures will rise and there will be impacts. Should a city invest in sea walls or desalination plants? That depends on whether you should expect more storms or less precipitation. You would need a high degree of confidence in the models before you could plan for adaptation. Seems like the obvious choice is to mitigate.
I'd rather live in 200 years with higher seas and 2214-level tech than slightly lower seas and year 2114-level tech.
Why wait for 2214? One solution to the current problem is to go full steam ahead with a technology revolution. Humanity has spent most of its existence getting energy by burning shit. We have an opportunity adopt newer energy technologies that could be disruptive in the same order of magnitude as the internet. This scares the heck out people heavily invested in existing industries who would like to hold us back, but that isn't a good reason to remain stuck with the technologies of the past.
"While solar currently accounts for less than 1% of the energy supply, it is an exponentially improving technology, both in terms of price (14%/year) and pace of construction (60%/year). Already it is approaching parity with other energy sources in the Western US. Assuming this trend continues for another 10 to 20 years, and there’s no reason not to, solar power will become 5 to 10 times more cost effective than it is today. This raises an interesting question. What happens if solar becomes an order of magnitude cheaper than other sources of power?
This is the nature of disruptive technology. It represents such an improvement that it renders existing industries obsolete. We saw waves of disruption take place as the Internet upended entire industries. Expect to see a lot of this in the coming years." - https://medium.com/armchair-ec... .
We already know how it works with peer reviewed journals. Opposing AGW is a sure way to ensure that your paper is not published. Pretty easy to get those kinds of numbers when you can control who gets published.
So you think there is a conspiracy among all journals to keep out contrary evidence? Really? Don't you think one of them would break from their secret pact and scoop the others?
Show me the peer reviewed article published in 1999 that correctly predicted global average temperature throughout the 2000s. Show me the article published in 2005 that correctly predicted the state of the antarctic sea ice in 2014. You can't because they don't exist.
http://news.slashdot.org/story... - When the 1981 paper was written, temperatures in the northern hemispheres were declining, and global mean temperatures were below their 1940 levels. Despite those facts, the paper's authors confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions.' The prediction turns out to be remarkably accurate
http://www.theguardian.com/env... - The paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.
Of note, the other product of combustion is water vapor. Irrigation forces more water vapor into the air. Paving forces more water vapor into the air.
Possibly, but how much water vapour air will hold is a function of how hot it is. Spray water into the air in winter and you will still have low humidity. Heat the planet and you will end up with more humidity. This is a feedback - and as you note - a serious one.
Your intuition fails you in this case (and the scientific method is in fact your friend). It turns out we can measure this with the CERES satellite and we find that low thick clouds cast a refreshing shadow and reflect sunlight back into space, while high wispy clouds reflect little sunlight but will trap the infrared heat beneath them.
CERES is a package of three telescopes that watch our planet from Earth orbit. "One telescope is sensitive to ordinary sunlight," says Wielicki. "It tells us how much solar radiation is reflected from clouds or ice." The other two telescopes sense longer-wavelength infrared heat. They reveal how much heat is trapped by clouds and how much of it escapes back to space. - http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...
Slashdot Mirror
+1 creepy?
I think you are missing the point. All models are wrong, but we use them very successfully for a wide array of tasks. We used models to discover Neptune for instance. The models that we used were wrong (as are ALL models), but they successfully predicted the location of Neptune based on the orbit of Uranus.
Or perhaps "If we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time."
Best line: "Models are not right or wrong. They are always wrong. They are always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it is skillful."
Here is the man himself giving a TED talk on the limitations and capabilities of climate models: http://www.ted.com/talks/gavin...
Increased surface area is causing melting? Possibly the result of melting I would guess, but probably not the cause.
Antarctic ice is losing mass. That is what we care about because it causes sea level to rise. Not sure what, if anything is affecting wave size, but you know what causes ice to melt?
Yes. It turned out that carpet bombing with DDT just created DDT resistant mosquitoes.
Why they don't leave the irradiated mosquitoes go back in the wild in order they can diffuse the vaccine themselves?
How would you monetize that?
Perhaps a decade from now, when the vaccine is available, the poor folks living in these areas can stop cursing at the western do-gooders who got DDT banned.
Likely they are already aware that DDT was never banned (and is still in use) in areas with malaria. There's no stopping the frothing of the anti-environment types though - vaccine or no.
