Everyone knows the hockey stick is bogus manipulation of data
Nope, the hockey stick graph has been confirmed by several studies. You can find plenty of references in the wikipedia page above. And if you dismiss all of the data, then what are you going to use to show that "we are still coming out of an ice age" as GP tried to claim?
Try looking at the actual findings in the actual studies though. The distinctive Hockey Stick shape in Michael Mann's original graph came about by showing 2 disparate datasets on the same graph, the reconstructed temperatures for the last couple thousand years, and then the instrumental record appended on the end. The immediate deviation from the trend for the past millenia doesn't just correspond to the start of the industrial era, it corresponds to a change in datasets. You don't get a more obvious red flag than that.
Now, absolutely, followup studies have been done since, and they have largely confirmed the flat/static trend from Mann's original work. They've also recreated the hockey stick at the end the same way by introducing the instrumental record.
Fine, you'll then say if that is all as sketchy and iffy as it sounds, you'd expect the proxy reconstructions to have troubles recreating recent warming, right? Here's an updated study by the same Michael Mann of fame for the first hockey stick graph. If you just read the overall conclusions, Mann mostly says that with new data and new methods they largely validate their previous work. However, if you look close the article also notes: However, in the case of the early calibration/late validation CPS reconstruction with the full screened network (Fig. 2 A ), we observed evidence for a systematic bias in the underestimation of recent warming. This bias increases for earlier centuries where the reconstruction is based on increasingly sparse networks of proxy data. In this case, the observed warming rises above the error bounds of the estimates during the 1980s decade, consistent with the known ‘‘divergence problem’’ (e.g., ref. 37), wherein the tempera- ture sensitivity of some temperature-sensitive tree-ring data appears to have declined in the most recent decades. Interestingly, although the elimination of all tree-ring data from the proxy dataset yields a substantially smaller divergence bias, it does not eliminate the problem altogether (Fig. 2B). This latter finding suggests that the divergence problem is not limited purely to tree-ring data, but instead may extend to other proxy records. Interestingly, the problem is greatly diminished (although not absent—particularly in the older networks where a decline is observed after 1980) with the EIV method,
If you then look down to Fig. 3, you'll notice that the EIV reconstruction doesn't just do a better job tracking recent warming, it also is by far the warmest reconstruction, with historic peaks exceeding anything but the big red instrumental record tacked on again.
So to summarize, your declaration that "the hockey stick graph has been confirmed by several studies" is true in the sense that they've recreated the historic trend many times. However, even the original author(Mann) as linked above notes that the methodology for recreating a fairly flat/cool historic reconstruction, also fails to reconstruct current warming. So much so as to fall outside the "error bars", and even mentions that this is the "known divergence problem", meaning it is well known that without attaching the instrumental record on the end, you don't get your nice hockey stick graph.
The Linux community has spent almost 3 decades now still ignoring desktop users wants and needs. There has been this blind belief that if only parity with the Windows experience(Apps, HW support, ease of use, etc.) could be reached then, finally the world would embrace Linux. Users though do NOT care about their operating system. The user community is not out there wishing against hope for the day they can run Linux on their desktops. Until the Linux community actually decides to look at what they can offer users that Windows can't, and that users actually care about, there will be zero progress towards getting Linux on desktops. Even Apple, with all it's resources and it's user oriented design of OSX had an uphill battle selling itself and had to distinguish itself to users with things like 1 way fo doing things, simplified UI and HW choices, and an overall support model of it works or it need to get replaced. Apple provided users with a simplified experience. What's Linux even attempting to offer?
It's not just that but the point of an OS is to offer APIs so programming is easier.
It is much much much easier to write quality programs for Windows than Linux. This is why all the game platform is dominated by Windows, so is office software.
Windows API's and quality programming should never be in the same sentence. Both OS's require a learning curve to understand their perspective API's, so if you started learning to code in Windows, that will be more familiar to you. However, there is an awful lot of crap code that comes out with the Windows API's. At least with Linux, there is an entire community to check your code and help improve it. As far as gaming, the main reason has more to do with marketing and not the API's. The simple economics of scale is why the gaming industry shy's away from Linux in favor of Windows. Unfortunately, is a chicken vs. egg situation. We need good Linux games to get people interested in the OS, but we need a lot more people using Linux before the game developers will give it serious consideration.
Here's a fundamental thing that's getting missed. If you could magically have ALL games 100% Linux compatible tomorrow you still would not have given people a reason to switch to Linux. You only removed 1 reason for people to refuse to use it. It is not enough to fix the very many show stopper issues keeping people off Linux, you need to give users something they care about and can't get on their Windows box. Name me something users care about that is better on Linux. Failing that, even provide a GOAL for the Linux community to work towards that would provide users something they care about and can't get elsewhere.
I have no idea why you're downloading and double-clicking.deb files. We've had package managers for a long time now. Your issue isn't that linux doesn't work well, it's that it doesn't work like you think it does. That speaks nothing to how well it works, and everything to difficult it is to teach people that microsoft's way isn't the best way to do things.
Maybe this needs to be said more bluntly, you can get all your facts right, but in the end nobody cares! Suzy in purchasing has and never will think about how best to do things with a computer. She wants to complete a task, the computer is a tool and the less time it spends in her way the happier she is.
Pretty much any average user can download and install linux, and do most of what they currently do in Windows out of the box.
You've never worked with any average users then. Average users are sketchy with downloading and installing browser extensions. You are NOT looking at the 95% of the user base here. Users don't give 1 second of thought to the process of I need an OS, and then a browser and my office productivity package before I can do what I want. When they walk up to a computer they will ask does it have internet, or can I use Word/Excel/Powerpoint on it. Many users will want Quickbooks or QuickTax. Even if they can get a techy friend to download and install linux for them as you describe, they aren't going to be able to do any of those out of the box except use internet(unless they get unlucky and even that needs some tweaking too). MS Office and the Quicken toolsets aren't available under Linux period. I know you may reply with OpenOffice, but users will reject that and demand the computer just be put back the way it was when it was working. Try moving users from MS Office 2010 to MS Office 2016 and listen to how many have problems adjusting and missing things they used to be able to find. You have NO idea what users need or are interested in trying to do for themselves.
It's sometimes rather baffling how disconnected from what users actually use their computers for the average slashdotter is. Indeed. Users can just download Linux, install it, and use it out of the box. Yep, the disconnect is baffling.
If $700 a month stops us from having to pay almost four times that amount to lock that person up in jail, we're recognizing cost savings there as well.
US population is ~325million, so UBI of $700/month costs the country $227.5 billion per month, or an annual budget of $2.7 trillion. The entire federal budget via wikipedia for 2017 was $3.3 trillion. So, if you can find a way to run the military, police and the rest of the federal government for the remaining $0.6 trillion the US could afford it. Realistically though, it means cutting a LOT more than just current social program funding...
I mean, why so old when other sources show that by 2007 mcintre et al was disputed as being flawed, AND in the itnerim time many more models confirmed the hockey stick shape ? Why indeed show only something from 15 years ago ? The reader may decide if this was intentional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Convenient to leave out Mann's biggest trick. His original hockey stick graph displayed to disparate datasets. His proxy reconstruction of old temperatures, and superimposed on that was the instrumental record. This created the shocking effect of the graph abruptly surging away after 1900. Everyone then made a big deal about that coinciding with CO2 emissions, but much less attention was directed to that also coinciding with the change in datasets...
You are correct that more recent studies have more or less recreated Mann's results. Many have improved on his work in a very important way by including graphs showing uncertainties more clearly. In those the noise dwarfs the signal, so again without the instrumental record, there is no sudden and abrupt 'hockey stick' shape within the proxy reconstruction. For that, you still need the subtle trick of adding instrumental data onto the end.
Here's some of their notes and conclusions making more or less the same observations as my summary: "Regardless of the many seemingly contradicting results regarding, e.g., regularization methods, and regardless of other technical issues, underestimation of low-frequency variability is a serious concern and that reconstruction methods in particular have problems reconstructing temperatures that are outside the range of the calibration interval. The main reason seems to be a feature of direct regression and CPS methods which under general assumptions can be shown to be biased toward zero."
"We saw that the different reconstructions agree on the general form of the low-frequency variability but that they disagree on the amplitude; the centennial-scale amplitude (i.e., the temperature difference between the warm eleventh century and the cold seventeenth century),in particular, varies from 0.14 to 1.3C
Around page 25 they have this to say in comparing reconstructions to instrumental records: "It is obvious that the noise is considerable and that the signal TTis not easily seen in P. In particular, for c=0.40 and c=0.25 the trend in the twentieth century is practically lost in the noise. It is clearly not a simple task to extract the signal from the noisy series—almost like making eggs from scrambled eggs—although temporal or spatial averaging may reduce the noise."
In other tree ring reconstruction reviews(I can't find it right now but I've not spend much time either) the authors note that bad sensitivity to high temperatures (like the current period), is a known issue particular to tree rings and handling of that problem is a big and current research area.
So the overall summary being, there are a lot of unknowns, the hockey stick only 'works' if you are a bit dishonest on your graph, and when we say the current warming is unprecedented over the last millenia plus it is with a host of caveats and uncertainties that you need to read the full papers to see, and the uncertainties aren't nothing.
If weather patterns changes smoothly that would work - however it doesn't appear that will be the case. The problem is that when weather becomes unstable you can no longer use last year's weather to predict the coming year.