Complete nonsense. Please show me the graph of how Venusian global mean surface temperature has changed over the last few decades. None exists. We have a few data points from which to infer (and these lead us to believe it was warmer in 1990 than in 2009 (Kostiuk 2011) which would seem to invalidate your theory).
The rest of your post is a little too nutty to parse although you seem to be implying that there is a global conspiracy to fake the temperature tends.
Interesting. thanks.
Most deniers dispute CATASTROPHIC global warming
which can mean whatever straw man you want it to mean since this phrase is never found in the literature and 'catastrophic' is a pretty subjective word.
Those aren't exactly doomsday predictions, and it is not clear that they have been proven wrong, so I'm not sure they are especially good examples of doomsday scenarios that have been proven wrong. To me they just look like incremental improvements to our understanding of their subject matters.
To put it bluntly, even the phrase "global cooling" doesn't pass muster.
How many papers with the phrase "global cooling" can you find that show that the current warming trend is not primarily caused by humans? None of course. Any papers with the phrase "global cooling" are looking at periods millions of years ago. Why would slogging through thousands more papers that are not focused on the current warming be expected to have any thoughts on whether the current warming is caused by humans? Please find me even one paper with the phrase "global cooling" that takes a negative stance on the human contribution to the current warming.
biased evaluators
The papers were also evaluated by the people who wrote them. The authors themselves found greater consensus (98%) than the third party reviewers. So if the reviewers had a bias, it was towards non-consensus.
We have an array of temperature sensors scattered across our planet. Even still, some doubt that our planet has warmed. Surely we cannot measure the global mean surface temperature changes on other planets (where we have possibly one or two data points) to determine with any confidence whether they have warmed, cooled, or by how much.
The IPCC, normally the bastion of global warming alarmism
Bullshit. The IPCC reports are a synthesis of the existing science. If you are alarmed by the findings of the IPCC reports then you are alarmed by the science.
I notice you are being pretty selective on what you quote (Watts is probably the worst place to go for science reporting). For instance, you quote "There is low confidence that the rate of Antarctic ice loss has increased over the last two decades" (BTW, this means that evidence is sparse but indicates that the rate of mass loss has in fact increased over the last two decades.), but you did not quote the next line "however, GRACE data gives medium confidence of increasing loss over the last decade."
So yes, we have observed that it is currently losing mass. All evidence indicates that the rate of mass loss has been accelerating over the last decade or more. Our confidence in this finding is increasing as newer instrumentation is developed and deployed.
You should also understand that SMB can increase (reducing sea level rise), but if outflow also increases then you will still end up losing mass and increasing sea level overall. This is exactly what they find: "Overall, increased snowfall seems set to only partially offset sea level rise caused by increased outflow," Again, Watts doesn't seem to understand that SMB is not total mass balance and somehow glossed over everything else.
They also presciently warn that tipping points could be hit (and that have since been observed): "outflow from an ice sheet resting on bedrock below sea level increases if ice at the grounding line is thicker and, therefore, faster flowing. On bedrock that slopes downward towards the ice-sheet interior, this creates a vicious cycle of increased outflow, causing ice at the grounding line to thin and go afloat. The grounding line then retreats down slope into thicker ice that, in turn, drives further increases in outflow. This feedback could potentially result in the rapid loss of parts of the ice sheet, as grounding lines retreat along troughs and basins that deepen towards the ice sheet’s interior. Future climate forcing could trigger such an unstable collapse, which may then continue independently of climate.
Here is the full report on the cryosphere: http://www.climatechange2013.o...
You get a 20% or so increase in maximum humidity at the levels we are talking about. That is the MAXIMUM level of humidity. It isn't always 100% humid.
According to earlier you: "the world is on average more humid by perhaps 1% than it was 100 years ago. Which would be more than enough to account for ALL observed warming."
CO2 doesn't cause significant warming in Earth's atmosphere, and anyone who tells you it does is just lazy and takes it on faith.
As you noted before, you can: "put pen to paper and make the calculations yourself". If you do so, you will find we have already caused 0.57C warming before feedbacks. We have observed ~0.8C. How close do you get to that when you account for the observed water vapour feedback?