Think of it this way - if for the last decade there were 5 years where corn would have survived, 3 years for wheat, and 2 for soy - and they were all jumbled up, then what should you plant this year? Corn maybe? You've got a 50% chance of getting a crop, if the last decade is representative, but that's still not very good odds. And of course slow growing tree crops and the like can't be readily picked up and moved from year to year, so we'll likely lose most of those, or at least make them much more expensive (hope you're not too attached to coffee or nuts)
Similarly, if we cross the tipping point to a hothouse Earth, and could just jump a few millenia into the future, things would probably look pretty rosy. All of Canada and Russia, Northern China, etc. will likely be warm and fertile. The problem is not the destination, it's the long, unpredictable journey to get there.
Thats a lot of postulating, but you’ve entirely neglected to acknowledge the data. Specifically, over the last 100 years, global crop yield per acre has steadily risen, while global tmeperature has steadily shifted from historic norms. You can explain as long as you like how that shouldn’t happen, but that doesn’t alter the facts.
...Perhaps even worse, at least for us, is that it's looking like such transitions don't happen smoothly. As the thermal engines driving weather destabilize, weather patterns become less predictable from year to year, and the rate of crop failure increases considerably as a result. And when people get hungry, wars break out.
Sounds like a testable hypothesis. In the last century global temp has risen around 1C after having remained comparatively stable prior to that. One could take global crop yields, and compare the annual trends against the change in global temperature.
The trouble is, that your hypothesis of increased crop failure, and presumably decreased global yields(else if yields don't drop who cares), presupposes that all other things remain equal...
Of course, global crop production has been trending persistently upwards as temperatures have also trended up. Numerous advances in crop technologies and techniques being a portion, and additionally regions impacted by climate change where conditions become too warm/cold/dry/wet for one crop are rotated for others. Farmers don't stubbornly plant the same crop for decades when conditions change, even if that would make projecting trends easier...
For a moment there I thought you were the sort of person who sought out data and evidence in order to be informed.
But with "seemingly overturned on an annual basis" you revealed your true colors and blew it.
Stop wasting time nit-picking and start playing your part in fixing this very real problem.
Spend a little more time reading what I said rather than trying to identify what team I appear to be on...
The GP was pointing out disillusionment from the continual headlines stating new discoveries showing AGW is going to be much worse than previously thought. Those discoveries, like the linked article here, are what I am referencing as 'seemingly' over-turning the previously 'settled scientific consensus'. The rest of my post referencing the IPCC and the linked article being mis-characterized for a sensational headline make that clear.
The point being made/defended was simple. If alarmists(not scientists) want to decry opponents of their political solutions as deniers of 'settled science', they can only sensationalize so many headlines like 'OH NO, it's going to be even worse than anticipated" before they are the ones that have repeatedly insisted that their 'settled' science was entirely out to lunch.
Again, my original post finished by observing that the actual journal article in this case does make reference to the IPCC, does NOT claim to have overturned the IPCC predictions, and merely notes that their additional evidence will be compiled into the overall collective analysis the IPCC uses for it's next report. That is to say, the sensational headlines from the journalists are the BS, are the scientists meanwhile are not the ones declaring everyone panic, the previous IPCC finding have been overturned...
There is no one credible with a dissenting opinion for all practical purposes. The number of dissenting scientists with any relevant expertise is on par with the number of creationist paleontologists. We have the documentary evidence that the entire AGW denier movement was started by and funded by oil companies which knew about AGW in the 1970's. You are a fool.
Poor effort, you clearly didn't read a word I wrote.
You realize that when a group like the IPCC says they have High Confidence that changes due to climate change will be in range x,y,z that dissenting opinions are not only those with less severe predictions, but equally those like that linked here citing more severe changes?
I would have given money, changed my lifestyle, my purchasing habits, whatever was required - and I did, for a time.
That's not how it works. What's needed is for you to vote for people who will do something about it, and convince others to do so as well. Nothing you can do on a personal level means jack diddly shit.
And there it is in a nutshell. "Climate change" is only cared about as a tool for obtaining more political power.
j/k(because some kind of sarcasm tag is mandatory.)
Exactly what you'd expect a shill for Big Oil to say. There's no money to be made in saving the planet, only the Big Oil agenda has a financial incentive to deceive and manipulate people. Control of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade markets surely don't provide an incentive of control. You'd have to be some political big dog already to profit that way, but you don't see any big wig folks like former presidential candidates with skin in the game like that.
So how would you recommend that new knowledge is shared with the public so that you would actually believe it ?
I think folks like the parent are asking to be engaged honestly, rather than trying to be tricked and frightened into doing what they are 'supposed' to do.
He's just pointing out a very real problem that the alarmist crowd is creating.
Go back to the first IPCC report and Al Gore's movie and shared Nobel prize. Assume the parent poster paid attention, looked at the evidence and agreed it looks sound and made a decision to make certain changes and support some actions to improve things. Now, during all the backlash, parent was onside with the movement to improve things, and had seen the scientific consensus from the IPCC and could agree to summarizing things as 'settled'. Thus, calling out the opponents and hold outs as denying the science seemed rational.
Fast forward a year or two though, and multiple head lines have come out from the alarmists that oh no, these couple scientists had demonstrated it's much worse than we though, we must act even more. Maybe parent even accepted this, science does refine itself, so ok.
A few years later, and even more reports stating things are going to be even worse than last years worse pile onto each other. There comes a point when the parent says stop, somebody somewhere in all this is either lying about just how settled the original science actually was, or just how much worse these new studies actually are showing things to be, and maybe all those folks being called deniers were being called wrong for political and not scientific reasons.
This is an extremely confused response. This essentially says that the more scientists are concerned about a problem the less you are concerned. If you keep seeing a lot of different articles and ways something might be a problem, and one isn't personally a subject matter expert, deciding to then dismiss all of it is the opposite of good logic. That said, it is true that by nature of media coverage the less concerning predictions about climate change get less attention in the general media, so you might not see them as much, but that doesn't change the fact that the broad consensus is pretty severe. Studies like this are trying to figure out just how severe that is, and even the mild predictions are pretty serious. Honestly, your response comes across a little as someone who has decided that you aren't going to bother making any even small changes in your lifestyle and then found a justification for it.
I largely share the parent's conclusions, and am pretty convinced it's the most rational response too.
If we walk back to Gore's noble prize for an inconvenient truth and the IPCC's work, at that time those calling for action and change all cited the scientific consensus, that the science was settled. Anyone with a dissenting opinion on the impacts or the best course of action was called a denier.
The thing is, the crowd trying to push an agenda of carbon taxes, industry cutbacks, etc has repeatedly dragged out scientific studies like the above out to declare that we must act now because, oh no, it's even worse than we feared.
The rational crowd though is starting to question how come the scientific consensus that was so settled, is now being overturned on a seemingly annual basis, and maybe those pushing for change and dragging this reports into the spotlight are just playing chicken little to get their agenda through.
An easy example, the most recent IPCC 5AR(2013, so 7 extra years of research since Gore's Nobel prize), says the following on sea level rise to 2100: For the period 2081–2100, compared to 1986–2005, global mean sea level rise is likely (medium confidence) to be in the 5 to 95% range of projections from process-based models, which give 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6, 0.32 to 0.63 m for RCP4.5, 0.33 to 0.63 m for RCP6.0, and 0.45 to 0.82 m for RCP8.5. For RCP8.5, the rise by 2100 is 0.52 to 0.98 m with a rate during 2081–2100 of 8 to 16 mm yr–1. We have considered the evidence for higher projections and have concluded that there is currently insufficient evidence to evaluate the probability of specific levels above the assessed likely range. Based on current understanding, only the collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet, if initiated, could cause global mean sea level to rise substantially above the likely range during the 21st century. This potential additional contribution cannot be precisely quantified but there is medium confidence that it would not exceed several tenths of a meter of sea level rise during the 21st century.
Scenario 8.5 is to show the worst case, if emissions are still accelerating in 2100, and has it's range of 0.52m to.98m sea level rise by 2100. That's what the "settled" science says, but then along comes a headline claiming things are happening much faster, even "increasing exponentially as a result of manmade global warming".
The good news for the scientific crowd though, is if you read closer, the Nature article linked does acknowledge the IPCC work and makes far more modest claims, merely that this may alter future IPCC corrections. This is in contract to the chicken littles writing the headlines.
Ignoring all of the oh-no it's even worse and now it's even more important to act crowd is a good idea, they are generally trying to use deception to manipulate people.
Plenty of scientists are saying there is not a scientific link between the fires and climate change, even Vox ran a story with that.
Maybe they should go talk to the experienced firefighters that say that fire is behaving in ways they have never seen before. Things are changing and barring ALIENS! the only reasonable explanation is climate change...
Surprisingly, Aliens or climate change aren't the only possible explanations. I know, hard to believe but hear me out.
It's beginning to be widely accepted that fighting forest fires has contributed to making the big ones worse. When we stop small forest fires, that means dead fall and dried planet matter continue to accumulate. It turns out, larger trees used to survive small forest fires, and the smaller fires cleared out the dead fall and dried material. With us stopping those fires though, enough tinder is accumulating that when a fire does hit, it's bigger, stronger and worse than ever before.
I know, citation please, so here's a fire forest researcher from UBC from a region of Canada where we fight multiple forest fires every year saying the same thing.
Before you get too sad though, there is a silver lining. The faculty member mentions that changing forest fire management might be opposed by standard logging industry practices, so we can still hate on corporate/industrial causes for the problem, hurray!
Personally, I work to live. If I could live a fairly comfortable life, like I do now, without working, I would quit my job tomorrow. The only reason I put up with the bullshit I do, day after day, is that it gets me a nice house and a nice car, the ability to travel and eat at restaurants, and all the other nice things money can buy (including a lack of financial anxiety). If I could have all that, with less of the daily bullshit, it would be great. I'd probably even give up a bit in order to work less. It's not laziness. It's the recognition that I want more out of life than being someone's employee.
I understand that our Capitalist and monetary systems require us all to stay on the hamster wheel. That's a whole other discussion.
The systems really aren't a whole other discussion though, right? Take away all those systems, take away society and give yourself a flourishing tropical island paradise all to yourself. Even with those kind of ideal conditions, you are still stuck as an employee, this time an employee for yourself and/or mother nature. If you want clothes still, your going to have to collect and process the raw materials and make them into the clothing you want. That's a lot of work. Food, shelter and any tools to make that easier are all going to require work.
You can't just say you want more out of life than being an employee, without acknowledging the fact that at fundamental level, the basic necessities of life take work to produce. In fact, they take an incredible amount of work to produce. The owning of stupidly comfortable clothing, weather proof homes with hot/cold running water, food(let alone imported food) is an historically ludicrous level of wealth. It's hardly fundamentally obvious that the work we have to put in to acquire and maintain such a lifestyle is unreasonably tailored against us.
Does the fact that there has been a for-profit campaign at misrepresenting the truth surrounding this topic make you question the path you took to come to the exact outcome they were aiming for?
Not for a second.
Then you're a true believer that won't question the dogma you've been fed. Good luck with that. It's great you're appealing to science. It's a good path. But part of science is re-examining your preconceived notions.
sigh, the irony. I've already pointed to the data you ask for later now and that you imply I refuse to. This is the last I'm gonna bother with responding as you seem disinclined to read anything that disagrees with your own preconceived notions.
I started out by pointing out the difference between global warming and climate change. Then I dug into the text you regurgitated from the IPCC report. I found what you were bitching about, and pointed out the text that followed in the very same report. Then I questioned where you actually got the values you were complaining about.
That's a lovely dump of some paper.
Now cough it up the actual values. SCIENCE. You've stated:
Uncertainty of the energy imbalance in climate models is GREATER than the energy imbalance caused by that CO2 increase, and by quite a lot.
1) What is the uncertainty of the energy imbalance in climate models? (The uncertainty for the factor for cloud feedback was +-0.7 W m–2 C–1)
From the IPCC AR5, Chapter 9 on evaluation of climate models. You'll find this on page 763 as I already pointed out.
Both the CMIP3 and CMIP5 model ensembles reproduce these patterns with considerable fidelity relative to the National Aeronautics and Space Adminsitration (NASA) Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) data sets (Pincus et al., 2008; Wang and Su, 2013). Globally averaged TOA shortwave and longwave components of the radiative fluxes in 12 atmosphere-only versions of the CMIP5 models were within 2.5 W m–2 of the observed values (Wang and Su, 2013). Comparisons against surface components of radiative fluxes show that, on average, the CMIP5 models overestimate the global mean downward all-sky shortwave flux at the surface by 2 ± 6 W m–2 (1 ± 3%) and underestimate the global downward longwave flux by 6 ± 9 W m–2 (2 ± 2%) (Stephens et al., 2012).
Now, if you care enough, you can go to the previous post and read the excerpts I gave you from Mauritsen on model tuning. From his setup, we know that modellers universally hand tune the TOA imbalance to the satellite record, and the above IPCC ranges are AFTER tuning, so the true uncertainty is going to be higher still as tuning is compensating for unknowns(uncertainty). For the purpose of my claim though, we can even assume ALL the unknowns and uncertainties being tuned for don't exist or cancel themselves out. The inter model average deviation from observation of 2.5 W m-2 is plenty.
2) What is the energy imbalance caused by CO2 increases?
This is the main thrust of your argument, yet you've HAVEN'T ACTUALLY STATED WHAT THEY ARE. Other than.... "A lot".
The energy imbalance causing the recent warming is 0.5-0.7 W m-2. I already again pointed this out up thread referencing NASA's direct satellite observations. You then waved it away as irrelevant to whether or not climate change is happening, despite the fact we never disagreed on that...
Here's a different reference then for the same from Mauritsen(one of the papers the IPC references) while discussing the tuning process for their model, although one of his references for the imbalance they target is the same team under Hansen at NASA I referen
First, I realize my quoting your question left it ambigiois what I was answering no to.
No, Iâ(TM)m not bothered or worried in the least whether or not (mis)information campaigns do or do not align with the conclusions I find in peer reviewed journal articles. If the facts are soundly reasoned by relevant experts it certainly shouldnâ(TM)t matter to anyone valuing the scientific method.
Regarding observed warming for the last 100 years, Iâ(TM)ve already stated many times that there is no uncertainty there at all.
I also realize in reviewing the paragraphs I quoted I missed inserting... between each, the Italicized paragraphs in the previous post do not necessarily follow immediately after one another in the journal article referenced and apologies that the layout unintenionally gives that appearance.
Yes, let's get back to TOTALLY DODGING THE QUESTION:.
Does the fact that there has been a for-profit campaign at misrepresenting the truth surrounding this topic make you question the path you took to come to the exact outcome they were aiming for?
Answer it, you bastard.
If you agree that there is not uncertainty when it comes to measured global warming them I'm good.
Only because you asked so nice.
Not for a second.
Do you acknowledge that our climate models are only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance?
No. That's more like global warming models. The aggregate. The global warming models are only as good as their predictions of global energy imbalance, those two things are practically synonymous. Climate models would be the resulting shifts in.... mostly the water cycle, but also wind patterns, and where storms develop. Ocean currents as well I guess. Global warming and the resulting changes to climate are very much tied to the hip of one another and I don't think you'll argue that global warming leads to climate change. The less certain we are about how hot it's going to get the less we can predict climate changes. I think this actually leans in your favor, but it's good to be precise.
You've shifted from complaining about the size of the error margins in Top of Atmosphere heat exchange to the IPCC's comments about modelling cloud effects....oh, I see where you lifted that from. The IPCC report, page 750, box 9.1. Yeah, it mentions "For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. " My argument against that would be to READ THE REST OF THE FUCKING INFOBOX. The IPCC itself states about the models: "There is very high confidence that models reproduce the general features of the global-scale annual mean surface temperature increase over the historical period, including the more rapid warming in the second half of the 20th century" IE, they CAN INDEED "hindcast", as you claimed they cannot. On model tuning: "What emerges is that the models that plausibly reproduce the past, universally display significant warming under increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, consistent with our physical understanding."
...
So you start by answering that NO, climate models aren't only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance, and then start talking as though global warming models are an entirely different thing. We are talking about climate models ability to hindcast past warming and the predict future warming. Highschool physics already is enough that you should understand the driving of any changes to the global climate over time is entirely coming from the energy coming and out of the system, yet you want talk around that.
And you prattle on some more continually misunderstanding the heart of things, and for a chuckle, dodging the other simple questions. Did you mean to start your post with talk of dodging questions as a form of irony?
I'm tired of trying to get you to look at the science of the models only to be met with tirades of how that's just what Big Oil wants you to believe...
I'm instead going to simply directly quote the peer reviewed science itself, here's the Mauritsen article the IPCC referenced along with a dozen others on model tuning. I'm including excerpts below that I've been paraphrasing to you in short from. It's fairly written in straightforward language and it's unambigious it matches what you won't listen to from me:
The need to tune models became apparent in the early days of coupled climate modeling, when the top of the atmosphere (TOA) radiative imbalance was so large that
I would say yes, it is clearly out of touch with reality.
. . . ho boy.
...then doesn't that kind of highlight the part of their plan where they perform character assasination on anyone supporting the Kyoto agreement? The part where they have plans to paint them as "out of touch with reality"?
I know that regardless of what PR campaign they're running, and what kind of propoganda and lies have been injected into the debate, none of that changes the actual scientific facts....
Yes, let's get back to the scientific facts as you didn't answer me on them when I posed this: Do you acknowledge that our climate models are only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance? It's basic physics so I don't mean to be insulting, but it seemed you wanted to wave that away before? Following from that, the IPCC has summarized the modellers themselves as observing that they can not hind cast the recent warming without manually correcting unknown parameters like clouds to correct the energy imbalance. This is to be expected, as the uncertainties like clouds have a greater influence on the energy imbalance than the increased CO2 concentrations we're experiencing.
So far, I only have one point of agreed upon fact with you, and the rest unknown. Here's the basic facts that I claim make it clear that Kyoto is not backed by science, and that to claim otherwise is out of touch with reality: -agreed-Climate has warmed ~1C in the past ~100 years, primarily due to human CO2 emissions. -?agreed?-Uncertainty of the energy imbalance in climate models is GREATER than the energy imbalance caused by that CO2 increase, and by quite a lot. -?agreed?-Kyoto demands signatory's reduce emissions to 18% less than 1990 levels by 2020 -?agreed?-Historically GDP and emissions follow tightly, so achieving Kyoto reductions amounts to erasing 30 years of GDP growth.
I haven't heard you disagree with these facts, but that you still seem so shocked by my conclusion based upon them I have to ask if you reject any of them. I must also add I'm getting a bit tired of having to re-reference the IPCC very clearly making my second assertion for me.
the observed historical warming has been measured with high precision and certainty.
Boom! DONE. I agree. Again. And that means the IPA oil giants are conducting a propaganda campaign. FUD, pure and simple. Those asshats. That was really my only argument. This is established, known, not-uncertain fact.