The site you have linked shows that atmospheric moisture holding capacity increases dramatically with increasing temperature. The increase is exponential across the curve. That is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to claim. Further, oceanic lower-tropospheric water vapour has increased by about 4% since the 1970's, which is consistent with what we should expect given temperature increases over the period.
"Observations of oceanic lower-tropospheric water vapour reveal substantial variability during the last two decades. This variability is closely tied to changes in surface temperatures, with the water vapour mass changing at roughly the same rate at which the saturated vapour pressure does. " - www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-2-1.html
So you are right. "AGW "denial" would be reasonable if there were an argument that the amount of CO2 we have put and are putting into the atmosphere won't cause a feedback loop." ...and... Water vapor is a very powerful greenhouse gas that "has a gigantic broad "peak" that swamps most other signals". Increased water vapour is an expected result of global warming from CO2, and one of the more powerful feedback mechanisms. You are also right that all this can all be derived from first principles without any need for climate models. You can use "pen to paper and make the calculations yourself, assuming you understand a little physical chemistry."
Until the models are refined to the point that they make useful (and correct) predictions, how can we rely upon them to produce environmental policies with serious economic impacts?
This is one reason why mitigation is a lot cheaper than adaptation. Predicting how climate change will impact each city is more difficult than predicting that temperatures will rise and there will be impacts. Should a city invest in sea walls or desalination plants? That depends on whether you should expect more storms or less precipitation. You would need a high degree of confidence in the models before you could plan for adaptation. Seems like the obvious choice is to mitigate.
I'd rather live in 200 years with higher seas and 2214-level tech than slightly lower seas and year 2114-level tech.
Why wait for 2214? One solution to the current problem is to go full steam ahead with a technology revolution. Humanity has spent most of its existence getting energy by burning shit. We have an opportunity adopt newer energy technologies that could be disruptive in the same order of magnitude as the internet. This scares the heck out people heavily invested in existing industries who would like to hold us back, but that isn't a good reason to remain stuck with the technologies of the past.
"While solar currently accounts for less than 1% of the energy supply, it is an exponentially improving technology, both in terms of price (14%/year) and pace of construction (60%/year). Already it is approaching parity with other energy sources in the Western US. Assuming this trend continues for another 10 to 20 years, and there’s no reason not to, solar power will become 5 to 10 times more cost effective than it is today. This raises an interesting question. What happens if solar becomes an order of magnitude cheaper than other sources of power?
This is the nature of disruptive technology. It represents such an improvement that it renders existing industries obsolete. We saw waves of disruption take place as the Internet upended entire industries. Expect to see a lot of this in the coming years." - https://medium.com/armchair-ec... .
We already know how it works with peer reviewed journals. Opposing AGW is a sure way to ensure that your paper is not published. Pretty easy to get those kinds of numbers when you can control who gets published.
So you think there is a conspiracy among all journals to keep out contrary evidence? Really? Don't you think one of them would break from their secret pact and scoop the others?
Show me the peer reviewed article published in 1999 that correctly predicted global average temperature throughout the 2000s. Show me the article published in 2005 that correctly predicted the state of the antarctic sea ice in 2014. You can't because they don't exist.
http://news.slashdot.org/story... - When the 1981 paper was written, temperatures in the northern hemispheres were declining, and global mean temperatures were below their 1940 levels. Despite those facts, the paper's authors confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions.' The prediction turns out to be remarkably accurate
http://www.theguardian.com/env... - The paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.
There are scientists who take contrary positions on every scientific issue.
Of note, the other product of combustion is water vapor. Irrigation forces more water vapor into the air. Paving forces more water vapor into the air.
Possibly, but how much water vapour air will hold is a function of how hot it is. Spray water into the air in winter and you will still have low humidity. Heat the planet and you will end up with more humidity. This is a feedback - and as you note - a serious one.
Your intuition fails you in this case (and the scientific method is in fact your friend). It turns out we can measure this with the CERES satellite and we find that low thick clouds cast a refreshing shadow and reflect sunlight back into space, while high wispy clouds reflect little sunlight but will trap the infrared heat beneath them.
CERES is a package of three telescopes that watch our planet from Earth orbit. "One telescope is sensitive to ordinary sunlight," says Wielicki. "It tells us how much solar radiation is reflected from clouds or ice." The other two telescopes sense longer-wavelength infrared heat. They reveal how much heat is trapped by clouds and how much of it escapes back to space. - http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...