Good.
you CAN NOT state that the science on future warming trends is so certain that we know adopting such catastrophic economic consequences now is better than adapting to future warming...
We can state for certain that (as of 2018) global warming will continue. It is also a fact that there has been major economic disruption due to climate change.
If we use a lot of rounding, the last 100 years we have witnessed 1.0 degree C of warming. In that same 100 years global economic production, and more importantly food production has risen consistently. As in, the entire 100 years that our species has been experiencing global warming, we've been flourishing. If you'd like to cite some "factual" examples of major economic disruption due to climate change I'd love to hear them. At this point the most commonly cited ones are simply instances of the same kinds of natural disasters we already experienced 100 years ago, but now with a climate model assisted estimate of some small percentage of the disaster being made worse or attributable to recent warming.
The current debate is how bad it is going to be and what to do about it. I have stated this multiple times. I think we're both on the same page about the current state of the science, although you seem to be confused about what a statistical model is. I don't think that really matters though, we both agree on the main point.
I think we are agreed on past observation, but I don't believe we are at all agreed on the certainty of future predictions. Do you acknowledge that our climate models are only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance? It's basic physics so I don't mean to be insulting, but it seemed you wanted to wave that away before? Following from that, the IPCC has summarized the modellers themselves as observing that they can not hind cast the recent warming without manually correcting unknown parameters like clouds to correct the energy imbalance. This is to be expected, as the uncertainties like clouds have a greater influence on the energy imbalance than the increased CO2 concentrations we're experiencing.
If we are agreed on the above, then I would say that yes, we are agreed on our understanding of the science discussed so far.
hmmm, I haven't really pushed the Kyoto treaty... but if I did, would you say that I'm"out of touch with reality"?
I would question whether or not we agree on the main point. If the main point is to pay penance for past CO2 emissions and warming, then Kyoto is science backed. If the main point is to prepare for the future though, then scientific certainty in a future catastrophic enough to justify Kyoto is necessary to still be in touch with reality. The fact is, by 2020 Kyoto demands a rollback of 3 decades of global economic growth. When we lack ANY quantitative certainty around how much that emission reduction will save us, I would say yes, it is clearly out of touch with reality.
Quothe the IPCC "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal".
Again, you are under the mistaken impression that we were ever in disagreement on this.
AH! Wonderful. Then there's really no basis for those bullet points put forth by the API, it's not uncertain at all that the Earth is warming, we know for sure it's going to keep warming. It's just a nefarious plan of propaganda, FUD, and character assassination set forth by a committee of megacorps. Alright, as long as we're square on that, then honestly I'm fine with whatever nuance you want to quibble over about data vs statistics vs models.
How can I be more clear? For the umpteenth time, the observed historical warming has been measured with high precision and certainty.
At the same time, our best and most reliable predictions about FUTURE scenarios for warming depend upon climate modelling. The uncertainty of the climate models for predicting the impact of our emissions is huge, as the IPCC has repeatedly made clear the basic underlying energy budget that the physics relies upon has more uncertainty in it than the contribution our emissions is making.
Do you realize that the Kyoto protocol had member countries committing to reduce emissions to 18% below 1990 levels? Do you also know that historically most of a nations emissions are directly correlated to it's economic growth? If you thought the housing bubble and ensuing crisis was a disaster when just a year or two of growth was lost, what do you expect from 2-3 decades being cut out to meet 1990 emission levels for the sake of the Kyoto protocol?
Most importantly, you CAN NOT state that the science on future warming trends is so certain that we know adopting such catastrophic economic consequences now is better than adapting to future warming...
OH NOES! A satellite doesn't have an accurate reading when looking at Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. Now all we have to use to observe and predict global warming is thermometers, tree rings, glaciers, sea-ice levels, core samples, and historical records thereof. "Robust multi-decadal warming, global mean surface temperatures". The correct phrase is "multiple independently produced datasets".
All those records are great for observing. Strange you would feel the need to even mention it? I clearly agreed with you on the point when I said the models do on the whole hind cast the observed warming correctly.
Predicting though, that is another beast. You see, climate models are moving on to using basic physics to drive them. The physics of course relies on the energy of the sun, the trapping and reflection of that energy, and the changes driven by that energy transfer. It's the primary principle on top of which everything else relies upon, you can blithely wave it away as unimportant, but your the one ignoring the science of things then, not me.
It's not like all of global warming depends upon one satellite, or one method of measurement.
Quothe the IPCC "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal".
Again, you are under the mistaken impression that we were ever in disagreement on this.
Now... having a precise value for global ToA flux would certainly be a nice metric to have. It'd give us a MORE accurate knowledge of how much the globe has warmed. It might even help us predict how much it's going to warm next year.
Agreed on the first part. Getting a TOA flux at least with error margins smaller than the actual amount driving the observed recent warming would give us more accurate knowledge than we have now. Being able to model it that accurately however isn't best described as helpful to predicting how much it will warm in the future, it is absolutely a prerequisite to any ability to do so.
Without improving the energy balance, we have to abandon the world of modeling the physical processes and instead rely on statistical projections of past records like temperature, which is obviously a little bit unsatisfactory if showing confidence in our predictions is at all desirable.
you clearly left my claim untouched, that the energy imbalance is badly modelled.
Read the fucking executive summary again:
There is very high confidence that models reproduce the general features of the global-scale annual mean surface temperature increase over the historical period, including the more rapid warming in the second half of the 20th century
The models sure as shit aren't perfect, it's not like we can predict the rainfall in a month. But they are not badly modeled.
But hey, thank you for actually doing the minimal amount of footwork to make a claim. Page 749. 8 papers had to deal with clouds. And you're not wrong, the IPCC said it themselves in the executive summary:
The simulation of clouds in climate models remains challenging. There is very high confidence that uncertainties in cloud processes explain much of the spread in modelled climate sensitivity. However, the simulation of clouds in climate models has shown modest improvement relative to models available at the time of the AR4, and this has been aided by new evaluation techniques and new observations for clouds. Nevertheless, biases in cloud simulation lead to regional errors on cloud radiative effect of several tens of watts per square meter. {9.2.1, 9.4.1, 9.7.2, Figures 9.5, 9.43}
This shit is hard, but it's getting better all the time. Even with that very real and very sciency factoid of uncertainty when it comes to clouds in a number of climate models, we still have a very high level of confidence (ie, it is not uncertain) that climate change models accurately show the rapid warming after 1950.
That uncertainty does lead to questions about how bad it's going to get.
Here's what NASA's CERES satellite system observed directly about the global energy imbalance. -global mean net TOA flux for July 2005–June 2015 is consistent with the in situ value of 0.71 W m2 -he overall uncertainty in 1 × 1 latitude–longitude regional monthly all-sky TOA flux is estimated to be 3 W m2 [one standard deviation (1)] for the Terra-only period and 2.5 W m2 for the Terra–Aqua period both for SW and LW fluxes.
So, currently state of the art Satellite observations show there is a 0.71 W m-2 energy imbalance driving the warming from GHGs, but also notes that the uncertainty of the measurements is between 2.5 W m-2 and 3.0 W m-2. So even the observational uncertainties exceed the signal.
Let's look at the models, as cited in your link to the IPCC AR5, on page 763: Globally averaged TOA shortwave and longwave components of the radiative fluxes in 12 atmosphere-only versions of the CMIP5 models were within 2.5 W m–2 of the observed values (Wang and Su, 2013).
So there you have some pretty important facts. Even the observed TOA imbalance has uncertainties greater than the signal, let alone the climate models.
What does that mean though? Given that the observed warming of the last 100 years was driven by an energy imbalance of 0.7W m-2, it means that an uncertainty in models of 2.5W m-2 makes predictions pretty much unworkable.
Oh, but the models DO accurately model the warming of the last 100 years, how does that fit? Well, as pointed out up thread, the answer is tuning. If you tune parameters that are modelled poorly, like clouds, to correct the energy imbalance then you can get the right imbalance and recreate the warming.
Modelling of clouds, as noted on page 820 of the IPCC report says: Cloud feedbacks in AOGCMs are generally positive or near neutral (Shell et al., 2008; Soden et al., 2008), as evidenced by the net positive or neutral cloud feedbacks in all of the models examined in a multi-thousand member ensemble of AOGCMs constructed by parameter perturbations (Sanderson et al., 2010)
Did Saddam commit a genocide? I think there's a difference between massacres and genocide. If the beef is he deliberately killed thousands of civilian Kurds from the air, the US just did something not too dissimilar in Mossul and Raqqa. The cities were destroyed WW2 style pretty much killing thousands...
I was of course referencing the A-Anfal campaign, your wiki primer is here. It's documented more thoroughly and extensively at Human Rights Watch here.
Saddam's campaign saw the destruction of 90% of Kurdish villages. The use of chemical weapons on those villages. A death toll estimated between 100 and 200 thousand. Concentration camps were setup. Fighting age males were sorted and shipped out from the camps on buses like cattle to be shot and buried in mass graves by bulldozers. The women in the camps were systematically raped, not as punishment or intimidation but to impregnate Kurdish women with half Arab children in an effort to breed the Kurds out of existence in one swing as the other Kurdish males of 'fighting' age were being buried in the desert.
Yeah, go ahead and put a question mark around whether all that really classifies as 'genocide' or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows the hockey stick is bogus manipulation of data
Nope, the hockey stick graph has been confirmed by several studies. You can find plenty of references in the wikipedia page above. And if you dismiss all of the data, then what are you going to use to show that "we are still coming out of an ice age" as GP tried to claim?
Try looking at the actual findings in the actual studies though. The distinctive Hockey Stick shape in Michael Mann's original graph came about by showing 2 disparate datasets on the same graph, the reconstructed temperatures for the last couple thousand years, and then the instrumental record appended on the end. The immediate deviation from the trend for the past millenia doesn't just correspond to the start of the industrial era, it corresponds to a change in datasets. You don't get a more obvious red flag than that.
Now, absolutely, followup studies have been done since, and they have largely confirmed the flat/static trend from Mann's original work. They've also recreated the hockey stick at the end the same way by introducing the instrumental record.
Fine, you'll then say if that is all as sketchy and iffy as it sounds, you'd expect the proxy reconstructions to have troubles recreating recent warming, right? Here's an updated study by the same Michael Mann of fame for the first hockey stick graph. If you just read the overall conclusions, Mann mostly says that with new data and new methods they largely validate their previous work. However, if you look close the article also notes:
However, in the case of the early calibration/late validation CPS reconstruction with the full screened network (Fig. 2
A ), we observed evidence for a systematic bias in the underestimation of recent warming. This bias increases for earlier centuries where the reconstruction is based on increasingly sparse networks of proxy data. In this case, the observed warming rises above the error
bounds of the estimates during the 1980s decade, consistent with the known ‘‘divergence problem’’ (e.g., ref. 37), wherein the tempera-
ture sensitivity of some temperature-sensitive tree-ring data appears to have declined in the most recent decades. Interestingly, although the elimination of all tree-ring data from the proxy dataset yields a substantially smaller divergence bias, it does not eliminate
the problem altogether (Fig. 2B). This latter finding suggests that the divergence problem is not limited purely to tree-ring data, but
instead may extend to other proxy records. Interestingly, the problem is greatly diminished (although not absent—particularly in
the older networks where a decline is observed after 1980) with the EIV method,
If you then look down to Fig. 3, you'll notice that the EIV reconstruction doesn't just do a better job tracking recent warming, it also is by far the warmest reconstruction, with historic peaks exceeding anything but the big red instrumental record tacked on again.
So to summarize, your declaration that "the hockey stick graph has been confirmed by several studies" is true in the sense that they've recreated the historic trend many times. However, even the original author(Mann) as linked above notes that the methodology for recreating a fairly flat/cool historic reconstruction, also fails to reconstruct current warming. So much so as to fall outside the "error bars", and even mentions that this is the "known divergence problem", meaning it is well known that without attaching the instrumental record on the end, you don't get your nice hockey stick graph.
The public just buys what the major tech marketing machines are selling. Very few even know there is an option and why it matters.
Just my 2 cents ;)
Why does it matter to end users?
The Linux community has spent almost 3 decades now still ignoring desktop users wants and needs. There has been this blind belief that if only parity with the Windows experience(Apps, HW support, ease of use, etc.) could be reached then, finally the world would embrace Linux. Users though do NOT care about their operating system. The user community is not out there wishing against hope for the day they can run Linux on their desktops. Until the Linux community actually decides to look at what they can offer users that Windows can't, and that users actually care about, there will be zero progress towards getting Linux on desktops. Even Apple, with all it's resources and it's user oriented design of OSX had an uphill battle selling itself and had to distinguish itself to users with things like 1 way fo doing things, simplified UI and HW choices, and an overall support model of it works or it need to get replaced. Apple provided users with a simplified experience. What's Linux even attempting to offer?
It's not just that but the point of an OS is to offer APIs so programming is easier.
It is much much much easier to write quality programs for Windows than Linux. This is why all the game platform is dominated by Windows, so is office software.
Windows API's and quality programming should never be in the same sentence. Both OS's require a learning curve to understand their perspective API's, so if you started learning to code in Windows, that will be more familiar to you. However, there is an awful lot of crap code that comes out with the Windows API's. At least with Linux, there is an entire community to check your code and help improve it. As far as gaming, the main reason has more to do with marketing and not the API's. The simple economics of scale is why the gaming industry shy's away from Linux in favor of Windows. Unfortunately, is a chicken vs. egg situation. We need good Linux games to get people interested in the OS, but we need a lot more people using Linux before the game developers will give it serious consideration.
Here's a fundamental thing that's getting missed. If you could magically have ALL games 100% Linux compatible tomorrow you still would not have given people a reason to switch to Linux. You only removed 1 reason for people to refuse to use it. It is not enough to fix the very many show stopper issues keeping people off Linux, you need to give users something they care about and can't get on their Windows box. Name me something users care about that is better on Linux. Failing that, even provide a GOAL for the Linux community to work towards that would provide users something they care about and can't get elsewhere.
I have no idea why you're downloading and double-clicking .deb files. We've had package managers for a long time now. Your issue isn't that linux doesn't work well, it's that it doesn't work like you think it does. That speaks nothing to how well it works, and everything to difficult it is to teach people that microsoft's way isn't the best way to do things.
Maybe this needs to be said more bluntly, you can get all your facts right, but in the end nobody cares! Suzy in purchasing has and never will think about how best to do things with a computer. She wants to complete a task, the computer is a tool and the less time it spends in her way the happier she is.
Pretty much any average user can download and install linux, and do most of what they currently do in Windows out of the box.
You've never worked with any average users then. Average users are sketchy with downloading and installing browser extensions. You are NOT looking at the 95% of the user base here. Users don't give 1 second of thought to the process of I need an OS, and then a browser and my office productivity package before I can do what I want. When they walk up to a computer they will ask does it have internet, or can I use Word/Excel/Powerpoint on it. Many users will want Quickbooks or QuickTax. Even if they can get a techy friend to download and install linux for them as you describe, they aren't going to be able to do any of those out of the box except use internet(unless they get unlucky and even that needs some tweaking too). MS Office and the Quicken toolsets aren't available under Linux period. I know you may reply with OpenOffice, but users will reject that and demand the computer just be put back the way it was when it was working. Try moving users from MS Office 2010 to MS Office 2016 and listen to how many have problems adjusting and missing things they used to be able to find. You have NO idea what users need or are interested in trying to do for themselves.
It's sometimes rather baffling how disconnected from what users actually use their computers for the average slashdotter is.
Indeed. Users can just download Linux, install it, and use it out of the box. Yep, the disconnect is baffling.
If $700 a month stops us from having to pay almost four times that amount to lock that person up in jail, we're recognizing cost savings there as well.
US population is ~325million, so UBI of $700/month costs the country $227.5 billion per month, or an annual budget of $2.7 trillion. The entire federal budget via wikipedia for 2017 was $3.3 trillion. So, if you can find a way to run the military, police and the rest of the federal government for the remaining $0.6 trillion the US could afford it. Realistically though, it means cutting a LOT more than just current social program funding...
I mean, why so old when other sources show that by 2007 mcintre et al was disputed as being flawed, AND in the itnerim time many more models confirmed the hockey stick shape ? Why indeed show only something from 15 years ago ? The reader may decide if this was intentional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Convenient to leave out Mann's biggest trick. His original hockey stick graph displayed to disparate datasets. His proxy reconstruction of old temperatures, and superimposed on that was the instrumental record. This created the shocking effect of the graph abruptly surging away after 1900. Everyone then made a big deal about that coinciding with CO2 emissions, but much less attention was directed to that also coinciding with the change in datasets...
You are correct that more recent studies have more or less recreated Mann's results. Many have improved on his work in a very important way by including graphs showing uncertainties more clearly. In those the noise dwarfs the signal, so again without the instrumental record, there is no sudden and abrupt 'hockey stick' shape within the proxy reconstruction. For that, you still need the subtle trick of adding instrumental data onto the end.
The newest review of the literature I can find right now(I'm being lazy) is in Reviews of GeoPhysics on AGUpub, "Challenges and perspectives for large-scale temperature
reconstructions of the past two millennia".
Here's some of their notes and conclusions making more or less the same observations as my summary:
"Regardless of the many seemingly contradicting results regarding, e.g., regularization methods, and regardless of other technical issues, underestimation of low-frequency variability is a serious concern and that reconstruction methods in particular have problems reconstructing temperatures that are outside the range of the calibration interval. The main reason seems to be a feature of direct regression and CPS methods which under general assumptions can be shown to be biased toward zero."
"We saw that the different reconstructions agree on the general form of the low-frequency variability but that they disagree on the amplitude; the centennial-scale amplitude (i.e., the temperature difference between the warm eleventh century and the cold seventeenth century),in particular, varies from 0.14 to 1.3C
Around page 25 they have this to say in comparing reconstructions to instrumental records:
"It is obvious that the noise is considerable and that the signal TTis not easily seen in P. In particular, for
c=0.40 and c=0.25 the trend in the twentieth century is practically lost in the noise. It is clearly not a simple
task to extract the signal from the noisy series—almost like making eggs from scrambled eggs—although
temporal or spatial averaging may reduce the noise."
In other tree ring reconstruction reviews(I can't find it right now but I've not spend much time either) the authors note that bad sensitivity to high temperatures (like the current period), is a known issue particular to tree rings and handling of that problem is a big and current research area.
So the overall summary being, there are a lot of unknowns, the hockey stick only 'works' if you are a bit dishonest on your graph, and when we say the current warming is unprecedented over the last millenia plus it is with a host of caveats and uncertainties that you need to read the full papers to see, and the uncertainties aren't nothing.
If weather patterns changes smoothly that would work - however it doesn't appear that will be the case. The problem is that when weather becomes unstable you can no longer use last year's weather to predict the coming year.
Think of it this way - if for the last decade there were 5 years where corn would have survived, 3 years for wheat, and 2 for soy - and they were all jumbled up, then what should you plant this year? Corn maybe? You've got a 50% chance of getting a crop, if the last decade is representative, but that's still not very good odds. And of course slow growing tree crops and the like can't be readily picked up and moved from year to year, so we'll likely lose most of those, or at least make them much more expensive (hope you're not too attached to coffee or nuts)
Similarly, if we cross the tipping point to a hothouse Earth, and could just jump a few millenia into the future, things would probably look pretty rosy. All of Canada and Russia, Northern China, etc. will likely be warm and fertile. The problem is not the destination, it's the long, unpredictable journey to get there.
Thats a lot of postulating, but you’ve entirely neglected to acknowledge the data. Specifically, over the last 100 years, global crop yield per acre has steadily risen, while global tmeperature has steadily shifted from historic norms. You can explain as long as you like how that shouldn’t happen, but that doesn’t alter the facts.
...Perhaps even worse, at least for us, is that it's looking like such transitions don't happen smoothly. As the thermal engines driving weather destabilize, weather patterns become less predictable from year to year, and the rate of crop failure increases considerably as a result. And when people get hungry, wars break out.
Sounds like a testable hypothesis. In the last century global temp has risen around 1C after having remained comparatively stable prior to that. One could take global crop yields, and compare the annual trends against the change in global temperature.
The trouble is, that your hypothesis of increased crop failure, and presumably decreased global yields(else if yields don't drop who cares), presupposes that all other things remain equal...
Of course, global crop production has been trending persistently upwards as temperatures have also trended up. Numerous advances in crop technologies and techniques being a portion, and additionally regions impacted by climate change where conditions become too warm/cold/dry/wet for one crop are rotated for others. Farmers don't stubbornly plant the same crop for decades when conditions change, even if that would make projecting trends easier...
For a moment there I thought you were the sort of person who sought out data and evidence in order to be informed.
But with "seemingly overturned on an annual basis" you revealed your true colors and blew it.
Stop wasting time nit-picking and start playing your part in fixing this very real problem.
Spend a little more time reading what I said rather than trying to identify what team I appear to be on...
The GP was pointing out disillusionment from the continual headlines stating new discoveries showing AGW is going to be much worse than previously thought. Those discoveries, like the linked article here, are what I am referencing as 'seemingly' over-turning the previously 'settled scientific consensus'. The rest of my post referencing the IPCC and the linked article being mis-characterized for a sensational headline make that clear.
The point being made/defended was simple. If alarmists(not scientists) want to decry opponents of their political solutions as deniers of 'settled science', they can only sensationalize so many headlines like 'OH NO, it's going to be even worse than anticipated" before they are the ones that have repeatedly insisted that their 'settled' science was entirely out to lunch.
Again, my original post finished by observing that the actual journal article in this case does make reference to the IPCC, does NOT claim to have overturned the IPCC predictions, and merely notes that their additional evidence will be compiled into the overall collective analysis the IPCC uses for it's next report. That is to say, the sensational headlines from the journalists are the BS, are the scientists meanwhile are not the ones declaring everyone panic, the previous IPCC finding have been overturned...
There is no one credible with a dissenting opinion for all practical purposes. The number of dissenting scientists with any relevant expertise is on par with the number of creationist paleontologists. We have the documentary evidence that the entire AGW denier movement was started by and funded by oil companies which knew about AGW in the 1970's. You are a fool.
Poor effort, you clearly didn't read a word I wrote.
You realize that when a group like the IPCC says they have High Confidence that changes due to climate change will be in range x,y,z that dissenting opinions are not only those with less severe predictions, but equally those like that linked here citing more severe changes?
I would have given money, changed my lifestyle, my purchasing habits, whatever was required - and I did, for a time.
That's not how it works. What's needed is for you to vote for people who will do something about it, and convince others to do so as well. Nothing you can do on a personal level means jack diddly shit.
And there it is in a nutshell. "Climate change" is only cared about as a tool for obtaining more political power.
j/k(because some kind of sarcasm tag is mandatory.)
Exactly what you'd expect a shill for Big Oil to say. There's no money to be made in saving the planet, only the Big Oil agenda has a financial incentive to deceive and manipulate people. Control of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade markets surely don't provide an incentive of control. You'd have to be some political big dog already to profit that way, but you don't see any big wig folks like former presidential candidates with skin in the game like that.
So how would you recommend that new knowledge is shared with the public so that you would actually believe it ?
I think folks like the parent are asking to be engaged honestly, rather than trying to be tricked and frightened into doing what they are 'supposed' to do.
He's just pointing out a very real problem that the alarmist crowd is creating.
Go back to the first IPCC report and Al Gore's movie and shared Nobel prize. Assume the parent poster paid attention, looked at the evidence and agreed it looks sound and made a decision to make certain changes and support some actions to improve things. Now, during all the backlash, parent was onside with the movement to improve things, and had seen the scientific consensus from the IPCC and could agree to summarizing things as 'settled'. Thus, calling out the opponents and hold outs as denying the science seemed rational.
Fast forward a year or two though, and multiple head lines have come out from the alarmists that oh no, these couple scientists had demonstrated it's much worse than we though, we must act even more. Maybe parent even accepted this, science does refine itself, so ok.
A few years later, and even more reports stating things are going to be even worse than last years worse pile onto each other. There comes a point when the parent says stop, somebody somewhere in all this is either lying about just how settled the original science actually was, or just how much worse these new studies actually are showing things to be, and maybe all those folks being called deniers were being called wrong for political and not scientific reasons.
This is an extremely confused response. This essentially says that the more scientists are concerned about a problem the less you are concerned. If you keep seeing a lot of different articles and ways something might be a problem, and one isn't personally a subject matter expert, deciding to then dismiss all of it is the opposite of good logic. That said, it is true that by nature of media coverage the less concerning predictions about climate change get less attention in the general media, so you might not see them as much, but that doesn't change the fact that the broad consensus is pretty severe. Studies like this are trying to figure out just how severe that is, and even the mild predictions are pretty serious. Honestly, your response comes across a little as someone who has decided that you aren't going to bother making any even small changes in your lifestyle and then found a justification for it.
I largely share the parent's conclusions, and am pretty convinced it's the most rational response too.
If we walk back to Gore's noble prize for an inconvenient truth and the IPCC's work, at that time those calling for action and change all cited the scientific consensus, that the science was settled. Anyone with a dissenting opinion on the impacts or the best course of action was called a denier.
The thing is, the crowd trying to push an agenda of carbon taxes, industry cutbacks, etc has repeatedly dragged out scientific studies like the above out to declare that we must act now because, oh no, it's even worse than we feared.
The rational crowd though is starting to question how come the scientific consensus that was so settled, is now being overturned on a seemingly annual basis, and maybe those pushing for change and dragging this reports into the spotlight are just playing chicken little to get their agenda through.
An easy example, the most recent IPCC 5AR(2013, so 7 extra years of research since Gore's Nobel prize), says the following on sea level rise to 2100:
For the period 2081–2100, compared to 1986–2005, global mean sea level rise is likely (medium confidence) to be in the 5 to 95% range of projections from process-based models, which give 0.26 to 0.55 m for RCP2.6, 0.32 to 0.63 m for RCP4.5, 0.33 to 0.63 m for RCP6.0, and 0.45 to 0.82 m for RCP8.5. For RCP8.5, the rise by 2100 is 0.52 to 0.98 m with a rate during 2081–2100 of 8 to 16 mm yr–1.
We have considered the evidence for higher projections and have concluded that there is currently insufficient evidence to evaluate the probability of specific levels above the assessed likely range. Based on current understanding, only
the collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet, if initiated, could cause global mean sea level to rise substantially above the likely range during the 21st century. This potential additional contribution cannot be precisely quantified but there is medium confidence that it would not exceed several tenths of a meter of sea level rise during the 21st century.
Scenario 8.5 is to show the worst case, if emissions are still accelerating in 2100, and has it's range of 0.52m to .98m sea level rise by 2100. That's what the "settled" science says, but then along comes a headline claiming things are happening much faster, even "increasing exponentially as a result of manmade global warming".
The good news for the scientific crowd though, is if you read closer, the Nature article linked does acknowledge the IPCC work and makes far more modest claims, merely that this may alter future IPCC corrections. This is in contract to the chicken littles writing the headlines.
Ignoring all of the oh-no it's even worse and now it's even more important to act crowd is a good idea, they are generally trying to use deception to manipulate people.
Plenty of scientists are saying there is not a scientific link between the fires and climate change, even Vox ran a story with that.
Maybe they should go talk to the experienced firefighters that say that fire is behaving in ways they have never seen before. Things are changing and barring ALIENS! the only reasonable explanation is climate change...
Surprisingly, Aliens or climate change aren't the only possible explanations. I know, hard to believe but hear me out.
It's beginning to be widely accepted that fighting forest fires has contributed to making the big ones worse. When we stop small forest fires, that means dead fall and dried planet matter continue to accumulate. It turns out, larger trees used to survive small forest fires, and the smaller fires cleared out the dead fall and dried material. With us stopping those fires though, enough tinder is accumulating that when a fire does hit, it's bigger, stronger and worse than ever before.
I know, citation please, so here's a fire forest researcher from UBC from a region of Canada where we fight multiple forest fires every year saying the same thing.
Before you get too sad though, there is a silver lining. The faculty member mentions that changing forest fire management might be opposed by standard logging industry practices, so we can still hate on corporate/industrial causes for the problem, hurray!
Personally, I work to live. If I could live a fairly comfortable life, like I do now, without working, I would quit my job tomorrow. The only reason I put up with the bullshit I do, day after day, is that it gets me a nice house and a nice car, the ability to travel and eat at restaurants, and all the other nice things money can buy (including a lack of financial anxiety). If I could have all that, with less of the daily bullshit, it would be great. I'd probably even give up a bit in order to work less. It's not laziness. It's the recognition that I want more out of life than being someone's employee.
I understand that our Capitalist and monetary systems require us all to stay on the hamster wheel. That's a whole other discussion.
The systems really aren't a whole other discussion though, right? Take away all those systems, take away society and give yourself a flourishing tropical island paradise all to yourself. Even with those kind of ideal conditions, you are still stuck as an employee, this time an employee for yourself and/or mother nature. If you want clothes still, your going to have to collect and process the raw materials and make them into the clothing you want. That's a lot of work. Food, shelter and any tools to make that easier are all going to require work.
You can't just say you want more out of life than being an employee, without acknowledging the fact that at fundamental level, the basic necessities of life take work to produce. In fact, they take an incredible amount of work to produce. The owning of stupidly comfortable clothing, weather proof homes with hot/cold running water, food(let alone imported food) is an historically ludicrous level of wealth. It's hardly fundamentally obvious that the work we have to put in to acquire and maintain such a lifestyle is unreasonably tailored against us.
Does the fact that there has been a for-profit campaign at misrepresenting the truth surrounding this topic make you question the path you took to come to the exact outcome they were aiming for?
Not for a second.
Then you're a true believer that won't question the dogma you've been fed. Good luck with that. It's great you're appealing to science. It's a good path. But part of science is re-examining your preconceived notions.
sigh, the irony. I've already pointed to the data you ask for later now and that you imply I refuse to. This is the last I'm gonna bother with responding as you seem disinclined to read anything that disagrees with your own preconceived notions.
I started out by pointing out the difference between global warming and climate change. Then I dug into the text you regurgitated from the IPCC report. I found what you were bitching about, and pointed out the text that followed in the very same report. Then I questioned where you actually got the values you were complaining about.
That's a lovely dump of some paper.
Now cough it up the actual values. SCIENCE. You've stated:
Uncertainty of the energy imbalance in climate models is GREATER than the energy imbalance caused by that CO2 increase, and by quite a lot.
1) What is the uncertainty of the energy imbalance in climate models? (The uncertainty for the factor for cloud feedback was +-0.7 W m–2 C–1)
From the IPCC AR5, Chapter 9 on evaluation of climate models. You'll find this on page 763 as I already pointed out.
Both the CMIP3 and CMIP5 model ensembles reproduce these patterns with considerable fidelity relative to the National Aeronautics and Space Adminsitration (NASA) Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) data sets (Pincus et al., 2008; Wang and Su, 2013). Globally averaged TOA shortwave and longwave components of the radiative fluxes in 12 atmosphere-only versions of the CMIP5 models were within 2.5 W m–2 of the observed values (Wang and Su, 2013). Comparisons against surface components of radiative fluxes show that, on average, the CMIP5 models overestimate the global mean downward all-sky shortwave flux at the surface by 2 ± 6 W m–2 (1 ± 3%) and underestimate the global downward longwave flux by 6 ± 9 W m–2 (2 ± 2%) (Stephens et al., 2012).
Now, if you care enough, you can go to the previous post and read the excerpts I gave you from Mauritsen on model tuning. From his setup, we know that modellers universally hand tune the TOA imbalance to the satellite record, and the above IPCC ranges are AFTER tuning, so the true uncertainty is going to be higher still as tuning is compensating for unknowns(uncertainty). For the purpose of my claim though, we can even assume ALL the unknowns and uncertainties being tuned for don't exist or cancel themselves out. The inter model average deviation from observation of 2.5 W m-2 is plenty.
2) What is the energy imbalance caused by CO2 increases?
This is the main thrust of your argument, yet you've HAVEN'T ACTUALLY STATED WHAT THEY ARE. Other than.... "A lot".
The energy imbalance causing the recent warming is 0.5-0.7 W m-2. I already again pointed this out up thread referencing NASA's direct satellite observations. You then waved it away as irrelevant to whether or not climate change is happening, despite the fact we never disagreed on that...
Here's a different reference then for the same from Mauritsen(one of the papers the IPC references) while discussing the tuning process for their model, although one of his references for the imbalance they target is the same team under Hansen at NASA I referen
First, I realize my quoting your question left it ambigiois what I was answering no to.
No, Iâ(TM)m not bothered or worried in the least whether or not (mis)information campaigns do or do not align with the conclusions I find in peer reviewed journal articles. If the facts are soundly reasoned by relevant experts it certainly shouldnâ(TM)t matter to anyone valuing the scientific method.
Regarding observed warming for the last 100 years, Iâ(TM)ve already stated many times that there is no uncertainty there at all.
I also realize in reviewing the paragraphs I quoted I missed inserting ... between each, the Italicized paragraphs in the previous post do not necessarily follow immediately after one another in the journal article referenced and apologies that the layout unintenionally gives that appearance.
Yes, let's get back to TOTALLY DODGING THE QUESTION: .
Does the fact that there has been a for-profit campaign at misrepresenting the truth surrounding this topic make you question the path you took to come to the exact outcome they were aiming for?
Answer it, you bastard.
If you agree that there is not uncertainty when it comes to measured global warming them I'm good.
Only because you asked so nice.
Not for a second.
Do you acknowledge that our climate models are only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance?
No. That's more like global warming models. The aggregate. The global warming models are only as good as their predictions of global energy imbalance, those two things are practically synonymous. Climate models would be the resulting shifts in.... mostly the water cycle, but also wind patterns, and where storms develop. Ocean currents as well I guess. Global warming and the resulting changes to climate are very much tied to the hip of one another and I don't think you'll argue that global warming leads to climate change. The less certain we are about how hot it's going to get the less we can predict climate changes. I think this actually leans in your favor, but it's good to be precise.
You've shifted from complaining about the size of the error margins in Top of Atmosphere heat exchange to the IPCC's comments about modelling cloud effects. ...oh, I see where you lifted that from. The IPCC report, page 750, box 9.1. Yeah, it mentions "For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. " My argument against that would be to READ THE REST OF THE FUCKING INFOBOX. The IPCC itself states about the models: "There is very high confidence that models reproduce the general features of the global-scale annual mean surface temperature increase over the historical period, including the more rapid warming in the second half of the 20th century" IE, they CAN INDEED "hindcast", as you claimed they cannot. On model tuning: "What emerges is that the models that plausibly reproduce the past, universally display significant warming under increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, consistent with our physical understanding."
So you start by answering that NO, climate models aren't only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance, and then start talking as though global warming models are an entirely different thing. We are talking about climate models ability to hindcast past warming and the predict future warming. Highschool physics already is enough that you should understand the driving of any changes to the global climate over time is entirely coming from the energy coming and out of the system, yet you want talk around that.
And you prattle on some more continually misunderstanding the heart of things, and for a chuckle, dodging the other simple questions. Did you mean to start your post with talk of dodging questions as a form of irony?
I'm tired of trying to get you to look at the science of the models only to be met with tirades of how that's just what Big Oil wants you to believe...
I'm instead going to simply directly quote the peer reviewed science itself, here's the Mauritsen article the IPCC referenced along with a dozen others on model tuning. I'm including excerpts below that I've been paraphrasing to you in short from. It's fairly written in straightforward language and it's unambigious it matches what you won't listen to from me:
The need to tune models became apparent in the early days of coupled climate modeling, when the top of the atmosphere (TOA) radiative imbalance was so large that
I would say yes, it is clearly out of touch with reality.
. . . ho boy.
I know that regardless of what PR campaign they're running, and what kind of propoganda and lies have been injected into the debate, none of that changes the actual scientific facts....
Yes, let's get back to the scientific facts as you didn't answer me on them when I posed this:
Do you acknowledge that our climate models are only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance? It's basic physics so I don't mean to be insulting, but it seemed you wanted to wave that away before? Following from that, the IPCC has summarized the modellers themselves as observing that they can not hind cast the recent warming without manually correcting unknown parameters like clouds to correct the energy imbalance. This is to be expected, as the uncertainties like clouds have a greater influence on the energy imbalance than the increased CO2 concentrations we're experiencing.
So far, I only have one point of agreed upon fact with you, and the rest unknown. Here's the basic facts that I claim make it clear that Kyoto is not backed by science, and that to claim otherwise is out of touch with reality:
-agreed-Climate has warmed ~1C in the past ~100 years, primarily due to human CO2 emissions.
-?agreed?-Uncertainty of the energy imbalance in climate models is GREATER than the energy imbalance caused by that CO2 increase, and by quite a lot.
-?agreed?-Kyoto demands signatory's reduce emissions to 18% less than 1990 levels by 2020
-?agreed?-Historically GDP and emissions follow tightly, so achieving Kyoto reductions amounts to erasing 30 years of GDP growth.
I haven't heard you disagree with these facts, but that you still seem so shocked by my conclusion based upon them I have to ask if you reject any of them. I must also add I'm getting a bit tired of having to re-reference the IPCC very clearly making my second assertion for me.
the observed historical warming has been measured with high precision and certainty.
Boom! DONE. I agree. Again. And that means the IPA oil giants are conducting a propaganda campaign. FUD, pure and simple. Those asshats. That was really my only argument. This is established, known, not-uncertain fact.
Good.
you CAN NOT state that the science on future warming trends is so certain that we know adopting such catastrophic economic consequences now is better than adapting to future warming...
We can state for certain that (as of 2018) global warming will continue. It is also a fact that there has been major economic disruption due to climate change.
If we use a lot of rounding, the last 100 years we have witnessed 1.0 degree C of warming. In that same 100 years global economic production, and more importantly food production has risen consistently. As in, the entire 100 years that our species has been experiencing global warming, we've been flourishing. If you'd like to cite some "factual" examples of major economic disruption due to climate change I'd love to hear them. At this point the most commonly cited ones are simply instances of the same kinds of natural disasters we already experienced 100 years ago, but now with a climate model assisted estimate of some small percentage of the disaster being made worse or attributable to recent warming.
The current debate is how bad it is going to be and what to do about it. I have stated this multiple times. I think we're both on the same page about the current state of the science, although you seem to be confused about what a statistical model is. I don't think that really matters though, we both agree on the main point.
I think we are agreed on past observation, but I don't believe we are at all agreed on the certainty of future predictions. Do you acknowledge that our climate models are only as good as their predictions of the global energy imbalance? It's basic physics so I don't mean to be insulting, but it seemed you wanted to wave that away before? Following from that, the IPCC has summarized the modellers themselves as observing that they can not hind cast the recent warming without manually correcting unknown parameters like clouds to correct the energy imbalance. This is to be expected, as the uncertainties like clouds have a greater influence on the energy imbalance than the increased CO2 concentrations we're experiencing.
If we are agreed on the above, then I would say that yes, we are agreed on our understanding of the science discussed so far.
hmmm, I haven't really pushed the Kyoto treaty... but if I did, would you say that I'm"out of touch with reality"?
I would question whether or not we agree on the main point. If the main point is to pay penance for past CO2 emissions and warming, then Kyoto is science backed. If the main point is to prepare for the future though, then scientific certainty in a future catastrophic enough to justify Kyoto is necessary to still be in touch with reality. The fact is, by 2020 Kyoto demands a rollback of 3 decades of global economic growth. When we lack ANY quantitative certainty around how much that emission reduction will save us, I would say yes, it is clearly out of touch with reality.
Quothe the IPCC "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal".
Again, you are under the mistaken impression that we were ever in disagreement on this.
AH! Wonderful. Then there's really no basis for those bullet points put forth by the API, it's not uncertain at all that the Earth is warming, we know for sure it's going to keep warming. It's just a nefarious plan of propaganda, FUD, and character assassination set forth by a committee of megacorps. Alright, as long as we're square on that, then honestly I'm fine with whatever nuance you want to quibble over about data vs statistics vs models.
How can I be more clear? For the umpteenth time, the observed historical warming has been measured with high precision and certainty.
At the same time, our best and most reliable predictions about FUTURE scenarios for warming depend upon climate modelling. The uncertainty of the climate models for predicting the impact of our emissions is huge, as the IPCC has repeatedly made clear the basic underlying energy budget that the physics relies upon has more uncertainty in it than the contribution our emissions is making.
Do you realize that the Kyoto protocol had member countries committing to reduce emissions to 18% below 1990 levels? Do you also know that historically most of a nations emissions are directly correlated to it's economic growth? If you thought the housing bubble and ensuing crisis was a disaster when just a year or two of growth was lost, what do you expect from 2-3 decades being cut out to meet 1990 emission levels for the sake of the Kyoto protocol?
Most importantly, you CAN NOT state that the science on future warming trends is so certain that we know adopting such catastrophic economic consequences now is better than adapting to future warming...
OH NOES! A satellite doesn't have an accurate reading when looking at Top Of Atmosphere energy imbalance. Now all we have to use to observe and predict global warming is thermometers, tree rings, glaciers, sea-ice levels, core samples, and historical records thereof. "Robust multi-decadal warming, global mean surface temperatures". The correct phrase is "multiple independently produced datasets".
All those records are great for observing. Strange you would feel the need to even mention it? I clearly agreed with you on the point when I said the models do on the whole hind cast the observed warming correctly.
Predicting though, that is another beast. You see, climate models are moving on to using basic physics to drive them. The physics of course relies on the energy of the sun, the trapping and reflection of that energy, and the changes driven by that energy transfer. It's the primary principle on top of which everything else relies upon, you can blithely wave it away as unimportant, but your the one ignoring the science of things then, not me.
It's not like all of global warming depends upon one satellite, or one method of measurement.
Quothe the IPCC "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal".
Again, you are under the mistaken impression that we were ever in disagreement on this.
Now... having a precise value for global ToA flux would certainly be a nice metric to have. It'd give us a MORE accurate knowledge of how much the globe has warmed. It might even help us predict how much it's going to warm next year.
Agreed on the first part. Getting a TOA flux at least with error margins smaller than the actual amount driving the observed recent warming would give us more accurate knowledge than we have now. Being able to model it that accurately however isn't best described as helpful to predicting how much it will warm in the future, it is absolutely a prerequisite to any ability to do so.
Without improving the energy balance, we have to abandon the world of modeling the physical processes and instead rely on statistical projections of past records like temperature, which is obviously a little bit unsatisfactory if showing confidence in our predictions is at all desirable.
you clearly left my claim untouched, that the energy imbalance is badly modelled.
Read the fucking executive summary again:
There is very high confidence that models reproduce the general features of the global-scale annual mean surface temperature increase over the historical period, including the more rapid warming in the second half of the 20th century
The models sure as shit aren't perfect, it's not like we can predict the rainfall in a month. But they are not badly modeled.
But hey, thank you for actually doing the minimal amount of footwork to make a claim. Page 749. 8 papers had to deal with clouds. And you're not wrong, the IPCC said it themselves in the executive summary:
The simulation of clouds in climate models remains challenging.
There is very high confidence that uncertainties in cloud processes
explain much of the spread in modelled climate sensitivity. However,
the simulation of clouds in climate models has shown modest improvement
relative to models available at the time of the AR4, and this has
been aided by new evaluation techniques and new observations for
clouds. Nevertheless, biases in cloud simulation lead to regional errors
on cloud radiative effect of several tens of watts per square meter.
{9.2.1, 9.4.1, 9.7.2, Figures 9.5, 9.43}
This shit is hard, but it's getting better all the time. Even with that very real and very sciency factoid of uncertainty when it comes to clouds in a number of climate models, we still have a very high level of confidence (ie, it is not uncertain) that climate change models accurately show the rapid warming after 1950.
That uncertainty does lead to questions about how bad it's going to get.
Here's what NASA's CERES satellite system observed directly about the global energy imbalance.
-global mean net TOA flux for July 2005–June 2015 is consistent with the in situ value of 0.71 W m2
-he overall uncertainty in 1 × 1 latitude–longitude regional monthly all-sky TOA flux is estimated to be 3 W m2 [one standard deviation (1)] for the Terra-only period and 2.5 W m2 for the Terra–Aqua period both for SW and LW fluxes.
So, currently state of the art Satellite observations show there is a 0.71 W m-2 energy imbalance driving the warming from GHGs, but also notes that the uncertainty of the measurements is between 2.5 W m-2 and 3.0 W m-2. So even the observational uncertainties exceed the signal.
Let's look at the models, as cited in your link to the IPCC AR5, on page 763:
Globally averaged TOA shortwave and longwave components of the radiative fluxes in 12
atmosphere-only versions of the CMIP5 models were within 2.5 W m–2 of the observed values (Wang and Su, 2013).
So there you have some pretty important facts. Even the observed TOA imbalance has uncertainties greater than the signal, let alone the climate models.
What does that mean though? Given that the observed warming of the last 100 years was driven by an energy imbalance of 0.7W m-2, it means that an uncertainty in models of 2.5W m-2 makes predictions pretty much unworkable.
Oh, but the models DO accurately model the warming of the last 100 years, how does that fit?
Well, as pointed out up thread, the answer is tuning. If you tune parameters that are modelled poorly, like clouds, to correct the energy imbalance then you can get the right imbalance and recreate the warming.
Modelling of clouds, as noted on page 820 of the IPCC report says:
Cloud feedbacks in AOGCMs are generally positive or near neutral (Shell et al., 2008; Soden et al., 2008), as evidenced by the net positive or neutral cloud feedbacks in all of the models examined in a multi-thousand member ensemble of AOGCMs constructed by parameter
perturbations (Sanderson et al., 2010)
So clouds con
Did Saddam commit a genocide? I think there's a difference between massacres and genocide. If the beef is he deliberately killed thousands of civilian Kurds from the air, the US just did something not too dissimilar in Mossul and Raqqa. The cities were destroyed WW2 style pretty much killing thousands...
I was of course referencing the A-Anfal campaign, your wiki primer is here. It's documented more thoroughly and extensively at Human Rights Watch here.
Saddam's campaign saw the destruction of 90% of Kurdish villages. The use of chemical weapons on those villages. A death toll estimated between 100 and 200 thousand. Concentration camps were setup. Fighting age males were sorted and shipped out from the camps on buses like cattle to be shot and buried in mass graves by bulldozers. The women in the camps were systematically raped, not as punishment or intimidation but to impregnate Kurdish women with half Arab children in an effort to breed the Kurds out of existence in one swing as the other Kurdish males of 'fighting' age were being buried in the desert.
Yeah, go ahead and put a question mark around whether all that really classifies as 'genocide' or not.